The Strangers' Gallery Read Online Free Page B

car in the driveway, a painting crew erecting scaffolding beneath the eaves—the clapboard was peeling badly—and a young woman sitting at an easel on the verandah, also painting. She looked as if she might have been painting my house. The moving van, I thought, must have come when I was at work. But there had been no moving van, Miranda told me, later on. She had moved all her stuff, what there was of it, in her station wagon. She had been house-sitting until the end of August and in September moved into a nearly empty house. There was a fridge and stove in the kitchen, a washer and dryer in the basement, but no bed, no tables, no lamps, no chesterfield set. She slept on the hardwood floor in her sleeping bag on several layers of quilts. She was in no hurry to furnish it, she said. It was a small house, anyway, practically identical to my own—two bedrooms upstairs, a bathroom halfway up, a small kitchen, living room, and dining room—no more than 1,200 square feet in all, and didn’t require much to fill it up.
    I was, I now realize, strangely drawn to her from the beginning, though in the long melancholy wake of Elaine’s departure, the thought that someone as young and vivacious as Miranda might have any interest in a work-obsessed solitary like me never really crossed my mind. Yes, she was the epitome of what I thought of as
vivacious
, but there was an undercurrent of sadness and fragility, it seemed, the shimmering vulnerability of a trembling aspen at sunset in the evening breeze, somewhere between a
joie de vivre and a shudder.
    There is an old song, an old standard as they’re called, “Blue Skies,” in which the melody and lyrics seem to be working against each other. The singer’s happiness, as expressed in the words, is undermined by a rather melancholy tune, as if the singer cannot really believe his good fortune or is already aware that, like everything else, it will not last. Indeed, except where skies are concerned and, perhaps to a lesser extent, oceans, blue seems to be the universal colour of sadness—the blues. “Blue Skies” was the song that Miranda was singing.
    I soon discovered that she was of a rather solitary disposition herself—I hardly saw her at all that first autumn—though she had introduced herself to all the neighbours one Saturday morning, about a week after she had moved in. She had a full-time teaching job, of course, along with what seemed like a full-time avocation, painting.
    â€œI’m Miranda Michael,” she said, offering her hand on the verandah that morning and, as I hadn’t held a woman’s hand in so long, its softness and warmth were so inviting I remember wanting to hold on to it longer than I should have. For a moment, I thought that she already knew my name, that perhaps she had said, “I’m Miranda, Michael.”
    â€œJust moved in across the street,” she added.
    â€œMichael Lowe, Miranda Michael,” I said, to be sure I’d got it right. “We must be related.”
    She seemed to smile at my little joke, and we conversed easily for five minutes or more before she went next door to see the Morrows, who, I found out later, had known her deceased parents. Frank was the first to tell me about the tragedy that had befallen the family.
    â€œWhat do you do?” I asked her at one point.
    â€œI’m an art teacher,” she said, but if anyone had asked me later on, after I’d got to know her, I would have said she was a painter, for that is what she did morning, noon, and night—before she went to work, on her lunch hour, and after work. Teaching was just her day job, as artists like to call it. She had never exhibited her work, however, perhaps feeling insecure about being “palette-challenged,” as Anton was to describe it later on—or colour-blind, not to put too fine a point on it, like a writer with dyslexia or a composer who couldn’t dance.