SIX
Out the window of her bookstore Myrna could see Armand Gamache and Jean Guy Beauvoir walking down the dirt road into the village.
Then she turned back to her shop, with its wooden shelves filled with new and used books, the wide plank pine floors. Sitting on the sofa beside the window and facing the woodstove was Clara.
She’d arrived a few minutes earlier clutching her haul of newspapers to her breasts, like an immigrant at Ellis Island clinging to something ragged and precious.
Myrna wondered if what Clara held was really that important.
She was under no illusion. Myrna knew exactly what was in those papers. The judgment of others. The views of the outside world. What they saw when they saw Clara’s art.
And Myrna knew even more. She knew what those beer-sodden pages said.
She too had gotten up early that morning, dragged her weary ass out of bed, trudged to the bathroom. Showered, brushed her teeth, put on fresh clothes. And in the light of the new day she’d gotten into her car and driven to Knowlton.
For the papers. She could have simply downloaded them from the various websites, but if Clara wanted to read them as newspapers, then so did Myrna.
She didn’t care how the world saw Clara’s art. Myrna knew it was genius.
But she cared about Clara.
And now her friend sat like a lump on the sofa while she sat in the armchair facing her.
“Beer?” Myrna offered, pointing to the stack of newspapers.
“No thank you,” smiled Clara. “I have my own.” She pointed to her sodden chest.
“You must be every man’s dream,” laughed Myrna. “Finally, a woman made entirely of beer and croissants.”
“A wet dream, certainly,” agreed Clara, smiling.
“Have you had a chance to read them?”
Myrna didn’t need to point again to the reeking papers, they both knew what she meant.
“No. Something keeps getting in the way.”
“Something?” asked Myrna.
“Some fucking body,” said Clara, then tried to rein herself in. “God, Myrna, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I should be upset, devastated that this has happened. I should feel horrible for poor Lillian, but you know what I keep thinking? The only thing I keep thinking?”
“That she ruined your big day.” It was a statement. And it was true. She had. Lillian herself, it must be admitted, had not had a great day either. But that discussion would come later.
Clara stared at Myrna, searching for censure.
“What’s wrong with me?”
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” said Myrna, leaning toward her friend. “I’d feel the same way. Everyone would. We just may not admit it.” She smiled. “If it had been me lying back there—” But Myrna got no further. Clara burst in.
“Don’t even think such a thing.”
Clara actually looked frightened, as though saying a thing made it more likely to happen, as though whatever God she believed in worked like that. But Myrna knew neither Clara’s God nor hers was so chaotic and petty they needed or heeded such ridiculous suggestions.
“If it was me,” Myrna continued, “you’d care.”
“Oh, God, I’d never recover.”
“These papers wouldn’t matter,” said Myrna.
“Not at all. Never.”
“If it was Gabri or Peter or Ruth—”
Both women paused. It might have been a step too far.
“—anyway,” Myrna continued. “If it was even a complete stranger you’d have cared.”
Clara nodded.
“But Lillian wasn’t a stranger.”
“I wish she had been,” admitted Clara, quietly. “I wish I’d never met her.”
“What was she?” Myrna asked. She’d heard the broad strokes, but now she wanted to hear the details.
And Clara told her everything. About the young Lillian, about the teenage Lillian. About the woman in her twenties. As she got further into the story Clara’s voice dropped and dragged, lugging the words along.
And then she stopped, and Myrna was silent for a moment, staring at her friend.
“She sounds like an emotional vampire,” said Myrna, at last.
“A what?”
“I ran into quite a few in my practice. People who sucked others dry. We all know them. We’re in their company and come away drained, for no apparent reason.”
Clara nodded. She did know a few, though no one in Three Pines. Not even Ruth. She only drained their liquor cabinet. But Clara, oddly, always felt refreshed, invigorated after a visit with the demented old poet.
But there were others who just sucked the life right out of her.
Lillian was one.
“But it wasn’t always like that,” said Clara, trying to be fair. “She was a friend once.”
“That’s often the way too,” nodded Myrna. “The frog in the frying pan.”
Clara wasn’t at all sure how to respond to that. Were they still talking about Lillian, or had they somehow veered into some French cooking show?
“Do you mean the emotional vampire in the frying pan?” asked Clara, uttering a sentence she was pretty sure had never been said by another human. Or at least, she hoped not.
Myrna laughed and sitting back in her armchair she raised her legs onto the hassock.
“No, little one. Lillian’s the emotional vampire. You’re the frog.”
“Sounds like a rejected Grimm’s fairy tale. ‘The Frog and the Emotional Vampire.’”
Both women paused for a moment, imagining the illustrations.
Myrna came back to her senses first.
“The frog in the frying pan is a psychological term, a phenomenon,” she said. “If you stick a frog into a sizzling hot frying pan what’ll it do?”
“Jump out?” suggested Clara.
“Jump out. But if you put one into a pan at room temperature then slowly raise the heat, what happens?”
Clara thought about it. “It’ll jump out when it gets too hot?”
Myrna shook her head. “No.” She took her feet off the hassock and leaned forward again, her eyes intense. “The frog just sits there. It gets hotter and hotter but it never moves. It adjusts and adjusts. Never leaves.”
“Never?” asked Clara, quietly.
“Never. It stays there until it dies.”
Clara look a long, slow, deep breath, then exhaled.
“I saw it with my clients who’d been abused either physically or emotionally. The relationship never starts with a fist to the face, or an insult. If it did there’d be no second date. It always starts gently. Kindly. The other person draws you in. To trust them. To need them. And then they slowly turn. Little by little, increasing the heat. Until you’re trapped.”
“But Lillian wasn’t a lover, or a husband. She was just a friend.”
“Friends can be abusive. Friendships can turn, become foul,” said Myrna. “She fed on your gratitude. Fed on your insecurities, on your love for her. But you did something she never expected.”
Clara waited.
“You stood up for yourself. For your art. You left. And she hated you for it.”
“But then why’d she come here?” asked Clara. “I haven’t seen her in more than twenty years. Why’d she come back? What did she want?”
Myrna shook her head. Didn’t say what she suspected. That there was really only one reason for Lillian to return.
To ruin Clara’s big day.
And she had. Only not, almost certainly, in the way Lillian had planned.
Which, of course, begged the question: Who had planned this?
“Can I say something to you?” Myrna asked.
Clara made a face. “I hate it when people ask that. It means something awful’s coming. What is it?”
“Hope takes its place among the modern masters.”
“I was wrong,” said Clara, perplexed and relieved. “It’s just nonsense. Is this a new game? Can I play? Wallpaper chair is often cows. Or,” Clara looked at Myrna with suspicion, “have you been smoking your caftan again? I know they say hemp isn’t really dope, but I still wonder.”
“Clara Morrow’s art makes rejoicing cool again.”
“Ah, a conversation of non sequiturs,” said Clara. “It’s like talking to Ruth, only not as many fucking swear words.”
Myrna smiled. “Do you know what I was just quoting?”
“Those were quotes?” asked Clara.
Myrna nodded and looked over at the damp and smelly newspapers. Clara’s eyes followed her, then widened. Myrna rose and went upstairs, finding her own copies of the papers. Clean and dry. Clara reached out but her hands were trembling too hard and Myrna had to find the sections.
The portrait of Ruth, as the Virgin Mary, glared from the front page of the New York Times art section. Above it was a single word, “Arisen.” And below it the headline HOPE TAKES ITS PLACE AMONG THE MODERN MASTERS.
Clara dropped the section and grabbed for the London Times art review. On the front page was a photo of a Maoist accountant at Clara’s vernissage. And below it the quote, “Clara Morrow Makes Rejoicing Cool Again.”
“They’re raving, Clara,” said Myrna with a smile so wide it hurt.
The pages dropped from Clara’s hand and she looked at her friend. The one who’d whispered into the silence.
Clara got up. Arisen, she thought. Arisen.
And she hugged Myrna.