Recapitulation Read Free

Directly across was a Five Minute Car Wash with a big apron of concrete and a spic dazzle of white paint and red tiles. In the times he remembered, that lot had held a peewee golf course where men in shirt sleeves, women in summer dresses, young couples loud with laughter, had putted little white balls along precise green alleys of artificial grass and over gentle predictable bridges and causeways into numbered holes.
    “Look at them,” Holly had said to him once as they sat in the tower bay looking down at the after-dinner golfers moving under the floodlights. “
Toujours gai
, my God! Someday I’m going to build a miniature golf course with fairways six inches wide and rough six inches deep. I’ll fill the water holes with crocodiles and sow the sand traps with sidewinders. How would it be to hide a black widow spider in every hole, so that picking up your ball would earn you some excitement? What if you sawed the supports of all the little bridges nearly in two?”
    Live it dangerously. It was strange to recall how essential that had once seemed. Go boom, take chances. He ran his hand along the sill, thinking that this was the pose, sitting right here and looking out, that Holly had assumed when Tom Stead painted her in her gold velvet gown.
    Probably that portrait wasn’t anything special. It couldn’t have been. The chances were that Tom Stead was painting signs somewhere now, if he hadn’t drunk himself to death. But then, in this room, in the presence of its subject whose life overflowed upon them all, that slim golden shape with the velvet highlights was Lilith, Helen, Guinevere,
das Ewig-Weibliche.
And it was hardly a day before other girls, less fortunately endowed or graced, began dropping comments on how
warm
that Holly-Stead romance was getting, and hinting that there was tucked away somewhere, in the best Goya fashion, a companion portrait, a nude.
    Well, well, what a bunch of bohemian puritans. Mason did not believe in any nude, or in its importance if there was one, though at the time the possibility had bothered him, and he had been malely offended, surprised that she would
lower
herself.
    What he had meant was that his vanity was hurt if Holly accorded Stead any privileges she did not accord to him. And he didn’t really believe that she accorded any to Stead. What truly shone out of that golden portrait, as out of Holly herself, was not glamour but innocence. Under the sheath she was positively virginal, a girl from Parowan who had made the big step to city excitements but remained a girl from Parowan. If you cracked the enamel of her sophistication you found a delighted little girl playing Life.
    Once more he felt on his lips the touch of that soft, childlike kiss by the piano on a Christmas morning, and stood up so abruptly that he startled himself with the sight of the dead woman, whom he had forgotten. It
was
innocence. Holly could put away the predatory paws of college boys, twist laughing from the casual kiss, pass among the hot young Freudians as untouched as a nun, shed like water the propositions that came at her seven to the week. There she sat in her gold gown by her window opening on the foam: a maiden in a tower.
    Like someone tapping at a door, wanting to interrupt a privateconversation, Nola was there in his head asking to be asked in. He found it curious that he didn’t want to ask her in, not just now, though she was surely a more significant part of this lost place and past time than Holly. It was Holly he wanted to talk to just now; she seemed fresher with possibilities, not so tainted with old sullen emotions. The two had briefly shared these rooms, but it was Holly whom the rooms remembered.
    He crossed to the door of what had once been her bedroom, wanting to look in on her intimately. In this room, now completely bare, aseptically painted, he had sat many times when she was ill or when on Sunday mornings she made it a charming point of her sophistication to entertain in bed.