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  • Sometime, Springtime
  • Elizabeth Poliner (bio)

In the town of East Haddam, Connecticut, the Goodspeed Opera House was showing Sometime, Springtime, a new musical that by all accounts would go to Broadway. Annie, Shenandoah, Man of La Mancha: these were some of the hits that had got their start, once upon a time, at the Goodspeed. But a show like Sometime, Springtime hadn’t come around in a while.

Nell, a sucker for musicals, was absorbed by a review of Sometime, Springtime—title surely to be changed once it moved to New York, the reviewer, a New Yorker himself, noted. The reviewer also noted that Camille Beaux, lead actress, played the newly widowed heroine passionately, as if her life depended on it. And apparently it did. The actress had just lost her mother, and each night, through theater, she had the opportunity to explore that grief anew. Or so she was reported to have said. Not to dwell on it, but to comprehend it, night by night, a little more completely. For that, Camille Beaux stated, she would always be grateful.

Nell finished the review convinced she had to see Camille Beaux in this role. She admired her seriousness. She admired her “flawless craftsmanship.” She admired her courage to engage in that emotional exploration, however arduous, for the duration of May, June, and half of July. Perhaps some of Camille Beaux’s wisdom would rub off on Nell. She only hoped Sometime, Springtime had a happy enough ending. Nell didn’t know if she could bear anything less.

She was en route, via train, from Manhattan to Old Saybrook. At the station she searched briefly for Chase Patterson, custodian of the Pine Day School in nearby East Haddam, where Nell was the semester’s visiting artist, a position she’d won through a competition. For some time before this, her career had slowed, but she’d taken the winning as a hopeful sign. Perhaps if she moved, literally, from Manhattan to East Haddam, her work might move again too. In contrast to the tidy [End Page 49] painting she’d submitted to the competition, her art these days was a splotchy kind of thing—collages she’d only just gotten into, having found she was blocked when it came to the oils that had been her medium for so long, until her breakup with Cal. If you can’t paint it, paste it, she figured, though she really had no idea what to make of her compositions, as dense and chaotic as her dreams. What did make sense was that the work differed from anything she’d done before, and in that difference it mirrored that peculiar feeling she woke with each morning when she’d realize anew, as if the loss happened yesterday rather than last year, that she’d be spending the day in a kind of foreign universe, the world without Cal, a place where she felt alien, displaced, and always, no matter how well-fed, just a little hungry.

As had become their custom, she and Chase Patterson barely spoke during the drive to the school. For his part, she knew he was shy. For her part, because Chase Patterson looked so much like Cal—they were the same age and had the same dusty auburn hair color and even a similar broad cut of jaw—she felt an urgent need to look elsewhere. The likeness, triggering the most visceral of memories—she could practically smell Cal—was too painful to behold.

Thankfully, it wasn’t long before Chase dropped her off at her studio, a renovated chicken coop. Now, with its skylight, sleeping cot, and makeshift kitchen, it was a good enough workspace. Bare walls and bright light—that was all she needed. As usual, she’d stay for the weekend, hopping the train back to Manhattan Sunday evening. Pine Day School preferred her there all week, but in New York she had a mundane but profitable enough paralegal job she couldn’t do without. And so she came on Thursdays, to be with students on Fridays, then to blindly paste multicolored shapes onto paper until parting time on Sundays.

The school lent her a car...

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