What Was She Thinking?: Notes On a Scandal
By Zoe Heller
Holt, 258 pages, $23
Orchard
By Larry Watson
Random House, 241 pages, $24.95
On Sept. 11, 1998, America reached the nadir in its long history of sexual voyeurism. That was the day Kenneth Starr’s account of the affair between Bill and Monica was released. Yes, there were the cigar and the dress, the stains and the phone sex. Newspapers were on to something when they carved out a big part of their weekend editions to reprint the tawdry tale in total. Readers certainly weren’t reading the comics first that morning.
Although Starr answered many essential questions, such as where and how often they did it, a larger issue remains: Why do we get so worked up over the sexual affairs of other people? Sociologists somewhere are no doubt busy studying this question. In the meantime, two novelists have approached this issue from different angles, emerging with tales of sexual imbroglios juicy enough to tide us over until the next tabloid shocker.
Larry Watson’s “Orchard” sets up an intriguing sexual triangle inspired, it seems, by the 1986 release by Andrew Wyeth of 240 paintings of his neighbor, Helga Testorf. In “What Was She Thinking?” a 42-year-old woman embarks on a risky affair with a 15-year-old boy. The whole debacle unfolds on the campus of an English secondary school, where the former is a pottery teacher and the latter a loutish pupil.
Although “What Was She Thinking?” is more authentically tabloid–the novel unfolds after the perpetrator, Sheba Hart, has been publicly shamed–it is by far a more sophisticated novel. Heller’s day job has been columnist for London’s Daily Telegraph, and she uses her inside skinny on the media to capture how it distorts the truth out of any private event.
Subtitled “Notes on a Scandal,” the novel provides the titillating pleasure of watching something bad happen up close. The novel’s narrator, Barbara Covett, is a history teacher at St. George’s secondary school in North London, where Sheba taught. In the scandal’s wake, Barbara claims a close friendship with Sheba and begins acting as her spokeswoman. Think Linda Tripp done up as an English schoolmarm and you’ll get the picture.
Barbara wants to correct the record about her friend, and “What Was She Thinking?” is her attempt to do that. As if aware of the public’s distrust of memoirs these days, Barbara frequently refers to her timeline, her diary and a system of gold-starring significant dates. You would think she was testifying before Congress.
This entire hullabaloo over accuracy is bogus, though, because “What Was She Thinking?” is not a testimony in fact but a dirge all about Barbara. Throughout her monologue she rails about her likes and dislikes, how painfully she has been overlooked and how, when Sheba came to school, she initially felt jilted out of a potential friend by her nemesis. We even get to know her cat quite well.
Heller does a beautiful job giving voice to a hero who is both in control and losing control. Early on, Barbara’s pages are quite orderly, but she soon goes off on tangents, allows her imagination flights of fancy. Recounting the day Sheba and her young lover first kissed, Barbara describes Sheba admiring the young man’s profile:
“[H]e had something of an old prizefighter about him, she thought. Except, of course, that his skin was so golden and impeccable. She had a powerful urge to put her hand to his cheek.”
Given how assiduously Barbara has been documenting this affair, the lack of any reference to Sheba’s confirming this detail means everything from “she thought” onward is almost certainly an invention. As these fuzzy moments multiply, Barbara’s sense of cool evaporates, and she grows feverish, careless, more naked in her storytelling. “What Was She Thinking?” becomes less about the affair and more about what observing its progression did to Barbara. “This is not a story about me,” Barbara asserts in the foreword. Ha!
Although “What Was She Thinking?” tunnels in on Barbara’s obsession with Sheba, Heller manages to squeeze in a few good characters, including a headmaster named Pabblem; Sheba’s condescending older husband, Richard; and a handful of teachers with mental tics and hygiene issues authentic enough to make a reader suspect they were drawn from real-life subjects.
Still, Barbara is the whirlwind at the center of this, or so she thinks. This delusion gets to the heart of this frothily good read. Relationships, Heller suggests, even the most questionable of them, are by nature closed systems: Only those inside them know how it feels. No matter how much grubbing around in the dirt we do, we’ll never truly understand why Bill took Monica into his back office, or why Charles dumped the lovely Diana. As outsiders, the only thing our investment in the details does is tell us how we feel about them, such as when Barbara, worked to a lather by imagining her friend kissing the teenage lover, barks, “how immensely silly the whole thing must have looked.”
The fiasco that Larry Watson writes about in “Orchard” takes place long before CNN could beam the details around the globe, but that doesn’t take away from its awful immediacy. Set in scenic Door County, Wis., during the late 1940s and early 1950s, the novel concerns a triangle of damaged people looking outside themselves for a way to happiness.
At the center is Ned Weaver, a famous painter of landscapes and portraits who has a habit of taking his models to bed. Although many romantic artists claim their dalliances are necessary to fuel the fire of genius, Ned is simply enjoying his ability to get what he wants. He even seduces his best friend’s wife. Ned’s latest conquest, however, will cost him, because the woman in question is Sonja House, the Norwegian-born wife of an apple-orchard owner named Henry House.
House, as his name unsubtly hints, has a thing about property. He likes his horse and his apple fields and especially his curvy wife. On their wedding night, Watson depicts a postcoital Henry tearing the sheets off his wife. ” ‘[Y]ou’re just going to have to stay cold until I get my eyes full,’ ” he says cruelly. In a similar scene, Henry discovers sunburn on his wife’s backside. She tries to hide her body from him and Ned laughs: ” ‘One way or the other, I’m going to see.’ “
So much of the novel is captured by that single sentence. Henry, of course, will see because Sonja is his wife, and a man is entitled to see his spouse naked. Perhaps at one point in history this made sense, but in “Orchard,” this sense of entitlement smothers marriages. Henry is entitled to glimpse his wife’s naked flesh, but a stranger can see her better from the inside by standing before her and applying paint to a canvas. Conversely, Ned can be more present with a naked stranger than his own wife.
Since there is so much in this novel about looking, it’s important that Watson get the stuff on art right. Unfortunately, there’s something forced and wooden about Watson’s handling of painting here. For one, Ned is constantly pronouncing on his work in a manner so fatuous you wonder why the villagers have such respect for him. ” ‘When most people look at one of my drawings or paintings, what they fail to see is the story,’ ” he tells Sonja at one point, as if he were being interviewed on “60 Minutes.” ” ‘But everything I draw or paint has its own story. A past. A future. Never only the moment on the canvas.’ “
He’s no Bob Ross, that Ned, but then again, he probably shouldn’t be. Artists should be producing work, not analyzing it. Still, throughout “Orchard,” Ned lectures Sonja, and by extension, the reader, on how to think about art. It’s as if Watson doesn’t trust the reader to understand the thematic parallels he’s making in his storyline. In overplaying these themes, Watson makes it hard for us to believe Ned really is that charming. Only an idiot could manage to sit through hours of this tripe.
It’s a shame Watson could not deal with art in the same fashion he does landscape here. Throughout “Orchard,” the only thing that approaches the timeless beauty of true art is Watson’s descriptions of the seasons. Like the work of a master watercolorist, Watson’s strokes are so fine and sure they cannot be detected. It’s as if the orchards and pine trees that fill this book didn’t need inventing; that they already existed on their own.
Against the backdrop of this natural beauty, the dramatic denouement Watson cooks up for “Orchard” seems melodramatic, a bit too obvious. A craggy old orchard hand steps in like some backwoods Iago to plant the seed of jealousy–all the townsmen, apparently, knew about Sonja’s modeling before Henry–and we’re off to the races. If you get this far, it will be hard not to follow the story to its bitter end. But as Zoe Heller has shown, it’s not where things wind up but what happens on the way there that defines an affair. In this very important manner, Larry Watson has let us down.
