Hollis and Scotty at Seahome

1927

Scotty MacAllister drives them out of the city, along the highway, toward Seahome.  It seems a long drive today, longer than it has ever seemed before.  The houses are enormous here, hidden back on green lawns.  Catching a glimpse of their shingled sides is like seeing elephants through the trees.  The road turns smooth.  Hollis stares unthinking out the window, thumb under his chin.  Finally Scotty turns the car down a gravel lane humped in the middle with weeds.  The car tosses and bucks, its springs creaking.  Leaves stir as the great brougham passes.  The air here is dense, humid with full vegetable summer, and then the lane emerges from the brush.  Ahead of them on a broad lawn stands the white shamble of the house, many-windowed, an up-and-down sort of giant cottage with several brick chimneys.

Though they have been gone only two days the house seems palpably empty, and there is a bland indoor coolness that comes as a relief after the muggy outdoors, as though remnants of the vanished spring have found themselves trapped in the dim interior.  Hollis loves houses, especially old ones, it is a queerish sort of interest, he suspects; although really he is still finding these things out, even now, discovering what it is all right to be interested in and what is too much of a telltale.  There are two Lesbians in their circle so it is not as though such a thing is to be hidden but in polite company you are however expected to keep it mostly under your hat.  So out of habit he keeps his eyes level, he won’t be seen inspecting the décor, for pity’s sake, it is too typical.  In the front hall, standing in his muddy heels on a round Chinese carpet, Scotty takes off his hat and halloos.  The Irish girl comes stumping out of a back room, scowling.  “I didn’t hear a thing,” the girl says, ginger hair in a knobby braid.  “You’re back up for the weekend?”

“At least,” Scotty tells her.

They go down a hall into the sitting room.  Empty of carousers it seems very plain and staid.  The water is visible past the windows; the furniture is odd pieces, in a sort of Yankee style, but shabby, old spindle-chairs and unraveling rag rugs, although, also, incongruously, in front of the fireplace sits a great fat silver upholstered sofa, the sort of thing you find in Bonwits now and that you shudder at.  Scotty goes to the bar under the windows, a long bright array of bottles and decanters.  “Name your drink, Hemp.”

Hollis repeats the joke that is going around: “Christen me a little gin martini.”

Scotty stands at the sidebar, his back to the room.  He has a good solid stance, Hollis observes, two feet solid on the ground, his trousers hanging well off his rear end, nice broad shoulders.  “Well, it’s twins,” Scotty says, making two, and handing him one.  “Over the lips, et cetera.”

“Look,” Hollis says, drinking, “you’ve got a right to be sorry you invited me out here.”

“Well, I might as well be.  It wouldn’t be any fun otherwise.”

“I mean I’m not fancy.”

Scotty bares his teeth.  “Goddamn it, Hemp.  You don’t see Charlie Chambers going out of his way for you or any of those others.  They don’t give a damn about you, if that makes it any better.”  Scotty drinks his glass off in two gulps and wipes his mouth with his fingertips.  “You had a hard week, and you can just stay out here for a while.  So why not just shut up about it.”

“All right,” he says.  “I just hate the idea of charity.”

“Ain’t no durn charity tolrated rund these purts,” Scotty assures him, turning back to refill his drink.  “The Beef wun’t stund for it.”

They drink for a while and eat cold chicken at the dining room table and then hit the hay.  The next day is hot.  Hollis wakes early and takes his paints to the lawn.  Around his feet is a fury of tiny life, ants and beetles and wispy, scraggly moths clambering from blade to blade, intent pencil shavings.  He does feel slightly dashing there in his straw hat and white pants and shirtsleeves; a sort of decorous Seine-side aesthetic overtakes him. Mais oui. So: there are two choices, Monsieur Hempstead – le sea or le house.  Le sea is pretty and very classical, of course, but it is not really a thing so much as a color and an infinitely varying but nearly-indistinguishable series of motions; and then there is the hidden bulk to it, the sense of a vast green depth, and maybe the eternal deathly cold of it –

Fft, forget it.  The house it is.

He takes a pencil to the cardboard.  The soft lead hisses.  He produces a minutely wavering line.  The house stands motionless as he takes it down, plane by plane.  After ten minutes there is a pencilled ghost of it.  It is not very good.  It is never very good.  But he stows the pencil between his teeth and presses out coins of white, blue, and green on his palette.

As usual the first painting of the day is so bad, the windows tiny and the color not slate blue but deadly gray and everything lopsided and out of true – so bad that he starts to giggle there on the sunstruck lawn.  Paint is daubed on his shirtsleeves and his white pants and long sad drips are runnelling down the cardboard and even down the legs of the easel as though it is pissing itself.  He spits the pencil into the grass.  He wants to fling the palette sidearm into the sea.  But he can’t!  He touches the clean back of his wrist to his forehead and sighs and set down the palette and messily unbuttons his shirt and shakes it off, and so reveals the undershirt with its low scoopneck, and with careful fingers sets his straw hat back on his head and, drawing the attention of Scotty, he hopes, picks up the palette and begins again, abandoning the house to its ruin and instead using the blank field of the sky to attempt a portrait of a meringuey stack of cloud that now stands there above the trees.  There is a curve to it; swiveling his brush he gets not exactly a cloud, not exactly anything, but manages to bring off a feeling of roundness and of body; accidental, surely, but something.

Something, anyway.

He tries that cloud again.  Just a turn of the brush like so.  Too much paint.  Another turn.  In the morning light the paint itself is beautiful, its thick gloss adhering to the chinablack of the bristles.  Why ruin it?  He mixes a tiny bit of the disastrous gray into a spot of white and produces, to his surprise, a sort of successful shadow on the back of a cloud.  He squints into the sky, checks his work again.

He makes a row of shadowed clouds, each worse than the first.  Then at the end of the row he produces a decent copy of the first but with an interesting blocky shape on the back end that is not quite the cloud but an improvement on it, a better version.  He goes on like this until around lunchtime the door opens and Scotty appears.  He comes down and maneuvers around behind him and cocks one eye at a painting of the house and stands critically until Hollis can longer bear it and turns in expectation.  Scotty says, “Funny how grass sort of has all sorts of blades and yet you never realize how much it really actually looks like a bunch of spinach.”

“Oh, say,” Hollis protests.

“You couldn’t get a mortgage on that house, either.  One look and the bank’ll condemn it.  What’s my room doing, incidentally, sort of floating away or something.”

“I tried to sort of stretch it out.”  Hollis gestures with the tip of his brush.  This feels interestingly fine, as a sort of wandish elegance seems to extend along his fingers.

“Lunch, anyway,” Scotty cuffs him on the shoulder, “if the dogs haven’t got it yet.”

After lunch Hollis pokes around a little on his own while Scotty goes upstairs to shave.  He is sort of used to the big houses of his posh friends but the MacAllister’s house is his favorite of them all.  We of the new time call in vain of its like. If the world were just he would have lived here forever.  It is the sturdy Yankee makeshift quality that attracts.  With a conoisseur’s eye he runs his fingertips over the ripples in the windowglass and without anyone to watch tips the beat-up chairs forward to see the Sheraton brand.  The plaster is hard and undulates satisfyingly under his palm and the rugs upstairs are worn to an exquisite elderly faintness.  He passes rooms heaped with crimson-bound books and bedroom after bedroom made up in expectation of someone’s coming.  He inspects these, turning up the black lace coverlets and slipping his hand between the sheets and setting the rocking chairs in motion with the tip of his shoe.  But Aunt Lacy is dead and The Beef is up in the City all summer and the women cousins in Scotty’s line have either married or go to Nantasket or some having married not too well to Nahant.  He climbs up to the top floor where the pink and silver wallpaper is scrolling itself off the plaster.  He ducks hurriedly down the long corridor, his hand on the ceiling, not wanting to be discovered up here by the Irish girl who has long since marked him as an interloper.  Of course if he had lived here forever it would be up here among the help.

Eventually he finds his way to Scotty’s rooms where he knocks.  A voice halloos so he treads in softly.  Scotty’s desk is a mass of papers.  Books are stacked everywhere on the desk and piled on the rug; slim volumes are used as bookmarks in bigger ones, the whole scene a tipping chaos.  And there is a troubling tumult of cast-off sweaters and things that Hollis tries not to look at, neckties strung over the window latches and crumpled on the mantel, and everywhere cigarette ends in saucers and cups tarred with ancient dregs.  As always Hollis finds it all too appealing, a boy’s room – an unguarded boy, safely tucked up here among his own enthusiasms.  Scotty is writing a play.  “Bad,” he warns Hollis.  “A bad, bad day.”  His friend gestures hopelessly at the sheaves of scrawled-on foolscap.  “Of all the most useless things to do in the world.  I could be unloading trunks in Bangalore or something but instead Fate has put me here to spend my fruitful youth at a window by the sea.”

“At least it’s not painting.  Nothing’s as bad as painting, I’d think.”

“Well, no, nothing’s as bad as your painting, old boy.”

“What’s it about?”

Scotty recoils at himself, scoffing.  “No, but I mean it’s just so moronic, you know.  I haven’t even told you what this one’s about.  It’s a sort of a comic play about everyone.  Charlie and Olive and Benjy and all those types.  And me.  And you, incidentally.”

“Oh.”  He feels himself flushing.  “Well, thanks for putting me in with that bunch, I guess.”

“Sure.  But you don’t come in for much.  Actually you just sort of do what you do, stand there being sensible.  A sort of melancholy half-drunk chorus most of the time.  Also The Beef’s in it, of course.  And my mother, as a ghost.”  Scotty winces now, his expression becoming one of hopeless appeal.  “Too stupid for words, as it turns out.  I don’t suppose you have a match handy.”

“I think it sounds possibly all right.”

“You don’t want to hear any, do you.  You’ll just ride me.”

He can’t help it, he blushes.  “Only if I think you’ve got it coming.”

“I’ve got it coming, all right.”  Scotty is bending over his desk, fingers on the papers, reading them again.  “I guess I’m sort of stuck in the middle, actually.  I think actually it’s supposed to be about youth.  You know, youth and a sort of poverty of expression that happens.”

“Ah.  Well, that’s a first.”

He whirls, amused.  “No, but – really, I mean that whole bunch, you know.  Like you say.  None of them’s bad news exactly.  On their own.  But if you went five minutes out of your way to make them feel you actually liked them they’d turn around and eat you for dinner.  You know what I mean.  Just once in a while I’d like someone to stop and take a breath and just sort of be friendly without thinking about it.  I mean without trying to get off some – good line, you know.”

“Sure,” Hollis says.  “You’re a sucker, Scotty, that’s all.”

“Oh, well, that’s the truth.”  Scotty faces Hollis: the latest proof of his suckerdom.  “Just for that, I will read you some.  One of these days.  You deserve it.”  But he rucks down the rolltop desk and stands abruptly and says “But not until it’s really very much worse than it is right now.”

They eat alone again at the long dining table.  As usual there are rumors of parties to attend but Hollis can’t stand the idea of a party, not right now.  It is too far to drive, for one thing, and sitting there working his fork and drinking the MacAllisters’ claret under the electric chandelier he finds it hard to imagine talking to anyone other than Scotty.  And really, even now, in this marvelous house, Hollis just feels dreadful.   Dreadful, the word repeats itself in the back of his brain, with all its attendant dampness and loathing.  No parties for him.  He wants, yes, to be in someone’s company – he knows he is a moper and would only be worse on his own.  But he also wants to have a little while to think about what he has done to Mary, by locking her up, and he does not at all want to explain himself to anyone or to have to face a room with everyone knowing what he has done, the sudden hushed air of scandal and disaster.  So Scotty is the only company he can possibly stand.

The cook is a Greek named Marina, tall and masculine looking with a great hooked nose.  She gives them chicken baked in lemons and some sort of  flavorful pastry with spinach in it and between them they finish two bottles of the claret, a modest count.  When the servants go up to bed Scotty and Hollis have the house to themselves.  “We could play some cards, I suppose,” Scotty suggests.  “Or there’s the orchestra on the radio, if you wanted to hear that.”

“Aren’t we a couple of lively numbers.”

“Sure.”

They go into the sitting room again where the wireless is.  It is Lute McCall and His Quality Orchestra and they are playing from New York City.  Hollis doesn’t know much about music, only that he is an inelegant dancer and a sourpuss on the dance floor anyway.  He did not even get the fairy’s typical lightness of foot, which would have been some compensation.  Or the charm, needless to say.  Scotty gets out a deck of cards and they face each other across a little gaming table under a yellow lamp.  They play rummy.  “A penny a point,” Scotty insists.  “Otherwise it’s no fun beating you.”

“I’ve got about sixty cents to my name, you know.”

“Not for long.”  Scotty’s face under the lamplight is pouchy and fatigued.  “Not if I can help it.”

Scotty wins fifteen cents off him in an hour while Lute McCall beats his band and then they are both yawning.  “All this seaside air,” Scotty says.  And the hour as passed and Hollis has thought of Mary only twice, and he is a damned heel, isn’t he.  Enjoying himself even a moment.  What she must be doing right this minute.  What she must be thinking.

He closes his eyes.  Sees it all again.  Poor Mary.

All that blood.

He paints clouds.  He improves.  After all there is nowhere to go but up.  Through July he goes at it in the morning light and comes to know the taste of the air at seven, at eight, as the cool morning dew leaves the air and the sun hits the grass.  He paints the house from all angles and all sides as the hours from nine to eleven pass in a sunny daze.  Near noon he begins to tire.  He covers his palette with a drifting sheet of onionskin and goes into the house with his shirtsleeves rolled.  Marina has set the table for lunch.  Scotty is up by now usually but is not always at the table with him.  He eats ham and biscuits, salads with walnuts, fish in lemon sauce, in the otherwise unoccupied dining room.  There is the airy sense of unclaimed time.  The polished tabletop gives back the reflection of the windows.  His water glass is radiant crystal.  He allows himself a glass of wine.  Marina is away in the kitchen.  Now and then comes a clattering crash as she struggles a rack from the oven.  Water runs in the sink.

Through the French doors he can see his easel standing there down the lawn.  It is a tiny square at this distance and obvious for what it is, a futile vanity.  You cannot get it all.  You cannot get the shadowy moving grays of the white-lace curtains that drape over the French doors, each eyelet and stitch of lace itself containing a shadow and a thready texture.  You cannot hope to get the hang of the curtains as they move weighted by a row of washers that have been sewn into the hem and which are themselves shadowy gray shapes tocking gently against the white wood frame of the doors.  Nor can you hope to get the shadows along the curves of the ceiling or the blasting brightness of the day as seen from the dim interior of this dining room or the diminishing grays and blues of the sea as it travels to the horizon, that same sea that is audible to him now as he sits there, thudding and slopping along the seawall all day, scenting the air with seaweed and diesel fuel.  You cannot get it all.

“Thank you,” he calls to Marina, standing, setting his chair back in place on the carpet; and she calls back, “You’re welcome!”

She lets him step out into the day again before taking away his dishes.

When he sets himself to work again is it difficult for the first few minutes.  He peels back the onionskin and stabs it into the lawn with the slender handle of a #11 so it will not blow away.  The day is too large, the sky too high.  He is a joke.  Marina’s voice stays with him.  He faces his painting.  The rows of clouds seem comic.  Failed pastries.  One looks like a big baggy ass.  He balances the #6 across his middle finger.  Tip, tip.  Begins again.  The first one awful.  The second awful.  The third one awful.  And awful, awful, awful.  Then, all right.  One with the shady deep textured thereness that moves him.  Then it is okay again.  Everything is fine.  Scotty is in the house somewhere, maybe eyeing him from behind the shade – it is this possibility, he half admits, that gives him such stamina, he does not mind impressing him.  And Mary is being cared for.

Then one Friday afternoon in July he is on the driveway side of the house and is at work on the sky from that angle when The Beef arrives, stepping out of his Cadillac with the air of wounded dignity that indicates the beginnings of a hangover.  He resembles his son not at all, two hundred pounds and egg-shaped with tiny feet, and is very bald, his scalp ridged and red, with white pig bristles here and there, and he is wearing a gray summer-weight suit that wraps him up neatly, like a swaddled baby.  With his fingertips at its rim he holds a glass of what appears to be scotch down along his thigh.  “You,” he calls to Hollis.  “I don’t remember you being here.”

He puts down his things and comes forward.  “I’m a friend of Scotty’s.”

“Is Scotty here?“  The Beef pivots, amazed, staring at the great windowed house.  “I’ll be damned.  You’re a friend of his?”

“Yes sir.”

The Beef evaluates this statement.  He lifts a calculating eyebrow and lets out an unemphatic belch, a routine release of internal pressure.  “And you paint, do you?”

“Not so far as I know, actually.  But I’m giving it a go.”

“Painting.  Well, not in my line of work.  Could be worse, though,” The Beef confides, with a touch of knowing sympathy.  And indeed there is something pathetic about The Beef in person, although he is reliably entertaining at a distance.  Once late last summer The Beef set Chet Davidson’s tennis court on fire by spilling a drink and simultaneously dropping his cigar into the puddle, then comically attempted to put out the fire by stomping on it, hands in the air like a gypsy dancer.  Only when someone threw a bucket of melted ice was disaster averted and everyone had gone around smelling the burnt hay smell of the court and observing Chet’s attempts to make a joke out of it all, even while he couldn’t help himself from looking sadly at the soggy black depression by the service line and pressing the tip of his shoe into the mark.

Well. The Beef goes up to the house.  His two dogs have lowered themselves now out of the Cadillac, cautious Afghans named Cal and Reggie.  They are cocao brown and very stupid and like their owner have met Hollis before but also will not remember.

“Hello, boys,” he tells them, but they give him a wide berth as they trot on down the gravel path around the side of the house, heading for the water.  Watch out for the fairy, old boy.  Ooh indeed watch out for the fat fat fairy.

And of course he owes them.  He has simply ignored it but he owes them everything.  And the coin of Hollis’ repayment is his helpless dedication out here on the grass.  A mascot.  A kept man.  The poor ugly faggot out on the lawn, doing his faggoty things.  Interestingly as he thinks these things his clouds are better than ever.  It is freeing to think such ugly thoughts about yourself.  The worst has already happened.  Angry, ashamed, diminished, he becomes thoughtlessly fluent, and paints a lovely quarter of the sky, blue and towering with the most beautiful clouds.

When he is finished he looks at it with a feeling of wonder.  It was he who has done it, all right, but he has hardly noticed.  The great black Cadillac sits ticking on the lawn as though deciding whether to explode.  He will have to leave, of course, but he cannot imagine, now, what could possibly happen next.