Fear itself

4

It must have been quite a sight. The middle-aged couple, huge man with a Panama hat and a broken arm, big woman with a long brown braid and a broken nose, all but skipping down the ramp into the terminal.

“We did it!” Dorie exulted, still flushed with the glory of having licked her last phobia.

“You did it,” said Pender. He was happy for her, of course, and not unmindful of his contribution, but mostly he was just glad to be out of goddamn coach. One first-class flight with Sid had been enough to spoil him forever.

Normally, Sid would have been waiting at the curb in front of the baggage claim. There are friends, and then there are friends who pick you up at the airport-Sid was the latter to Pender, and vice versa. Pender hadn’t asked him this time, though-he wasn’t sure Sid was still talking to him, after the stunt he’d pulled at SFO last Friday. So after they picked up Dorie’s baggage, the suitcase and footlocker-and mirabile dictu, both arrived safely, sliding down the designated carousel in the designated airport-Pender hailed a cab.

The ride from Virginia to Maryland was Dorie’s first experience with honest-to-God autumn foliage. Pender got a kick out of watching her-the expression on her face was MasterCard-ad priceless: not so much that of a kid in a candy shop as a teenage boy in a whorehouse.

Pender turned tour guide for the last leg of the drive, pointing out Civil War sites, detailing the history of the C amp;O. At the bottom of Tinsman’s Lock Road, a canopy of yellow-leaved box elders shut out the sky. Dorie had never seen light like that before-where she came from, bowered light was always green.

Pender pointed out his driveway, warned the cabbie about the ruts. They jounced the last few hundred yards. Then, as the driver carried the luggage to the front doorstep, Dorie told Pender she wanted to see the canal while it was still daylight.

“Follow that path around the side of the house,” Pender told her, “and keep going downhill until you see a woman in a bloodstained nightgown looking for a redheaded baby. I’ll catch up as soon as I pay the man.”

Phasmophobia-fear of ghosts. Despite her protestations last night, Dorie didn’t have it, had never had it-after all, who ever heard of a ghost wearing a mask?

The path was steep and narrow; it wound down through a dense wood, then opened out suddenly on a scene Dorie longed to paint with all her heart, and doubted she could ever capture. Pender had been right-she would need to add a few new oils to her palette to get it all: the formal strips of color in the foreground, emerald green lawn, malachite green water, reddish brown canal wall built of rough-hewn, fitted sandstone blocks; the particulate air, the long black shadows, the horizontal light streaming in from dead ahead, but cut into dazzling vertical columns by the single row of flaming trees towering behind the towpath running along the raised berm of the far bank.

Impossible, though, to capture all that in a plein air, then paint in any of the detail-the footbridge, the miniature waterfall tumbling down the flume, the split-rail wooden fences, never mind the joggers and dog walkers on the towpath-before the light faded entirely.

Still, wouldn’t it be something to try! If the weather held, she could set up her easel in the same spot a few days in a row, paint in one section at a-

“Well? Did I lie?” Pender caught up with Dorie as she mentally began cutting the scene into horizontal sections-the landscape defined its own verticality.

“It’s beautiful, Pen. I can’t wait to paint it. Or try, anyway. Where’s the nearest art supply store?”

“We’ll have to consult the yellow pages on that, scout,” said Pender as they started back up the path to the house. “The last time I bought any art supplies, they came in a Crayola box with a built-in sharpener.”

“I loved that built-in sharpener,” said Dorie.

“Me too.”

When they reached the house, Pender nodded toward the porch. “Let’s go in that way-I want you to see the panorama.”

“Technically, a panorama is an unbroken view or a series of pictures representing a continuous scene,” Dorie explained as she trudged up the steps after him.

Pender stopped on the landing and turned back to her as if he had something important to say. Actually, he was just winded from the climb. “Did anybody ever tell you you were extremely argumentative?”

“Yes. I always took it as a compliment.”

The view from the porch was spectacular, Dorie had to admit. It occurred to her, as Pender unlocked the sliding glass door, that she could paint from up here in the morning, then go down to the canal in the afternoon. It’s a tough job, but somebody has to do it, she thought, following Pender into the house. God, I love my work.