McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales - Michael Chabon [94]
But loyalty and the beginnings of love kept her here, in Janna’s cabin in the woods, edgy and frustrated and in limbo. As soon as the constrained letter to Janna was in its envelope and the checks made out (Courtney repeating her satisfaction that the winter’s enormous electrical bills had settled down) she let the girl get to the mop and the shopping, and with a sigh of relief moved over to the loom.
As she slid onto the weaver’s bench, Suze reflected, as she had a thousand times before, how odd it was that she felt so comfortable there. This middle-aged daredevil, this adrenaline junkie who dangled from precipices, walked across continents, and flung her body out of planes into thin air, returned home to make her living as a weaver—just about the least impetuous, most encumbered, most tightly controlled art form there was. In weaving, one set of threads was strung onto five hundred pounds of loom, the other attached to a shuttle: right to left then back again, the threads locking into a pattern predetermined before the warp threads were on the loom. In weaving, there was little scope for wild improvisation even on the big hangings; in weaving, focused intensity counterbalanced the boisterous disorder of her wanderings.
Oddly enough, before her sight had begun to fail, she had already been turning from the intense colors she had worked in for so many years—colors she had learned along with the techniques, in Guatemala and Rajasthan—to stark black and white. Almost as if her mind had known that the world of sight was about to draw in on her. Last year, she had produced a series of all-black or all-white pieces, with subtle patterns emerging from the tactile qualities of the thread. An astute gallery owner had dubbed the pieces Weaving Darkness, a couple of important critics had commented on the interesting things Suze Blackstock had to say concerning texture and about color-in-colorlessness; to her considerable surprise, Suze was on her way to becoming famous in the weaving world. She “saw” the growing piece with her fingers as she was weaving it; fully sighted people saw it in a slightly different manner when it was hanging on the wall. A gallery in New York wanted her pieces for a one-woman show in the fall, there was talk about an article in Time, the Smithsonian had written about acquiring a hanging.
Suze was not unaware of the irony of her success.
Today she was working on a white piece, a glowing expanse on her vision where the sun poured through the south window onto it. She could as easily have worked at night, and occasionally did with the black pieces, but the sensation of brightness seemed to emphasize the sensations in her fingertips, and make the piece more of a whole. She barely noticed when Courtney left for town; was surprised, when the girl returned, to find she’d been at it for an hour and a half.
When Courtney asked her from the kitchen if she wanted tuna fish or turkey, she told the girl to choose, and went to wash her hands. She and the girl usually ate lunch together; she thought it made Courtney feel noble to think she was providing company to the lonely old lesbian instead of just cleaning her floors and buying her groceries. And in fact, although she didn’t care much for being the object of Christian charity, Suze didn’t mind eating with the girl, even though the conversation was sometimes hard going.
Courtney had chosen tuna, and set it out, as always, four-square, with the glass a precise two inches from the plate’s one o’clock mark. The glass held iced tea, as usual. When Suze had suggested a beer one warm day, the girl had gone silent. Courtney was willing to overlook the irregularity of her neighbors’ relationship, would dutifully run her dust rag over the bottles of gin and scotch on the sideboard (replenished periodically by odd-job Andy), washed up without complaint the glasses smelling of Suze’s nighttime