Martin hated their house at first. It took him too far from the city and the cramped studio on Fourteenth Street he’d come to romanticize. He enjoyed watching the restless parade of crooks, bums, and nuns beneath his window. He enjoyed putting a canvas against a wall and making brash marks that clanged like music. But this house has endeared itself to him over the years. The rooms have absorbed something of him, and he of them. And he knows that it was a fortunate confluence of timing and geography that softly deposited him upon a tenure track at the neighboring state university, just a twenty-minute drive from Minuteman Road.
They’d grown fairly close with some of the neighbors, a handful of couples with children the same age as theirs, with whom they took turns hosting dinners. Martin always had the feeling that these gatherings were building toward some ultimate consummation of friendship that hovered just one or two dinners away. The Loomises were the first to sell. They traded their lovely, weatherworn home on the sound for a Spanish-tiled monster in Jupiter. The Petries were next, once their children were safely launched onto Wall Street. For them it was Sanibel Island. Then the Henrys and the Callahans. They all fell, as if to gravity, to that southerly force so much like the grip of death. They all bequeathed their houses to sweet, anxious families like mirror images of their younger selves.
Philomena broached Florida just once, and just once Martin said never.
After dinner, he helps his wife with the dishes, then retires to the studio. In one corner, a sawhorse sits idle. In another, a tower of brittle sketchbooks leans into the wall. The easel wears a thin pelt of dust. Martin settles into the worn easy chair and opens an issue of Time magazine. A fly orbits his head, alights on his ear, clings. There is the brief, eerie feeling of miniature appendages taking purchase on flesh before his hand rises reflexively. The fly finds a perch on the edge of the gummed-up turpentine jar, and Martin sinks deeper into his chair. He skims the pages of Time and naps, as has become his evening ritual.
The Gregorys come on Saturday. Coraline is a doll, he has to admit, with a fit body beneath her cable-knit sweater and pedal pushers. He shakes her hand firmly—he is still a robust man and wants to demonstrate this—and returns her smile with a handsome set of teeth, still his own. The husband, too, Martin finds likable. Bill Gregory wears a pair of wide-wale corduroys with a brass-buttoned blazer. His collar parts, revealing the pink flesh of a happy businessman. It seems impossible that these are the philistines behind the nouveau concoction on the corner.
They exchange pleasantries and take seats around the wooden coffee table that still bears the scars of children’s homework. Philomena serves tall glasses of Campari and soda with lemon crescents. Coraline and Bill share the old brown couch, and their hosts flank them in armchairs.
Bill leans forward toward Martin. “So, Philomena tells us you’re an artist.”
“Oh.” Martin glances at his wife. “Well, yes.”
“What kind of work do you do?” Coraline asks.
Martin looks again toward Philomena, who returns his glance with an encouraging smile.
“Well, I’ve always been a painter, primarily,” he begins, “but really I’ve dipped into everything.”
“The Carnegie Museum owns one of his paintings.” Philomena swirls her glass. “So does the Menil Collection in Texas.”
“Really?” Coraline puts down her Campari. “I wonder if we may have seen your work.”
“Oh, probably not. It hasn’t been on view in a while,” says Martin, sipping his drink too quickly, the herbal syrup delightfully bitter.
“Do you work here at home?” asks Bill.
Martin nods.
“Could we”—Bill looks at Philomena—“come visit the studio sometime, maybe have a tour?”
Martin clings to his drink and considers for a moment its wedge of lemon, curled at the rim like a banana slug. He puts the glass down and stands.
“Well, why not. Let’s go do it now.”
For a moment he stands alone, fearing that he has misread the moment. This is the time for dinner, of course, not a studio visit. But the Gregorys stand, and then his wife. He leads them through the breezeway to the studio, which was once the garage.
He begins with the vertical painting rack. One by one he slides the dusty old abstracts into the light and perches them on the easel. The Gregorys make complimentary noises. Then he moves to the later, experimental sculptures, arachnid shapes. There are many more of these to show, their production having aligned with the art world’s lamentable shift toward performance and politics. He’d been offered only two solo shows between 1970 and 1985. After that, his gallery had relegated him to summer group exhibitions, then ceased to invite him at all. He tries not to mind this. He has no reason to complain, having earned a comfortable living from teaching, having raised two children to adulthood, having stayed happily married. He has retained his health well into retirement, and although he’s never warmed to golfing, he has found ways to stay occupied. It makes no sense to generate more art at this point. It would only take up space.
“Martin, this is phenomenal work,” Bill says gravely.
“We’re art collectors, you know,” Coraline adds. “So this is very exciting for us.”