It was thoroughly disconcerting to him and would, he thought, remain ever so, this mix of guile and innocence, of sensuality and the politic, shifting from moment to moment like the rain.
“No!” he said, “No need, I–”
“Nonsense,” she said, smiling back to him as if a sweetheart to her dearest beau, and crossed the room to make tea.
It was a shock suddenly to notice as she moved through it what a wreck the cottage was. There was something so contained in her that you did not take notice of what was beyond the fixed serenity of her gaze. She was the self-organizing system, the calm of flowing water. Now as she moved to the propane stove (firm buttocks in worn, tight jeans–much of what they wore castoffs, donated for refugee relief) storms of chaos settled back around her: fluttery curled pages of stained children’s books and her husband’s strewn teeshirts and books avalanched in a clump from a broke-leg spindleback chair, the clatter of rain on the roof in the ceilingless room mixed with the hiss of noisy Bach from a terrible eight-track tape player with stained decals of Sesame Street figures on its grimy yellow plastic sides. Below the bare rafters a strange filing system of documents hung from clothes pins on a line along one wall. They fluttered like worn flags as she made her way through shopping bags of donated tinned food, Kraft dinners and polyester clothes, stopping at the stove where steam from the teakettle misted the cindery air. Thumbtacked to the near wall a reproduction of a dreamy painting of a young girl innocent in underpants glowed like an ikon, its muddy pastel tones infused by a contained, strange light like goldleaf. Years later he discovered that the painting was by someone named Balthus, himself a Pole by birth.