Life Drawing Read online

  When I was a teenager, long before any of this, my sisters and I used to play a game, just between ourselves, that consisted solely of muttering under our breath, there’s a nice little friend for you, whenever we saw a boy—or in my sister Jan’s case a girl. Most of the time it was said sarcastically: there’s a nice little friend for you, just as the most appalling skinhead cousin of the kid hosting the party walks in. Every once in a while, though, it was said appreciatively. There’s a nice little friend for you. No, seriously. By the door. We were always on the lookout. All teenagers are, I suppose. We were human periscopes, scanning, scanning. And the fact that there were three of us, close in age, meant that there was never a time when at least one pair of eyes wasn’t engaged.

  The period between my affair and our move to the country was a bit like that. Is this her? Is this possible? There’s a nice little friend for you. I hope he doesn’t think so. I hope he doesn’t see her. I hope he does. I hope he never tells me. I hope he does. It was never far from my mind.

  We could move out to the country now, you know.

  As we always told the story, the idea came upon us both at once, as though we had acted on it without either of us having to speak the words aloud. But in fact I was the one who said it, sitting in a diner, dawdling over late night pie and coffee, trying to comprehend the degree to which our circumstances had changed with our newly copious bank account.

  “We could move out to the country now, you know.”

  This is Owen, on the day we moved in: He is pacing off the distance between the kitchen door of the house and the great doorway of the barn. Well over six feet tall, slender to the point of being skinny, as he places one heel to the front of the other foot’s toes, and again, and again, he looks single-legged and as though he will blow over with just a mild gust of wind. It is autumn, mid-October, and the greens of our first encounter with this land have dressed up in fancy costume, orange, scarlet, yellow, to welcome us. It is almost too much to take in, all the beauty. And this is why Owen is doing what he is doing, measuring this line—which there is no reason to measure. Because this is what Owen does when he is overwhelmed.

  Watching from what is to be my studio, I know he doesn’t really need or even want to know how many lengths of his own feet it is from one building to the other. Except that it is a start. In this hurricane of incomprehensible loveliness, he begins with the ground, with his own feet on that ground. He begins with a count. And standing at the window, I remember how he first loved me, physically. What those earliest sexual moments were like when he counted the freckles on my belly, when he stretched his hand across my breasts, nipple to nipple, measuring my body with his own, so earnest, so strangely in his own head yet defined by the act of knowing me, all at once. It felt like a form of devotion I had never imagined, as he committed my body to his memory and so committed himself to me.

  I could never match it, I was sure.

  When he reaches the barn, his form relaxes. He turns and walks briskly, loosely, back to the house. He is still boyish at forty-eight. He is that boy with the just-too-long hair that falls into his face, wearing the sweater he must have borrowed from his dad. His limbs still seem as though he’ll grow into them, with time. As he nears, I see the earnestness on his face. He has solved a problem. He’ll move on now to the next one. Testing the depth of the pond. Or counting the steps to the basement. This, for him, is moving in, as for me painting walls and hanging pictures is. He is all about acquiring knowledge. I am all about recasting a place into what I want it to be.

  These are the sorts of things you see when you step away. It doesn’t mean you’re right. It just means it’s what you see.

  2

  The basil I picked that day ended up on our kitchen table in a mason jar where it looked more than a little sad, and I went back into my studio, back to work.

  It is typical of productive artistic periods for me that they have their origins in something beyond my control. (That’s true of the bad times too, of course, which is the hell of it—as Owen was daily experiencing.) My work that summer had started with a bathroom renovation we had finally gotten around to a few weeks before Alison’s arrival. The second-floor hall bathroom was a wreck. It had never been used much, so we’d always ignored it, but that winter the tiles had started popping off the walls and somehow that made the sagging ceiling intolerable. In May, we took a few bids, all of which were low. Nobody had enough work, everyone was cutting their profits. We went with the man who seemed most amiable, and before a week passed he had a crew there doing demolition.

  I spent an irritated morning listening to the bangs and shattering, to the too-loud, blaring radio, and then around noon went up to ask if they needed anything for their lunch. Something caught my eye. A pile of old newspapers, twisted and crumpled, in my hall.

  “What are those?”

  “From when the house was built,” the contractor—Thad—told me. “People used those to insulate. Back in the day.”

  The first thing I did was iron them. (Owen laughed because in all the years we’ve been together neither of us had ever ironed anything. The iron had come with the house, as had any number of such odds and ends.) It took me a long time. It took me far longer than it had to because I got caught in watching the way the faces, the images, and the words came clear. The crumples themselves were like a blurred focus that I could manipulate. And there was also, inevitably, a sensation of moving backward in time. Not only because the papers were old, but because the act of crumpling a newspaper is a strictly forward-moving act. It isn’t something one normally does, then undoes. The ironing process became all about restoration for me. Restoration, clarity. And then, also, loss. War. 1918. World War I. Crumpled newspapers with body counts. With surges of hope, documented. Defeats. Deaths and more deaths. Homecomings and more deaths.

  I recrumpled some, to get the feel of doing that. Just the act of bringing the names of the slaughtered into focus and then obscuring them again; then back into focus. I began to jot notes about permanence and impermanence. I began to imagine the newspapers themselves in other forms. Things that could not be crumpled. Chiseled in stone. Etched into metal. I took one and burned it in a small copper bowl I had and saved the ashes. Why? I didn’t know why. I’d stopped thinking sensibly—which is not how projects usually begin for me. But from the beginning, this was different. This was about ideas, about intuitions, something intriguing me that I didn’t understand. And in the beginning, that felt right.

  I took pictures of the bathroom still under construction, of the space between the walls where the papers had been entombed. I thought about the papers having been used for warmth and of the heat of the iron bringing them back. I tried to make something of that. I thought of the tiles popping off, of the pressures exerted not by the fluctuations of temperatures over years but by the words and images themselves.

  There are moments in a creative life when you understand why you do it. Those moments might last a few seconds or maybe, for some people, years. But whatever the actual time that passes, they still feel like a single moment. Fragile in the way a moment is, liable to be shattered by a breath, set apart from all the other passing time, distinct.

  But then it changes. And what seemed unimaginably exhilarating gets bogged down, even when a project is going well. It is a gradual, inevitable sobering during which your right to be passive diminishes. What the ether has given you, now in fact belongs to you. And then it is work. Then it is hard.

  By the time Alison arrived, I had moved into that second stage. The one that requires not only that boundless sense of possibility, but practical decisions. What form was this project to take? All my life, even in childhood, I had drawn and painted views of one kind or another. Landscapes. Streetscapes. Buildings. Interiors. Whatever happened to be outside a window. Since we’d moved to the country, it had been mostly rural views, the occasional village street. To the modest circle of people who knew my work, my canvases were distinctive for their minute detai
l and precision. And I had always had a way with light, an essence that seemed to speak a language in which I was fluent, a vocabulary of projection and shadow. But I had never been much for portraiture. I could manage simple likenesses, as any decent art student might, but human forms, human faces, were not for me.

  Yet it was these boys, caught in these obituary photographs, and the fact of their cannon-fodder deaths that drew me in. Not a vista, as usually inspired me; but something more like a story. Their deaths and then their utilitarian haunting of my home.

  I didn’t understand the project yet, nor what it would grow to mean to me over time, but I was already somewhat wary of my attraction to these stories of death, aware of my capacity to define myself by what I had lost when my young mother lost her life; aware that my sister Charlotte’s death had echoed my mother’s, compounding that capacity in me. Painting had always been a shelter from those wounds, my canvases both unpopulated and unapologetically beautiful, a salve for the uglier realities of human life. That those realities seemed now to be finding their way into my work unsettled me; but I could not ignore the pull.

  These were the problems I was worrying about in the morning, just before I met Alison, problems on which it wasn’t easy to concentrate after our encounter in the garden. Halloooo … The intrusion, as I thought of it, as if it were clearly a negative event, though underlying that peevish stance toward any interruption of our solitude lay a curiosity about her presence that bordered on excitement.

  Unable to focus, I gave up and checked my email. And there, among the political petitions I might sign and the notices of gallery shows back in Philly I wouldn’t attend, I found a note from Bill’s daughter, Laine. Laine, who was the reason Bill and I had met. She’d been one of my private students, back when she was in high school. By the time of Alison’s arrival, she’d just graduated NYU a few weeks before, staying on in New York, working at temp office jobs and taking a studio class. We exchanged emails regularly, every couple of months, a fact I kept hidden from Owen, though I didn’t like to think of it that way. I had just never mentioned it, I preferred to tell myself. I was always happy to see her name there in my inbox, though always too, inevitably, her emails carried a wave of sadness back to me.

  So, it’s time for me to give you the summer report. Aren’t you just dying to hear how my adventures in The Big City progress?

  Our work together had started in the spring of 2005, soon after Charlotte’s death. Just seventeen years old, Laine had been a handful then. It was her mother (Georgia, about whom I would later have emotions like battling weather systems) who’d made the first call, describing Laine as very sweet underneath it all. And artistic—they thought. They were looking for something for her to get into, something to keep her from becoming a completely disaffected, messed-up kid. She was about halfway there, halfway to fully checked out, her mother said; and I’d felt a lot of respect for Georgia’s straightforward approach. Most of the kids I taught who were heading for trouble had parents with their hands over their ears, saying la-la-la-la-la dawn to dusk. I looked forward to meeting a mother who seemed ready to see her child for who she actually was.

  But then it wasn’t the mother who brought Laine that first Friday afternoon. It was the father. It was Bill.

  It was always Bill.

  Laine and I worked together for eighteen months, a time during which she grew from being a surly, hostile kid hell-bent on pissing off all adults, to being a hardworking young woman anxious to please; and a damn good painter too. And all that time, all those months, all those Friday afternoons and then later Fridays and Tuesdays both, Bill brought her and Bill picked her up—because Laine hadn’t yet learned to drive and because this was their special time together; and because now and then the universe just insists on changing your life in ways you didn’t ask it to.

  This studio class I’m taking is totally worth it, even though approximately half the people in it are complete freaks—and not in a good way. But the teacher is really excellent though not as excellent as you, of course.…

  Sometimes a teacher and student click, even though their work is very different, and that was our story. While I had never been drawn to figures, Laine saw herself, even then, as a portraitist of a kind. While I could find it oddly unsettling to stare at faces, Laine became increasingly aware that doing so both soothed and inspired her. And since the models most readily available were me, Bill, and also Laine herself, reflected in a mirror I had supplied, many of her paintings were of one or two or sometimes all three of us. She would also turn up occasionally with sketches of her mother, meaning Georgia watched over us all during some weeks. Once in a while, I would shift Laine’s gaze out the window toward the skyline of Philadelphia, or take her into Fairmount Park and ask that she broaden her view, think more about the big picture, the interaction of light and something other than a face; but soon she would turn back to what she loved.

  “It’s the only thing that interests me,” she would say. “People.”

  “Well, me too, I suppose. But there’s more to people than the people themselves.”

  I just broke things off with Dean—whose real name wasn’t even Dean, it turns out. Do you believe that? He had this James Dean fixation, so the name was some kind of homage and honestly if I had known that from the start I definitely would have spared myself three months of discovering what a pretentious wannabe hipster fool he is. But at least it was only three months.…

  Over the time that she and I worked together and argued and grew—both of us—something developed between me and Bill though we never crossed any lines, never did any more than talk. And we never talked about anything even remotely inappropriate. I had blurted word of Charlotte’s death early on, maybe using the fact to excuse some mistake in scheduling I’d made, my thoughts still scattered, my brain not quite functioning; and it turned out he too had lost a sibling—a brother, when they were small. A house fire, Bill in the home as well, but rescued in time. I remember how his telling me seemed to freeze the scene we were in, just for a moment, as if I needed a pause in reality to recast him, to reconfigure us all. I had been so quick to dismiss his suit, his briefcase, his clean-cut, lawyerly presence, and to mistake it for his real self. I had been so wrong. We didn’t speak exclusively or even often about grief for all those months, not by any means, but we shared an intimacy with it that I did not with Owen. And we shared Laine increasingly too. His daughter, whom I was also raising—in a way. Who needed me. Who had taken on some of my outlook, some of my being. I would never have said she belonged to us, together, but I felt it in my body, in my blood.

  “Neither Georgia nor I has the least creative talent,” he would say. And he would marvel at my work in a way I was unused to, traveling as I did in artistic circles where it was just assumed that everyone had talent of some kind. To Bill, the fact that I could fill a canvas with oily goo from tubes and have the result be both beautiful and—as he would say and say—emotionally compelling, was nothing short of a superpower. That I could help his daughter do the same he looked on as a miracle. There was an innocence to him, an innocence of my world, that ultimately attracted me enough to rob us both of any claim to innocence we might make.

  Sometimes, when Laine used us for subjects, she would ask that we sit motionless while we spoke, and occasionally would insist that we stop moving even our lips—almost as though she sensed something might be happening that she should try to avert.

  But nothing could avert what was to come.

  Watching Laine over those months was like watching a slow-motion film of a driver who damn near swerves off the road, but then corrects course just in time. Watching me, I suppose, was like some kind of reversed reel. At the time, it felt like the relationship that Bill and I developed was helping me heal—from Charlotte’s death; from learning that with Owen I would never have the children I had decided I wanted after all. I felt not only grief-stricken then; I felt incapable. I had been unable to save a sister. Unable to become a mother.
What was I able to do? What powers did I actually have? I was right up close in a staring contest with the undeniable fact that for all the little things over which we have some control, for the most part we have none; and I was at a loss to know how to respond.

  It’s a lesson I might have learned when I was two and my mother died. It’s a lesson that should perhaps have been etched into me then, whatever my conscious memory of events, but it felt newly true after Charlotte’s death, after my own empty body remained unfilled.

  And to be honest, after faux Dean, I think I may be done with relationships for a while. I mean, the whole “we’re going out together” thing is kind of a joke. I know you’ve been with Owen your entire adult life, but the truth is that basically no couples my age make it past a year. So why even pretend it’s some kind of lifelong thing? I would much rather put that kind of commitment into my work.…

  This is us on the afternoon of Laine’s last lesson:

  Bill and I are seated on wobbly old stools at the end of my studio, all rough-hewn factory space. And we are suddenly awkward with one another. Because it has happened in a flash. A look has passed between us, a sudden, irreparable change. And it has stifled the flow of our speech. For weeks now, for months, we have been engaged in excitement over Laine’s next step. She got into the school she wanted to attend. She put together a senior project of paintings so eloquent they seemed eternal; they seemed like real art. It is all so exciting. I am filled with pride, as though she were my child. Maybe I exaggerate my own role—my push back to the universe. Look! Look, it does matter what we do. It does.

  But in all the excitement, in all of the pride, one fact has gone unrecognized.

  It shouldn’t be hard to manage—not if we really are, as they say, just friends. It should be easy. Well, we’ll just have to meet for coffee from time to time.