The Years Best Science Fiction & Fantasy: 2009 Read online

  I couldn’t figure out why on earth Collingsworth was so dead set on denying his clearly much-beloved wife something it would be so very easy for him to give her. Observing him, I wouldn’t have said that he was in general clutchfisted or unkind or unreasonable. And yet there he was, out-Scrooging Scrooge. It was beyond comprehension.

  Tackling him on the subject led only to discussions that went round and round and ended up nowhere. Out of pure frustration, I did a watercolor of the fountain as it might be if it were left in peace: green, clear, fern-bordered, with lilies floating on its surface and a bright shadow beneath that I had meant for the reflection of a cloud but looked a little like a woman’s face.

  And still, as the weather grew hotter, we trooped down to the spring on Saturday mornings, rubbed soap into our laundry, rinsed them in sullen green water, and hung them in the sheltered bamboo grove to dry.

  Late one blazing Saturday afternoon, I went to rescue my personal laundry before the drying-yard was overrun with students rushing to bring in their linen before dinner. As I approached the gate, I heard Collingsworth’s querulous tenor and Ondine’s aggrieved soprano within. I hesitated a moment, then edged silently between the tall, rustling stalks and listened.

  “You promised,” Ondine was insisting. “As soon as it became possible, you said.”

  “That has yet to be established.” Collingsworth sounded insufferably stuffy.

  “It has been established. Whittier has established it. I do not understand why you refuse to accept it. I have kept my end of the bargain, have I not?”

  This last was said with real pain, like a small child discovering that the world is unfair. But there was pain in Collingsworth’s voice, too. “You’ve been a good wife to me, Ondine. I’ve been happy. We’ve been happy. Why can’t we just go on as we have been for a little longer?”

  “How long? A month? A year? Until you die of old age? Things are no longer what they were, Peter, and nothing you say can make them so. You lied to me. You’re lying to me now. I will not stay with a man who lies to me.”

  “I’d never lie to you, Ondine.”

  There was a silence broken by the brisk smack of flesh on flesh, a grunt (Collingsworth) and a sob (Ondine). I hurriedly extracted myself from the bamboo and backed away from the gate just as Ondine thrust it open and strode towards the house, her face set with fury.

  Little as I was liking Collingsworth just then, I could not but pity him.

  This state of affairs could not go on. A fire smoldering in a pile of damp leaves will burst into flame as soon as it has a little air to feed it. You wouldn’t have said there was much air abroad the night everything exploded. It was hot and dry and breathless, the latest in a procession of hot, dry nights punctuated by ever hotter and more breathless days. Midsummer Night’s Dream was progressing poorly, lines and blocking both lost to the mind-numbing heat. The dancers stumbled and strained and complained of dizziness. One of them fainted altogether in the midst of her fouettés and sprained her wrist. Mme. Fabre refused to turn on the stove, and we supped lightly on bread, cheese, salad, and slivers of cold duck breast washed down with blood-warm rosé.

  When we’d eaten, the students began to clatter the plates onto trays. Collingsworth drained his glass and wiped sweat from his face. “Damn hot tonight,” he said. “The hell with your old washing machine, Ondine. What we really need is a swimming pool.”

  Ondine hadn’t spoken directly to her husband since the incident in the drying yard, but she spoke now. “You’re drunk, Peter.”

  “So I am, Ondine. But mostly I’m hot. Wait, we have a pool. Cold as be-damned, too. How about a nice dip?”

  “It’s full of soap-scum,” Ondine said, her lip curled with distaste. “And duckweed.”

  “What’s wrong with duckweed?” Collingsworth asked. “It’s a plant, isn’t it? Natural and all that? Come swimming with me, Ondine, please. For old times sake.”

  It seemed a reasonable enough suggestion, given the heat and the natural chill of the fountain’s water. I’d paddled my feet in the run-off more than once the past few hot days, and thought nothing of it. But there was something in Collingsworth’s voice, some note of bravado or challenge, that drew my eyes first to him and then to Ondine.

  “How dare you,” she said in a harsh whisper more shocking, somehow, than a shout. “How dare you speak of ‘old times’? You are a fool and a liar, Peter Collingsworth. But until this moment, I had not realized that you were cruel.”

  Medusa could not have done a more thorough job of paralyzing us. The students and I were stone-faced and astonished, eyes fixed on our hands, our neighbors, our plates, anywhere but on Ondine’s incandescent fury and Peter Collingsworth’s misery.

  “Not cruel,” he said, bewildered. “Surely not that. I only want what’s best for us.”

  Ondine stood up. “You may all go to bed, now,” she said. “It is late.”

  Obediently, quietly, disproportionately shocked, we went to our rooms like scolded children—Collingsworth, too, his arms dangling helpless at his thighs as he crossed the courtyard and mounted the stone steps to the house.

  I retired to the bread oven, too wrought up to sleep. I lit my entire stock of candles, set them on the deep window ledges and alcoves, and spread my summer’s work across the bed and the desk and examined it thoroughly.

  The sketches weren’t bad. Literal-minded as ever, but lively enough. They’d do for a book titled “A Summer at La Source,” or “What I Did At the Holidays.”

  The painting, on the other hand, was dreadful: a muddy, incomprehensible, unreadable, ugly mess. I’d over-worked it. The thing to do was let it go, start over on a clean canvas once I’d thought a little more clearly about what I wanted it to say about La Source.

  The problem, of course, was that I’d put everything I felt about La Source into the sketches and watercolor of the fountain I’d painted to show Collingsworth why he should buy his wife a washing machine.

  My chest heaved and huffed. Caught between laughter and tears, I came out with something like a strangled bark, harsh and hard on the throat. It was hopeless. I was not the kind of artist I wanted to be.

  Shuffling the sketches into a pile, I added the watercolor, and stacked them all on the canvas. Then I tucked a box of matches in my pocket, gathered the ungainly bundle in my arms, and set out through my private door and into the wood.

  Of course I went to the fountain. There was nowhere else to go where a bonfire such as I intended would not begin a conflagration.

  There was a moon, full or close to it, which gave me enough light to navigate by. Awkwardly, I negotiated rocks and roots, making, I’m sure, a racket that would wake the dead, stumbling at last onto the mossy turf of the fountain glade.

  And there I saw Ondine, her pale hair unbound and glistening in the moonlight, perched on the edge of the upper basin.

  I stopped dead, my work clutched to my chest as if to keep my hammering heart from leaping out.

  “Desdemona,” she said, soft but commanding.

  “Whittier,” I said weakly. “I prefer to be called. . . .”

  “I do not give a good God-damn what you prefer,” she said. “Come here, Desdemona, and stop acting like a school-girl.”

  I came. I was angry and embarrassed in more ways than I can tell, but I came.

  In a fluid movement, she turned to face me, her white feet peeping from her nightgown’s white hem, looking ridiculously, unbelievably young.

  “Sit down,” she ordered me. “Show me.”

  “It’s dark,” I said.

  “All the better.”

  Never argue with drunkards or lunatics, my father taught me. So I laid the stack of paper and canvas at her feet and sat and forced myself to watch her face as she went through them. I couldn’t see the art, of course. I shouldn’t have been able to see Ondine, either. But I could, quite clearly.

  She was wearing her teacher-face, calm, unrevealing, entirely concentrated, her eyes glittering in the tric
ky moonlight as they scanned each sketch, each watercolor and oil study in turn, and laid it aside.

  My pulse fluttered nervously. All around us, the wood was still, the soft trickle of the fountain like a sleeper’s long-drawn breathing, the paper passing through her hands like the rustle of bed sheets. In the midst of all this peace, I felt like an alarm clock set to go off much too early.

  Before I quite exploded, Ondine looked up at me. “Why did you bring these here, Desdemona?”

  It did not occur to me to prevaricate. “To burn them.” It didn’t sound quite the considered and adult decision I had thought it, so I went on: “It’s no good, you see. I’ve put a lot of time and energy into becoming an artist, and I’m not getting any better. I’m not getting any younger, either. It’s time I just admit that I’m a dauber, a Sunday painter, a hobbyist, dispose of the embarrassing evidence, and get on with my life.”

  “Better at what?”

  She didn’t sound as if she especially cared, which perversely made me more eager to make her understand. “Come now, you’ve seen the work,” I said. “The drawings aren’t terrible, but I’m not at all interested in churning out pretty landscapes for the tourist market.”

  Ondine lifted a blurry sheet I could just identify as my watercolor of the fountain. The moonlight caught the shape in the water, gave it features I’d never intended, turned it into a face, wide-eyed and mischievously smiling. “Like this, you mean?”

  “Exactly like that.”

  Her gleaming white foot stirred the train wreck that I’d intended to be my masterpiece. “And what of this?”

  “What of it?” I echoed bitterly. “I put my heart and soul into that, not to mention everything I’ve ever learned about technique. It’s crap. Utter, complete, thorough-going, bone-deep crap. I can’t stand the sight of it. I can’t stand the sight of any of it.”

  “And so you’re going to burn your heart and your soul and go back to England and do what? Design bookkeeping systems for impractical artists? Pursue a certificate in accountancy?”

  Her voice pricked me like a silver needle. When it became clear I could not answer, she stretched, shaking back her long white hair, and came to her feet in a single, smooth, dancerly surge.

  “Are you going to burn your art or are you not? Because if you are, you’d best get on with it. I’d advise you to gather enough stones for a hearth first. You don’t want the fire to spread.”

  Squatting ungracefully among my scattered sketches, I gaped up at her silhouette, black against the electric blue sky.

  “You’d be a fool to do it,” she went on. “I’ve loved many artists. I know true art when I see it, and I see it here. If you, however, cannot tell a baby from bathwater, there is nothing more to be said.”

  Suddenly, she looked old and tired, her slim body exhaustedly collapsed in upon itself. I was as shocked by the change in her as I was by her words, which left me as confused as I’d been in my life.

  “I’m going to bed,” she said. “Give the watercolor of the spring to me. You should keep the oil yourself.”

  “Why?”

  “To remind you of who you are not.”

  In the event, I didn’t burn anything. I sat brooding in the glade until the birds woke up, then retrieved every scrap and stumbled back to the Bread Oven. Not being one who can function very well on no sleep, I did not feel up to dealing with my employers and their crochets. But I wasn’t actually ill, so I didn’t feel I could ask for a day off. What would I have done with it, anyway?

  Collingsworth wasn’t at breakfast, but Ondine was, looking like an active woman of seventy-odd who’d enjoyed a night’s unbroken slumber. She smiled at me with absent courtesy and handed me a brioche as if our moonlit interview had never happened.

  When I took my coffee down to the cellar office, I found Collingsworth at the desk. My washing machine file was open in front of him, and tucked into the frame of the floral still life over the desk was my watercolor of the fountain.

  “You’ve done an excellent job, Whittier,” he said without turning around. “It’s all as clear as glass. I’d be an idiot not to install a washing machine at La Source. I was an idiot not to do it long ago. Get on the horn, there’s a good girl, and order us up one today. I’d like to get the thing installed as soon as possible, work out the bugs, release the spring into the wild, as it were, and move on.”

  It was so utterly unexpected, so sudden—and I was so sleepy—that I didn’t have the first idea how to respond. I stood in the door gaping. “It was this that did it,” he said, gesturing to the watercolor. “I don’t know how you know, but you do. And now you’ve reminded me, I can’t pretend any more. I don’t know whether to thank you or sack you.”

  A week later, the washing machine arrived. Installing it was a five-act drama, peopled by a large cast of plumbers, electricians, masons, building inspectors, and petty bureaucrats. They enacted scenes of comedy, melodrama, and even near-tragedy, and then they bowed and departed, leaving behind a concrete slab with a white enamel box on it, crowned with dials and displays.

  The washing machine was the last word in energy and water efficiency and boasted an instruction manual an inch thick, written by illiterate engineers whose first language, at a guess, was Medieval Icelandic. By the time I’d figured out how to work it, I hated the sight of it more than tongue can tell—more than Collingsworth, I think, although he had thrown himself so completely into Dream rehearsals that nothing else seemed to matter.

  Still, he was present for the grand washing Ondine organized next laundry day—a real production, with a ceremonial procession of maidens bearing sheets and towels to the flower-garlanded appliance.

  The whole thing ought to have been squirmingly precious, but it was actually rather splendid, in a Dionysian sort of way. The maidens stuffed the sheets into the washer, Collingsworth measured in an anxious ounce of low-sudsing, bio-degradable detergent, and I unlatched the agitator and set the dial. Ondine pressed the “On” button with a dramatic flourish and we all held our breaths as the washer began to hiss and churn. Once we were sure it wasn’t going to explode or overflow, the linen-bearers and their acolytes dispersed to play tag in the courtyard.

  “How long’s it likely to take, Whittier?” Collingsworth asked.

  “Forty-five minutes,” I said. “Counting the spin cycle.”

  He studied the gently chugging machine, an expression of profound sadness on his good-humored face utterly at odds with the object, the day, the occasion. “The end of an era, what?” he said, artificially jocund. “Keep an eye on it will you, Whittier? I’m going to run Titania and Oberon’s fight in Act II.”

  “Poor Peter,” Ondine said. “He does so hate letting things go. You’ve seen the albums? He’s got clippings on all his old students. Very few of them become performers, but they do get married and have offspring and so on. One won an award for a children’s book: The Enchanted Fountain, it was called.”

  “I know that book!” I exclaimed, surprised. “I bought it for my niece. I didn’t know it was based on La Source.”

  Ondine smiled, a gleam of teeth in the gloomy barn. “That’s because she made everything up. She didn’t even bother to research the local folklore. She just made up a improving story, peopled it with sentimental children and sweet Victorian fairies, and set my spring behind it like a badly-drawn backdrop.”

  “Isn’t that what art is?” I asked, my eyes on the featureless machine. “Making things up?”

  “No,” she said. “That is commerce—identifying a market and satisfying it. Art is seeing the truth and revealing it, as beautifully and forcefully and honestly as you are able.”

  Startled, I turned to look at her. But she was gone.

  While the washing machine was disposing of the first load of sheets, I mulled over Ondine’s pronouncement, coming to no conclusion except that it felt like part of a conversation we’d been having since I first came to La Source.

  When the machine shuddered to a halt at la
st, I extracted the sheets and carried them to the drying yard in the middle of the bamboo grove, where I pinned them on the lines and left them hanging in the sun. I felt, ridiculously, as though something portentous had happened—in La Source, for Ondine and Collingsworth, for me. But I couldn’t for the life of me tell what.

  With the washing-machine chapter closed, the camp turned its whole attention to the play. Collingsworth and Ondine coached the students in their lines and their steps, cobbled together props and costumes, set lights and music cues. Collingsworth suggested sets and Ondine made me paint them: pasteboard columns and a rough-cast wall, cloths of honor for the thrones of Theseus and Hyppolita, gnarled trees and rocks of made of old cartons and burlap for the fairy wood.

  All this activity kept me from thinking about my own painting, now tucked into the back reaches of the wood-shed where the scenery from previous productions was stored. It also kept me from thinking about Collingsworth, who looked older, greyer, and more strained every time I saw him, and Ondine, who seemed to be growing correspondingly younger.

  The play was a triumph. We used the open barn as the stage, with the audience in the courtyard and Ondine and Collingsworth on the house veranda, flanking the mayor of St. Martin and his wife, all in high-backed chairs. Town dignitaries ranged down the steps at their feet, and the rest of the audience—townsfolk, Collingsworth’s friends, the odd English tourist—half-filled the courtyard. I spent the play backstage, with masks and silk flowers and garlands and a pocket full of pins against wardrobe malfunctions, peering through the decidedly un-Athenian wood I’d made and watching a gaggle of self-centered, rowdy, undisciplined adolescents showing just how focused, passionate, and responsible they could be in service of a commonly-desired end.

  The applause was uproarious, especially in view of the fact that a good part of the audience hadn’t understood a single word of what they’d heard. They applauded the young actors, they applauded the Collingsworths, they even applauded me, dragged from behind the scenery with Cupid’s flower in one hand, Titania’s pink scrunchy around my wrist, and my unwashed hair bundled into a paint-stained bandana.