Textures of Life by Hortense Calisher

Author:Hortense Calisher [Calisher, Hortense]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781480438934
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 1963-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

6

FAR BELOW THEM, THE immense of the Pacific moved its colors or lay still thereunder—a cruel green either jagged or icy jade, a blue dizzying ozone where must lie the navel of the Good, and a purple which should have been the utter profound and was rock. Year after year, the dreadful seaside painters at Carmel caught the three colors infallibly. No good painter ever tried. She and he had several times, in earlier weekends here, made these observations. Now they sat at breakfast before the open window, exchanging them without speaking. The cabin, of redwood and glass, had been first a movie star’s hideaway, then a restaurant, and lastly, until Mr. Pagani had bought it years back, a boarded-up plateau for whatever gulls arrived that high, or eagles that low. At first, the heights here had terrified her. She had learned to turn her back on the ocean, leaning out the window on the garden side to steady her gaze on the foundation, which disappeared into the ground like that of any other house. The garden, set between it and the magnificently higher scar of the coastal road, had been reassured against the sky by shrubs and trees that pressed away from all but one glimpse of the sea, making an inland niche where one might rest from nobility. He had never made her feel that she must rest from his. They lived a quiet life together, never a sacrificial one on either side. Sometimes, with the fractional inner gasp of those whose lives have been halved, she was thrust not back but out, barely able to believe in this half—its reality went so deep. But they were not given to naming their state, any more than he the common enough disease he suffered from. In it, she and he were equal invalids just emerged from the examining room, stammering out to themselves, “Ah. So that’s what I’ve got, is it!” When they were at the window as now, however, she always fixed her eyes, with a steady, humming sense of ownership, on the blue.

“When he comes,” she said, “I’ll make myself scarce, eh.”

“It’s us he’ll be wanting to see.” As often, he was laughing at her. “Besides—where?”

Large as the room was, even sumptuous in plan because of the movie star, it had the atavistic hut-comfort of everything provided for in one. Having been a restaurant had been good for it, leaching it of the personal. Leftovers were its comforts, the richest from Jacques’s travels, but even these had the no-nonsense, quiet, saddlery tones of male usage. The long-haired Anatolian blanket, hanging from the gallery where David would sleep, hung there to air; shorter-curled Greek rugs, also goat, warmed the tiles. Presumably the air cleaned the place, working like a good slavey night and day, or else perhaps, now and then in their absence, the place shook itself all over, honest creature in its stall, and lay down again. She never thought of it as a house.

There was all outdoors, of course.

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