by Meg Wolitzer
One day she entered the white studio a few minutes before Paul did, for he was still trying to find a parking spot on the street. As Roz began to remove her clothes for the session, an exterminator suddenly walked out of the bathroom carrying his canister of poison, and John Sunstein leaped up and placed himself between the man and Roz. “I forgot he was here,” John said. “I’m so sorry. We had a little cockroach situation.”
Roz quickly slipped into her robe, but the exterminator seemed unfazed by her nudity. When he turned to leave, she and John saw that the words “We Zap ’Em” were stitched across the back of his jumpsuit, and for some obscure reason this cracked them up. They sat together and laughed, and when Paul showed up and wanted to know what was funny, neither of them could really explain it. You had to have been there, they said. Throughout the rest of the day, Roz thought about how chivalrous John Sunstein had seemed, as though he understood that the sight of her naked body was not something to take lightly, but not something to exclaim over mightily, either.
At the end of the nine months, after all the artwork was complete, Roz and Paul brought John a bottle of good champagne as a present and thanked him emotionally for his beautiful work. “I used to be so mortified when I came in here,” Roz said to him as the three of them stood together drinking the champagne from the coffee mugs that Sunstein quickly had to wash in his kitchenette. “I thought I had no right to show myself like that,” she went on. “But it’s as though you gave me the right. You gave it to both me and Paul. So thank you.” They lifted their mugs and Sunstein lightly, awkwardly hugged them, and that was the end. Their work was done.
As it happened, Roz and Paul met John Sunstein again several times over the next couple of years, first with the editor and the art director to discuss the book’s layout and to make decisions about the inclusion or exclusion of particular drawings, and then, when the book appeared and quickly became such a freak success, Sunstein was occasionally interviewed along with them. Sometimes, if there was an article about the Mellows in a magazine, a sidebar would appear about the artist. Roz was always glad to get another glance at his shy face and pained smile, the slightly jagged part in his long hair. Day after day he had made himself invisible so that they could be more visible. One article said that he had gone back to drawing album covers now; the Kinks were interested, and his agent was in negotiations with Jefferson Starship.
“So, any more nudity in your future?” an interviewer asked.
“I hope so,” John Sunstein had answered, laughing.
After that, there was no more contact, no more need for them to see him, and the continuing success of the book took Roz and Paul everywhere, kept them twinned and intertwined, with little time to imagine a world outside the sexual landscape they had created. Their children, busy with homework and one another in the house in Wontauket, grew and grew.
In early summer 1977, when a magazine asked for a few new drawings of the couple for a feature article, Roz and Paul returned to the studio. This time, Sunstein had a new studio apartment, located all the way downtown. In the distance stood the massive, four-year-old towers of the World Trade Center. Roz and Paul had been photographed on the observation deck a few months earlier, with the wind in their hair and Paul’s arms wrapped around her. “Who’s on top?” read the caption.
When they arrived to pose for him this time, Sunstein seemed different, more subdued than ever. He looked older too, Roz thought, for he’d cut his hair so that it only came down to his chin. His face was still shy and closed up. He had gotten very rich over the past two years from the book, though not nearly as rich as they had. Roz wondered what he spent his money on; surely not clothes. She wondered if he lived alone, and then she realized that in all the time of posing for him, she’d learned very little about him. She and Paul had never asked, and John had never offered. That was one of the side effects of continual and labor-intensive sex tableaus; they didn’t allow for anything else. There was no world beyond the boundaries of the bed.
Today, Sunstein’s bed awaited them. It was different from the one they previously used. “The sheets are clean; I just changed them this morning,” he said. “But anyway, I’ll draw the old bed. This is just a stand-in.”
“Can I have a stand-in for myself?” Roz asked.
“Thanks a lot,” Paul said, and he absently began to unbutton his clingy blue shirt. Chest hair sprang out as the buttons were opened. He was wearing striped briefs today, and she felt, looking at him critically, that success had rendered him well fed, that he had the appearance of someone who had been corrupted by too many interviews and audiences.
“Please,” she said to Sunstein, “I’m serious. Couldn’t you just use the other sketches of us as a starting point? Couldn’t you imagine what we’d look like?”
“Yes,” he said. “I could imagine it. But I don’t think I could draw it. They’re different things.”
“Oh,” she said, not really understanding the distinction.
“Roz, what’s the problem?” Paul asked. “It’s just John. Is it because you’re so famous now, is that it? You feel different?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
Paul put his hands gently on her shoulders, rubbing lightly. Roz slowly undressed, full of dread, the way she’d felt the first time they’d posed for the artist, except back then she’d also felt a kind of excitement, while now she only felt ashamed. She lay upon the bed with Paul, and in this new shade of white light, subtly different from the one in the other studio, what they were doing seemed different. Or maybe she was different. Paul’s hand cupped her breast, and she looked dispassionately at the sight: Still life with hand on breast.
What was it I wanted, again? she wondered. A long time ago she’d wanted Paul, and that was it; and then she’d gotten him and kept him. It had been exciting to know that she wouldn’t have to live the stiff, walking-stick life her parents had led. Her marriage to Paul was a response to theirs, just the way all marriages are a response to those earlier ones, with corrections made in the flawed texts, only to be corrected again, and yet again, over time.
So Roz closed her eyes when posing in bed with her husband now, the way a baby imagines that, upon closing her eyes, no one else can see her. Paul’s hand found Roz’s breast and curved around it, accommodating to the shape, which had changed in the slightest way over these two years, the edges loosening, the tissue shifting, the formed sand pies giving way to something a little more gelatinous, though this was not yet apparent to the human eye, only the human hand. The husband’s hand.
“All right,” Roz said. “It’s fine. We’ll just do it, then. I don’t want to make a big deal out of it.”
“You know how to make a man feel good inside.” Paul laughed.
But later, when they were done posing and Paul had stepped into the kitchenette to make a phone call about the lecture they were going to give tomorrow in Boston, Roz and John Sunstein were briefly alone. They were standing together, and she was dressed again. Roz had tucked her silk blouse into her skirt, zipped up her boots, and was now looking for a mirror so she could brush her hair.
“In there,” said John, pointing to the bathroom.
She took out a hairbrush from her purse as she walked, and it wasn’t until she was inside the small white bathroom that she saw he had followed her. She turned to him in puzzlement, her hairbrush raised reflexively, and Sunstein came very close in one swift movement and quietly said, “I love you, you know.”
“Pardon?” she said, rendered so stupid so quickly.
“I love you,” he said flatly, as if his punishment for saying it once was to have to say it immediately again.
She just gaped at him, completely defenseless against these words that seemed almost another language, as though he’d said to her, “Yb lff gruxtyl,” and she needed a moment to translate.
“No,” she said involuntarily, “you don’t. You don’t even know me.”
But she saw that his face was so completely focused now, s
o full of feeling that she had to look away from him, and she heard him insist, “Yes I do.” And of course, yes he did. All that time they’d posed for the book, he was right there, seeing how she operated, what excited her, what made her shy or amazed. He was there all that time, watching her, knowing her. “It’s true,” he went on. “And I’m in love with you. I had to say it.”
“When?” she asked in a whisper. “When?” As though she were inquiring about two other people, as though this were separate from them and she was just curious.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Always. I’d come to work, and I’d sit there drawing you, looking at you, and I’d be really happy. I just had to tell you. I know you probably can’t feel it too, but I had to say it once, so you’ll always know. I won’t bother you with it again.”
She was like an appliance stirring to attention; she felt something move and heard its drone. Oh, this feeling again, she thought as it attached itself predictably to her abdomen. But it wasn’t only arousal, or even exactly arousal. There was some other element, too, but it couldn’t be corresponding to love, could it? How could it be, when he was just “John Sunstein,” or just “the artist,” or even just “the man behind the easel”? Pay no attention to the man behind the easel. And she hadn’t paid attention, mostly, throughout the years since she’d first met him up until now, at this particular moment, though of course she’d admired him physically because he was young and unspoiled.
Here, then, was John Sunstein, out from the shadows, and his hand was on her face. She took his hand in her own and moved it to her mouth. Slowly, thoughtlessly, she kissed his fingertips and let her mouth go around them one at a time. What are you doing? she asked herself, and she could only answer: I have no idea, so don’t ask again.
He drew her close to him in one swoop, and the hairbrush flipped out of her hand, landing on the tiles with a clattering sound. It was as if, in the small silvery bathroom with the mirror right there to record their actions, she could see how much he was not her husband. His face was still so young; he was thirty now, to her forty-one. Here was a face that couldn’t be hidden behind an easel and a sketchpad any longer. He was right in her line of vision, the way she’d been all those years in his.
John moved Roz deeper into the small room, and she leaned against the pocked glass of the shower stall, which shook on its metal track. She put his hand against her heart, and suddenly she was the one demanding and wanting, when moments earlier she had wanted nothing. We’re so simple, we human animals, she thought; no, we’re not animals, we’re evolved race cars, and we go from zero to a hundred in no time at all, not caring about danger. We spring into action because an idea is planted in our heads by someone else, and then all of a sudden it seems like it had been our own idea all along, and so we take full credit for it.
In the recesses of the studio, Paul’s voice lifted and they could hear him talking on the phone. Since he clearly wasn’t yet using the wrapping-up cadences at the end of a phone call, John Sunstein took the opportunity to kiss Roz Mellow. The kiss was hard and deep but somehow also chaste, as if he wanted her to know that he wasn’t only about sex, and that he would never see her as mainly a sex partner; yes, she would be that too, and both of them could imagine what it would be like to move this state of high excitement onto a bed; but no, he would not be like Paul, always saying Look at you. Or Roz, try it this way. John had seen everything; he knew what Roz looked like in orgasm, and at rest, and in tears. He knew it and he’d seen it and she would never have to prove anything to him. This, it seemed, was what he wanted her to know right now.
His body was narrower and much more hairless than Paul’s, different in all ways. John hadn’t sloughed off youth yet, even though he’d cut his hair. His jeans were low-slung; he was fluid and rangy. Roz, too, knew that she was different from the women John had been with. She was older, she had done things, she was a mother, she was responsible and reliable, and what a relief that might be to him. He was happiest in her company, sitting quietly and drawing this woman who lay on a bed in various poses that displayed her beauty, yes, but also her energy and her warmth, and, once in a while, her unhappiness. This young, mostly silent man was in love with her.
Paul was still talking on the telephone now. “Yeah, we’re just about done here,” she could hear him say. “We’ll be out of here soon. . . .” And then his laughter, easy, so purely unaware.
“John,” said Roz into his neck. He smelled like fruit, and she thought that he probably washed his hair with one of those shampoos her daughters used, meant to evoke a distant orchard visited in childhood, or in a dream. “I don’t know what I’m doing,” she said, “and I don’t know what to do now.”
“I know,” he said. “We’ll figure it out.”
They stood in silence for a few seconds. “So have you figured it out?” she asked.
“Not yet,” he said. Then he pulled back and looked at her. “Oh, I should tell you something,” he said. “Nobody really calls me John. I mean, in business they all do. But usually I’m Jack.”
So Jack’s big boots sat on the newly clean closet floor twenty-six years later. His feet no longer fit into them; like most people, everything had gotten slightly larger with age. He was still slender and looked younger than he was and he was still intact, had remained himself, but he’d lost almost all of his beautiful boyish hair and that had changed his appearance completely. The boots in the closet were trappings of a younger persona, but Jack couldn’t throw them out, and there they sat among Roz’s wavy old wooden Dr. Scholl’s sandals and some discolored high-top sneakers that had belonged to one or another of the children over the years.
In the first two weeks after Jack had kissed her in the summer of 1977, Roz had gone back to the city to see him several times, at first in a trance of trepidation and thrill. She and Jack went to bed and made love easily, affectionately. She liked his taste, the sweetness of his clean skin, the way he kissed. He put his hands on her, his head between her breasts, his finger on her clitoris, as if stirring a little pot. She was delirious, and then somehow calm. He knew when not to touch her, too, when to almost ignore her. She went with him to Pearl Paints, where he purchased new brushes, cans of fixative, and canvas by the yard. The store smelled so strongly of him that going there was erotic. They talked at a rapid pace, trading stories of her past and her marriage and his own past and his various relationships with women. Jack was Jewish, the son of a rabbi from Plainfield, New Jersey, and at her coaxing he brought her a snapshot of himself at his bar mitzvah. There he was with his hair as long as a girl’s, his teeth encased in braces; behind him were a mother and father with their hands on his shoulders, urging their son into the future and manhood and eventually into an affair with a married woman much older than himself.
Every day, those first weeks, when Roz came to see Jack, she was not sure how long this could last. There were no plans, and she warned him of this. “I have been married for almost twenty years. I’m married. I have four children.” As though being planted deeply into a life meant you could never uproot it. He didn’t try to change her mind, but simply accepted what she said, while adding that he wanted to be with her, wanted to marry her, and all she had to do was say the word. His ardor was reliable, and unlike Paul, he didn’t pour himself all over her. She was so grateful for Jack’s quiet.
Being at home with Paul at night made her jump out of her skin, but she endured it. One night in the den, Paul showed Roz a magazine ad for a record album. The cover art was a highly stylized drawing of the band. “Doesn’t that look familiar?” he asked her.
“It must be Jack’s,” she said.
“Who?”
“John. John. Sunstein, I mean.”
“Since when is he Jack?” asked Paul.
Despite herself, Roz stammered, her face aflame in this moment of having been caught. “He said his friends call him that,” she said, and she thought: Can I give myself away any more than this? Can I possibly be any more obvious? Despite
the intensity of Roz’s response, Paul said nothing to her. But one afternoon the following week, when she told him she was going to the city to have drinks with her old friend and roommate Vivian, who was now a style writer for Vogue, Paul followed her. She took the new car into the city, a red high-end Volvo they’d recently purchased, and he drove the old one. Vivian’s office was in the Condé Nast Building on Madison and 44th Street, but Roz headed downtown, and found parking on Greenwich Street. Later she learned that Paul double-parked out of her line of vision, seeing that he was right about her, and watched as she stood at the entrance of the artist’s studio, where she pressed one of the row of crude metal buzzers, then waited. In a second she went inside the building, and the door clicked shut behind her. Paul stayed out on the street, sweltering. He punched the palm of his hand hard, smashing against it, and then he shook his hand in the air while it throbbed. For twenty minutes he stood on the street, and finally he went to the door and pressed the buzzer that his wife had so recently pressed.
“Yeah,” Jack’s voice said, all fuzzed over.