Life Drawing: A Novel Read online

  He looked at me, a smile hovering there. “Tell her I said to get you good and drunk. I wouldn’t mind an afternoon like last night.”

  “You and me both,” I said. “Feel free to join us. For drinks that is.”

  “Very funny. But I think I’ll keep at this a while more.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” I said, never quite sure how to respond when I sensed Owen digging himself deeper into his seemingly endless futile pursuit. And then, “See you in a bit.”

  We sat in the living room, Alison on the pale, slipcovered love-seat that had come with the house and I on the pumpkin-colored wingback chair we’d chosen from the relics in Owen’s aunt’s home. I poured us each a large glass of wine. Very large.

  Alison commented on the beauty of the house, the old random-width floors, the stone hearth, and I thanked her. She asked if the room beyond the French doors flanking the fireplace was my studio, and I said it was.

  “I’m sorry if I seem a bit out of it,” I said. “The visits to my father … they never fail to upset me.”

  “No, I’m so sorry,” Alison said. “It does seem like a terrible … passage. A terrible way to travel through the final years.”

  “Yes. Yes, it is.”

  I asked her how her morning had been; but then, as she answered, I felt her words floating all around, not quite finding their way into my consciousness, my attention riveted elsewhere, a million miles away, back to my father, back to my childhood—and then finally fixed on a painting of mine above our mantelpiece, an oil of an old milliner shop in South Philly, facing out from inside, looking through the window filled with finished hats on mannequin heads. The first painting I did after Bill. The painting that marked the true start of my recovery from all that heartache. I stared at it as if it might steady me, like a spinning dancer finding a single focal point.

  “Is that one of yours?” Alison had followed my gaze.

  “Yes. I’m sorry. Yes. From a few years ago. But I don’t mean to zone out … I’m afraid I really am tired.”

  “I like it very much. And you should just relax. Don’t mind me. Unless you’d like me to go …”

  “No, no, not at all. I’m just sorry to be a bit out of it. But very glad for the company.”

  “I love the hats,” she said. “Every detail is so … so vivid. Even the netting. You must use a single-haired brush.”

  I laughed. “Not quite, but close. I thought I might paint just the window, from the outside, I mean. It was so … so beautiful and I’ve always been drawn to exteriors. But then … then I ended up not finding the hats as interesting as the scene behind them. Also, it was very cold outside.”

  Cold outside. And cold inside of me. A full year after Bill. Eleven months after my confession to Owen. My heart like a single tooth, sharp and useless; my ability to paint, frozen, perhaps forever stilled. I’d found Steinman’s one afternoon on a directionless, miserable walk that had promised nothing beyond freedom from the frustrations of my studio. I had stumbled across this tiny store, a bright red door, gold lettering, the elaborate hats, beautiful, fantastical against the dingy gray of Fourth Street.

  “It seems like a long time ago.” That wasn’t entirely true. At moments, it seemed like I could stand up, turn around, and walk right back into that time. “I loved it there,” I said.

  That part was true. The place had been run by an older pair, a brother and sister, Len and Ida Steinman, both in their early seventies. Neither had ever wed and they had an intimacy like that of a couple, so at first I had thought them married. He was tall, taller than Owen—which, coming from my family of short Jewish men, surprised me. She was tiny though. Birdlike. And beautiful. She had such an elegance to her. The shop itself was a mess, the sort of chaos only the owners of such a workshop could navigate; but she was anything but. A polished gem among the filmy fabrics and odd forms on which the hats were built, she was breathtakingly complete in a sea of aspiration.

  “The light is incredible,” Alison said. “Why am I sure it was winter?”

  “It was. Winter light. It’s got a certain clarity. Also, through the window, see? That tiny tree way down the street is bare. It doesn’t jump out, but it registers, I think.”

  I’d sat in that store for weeks, doing sketches, then setting up an easel, bringing in paints, hoping no one would complain as the air took on the new smells. Neither Len nor Ida appeared in the painting—except for one of Ida’s arms. I’d wanted to paint all of her, a rare impulse for me. But I had felt too daunted to try. Even apart from my poor portrait skills, I was sure that her essence contained an element of perfection I had no right to try and channel. Me, in my fallen, repentant state. So I spent all those weeks with my eyes on the rolls of tulle and the fabric flowers, the light slipping around the gold lettering in the window; and I stole long, inexplicably hungry looks at Ida Steinman. I could detect it in the painting still, the way that she was neither in nor out, that navy serge jacket sleeve, child-sized, hovering at the edge of the canvas, at the edge of my consciousness.

  “It isn’t one of my favorites,” I said. “Owen loves it though. He more or less insisted we hang it there.”

  But I didn’t want to discuss the painting anymore. It was like hearing the ocean, waves crashing, the memories beginning to pound against my thoughts as we spoke. How often had I sat with Owen just like this, in the aftermath of my time with Bill, my heart breaking, my energy all directed toward hiding that fact? I had been well practiced then at secret oceans, secret waves, adept at splitting myself in two. Now I just wanted to move off that subject, that time.

  “Are you painting yet?” I asked. “Are things set up?”

  She told me she’d been shifting things around, still trying to work out which spaces were for what. “But I think I know which room will be the studio. And I heard from Nora today,” she said, her voice brightening. “Just a note, but that was nice. She’s zeroing in on when she’ll be here. Probably early September. She’s in Florence now, and I have a hunch that there may be a boy, though she didn’t say so outright. I am reading between the pixels—or whatever they are.”

  “You must be very close. If you can read what she isn’t saying.” I wondered if I could do that with Laine, though it was hard to imagine Laine leaving much unsaid—a thought that made me smile.

  “Oh, we are close. We truly are, which is such a gift, I know. Not to say we don’t have our moments, but isn’t that the case with all mothers and daughters?”

  “I suppose.”

  “It’s hard for me to believe she’s so grown now. Gallivanting over Europe. It’s a cliché but I think she’ll always be a child to me. In my mind, she froze somewhere around five.”

  “I imagine it’s hard to keep up.”

  “It is. You just blink and they’re adults.” She took a long sip of wine.

  “We wanted to have children,” I said—something I hadn’t said out loud in years, a sentence gathering dust among all the other unspeakable ones. I could barely believe the words had slipped out, escaped while I had been busily pushing other subjects out of mind. “But it would have meant all kinds of interventions. And complicated decisions and then there was the thought of adopting, but …”

  But Charlotte had been so ill then. Charlotte, who had never married and had only her sisters to see her through. The two crises had somehow collided, competed for space. Dying had won. “We didn’t do it. Obviously.”

  “I’m so sorry.” Alison kicked her sandals off, tucked her feet up under herself. “Do you still talk about it?” she asked.

  “Not really.” I hoped she wouldn’t ask for more details. Owen would have been horrified at my chatting to the new neighbor about his negligible sperm count, and I didn’t have the imaginative energy just then to make something up. “Owen … well, Owen is very much one for just moving forward. He doesn’t really do regret.”

  “Perhaps I’m a bit that way too,” Alison said. “Not doing regret—which is good. Because I could easily waste deca
des if I did.”

  It had been so long since I’d had this sort of talk with another woman. I had forgotten how smooth the glide into intimate subjects could be. “Do you mean your marriage?” I asked. “You said that was difficult.”

  “That. Yes. My husband, Paul, well, it was all very turbulent. Awful, actually. I suppose the phrase is ‘anger management issues.’ He has anger management issues. So it was very hard at times. To put it mildly. Though without the marriage there’s no Nora. So nothing’s simple, is it? Least of all regret.”

  “I’m so sorry. That sounds terrible. You stuck it out a long time.”

  “Just about twenty years.” She took a sip of wine, the last in her glass. I pointed to the bottle, and she nodded. “Yes, thanks. Some of it was just Nora, I suppose. Not wanting to put her through the whole broken-home thing. And also …” She hesitated. “Also, I didn’t want Nora alone with him when she was young.” She shook her head. “That came out wrong. I don’t mean anything lurid. Paul’s not that sort at all. I just knew from years of experience that if I was there, his anger got directed to me. And if she started spending lots of time with him, alone … I worried. Maybe without reason, but I felt better having her under my roof. Even if it meant having him there too. But then once she went off to school, it was just … just untenable.” She closed her eyes briefly, shook her head. “Awful,” she said. “I’d thought I was the witness holding the worst of him back, but then it turned out that Nora had been.”

  “How horrible,” I said. “I can barely imagine.”

  “Yes, it is. It was,” she said. “Which is why I don’t look back too much.”

  “Owen and I don’t really dwell on the past, either. Maybe because we’re so alone here. There’s no one to talk to who didn’t live through all the events.” But I knew it wasn’t our solitude that had shut down so much of our history. It was our history that had produced our solitude. “We … we talk our way through the facts of each day. It’s raining. The garden needs weeding. Look what’s in the paper. We rarely get into the past. Though I think that’s more Owen than me.”

  I was making a choice. I could feel it. Maybe the wine was fueling that choice, but I would confide in Alison about Owen. I wouldn’t divulge our real secrets, but I would say things to her that I wouldn’t say in front of him. About him. About us.

  “No marriage is entirely easy,” I said. “Even the ones that last.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t know about the ones that last.” Alison laughed a little. “I might have settled for one that was only difficult.”

  I asked her if she was still in touch with the ex.

  “Not at all,” she said. “Nora sees him. I do not. Emphatically. Do not.”

  “It must be strange,” I said. “Being that intimate with someone for so long and then … Nothing.” Bill entered my thoughts, again. We had been so intimate. And then nothing. I took another sip of wine.

  “Oh, I am big on fresh starts. Second chances. Third, if necessary.” Alison looked at her glass, empty again in her hand. She put it down and stood. “I’m now going to wobble my way home and probably pass out. And after that, I need to get back to setting things up.”

  At the kitchen door, I thanked her. “It was a tough day,” I said. “This made it a much better one.”

  She smiled. She said, “For me as well.”

  When she’d gone, I returned once again to the painting over the fireplace—as if it and I had unfinished business, as perhaps we did. I stared at Ida’s arm. Navy blue serge. Two brass buttons at the cuff. Her hand obscured by a cascade of lilac taffeta. Her elbow, just beyond the painting’s edge.

  How often had I wished I could pull on that sleeve? How many times had I ached to tug at the cloth, as if to get her attention; and guide the woman herself to the center of the scene.

  A painter looks. That’s what she does.

  But she doesn’t always look in the right direction.

  5

  Within a matter of days, having Alison next door felt close to normal—except to the extent that the novelty of her presence was itself a positive. Any early irritation at being intruded on had dissolved. And though she and I didn’t immediately form a habit of lengthy visits back and forth, or take the walks that would later become regular in our days, we chatted in the yard a bit now and then and waved from one porch to another. When she picked up her mail, she left ours on our step; and when I got there first, I did the same for her. And during that time, I felt the strangely unfamiliar pleasure of making a friend. How long had it been since I had last done that? It had been years. Maybe it had been my entire life—in a way. Charlotte had always been my closest friend, the girl and then the woman in whom I could confide anything. But there was a difference here, because in part that had been because Charlotte knew me so well. And with Alison, some aspect of the pleasure was that she didn’t know me at all. The air around us was clear, unfilled with history. I had a chance to recast myself afresh. Or anyway I believed that I did, and weary of my own prior mistakes and missteps, I reveled in that.

  Over those same days, I continued to push myself to understand what I wanted from the newspaper soldiers—or what I wanted to give to them. It didn’t matter how inherently interesting they were, or how their entombment in my walls resonated with my own obsessions; if I couldn’t find my way into the project, it was about nothing more than a curiosity found during a bathroom renovation.

  But then, one morning I woke up with an idea. Like spontaneous generation, this sudden certainty about what to do.

  The first canvas I envisioned was of two soldiers, WWI soldiers, in my living room, on my furniture, playing chess. The pale brocade couch, the old orange armchair, all of it ours. The trees through the window, our trees. Our house. And them. These too-long-dead boys released from my walls, set back into motion. I imagined one leaning forward, intent on his next move. Jackie Mayhew, learning how to play chess. The other boy grinning from ear to ear.

  I rose and went downstairs, leaving Owen still asleep. As the coffee brewed I grabbed a sketchbook, a few pieces of charcoal from my studio. By the time Owen shambled down, an hour or so later, I was lost, a half-empty, cold cup of coffee by my side. He didn’t say anything to me and I didn’t expect him to. I was working. Somewhere in my consciousness it registered that he went back upstairs; and then that he came back down. I may have smelled hints of his shower, soap, shampoo. I heard the kitchen screen door, the wooden clatter as it closed. I knew without knowing that he had gone to the barn.

  I wandered the house like a restless ghost myself that first day—a ghost with a sketchpad and charcoal. In each room I let myself imagine what these boys, these young men, might be doing. I didn’t have a particular idea in mind, not any one kind of activity. I didn’t think: It needs to be ordinary. Or: It needs to be childlike. In the guest bedroom, I sketched a boy opening the window. Just a very rough sketch. In the kitchen, I put one at the refrigerator, one at the stove, frying eggs. Another, sitting, his boot-heavy feet up on the table. I didn’t begin to think then about the level of logic involved in these works. Was I trying to depict an actual household? A strange barracks of a kind? Were these things all going on at once? At the same time of day? Would a single face appear in more than one room? Those were all questions I would ask in the weeks that followed, but then I just drifted from one space to the next.

  I pushed aside another question too: how I was going to do paintings in which human figures played so prominent a role? I never had. But I would manage somehow, I told myself. My instincts couldn’t be this strong and also be wrong, I told myself—as if I had never made a passionate mistake in my life.

  By dinner, I was bursting, but the sight of Owen’s somehow sunken face silenced the excitement I wanted to share. I have always been an artist who talks through her projects. I like having conversations with people about what I’m doing. It helps me think. But with Owen in the state he was in, I knew it was wrong to crow about my breakthrough and my sudden c
onviction—necessary at the start of every project—that I was about to do the best work of my life. When he finally got around to asking me how my day had gone, I just said, “I think it’s moving forward.” And when he let the subject go at that, I tried hard not to resent his failure to detect the insincerity underlying my casual tone. A rich man has no business expecting a starving man to ask him how his four-star dinner was that night.

  “I think I’ll do some shopping tomorrow,” he said, as we ate. “We’re out of stuff and I could use a change of scene.”

  I heard the invitation, but giving up the next day’s work was unthinkable. I said nothing and after a bit he said, “So make me a list if there’s anything you want.”

  “I will,” I said. “Thanks.” And then, “Shampoo, I think. And toilet paper too. Definitely toilet paper.”

  “Just make a list,” he said.

  I don’t know at what precise moment it occurred to me that maybe I could talk to Alison about work—mine and hers—but the next day, while Owen was on his shopping trip, I walked over the hill and knocked on her door with that in mind.

  “Hold on …,” I heard.

  “It’s Gus,” I called through the glass panes, watching her emerge from the kitchen, a dishtowel in her hand. She wore a dress, as she always seemed to do, this one pale blue, and glasses, great round ones with black rims. They were large enough that they might have looked ridiculous, but instead, by contrast they made the delicacy of her features even finer. She had lipstick on, a bright coral, something I found vaguely disconcerting since she had been alone.

  Once I knew she’d seen that it was me, I tried to open the door, but it was locked.

  “Hang on,” she said, turning one knob and then another. “How nice of you to come by.” To my surprise, she leaned to kiss my cheek. I wondered if any of the coral had stayed on me.

  “It’s been three days since I did any dishes.” She folded the towel. “It’s tricky living by oneself, isn’t it? You think there’s nothing to clean, no one to do it for, and the next thing you know, there are fruit flies everywhere.”