The Wanting Life

by Mark Rader

  For thirty years, first as lovers, then as a married couple, Georgia and Albert had written constantly to each other, sometimes twice a day. Early on, they made love in Albert’s studio. Then, after sex, while she was still naked, he’d taken photos of her, but not pervy ones—artful, honoring ones. There had been something about young Georgia that young Maura found thrilling: her flinty confidence in her muscled yet feminine body; the breasts she often held in her strong, veined hands in the portraits, as if to say, Yeah, I like ’em too; her unplucked, mannish eyebrows. Albert, with his brushy white train conductor’s mustache and rimless glasses, didn’t do anything for her (back then it was Rob Lowe in St. Elmo’s Fire), but the heady brew of serious, disciplined, ruthlessly critical artist plus big-hearted lover plus wry, playful, funny man of the world evidenced in his letters was something she’d decided she would be requiring in a man. In the four, five years after finding this example—from her junior year of high school to the spring of her junior year of college—she’d been on fire with the goal of finding her own Albert, her equal in making art, the one whom she’d never want to stop hanging out with, talking with, figuring out life with, passionately fucking and going to art shows with. And if Maura had patience and a steelier heart, she might have kept searching, as some did, as Alison seemed to have done, into their thirties. But she’d not been patient. She’d given up. Too soon, too soon.

  At their table at the restaurant, Maura suddenly felt her heart beating so quickly she excused herself to the bathroom. For a few minutes she sat on a closed toilet taking deep breaths, trying not to hyperventilate. Everything okay? Kris asked, after she returned. Oh, I’m fine, she said. The veggie lasagna did a number on my stomach, that’s all. But she wasn’t fine: she wanted to leave, immediately, before she started to cry, here in full view of the Class of 1988. So she’d taken a fake call from Harden, pretended Ella was sick and needed her mom, and called a cab to take her home.

  A month after the reunion, she applied to the Blue Woods Center, an arts retreat in Connecticut. Since having the kids, she’d not done much painting, though who was she kidding? She hadn’t done much in the eight, nine years after college and before the kids either. Even so, ideas for paintings flew into her head sometimes, including—most promisingly and recently—a series of Edward Hopper–esque domestic scenes in which the mother was a mythological creature. A Minotaur-woman, say, sitting on a bus glancing at her iPhone. A gryphon-woman waiting in line at a Walgreens. Medusa in a dirty bathrobe watching David Letterman with a glass of Pinot Grigio. The key to making these scenes work would be to make them poignantly, authentically sad, otherwise the painting would be nothing but an arty Far Side cartoon. It had seemed gravely important that she do this—that she do something to put her back in touch with her hopeful, less jaded self. So she had.

  For three weeks, late at night in the basement, she worked on a painting of the Minotaur-woman on the bus, and it turned out better than she’d hoped. For the application, she wrote a statement of purpose that used the phrase “the tragicomedy of domestic life”; she sent photos of the new painting as well as her favorite four from college, which she still had as slides. And unbelievably, they’d accepted her—she who’d barely touched brush to canvas in fifteen years. There was a fee of $200, but beyond that, all she had to do was show up and work in the little Danish modern studio that was all hers, with a loft up top to sleep in. Every day a big, communal dinner was cooked up by the resident chef and served at the main house, at which point she could get out of her head and meet some fellow artists, if she so chose. At first, Harden had groused at the prospect of rolling solo with the kids for two weeks. But when she reminded him that he’d gone on a fishing trip with his dad for ten days a few years back, he backed down and agreed.

  The first night at what the staff called the “big table” everyone introduced themselves, and as it turned out, most of the people there were as she’d imagined they’d be—full-time artists or artistteachers. When it was her turn, she said she was a graphic designer who worked in advertising, but she was trying to get back to doing her own art. Elena, a white-haired poet wearing bright pink overalls, jumped in quickly to announce she’d brought a case of great Shiraz along, and they’d started to eat, thankfully.

  Across the table was David, smiling. He wasn’t as traditionally good-looking as Harden—his spiky hair was thinning on top, his chin was weaker, and faint acne scars ran along his cheeks—but she was immediately attracted to him: something about his kind, dark eyes and his small compact body and the way he leaned forward to listen to her when she talked. He was on the fine arts faculty at the University of Southern Maine–Portland, a sculptor, separated from his female partner of fifteen years for a year now but apparently, finally, okay with this. Though he had to be in his late forties, he seemed young in a way that reminded her of the supposedly senior citizens you saw throwing footballs in Viagra ads, the only geriatric thing about them being their suspiciously white hair.

  The second night after dinner Ryan, the cabin manager, started a fire for them in the common room. Big stone hearth, comfy couches and chairs, arty ski lodge vibe, glasses of Scotch. For maybe an hour the storytelling and laughter ebbed and waned until, one by one, people excused themselves to go back to work, or sleep, or watch porn and jerk off (or so Josh, an irreverent young composer, had informed everyone he was about to do). She and David, on the other hand, who had begun talking halfway through dinner, had stayed.

  What it felt like was college, first few weeks of freshman year, opening up to her lovely roommate, Wendy—if she’d also wanted to sleep with Wendy. For three hours, their conversation meandered in the best way: whatever one brought up to talk about, the other was happy to run with. David had grown up dirt poor outside of Cleveland, the youngest of six, and he’d briefly studied art at Cleveland State on scholarship, but dropped out and gotten his M.F.A. and a teaching job only a decade ago, in his late thirties, after years of eclectic jobs. He’d lived on a houseboat in Amsterdam for three years where he paid his rent by playing Hank Williams songs at a cowboy-themed bar; served as an apprentice at a glass-blowing studio in Tucson for a year after that; spent a summer as a nurse’s aide at an old folks’ home—and every odd experience had left a few wry, funny stories in its wake. Unlike Harden, who’d stopped being curious about the world sometime around 1995 and so rarely tried to make her laugh, David seemed hungry to entertain her. And so eager to listen.

  She asked to see his sculptures and he showed her pictures of them on his phone. The latest were a series of surrealist beds and stairs. One had a whirlpool spiral carved in the middle. Another was made of plastic and half submerged in a polyurethane block, like ocean trash. Another was a real, antique four-poster bed but with legs he’d added that were twenty feet tall, and beside it he’d placed a small child’s trampoline, spray-painted a bright red. The Impossible Sleep, it was called, and though he said it was about insomnia, she read into it something about the elusiveness of peace in life, period, that struck a chord. Is he pretentious? she asked herself. Because I can’t do pretentious. But he wasn’t, she decided. Just deep.

  Like her, David was drawn to nakedly symbolic things and not embarrassed by that (Harden would find such a preoccupation weird and unmanly). As for her, he kept cutting off his own stories to ask her more: about life as a graphic designer, her childhood, her kids, her favorite artists. Their talk had wrapped up around two fifteen, and by the end of it, she’d already fallen in love with his wonderful sideways grin, the deep dimple faintly visible in his scruff.

  See you tomorrow then, he’d said.

  Yes, she said, beaming. See you then.

  That night, lying in bed, her heart thumped in her neck with adolescent joy. If he was to come to her studio, say, because he’d gotten caught in the rain and slipped and fallen into the mud, and the drain in his shower was clogged, which would require he use hers, and if after this shower, he walked to her from the bathroom wearing only the white towe
l that hung in there, his chest hair (which was thick, she guessed, white with a smattering of black, a bit younger than his head hair) exposed, his stomach yoga-flat, well—would she do anything if that towel somehow came undone and fell to the floor? She didn’t know. But not knowing was infinitely more interesting than no.

  In the days that followed, she threw herself into her work. She got up at quarter to six, drank a huge mug of coffee on the couch while listening to Erik Satie for maximum poignant feelings, then set to it. She was painting, she knew, as well as she could, and for him as much as for herself. She wanted him to see that she wasn’t some fluky suburban dilettante but deeper than even she knew, deserving of his affection and respect, this David of the interesting lonely life and the warm, clicking mind.

  They respected the other’s space, and neither visited the other’s studio during the day. But after dinner, they made up for it by walking along the path cut through the forest beside the center with flashlights to guide the way: two friends, yes. Just two new platonic friends. Not even in college had she ever felt both so new and so comfortable, so impatient with her usual doubts and hesitations. Swiftly, she followed her instincts at the easel in laying down a base, then, for hours at a time, homed in like a surgeon, often unconsciously holding her breath, moving faster than usual, as though the Blue Woods review committee might appear at any minute and tell her it was all over. Sorry! Time’s up! The sense of urgency was giving her paintings a vitality that felt unfamiliar but that she liked very much.

  On their walks they were extremely chaste; they walked not touching, with arms crossed or hands in their pockets. They were, she thought, like characters in an Austen novel—the space between their faces (exactly the distance they’d need to bridge if they kissed) alive with the light of their eyes or the expectation of the next look. Until high school, she’d gone to Catholic school—at Don’s insistence—and considered herself Catholic. But freshman year of high school she’d arrived at her mother’s position—that the Church was a sexist crock, unnecessary to her development as a female human. She started telling people she was agnostic, though secretly she was an atheist. Except that sometimes she thought, Maybe I’m not. God the judge up in heaven didn’t do it for her, but there was one conception of God she’d always liked, something her uncle Paul had shared during an Easter vigil service they’d been in Northfield for, the one at which candles had been passed out to everyone in the pews, the wicks of which you lit with the candle flame of the person beside you, before passing on your flame to the person on the other side of you—the operation like a reverent assembly line. Do you notice how the flame flares for a moment, when you touch it to the wick of another candle? he’d asked the congregation. I like to imagine God like this, flaring higher for a moment whenever we deeply connect with another person or God’s creation. Yes, she’d often thought, that was a God she might believe in.

  In college, she’d taken an elective in which she read poets who searched for and documented what her professor called the “secular divine”: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wordsworth, Rumi, W. S. Merwin, Sharon Olds, Mary Oliver. In the little wooded groves of language they made on the page, what was worshipped were the delicate things of the world and love in all its forms. What endeared her to these poets was that they didn’t find the emotional life to be secondary to the practical world: to them, it was something worth devoting their whole lives to…and in her walks with David, she knew she was in the presence of a person who felt this way too, a man who maybe didn’t write about the bittersweet sadness of life, but who thought about it and enjoyed talking about it. He was someone who liked discovering new things as much as he felt it necessary to eulogize lost things. Within a week, Maura saw she had fallen in love.

  With four days to go, she started to dread leaving the retreat so much that her stomach hurt; her sessions at the easel were interrupted by bouts of loud, stuttering, acidic shits. Every other night, she’d called and talked to the kids—and especially around their bedtime, she missed them: their lean-strong limbs and soft cheeks, the chicken bouillon smell of the tops of their heads when she kissed them there. But more than that she missed David, already. On the last night, after a feast of paella and chocolate baklava that Debbie, the center’s cook, whipped up for them, there was a small reading, and then the poets and essayists and the lone fiction writer wandered over to the artists’ studios for an open house. The smiles that instantly crept onto people’s faces on grasping the theme of her project receded into something more pensive upon further looking. This made her happy. If it had been only grins she’d have been hurt. That night, she and David felt the need to talk to other people more than they had been, and after it was all over, she went to her room, and he went to his, with a little wave. But an hour later he sent her a text, his first to her—which meant he’d put her number, from the roster they’d all been given on their first day there, into his phone.

  Okay if I drop by?

  Hollow with fear, she texted back: Yes.

  Sex, if she wanted it, was imminent, and she let slip the thought: Just this once. Upon closing the door behind him, he walked to her, put his hands on both sides of her face, and finally kissed her, his breath smelling of the pot he must have smoked for courage. At the point when they were on her bed, and her bra was off, Maura’s phone buzzed from the floor where it had fallen from the pocket of her puddled jeans—and Harden, the kids, her other life, came roaring back. David, I’m sorry, she said. I have to stop. Don’t say that, he said, but she’d crossed a line she couldn’t uncross. He sighed and said he understood, kissed her on the forehead and left, and she kicked the side of the sofa three times, hating herself for her stupid morals. As compensation the morning after, in bed, she completed the fantasy, and naked, spectral David made her come twice.

  After breakfast that last morning, standing beside his old Dodge pickup, which he used to ferry materials to and from his studio at home, and was now going to drive back to Portland, he held her in a firm embrace.

  I feel like I want to stay another month here, just with you, he said.

  She nodded, unable to speak.

  Can I call you—or write you after this?

  Yes, she said.

  I actually feel like asking if I could come see you, he said, but that’s probably asking too much.

  It might be, she said. But we’ll see.

  Two days passed before he emailed her—and they picked up right where they left off. For two years before all this, a few times a week, she’d been in the habit of going on a nighttime run, two or three miles, to clear her head and—to be honest—to avoid Harden, who preferred to spend his evenings in front of the TV in the living room scanning channels, drinking his Newcastles (always Newcastle), decompressing from his day. So it was during these runs that turned into walks that she would talk to David. They had unlimited calling on their cell phone plan, same bill every month; there would be no reason for Harden to ever check or suspect. The route she took around the neighborhood, always the same, became a ritual, the scenery that slid past as familiar and welcome as the sound of his voice.

  She talked about Harden: how he didn’t seem to think about her when she wasn’t right in front of him, how he was a good dad but how he bored her to tears, how she just wasn’t interested in talking to him anymore, and how it seemed the feeling was mutual. David talked about his ex, Sarah: how narcissistic she was, this part-time actress/grant writer/only daughter of two shrinks; how she’d cheated on him with an old college friend; how she’d emotionally checked out on him when his dad was dying a year ago and he’d had to go to Cleveland to care for him. You, though, he said, one October night after a rain, pale orange leaves plastered to the black shiny sidewalks, I knew before I even talked to you that you were a good person.

  I don’t think I’m that good, she replied. I’m probably not even in the top fiftieth percentile.

  David chuckled. Spoken like a former grade grubber.

  I’m serious though, she said
. I mean, just think about what we’re doing right now.

  Maura, he said solemnly, I think you’re definitely in the top twenty-five.

  She laughed. So I’m basically a C-minus human being.

  I can’t even make a joke about that, he said. To me, you’re off the charts.

  A month of this turned to two, early fall turned to winter—and in between their Tuesday and Thursday night talks, David began sending her things. Jack Gilbert was one of his favorite poets, so he texted her his poems, in real time, without prelude, as if he were writing them just for her (she loved the suspense of waiting for the next line—and the autocorrect mistakes that popped up now and then). He sent her iPhone videos of himself in his studio or out on his boat, narrating what was on his mind, showing her his dog, Ralphie. The blood trapped under a thumbnail after he’d dropped a pipe on it. A giant moth wrapped in a spiderweb like a mummy. She didn’t send videos back; she was worried she’d not be able to bring herself to delete them and would be found out, so she’d simply made do by mining her days for pictures or articles that would make him laugh his David laugh—or make him say, in all earnestness, Isn’t that something. The two distinct selves she’d been before—Work Maura and Home Maura—had sprouted a sister: Maura in Love. The belief that life was obligation, that only the lucky few experienced true love in their life, that there was a ceiling on how fulfilled she would ever feel—all that was burning away like fog to reveal an almost sacred truth: Connection is everything. Stagnancy, death.

  She did what was needed of her at work, no more, no less. With the kids she felt more full of love to give, but she also felt guilty over what she was doing to their dad and (who was she kidding) greedy to do things that would demonstrate to David what a loving, tough, wonderful mother she was. The only person who suffered from her new brightness was Harden. Because it was impossible to not punish him with even more than the usual distance. He who was committing the unforgivable sin of not being him.