The Widow's Season by Laura Brodie Read Free Book Online

probably the fleshy product of a young imagination. By the time he reached medical school, David had been embarrassed by his pages full of breasts and buttocks. He had switched to watercolors of elderly men, the paint running down their cheeks in folds of flesh pulling earth-ward. Sarah held one at arm’s length—a black man at a bus stop with drips of paint carving veins into his neck, his coat a bundle of wrinkles.
    She had fallen in love with David during his watercolor phase. There were both living in New York. He had been finishing his first year of residency at Columbia just as she was wrapping up her senior year at Barnard, and they had met at a reception following a poetry reading. She couldn’t recall the poet’s name—they passed through Barnard in an endless processional—but she did remember her first glimpse of David, alone at the far end of the hors d’oeuvre table.
    She could always tell when a man was watching her, ever since her fourteenth birthday when she had “blossomed” (her mother’s word) from a knobbly stalk into something rounded and soft. Overnight she had become an object of male assessment, a fact more annoying than empowering, because too often the eyes that followed her belonged to old men, or ugly men, or men with anxious faces whose only pleasure seemed to rest in the ability to stare. And so she was relieved, on that evening in May, to glance down the table and find that this particular gaze came from a young man in his twenties, neatly dressed, even handsome, who grinned when their eyes met.
    She remembered David’s opening line as he walked over. “Toddler food,” he had said, nodding toward her paper plate filled with red, seedless grapes and Cheddar-cheese squares. With hand outstretched he had introduced himself, saying how much he enjoyed Ted Hughes ( that was the poet, how could she have forgotten), and would she like to go with him to the café across the street where the food was much better?
    Sarah had never before encountered such unabashed confidence. All of her college dates had been sweet, bumbling boys with apologetic gestures. But David was a twenty-six-year-old vessel of optimism, arriving on the scene at the perfect moment, because she had been slouching toward graduation with her habitual dread of endings, on the lookout for another well-worn path to tread. She hadn’t expected that path to include a man—at least, not so soon; it violated the Barnard creed. And yet here was this handsome doctor in training, emerging like her private Polaris, and yes, she would follow him to the café, and back to his apartment, and on to whatever promised land his gods had foretold. Four months more and they were living together; another year and they were married.
    She supposed it was foolish, to have gotten married so young. If she had lived on her own for a few years, she would have been more prepared for her present solitude. But two things in life could never be scheduled—love and death. And anyway, the foolishness of her youth was happier than all the calculations of her middle age.
    Sarah put the portfolio down and moved on to David’s recent work in the bin, oil landscapes with fuzzy boundaries between trees, river, and sky. Here were the Blue Ridge Mountains that stretched east of Jackson, fold after fold of purple and gray. And here was Stuart’s Pass, cutting through the Alleghenies that slanted in the west. None of David’s work was abstract; one could always say with certainty, “Here is a cliff, here is a chimney,” but everything was subject to motion and change.
    She stopped at a painting of a dark-haired man in his forties—David’s only self-portrait, and not his best work. The features were correct, but the mouth lay flat and empty. Only the eyes were alive, challenging her with a slight sense of humor. Staring into them was like opening a porthole on a sinking ship.
    She turned at a creak of the stairs, and found Nate watching her.
    “David did