(The Happy Ending Project is on vacation this week. In its place we bring you this original short story. The Happy Ending Project will return next week.)
As she thought about it, it seemed to Kimberly Smoot that the sudden availability of the old cheese house was the first piece of good luck in her life in, well, two years at least. It had been easily that long since the ugly end of her last relationship and she still shuddered at the thought of her own blubbering, desperate role during the ragged drawn-out finish. Her subsequent breakdown, the humiliating intervention of her mother, and the final insults of her firing, eviction and hospitalization were now almost distant memories –- but maybe ones she might mine as rich “material.” Now the clean, dry-stone walls, broad, richly grained floorboards and hand-hewn beams of the quaint outbuilding were as far as she could ever have hoped to be from the dull split-level mediocrity of the middle-class Long Island town she grew up in. It certainly looked like the perfect setting to get “back on her feet”. The phrase had been applied to her more than she cared to remember over the last decade, by her doctors, her exhausted parents and now, with grim acceptance, herself.
The structure sat on the vast grounds of the old Milburn estate in upper Connecticut. The place itself had been a working farm owned by a wealthy financier, Tock Milburn, who wished to expose himself and his family to a kind of pastoral, utopian splendor when not in the city hard at the business of making money. Most of the family fortune had long since disappeared and a lone surviving grandson had deeded much of the land to an artist’s colony, rented the great house and habitable outbuildings, and for the most part let the balance of the property and working structures go to seed. Dilapidated cow barns, chicken coops and greenhouses lay sagging and vine-covered and seemed to settle further into dangerous near collapse with every changing season.
Kimberly had been advised to steer clear of the structures and had even been warned of feral pigs in the forest. In fact, she’d been told to keep pretty much to her own dwelling. The artist Colony Macintowe was strictly off limits to non-Fellows. It was protected by high fences with signs which warned — with what Kimberly supposed was intended as a kind of intimidating smug humor — “If you don’t belong here, don’t even think of trespassing!” But staring at the ample fireplace with its fine old wood inset beam mantle, Kimberly felt a sense of renewed possibility. The feeling, the atmosphere, the “energy” of the place – it was the first truly appropriate environment for someone like her… ever. It seemed like the kind of surroundings she had always longed for. She was, after all, an exceptional girl, plunked down at birth as if by aliens in the most stultifying, tacky outpost in the entire world. And she was exceptional. She’d felt it from earliest consciousness growing up in Massapequa, with its endless low-lying strip malls and identical ranch homes and seafood shacks. She’d had to fight hard to resist the attempts from all sides to stunt her exceptional qualities and the pernicious influence of the local girls, who pronounced words like turtle and total without the second “T.” “C’mon Kimmy, ya gotta think Vince is a to-uhl fox?” Then there were the boorish boys themselves, spending endless hours bent over car engines in sleeveless mesh tank tops. “Hey Kim, j’hea Tommy tuo-chahd a tur-uhl?” The pattern continued with the only slightly more sophisticated brutish college boys she dated who would seem promising and always disappoint. And years later, after failing to graduate, there was the series of mindless low-level jobs in publishing houses where snobbish WASPy girls only two and three years her senior would roll their eyes and titter when she would try to discuss books or submit a piece of writing. It took all her courage to submit a short piece about her retarded sister to a younger editor who was kind to her in the elevator and, she had heard, was unhappily married. When it was returned without comment, she doubted he had ever actually read it.
Back in her junior year, living in a far too expensive apartment with two other NYU roommates, she thought sometimes of returning to her first love, modern dance. She thought of that mostly posing in the morning half-light of a boy’s apartment after sex. She would prop her leg on the high back of an armchair and extend a graceful arm half-circled overhead, as if the art were so much a part of her, that she lived her life in constant training. But the reaction she hoped to elicit, a sort of charmed and admiring “wow, you’re really flexible” or “are you in a show now?” rarely came. Sometimes, the balletic gesture was acknowledged with an irritable, hungover “what are you doing?” but more often it just went unnoticed. She had always been a pretty girl with a slender body and when she felt she had slightly large thighs, she attributed it, when she preemptively mentioned it before undressing, to her “dance work”.
Freshman year, Kimberly laundered her background immediately on arrival, saying that she came from “New York State.” She hoped that evoked something less sterile than the mid-Island suburbs. Her father, a typing teacher and wrestling coach at her high school, she morphed into a kind of embattled rural intellectual who was too much of a maverick for the city. Her homemaker mother, who loved to do “craft” with her friends became a blurry kind of artist. It had been this kind of mental unfocusing of the images around her that Kimberly spent endless hours perfecting as a child. She hoped the machine-cut carpets in their cramped living room could be willed into faded tribals from the Caucasus and the plastic covered rattan chair transformed into a kind of craftsmanny old heirloom.
Her ability to distort the details around her became so muscular that she began to affect an arty hauteur. It had confused and hurt her best friend Stacy who simply didn’t “get” a thrift store cape she once appeared in. “Wassat? Ya look like a fuckin magician!” As she drifted from her friends, she began to think of herself as a part of a kind of secret besieged intelligentsia whose members were prevented by some oppressive force from reaching out to each other. Her isolation, and the taunts of the kids who used to be friends, only reinforced her sense of heroic mission. “God, Stacy, I never thought you’d be so threatened by anything Bohemian!” She had also started using the vocabulary of the psychology and the recovery movement after her visits to the school therapist became a regular part of her “Journey.” “Processing” things and “doing the real work” of examining “interior issues” now punctuated her descriptions of everyday activities.
“The fuckin’ thing is my father really is a fuckin’ Bohemian,” Stacy would say, recalling the event to friends years later. “He’s from that puat of y’know… Czechoslovakia.” Stacy had married her high school boyfriend who worked in his father’s body shop. Sometimes, with affection, she would think back about her old friend, to when they were little girls collapsed in peals of laughter up in her bedroom. Other times she would almost lose it, recalling when her menthol cigarette or a rhinestone pin was raked by Kimmy’s critical gaze – after she had become some kind of sour-pussed snob. Sporadically she would hear bits and snippets about “Poor Kimmy” through her mother who still visited Mrs. Smoot to work on family photo collages. There was something about an abortion, an abusive boyfriend, alcohol, drugs and a failed marriage. “Was she in a nuthouse at some point?” Stacy didn’t want to think about it. But it did serve her well to think about it sometimes to reaffirm the wisdom of some of her own choices. That was before her mostly good home life had crumbled amid her own husband’s drinking and cheating.
That world of stretch pants and tacky, pre-fab homes was now miles and years behind Kimberly as she savored the incredible “space” of the cheese house. It was a perfect workspace for someone exceptional like her. Even if, at thirty-seven, she hadn’t yet really produced anything creative, this work space was probably all that she needed to tap into her talents and get a “project” off the ground. She had cleaned and shellacked the flagstones around the fireplace. She threw the faded geometric antique carpet in front of her craftsman couch, which had cost her a month’s rent at a “Flea”. She wondered sometimes if she had an excessive interest in identifying her likes and dislikes, as if that might be a hollow way of defining herself, but she was able to quickly dismiss such thoughts by contrasting them with the totally inert sense of taste that she experienced in Massapequa. “Christ, they wouldn’t know Rimbaud from Rambo” she had quipped early at some point in her freshman year, before she instantly worried if she had heard that someplace before. Shortly thereafter, the decision had been made to make no reference at all, derisive or otherwise, to her origins.
Now here in her new “studio,” as she had resolved she would call it to imply on-going general artistic endeavor, she had also shellacked the baseboards and mantle to a very satisfying glow. Zinser’s Amber Shellac was a substance she had discovered at rec therapy during a stay at a psychiatric institute after a breakdown, and from the first time she had applied it to some old newspaper on a wastebasket she was enthralled. The miraculous stuff could transform the surface of almost anything plain with a patina that at once made it old, weathered, historical, and somehow substantial. She even loved the tingling, toxic smell, which had a transformative quality she imagined burning away all that was new and unworthy. As she surveyed the room she could easily imagine curling up in the arms of a paint spattered Fellow from the Colony before French kissing turned more intense and they retired to the pencil-point feather bed that beckoned so invitingly behind them.
The problem was that nearly a month after transforming the cottage to create her perfect tableau, she had met no one interesting from town and accomplished no creative work of any description. A neglected, now incomprehensible pile of notes, ideas and thoughts gathered dust on her shellacked work table, a beautifully distressed, vintage, inclining draftsman’s desk she had found behind the cottage. Furthermore, she had also made no progress in her main purpose for being there. It was, in fact, the reason she’d found the place at all! Her quest had started at a reading by the famous writer Richard Yates at the New School in the City where she had overheard a literary agent speak of the prestigious Mackintowe Colony and Mr. Yates’ new residence there. She had found the Colony on a map and researched the estate – visiting it and, to her delight, finding the cottage for rent. She adored Yates’ work and everything she knew of his life. Talented and not nearly appreciated enough – a writers’ writer who drank and smoked like he had no tomorrow. Wasn’t this what she had always needed? A mentor? An exceptional but flawed man who would recognize her talent and forgive her indiscretions and shallow, peregrine past? Encourage her, laugh with her? And Hell, who knew what might blossom?
Yates would understand why someone of her age hadn’t yet found her “voice” and even understand when she described the pain she felt as “a faint throbbing on the underside of her heart.” It seemed to Kimberly Smoot that all her experience (and maybe Yates’) had led to this juncture, where the battlefield was Yates’ own – the human heart. They would explore its delicate yearnings together, and face the tragic lies and ultimate inadequacy of that delicate organ to stave off loneliness. And they’d do this with an ample supply of alcohol and cigarettes at the ready. The real problem was she had seen the author only fleetingly several times and he hadn’t seemed to notice her when she smiled or waved and she wouldn’t know what to say if he had.
She had imagined all sorts of coincidental encounters as she drank and smoked alone in front of her fire that would jumpstart the second half of her life. Finally, she hit upon the perfect plan. She would host an hour of informal cocktails “To Honor Mr. Yates!” That was it! It would be respectful but seem thrown together in an offhand and debonaire manner by a younger writer – a near peer. Why she needn’t be a Fellow at all! In the following days she set about with incredible care and precision, designing and printing the most casual of invitations. She could tape it to his door and avoid the awkwardness of a stumbling verbal introduction. At last she settled on a simple note on cream construction paper, unshellacked, which said only “Cocktails in Tribute to Mr. Yates,” with the time of 6 PM. She could post another at the dining hall at Macintowe. Getting in would be a problem but she would handle that.
She racked her brain for anyone else from her past that might be an asset in bringing the carefully constructed scenario to full completion. Unfortunately, that brought back only the uncomfortable memory of her last boyfriend. He was a stout married man who had regretted their affair from almost the minute they slept together and the saddest part was she seemed to perceive it. He had been too weak to end it for four months and only at her release from the psych ward at Bellevue had he taken unequivocal action by giving her ten thousand dollars and firmly stating that it was to be their very last transaction. She worried, too, that the balance remaining from this cash settlement was getting very low, having been spent almost entirely on the renovation of her workspace.
Her spirits rose slightly as she looked in her mottled antique mirror and was pleasantly surprised by her appearance. Her fashionable black bob had grown out a little crazily but the partially shaved bit on the side gave her a punky, dangerous artistic mien, she felt. She had cut her own bangs in the bathroom mirror with round-topped art scissors and the uneven result had obliterated the straight Betty Page cut that attractively accented her deep brown eyes. Her nose was long and pretty and her cheekbones high like a fashion models’. The years and alcohol had only slightly softened her features
The last time she had unveiled a new “look” had been at her fifteen-year high school reunion and that had gone badly. Getting far too drunk and hearing one too many stupid comments from balding fattened plumbers and real estate agents, she’d flipped up her skirt to reveal her panty-less untamed bush, in a gesture intended to be shock the bourgeoisie and the working class along with them. The heel of one of her cowboy boots had hooked on the train of another girls’ dress and she’d stumbled head over heels into the food table and onto the floor. Even the waves of uncontrolled vomiting that followed didn’t cause her legs to close, leaving the tiny string of her tampon clearly exposed. She wondered sometimes later when she could bear to, whether that last detail strengthened or detracted from her artistic and cultural statement.”
Days passed and no calls were returned from the three friends she’d called in New York. She had also been thwarted at the gates of Mackintowe where she was forced to leave the invitation with an impassive guard. Kimberly was still hopeful that since the party was called for a Monday, a slow social night anywhere, a few curious types wanting to kill time would at least stop by. She had taped the note to the house where Yates was in residence on a Sunday, with the event to take place the following day. Hitchhiking to town she bought some beer, wine and whiskey, and assorted cheeses.
At 6:30, with the food arrayed attractively on a table near the fire, she waited while having her second drink and watching ice melt in the fire bucket she had amusingly repurposed as an ice dispenser.
By 8:15, with five drinks under her belt, she felt emboldened enough to reconnoiter. Yates had been given a handsome caretakers’ house several hundred yards up the glen and Kimberly walked and stumbled until she was a few feet from the glowing window of a book-lined library. As she pressed her face to the cold glass, she could see the great man sitting on his couch, an oxygen tank by his side with a lit cigarette in his hand. “What must he be thinking?” Kimberly wondered. “Of some characters’ terrible descent into madness after one too many of life’s body blows, or of the pointlessness and unavoidable self-deception people indulge in?” His whole body seemed locked in hard concentration, and Kimberly noticed a perfectly circular pattern of fog formed by the breath in front of her. It seemed to her like the most delicate and flawless creation of her whole life lay in that circle as a bead of sweat dripped from her nose and formed a jagged river down the center.
Yates’ work had gone well that day and his output since arriving at the Colony had been consistently strong and fine. “Where the fuck were all the beautiful young women he had imagined at this fucking place,” he thought? The only sign of visible life he’d seen in the last week had been a sad, staring girl he assumed to be the retarded daughter of some local handyman, her hair chopped crudely as if with pinking shears by a sadistic Mother Superior in a medieval monastery.
Kimberly was startled when the writer’s reverie was interrupted by a thundering, spasmodic cough, which continued long after she had run down the hill back to her cabin. Hours later, after she had found that some of the Fellows must’ve come, taken the beer and left and after she had lost count of her drinks and had begun to shellac the outside of a cedar firebox by the fire, she recalled a lilting Depression Era song playing on the radio in the Yates’ house. She had heard it before, in a television documentary on F. Scott Fitzgerald. “I don’t want to set the world on fiiiire”. And many hours after that, after the great writer had followed the instructions to the cottage and stumbled away again, dragging his oxygen tank and cursing, when he found the lights on but saw no movement, Kimberly awoke with a terrible headache. Her eyes stayed shut as her tongue felt slowly around the sandpaper surface in her mouth. She didn’t yet feel the absence of a clever painter with flecks of acrylic in his hair. It would be a long time before she would understand the full extent of her missed opportunity with its sting both familiar and ever fresh. The shafts of awareness that peered through the fog in her brain couldn’t anticipate her ejection from the cabin in only a month, or still another trip to the Huntington Facility or another more tragic marriage with its terrible consequences. For Kimberly Smoot on a March morning in 1989, all of her consciousness was devoted to the simple, growing realization that her face was stuck fast to the clean smooth newly shellacked surface of an antiqued cedar firebox.
The Old Yorker 