The Brush

By October she was painting three hours a day and lying about it.

The lying was not elaborate. It was the ordinary lying of a woman who has discovered a private room in a house with no doors: she said she was going to the gym, to the grocery, to the school; she said she was tired; she said Yvette could handle it. What she did was walk six blocks to a studio above a hardware store on Magazine that a woman named Birdie rented by the month, and paint the porch at Grand Isle forty-one times.

Birdie sold two of them in November without asking.

"I put them in the back," she said. "A man from Chicago bought one. He thought it was the Outer Banks."

Marin looked at the check for four hundred dollars and felt something she had not felt about money in her entire married life, which was that it was hers. Not the house's, not the account's, not Curtis's. Hers. She put it in an account at a different bank, and the fact that she did not tell Curtis about the account was, she knew, either the first dishonest thing she had ever done to him or the first honest thing.

The krewe did not forgive her. There was a call in which a woman she had known since she was nineteen used the phrase we all have to pull, and Marin heard herself say, pleasantly, into the phone: "Then pull without me." She hung up. She sat perfectly still for a moment with the phone in her hand and the window open on the street noise of Esplanade, and then she went upstairs and painted for five hours and did not come down for dinner.

Curtis came to the studio in December.

He had never come to the studio. She had not told him where it was, and he had found out anyway, which she supposed was not difficult and which she filed away as information about him she had not previously had. He stood in the doorway with his coat on and looked at the forty-one porches.

"You're not coming to the ball," he said.

"No."

"Marin. It's the ball. My mother——"

"I know what it is."

"People will talk."

"Let them."

He said the thing he had been building up to since October. He said it in the flat, reasonable voice of a man presenting a case to a client, and it was this: that she had not been herself since the summer, that he had been patient, that he had made allowances, that he had assumed it would pass, and that he wanted her to see someone.

"See someone," she said.

"Lyle. I've spoken to Lyle."

Dr. Lyle Broussard had been the family's internist for nine years, had delivered neither of her children, had once told her over a glass of iced tea that grief was not a disease and that people who treated it as one sold a great many vitamins. He was sixty-some years old and he wore the expression of a man who had listened to a great many people and believed most of them.

She went. Not because Curtis asked. She went because she wanted to know whether a doctor would say the thing the committee had been circling for months — that she was ill — and whether she would be relieved to hear it.

He did not say it.

He asked her about her sleep and her appetite and whether she was drinking more, and she answered honestly, and then he sat back in the chair in his office on Napoleon Avenue with his hands folded and said:

"You are not sick. Don't come to me expecting a prescription for a life."

She waited.

"Your husband asked me if something was wrong with you," he said. "What he means is that something is wrong with him, and he would like it relocated."

She laughed. It startled both of them.

"Curtis is not a bad man," she said.

"No," said Dr. Broussard. "He is a man who has never once been required to imagine you. Very few men are. It is not a crime; it's a condition of the occupation."

He went on, in the way he had, looking at the ceiling more than at her. He said that a woman who had spent her whole adult life being somebody's possession did not become a person in a season, and that the process looked from the outside exactly like selfishness, and that there was no version of it that was comfortable for anybody, and that the people who loved her would experience it as a loss because it was one.

"Is there anything I should do?" she asked him.

"No," he said. "There's something you will do. That's different."

That night Curtis asked her what Lyle had said.

"He said I'm not sick."

"Well," said Curtis, after a moment, "that's good." He stood there in the doorway of the back room with a glass in his hand and she saw that he had wanted a diagnosis badly — that a diagnosis would have solved the entire problem by making it not his — and she felt, unexpectedly and for the last time in their marriage, something like pity.

"Curtis," she said. "I'm not going to the ball and I'm not going to the luncheons and I'm not going to pretend I enjoyed them."

He nodded. He said all right. He went to bed.