John D. MacDonald

Nothing Must Change

At noon Carol heard the creak of the bed in the next room, heard Max’s vast awakening yawn. She turned on the gas under the coffee, then stood holding the handle of the dish mop so tightly that her fingers hurt. Max had come to bed just before dawn, after a roaring shower, bringing with him the faint tart odor of the thinner he had used to clean the oil paint from his fingers.

When she had gotten up, she had looked upon his sleeping face, the face that had been for the past three weeks the face of a stranger. Three weeks; this time, the cool-eyed, quiet withdrawal had lasted longer.

Carol heard the soft slap, slap of his old slippers as he went down the hallway and into the studio that had been the kitchen shed until he had cut the window and skylight.

She realized that she was holding her breath, wailing, hoping for an end to the lonely weeks. The coffee began to make a whispering sound.

“Carol!” he shouted. “Carol! Come here!”

With shaking hand and with a great joy in her heart she turned the gas down and hurried to him. “I’m coming, Max,” she called. It seemed an endless time since she had heard that warmth in his voice. Now the time of strangeness was over, and once again there would be laughter and love and their intense togetherness.

He stood in his shorts, his wide brown back turned toward her, his shoulders tensed, feet planted. The canvas was big, bigger than the last. He had turned it so the noon light struck it.

“I dreamed I did it the way I wanted to do it,” he said, his voice tight in his throat, exultant. “I walked in and it was here.”

She looked at it with the peculiar dismay that all his paintings gave her. If she had dared to criticize it aloud, she would say, “It’s too big and bright and harsh and ugly and... and I don’t understand it.”

“It’s nice,” she said, in a small voice.

He turned quickly, the tooth-white grin on his tanned face, the uncombed black hair across his forehead. The grin softened, and he put his hands on her shoulders, kissed the tip of her nose. “Hello, darling,” he said.

“Hello, Max. Hello, husband.”

“I said it was going to be of a flower this time, and maybe you thought of rosebuds in a vase. Not a thing like this. Not a fleshy, anatomical, hungry flower growing in a jungle of light instead of form. You wanted a pretty flower.”

She felt herself blush. “No, Max.”

He laughed hugely. “It’s done, by God. Break my arm if I reach for a brush. I’m starved. I want to eat, swim, walk forty miles, get drunk, sing and make love to you. All at the same time.” He kissed her tenderly, and then so hard that it hurt her lips.

He sat at the kitchen table and watched her as she cooked his eggs and bacon. She could feel his eyes on her.

“Patient Carol,” he said softly. “Where have you been for three weeks?”

“Right here.”

“Waiting for me to come back from a far place. Three lost weeks. I look at you and say they weren’t worth it. I look at the canvas and say they were. But you look happy now. As if lights had gone on behind your eyes. Now you can stop worrying about poor Max and those dreadful daubs. Poor crazy Max spinning in a humming silence like a twenty-cent top, slapping good paints on good canvas in a meaningless pattern.”

“I didn’t think that at all,” she said primly.

As she brought the plate to the table, he pulled her down into his lap. He stared very intently and very soberly into her eyes. “You’re right for me,” he said. “So very right for me. All the warmth of you and the love. I can feel it around me, my darling, even when I seem so far away. I can work with that love around me. Without you, I’d shake apart like a broken machine.”

She looked up into his young eyes under the fierce black brows. His intensity always made her feel soft and weak.

“I love you,” she said, like a child saying something memorized.

“I can say I love you, too, but this isn’t the way I can say it best. Some day, when I know enough, when I can make my hands and eyes do what’s in my mind, I’ll put love on a canvas. I’ll put it there so strong and bright that you’ll never look at it without having it take your breath away. I promise that, Carol.”

“Max, I—”

“Coffee, woman!” he said with mock ferocity.

She sat across the table from him and watched him eat. He grinned at her. Max was larger than life, more alive than any person she had ever known. Her family, all her friends, had always been so careful to underplay their lines, subdue all emotions, move primly through an orderly world. Maybe that was why she—

She went to the front room and got the letter, brought it to him. He looked quickly at her. “What has frightened you?” he asked.

“No, Max. I’m not frightened. Read the letter.”

He glanced through it quickly, looked again at the return address. “Lasson!” he said. “Greta Lasson. Where have I heard that name? Don’t tell me.” He snapped his fingers. “Articles. She writes about painters and painting. Criticisms of shows. She’s big-time.”

“We were roommates at Smith,” Carol said evenly.

He looked at her intently and then grinned. The grin faded quickly and was replaced by the owlish look of a natural mimic. He imitated a prissy, lisping female, dealing cards: “It is my deal, isn’t it, darling? Did you count my natural canasta? Girls, I have the most exciting news about Carol Prior! Well, you know how she remarried only a year after her husband died. Married some perfectly mad painter type just years younger than she is, named Max Cheventza. Some sort of a foreigner. We’ve been so worried about dear Carol, holed up down there in some sort of fantastic shack on the Gulf Coast of Florida, with that unscrupulous person who claims to be a painter living on her money. Well, dear Greta has agreed to stop in on them and bring Carol to her senses. Oh, dear! Did you have to freeze the pack?”

The laughter brought tears to her eyes. “Please, Max. Please!” she pleaded.

He jumped up, went to the doorway, came strolling back with one hand on his hip, a delicate sneer on his lips. He went to the chair where he had been sitting and extended a languid hand.

“How do you do, Mr. Cheventza! I’m Greta Lasson, you know. The famous Greta Lasson? I’m dying to see your work. But dying!” He glanced around the kitchen, wrinkling his nose. “Terribly quaint, Carol. Just too terribly, terribly quaint.”

Through laughter she protested, “But Greta isn’t like that at all! She’s nice, really.” No, Greta wasn’t like that. Greta was tall, with a long cool face and level eyes and an almost fanatic honesty.

He sat down and picked up the letter again. “She’s arriving on the sixth, eh? When’s that?”

“Today, Max.”

“Today! Can’t we head her off? This was to be our day, Carol.”

“I don’t see how. She’s driving through to Sarasota.”

He stretched, pushed the empty coffee cup away. “So be it. Climb into your suit, lady. We’re going swimming, anyway.”

Two hours later, as the sun had slid halfway down the western sky, she sat on the beach and watched Max come in through the surf line, swimming hard. He came up across the beach toward her, lean and tall and strong. He paused to shake water from his ear.

She thought of Greta. Greta would be... She was a year younger... thirty-two now. It had been two years since she had seen Greta, at Charles’ funeral.

Poor Max, with his pathetic pride in his work, his confidence that it was good. It wasn’t difficult to see what was behind Greta’s visit. Max’s analysis had been almost frighteningly correct. She could hear one of her old friends saying, “While you’re in Florida, Greta, why don’t you stop in on Carol and see if you can straighten her out? You know — pry her loose from that confidence man she married.”

Carol smiled grimly. There was no power on earth that could pry her loose.

But what Greta might do to Max was another problem. She tried to tell herself that this way might be best, that Greta’s honesty would make disillusion quick and clean. Max was young enough, at twenty-five, to bounce back, possibly find a new outlet for his intensely creative energies. She wished that she had gotten Greta’s letter in time to write back a white lie that would cancel the visit. Probably Greta had guessed her reaction and had timed it in just that way.

“Why so somber, old lady?” Max asked.

She tilted her head to one side and smiled up at him. “Old enough to know better,” she said. It was a game they played, question and response. Yet she knew that she did not feel older than Max. She thought, with a certain smugness, that Greta might be more than mildly astonished to find a Carol with a younger figure, a younger face than when Charles was alive. It was odd. Charles had always seemed to expect a matronly dignity, and so you became what he seemed to want. And with Max you could be forever young.

Now she knew she would have to be young enough to fight this thing with him, to help him withstand the sharpness of disappointment, to help him find a new direction for his life.

She thought it most odd that Max should have such a blind spot. And she knew that she was not wrong. The modern schools were no mystery to her. Subjective art did not appall her, and she could look at formlessness in an unselfconscious attempt to find decorativeness without implication. But Max’s work, with the ripened flesh of flowers, or gray stumps in a harsh chrome-yellow sea, with backgrounds like flashlight rays converging on swamp grasses — it was not representational, nor subjective, nor anything classifiable. It simply made her feel tense and confused and oddly frightened.

Max glanced beyond her toward the house and said casually, “The top brass has arrived, I think.”

She jumped up, turned and saw Greta, tall and slim, getting out of a blue sedan parked in front of their house, on the far side of the narrow gravel road. Carol snatched up the blanket and cigarettes and hurried toward the road. She was suddenly conscious that the bathing suit Max had bought for her was more extreme than any she had ever owned before.

“Greta!” she called.

Greta turned from the front door, shading her eyes against the sun. “Carol? My goodness, it is Carol!” Greta’s lips were cool against her cheek, her thin hand strong on Carol’s arm. She turned those level eyes on Max. “If you’re Max I’m going to ask you what you’ve done to her. She looks seventeen.”

“Sixteen,” Max said firmly.

They all laughed and some of the tension was gone. They went into the house. Greta sat on the edge of the bed and talked to Carol through the half-open bathroom door as Carol changed. Max, still in swimming trunks, was making a great clatter in the kitchen, fixing rum Collinses.

Carol came out of the bathroom, zipping her dress at the side. “Hope you still like spaghetti. Max taught me his way to make the sauce.”

“Love it! Your Max is quite an overpowering guy, Carol. I didn’t expect him to look like that.”

“I suppose,” Carol said distantly, “you expected an oily little type with a waxed mustache and a beret.”

“Oh, come off it, lady,” Greta laughed. “Ex-roommates don’t have to spar. Actually I’m eaten up with jealousy. Not over Max, but over how slim you are and how your complexion looks and how your eyes shine.” Her voice sobered. “You must be very happy.”

Carol turned quickly away. There was no sane reason for the sting of tears in her eyes. “I am happy, Greta. Happier than I knew anyone could be.”

“I will report that in all the proper places. Everyone will be suitably enraged, and just as jealous as I am.”

Carol lowered her voice and said hastily, “Max will want you to see his work, Greta. I’d never ask you to do anything that would not be completely ethical, Greta, but if you could—”

Max came to the bedroom door. “Gabble and yadata-yadata. Is a man to drink alone?” He had showered out in back, changed to soft gray slacks and a black, short-sleeved shirt.

“Here we come,” Greta said, giving Carol an odd, questioning glance.

“Get her suitcase from the car, Max,” Carol said, wanting time to finish what she had started to say.

“No, please,” Greta said. “You can twist my arm for drinks and a very early dinner, but I must be out of here by seven-thirty at the latest. That’s for sure.”

“Lucky you,” Max said. “The guest mattress is stuffed with coral and driftwood.”

They took the drinks out onto the small side porch that faced the gulf. Max dropped the rattan blinds against the sun which slanted directly in at them. The sound of the surf sixty yards away was like the slow pulse of a great heart.

In the silence Max looked over at Greta and said, “You don’t look a Saint Bernard.”

“My goodness! What do you—”

“With a keg tied under your chin,” Max said, grinning.

“What? Oh, I get it,” Greta said. “Rescue mission. I should ask you how you guessed, but maybe it was pretty obvious. Maybe I was wrong. Long-distance impressions aren’t too valid.”

“Agreed, Greta,” he said. “I wasn’t going to show you my work. I had it all decided. I’ve read some of your stuff. You make sense.”

“Oh, thank you, sir!” Greta said.

“Children! Please!” Carol said.

“You stay out of this.” Greta said. “I’m about to use a left hook on him.”

“And I’ll bet it’s a beaut,” Max said solemnly. “Just one thing I want clear. I’m not hungry yet. I’m not even ready for one of those reviews beginning ‘I found the most exciting new talent in Florida.’ ”

“Is it exciting? Or even talent?” Greta asked.

Max stared at Carol. “That was the left hook she mentioned.” He turned back to Greta. “I’m not saying this well. I didn’t want you to see the stuff because your opinion didn’t matter to me one way or the other.”

“And now it does?”

“Because I like you. Is that a silly reason?”

“Not entirely,” Greta said. “Shall we go look at this exciting new talent?”

“Oh, not yet!” Carol said, trying to sound casual, yet knowing that the strain in her voice was too evident. “Let’s do it after we eat, shall we?”

She saw them both stare at her. Max said. “And miss the daylight?”

Greta interrupted smoothly, “She’s being a good wife, Max. Never show pictures to a critic with hunger pains. But I would like to see them now.”

“Let’s go,” Max said. They walked ahead of Carol, through the kitchen. The sauce was bubbling on the back of the stove. She bit her lip hard and blinked back the tears. More than anything else she wanted to run, to hide, to do anything but watch Greta’s cool and devastating dissection of Max’s work. But now was a time to stand by Max.

She hurried after them down the hallway to the studio. Greta sat near the window. Carol stood near the door. Max set the empty easel in place, then bent over the canvases stacked against the wall. He whistled thinly between his teeth as he sorted through them. Carol watched him for some sign of nervousness and could see none. Max and his confidence! Suddenly it seemed pathetic.

Carol moved just a bit so that she could watch Greta’s face. Max selected one and put it on the easel. It was one of the early ones, done before she had met Max. Greta did not change expression, but Carol thought she saw one hand tighten.

“All right,” Greta said flatly, indicating nothing. Max moved the picture, selected another. He showed her seven, all told. The last four were familiar to Carol; they had been done since their marriage. The last was the one finished the night before, under the special daylight fluorescence.

“All right,” Greta said.

“That’s all I care to show you, Greta,” Max said.

Greta stood up. She walked aimlessly across the studio, tapped a cigarette on the back of her hand, lit it. The lighter made a small click, loud in the silence.

“Do it gently,” Carol pleaded silently.

“I don’t know,” Greta said, her voice oddly thin. “You see, I honestly don’t know.” It was as though she were pleading with Max to understand why she didn’t know. “Your work is strange, Max, and it’s powerful. Those first two or three were nothing. Exhibitionism. Muscle-flexing.”

“That’s why I showed them to you, Greta. I was exploring then. I didn’t really know where I wanted to go. But now... it feels right for me. Not all the way right, of course.”

“It’s a pretty complete break, you know.”

“Five years ago I knew it had to be that way. But I couldn’t do it. Just in the last year.” He walked over to Carol and put his arm around her waist as though in that way he were explaining something to Greta.

Greta lost a lot of her indecision. She turned toward Max. “Just give me a little time. I’ll be back. I know I’ll be back. That flower... neat little people have been doing flowers so long that you forget a flower is actually—”

“—Actually pretty primal,” Max said. “Pretty rough in its own way. All of them a little bit of a Venus’-flytrap, but big enough to swallow a man, if he lies down and looks at it grass-level, forgetting the prettiness, seeing just the meat and life of it.”

“I’ll be back. Until then we won’t talk about it, Max.”

Carol was surprised at the way they shook hands, quite solemnly. They ate on the porch in what was left of the day, and finished when the beach was dusk-purple, the stars beginning to show. It was an odd meal. Carol, in joy at the narrowness of the escape, knew that she was talking too much, but she couldn’t stop.

“Now I must go,” Greta said. “It’s good to know you, Max. Walk me out to the car, Carol.”

They stood by the car in the deep dusk. Max was singing, off key, in the kitchen. Carol could taste sea-salt on her lips. “I don’t know how to thank you, Greta, for understanding what I tried to say. If you’d told him how bad they are—”

Greta gasped. She took Carol’s shoulders and shook her strongly, gently. “What are you trying to say? Bad? How can you know? I don’t know. Good and bad can be determined when you use established rules. Then along comes someone outside the rules.”

“If he could have a show, then...” Carol said, uncertainly, feeling guilt as though in some obscure way she had betrayed Max.

“He’s not ready. He knows it. He wouldn’t permit a show yet. He’s got enough to become a cheap fad right now. A cheap, profitable fad.”

“But I—”

“Carol, dear, look at them sometime. Forget all you think you know. He’s learning to say, in his own way, that this is a wild, mad, wonderful world and every small thing in it shares in the madness and the wonder. What he is saying is coming from a whole and complete man.”

Greta had spoken the last few words in a tense half-whisper. She turned so that what was left of the light touched her face. She smiled crookedly. “I do go on, don’t I?”

“I didn’t know,” Carol said, quite humbly.

Greta kissed her cheek. “In a hundred years you may be in all the biographies. Cheventza’s wife. Or he may never get beyond the point he’s reached. Either way, Carol, I—”

“You what?” Carol asked.

“I envy you with all my heart,” she whispered.

They stood in the dusk-silence and heard the drum of the waves.

“Well, I’m on my horse,” Greta said brightly.

“You will come back?”

“In a year. A year should do it, one way or the other.”

Greta opened the car door and slid behind the wheel. “Take care of him,” she said. She started the motor quickly and drove away. The blue sedan rocked and swayed down the uneven gravel road, twin red taillights glowing.

Carol stood there long after the car had gone. At first she wanted to run in, have him hold her tightly, confess to him her lack of faith in him. Then she realized that her faith or lack of it must not intrude. He had worked well in the face of her carefully concealed skepticism. Now there was more reason than ever for nothing to change. To keep on living as they had — that was the pattern.

There would be days now of warm laughter and kisses that would taste of sea-salt, and night walks on the beach and the strength of his arms. And sooner or later he would slip away to that secret place within him where he worked, unconscious of time.

And she knew that whenever it happened, her loneliness would be no less intense, no less painful. But her pain would not be pointless, either; for if the very act of losing him sometimes was her part, then she would do her part — and make it a piece of the whole that was their happiness. No, nothing must change. Nothing — for this, as it was, was the fact of togetherness.

Content

John D. MacDonald
Nothing Must Change