She’d met Clara her very first night in Three Pines. She and Myrna had been invited over for dinner, and while Constance yearned for a quiet dinner alone with Myrna, she didn’t know how to politely decline. So they’d put on their coats and boots and trudged over.
It was supposed to be just the three of them, which was bad enough, but then Ruth Zardo and her duck had arrived and the evening went from bad to a fiasco. Rosa, the duck, had muttered what sounded like “Fuck, fuck, fuck” the whole night, while Ruth had spent the evening drinking, swearing, insulting and interrupting.
Constance had heard of her, of course. The Governor General’s Award–winning poet was as close as Canada came to having a demented, embittered poet laureate.
Who hurt you once / so far beyond repair / that you would greet each overture / with curling lip?
It was, Constance realized as the evening ground on, a good question. One she was tempted to ask the crazy poet, but didn’t for fear she’d be asked it in return.
Clara had made omelettes with melted goat cheese. A tossed salad and warm, fresh baguettes completed the meal. They’d eaten in the large kitchen, and when the meal was over and Myrna made coffee, and Ruth and Rosa retired to the living room, Clara had taken her into the studio. It was cramped, filled with brushes and palettes and canvasses. It smelled of oil and turpentine and ripe banana.
“Peter would’ve pestered me to clean this up,” said Clara, looking at the mess.
Clara had talked about her separation from her husband over dinner. Constance had plastered a sympathetic look on her face and wondered if she could possibly crawl out the bathroom window. Surely dying in a snow bank couldn’t be all that bad, could it?
And now here Clara was again talking about her husband. Her estranged husband. It was like parading around in her underwear. Revealing her intimates. It was unsightly and unseemly and unnecessary. And Constance just wanted to go home.
From the living room she heard, “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” She didn’t know, and no longer cared, whether it was the duck or the poet who was saying it.
Clara walked past an easel. The ghostly outline of what might become a man was just visible on the canvas. Without much enthusiasm, Constance followed Clara to the far end of her studio. Clara turned on a lamp and a small painting was illuminated.
At first it seemed uninteresting, certainly unremarkable.
“I’d like to paint you, if you don’t mind,” Clara had said, not looking at her guest.
Constance bristled. Had Clara recognized her? Did she know who Constance was?
“I don’t think so,” she’d replied, her voice firm.
“I understand,” Clara had said. “Not sure I’d want to be painted either.”
“Why not?”
“Too afraid of what someone might see.”
Clara had smiled, then walked back to the door. Constance followed, after taking one last look at the tiny painting. It was of Ruth Zardo, who was now passed out and snoring on Clara’s sofa. In this painting the old poet was clutching a blue shawl at her neck, her hands thin and claw-like. The veins and sinews of her neck showed through the skin, translucent, like onion paper.
Clara had captured Ruth’s bitterness, her loneliness, her rage. Constance now found it almost impossible to look away from the portrait.
At the door to the studio she looked back. Her eyes weren’t that sharp anymore, but they didn’t have to be, to see what Clara had really captured. It was Ruth. But it was someone else too. An image Constance remembered from a childhood on her knees.
It was the mad old poet, but it was also the Virgin Mary. The mother of God. Forgotten, resentful. Left behind. Glaring at a world that no longer remembered what she’d given it.
Constance was relieved she’d refused Clara’s request to paint her. If this was how she saw the mother of God, what would Clara see in her?
Later in the evening, Constance had drifted, apparently aimlessly, back to the studio door.
The single light still shone on the portrait, and even from the door Constance could see that her host hadn’t simply painted mad Ruth. Nor had she simply painted forgotten and embittered Mary. The elderly woman was staring into the distance. Into a dark and lonely future. But. But. Just there. Just slightly out of reach. Just becoming visible. There was something else.
Clara had captured despair, but she’d also captured hope.
Constance had taken her coffee and rejoined Ruth and Rosa, Clara and Myrna. She’d listened to them then. And she’d begun, just begun, to understand what it might be like to be able to put more than a name to a face.