"and
it was clear to both of them that they had still
a
long, long road before them...."
Chekhov,
"The Lady with the Pet Dog"
It was said that a new person was
to arrive today. Thus, Gad remarked dryly to himself--for there
was no one else to whom to remark; he sat alone, as he
did every morning--the buzz and murmur, the trill of speculation.
He closed his eyes as he sat spooning oatmeal from his bowl, and
let himself imagine a cloud forming, swollen with expectancy,
above all of their heads and rising toward the ceiling of the
dining room. A cloud that would burst, raining disappointment,
as soon as the newcomer was actually among them.
Gad (but no one called him that
here; he was called Gad by his friends, of which there were none
within two hundred miles) was certain of this. After two weeks
he had divined the way things worked. Already he felt sorry for
the person who would join them next. After all, it had taken hardly
twenty-four hours for the others not only to lose whatever interest
in him they had had before he had arrived but to begin to actively
dislike him. Indeed, it seemed to him that beneath the surface
of camaraderie, the Ping-Pong and pool and poker playing, nightly
readings, slide shows, open studios, screenings of incompletely
edited and barely comprehensible films, group discussions over
wine and Cheetos of "the artistic process," trips to
town (eight giggling artists piled into one car, painters and
poets in the backseat on the sculptors' laps) and half-drunken
midnight walks "to see the moon" or to make offerings
(an orange or a roll swiped from the breakfast basket or a copy
of a newly finished poem or in a pinch whatever happened to be
picked up on the ground along the way: twigs, pebbles, pine cones,
leaves) at the graves of the Colony's "beloved founders"--this
last a pilgrimage he had declined to make, his first night: one
of a short, fatal series, he now understood, of artists' colony
faux-pas--there was frank, outright hostility to anyone who was
less than a perfect fit. If this latest newcomer was not exactly
to their liking, he or she would be excluded utterly, almost at
once. As he
had been.
Demetrius Gadol--Greek Jew by extraction,
composer by vocation, described only recently in the Times'
Arts and Leisure section (listed, his wife always made sure to
point out when he spoke of the Times piece in her earshot;
the description, she would say--Janet was a great advocate of
humility, as well as an expert in his humiliation--was just two
sentences long) as one of "Thirty-three Composers Under Forty
To Be Reckoned With"--ate his breakfast, listening as all
around him the newcomer was discussed. With his eyes closed, it
was easy to pick out the threads of gossip amidst all the other
morning chitchat, laughter, the rehashing of last night's drunken
revelry, the clattering of cutlery to china, the ringing phone
outside the dining room and the scrape of a chair ("I'll
get it"--"No, please, let me, I'm expecting a call"),
the glassy clank of cups replaced thoughtlessly, uncentered, into
saucers, the periodic maraca of dry cereal shaken from its box,
toast popping at asymmetric, unexpected intervals. The new person,
he heard, was a woman. That she'd been assigned one of the choicest
bedrooms--so it was reported--in the mansion itself rather than
one of the newer "dorms," fitted with twin beds and
pressboard bureaus, stirred up a flurry of conjecture. Just how
well-known
was she?
But which studio? somebody asked.
No one knew for sure, and a digression followed, about which studios
were winterized and how many were occupied. Gad waited for the
flow of information to resume. He was surprised by how attentively
he waited. Surprised, first; and then ashamed; and finally, decisively,
amused. He had always been willing to laugh at himself--it was
one of his saving graces, Janet had said long ago (and as this
had been one of the very few kind things she had ever said to
him about himself, he had chosen to believe it and to keep believing
it, even though she had never, in the eighteen years since then,
repeated it). Had he not made a little speech--a shocked, stern,
self-righteous speech--on his second night in residence in response
to the exchange of speculations that had gone on all through dinner
that night about the three artists who
were due to turn up the next day?
The "let us not forget what
we're all here for" speech, he'd heard it called since then.
They'd hated him for it. Now he pretended not to listen as somebody
mentioned a composing studio, a stone cabin at the far end of
the woods. His heart leapt. Since the day of his arrival, he had
been the lone composer, as writers of all stripes, painters, sculptors,
a printmaker, three "conceptual" artists (including
one who called himself a "light"--as in electricity--artist),
two filmmakers, a video artist, and an architect came and went.
But she isn't a composer, is she? someone else said. No,
I think a writer. But where else can they put her?
Novelist? somebody said.
No, short stories, I think. And another voice: Just
one collection? Two? But then someone else--one of the painters,
Gad thought--said, I heard she was a playwright. I thought
I heard she might've even won an Obie.
She must have won something,
someone said--followed by laughter, and a series of remarks, again,
about the well-appointed bedroom, the one that had been the house's
mistress's, in the days before the mansion and its grounds had
been turned into a "refuge for the gifted" (as decreed
by the master and mistress's Last Will and Testament, portions
of which were engraved on small bronze plaques embedded into the
stone wall that enclosed the Colony).
Somebody said, Maybe she's just
well-connected.
Or else pregnant. I've heard
they give special attention to pregnant artists.
So that's how I could get a bigger
studio next time. Laughter, again. The speaker was a man.
One of the great hulking sculptors who worked with heavy, manly
materials--concrete, steel, lead--and produced unbearably ugly
structures to which they gave cryptic titles. Gad shook his head.
He sometimes thought, despite the evidence--the one-man shows
in SoHo and the published books and grants and prizes--that he
was among a bunch of idiots.
That no one seemed to be sure just
what the newcomer "did," thought Gad, was a hopeful
sign. It meant that no one knew her, which would make it that
much harder for her to be swept into the circle that excluded
him. If he went out of his way to meet her first (if, say, he
happened to be sitting in the armchair just inside the front entrance
to the commons room tonight, so that he would be the first to
see her when she came in before dinner), perhaps he might make
an impression on her that would not be undermined by what the
others would say to her later--for it seemed to him that those
who had been in attendance when he'd first arrived had passed
on their animosity toward him like a contagion to everyone who'd
joined them in the fortnight since.
For a moment, as bits of information,
rumors and wild guesses were chewed over, spat out, altered, barked
about, Gad indulged himself, imagining her. Because it was a pure
fact of his life that he found it much easier to get along with
smart, young, pretty women than with men--or with women who were
neither young nor pleasant to look at (as Janet never tired of
pointing out)--he allowed her beauty, youth, and brilliance. Since
the day he'd landed here, there had been mostly men, along with
a few--it had to be said-homely women. At this, he blushed and
ducked his head, as if the women scattered here and there about
the dining room might have had the ability to read his mind. But
everyone was busy now considering what prize it was the new arrival--Hannah
Something, he caught; he had just missed the last name--might
have won. The National Book Award, someone suggested.
No--some big grant, not a book
prize. Not an Obie either. I really don't think she's a playwright.
No, I think she might be. Maybe
that Louisville thing, you know--
Or an NEA.
No, bigger.
The Lottery, somebody said.
More laughter. The phone began to ring again. Cereal rasped into
a bowl. Toast popped. A spoon swirled, clanked gently, in a cup.
Christ, not a MacArthur, someone
said. Briefly everyone was silent.
A Pulitzer? Gad heard one
of the painters ask, tentatively, breaking the spell.
No, no--all the writers were sure
that wasn't it.