The Fatigue Artist

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  In college he had been a runner. The track team, he told me as we sat in the restaurant, called him the Flying Feather. Because he was so thin and so tall, I was curious about what he might look like without his clothes, and as if he could read my mind, I tried to suppress my curiosity. I was used to Q.’s reading my mind and reveled in it. Reading each other’s minds had been an antidote to the common notion that we live trapped in our solitudes, a notion I’m sure Ev held. I never told him I had proof to the contrary. I didn’t know, when I thought furtively about what he might look like without his clothes, that Ev had no interest whatsoever in reading my mind, indeed wouldn’t think of another’s mind as something that might be read or that one might wish to read.

  “Why did you and your wife separate?” I asked.

  “She didn’t want to go on with it,” he replied, delicately spearing the meat out of the claw of a lobster. I liked watching him eat the lobster—he didn’t refuse to accept that particular one of life’s offerings. But he didn’t eat red meat. He was fastidious, I later found, not moralistic. He didn’t like the look of blood. I think he must have regarded my roast beef, that first night, with distaste, though he was far too polite to comment on my tastes, ever. I don’t think he ever knew my tastes, as a matter of fact, or thought of people as collections of tastes, as I tend to do.

  “Why not?”

  He looked at me forthrightly, the whites of his eyes clear and innocent as porcelain. This, too, was good. It bespoke candor and simplicity. Q. also was candid, God knows, but hardly simple. “I don’t know.”

  That should have alerted me, but I was young and walking around gingerly to keep the pieces of my heart together instead of using my brains. Later, when I learned his wife was a psychiatrist, I was willing to bet she had told him in analytic detail exactly why she didn’t want to go on. Perhaps he didn’t understand her reasons, or understood but didn’t consider them sufficient to end a marriage. More likely he didn’t care to tell me. I actually never knew what he felt about anything and sometimes suspected he didn’t either, or didn’t want to know. Maybe he lost sight of her reasons, in the mist of sadness.

  “Are you still in love with her?”

  Again the candid look. He was standing up well under my deliberately indiscreet questioning. “I’m not sure,” he said with an awkward, self-deprecating smile. After Q.’s theatrics and virtuosity at dialogue, I found Ev’s hesitations, even his sadness, trustworthy signs. I made many such mistakes. I thought anything that was not Q. would be salutary. That is how blind and broken I was.

  “She used to say that every appetite passes in twenty minutes,” he volunteered, grinning again, and I grinned along with him.

  “Is that so? What else?”

  “Let’s see. She arranged the bathroom so that nothing was visible except the absolute essentials like soap, towels, toilet paper. She even found a little contraption that hid the toilet paper. All the everyday stuff, toothpaste, deodorant, was in cabinets, so it looked as though we had no bodily needs.”

  I was entranced. Those were the early days of my data bank. I pushed on, but that was all he had to say.

  He insisted on taking me home in a cab. I didn’t ask him in and he didn’t seem to expect it. As I undressed for bed I reviewed what I liked about him. His tallness, his awkwardness, his devotion to his children, his politics, the clear whites of his eyes, and his skill in extracting the meat from the lobster, perhaps from having grown up on Cape Cod. Above all, he didn’t seem awed by my having written a book or by my possessing opinions and delivering them forcefully. (Q. hadn’t been put off by that either, except that those latter qualities, he once explained, deprived me of magic. Women, I gathered, were supposed to be mysterious. I could never figure it out. Q. loved to hear what I thought, he implored me to tell him, but when I obliged, there was no mystery left. Or so he said. I never felt mystery was a matter of words.)

  Was that list enough to like? Sure. Not for marriage—I wasn’t dreaming of marriage then—but for diversion. Recuperation. If he called. I wasn’t sure he would, nor did it matter much. Just an evening off from brooding over Q. Practice for a future.

  He courted me with shy, fumbling grace, like someone who doesn’t quite know the steps to a dance but tries to follow, faking a bit. When I realized what he was attempting I helped him along, since my instinct is to help in socially awkward situations. I made it easy, led him through the steps. I was fascinated when he peeled off his clothes, like peeling a banana. He looked like a Mannerist rendering of Jesus about to be hoisted onto the cross. Beautiful in his way. We made such an incongruous pair—I’m not the austere type—that I wanted to call up Q. and joke about it: Hey, I’m sleeping with this guy who looks like Jesus Christ. A man of sorrows. But of course telling Q. was unthinkable. I never wanted to see him again, the dog. Who could foresee that in years to come Q. would do just that, call to tell me about his latest loves. In character, I should point out, Ev was nothing like Jesus Christ, only in appearance, angular and sorrowful.

  Months later, meeting his parents, I decided he might be congenitally sad. They came down from the Cape to spend a few days in New York, tall and thin and sad just like Ev. Not sad in the sense of morose or displeased. Sad in a deeper way, as if nothing they did or saw could distract them from the sad truth of life’s ultimate futility. And when Ev took me to see the house where he grew up, in the town washed by the sea and the bay, I learned one reason for the sadness, a good enough reason in itself yet so far in the past that I thought it should have lost its force. Maybe it wasn’t the real reason.

  His parents visited us several times after we were married, and I tried to make them happy by cooking good dinners and taking them to musical comedies and for walks along the river, but though they said they were having a fine time, nothing could dispel the sadness beneath. Listen, I wanted to tell them, we all know about life’s ultimate futility. Surely you can put it aside for a few hours and enjoy yourselves. But apparently not. After a while I decided that whatever the reason, it was their pleasure to be sad and they had passed it on to Ev, and why should I presume to interfere? He was an only child, born after his parents had been married many years, and maybe their cellular exhaustion made him sad as well, in which case each new sadness that befell him was added to the original store, spreading itself through the entire long length of him.

  He moved wraith-like everywhere, yet attracting attention because he was so tall. I once asked if it didn’t hinder him as a reporter, being so noticeable, and he said, with the half-smile that tinged his simplest remarks with the aroma of rue, that maybe it did, surely it would were he on a secret assignment, that is, pretending to be other than a reporter. “I suppose I couldn’t be a spy. Spies should be nondescript.” “But would you even want to be a spy?” I asked. “No. Not with the world as it is.” He paused, as always, between sentences. Did he mean if the world were otherwise he might want to be a spy? I often had cause to wonder about those pauses, and decided he was formulating his next thought, for he rarely spoke without thinking first. Yet his next words might be matter-of-fact, nothing that required formulating. “I think I’d make a good spy, though, otherwise.” Implied but unsaid was the question, What do you think? “Yes, an excellent spy,” I said obligingly.

  He moved wraith-like through our marriage, through his life and his death. I was surprised, I am still surprised, and affronted, that the bullet was able to find him. He seemed too unsolid to be a good target, but then he wasn’t a target; he was hit by accident. I’ve often pictured the bullets whizzing on the grubby Bronx street where the cops staged an impromptu helicopter raid, swooping down on drug dealers, and where Ev was investigating a story about those dealers. In my visions I make him turn sideways and offer his papery profile, eluding the bullet. In reality, he must have looked around with his startled, monkish air, squinting in alarm. He must have presumed he could be a spectator, since as he liked to tell me, his life was undramatic. His death made up for that.
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  It wasn’t an awful marriage, simply a marriage that didn’t begin to explore what marriage might be. If Q. and I were lashed by some invisible rope, Ev and I were divided by the finest of screens. He’s more vivid dead than alive because the screen—his screen—is gone: he can’t keep from being seen. I insist on trying to see him, inventing a life for him. Guilt, you may say. But not guilt over Q. I don’t hold that conventional view. Guilt because I didn’t insist on seeing him, on tearing away the screen, while he was alive. I was preoccupied elsewhere.

  So I can’t say I knew him very well. I was married to him for eleven years, until he was shot in the street; I tried to know him, and then at some point I stopped trying.

  It wasn’t a marriage without love, either. It was an affectionate, functional union. I loved him not just for appealing qualities like his tallness or his decency or his exemplary politics or his respect for my privacy, but because my life was attached to his, and young as I was, I knew it is essential to love your life or else change it. I couldn’t or didn’t wish to change it so I willed myself to love it. For years we sat companionably working on opposite sides of the room. I would go off to a closet-like room to write, but I could read and prepare classes with him nearby. He liked my presence and could work under any conditions. Only sometimes the silence got to me.

  He never asked much about me. He rarely asked questions when he wasn’t working, maybe because as a reporter he had to ask so many, and time off meant not asking any questions. I told him a few things nonetheless, out of courtesy. Fairness. If he lived with me, there were a few things he ought to know about. Such as Q. Besides, I understood later, I liked to shape stories about myself and Q. I liked the idea of being part of a story. The version, especially, in which I played the role of wronged innocent—snared, enchanted, held prisoner by a spell—made it possible for me to live with the outcome. Or what I thought then was the outcome. I couldn’t foresee that there would be outcome after outcome.

  I didn’t tell Ev his full name because I thought that, working at a newspaper, he might recognize it. I didn’t want him attaching my story to a specific known quantity, for that might weaken my version of it.

  He heard me out patiently, occasionally giving his rueful half-smile. That was all. And the silence grew, broken by the children, Tony and Jilly, who came down from Boston by train every fourth weekend. Ev or I or sometimes both of us would pick them up at Penn Station on Friday nights. Tony was eleven when the trips began, and they continued for years, until he refused to come anymore and Jilly had to manage on her own. They would step off the train, two valiant children, glancing around for us. Tony was protective of Jilly, who was just five; he gripped her hand firmly and sometimes even carried her to keep her up out of the crowd. He looked apprehensive, not of the strangers or the escalator or the bustle, but of the responsibility vested in him. I told Ev they were too young to travel alone, but he and his ex-wife, Margot, the psychiatrist, thought otherwise. She planned the trips carefully, as she did everything, packing healthy snacks and thermoses of apple juice. She gave Tony money for emergency taxis and phone calls, and tucked some bills in Jilly’s pocket, too, in the unlikely event that they got separated, along with a slip of paper with Ev’s name, address and phone number. She even gave them instructions about going to the bathroom. If Tony had to go, he was to ask a nice lady nearby to keep an eye on Jilly. If Jilly had to go, he was to stand in the corridor outside the unlocked door, because doors on train lavatories are tricky and Jilly was afraid of getting locked in places. With all those precautions, I still thought it wasn’t a good idea.

  Often I have wondered if it was the strain of those monthly trips that made Tony dislike me so, for he must have believed, erroneously, that if not for me his father would be living in Boston. He didn’t complain much (though when he did it was at the most inopportune moments, such as while I was cooking dinner), but I could read resentment in the set of his shoulders. Jilly always looked eager for adventure: she had a round rosy face and dark curls flopping around her head, giving her the look of a wild child. I was surprised, from what I had heard of her mother, that the hair was not smoothed down and disciplined by barrettes. Her eyes gleamed with intrigue, as if she would willingly go off with any of her fellow passengers at the merest suggestion.

  We had a room fixed up for them and spent the weekends doing what we hoped they would enjoy, but because Jilly was so small it often happened, especially in winter, that Ev took Tony on excursions while I stayed home reading her stories and baking cookies and playing with clay and beads, or watching her prance around in my hats and high-heeled shoes, gobs of makeup anointing her face. We acted out fairy tales about witches and princesses and fairy godmothers, and when Ev and Tony returned from their wanderings I’d be faintly abashed to be discovered hunched as a crone, a shawl draped over my head, locking Rapunzel in her tower room—an armchair piled with pillows—or tucked in bed while Jilly tripped about with a red scarf for a hood and a basket of fruit on her arm. We could have used someone to play the Prince or the wolf, but Ev only smiled vaguely and ruefully, his eyes tearing from the cold, raw pink patches on his pale cheeks, and Tony, lean and ascetic like his father, glanced at us with disdain while streaking blackened snow across the floor.

  One Sunday evening after we’d taken the children to the station we went to a movie, and there on the screen briefly flashed Q., to my shock and dismay: I was so out of touch, I didn’t even know what he was doing. I, who used to know everything! He was playing a pastry chef in a fancy restaurant.

  I couldn’t keep still. I nudged Ev. “That is the man,” I said. “The actor I told you about. The prince who turned out to be a frog.” I spoke impulsively, as I tend to do. I was feeling full of life, free of the past. Maybe I thought, too, that I’d get a rise out of Ev, for I was getting frustrated at his impassivity but not yet grasping where my frustration came from.

  “Mmm,” he grunted.

  I felt myself deflate, as if my clothes were caving in around the space that used to hold my body. I temporized. He didn’t like to talk during movies. It was gauche of me to blurt it out. He was more sensitive than he appeared. Jealous? Q. didn’t show up to advantage in his white chef’s hat and silly accent. Was Ev jarred to find that this was the man his wife had been so foolish about?

  There rose in me a gust of desire to defend Q., to declare how magnificent and inspiring he was, even to boast of how women were drawn to him, not a quality I had ever before considered an asset. Surely he was not to be judged by a bit part in a comic murder mystery. But I kept quiet. Ev might be waiting until later to ask what it meant to me, seeing him loom so unexpectedly on the screen. Was I shaken or stirred or infuriated or what? And I would say no, none of the above, merely startled, for it was all over with Q., and in any case it was Q. playing a role, something he did so well that the real man was barely discernible. All I felt, besides admiration for his skill, was amusement at seeing a pastry chef with the familiar lineaments of Q.’s face and body.

  But after we left the theatre Ev said nothing. I understood, then, that he would say nothing most of the time. He would listen; he would never ask. If I complained of his lack of curiosity, he’d call it politeness, discretion, as if any fool should appreciate that.

  I didn’t appreciate politeness or discretion. I wanted what I had had with Q. A form of neurosis, a boundary problem, Ev’s ex-wife the psychiatrist would no doubt call it, but it made us happy. In the end, Ev’s not asking about Q. drove me to thoughts of him which the image on the screen alone had not provoked. And the silence grew.

  3

  Do something about it, Jilly said. The nearest health food store is a few blocks down Broadway. Its windows flaunt posters about foot massages and aids to flawless digestion and sexual virility. As soon as I’m well inside, strolling down the aisles of grains and rainbow-hued juices, the odor of sanctity—flat and dusty, earthy but without earth’s moist, loamy richness—makes me want to rush out and sin. It�
��s a flimsy, stingy smell, like a wasps’ nest rotting behind a wall or a mess of cobwebs tangled on the mop. A smell that may signify the freedom guaranteed on many of the labels: wheat-free, sugar-free, yeast-free, fat-free. Freedom, my generation was told, means nothing left to lose, and here the lesson has been learned well. The smell calls to mind a style of writing practiced by some of my colleagues: metaphor-free, emotion-free, meaning-free, form-free, suggesting that the writers are knowledge-free and talent-free.

  “I’d like some vitamins, please,” I announce to the young woman behind the counter: dark skin, hair in impeccable corn rows fastened by colorful beads, taut shoulder and arm muscles. The picture of health, a fine advertisement for the wares, but her eyes as she reluctantly looks up from her book—such rage can’t be healthy.

  “What kind?”

  “I’m not sure. A pill that has all the vitamins together. Something to give me energy.”

  “What you want is a multi,” and she turns, reaching a long balletic arm behind her to pick a brown jar off the shelf and set it before me. Near the cash register is a small placard lauding the strengthening effects of bee pollen. That has a nice sound to it—nectar, honey. Yes, Jilly mentioned it.

  “Is that bee pollen any good? For energy, I mean?”

  “Sure.” She shrugs.

  I take a jar; it’s in tablet form, not sticky, as I imagined. What next? This isn’t going as well as I’d hoped. A stranger in a strange land, I’m not finding succor. The hollow smell of health is making me slightly woozy. No place to sit down except the stool behind the counter where the clerk is perched with her paperback copy of Beloved, and I’d rather not ask her. I try rooting my feet as the Tai Chi teacher counsels, to feel the rushing spring from the earth. Surely it can penetrate the floorboards of the health food store.