A Bystander Untouched But Not Unharmed

Blue by Richard Bausch

Ernest and Marion Hart spent nearly the whole month of January 2020 in Rome. They visited the Piazza Navona, and St. Peter’s Square and the Vatican, and marveled at the great art everywhere they looked, but they also made time to frequent the wine shops and cafés, where they had veal chops and pasta, sampled osso buco, arancini, Italian ice cream and pizza, and tasted Brunello and amarone and Barolo, and they came to sense something of the daily rhythms of life there. On the last day, they went to the Spanish Steps and actually threw coins in the fountain and then spent an hour at the Keats-Shelley house, where the poet died. They saw his death mask, the delicate, aquiline, nearly feminine features in that profound repose. Gazing at it, Hart experienced a strange sweet quelling effect in his soul, and evidently his wife sensed this. The next day, flying home, she remarked on it; she’d thought about it overnight, and had come to believe that seeing the mask had somehow softened his normal inclination to gloomy deliberations (for years she’d told friends, teasingly, that this darkness was his nature, and her challenge). “Well, it looked like such pure deep rest,” he told her. In any case the whole experience had been so intensely satisfying for them both that as the havoc of Covid-19 subsequently passed so heavily over the world, the Eternal City became something they preserved in happy memory like a kind of mental bulwark. And now that the pandemic was waning, they’d commenced talking about finding a way to go back.

As things stood, they would have to incur more debt.

She was a writer of children’s books—their best friend Joan illustrated them—and though three had been published in the last five years, sales had seriously fallen off since the pandemic, as had so much else. The children’s book business had been slow to recover. He was a watercolor portraitist who specialized in family pictures, usually of children for their parents, and the recovery there was progressing a little faster. Even so, their finances were such that for supplemental income he manned the reference desk three days a week at the county library, while she taught a writing class at Midsouth Community College. She loved her work; he sometimes felt that he must tolerate his. Plus, her mother, Daisy, had moved in, and was helping to pay the rent.

Another impediment.

Daisy had fallen into the habit of shedding unwanted advice and at times she unwittingly made them feel as though they were her tenants. So Hart began walking out in the mornings—at first just for time alone. Yet the pattern had become habit and the habit pleased him.

Marion, as always, took things in stride. She considered that their irritations about her mother’s small trespasses were temporary; even in moments of annoyance, she could joke about it. That was Marion. Finding a way to season the facts with her usual wit. “My mom,” she would explain, “is a well-known pianist deprived of public performance by plague and my father is a bastard, but his alimony payments provide support beyond what she’s been able to make during the shutdown, so the three of us are sharing our wealth.”

This about alimony was only partially true: Daisy had indeed invested those payments and was receiving meager interest from them, but she no longer collected alimony as such and she’d been through several relationships since Edgar Clayton—as she liked to say—went over the wall. The old man, whom Hart had never seen face-to-face, was well-off by inheritance and lived in Madrid these days, involved voluntarily in some vague capacity with the State Department. An undersecretary of something. He hadn’t given Daisy one cent after the first two years, though they were still in touch occasionally. “They’ve got me between them,” Marion had said more than once. “I keep it interesting.”

Hart would say that she made everything interesting.

After nine years, he still liked watching her move through the rooms of the apartment—lissome, elegant, even in plain slacks and tan blouse, hair up, or held in a bandana—simply keeping up with what she gave herself to do. She was an arranger of things, bringing flowers into the house, or a lamp or vase she had found while thrifting; there were a lot of antiques in the rooms, and periodically she would change the order of where things were. When she was writing, she’d whisper low and he would hear it, and smile. Usually she sat at the dining room table for work, though Daisy’s presence had caused her to move everything into the little nook in the window of their bedroom. A happy arrangement, really. He could lie awake watching her, watching the light play across her features as she concentrated.

His memory was image-oriented after all, and that was probably the core of his gifts as a painter. He didn’t consider himself a true artist, since all his paintings were from photographs. Marion and Joan, in his estimation, were artists, Joan creating images from Marion’s created stories.

The three had met in an art class at the university.

Back then, he was a member of the university football team. Marion had been put off by this—she didn’t like the sport—and at first it seemed that he and Joan might become a couple. But consecutive knee injuries had put an end to football, and it was Marion who helped him through all that.

Now the library provided a quiet place to sketch when he was not helping people with their reference questions; he liked his workmates, who were all readers. Interesting people. And his clients had always been happy with the results of his work. Indeed, he enjoyed the whole process: taking the photographs either in the studio at home or out in various parts of the city, and then choosing the ones from which he would make the portraits. Marion took pride in the perfect accuracy of the work, and she would remark about how fortunate it was that the children were all beautiful. They were ordinary little citizens, of course, but so pretty to look at, each of them. And thank God, because Ernest Hart always painted what he saw. Recently, talking to Joan about the sweet time in Rome, she spoke of the dozens of sculptures they’d seen of the empire’s citizens. The artists for those had been honest, like Ernest. “These were perfectly rendered busts of wrinkled, ugly members of wealthy Roman society. God knows where the handsome ones went. Maybe they all gathered in Pompeii just before Vesuvius erupted.”

Joan shook her head, grinning.

“Too soon?” Marion said.

---

This particular morning, this one, begins quietly enough. Daisy goes out to the grocery store, and Marion begins preparing breakfast. It’s their weekly big breakfast morning. Joan is coming over with new sketches for their book. Hart kisses Marion’s cheek and sets out on his walk. Daisy has decided kindly to spare him the grocery trip. Perhaps she’s becoming aware of how her presence is affecting things. “I hope she knows we love her to pieces,” Marion says. “No matter what else.”

“She’s a great lady,” says Hart, meaning it in spite of his suppressed annoyance, heading out with a book.

It’s a hot morning, already past eighty. He walks down to Bradford Avenue and goes right, holding the book out so he can use his peripheral vision to keep from tripping on anything. He’s become quite adept at this, keeping an even pace, reading as he goes. It’s a paperback from the Brief Lives series, about the life of Sitting Bull. The two-and-a-half-mile point of the walk is the intersection of Bradford Avenue and Converse Street, perhaps fifty yards past a steep rise and descending slope. The routine has been to turn back at that intersection, for the immediate strenuousness of walking back up that slope and on home.

This morning as he reaches the crest he sees two ambulances, a fire truck, and a squad car ranged at various angles near a rusty Volkswagen minivan with a tree standing inside it.

The emergency vehicles block both Bradford and Converse. Their lights flash but he was reading the book and, in the brightness of the day, hasn’t seen them until now. He can’t recall sirens, even as ambient noise. Three EMTs are gathered tightly in the space where the minivan driver’s door would be. Two policemen are signaling traffic coming down the crossing street to turn around. A woman from one of the neighborhood houses is nearby. She’s wrapped in a white terrycloth bathrobe, shivering even in the heat, holding the robe tight at her neck. Beyond her is a man in a seersucker suit who appears dressed for work. He’s talking low, without looking at her. Hart approaches them, feeling the need to talk. But the man’s murmuring a prayer.

The woman turns to Hart. “I heard it happen. It woke me up.” She puts her other hand over her mouth. “Oh, God.”

“I didn’t even hear sirens” Hart manages.

The man says, “I just pulled up.”

The three EMTs at the driver’s side mutter commands back and forth. A bloody shape is partially revealed and then obscured as they work. It looks like they’re trying to pull back twisted steel.

A teenage boy with shoulder-length hair bound by a red bandana emerges from the house that stands in the tree’s shade. Hart has seen him on these walks. The boy approaches the minivan on the passenger side and pauses warily, looking in. One of the EMTs waves a warning at him, but the boy reaches into the space and brings out a suede shoe. A cop steps around the wreck to examine what the boy holds, and then, reaching in, brings out another shoe. Hart sees the cop’s thick, rounded, muscular shoulders through the tight gray shirt. The man in the seersucker suit says, “Ach—no—can’t do this” and steps away. He gets into his car and actually guns the engine; his tires screech as he turns around and heads fast back up over the hill. Hart thinks of leaving too, but the woman breathes a small frightened moan. Hart feels it would be impolite simply to leave her there. The muscle-bound cop and an EMT are now looking through the shrubs fronting the house.

“My God,” the woman says suddenly.

And Hart sees what she sees.

A tall, lanky man with his head slanting awfully to one side wobbles toward them along the sidewalk, wearing jeans and a T-shirt with a dragon’s head emblazoned on it, and no shoes. Hart looks at the bare feet. The man’s black hair is cut so short it looks as though the stubble on his dark jaw simply runs up his sideburns and over his scalp. Hart calls out to the EMTs and police. “Over here!”

The man sits down suddenly on the curb, perhaps twenty feet away. His head turns very slowly toward the smashed minivan and the tree, and then back to where Hart and the woman stand, fixed. The man stares at them, seems to take them in, then looks beyond them. His face shows no cuts or broken places; it’s one night-dark shade of blue, the skin itself a purplish midnight blue. He sinks back slowly on the grass.

“Here!” Hart calls to the EMTs, who are already rushing over.

“Christ,” the first EMT says, bending down over the man as two others arrive. He pushes on the chest, then bends down to listen. Two more EMTs run over with a defibrillator and they quickly set about putting it to use. Hart watches the spastic jolts and sees the violet hue of the flesh. The dirty soles of the feet. There’s nothing else anyone can do. Still another EMT, an elderly looking man with a spray of liver spots across his forehead. “I guess add this one, too,” he says. “Jesus.”

“But he—he was walking,” the woman exclaims, pointing shakily at the stilled shape on the grass. “He walked—he was walking. He looked at us. Didn’t he look at us?” she says to Hart.

The muscular cop has also stepped close. He stands with hands at his hips and stares. “Through the damn windshield, right out of his shoes.” He stoops slightly and indicates the face, the neck, the exposed chest. “Bleeding everywhere under the skin. Every single blood vessel, every—what do you call them.”

“Capillary,” the blond EMT says.

“Yeah. Capillary. Every capillary.” He shakes his head, bends down farther, lifts the body slightly and brings a wallet out of the back of the jeans. He straightens, opens the wallet and reads the driver’s license: “John Stahl. With an H. S-t-a-h-l. Born 1992. July. So, just—what—thirty-one years old?” He shakes his head. “Talk about dead man walking. Never seen anything like it.”

Talk about dead man walking. Never seen anything like it.

They’re all quiet. Hart thinks of mourners at a funeral.

The woman finally whimpers, both hands now clutching the collar of the robe, her knuckles whiter than the cloth. She keeps nodding slightly, staring at what’s there on the grass. “I’m sorry,” Hart says to her, as though apologizing for the fact that her life has brought her to this pass. And indeed he is sorry for it. For exactly that. He reaches to touch her shoulder but stops himself. Around them is a blur of activity. A TV van pulls up, people emerging willy-nilly from it as if spilled, with cameras and microphones.

Others are gathering now from the neighboring houses. A very old dark man with close-trimmed white hair and a pointed beard approaches. “Lawsy, Miz James,” he says. “I thought it would surely blow up. God help us.”

Hart walks back up to the crest of the hill and hurries on, trying not to look at any of the stopped or slowing cars. At length, he reaches his part of Bradford Avenue, and his own little road, Mills Court. Here is the familiar peaceful block: the yellow sign that reads No Outlet, the houses with their manicured lawns on the left, and, opposite those, his wide, low-slung, red-brick apartment building with its white-bordered windows, flowers in planters and smooth lawn dotted with stone nymphs and cherubs. He stands still for a while trying to call up full recognition of it all, then turns to gaze once more at the houses across the way, the trees flanking them and rising behind them, tall, slender pines with their tops showing sharply green against the pale summer sky. It’s a warm, sunny morning on Earth.

He feels displaced.

As he steps into the apartment he breathes the aroma of the bacon Marion’s been frying, and hears his own voice say, “None for me.” He sets the book down on the end table next to the sofa.

She says, “What were you expecting to see out there loitering like that?”

In that moment he decides not to say what he’s seen. “Just appreciating our street,” he manages.

“You weren’t waiting for Mom?”

“Such a pretty day,” he gets out.

But she has spoken over him: “That’s you, all right. Appreciating things. I wish you could do that while you’re walking. I’m always afraid you’ll trip and fall going along with your head in a book.”

“Peripheral vision.” His own voice sounds strange to him.

“Anyway, breakfast is almost done.”

“I’m not that hungry.” He lets himself down on the sofa, and watches her through the open entrance into the kitchen. She’s setting the cooked slices of bacon on a plate with a paper towel across it.

“Well,” she says. “Daisy won’t eat all this.”

Forcing a light tone, he says. “You’re my perfectly lovely girl.”

She pauses and smiles. “Sweet.”

This is an ordinary morning for her. He hauls himself in to sit at the table. “Not now for the bacon,” he says. “Really. Maybe in a little while.”

His hand shakes when he reaches for the cup of coffee she sets down for him.

“Should we turn the A/C on?” she says.

He makes his way to the thermostat in the hall. As he reaches to adjust it, he receives an intensely distressing awareness of the moment itself as being one of many separate meaningless others; he looks at his own hand and feels scarily on the verge of something.

Back in the kitchen, he tries to keep his attention on her features, which he loves in any light. She’s wearing gray slacks with a white tank top, and she’s pinned back her soft, ash-blond hair—the light from the window shines in the perfect waves of it. Oh, my darling.

There have been so many and such sweet times.

She continues preparing the breakfast, and when she opens the oven to keep things warm, he sees the dark blue of the inside. He quickly puts his hand up to his face, index finger and thumb squeezing at the top of his nose.

“You really not gonna eat?” she says.

“Prob’ly have something when Daisy gets back.”

She checks her watch. “Daisy should be back by now. And where’s Joan?”

He waits.

“Billy’s giving her hell,” she says.

Joan’s estranged husband is living in a rented room in Shelbyville and has actually taken out a protection order against her because she has been calling him demanding payment of money he owes her. It’s a lot of money. He’s a cop and he has friends in the precinct, and twice these friends have visited her after nightfall. Since they know her, too, they call the visits “friendly reminders” about the protection order. But for Joan it’s exactly like those old depictions of mobsters visiting store owners peddling protection, and it terrifies her.

“Who’s the one who actually needs a protection order filed,” Hart says now.

Marion waves this away. “She’s never gonna get the money back unless she files for divorce, but I think she still loves him in some obsessive way. It’s like an argument they both want to win without really changing anything. But he’s living in that upstairs room on Pond Street and she’s afraid to stay in the house.”

Hart sits back, feigning calm, clasping his hands at the top of his head. “I wish she didn’t have it to deal with.”His mind presents him with the figure of the woman clutching the terry cloth bathrobe closed at her throat. “I wish everything was all right.” He almost loses his voice.

“Daisy’ll want scrambled,” Marion says, as if to herself. Then: “Joan’ll prob’ly stay the night here.” She breaks three eggs into a bowl.

He folds his hands in his lap under the table. “I gotta set up the studio.”

Marion nods. “I know. The twin grandchildren. Mrs. Lessing, who insists on Mrs.”

“They’ll be here in an hour.”

“Just time for us to eat. Joan’ll bring new illustrations. And after I look at the illustrations and decide which ones we’ll use, we’re all supposed to go thrifting.”

“You think Joan’ll move in with us?”

“Nobody else’ll be moving in, Ernest.” The faintest note of vexation sounds in her voice.

“Hey,” he manages, evenly. “Everybody’s welcome.” As he draws in the breath to go ahead and, without being too graphic, start talking of the morning’s horror, Daisy arrives carrying a bag of groceries. “My God,” she says, setting the bag down. “There’s been a terrible accident over on Bradford. I wanted to pick up some donuts and I couldn’t get through. Must’ve been five or six ambulances and police cars.”

“It was two ambulances, a fire truck and a police car,” Hart hears himself say.

They stare. A long silence, no one moving. And then, in a strange rush of letting go, he’s telling them everything. He’s appalled at how it all pours out, and at the increasing tremor in his own voice. “Never saw a blue that shade, that deep,” he says finally, putting his hands to his face. “And it was—it was someone’s face, this guy’s face.”

Marion hurries around the table to embrace him. Then both women are near.

“The guy looked right at us.”

“Oh, baby,” Marion says.

He closes his eyes and sees again the lurching man, the terrible unsteady gait, the head so badly awry and the face, that ghastly dark tint. He looks at Marion, and at Daisy. All the words for the color run unbidden through his mind, words in a nightmare. Obscene words.

“I can see if Joan can go to her mother’s,” his wife says out of the silence.

“No,” Hart says. “Don’t do that. Let’s just—I’ve got this photo shoot.” He wipes his eyes. “It just shook me. I’ll be all right in a bit.”

“Should we forget breakfast?” Daisy says. “We should clear all this away.”

“I’ve got it, Mom,” Marion says. “He’s gotta eat.”

He manages to try a joke. “Where’s the donuts?” And feels the effort of drawing up his courage.

“Don’t be brave,” Marion scolds. “You don’t have to be brave.”

Her mother says, “Oh, honey, he can be brave or not, it’s up to him.”

“I’ve just gotta get set up for the shoot,” he tells them.

---

By the time Joan arrives with her sketches, he has gone into the studio. He’s having to fight the images that keep rising, and when he hears Marion and Daisy start telling it, he puts Chopin on the player, and fixes his gaze at what’s directly in front of him. Mrs. Lessing has asked for inside sets, no fake countryside. She wants bookshelves and drapes, and perhaps a wing chair. He puts together two different small sets, one involving a light gray plush scrap of curtain partially veiling two rows of books, the other with a lamp and a wing chair in soft pink light. The title letters on one book’s dust jacket are lined in pelagic blue, and he takes it off with a shaken agitation, fumbling with it, almost dropping the book. He pauses, the crumpled dust jacket in his fists. He looks around the room and finally closes it up in the bottom drawer of his desk. As he’s setting up the scene with the wing chair, Joan comes to the door. “You all right?”

He turns, looks into her dark eyes. “Guess so,” he says. “Yeah.”

“Maybe try to think of it as a bruise. One big, awful bruise.”

“Bruise doesn’t cover it. The guy looked at me.”

“Yeah, but he wasn’t really seeing you, Ernest.” She stands there, one hand on the frame of the door. Only the day before he confided in her that his mother-in-law’s almost continual presence has been getting on his nerves. And here is poor Joan dealing with Billy’s depredations. A marriage coming apart after fifteen years. He remembers thinking that Joan and Billy were solid as a couple—sometimes even suspecting that they might be more passionate when alone than he and Marion were.

“Anyway,” he says, forcing a small smile that turns into a sob. “Bruise—sounds too trivial.”

“Oh, God,” she says. “Poor Ernest.”

He sits down in the wing chair. It’s almost a collapse. “I can’t get it out of my head.”

She walks in, bends and put her arms around his neck. “You poor thing. Try not to let yourself dwell on it.”

They hold tight to each other for a moment. She’s his dear friend. When he took her out that time back in college they ended up in bed together; but there’s nothing remotely erotic in this embrace. Even so he feels the darkness of it, as though it’s a transgression, a defection. Everything seems to be caving inside him. When she lets go and steps back, he pulls up out of the chair, making an effort to seem strong, an infinitesimal part of him expanding with self-disgust, as if all this is an indulgence, something he should be able to control. “Hell,” he manages. “It’s done. I mean I just walked up on it. Christ.”

She glances back into the hall. “Any improvement with Daisy?”

“Wishing she’d go on tour for a while.” He hears the querulous tone and tries to walk it back. “No, she’s fine. And she is helping.”

Joan says, “Well, Marion feels exactly like you do about it.”

He glances at the wall with its photographs and paintings. None of it carries any weight now; it seems trivial. He can’t find himself in the web of things. He thinks of Marion and her sense of humor as if it’s a curiosity of nature, somehow not connected to him. When he looks back at Joan, it’s as if he’s just discovered her there. “Joan,” he says. “God.”

“Well” she says. “We just have to put one foot in front of the other.” Now she seems faintly confused. After a brief pause, smiling, she says, “Cliché saves the day.” Then she turns and goes on back into the living room. He hears the three women talking indistinctly. They’re having mimosas. He hears Joan laughingly say self-medicating.

A little later, he joins them, and has one, too, then pours himself a coffee. The breakfast is strewn on the table; several strips of bacon remain. He eats one, and his gorge rises.

“Maybe it’ll be in the newspaper,” Joan says.

“Oh, let’s stop,” says Marion. “Let’s put it behind us.”

Hart understands that Daisy has meant to distract them from the terror of the morning, and he loves her for it.

“Heard from your dad this morning,” Daisy announces. She’s standing at the sink, where she has rinsed her plate. She smiles. It seems almost genuine. She steps over, puts the end of her index finger on the shiny surface of the table and makes a slight circle. “It’s my pleasure to report that he’s had a minor operation to remove a boil from his right buttock.”

Marion says, “Mom.”

“No, really. So there he is. A short shit with an extra hole in his ass.”

Marion and Joan laugh, a little more heartily than the remark merits. Hart understands that Daisy has meant to distract them from the terror of the morning, and he loves her for it. He walks over and kisses her cheek. “Thank you,” he says.

---

Mrs. Lessing is a thickset woman with leathery olive skin and large white straight teeth. Her smile is odd. Her eyes and hair are a shade of light brown, and the twins’ features don’t reflect her at all. They’re blond, pale, slender, so strikingly identical that Hart can’t keep from continually glancing from one to the other. Their grandmother has them wearing the same outfit—red plaid skirt and pink blouse. Marion’s mother says, “Hello, I’m Daisy.”

One twin gives a quick curtsy and says flatly, “Carla.”

“Cissy,” says the other. This time the curtsy is exaggerated, with obvious mockery. She says to Joan, “You look like our math teacher at school.”

“Oh, I hope she’s good-looking.”

“She’s mean, and we don’t like her.”

In the same instant, almost as if intending to speak over any response Joan might have, Mrs. Lessing says, “What have I said about negative speech.”

Marion hurries to say, “Sorry for the mess, here. We’ve had a strange morning. Ernest saw an awful accident on his walk.”

Mrs. Lessing says, “There was a lot of traffic coming down from Poplar.”

“We had an accident last year,” Cissy announces. “A complete and total wreck.”

Hart says, rather insistently, “Well, we’re set up for our photo shoot. So, if you’ll just follow me, please.”

---

In the first setting, the girls argue over who’ll sit where. Cissy wants to be on Carla’s left, repeating the demand. “Her left. I want her left side.” Their grandmother seems merely to be observing them as they squabble. They look nearly translucent in the studio light; their very hair seems virtually diaphanous, wafting in the stirrings of air like filaments of white haze. Their pale cheeks show tiny blue veins. Hart finds that he can’t concentrate, can’t adjust the camera or their poses. Mrs. Lessing suggests several, and gets them to understand that they’ll have the opportunity to sit on either side of each other. “We’ll have one of each pose, sweeties.”

“Yeah, but what’ll he paint,” Cissy whines.

“I’ll paint what you agree is the one you want,” Hart tells them. The tiny forking of a vein in Cissy’s cheek shows even darker as the two girls keep on about how they should be posed. They’re so pretty, so delicately slight, so fair with their soft features and hazel eyes. So rude.

Somehow he manages to get them sitting still and takes a few shots of them in each setting. His stomach’s upset, looking at the color in the white cheeks.

When they’ve left, he goes into the bedroom and lies down. Marion, Joan and Daisy have gone thrifting, and are probably having lunch somewhere. His stomach hurts. He takes three chewable antacid pills and goes out to sit in the shade of the balcony off the dining room. He looks at the woods spanning that end of the building, the almost cloudless whitish sky above them. The day’s heating up. He closes his eyes, wanting sleep, but the face of the walking dead man jars him awake.

---

That evening on the local news there’s a report about the accident. The two newscasters, a young, movie-star-pretty brunette woman and a late-middle-aged man, go through it rather quickly. Behind them is a photograph of the wrecked minivan in its awful embrace of the tree. “Tragedy early this morning,” the young woman says, “when a high-speed chase ended in a crash that claimed the lives of two men.” Her partner picks up the story. “Martin Dupee, sixty-three, and John Stahl, thirty-one, of Collierville were killed instantly. Mr. Dupee, the driver, died behind the wheel and Mr. Stahl was thrown from the vehicle.”

There’s no mention of the macabre walk.

“Apparently,” the pretty young woman adds, “both men were intoxicated.”

The two newscasters turn then to local sports and weather.

“Why wouldn’t—what reasoning—” Hart begins. The TV screen now shows a green map of Memphis and surrounding areas.

Marion picks up the remote and shuts off the TV. “Think of it, Ernest,” she says. “What would a relative feel, hearing about a thing like that?”

They’re all quiet a moment.

“God” Hart says, low.

But Daisy and Joan are agreeing about how ghoulish it would be to report such details in a public broadcast.

In their bedroom, the Harts don’t speak about it. He brings up the lovely late afternoon light in the Piazza Navona. And the luminous twilights, how the shadow of Borromini’s church, Sant’Agnese in Agone, falls on Bernini’s Four Rivers Fountain at that time each day. “Remember” Hart says, “the guide telling us Borromini designed the building to do just that because of an ongoing spat between him and Bernini. Imagine, a four-hundred-year-old daily insult.”

“What made you think of that?” she asks.

“Rome,” he says, and brings her close in the bed. “I’m thinking about Rome.” He feels the urge to tell her, as the thought occurs to him, that this day casts a shadow that will always be there now, like the twilit shadow of the ancient church, but then she sighs, and says, “Maybe we can go back in the fall.”

“Oh, yes,” he says. “Oh, let’s do that.”

He sleeps so fitfully that it feels like wakefulness, like no sleep at all. Finally, turning the small reading light on, he tries to read the book about the man called Sitting Bull, whose literally translated name, according to the book, was Buffalo Bull Who Sits Down.

---

The morning paper has more about the accident, surprisingly as part of an article about alcohol and its effect on one family: it turns out that Dupee was the late-life son of a former Tennessee congressman, Wildcat Tyrus McGill, from the 1920s.

The Harts sit side by side at their kitchen table and read this, sipping coffee, Daisy and Joan having gone out to get takeout for brunch. The article says Dupee had been working as a handyman and Stahl was his nephew, helping him for the summer. The two had spent a long night drinking at a celebration of another nephew’s impending marriage. They were weaving in traffic and had no headlights on, and when a state patrol car attempted to pull them over they fled at high speed. The article says they were going a hundred and ten miles an hour when they hit the tree. The article writer posits the theory that the alcoholism could’ve been inherited, just as recent studies have suggested that suicide or the depression that produces suicidal ideation might be. Both men were divorced; both had been in several different kinds of difficulty involving alcohol and drugs and the itinerant lives they’d lived in the delta. For the nephew, there was also time spent in the Mark H. Luttrell Correctional center, after a violent altercation at a movie theater, two years before.

“No surprise,” Marion says. “Forgive me.”

Hart wants to know more. It can’t be that simple. “Why would they run?”

She shrugs. “Why worry about it now? We don’t know them.”

He stands and leans on the back of the chair. “But I can’t stop seeing it, honey. The guy looked right at me. He could see well enough to walk and he looked at me. And he was dead. And I—I can’t shake the memory of the particular shade of—of the color. I saw the deepness of it, its—its totality, just as I was beginning to know he was—what the situation was.”

“It’s done now, though. It’s over, honey.” She begins to clear away the coffee dishes. He watches her and reaches for a paper towel to wipe the table. “Let’s leave it,” she says. “Okay? We’ll just have to go over it again when Daisy and Joan get back.”

He gathers all his breath and sighs the words out slowly. “God, Marion. This is the blue planet. It’s mostly blue. A blue stone in the center of space.”

She’s silent, staring. Then she seems to draw herself up. “What’re you saying?”

“I couldn’t look at the sky this morning,” he tells her. “I started my walk and came back in. Marion, I couldn’t bring myself to look at the sky. I have this feeling: it’s like this is our—this—going along this way—living the minutes of the day, this is something not us, somehow, a chain of events unfolding in time and leading to some—fate. I can’t explain it.”

“Fate.”

“I can’t help but sense that this is the beginning of something.”

“Stop it,” she says. “You’re scaring me.”

He says nothing for a moment. They’re simply staring at each other. Finally he looks down. “I feel sickened, honey. I have this awful dread just now.”

She steps over and embraces him, and they remain like that for a few moments. “We just have to get past this next few days. It’ll fade.”

He doesn’t answer.

She continues. “Joan and I are supposed to have lunch with this woman who wants to be our publicist.”

“I’ve gotta try to paint.” The words sound troublingly beside the point.

“The cute twins,” she says. “They should go to Pompeii.”

He manages a smile and leans over to kiss her hair. “Keep joking,” he says. “And I’m sorry.”

---

How do you completely exclude one of the primary colors?

In the studio he sets out the photo Mrs. Lessing has picked—since, she told the girls, who were audible in the background with their arguing, the portrait is for her. He looks at the faces, and is confronted immediately by the new difficulty about shades of blue, and there are in fact hints of the color in all the photographs he has taken of them—he sees it in the light green, faintly cyanic drape and the blond walls of the room itself, and he sees it in the girls’ hair and pale cheeks, with those traces of the veins, and he can see it while anticipating all the necessary touches even to deepen some shade of gray; it’s all brutal distraction.

He backs away from it, experiencing again in memory the breath-stealing aghast horror of the tottering figure lurching toward him. He paces a little, still seeing it, and thinks of trying again with the walk. Go out and look at the lovely summer world. He puts sunglasses on, to mute colors. He fears now for his sanity. In the living room, Marion sits with her pages on her lap, penciling in changes.

She looks up. “Good idea with the sunglasses. You look cool.”

“Let’s do go back to Rome,” he hears himself say suddenly. “Now. Let’s find a way.”

She frowns. “Baby.”

“Maybe this is tied up with the pandemic, somehow.” The thought surprises him. “Can’t we—let’s find a way to go back this week.”

“Ernest,” she says. “Stop it. Everything’s all right. We’re all right.”

“I feel separate from you.”

She pauses, staring.

“From everything. And I think Rome—” he begins, but doesn’t finish.

“It’ll be fine.” She frowns slightly. “You’re just upset. It’s trauma, seeing a thing like that.” She seems to give a small half shrug, stepping toward him. The light from the window casts a bluish tint onto her white blouse, and he sees it above the frame of the sunglasses as he bows slightly to accept her kiss. The thought seizes him again that this is all one thing, part of something ongoing. There have been the depredations of the shutdown and the scares and climbing horrors of Covid, and Daisy’s moving in, and the increasing scarcity of funds and having to work the library job, and even Joan’s estranged husband with his friends in the police department—and Joan now, Joan, too—and through everything he, himself, making the effort to be decent and loving. Here this is now, like a pitiless last straw coming from the very chain of all circumstance. He recognizes the absurdity of the notion, yet feels it under his heart like truth. He stands braced against the counter, just beyond the bath of light from the window, as his wife approaches.

“Well?” she says. “C’mon—kiss me. In honor of our trip to Rome.”

He kisses her, holding on, eyes shut tight.