Short Story: “A Portrait of Rachel”

At almost twenty-seven years old, Marie Boisjoli had still not entirely outgrown the social dynamics of late adolescence. She had a tendency to default to pithy, doctrinaire opinions of the environments of her youth—high school as a place that could have been a contender in her esteem if certain things had been very different; her first college roundly demonized; UMass Amherst, at least as it had been five years ago, as a flawed wonderland that might have been practically perfect in every way had she only been a couple of years older and wiser when she was there. She had not rediscovered the Catholicism of her childhood until after she had graduated, and now overlaid on the social dynamics of the standard Millennial extended adolescence was the spiritual perspicacity, consisting in tumult, of the short sharp adolescence of a hundred years ago or more. She lived in an artist’s loft in North Adams and skateboarded to Mass.

            When Marie had decided to do a minor in studio arts with an aim towards becoming a professional painter, Shelby P., a friend from high school with whom she had rekindled her acquaintance and conviviality at UMass, had said “Why would you do that, Marie? Someone like you could do something with a much better chance of being remunerative.”

            “Like what? Orgo chem? I’ve seen the way people’s brains get blown out when they do orgo chem. And I’m familiar with how things work in CommColl.”

            “Your brain will get blown out eventually no matter what you do.”

            Shelby P. had said many cheerful things along those general lines since she had resurfaced in Marie’s life. The pessimism was bracing and even clarifying in some situations, such as the agonizing that Marie tended to do about the possibility of dating or marrying the wrong person or somebody to whom she would later turn out not to be attracted, but completely unhelpful in many other situations, such as the agonizing that Marie tended to do about whether she would be able to date or get married at all. Marie had only been on one date since deciding a couple of years ago not to date people who didn’t share her religious beliefs. It had been with a man much older than her who had expressed a distaste for “Millennial artiste types” and tried to walk it back by claiming that Marie was different from the others. She obviously had not trusted his ability to establish this even to her satisfaction, much less his own, after only knowing her for an hour and a quarter, so she had left the date (at an Indian restaurant in Williamstown) early and had had to be talked into sending him an “it’s not you, it’s me” text instead of just cutting him off without warning. The text had literally said, in those exact words, “it’s not you; it’s me”—Marie thought that at the very least he deserved better than a comma splice—to communicate her lack of interest in felicities in breaking this off with him.

            Ever since that point, Marie’s life had mostly been filled with taking commissions. She had never resorted to charging people to draw pictures of their favorite television and comic book characters the way some of her friends had done—she had nothing against doing this; it was just that she didn’t want to jump through the hoops required to convince the people asking for the pictures that she had any real knack for or interest in them. Instead, she took commissions for public murals and things of that nature, sometimes things as simple and unartistic as handywoman painting jobs for private homes, and tried to make the larger and more sporadic lumps of money that she got this way last for as long as she could. She had a deal with her parents for help with rent for her loft in return for coming home and doing some social and emotional heavy lifting around the holidays, a deal that had worked out well for the most part for the two and a half years so far that she had been living here, but she tried to pay for as many of her other needs on her own as she could. She didn’t have much trouble with food and clothes, but medical expenses were occasionally tricky. She didn’t have any car payments because she drove a rusty Ford a year younger than she was that still worked fine but that was so hellaciously ugly to look at that it had been hers for well under three thousand dollars. She only drove it occasionally and, other than home for the holidays, never any further than Pittsfield in one direction or Bennington in the other. For painting gigs that were further afield she took the bus or hitchhiked.

            One winter’s evening, a few days before the coldest night of the year, things started to change. Marie got home to her loft and checked the messages on the land line; she had people call the land line for business calls, partly as a hipster affectation and partly because when she was out and about she didn’t want whatever she was doing to be interrupted by her work. (When she went out for work, she gave her cell number to the person for whom she was doing the job, with a firm request that they not call that number again after the job was finished and not give it to anybody else. Once or twice people had broken the promises that they had made to that effect, but they had had more or less valid reasons for doing so.) There were four messages, of which she assumed, based on past proportions of experience, at least three were liable to be telemarketers or people calling from charitable causes she had donated five dollars to five years ago.

            This time, instead, they were all from one person, who introduced herself as Rachel Kellner, lived in Shutesbury just northeast of Amherst, and wanted her portrait painted.

            “I’d appreciate it if you could do it in a more or less traditional and at least semi-formal style, but I’m not going to be picky,” Rachel said in one of the messages. “I know that you mostly do murals and house painting these days but I have a friend who’s a professor in the UMass art department who said I should give you a call. Rick Stafford. Do you remember him?” Of course Marie remembered Professor Rick. He had taught her both figure drawing and color theory in that horrible semester when she had taken twenty-one credits to get a jump start on her minor. She had thought highly of him and was glad to know that he remembered her. Why he thought that she would make a good formal portraitist on the basis of figure drawing and color theory alone Marie wasn’t sure, but probably some of her other professors had communicated her progress to him after that semester.

            Marie made a point of not googling her clients if she hadn’t heard of them or couldn’t place their names on her own, but she was sure that she had at least heard the name Rachel Kellner somewhere before. She had a vague sense that it had been in some sixties counterculture context that she had heard it, and the voice on the phone had definitely been that of an agéd woman. Shelby P. knew a thing or two about the culture of the sixties but the real expert among Marie’s group of friends was a guy called Phil McCourt whom she had met and briefly almost-dated during her first semester at UMass. After taking a shower she called him up and asked if he knew anything about this Kellner person.

            It turned out that Rachel Kellner had been a Joan Baez-type ingénue folk singer early on in the sixties folk revival whose voice had been destroyed by smoking after a few years and who had briefly resurfaced as a producer for some B-plus-list New Wave bands in the mid-eighties. She would be about seventy-six now. Phil had had no idea that she lived in Western Mass. He did a little more research for Marie—he didn’t have the same compunctions about googling her clients that she did—and found out that in between, and after, her stints in the public eye she had languished in obscurity as a pharmacist and been almost-famous in science fiction circles as a matriarch of the Star Trek: Voyager fan base.

            “She lives in Shutesbury, she said?” he asked Marie over the phone the evening after she got the calls from Rachel (she had instructed Marie in the calls to think of her as Rachel).

            “Yeah,” said Marie. “Don’t google her address, okay? I don’t want you to be a creeper any more than I wanna be one.”

            “Relax; I wasn’t going to. I was just wondering—are you gonna be okay getting there with your car?”

            Marie had given this some thought earlier in the day. Phil was right in his implied assumption that she wasn’t likely to be able to get to Shutesbury by public transit. There was no easy combination of routes to take to even get from North Adams to Amherst, unless she wanted to spend all day getting there and get a hotel room for as long as she was doing the portrait, an option for which she really didn’t have the money right now. Then there was getting from Amherst to Shutesbury, for which there did not seem to exist any public transit at all. It seemed there was not any way around her car braving the Hoosac Range and the Cold River’s ungracious curves. She told Phil that she was sure things would be fine; she wasn’t actually as sure of this as she wished she could be, but all the roads that she would take were reasonably well-traveled as far as she knew until the last leg of the trip, when she turned off Route 116 up something called Bull Hill Road. She could probably stay on well-traveled routes longer if she went down through Amherst, then up the Shays Highway from Pelham, but if her car was going to have trouble anyway then it might be best to keep the route as short as she could.

            “I don’t drive a very good car,” she told Rachel over the phone the next day. “Do you have somewhere I could stay if I need to stay overnight, like a fold-out sofa or something?”

            “Wow. I haven’t hosted in a long time now,” said Rachel. “I don’t have a fold-out but my couch should still be deep enough to sleep on depending on your body type. How big are you?”

            “Five-seven, a hundred and thirty-five pounds or so?” said Marie. She had taught herself, she thought more or less correctly, to resent questions like this, but Rachel had a more valid reason for asking than most so she answered anyway despite the queasy feeling that she got.

            “God, I wish that were me,” said Rachel. “I’m five-four and a hundred and seventyish. But, well, I’m old, and after a certain age you actually look younger if you’re fat, so I guess I shouldn’t complain. Yeah, I think my couch will serve you just fine. Don’t feel the need to disguise anything when you paint me, by the way, the weight or the age or anything else; I want a ‘warts and all’ portrait. Did you see that episode of The Crown?”

            “I don’t watch much TV,” said Marie. “But, yeah, as long as you have a sofa I can use if I need to and a driveway big enough for me to park in, it should be fine. My time is flexible, and I’m guessing you’re retired?” Rachel made an affirmative but not particularly happy noise. “So I can come over whenever you’ll have me.”

            They arranged for a time, a time that was coming quickly. Marie would have to set out only a little bit after midday to be sure of getting to Shutesbury before it started getting dark. Even though the afternoons were getting lighter, they were still well within the part of the year in which they carried a sort of lingering premature senescence that suddenly collapsed into night, inevitably before one would have expected it. Rachel offered to burn some incense for her safe travels. Marie was not sure what to make of that; from somebody her own age it would have been manifestly dead serious or close to it, but it was hard to know just how seriously somebody like Rachel did or did not take ideas like that. If Rachel had just been a folk revival ingénue, or had just been a New Wave impresario, that would have been one thing, and Marie would have had something or other to go by, but the fact that her life had taken so many apparent twists and turns complicated matters. In the end Marie told her to feel perfectly free to burn some incense if she thought that that would help. Marie would, she said, reserve judgment on whether or not she herself thought it might.

            The appointed day and time arrived and Marie set out with her art supplies in the back seat and two changes of clothes in the trunk, plus a hopelessly stretched-out old t-shirt to sleep in. Tomorrow was Sunday; she might have to go to Mass at the UMass Newman Center again. She had not been there in a long time; the last time she had been there, she had been unserious about her faith and only putting in a token appearance on Maundy Thursday because she thought that it might look bad to some super-senior whom she wanted to like her if she didn’t. She wondered how the old place was; she wondered if it would be any less flat and unappealing to her now. The design of the place architecturally and liturgically, she remembered, left things to be desired, but in recent months she had finally made her peace with the relative insignificance of that compared to the sincerity with which the Mass was approached, which obviously would depend upon the priest. She doubted good old Father John was still there, and, indeed, looking it up, it appeared to be someone else now. All in all she had high but nervous hopes.

            She got to Shutesbury just as the sun was westering and the bare trees beginning to cast their shadows more heavily than before. She pulled into the short but sinuous driveway at Rachel’s A-frame set back modestly into the woods and parked next to a beaten-up old Subaru. The tree line melted back from the road to encompass it like a bezel. There were a couple of chickens strutting around the narrow and scantily snow-dusted lawn.

            Marie strode confidently up to the house with her box of charcoals in one hand and her easel in the other. She would be taking some studies on a sketchpad that she carried in the same box as the charcoals before, either tomorrow if she stayed over or some other day if she decided to leave after dark after all, breaking out the canvas frames and acrylic paints that she had left in the trunk of the Ford. Rachel had specified that she wanted to be painted in acrylic, possibly as a gesture to the difficulty that Marie was already going to face in getting this commission done. The idea that it was inherently and significantly easier to do good, serious paintings in acrylics than in oils was a myth as far as Marie was concerned, but she couldn’t blame a layperson for believing it, and for all she knew there might be other, fabulously well-thought-out reasons for Rachel to prefer acrylics to which Marie was not privy.

            There was no doorbell—it looked like one might have been there at one time, but if so, Rachel had removed it to make room for a mezuzah—so Marie knocked on the door harder and harder until Rachel answered it. She would appear to have been taking a nap; she was in a nightgown that swept the floor around her and had a sleep mask pushed haphazardly up over her forehead. Her hair was snow-white but beautifully lustrous and the lines on her face were fine and shallow, maybe because of the pudge on her cheeks. “Marie!” she said. “Good to see you; come on in!” She was acting as if their phone correspondence had extended and metamorphosed into a long acquaintanceship; perhaps, in the weird stretches and compressions of time that Marie had heard were for many people a part of old age, that was how it felt. Marie said a few polite words and Rachel led her into the house. In addition to the chickens a dog was in evidence; there was a dog bed with lots of fur shed in it and more moderate amounts of fur shed on most of the other upholstered surfaces in the living room. It looked like there was a kitchen behind this room; one other room on this floor, which looked like an addition to the house off to the left, not readily visible from the driveway; and a screen door that led to an enclosed porch on the other side of the kitchen. The living room had a pellet stove opposite the couch on which Marie guessed she was going to be sleeping. The bathroom must be upstairs.

            “I sure hope you like seitan because we’re going to be having a lot of it tonight,” said Rachel. “I cooked a ton of it up the other day with some mushroom and eggplant and dijon mustard. Of course, none of it’s fresh, but I got it from cold storage at a farm up in Montague so it can’t be nearly as bad as if I’d just gotten it at the supermarket. You okay with that?”

            “Yes, that’s absolutely all right,” said Marie. “It—can I ask, do you drive, Rachel?”

            “Yes, of course I drive; the Subaru’s out there in the driveway, isn’t it?; I live alone and it’s not like I can get around and get done what I need to get done on foot, living out here.” She waved her hand. “At my age there are only a few places I really know how to get to, though; some would say you get stuck in a rut after a while. I would have said that at your age. Now I just say I’ve become set in my ways.”

            They made more small talk of this kind—Marie told Rachel a little bit about her church and Rachel told Marie a little bit about her most recent synagogue. Then Rachel showed Marie around the living room. The pellet stove was burning, though not exactly crackling hot. Next to it was a stack of books with titles ranging from The Trump Prophecies to Zowie! It’s YAOI and from The Mirror of True Womanhood: A Book of Instruction for Women in the World to Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution. Marie decided to suspend judgment on Rachel’s reading habits, especially since she suspected that the books’ placement next to the pellet stove might be suggestive of something.

            “That half-wit dog is still upstairs, I guess,” said Rachel. “Normally she sleeps in that dog bed over there but she comes into my room to sleep with me every few days or so. I was taking a nap before you got here, if you couldn’t tell.”

            “I could tell,” said Marie. “—Rachel, can I ask if you have any kids or grandkids who visit?” She hoped that her concern for a seventy-six-year-old woman living alone in a place like this wasn’t too obvious to Rachel. It probably, regrettably, was.

            “I have kids, yes, but we don’t see much of one another,” said Rachel, “which is a shame. Love was free in the sixties but then the cold light of day hit and we all found out that you really do get what you pay for. I’m guessing your generation is realizing much the same thing.”

            Marie considered cautiously how she wanted to respond to this. The psycho-spiritual consensus, which she had heard from both friends and her therapist late in high school and in college, had been that casual sex was fine and potentially even psychosexually clarifying every now and then, but was the sort of thing best not made a habit of. That had been the standard to which she had held herself, generally successfully, until the last four or five years. She had heard that it was technically a more restrained standard than those of the last couple of generations when they had been young adults. “We’ve realized it,” she eventually said, “but I think I’ve probably realized it more than most people.”

            “Could you talk to people at your church about it, maybe?” suggested Rachel.

            Marie rolled her eyes. “Why would people at my church understand…you know what? Never mind. Do you mind if I do some hand and face studies starting in a few minutes? You won’t need to get dressed up for that and I’d like to get it out of the way while there’s still a combination of indoor and outdoor light. It won’t take too long but you will have to sit very still.”

            “Don’t a lot of artists do these kinds of studies from photographs these days?”

            “Some do, yeah, but I’m not one of them. I’d be more willing to do it for your face than for your hands if we end up having to do it; I do have a pretty good Nikon in my car, and hands are trickier to do studies of than faces.”

            “I can believe it. I know my hands have given me a lot more trouble than my face has over the years.”

            “Yes,” said Marie. “Well. In any case. I’ll take my stuff out and then let’s begin, shall we?”

 ❦

Rachel sat admirably still, much stiller than Marie had gone into the day afraid that she was going to. Her concept of an eccentric elderly woman, as a general sort or type or condition of person, could not accommodate an image of this kind of stillness. There was a grandeur to her even in her nightgown with her sleep mask now hanging around her neck.

            At one point Marie paused in the middle of a study of Rachel’s left hand from the right to go to the bathroom. Rachel directed her into the room off to the left, the extension not readily visible from the drive. “There’s a shower in there, a sink, and a bidet,” she said. “If you have to do number two then you’ll have to use the outhouse. It’s up a path about forty feet into the trees. I hope you’re not afraid of the dark.”

            “Not in particular,” said Marie, and went to the outhouse. When she got back, the dog, an Irish setter that she could tell had the characteristics typical of her breed, was lolling with her head sprawled across Rachel’s outstretched feet and her long pink tongue trailing along the floor.

            “This is Rosanna,” said Rachel. “Marie, say hi to Rosie; Rosie, say hi to Marie.”

            “Hi, Rosie,” said Marie. She squatted down to run her hand through the setter’s fur. The fur was silky but did not smell very good. Rosie did not seem ill-served or poorly taken care of, only old and unwell. She wondered how long Marie had had her. She looked at least ten years old—from this angle Marie could suddenly see quite a bit of silver around her muzzle—but with some more-than-residual happiness overlaid on the stupidity. Rosie reached up to lick Marie’s hand, then clambered to her feet.

            “Rosie, shake,” said Rachel, and Rosie proffered her paw for shaking, then lumbered back upstairs. “Dumb as a box of hammers but Lord do I love her,” said Rachel.

            Marie asked something she had been wanting to ask for a while now. “I don’t do much research on my clients,” she said, “so I have to ask—what New Wave band was it, exactly, that you were a producer for?”

            “Mostly Eyes in Their Last Extremity and Tinúviel,” said Rachel, “but I did some work with Patrick Morkan and His Horse right before I retired again. It was a weird world to come back into, twenty years after being the girl who used to be the future of American songwriting.” Marie decided not to pursue the possibility that Rachel might be exaggerating her accomplishments. She was saying this hieratically rather than conversationally.

            This attitude continued when they talked more about Rachel’s past over their seitan dinner. Her tone of voice was technically casual and conversational, but Marie had a hard time shaking the feeling that this tone was itself being dispensed, dolloped out, from some source deep beneath the sea or in a cavern deep in the earth. Rachel had cooked the seitan skillfully and it held the flavor of the mustard very well; the same flavor was a little less thoroughly in evidence in the mushrooms and eggplant, so the dish as a whole tasted a little uneven, but by no means bad. Gradually Marie came to suspect that she was on the verge of being chosen for something. It was not a comfortable feeling, especially since she had already been chosen to be Rachel Kellner’s portraitist, surely an honor worth at least a little more than Marie had assumed at first. She wondered how Rachel would have treated another portraitist, someone older maybe, or male. She liked to imagine it would have been different enough to make it worth comparing notes.

            “Before I started singing in the Village I was in my high school glee club,” Rachel said after dinner with the apparent expectation that this should somehow be reflected in the eventual portrait of her, “and, later, a holiday season sales clerk at a middle-end department store in uptown Manhattan.”

            “Are you a New York City native?” asked Marie.

            “Yes. You could hear it in my speaking voice until about 1982. You?”

            “No,” said Marie, who was disoriented enough to interpret this question as an insinuation that she was also from New York, “I’ve only ever been to the city a couple of times and only ever on day trips. My family’s from Central Mass.”

            “Boisjoli, is that a French Canadian name?” Marie nodded. “During my pharmacist days I would take trips up to Montreal to see Leonard Cohen sometimes before he was Leonard Cohen.” As Marie looked at her while she said this, a shadow played over her opening and closing jaw in a way that she would probably not be able to get any sketches or studies of but might want to try to include or at least allude to somehow in the final painting. “Anyway, it’s a much easier name to wrap your teeth around than Tanizaki or Buxtehude or the other names you encounter all over the place in a place like New York.” This statement, which escaped a firm verdict of being racist mostly because of Rachel’s less-than-invidious tone of voice in saying it, was nevertheless a much more reactive and closed-off sentiment than Marie would have expected from someone with Rachel’s life, septuagenarian or not, but it would have been an abdication of professional virtues and standards for Marie to say so out loud.

            “Rachel, can I ask what your politics are?” asked Marie, who figured it was at least slightly more acceptable to broach this if she did so as a question.

            “My politics are exactly what you’d expect. My opinion of the way those have been put into place is what’s different. Like I said, you really do get what you pay for.” Marie motioned for Rachel to turn her head a little to the left so Marie could get in a sketch of the way a curlicue of her hair fell over her temple. “I dabbled in saying I was ‘politically neutral’ but I realized that that just made me sound complicit rather than wise. I’d love to say it took the Iraq War or something of that sort for me to realize that but, actually, it was Star Trek: Voyager fandom.”

            “May I ask what aspects of Star Trek: Voyager fandom?” asked Marie, who had never resorted to charging people to draw pictures of their favorite television and comic book characters the way some of her friends had done.

            “You don’t know me well enough to ask that question. Let’s just say nobody was focusing enough on our common enemy.”

            “And who was the common enemy?”

            “The people who wrote Star Trek: Voyager. How did you like your seitan? You seemed to be enjoying it but you didn’t actually say.”

            “I liked it pretty well, thank you.”

            Such was the rest of their evening. At a little after nine, Rachel went out to feed the chickens and make sure they had come in from the cold; Rosie ran around the little yard for a little bit while Rachel was out there, barking at the cold and the dark and nothing else in particular, then ran back in just as enthusiastically and flopped down in the dog bed in the living room. Marie, who had already been to the bidet a couple of times since dinner by this point, took the opportunity to take her leave and make her way to the outhouse again when Rachel came back in. The tree-line now was tense, less gracious, and encompassed rather than embracing. The trees that poked up against the long-since-descended night were weird and harshly lit from the lights inside the A-frame, their branches shooting jaggedly up like lighting shooting from the ground up into the sky. Marie decided to stay outside for a few minutes, shivering, with a feeling of defiance that had suddenly and not really explicably come over her. She had no desire to defy her subject, but something about the world in which her subject lived felt stultifying and possibly oppressive despite its countercultural self-presentation.

            When she got back inside, Rachel looked liable to get ready to go back to sleep; when Marie asked, she said that she was doing just that. “I know people your age tend to prefer to stay up later,” Rachel said. “I’m sorry if there’s not that much around to entertain you. I don’t have a TV, just a laptop, or I’d give you my Netflix password.”

            “That’s okay,” said Marie. “I brought reading material. And I can watch Netflix on my phone if I really need to.”

            “Do you get reception out here?”

            “Yeah, like one bar.”

            “Okay.” Rachel shrugged. “Suit yourself. I’m sure Rosie’d like it if you could rub her belly a little too. Good night! I’ll try not to wake you up if I come down early.”

            Marie had mostly good but strange and tumultuous dreams on the sofa that night. In one, she was back at a concert in Fenway Park that she had not attended, but had heard from a couple of blocks away, when she had visited friends in Boston about three and a half years ago. The music took shape and color and the notes swarmed around her like friends and enemies. In another dream she was at her first college again talking to a boy whom she had liked from afar while she was there. He was frustrated with her, with the person she had become. He had been a few years older than her—he would not be in any sense a boy any more, really—but a boy he was in the dream nevertheless. She woke up frustrated with him, and with herself. She wondered what Lewis was doing these days. The last she had heard of him had been when she had made an ill-judged remark about his sister over email while he was away in Costa Rica. He had never spoken to her again after coming back.

            The last dream that Marie had, or at least the last one that she remembered upon waking, was of going home for the holidays as a middle-aged woman with a husband and several young children. This one was tumultuous because midway through the dream she realized that the person sitting at the head of the table for the Christmas Eve dinner was not her father but Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk. Musk told everybody at the table that the world was at a crossroads. Marie took his word for it.

            In the morning, she woke up before Rachel was downstairs, but definitely not before she was awake; she was laughing at something that she was presumably either reading or watching on her laptop. Marie called up the stairs that she was awake and waited for Rachel to come on down. She did not have to wait long; Rachel came down, exchanged polite words, and hopped in the shower. Breakfast, Marie guessed, could wait.

 ❦

After breakfast, they got back to sitting and sketching. Rachel was even chattier this morning than she had been last night. She and Marie discussed “Boisjoli” a little more and Marie mentioned that she had been to both Québec City and the South of France on Spring Break trips—the first in high school, the second when at UMass. Rachel grilled Marie on her impressions of France and Marie, who liked some aspects of French culture but could not stand others, went on a gut instinct that she could be honest with Rachel and got into some depth about it. Rachel developed this weird sneering expression but then settled back into affability and reasonableness.

            Out of the blue she asked Marie if she wanted children and Marie evaded the question rather than giving Rachel the “yes” that she desperately wanted to give. She did not want to get her own or anybody else’s hopes up. Rachel called very small children “anklebiters.” It turned out that she had four of them, by three different fathers, the first of whom she had been married to before his death from some disease about which she was maddeningly vague and the other two of whom she had had loving and sincere but in the final analysis transient relationships with in her late thirties. They had all gravitated towards either Florida or South Carolina, a part of the country that seemed to have a weird gravitational pull on a certain type of person that Marie had noticed several times before in conversations with other people.

            “Some people just can’t stand some stern weather,” said Rachel. “I dabbled in feeling that way myself at one time.” Marie felt this odd and fierce fondness for the way she said that she had dabbled in it, as if it had been a feeling that she could control and deliberately cultivate. Maybe it had been. In that case she definitely hadn’t had the inveterate, physical lapsed constitution in the face of cold that she knew a lot of other people did. Marie had heard from several acquaintances that humans simply had not evolved for this kind of weather, and she could believe it, but she would not have been willing to give up the changes of the seasons for anything, even though this winter being colder and wetter than the last two made it hard for her to get to Mass some Sundays.

            She took four or five pictures apiece of Rachel’s face from five different angles—from the front, full profiles from both sides, and three-quarters profiles from both sides. She used flash, she disabled flash, she put the camera on automatic and let the flash do what it may. She filled up half of her sketchpad with charcoals of Rachel’s hands and a few studies of the way the light hit her face and clothing that the camera couldn’t capture. Rachel wanted a portrait sitting down, from the knees up, with her hands folded in her lap—a more traditional posture than Marie, before meeting her, would have expected from someone with her background and profile.

            “Should I break out the easel?” she asked, finally.

            “Sure,” said Rachel. “Do you think you can finish today?”

            Marie raised her eyebrows. “Do you expect me to finish today?”

            “I’m not sure what to expect. What should I?”

            “You should expect that I’ll be able to get the basic strokes in today, ask you to approve the basic concept of the painting, then leave either later today or tomorrow morning and finish the painting from the sketches and photos I have when I get back to North Adams. I can drive it over to you or ship it to you at some later point and you can pay me the rest of my commission then. Does that sound okay to you?”

            “Sure,” said Rachel, noncommittally but accommodatingly. “By the way, and there’s no reason I really need to ask this so feel free to tell me I’m overstepping my bounds, but shouldn’t you have gone to Mass this morning?”

            “Oh, shit,” said Marie. “Is there anywhere around here that does Sunday afternoon or Sunday evening Masses?”

            “How should I know? I think the Newman Center at UMass might. You went there, didn’t you?”

            “Sure did,” said Marie. “I guess that’s what I’ll do.”

 ❦

They spent the rest of the day discussing the painting together—Rachel wanted a non-naturalistic color scheme for her clothing but wanted her features and hair to be true-to-life, all while not caring very strongly about the lighting and the placement of elements, which Marie thought was a confusing set of prescriptions—and Marie executed as much of it as she could before the sun went down. Then she arranged to spend one more night here—she would take a shower after getting back from Mass—and drove into Amherst, planning to go to the seven o’ clock Mass and then have a late dinner at one of the restaurants on North Pleasant Street.

            She found the Newman Center changed, but not much. The priest was new, and the vaguely unpleasant feeling that she had in the past gotten when she would go to Mass here had lessened considerably, probably due more to changes within her own self-concept than to any changes in the Newman Center. She was not sure how bad some of her sins were so she took communion without having asked for confession before Mass. Then she went to a Tibetan restaurant, of all things, in Amherst Center and had an uncharacteristically sumptuous dinner of boiled bread, dumplings, and a saucy potato dish, paid for with a check that she wrote in anticipation of the down payment going through on her commission like Rachel had promised her before her arrival.

            She drove back to Shutesbury with her high beams on for the whole way once she got out of North Amherst—there were a couple of cars that she passed but she forgot to turn the high beams off when she passed them; one of them honked at her. When she got back she finally familiarized herself with the bathroom, which she had used only very briefly and diffidently earlier in the day, for long enough to take a shower.

            “How was Mass?” asked Rachel.

            Marie shrugged, but she felt like doing more than shrugging. The shower was a peace and a comfort, her third of the night so far. The night wore on and got colder. Rachel put more wood pellets in the stove and snuggled up with Rosie.