Solitude

The party was Trent's idea, as everything on the island was.

He strung lights along the gallery of the main house and put a cooler of beer in the bathtub because he had read somewhere that it looked charming, and by nine o'clock there were forty people in the yard with the light in their faces and the gulf going silver behind them like a sheet being folded. Husbands had come down for the weekend. Children who should have been in bed were permitted to stay up until the ice cream, which was the absolute limit of human indulgence in the Landry calendar.

Camille played the piano first, because she always did. She played waltzes and kept excellent time and infused the whole thing with an expression that was genuinely inspiring, and she had told Marin that she kept up her music for the children, because she and Marc both considered it a means of brightening the home. Marin had heard her say this four times in seven years and had never once wanted to argue with her.

Then the twins from Baton Rouge did a duet and a small girl in black tulle did a skirt dance, and Marin sat on the window sill with her back to the frame and watched the whole thing from a distance of about four feet, which was a distance she had been keeping from her own life for weeks without knowing it had a name.

"You want to hear Nadia play?" Wyatt said.

He was standing in front of her. He had been standing in front of her a great deal.

"She won't."

"She will. She likes you."

"She likes nobody."

"She likes you." He said it as if it were evidence of something about Marin and not about Nadia, and then he went off across the yard to the far cottage where the old woman lived, and Marin watched him go, and watched the way he talked to her through the door — head down, patient, the way he was patient in the water — and after a minute Nadia Thibodeaux came out with her hands in the pockets of a man's cardigan, looking like she had been asked to perform an autopsy.

Nobody knew exactly how old she was. She had played in New Orleans and once, people said, in Paris, and then she had stopped, and then she had stopped being agreeable about it. She had quarreled with the symphony, with two conductors, with her own brother, and finally with the idea of an audience. She lived in the smallest cottage on the Landry property nine months of the year and played with the door shut.

She sat down at the piano without a word and did not touch the keys.

"Ask her what she wants to hear," she said to Wyatt, loudly, as if Marin were across a field.

Marin would not choose. She had been told that Nadia would take offense at any request, and she did not want to be the woman who asked for something, so she said please, anything, whatever you want, and the old woman looked at her for a long moment with those small hot eyes and then turned and played.

Marin had always believed she was fond of music. She was the sort of person who said I love music at dinner parties, and she meant it in the way people mean it when they have never been hurt by anything. Music had always given her pictures. Camille's pieces gave her pictures: one was a woman in an Empire gown coming down a long avenue between tall hedges; one was children at play; one, which Camille played often, she had privately named Solitude, and it always put the same figure in front of her — a man standing naked beside a desolate rock on a shore, his attitude one of hopeless resignation, watching a bird fly away from him.

She sat waiting for the pictures. She had arranged herself for them the way you arrange yourself for a photograph.

They did not come.

What came instead was not a picture at all. There was no rock, no bird, no woman in a gown. The thing went straight past her eyes and into the body, into the part of her that had been standing in water up to its ribs all summer. It was not sadness and it was not joy; it was, she understood later, closer to anger. She trembled. Her throat closed. She was crying in public in a room with forty people in it, and she did not move to stop it.

It ended. Nadia stood, made the small stiff bow she made, and walked off along the gallery without waiting for anything. As she passed Marin she put her hand on her shoulder and said:

"You are the only one worth playing for. Those others? Bah!"

And then, walking, not turning around, shouting over her shoulder:

"You want to paint? Bah. Everybody wants to paint. The artist must possess the courageous soul — the soul that dares and defies."

"What if I don't have it?"

"Then you will swim, and you will be nice to your husband, and you will die at eighty-two surrounded by people who never once asked you anything. Bah!"

Then somebody — it may have been Wyatt — said the thing that people say at the end of a night like that, which was: let's go in.

They went in. It was near midnight and the moon was up and the water had that flat sheet-iron look it gets when the wind drops. Everyone went down the path in a loose crowd, talking too loud, and then the crowd thinned as couples do, and Marin found herself alone at the edge of the sand with the noise of them behind her and the black water in front.

She walked in.

She did not decide to. There was no decision in it, and she would think about that afterward more than she thought about anything else, because the absence of a decision was the part that frightened her. She walked in up to her knees, up to her waist, and then the sand went and she did the thing she had not done in thirty-two years, which was to put her face in and go forward.

It was easy.

That was the shock of it. She had spent a whole summer believing there was a wall, and there was no wall, there was only a place where the floor dropped and you went on. She swam out twenty yards and turned on her back and looked at the string of lights on the porch and the tiny figures on the sand and the enormous indifferent sky, and something in her opened like a hand.

Then she thought: how far is it.

And the fear came, all of it at once, the way a fever comes — not fear of drowning so much as fear of the arithmetic of it, of the distance and the dark and the fact that nobody knew she was out here and that she was strong enough to get this far but possibly not strong enough to get back. Her arms went heavy. She rolled over and swam for the shore with an urgency that was undignified, and she reached the sand and stood up shaking and gasping in front of ten people who had been watching her the whole time and who said, variously: look at her, she did it, Marin, you did it.

Wyatt said, less than anyone: "You did it."

She was too out of breath to answer. She stood there with the water running off her, and the laughter and the lights and the ice cream and the husbands and the children and Camille's careful kindness all arranged themselves around her exactly as they had been the moment before, and she understood with perfect calm, standing in the wet, that nothing about any of it was going to be the same again, and that she was the only person standing there who knew it.