The Doctor's Wife

by Elizabeth Brundage

  “Looks just like her mama, only better. Cursed with it, is what I always said. I don’t let her out much, see? ’Cause I know what they’ll do to her. Give ’em a minute with her and that’ll be it, a slut and a whore, lickety- split. Just like her mama was.” The old man started to cough, a cascading hack that turned his face crimson. The girl got his water glass and helped him to a sip. When he had recovered, he leaned back against the pillows and lit another cigarette. “I’ll tell you what, son. I got a feeling about you, understand? You’ve got ambition and I admire that in a man.” He pulled a piece of tobacco off his tongue and nodded at his daughter. “I’m gonna let you paint the girl, but I ain’t payin’ for crap. It’s got to be good, real good, understand?”

  Simon went out to the car to get his paints and canvas and the wobbly easel he had stolen from the art school. The sun was low in the sky and the air smelled of wet earth and rain. When he went back inside he saw that the girl had put on lipstick and pinned her hair back in a barrette. He established himself in a corner of the living room, away from the scrutiny of the old man, who had turned the television back on, the volume up full blast. He sat the girl in a wooden chair and allowed his eyes to study her the way a scientist might observe a rare species of animal.

  “Lydia, is it?”

  She nodded shyly.

  “I’m Simon Haas.” He began to paint, then frowned, putting down his brush. He tilted his head this way and that. It was her hair, he realized. He went and took out the barrette and her long blond hair swung down over one eye. “There we go,” he said. “That’s much better.” Then he tossed her a cloth. “Get that stuff off your lips.”

  She blinked as if he’d insulted her. “You don’t need it,” he said. “You look better without it.” Her eyes returned to his and he smiled and he was relieved when she smiled back. He wet his brush. “How old are you?”

  “Fifteen,” she said, but he suspected she was lying.

  He told her she looked older, which seemed to flatter her enormously. Girls like her were easy, he realized. He knew he could probably get her to do almost anything.

  “Does your father know a lot about art?”

  “My father knows a lot about everything. He didn’t even graduate high school but he’s the smartest person I know.”

  “What’s the matter with him? Is he sick?”

  “Cancer. In his lungs.”

  “Where’s your mother?”

  “Dead.”

  He looked at her strangely. “I’m sorry.” He put down his brush and fiddled in his pocket for a cigarette. “Let’s go out on the porch for a minute.”

  “All right.”

  They sat on the porch and he smoked. He dragged on his cigarette, looking at her face. He’d never seen such a beautiful creature; it made him tremble. “Do you go to school?”

  “With the nuns,” she said.

  “I wanted to be a priest,” he told her, “before I started painting.”

  This made an impression on her. “You’d have to hear confessions. You’d have to absolve people of their sins.”

  “Yes,” he said quietly. “That’s what I do with paint. I absolve people.”

  She looked at him curiously. “Can you do that for me?”

  “You’re just a girl,” he told her. “You don’t have any sins.”

  Her eyes were huge and sad, reminding him of those pictures of starving children in magazines. “But I do,” she said.

  He painted her all afternoon. The girl sat patiently, like a cat, and didn’t complain once. She was like something under the earth, he thought. Would she bloom like a magnificent flower or be consumed like an ordinary turnip? He could feel a strange tension between them, as though the afternoon had been predestined, as though the turn he’d made down her father’s road hadn’t been arbitrary. Still, he didn’t want to be there. There was something wrong in that house, a bizarre tension that at once compelled and frightened him. He stopped painting suddenly and threw a sheet over the canvas. He told the girl he’d be back tomorrow, knowing in his heart that he had no such intention.

  He returned to the city with her face fixed in his memory. Her haunting eyes, expressing some inexhaustible sorrow. Her long, gangly frame, the pale skin mottled with cuts and bruises, mosquito bites, dirt and bicycle grease and tiny blades of grass. The little mounds of flesh that were her breasts. Her nipples, like sweet raisins waiting to be devoured. He reasoned that his was a painterly fascination, not a sexual one, but he doubted his own excuses. His attraction to her embarrassed him; he was nearly thirty-six.

  In the city that night he avoided the other squatters and hurried up the back stairs to the fourth floor. Even though the building had been condemned, it still provided good shelter. There were fifteen of them living there together. Artists mostly. One musician who played guitar all day and night. It was hard to have any privacy. They tried. They made places for themselves. His mattress was in a room that had once been the pantry. There were shelves, where he kept his few belongings. The linoleum had curled, but most of the subflooring was intact. At night, when he lay on his mattress, he’d hear the rats tumbling behind the walls. He climbed onto his mattress and arranged the cardboard around himself, creating a room of his own. Privacy. He took out the sketches he had done of the girl pinning her father’s laundry to the line. Her hands perched on the rope like small white birds. He had watched her mowing the lawn, the intensity in her face in the bright sunlight, the way her lean thighs exerted themselves under the pressure of the machine. The deep green color of the grass. Her glittering sweat. The wild yellow hair. The mystery in her eyes. He felt the alarming rush of an erection; it embarrassed him, it sickened him, but he could not ignore it, and he toiled, feverishly, with melancholy, until his ugly need went away.

  The morning brought him peace, and he felt newly inspired. He gathered his materials and rushed uptown to his class at the Art Students League. The studio was already crowded and he admonished himself for being late. It seemed no matter how organized he could be, he was always the last to arrive, sneered at by his fellow students. He had to settle for an easel in the rear of the room, near the heater, pulling the heavy contraption across the floor to achieve the best possible view under the circumstances.

  The model entered in her robe, a tattered kimono that she’d picked up at one of the secondhand shops in the Village, clutching the fabric at her bosom with flagrant modesty, and climbed onto the platform. She possessed a restrained anguish that intrigued him, the narrow intensity of her eyes, the hollows of her cheeks. The students busied themselves with preparations, allowing the model the illusion of privacy as she removed her robe and assumed a pose. It was during those fleeting moments that Simon Haas found his focus: the gentle lift of her shoulders as the robe dropped to the floor, the thrilling display of her nudity, her allowance of it, her delectable vulnerability. She wore her deep red hair pulled up in a loose chignon and he could smell her cologne, like vanilla. How easily they accepted each other, he thought. How willing she was to expose herself in the lofty name of art. They warmed up with several two-minute sketches, then settled into a twenty-minute pose with the model seated on a metal stool that scarcely accommodated her generous hips and squealed with her slightest movement. How easily she opened her legs! Her arms akimbo on her knees, her breasts plunging down like lavish ornaments. He noticed a bruise on her inner thigh, a curious place for a wound indeed, and, unlike his fellow students, he did not omit it.

  In the lounge on their break he attempted a conversation with the model, but she frowned with impatience and wandered away to have a cigarette. He had never had much luck with women, and romance, in general, seemed a remote abstraction. The room, with its mint green walls and long windows, was full of smoke and the busy rush of conversation. He stood in the corner, watching. He detested most of them. He kept to himself, mostly, but they knew him for his work, which was among the best in the class. He preferred to keep his distance; he didn’t trust any of them. There
were few of them in that room who would last, he realized.

  He spent the afternoon painting on the roof of the condemned building. He liked painting out in the open, up in the sky with the birds. There was plenty of room up there for his canvases, which were large. He liked the feeling of working big, of using his body to make a painting, of putting his whole self into it. The length of his arms and legs. The bold insistence of the light. The frank brutality of the light on the streets. And when evening came, like a beggar, dragging its dirty rags, he’d use his binoculars, insinuating himself into the homes of strangers. The filthy kitchens where women sweated and cried and stuffed themselves with their own cooking. Where men took their wives by force, their faces foul with desire. Where children screamed or simply sat alone in the chaos of neglect. A child like that captured his interest and he would watch for a long time with a burning in his throat. He’d been that child. Sitting on the chair in his mother’s kitchen. His father coming in, the chair going over and his father’s hand wrapped around his neck. The alarming weightlessness of his little body flying across the room. His father standing over him, Get up, boy, get up!, his mother pushing her body between them, trying to divert him, Leave him alone! Then taking his father into her room, the door closing, his father’s slow drunken groan easing through the cracks. Simon would sit on the kitchen floor for a long time, unable to move, his little body pulsing with terror. Humiliated by the smell of his urine. He’d wash the floor quickly, so they wouldn’t see, they wouldn’t know, and hurry into his room, hearing his mother’s voice through the thin walls, the way she’d whisper to his father, quiet and soothing as a nun. He lay there for a long time, waiting for her to come in. To tuck in the sheets, caress his forehead, whisper apologies, like mothers were supposed to do, but she never did.

  He knew a woman like her, like his mother, shackled with compromise. He had found her window; he knew the cherry walls of her room, the brass bars of her headboard. And the various men she’d entertain there. Their raging buttocks as they fucked her. The blue neon of the flashing sign, NUDE DANCERS! illuminating her common face.

  Later that afternoon, when the sun was low and the windows of the buildings glowed orange, he decided to pay the woman a visit. He found the building without trouble and rang all of the buzzers at once and continued to ring until the lock on the door released. He climbed the stairs to the fourth floor, smelling the rife odors of tenement life, burnt grease and fried bananas, the piquant draft of curry and saffron. He had counted the floors to her apartment from the outside, watching her clients arrive at the fourth-floor landing through the small window in the hallway, how they’d straighten their ties and slick back their hair before knocking, and now that he was inside it was easy to estimate the location of her door. It was four o’clock in the afternoon, the time of day, he had observed, that she kept to herself. When she would wash her stockings, perhaps, and hang them over the shower railing to dry. Or when she would shave her calves, or the sensitive area around her pubis. Sometimes she would paint her nails by the window, listening to the radio, the Cuban station, her body rocking gently with the music. It made him a little sick, visiting her now; still, he knocked on her door. “I just want to talk,” he told her when she opened it.

  She frowned. “What about? You a cop?”

  “I’m a painter.”

  “A what?”

  “An artist. I was wondering . . .” He cleared his throat. “Would you be willing to sit for me?”

  “To sit?”

  “For a painting. A sketch or two. I’ll pay you, of course.”

  “What are you, a pervert or something?”

  He smiled and raised his hands. “I refuse to answer on the grounds I may be incriminated.”

  This made her laugh. “You want to pay me just to sit there.”

  “That’s right.”

  She shook her head like she still wasn’t sure. She studied his face. “It’s your money,” she said finally, and invited him in with an extravagant wave of her hand.

  “Splendid.”

  She lit a cigarette and began to remove her clothes.

  “Leave them on,” he said. He wanted the red kimono. He wanted the black ribbon around her neck.

  “Suit yourself, da Vinci.” She dropped into an old wing chair with torn upholstery, bulging guts of yellow foam.

  “Long day?” he asked, just making conversation, getting out his pad, his pastels.

  “You kidding? I’m bright-eyed and fucking bushy-tailed.” She blew the smoke right at him. “How’d you find me, anyway?”

  “You’re not easy to miss.”

  She smiled slowly, flattered. She let him draw her for half an hour, then poured them each a glass of whiskey. The whiskey tasted good, and since he hadn’t eaten it warmed his belly.

  “I’m just curious,” she said, wiping her mouth on her wrist. “Why me? Why aren’t you out there painting buildings and the fucking East River? Why waste your time on some old whore like me?”

  He reached out and took her hand. He held it, the yellow skin, the chipped and bitten fingernails. Her thin, elegant wrists. “You interest me,” he said simply.

  She looked at him strangely and tears came to her eyes. “You must be pretty hard up.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Grace.”

  “Grace,” he repeated. “That’s a beautiful name.”

  The room was nearly dark now, the streets outside fluid with rush-hour traffic. She came to him quietly, kneeling between his legs, and kissed him. Her mouth tasted of whiskey and nicotine and he drank from it willingly. She went to the dresser and took out a small tin box that had once contained tea. She opened it and retrieved a tiny bag of white powder. She put out the lines on the shiny tin top and offered it to him and he accepted it. He’d been secretly hoping for this and he indulged in the ritual feverishly, desperately. They went to the bed. He was suddenly afraid of her. The pungent odor in the sheets and the soiled pillow smelling of hair tonic and cologne. She began to kiss him as her fingers wandered inside his pants.

  “No,” he whispered, “that’s not necessary.”

  But she did not stop. She wrapped her hand around him and worked him hard and harder and it hurt. He grabbed her wrists and held them down and she struggled and he took her brutally, watching her face twist in a kind of rapturous melancholy.

  “You’re all the same,” she said bitterly. “Every last one of you.”

  When he woke it was dark, and she was gone. He dressed in the strange blue light, imagining himself on the roof across the street, looking into this life, his own past, the whore, like his own mother, a willing victim of circumstance.

  A month later, in the violent heat of August, Simon drove to Amsterdam, New York. His intentions were not entirely despicable. He hoped to finish the portrait of the girl and receive his payment, trusting, of course, that the girl’s father would be satisfied with the finished product. It was something he should have done long ago. He felt his stomach churning although there was nothing in it but the flat beer he’d drunk that morning from an open can somebody had left behind. He had a cigarette butt left, he’d smoked half of it the night before, and he lit it now, a tiny scrap of flaming tobacco singeing his hand. He looked at his reflection in the rearview mirror, wondering how he would appear to the girl and her father. He wondered if they would be able to see his condition for what it was and he hoped, of course, that they wouldn’t. At least he had the car, which was worth plenty under the circumstances.

  He found the girl’s house with little trouble and turned down the long dirt lane. The house was dark, the shades pulled. It seemed neglected. The grass had become overgrown with weeds. He did not see anyone around. Two black crows sat on the porch railing and cawed at him when he got out of the car. Frightened, he charged toward them, waving his arms madly about, and they flew off shrieking. He had a strange feeling, then, like he should turn away. As if returning there had been a mistake. But he didn’t. He climbed the
steps and knocked on the door. There was no answer. He peered through the dark dirty glass and saw the hallway and part of the dining room with all the shades and curtains drawn. He tried the knob, and the door opened. He had a peculiar sensation that he was being watched, but the house appeared to be empty and was nearly silent save for the buzzing of flies. There seemed to be a lot of them flying about and the air was close and smelled of spoiled food. Simon walked toward the back room, where the girl’s father had been on the day he’d started the portrait. The buzzing of the flies grew curiously louder and an odor permeated the walls, an awful rotten smell that he could not place but knew was the result of something repugnant. And when he entered the room, he nearly vomited from the ghastly sight.