Free I see you everywhere by Julia Glass Page B

especially when you’re alone. You’re free to let loose, unobserved, but someone else has chosen the words you belt out in private, the rhythms you can dance to like a fool. I opened the front windows so I could hear the music out on the verandah, where I settled myself in the wicker swing. Before me stretched Leah’s wide bed of irises, the old-fashioned kind with big parchment petals. Beyond them stretched the lawn, unblemished; a swatch of road; some trees, maples and sycamores; another house; the early evening sky. I squinted until it all closed into glass chips of purple, apricot, cobalt, green. Listening to Bob, I dreamed of Sam.
    I met Sam at a May Day party on the roof of his building. Sam is a painter who turns his dreams into comic neon landscapes brimming with colorful people and oddly shaped creatures. They’re alien but also alluring, funny and warm. Sam lives in a loft shadowed all day by the Manhattan Bridge. Everything shudders when the subways pass over, including Sam, who laughs all the time. His teeth are white as gulls, a little jagged, and his eyes the color of trout, pewter flecked with green. He is in his late thirties and has a wavy ginger-colored ponytail that nearly reaches his waist. At the party, we had to shout every time a train went by. “Life on the Transit Fault!” he shouted gaily. “Like earthquakes all day long, it’s wild!” He said his dreams were full of earthquakes; so then, for the moment, were his paintings: toppling buildings, tidal waves, cars and boats tossed to the sky, yet without any sense of doom. He took me downstairs to see them. Artists are supposed to be an anguished lot. Not Sam, and that was partly why I fell for him. Also because he was full of surprises. One: that he was from Nebraska. Another: that twice a week he got up at four and drove to a marina at the end of Long Island, a place where you pay to go deep-sea fishing. When he came over to my apartment for dinner, he was all fired up from one of these trips, his nose polished red by the sun. The whole time he seemed to be blushing, hyperactive with rapture. “Thirtyfive blues,” he exclaimed, “ravenous devils, mouthful of razors!” He showed me a Polaroid of himself on the dock with a fish half as long as he Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 52 52
    Julia Glass
    was tall. Over stuffed chicken breasts, I listened to him reel off fishing tales like so many love affairs fondly recalled. Over ice-cream sundaes, I showed him photos of my fruit bowls and teapots and fanciful ewers.
    “Your colors are like fog and snow,” Sam said softly. “Fantastic and ephereal.” He sounded reverent. But did he mean ephemeral or ethereal ? I didn’t ask. As happens to me at these moments, I heard my sister scold me: Loosen up there, Lou. Another time she caught me acting like a schoolmarm, she startled me out of it with her best James Brown. “Get on the good foot, unh-unh-unh, get on the GOOD foot!” she grunted, dancing like the proverbial funky chicken. She can’t sing to save her life. After putting the dishes in my sink, I went to the bedroom to brush my hair and get my bearings. Now, I thought. Now. Breathless, I returned to the living room. There he still was, still glowing, his head tilted back on the sofa: snoring gently to my patterned tin ceiling. That was sometime late in June. Take it slow, I consoled myself. Sam could visit me out in the country, the ideal setting for romance. I pictured us under Leah’s pergola, sunset filtered through fragrant red grapes (however inconsistent the season). I thought of Clem, how she would have rolled her eyes and groaned at the image. “Boy,” she’d say, “if they’re out there to be found, you’ll find ’em, the looniest men on earth.”
    “Oh no,” I would tell her, “not this one.” And on we would spar. My sister was named for our grandmother Clement, a Louisiana belle who died of pneumonia when our father was eight. She