43
WHEN WE GOT HOME, we let ourselves in, and the girls immediately started up the stairs. I hesitated.
“Peter,” they whispered, one in each ear, tugging my arms, “come on.”
“Wait here,” I said. “There’s something I have to do.”
“Don’t be silly, Peter,” said Margot. “The work can wait.”
“No, no,” I said. “There’s something I have to do.”
“Oh!” said Martha. “I think I know what it is.”
I nodded my head.
“Oh!” said Margot. “Do you really want to do that?”
I nodded once more. The girls exchanged a look in silence.
“Wait here,” I said. “I’ve got to do this on my own.”
I let myself into the studio but left the door ajar. I went directly to the easel, where I’d left the sheet with the drawings of the dark-haired girl. It seemed embarrassing now, the record of a bit of self-deception, wishful thinking, the work of a boy who had let his imagination run away with him.
Still, it was my imagination and my work.
I folded the sheet carefully and put it in the pocket of my coat. I put my coat on the cot.
Then, noisily, I tore another sheet of paper from the pad. I heaved a sigh. Slowly and dramatically I tore the paper into pieces. I dropped the pieces in the wastebasket, turned the light off, and left, pulling the door shut behind me. Margot and Martha were waiting at the foot of the stairs. The look in their eyes was sober, reflective, and considerate. They had heard the tearing of the paper. They imagined that they knew what it meant. The meanings in such things come from ourselves, you know; they are ours alone, the laggard stepchildren of the facts.
“Let’s go,” I said.
We started up the stairs. Halfway up, Martha turned and looked toward the studio door.
“Don’t look back,” I said, just as Rocky had said it in L’Amour, La Guerre, La Poussière, and the three of us ran, laughing, to their room, where we crawled in under the covers of their bed.
“You did that just to please us, didn’t you?” said Margot.
“Yes,” I said, grinning in the dark at the truth of it, “I did.”
Sometime later, feeling very much at home there between them, in their oversize bed, I began to doze, and sometime later still, Andy and Rosetta returned and climbed the silent stairs and knocked on the girls’ door and said, “Good night.” Margot and Martha murmured, drowsily, “Good night,” and from somewhere cozy and comfortable and familiar, somewhere near sleep, I murmured “Good night,” too.
As soon as I heard myself say it, I knew what I’d done, and I was suddenly awake.
I suppose that, after a moment’s stunned hesitation, Andy burst through the door and began playing the part of the Giant vexed by the shock of the new, but I can’t say for certain, because by then I was already on my way down the ladder.
[This concludes At Home with the Glynns. The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy will continue soon with Leaving Small’s Hotel.]
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