Pure Hollywood by Christine Schutt

Author:Christine Schutt [Schutt, Christine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780802165657
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2018-07-02T04:00:00+00:00

A Happy Rural Seat of Various View: Lucinda’s Garden

They met Gordon Brisk on a Friday the thirteenth at the Clam Box in Brooklin. They pooh-poohed the ominous signs. The milky stew they ate was cold—so what? They were happy. They were at sea; they were at the mess, cork-skinned roughs in rummy spirits, dumb, loud, happy. And they really didn’t have so much to say to each other. They were only a few months married and agreed on everything, and for the moment nearly everything they did—where and how they lived—was cheap or free. They expected gifts at every turn and got them.

So it was at the Clam Box on a Friday night—lime pits along the rim of the glass, Pie feeling puckered—when Gordon Brisk introduced himself as a friend of Aunt Lucinda’s from a long time ago. Nick said he had seen Gordon’s paintings, of course. And Gordon said, “I’m not surprised.”

Gordon told a story that included Aunt Lucinda when she was their age. There were matches in it and another young woman who almost died. Aunt Lucinda in the story was the same—all love, love, love and this time for Gordon—and as for Gordon himself? He held up his hands. His hands had been on fire. He said, “Just look at these fuckers,” and they did. They looked and looked. The hands should have scared them, but they were drunk and sunburned and happy. They were glad, they insisted, glad to have met him. “Our first famous person,” Pie said after the after-dinner drinks when she and Nick were in the Crosley driving home.

Pie was driving, too fast; she was saying how she loved those amber-colored, oversweet drinks, the ones with a floating orange slice and a cherry. She had had too many, so was it any surprise she hit something? She hit something large and dark, but fatally hesitant. The Crosley, a gardener’s minicar, had no business on a public road, but Pie had wanted to drive it. The Crosley was a toy, yet whatever Pie hit hobbled into the woods, dragging its broken parts.

Home again and in their beds, Pie and Nick took aspirin and turned away from each other and slept. Next morning—frictive love—and then as usual in the garden, Aunt Lucinda’s garden, the famous one, a spilling-over, often photographed, seacoast garden. The garden was how they lived for free. They were the caretakers of an estate called The Cottage. Some cottage! Why would Aunt Lucinda leave this paradise, they asked, but she had told them. His name was Bruno and his wealth exceeded hers. The villa he owned in Tuscany was staffed. “Everything there is arranged for my pleasure,” so Aunt Lucinda said.

Gordon had said, “Scant pleasure.” He had said, “I’ll tell you pleasure. The killing kind.” And then to almost everyone at the Clam Box bar, he described his wife: shoeblack hair and pointy parts. That cunt was the source of the fire, or so he had said at the Clam Box. “I

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