Mrs. Bridge by James Salter, Evan S. Connell Page B

Stuart Montgomery and how the affair must have affected him. She saw him in Kansas City as a tall, leathery man with a hard, bulbous face like those carved on bottle openers or on the knobs of canes. He did not have much to say if she chanced to meet him on the street with his odd yellow briefcase, and when he tipped his hat he seldom bothered to smile. She wondered if he had wept when he learned what had happened, and If he tried to apologize for having allowed her to go home alone that night, or whether he had been with her and had been frightened away by the man’s gun. Or had he been struck over the head? Did he still respect her?
    Mrs. Bridge wanted to make some gesture to tell Lois Montgomery how she sympathized, but, after all, what could be done when no one ever mentioned It and when Lois simply stood there smiling and chatting and eating crabmeat sandwiches like everyone else?

44
Leda
    During one of the luncheons she got to talking with Grace Barron about art, the result being that the two of them left the clubhouse and drove to the William Rockhill Nelson art gallery and stayed there till it closed. Mrs. Bridge felt excited and guilty about the way they had gone off by themselves, but it was how Grace did everything.
    Goya, Holbein, Diirer, Corot these names, at once so familiar and so meaningless to Mrs, Bridge, were old friends of Grace Barron. And before long Mrs. Bridge knew this was a day to be remembered, like a day in February when, after months of lowering skies, the clouds roll back.
    A little self-conscious still, not yet ready to let Grace know what she was intending to do, Mrs. Bridge enrolled in a painting class for adults at an art school near the gallery. She bought a kit which contained some paints and brushes, a palette she had thought all palettes were of that peculiar ornamental shape and was slightly disappointed to find the one in her kit was plainly rectangular and a bottle of linseed oil and a bottle of turpentine, along with two metal cups which the clerk told her were to be used for the turpentine and the oil. She also bought a sugar sack for wiping the brushes, and a smock embroidered with bluebirds, and thus equipped she began her art lessons three evenings a week. She attended regularly for almost a month, skipped one night, got to several more, skipped three, attended spasmodically for another month, and finally dropped out altogether. But while she did paint she painted with a certain gusto and feeling, and with not a bad eye. The instructor once or twice gave her nice compliments and encouraged her to continue. He was a morose and rumpled little man of about forty with strong breath and bags under his eyes, who was in the habit of scratching his head and saying, “Well, let’s see, folks, to-night why don’t w r e sort of let ourselves go?”
    Occasionally there would be a model in costume, often an elderly immigrant in boots and a kerchief; sometimes they would paint an arrangement of driftwood and wine bottles. But one evening the instructor, whose name was Gadbury, told them to try a subject from mythology and work from imagination. He suggested Wotan as a subject, but added that they might do anything they wished. Mrs. Bridge could not recall anything about Wotan, but she did remember with stark clarity the legend of Leda and the swan. She proceeded to paint a small, zinc-white swan and a Leda standing stiffly erect, with hands behind her back and ankle-deep in water because hands and feet always gave her trouble, and she clothed Leda in a flowered dressmaker bathing suit not unlike her own.
    Mr. Gadbury, making his rounds, stood for a while looking over her shoulder at this Leda and at last said he thought the lake was too blue.

45
The Clock
    She spent a great deal of time staring into space, oppressed by the sense that she was waiting. But waiting for what? She did not know. Surely someone would call, someone must be needing her. Yet each day proceeded like the one before.