and the endlessness: there it was again.
The air coming off the water was cool and damp, and Julia, shivering, went inside to get blankets. She brought out the heavy Hudson's Bays, which were coarse white wool with broad bold stripes of color. She liked these, liked them for both their actual substance and their romantic heritage.
The blankets had first been made in the eighteenth century by the English trading company. They'd been bartered for furs, in the northern reaches of Canada. Julia liked the picture: she imagined the Indians arriving at the trading post with their burden of supple, lustrous skins, and loading up with the heavy, handsome blankets, carrying them back into the silent forests. The green, glassy waters, the tall-masted ships dropping anchor in the wide bay. The stillness of that pristine landscape.
Now, of course, you were taught that any exchange between colonials and indigenous tribes was inequitable, but Julia chose to see the scene as benign. Blankets for furs was not a bad trade, and the blankets were heavy, warm, handsome. She chose to see the exchange through its beauty, and wasn't this the way you defined your vision of the world? In just such a private, fumbling, illogical way, freighted with emotion, dimmed by ignorance, fueled by conviction?
So Julia handed out the blankets, which came, not from a silent galleon on a silver lake, but from a mail-order company in Maine, and was reminded of an earlier sublime moment, which was possibly imaginary, but which gave her comfort.
She tucked striped blankets around her father and Steven. The best and the heaviest, with the rose-colored star in the center, she put around her mother. It was too heavy for Katharine's fragile shoulders, and Julia propped it around her like a tepee.
“Thank you, darling, that feels lovely.” Katharine's smile glimmered up at Julia in the dimness. She smelled of lavender.
Her mother's gratitude was like a tiny blow, an offer of intimacy against which Julia hardened her heart, though she did not know why. She patted the frail shoulder beneath the blanket. “You're welcome,” she said lightly.
Julia sat down between her mother and Steven. His body radiated warmth and maleness; she was surprised again by his size.
“You're nice and warm,” she said, leaning toward him. She had a right to the heat he gave off: he was hers, in a way, as she was his. She thought of Simon, who was not hers, nor she his. Possession was not a part of their relationship, at least not yet, but he liked to wrap his arms around her, and she liked this very much. Body heat: why was it so powerful? She sat in the glow of Steven's, grateful that he hadn't stormed off to his room, that he was not judgmental and moody but patient and forgiving.
“I think I see one.” Edward's head was tilted back, the blanket standing like a ruff around his face.
“Where?” Julia asked.
“Over there,” Edward said. “Gone now.”
“You can never show your shooting star to anyone else,” Julia said. “It's always too late.”
“But you can see one together,” Katharine said.
They sat in silence, wrapped in their rough blankets, heads tipped back, gazing expectantly up into the darkness. The salt breeze moved past them.
“I don't dare blink. I don't want to miss one,” Julia said. “My eyes are drying out.”
“Age,” Edward announced. “The older you get, the less fluid you produce.”
“Wizening,” Julia said. “We're all wizening. Even you, Stevo.”
“I can feel it already,” Steven said. “Yaugh!”
“There's one,” said Katharine. “Don't I see one? Over there.”
“You've always had sharp eyes,” Edward said proudly. “She finds four-leaf clovers, too.”
Katharine was famous for this. She could sit down on any lawn, at any picnic, and casually pluck up the magic things. “Here's another,” she'd say brightly, while her children, on their hands and knees, scrambled fruitlessly through the grass.
“‘Thank you, she said modestly,’” said Katharine.
Actually, Julia thought, they're charming.
Affection flooded through her for her elderly, struggling parents, who were trying to make their way through each difficult day, who were beset and confused by the changing world, handicapped by their failing bodies, finding solace in humor and each other.
Julia, cocooned in the Hudson's Bay, felt the anxieties and irritations of the day falling away. The dinner and the argument were over, the kitchen was clean, the dishwasher rumbling and steaming. Above them rose the dark limitless sky, before them lay the deep benevolent mystery of sleep. The world seemed calm.
She couldn't protect Steven from his grandfather, who was complicated and demanding—as was she, as was everyone—and who loved him. In fact, Julia was suddenly proud of Edward and his absurd, infuriating antagonism. It was some essential thing. It was part of what he was, what charged and animated him.
The black sky stretched up into deep space. Julia wondered again how to paint it, how to capture its warm blue-blackness—not true black, but a velvety purply black. Maybe layers of transparent glazes, built up slowly like Jan van Eyck's soft, gauzy skies—though his were daytime ones. Few artists did the night sky: Whistler. Douanier Rousseau, The Sleeping Gypsy. O'Keeffe, the one of the sky and stars from underneath the tree. How to manage that soft breathing mysterious quality of the nighttime air, the sense of expanding space?
Julia thought of her handsome Jack, and felt the familiar flick of anxiety. She wondered where he was right now: not, presumably, sitting on a quiet porch overlooking the sea, waiting for the heavens to reveal themselves. Or maybe he was doing just that. Waiting for chemical stars to burst inside his brain. Handsome, bad-boy Jack, with his glinting, merry, sidelong glance. Jack, leaning back in his chair, throwing his head back to laugh. Jack's laugh.
She wanted to hear Steven's news of him; she was sure they'd seen each other in New York. She trusted Steven. He looked after his brother, and he knew Jack in ways she never would. Kids nowadays lived in another world, you'd never know what it was like. (What was it like?) They would never let you in. But Steven was reassuring about Jack. He's still a kid, Steven always said.
Jack played in a rock band; she'd watched him perform. Onstage, bathed in the exotic glow of the overhead lights, he was a star. She'd seen him up there, shifting his hips, giving that slow, knowing smile. Tossing his hair back from his eyes. He was so thin, that sexy, narrow torso, the flat stomach, the long elegant limbs. He was a hunk! It made her laugh. How did your own child become a hunk? It made her proud. What were you to think, his mother?
Whatever Steven had to say about Jack, she didn't want it said in front of her parents. She didn't want them to discuss Jack. Edward would turn authoritative and judgmental. It would be like her lack of money; he'd act as though Julia had deliberately chosen to have a son like Jack. Her father would have a list of reasons for Jack's situation: too much television, not enough discipline, the divorce. As though she'd had a choice about divorce, or as though she could go back now and do things differently.
Maybe they had been easier on Jack than on Steven, somehow things seemed to slacken with the second child. They'd done everything properly with Steven, the first time, but it seemed as though once they'd done it, it was done. It had seemed
