by Paula Bomer
Silence. Sonia has no more questions. Suddenly, she’s exhausted beyond all reason. “I have to go to bed,” she says. “Thank you so much for contributing to my study. If you like, I’ll mail it to you when it gets published.”
He hands her a card. “You do that.”
SONIA FALLS ASLEEP IN a daze. She sleeps on her side and normally she’s not sleeping well, she never sleeps well when pregnant, which is a cruel thing considering that soon enough she’ll be up all hours with a baby and really not sleeping well. And Sonia loves sleep, always has, more than most people. She is not the kind of person who is up at the crack of dawn. But this night, she sleeps well, dreamlessly, and it’s noon before she props herself up to call room service. After calling room service, she calls Dick at work.
“Hi, it’s me,” she says.
“Sonia?”
“Yeah, it’s me. Happy New Year.”
“I’m in a meeting, one sec,” he says. She hears him make excuses and pictures him walking into the hallway, leaving a conference room.
“What on earth?” he says. “Why are you calling me?”
“Did you get my postcard?”
“I got it,” he says.
“I’m in Boulder and I’m coming home,” she says. “It’s going to take a while. I have to stop a lot. Driving hurts my body like you wouldn’t believe.”
“Just get on an airplane.”
I’m not going to do that.”
“Get on an airplane, Sonia. We can get the car later. We can hire someone to drive it back.”
“Dick, I’m heading east today. Just give me some more time.”
“More time? More time?”
“You being pissy isn’t going to make me drive any faster or change my mind.”
“Don’t you care at all?” he says and she feels bad she called him at work, he’s so emotional. “About your own children? About … us?”
“I do. That’s why I’m heading back.”
“Why won’t you get on a plane? Believe it or not, you’re needed here.”
“Nicky’s son kills squirrels with a small gun and then they eat them,” Sonia says, because why not try to change the subject?
“That’s nice, Sonia. Come home.”
“I’m coming,” she says. “Bye.” And she hangs up and wonders, how awful will it be? Or will it not be awful? Why won’t she get on a plane? She gets up, takes a long warm bath in a beautiful pristine bathtub, a tub that in no way resembles the tub in Brooklyn. She thinks, feed the love. Nurture the love. How hard can that be?
Holiday Inn Expresses. Ramada Inns. A few Hiltons and not very nice ones. She now has a neck pillow she shoves behind her lower back, to ease the pain. Everything feels bad. Her ankles swell. It’s hard to reach the pedals and the wheel what with her belly in the way, and she hates it when her belly pushes up against the wheel, so her arms are outstretched and this tires them immensely. But she makes it to Wisconsin, and hours later, without calling first, she is driving to Philbert’s house. There is snow everywhere. Big piles of it. The road is pretty clean, but still. Snow, more snow, and then some more snow. Clean, country snow, unlike in Brooklyn. No yellow dog pee, candy wrappers, beer cans. Indeed, this snow has that sparkle to it, crystals refracting the light.
How could it be that he was listed like that? It was very unlike him, or her memory of him. But Philbert Rush would always be Philbert Rush. Surly, a bit paranoid, arrogant, gleefully vicious. As an infant—he’d told her this once—he screamed constantly, and thrashed about in his mother’s arms. Born raging. And yet, when Sonia calls information in Wisconsin—where she knew he’d moved from calling the Boston Museum School, a nice, young receptionist saying, he’s teaching at the University of Wisconsin—all she has to do is ask for Philbert Rush, and she’s given his phone number, as well as the route and town he lives in.
Phil Rush. “Outsider” artist, but of course, sought after because of his aloofness. Sonia always found that annoying. After ten years in New York he left—claiming no real art could ever be made in New York, that society destroys the artist. This, after conveniently spending enough time in society to secure Sonnebende as his venue for exhibition. So he moved to Boston where Sonia met him in his drawing class. His classes were famous because he rarely had anything nice to say to the students and all the students loved him for that.
On Sonia’s first day of class with Phil, she stood near the front, which was her way. A plumpish, breasty girl with red streaks dyed into her long brown hair was the model. She was beautiful, in that way that young women are, flawlessly fresh and round and she imbued the class with a sexual tension. Ten minutes into the class, Phil stood behind Sonia and she could smell him. It wasn’t a good or a bad smell, just a distinct, human odor. A salty, slightly sour smell. (Once she’d tried to paint how he smelled, for fun, at her studio in Boston. That one she threw out.)
He stood behind her on that first day, his arms crossed, his dark brow screwed into a deep V above his long, thin nose, his black hair standing straight up around his head as if he’d stuck his finger in a light socket.
He said, “You call that an arm? That is your idea of an arm? Where is the poetry in it? Where is the life? Throw that out. Throw it out and start over. God!” Shortly thereafter, she started fucking him.
He never let her spend the night. After dozing for a while on the floor, in the bed, wherever they’d landed, she’d get up, get dressed, and leave. He’d already be back in his studio. Fuck and paint. That’s what the man did. No matter what time of the day or night it was.
THE SKY IS DARK and she is nearly sweating from her copious body fat and the heat pouring out of the vents, but also, she knows it is cold out and this alone chills her blood. Fucking freezing cold dark Midwestern bleakness. Unending. And yet it does end, at least the trip part. She reaches a long, winding gravel driveway through some pine trees blanketed in a dull gray-white frozen snow and then—his house. An unassuming, wood-framed modern house. An outbuilding nearby in a cleared part of the woods that must be his studio. And everywhere else: purity, serenity, simplicity, seclusion. All of his concentration and flamboyance and originality reserved for the grueling, exalted transcendent calling. Sonia looks around and thinks, this is how I will live. Someday. Not now, not for ten years or more, but someday, this is how I will live. The sound of the wind on the icy trees sounds akin to the shriek of nails on a chalkboard. Before she knocks, he opens the door.
“You’re not invited. What are you doing here?” He stares at her with his lyrical almond eyes, his kissable expressive underlip firmly annoyed.
“I need to talk to you.”
“I should turn you away. My God. You are enormously pregnant.” His voice, deep but slightly grating. It’s as if he never could get rid of his Newark upbringing despite the sixty years spent trying.
“Let me in. You make yourself so easy to be found.”
“No one tries to find me here in Wisconsin. So I have no reason to make myself hard to find.”
“If you don’t want me to accidentally give birth here on your steps, then invite me in to sit down.”
He walks in the house and Sonia follows.
“Give birth on my front step. I love it. Rich. I could use that image, you know.”
THERE IS VERY LITTLE furniture. There is no couch. It is an ascetic environment, one created so he can work. It is not a home, really. It is a place where a man gets sustenance so he can work. A place to eat and sleep. Large, dark, abstract canvases lean against the walls. Rothko, without the color. The texture is thick. They are beautiful. How can something so simple take so much work? So much dedication? And yet, Sonia knows, it does. Sonia, exhausted and with intense back pain throws herself on the only comfortable looking piece of furniture she sees, a strange, black leather, S-shaped chair, a midcentury design. It’s not so uncomfortable. She starts, immediately, to tell him things. The boys at home. Her ambivalence. Even how she’d hoped to start painting again before this pregnancy began, a
nd as the words come out, she’s hears their lameness. The falseness and meekness of her words. And she can’t stop herself. She’s making more excuses, they’re churning in her brain now.
“I went on a road trip. I went to Boston and then back to Indiana, and then out West, to visit my sister.”
“You hated Indiana. And your sister.”
“I know, but it’s where I grew up. I needed to go back for some reason.”
“And what reason would that be?”
Sonia thinks about getting high and the gum art. “It was a good thing, it’s good to revisit our pasts. You should try it some time. When was the last time you were in Newark?”
He ignores her, turning his back to her, picking up something from a side table.
“Anyway, this pregnancy has me—has affected me—oh, I don’t know.”
She says, to her shame and embarrassment and really, to set herself up, “I know I’ll love this baby. When it comes. So I try and comfort myself with that.”
Now he’s back to looking at her. God, his attention. How she desired it so much, just to have him pay attention to her. “I don’t doubt that you’ll ‘love’ your baby. Whatever that means. You are so ridiculous, you know that? ‘I know I’ll love this baby,’ ” he says, nastily, mimicking her, sitting across from her and taking her in. “I see it in your eyes, that hope. The thrill of it. You are no better than a ten-year-old girl, wanting to go on the roller-coaster ride just one more time, and eat just one more bag of cotton candy. And there will be fun in it, in the excessiveness, but you may also throw your guts up. The suffering may outweigh the pleasure. And of course, you are not ten. It’s not your stomach and mind that is at stake. It’s other people’s lives. Other people’s fucking lives that you are messing with. Your two sons, the daughter that’s on her way, your husband, who it seems you don’t even give a fuck about. And yet, you walk this earth, travel this country, acting as if you are some holy person. Some Madonna. A mother! A mother-to-be! You want respect, you want to be treated well. You think you are doing this world a favor. But really, every day, and every child you choose to have—and I wouldn’t put it past you to keep on going after this third, by the way—is just you avoiding taking a long hard look at the failure you are. And the misery you have created. Hey, focus on a new one and then you won’t have to look at the mistakes you made the first and second times around!
“And there are many problems with this. First, you walk around with no truth. This kills your soul. You walk around, presenting yourself as someone that you are not, doing things, creating life, like God, but you are a false God, because you do not admit why you are doing what you are doing. To yourself, maybe the truth whispers itself to you, a tiny bit, at night sometimes. But you ignore it, and go about in the world as a complete lie. Your public life is a lie, and so your inner life, your soul, your chance to commune with God, is gone. And you call yourself a mother, like this is a good thing, something to be proud of, something that deserves respect. And you appear fit to be a mother, in the eyes of all the other liars you walk around the earth with. God! God help us all!”
Sonia feels one with the S-shaped chair. She thinks it’s actually made for pregnant women. Or maybe, it’s made so that a pregnant woman can never get up from it. The thought of getting up seems impossible. And the view of Philbert, as he walks slowly around—entrances her. She says. “Actually, I don’t appear fit to be a mother anymore. I’ve left my family. And a friend called social services on me. Or someone who used to be a friend.”
“You’ll go back. You’ll keep playing the charade. You’ll slime your way back into it. I don’t doubt that for a minute.”
This is what he says to her, after letting her into his home. Her back is relaxed now—this is so much better than the car—her legs up on the curve of leather, a cup of water in her hand.
He gets up and walks away from Sonia, he turns his glowing black eyes away, and for a moment she can really breathe. The air comes in, the air goes out. She looks at the back of his head and it is virtually a nest, gray and black dreadlocks crisscrossing about in a thick clump, with rivers and valley forming in the mass. Animals live in that hair, thinks Sonia, on his scalp, feasting on the flesh of his head. He disappears into another room and she can hear water run. Hear the click of a gas stove being turned on.
Her mouth is dry despite the water. What she really needs to do is drink oil. She is so happy to see this man. This was what the whole trip was about. Seeing him. And she hadn’t known that until now.
She says, “I love my children. I love having children. We are biologically programmed to have children. I became fixated on it at a certain point and I have no regrets. You call yourself an adult and you question my maturity to bring children in the world and yet someone took a chance and gave birth to you. You, who’s never humbled yourself to be a parent. Because being a parent is about humility. And about not being so self-absorbed anymore. Humility is a good thing. Even in the face of art. You think you’d be out here in fucking Wisconsin if you had kids? Fuck. You’d be the most famous painter in New York. Your art would have transcended itself. You would have been more of a person, and therefore, more of an artist. You’re just bitter. And wrong. Not having children is like not passing puberty. Not having children is like not ever getting a job. It is, it is all that … and so much more. Not having children is missing the most sacred transition in life, from child to adult. It’s like not dying, like not being born. It is missing the most important stage in life on this planet, the only real stage between birth and death, the two stages that are forced upon us.”
He sits down in front of her on a stool, holding a warm cup in his hands.
“You, you who once believed in free will. You think I don’t remember that about you? I remember things about you because you once had promise. Now you don’t. I look at you and I see it in your eyes. You belong in front of the TV. You belong on a park bench, you belong humped over a stove, cooking a disgusting box of macaroni and cheese. You are over. Your mind is gone. You have no light in your face. None. That wasn’t always the case, you know.”
“How dare you judge me now! I’m pregnant. I’m in a state of change. This is not the permanent me. This is me right now and very soon I won’t be pregnant anymore. The minute this baby drops out of me, I’ll be different. I’ll get a part of me back.” Sonia’s eyes tear with rage.
“A part of you back? And the rest? Where’s the rest go? Into those hungry mouths, all three of them. You choose to raise them, you choose to not have a life. It’s that simple. My mother …”
“Don’t fucking talk to me about your mother.” She spits out, interrupting him. “We are talking about me and I’m not your mother. Not all mothers are the same. To be a mother isn’t to be like all mothers.”
“Fair enough. But you are the one who brought up biology. We are not biology, Sonia, you fool. We live in a time where we have technologies to make choices. You chose to have kids.”
“I realize that.”
“And this talk of humility. What is that? That humility can only be experienced by a parent?”
“A certain kind of humility, yes, I think can only be experienced by a parent.” She puts both her hands on her stomach. The baby feels her agitation. It’s moving, visibly too, she looks down and can see her stomach move, and her hands feel it and a part of her wants Philbert to feel it, how amazing it is, to have a growing human inside you.
“Must you make it a special club, with special privileges, is that the only way to survive this horrible thing, being a mother? Pretend it’s something that it’s not? And you contradict yourself. Not all mothers are the same. But all mothers experience profound humility. So that is sameness. And so then I am right. And I have every right to compare you to my mother. You know what humility did to her? It made her nothing. It made her a sorrowful, bored, and mediocre person. She will get into heaven easily, but at what cost?”
“You don’t believe in heaven, Phil, remember?
And humility doesn’t have the same effect on everyone. I am humble in front of my canvas. How’s that? I worship art like you will never experience. I need it more now than ever before, I need it for an escape from my life. You, you don’t know what need is. Your whole fucking life is a luxury. I need art. You just live it. Just wait. Just stick around. You’ll see.”
“You and canvas? What canvas? When was the last time you were in front of a canvas?”
She’d told him she hadn’t been painting. She regretted that now. “The fucking canvas of my mind is rich. And soon enough, I’ll be in front of a real one. So I don’t get to be a young artist. Fine. But I’m going to start painting the minute this baby is out of me. So I don’t get to be a young artist.”
“You were once. You gave that up.”
“Youth is overrated in art. We might look better in the magazines, but very few people make interesting art before their forties.” Sonia had thought these very thoughts before, when Tom was born. When Mike was born. But then, it had been thirties, not forties, that had been the time when artists become interesting.
“Yes, you’ll start painting and later, I’ll be young again. I’ll be able to fuck like I used to fuck! Like I used to fuck you.” He smiles at her and even though ten years have passed, she realizes he hasn’t changed, despite his admitting he couldn’t fuck like he used to. He retains some sharpness, something youthful, that she knows is gone in her. He looks like sex—how men his age could do that, amazes her. His crazy hair, his eyes so alive, his lips hanging from his mouth, the memory of those lips on her. She’d fuck him in a heartbeat, although she could just imagine he would never, ever fuck a pregnant woman. “Painting isn’t something you can just pick up later. You used to know that once. You used to know more than you know now. I agree that as an artist ages, for the most part, his work becomes more interesting, but he must first go through all the early stuff, through it in art. Just being twenty or thirty isn’t enough. One must be creating and learning through that time, even if you are just producing a ton of crap.”