CHAPTER SIX
In Al's admittedly extensive experience, the first months of marriage were the easiest. His early days with Beth had been as close to paradise as he had ever come or was ever likely to come again. He didn't remember much about his first months with the Hungarian—didn't remember much about that marriage as a whole, really—but he was pretty sure that they had involved a whole lot of really excellent sex. As for Ruthie, well, the marriage hadn't made it past those first months, but that was really nobody's fault, and the first six weeks had been great. It took time for a relationship to degenerate into squabbling and discord. Therefore he wasn't surprised that 'round about the three-month mark (the same time as the last one had been filing for divorce), he started to see Sharon in a new and unpleasant light.
Sexy she was. An artist she might be. But Sharon Marie Quinn Godolphin Calavicci was also a slob.
It took time for her true colors to surface. In the beginning she seemed to fight her natural impulse towards slovenliness, but as she grew more accustomed to her surroundings and began to settle into the trailer and accept it, on some level, as home, this restraint gradually dissolved. It first manifested itself as a complete obliviousness to the strewn and crumpled clothing that greeted them almost every morning. Al didn't have a problem with picking up her cast-off garments along with his—after all, he was the one who'd remove them in a frenzy of mounting passion, and it wasn't exactly a two-person job to deposit yesterday's laundry in the hamper. Heck, he didn't even mind washing all the clothes: he did that better than she did anyway. But it was discouraging to come back from a long day at the Project to find a sink full of dishes, food carelessly left on the counter to spoil, socks discarded willy-nilly around the living room. She never even thought to take out the trash. She didn't wipe down the shower, or even the bathroom floor, when she was through with it. Her van needed a good vacuuming, her makeup kit was full of capless lipstick and broken applicator brushes, she never wiped the dust from her feet before tramping across his clean kitchen floor—
Al was starting to think like his last mother-in-law, which was, perhaps, the most frustrating thing. Until, that is, the day he came home and found that she had been using his clothes as backdrops.
Sharon didn't actually have, nor as far as Al could see had she ever had, a real job. She taught three classes per term at the community center, and made the odd buck on custom bodywork. Perhaps (he couldn't prove it, but no more could he discount it) she even occasionally sold some of her work. Mostly, however, she lived off the proceeds of her divorce, carefully invested for her by her brother and supplemented regularly. Having married out of high school, and then divorced Heinrich Godolphin when she opted to go to college instead of pursuing a quiet career as the wife of an oil-baron's son, Sharon had done quite well by way of a lump settlement. She had also traded two hundred bucks' monthly alimony for marriage to Al, which at least explained how she had managed to eat over the last twenty years. She occupied most of her time with her art, and it was usually in the bedroom-turned-studio that he found her when he returned home in the evening.
Today was no exception. She was sitting with her back to the window—the largest window in the house and the primary reason, so she said, that this was the space where she had to have her studio. Her easel was set up in front of her, and she was daubing brilliant orange oil paint onto the canvas. The strong chemical smell filled the hot air, stirred up and circulated by the electric fan blowing on Sharon's bare heels. In front of her on a TV-tray was an assortment of fruit and vegetables. Under these, draping up and over a chair, was one of his shirts.
Al glanced at this oddity, then looked at his wife. "What's up?" he asked.
"Uhm," Sharon replied, fixated with her painting. Al wandered into the room, circling behind her to glance at the conglomeration of geometrical shapes and dissonant colors. It didn't look much like the display in front of her. Sharon seldom used models when painting: her work was, she said, an expression of her mind and not of the real world. Models were reserved for her dramatic charcoal, which she loved as a change from the norm, and the occasional watercolor, which she explained were dull as hell but good exercises in composition, and sometimes saleable.
There were a couple such watercolors on the cinderblock-and-board shelves lining the walls. Al glanced at them. Desertscapes and vases full of flowers: the sort of paintings you would find in family motels and old folks' homes. Leaning against the shelves were canvases of Sharon's other work; the more interesting and less fathomable stuff. There was an abundance of the abstract variety, all vivid and vibrant and emotional despite their lack of coherent images. Stranger still were her surreal paintings. A starry sky with a harlequin doll fading in or out of reality. A roiling magenta ocean beneath a robin's-egg-blue sky. A window reflecting in intimate detail everything behind you: the entirety of a quaint living room, complete with an old television set. Al found that one uncannily disturbing. It mocked him: he could see but not be seen. He had consciousness but he did not exist. The picture screamed that he was nothing: just a mind without matter. A powerless observer without substance.
Shivering, he turned away, and found one of Sharon's older pieces. In an empty room sat a doll, illuminated by a shaft of light. She wore a tattered blue dress edged in lace. Her arms arced outwards, hands held up in her lap. She smiled her sweet pink smile. One blue eye glittered in the sunlight. The other was a gaping socket through which a ragged, spreading crack in the back of her head shone.
On the whole, Al liked the modern stuff better. He turned back to the artist and put a hand on her shoulder, smoothing the hair away from her neck. He bent and kissed the soft pink flesh behind her ear.
"It almost finished?" he asked.
"Almost," Sharon answered, tapping carefully at one corner with a brush bearing blue. "How was your day?" she queried.
"Long. Stressful." Al kissed her again, and this time she leaned in towards him as he did so, her hand still navigating the shoals of her imagination. "I've got this one scientist, a computer expert, who just isn't fitting in. If he wasn't such a drip I'd be able to help him integrate, but… aw, you probably don't want to hear it."
"You're right," Sharon said mildly. "I don't."
"Thanks. I feel valued," Al grumbled.
"Mm-hmm," she hummed, obviously much more interested in what she was doing than in any advances of his.
Al crossed the room to draw up the other stool. He sat upon it, resting his booted feet on the bar near the bottom. He began to undo the front of his uniform shirt.
"You're sexy when you're painting," he observed presently.
"Uh."
He grinned to himself, laughing a little. She definitely had a one-track mind. Mind you, he thought as his eyes raked over the curve of her thigh, so did he…
At last she got up and put her brush in the turpentine, then leaned against the window to scrutinize her work.
"Gorgeous," she said. "I love it when it works."
Al got to his feet and moved to join her, taking the opportunity to curl his arm around her waist. He looked at the mass of shapes, most of them rounded. Offset slightly right of and below center was a bizarre purple blob covered in black splotches and deep wrinkles.
"It have a name?" Al inquired.
" 'Still Life With Eggplant'," Sharon announced.
Al cocked his head to one side. "Looks more like an obese baby orangutan with a bad case of pellagra," he teased.
Sharon's mouth shriveled into a prune of fury and she stomped out of his grasp. "Well, I wouldn't expect you to understand!" she snapped. She flounced indignantly out of the room.
Al watched her denim-clad rear as it retreated, gnawing his lower lip in admiration. Left alone, he turned back to the picture. 'Still Life With Eggplant', huh? Well, he certainly didn't see it.
There wasn't even an eggplant in her little display, he noted with some annoyance. He picked up the apple set on top of the heap of fruit and bit into it. Crisp and sweet: perfect. Annoyed at the wrinkles Sharon had put in his shirt, he eased it out from under the rest of the food and made his way into the kitchen, where he plugged in the iron. Sharon was in the bathroom, going at her hands with the pumice stone and soap.
At length the iron warmed up, and Al set about smoothing the ugly creases out of the soft cloth. The lively colors of the pattern danced pleasingly before his eyes. Most people didn't appreciate the true beauty of color. That was what was nice about Sharon. She wasn't scared of color.
His eyes snagged on something that didn't quite fit: a color that didn't belong. It took a moment for it to register, and his eyes narrowed with anger when he realized what it was. There was a yellow blob of paint on his shirt.
He picked up the cloth and rubbed at it. It was definitely oil paint. Enraged, he scrubbed uselessly at the splotch. She had attacked his shirt with dirty hands, and ruined it!
Sharon came out of the bathroom, twisting her hair back into a sheaf of frizzled curls. "What were you saying about how sexy I am?" she asked.
Al was in no mood to mince words. As if treating the house like her personal dumping ground wasn't enough, now she was wrecking his clothes!
"You wanna explain this?" he snapped.
"Explain what?" Sharon asked. "I needed a backdrop for the arrangement, and that was perfect."
"Oh, you needed a backdrop," Al mimicked. "So you took one of my shirts and smeared paint all over it?"
Sharon frowned in puzzlement. "Paint?" she echoed, stepping forward. She glanced at the offending spot. "That? It hardly shows!"
"That's not the point!" Al blustered. "How many other shirts have you spoiled?"
She bristled at the confrontation tone. "I did no such thing!" she exclaimed. "You probably did it yourself."
"Hah! I don't paint!"
"Yes, you do!" she said. "You spent a whole term painting! You're actually pretty good, if you'd just stop feeling all self-conscious and admit it!"
He threw down the shirt that had been the catalyst for the now very sidetracked argument. "Self-conscious? I'm the least self-conscious guy you're likely to meet!"
"Egotistical and self-confident aren't the same thing!" Sharon bit back. "You're always second-guessing yourself and trying to bellyache about something you did or said. You won't believe me when I say your stuff is good, and you won't even let me put it up!"
"Put up your own paintings!" Al snapped. "And while you're at it you could start putting away your own laundry and washing your own dishes!"
Sharon adapted to the change of tangent as well as he did, springing down his throat with the vehemence of an angered she-bear. "I do my fair share of the necessary chores around here!" she cried. "So you can take that line and shove it!"
"Fair share? We'd be up to our armpits in your socks and underwear if it wasn't for me!" Al roared. "You're the messiest broad I've ever come across! How the heck didn't you get evicted for being a public health hazard? Do you even know how to wash dishes?"
"Of course I know how to wash dishes! There's just no point doing it!"
Al was rendered momentarily speechless with that blasphemy. "No point? No point?" he wheezed when he found his voice. "You ever eaten off of dirty dishes?"
Just the thought sent a shiver of revulsion up his spine. A memory of desperation chilled him.
"So if I need a dish I wash it!" Sharon said.
"And the rest of them sit in the sink, rotting?" Al demanded.
"I didn't mean I never wash dishes, you stupid fool!" Sharon snapped. "I mean what's the point of my cleaning up? Anything I do you find fault with and do over!"
"I do not!" Al retorted.
"Do too!" Sharon shouted. "If I put away the laundry, you're in there a half-hour later re-folding stuff! If I clean the bathroom I find you on your hands and knees scrubbing some little spot I missed! I wash the dishes, and you're rearranging the cupboards! God! It's like living with my mother! And let me tell you, I haven't done that since I was seventeen!"
The truth of her accusations didn't derail Al's fit of temper. "If you'd do things right the first time, I wouldn't have to do them over!"
"Look," Sharon snarled; "I know in the Navy they're more anal than a constipated city counselor, but out here in the real world we have better things to do with our lives than clean the kitchen floor with a toothbrush! You want to keep this dump looking like the Ritz on welfare, go ahead, but don't expect me to bend over backwards!"
"Like it or not, Sharon, this is your house, too, and if you can't be bothered to—"
"House? That's a good one! Next thing you'll be telling me what a nice neighborhood we're living in!"
"There's nothing wrong with the neighborhood!" Al roared.
"Oh, yeah? Junkies and Indians and illegal aliens! Nothing wrong with the neighborhood at all!" Sharon cried. "I can't believe this! You're a Naval captain and the director of some top-secret government thing, and we're living like a couple of Mexican street-sweepers!"
"We also happen to be a single-income household, and half my salary goes to alimony payments!"
"Oh, well!" Sharon snarked. "If you weren't such a flighty, philandering, inconstant lecher…"
"Look who's talking, Miss 'Paint With Your Libido'!" Al exclaimed. "How many guys did you sleep with last year? Or couldn't you find anyone who'd get past the smell of old socks and decaying dishes?"
"I'm amazed a man like you can find women at all!" Sharon retorted. "You think we dream about decrepit old soldiers covered in scars? You still paying off the last wife for agreeing to sleep with you? Two hundred a month that the court hasn't even ordered—"
"Ruthie deserves it, it's my money, and I don't see what your problem is!"
"My problem is that I'm living in a trailer in the slums so that she can pay her fancy big-city gigolos!"
"You don't know anything about Ruthie!" Al roared. "You wouldn't understand her even if you met her: she actually knows how to use a broom! And not the kind you fly away on, either!"
"Ooh, well, if you're so in love with Saint Ruth, why aren't you still married to her? She cheat on you? Wouldn't blame her!" Sharon cried. "Bet the one before Ruth cheated on you too. And your first wife! Didn't she run off with some lawyer after you left her?"
"I didn't leave her!" Al roared. "God damn you, I didn't have any choice!"
"Well, obviously she did, and I can see exactly why she didn't choose you!" Sharon snapped.
There was a moment of dead silence. Her words had struck Al like a boot in the gut. He stared at her, his mouth working noiselessly. Sharon watched him for a moment in mute surprise, perhaps aware of the ugliness of what she had just said. In the end, though, she was unwilling to take it back. She thrust out her chin.
"If you don't want me to touch your shirts, get them the hell out of my studio," she snapped. Then she turned on her heals and marched back into the one-time master bedroom, slamming the door behind her. Al stood for a moment, frozen in pain and disbelief.
He hadn't even really thought about Beth for a year. He certainly hadn't felt this kind of agony at her memory for a long time. Overcome with sudden weariness, he sank to the ground with his back against the cupboards and his stained shirt in his lap.
A wet nose butted his hand, and a soft tongue lapped against his fingers. Al looked down his face at the woeful eyes fixed upon him, eyes that clearly communicated confusion at Master's hurt and an innocent desire to ease it. Al lowered his leg and patted his thigh. Chester hopped into his lap and settled against his abdomen, still licking Al's wrist as he petted the ruddy fur. The consolation that came from the attention of this absolutely accepting and totally loving soul blunted the edge of the knife twisting in a wound that should have been old enough to have healed by now. Al let his hand fall into his lap, and still Chester caressed it with his hot little tongue, asking nothing more than acceptance of his loyalty and love.
It occurred to Al as the anguish began to give way to other black thoughts that this was the first fight he and Sharon had had that hadn't ended with the two of them making mad, passionate love. And he couldn't even remember what they had been fighting about.