At three o’clock Murray, deep in concentration and needing to pee, opened the door of the Portosan and found Leda sitting on the can with a flashlight reading.
She jumped up, although Murray had instantly slammed the dark door.
“I’m so sorry.” He was truly flustered. “I didn’t realize …”
He had certainly seen her pee before, so it had to be her reading that had agitated him. Watching her kill painting time was like seeing her shoot up.
“Not to worry.” She tried to sound chipper as she pulled up her dungarees. “Coming right out.” She emerged, the book behind her back.
She listened to his long urination.
Afterwards, while washing his hands briefly from habit (they of course remained covered with paint), he looked at her questioningly.
She poked at the little piles of paint on her palette with the tips of her brush handles. “Why are you watching me?” she said.
Out of concern, with love, he wanted to say. But out of concern, with love, he said nothing, as though he were dealing with a sensitive adolescent from whom he must keep a respectful distance.
“Don’t you have anything better to do?” she asked.
He resisted saying, I was going to ask you that, and simply nodded.
“Well, fuck off,” she said.
His face darkened.
She blushed, but could not bring herself to apologize. As though it were a gun, she aimed her index finger at him.
Murray had an impulse to slap her, but he stood still, then lifted both hands in a mock gesture of surrender and, although it took him a while to regain his concentration, went back to work.
At four, after he finished for the day and cleaned his paint-flecked eyeglasses with turpentine and washed his sweaty armpits and chest with laundry soap, he asked her if she wanted to talk.
She was standing motionless in front of her easel.
“Maybe you want to walk? Hey, that rhymes.” He smiled foolishly. “Look, I know you’re not seeking advice, but the thing about painting is, you have to create a rhythm for it. It’s rough if you work and quit, work and quit. You have to stay with it almost every day, if only for a little while. The quitting seems to check the flow, and then you have to break through into the rhythm all over again. Having a bad time at the beginning is almost necessary. It’s a struggle and a struggle and a struggle, but if you keep at it right, the struggle can become a dance.”
She burst into tears.
He held her by her shaking shoulders, swayed a little with her.
“I’m not your child,” she said sullenly. They stood eye to eye. “I can’t let myself depend on you as if I were your child.”
“We all depend upon each other,” he said quietly. “Let me see what you have there. I’m sure it’s better than you imagine.”
She shook her head no, but he had already turned the easel toward him. On the smeared canvas were dark wet stains—residue of turpentine—and occasional flecks of dull, dirty paint. And nothing else. She had erased a month’s worth of fits and starts.
He stood beside her dumbly, almost as bereft as she.
During the next few weeks she refused to see him, rarely even picking up the phone, so that he was reduced to leaving notes with her doorman: “You can do it, dear. I have faith in you. Believe in your wonderful self.”
And: “It’s hard to believe in yourself in the beginning. At least believe in my belief.”
He meant what he wrote, but the repetition made him sound evangelical (rabbinical, he supposed), hence suspect. In reaction, he sent her a silent bouquet of blue flowers, and then a drawing of a bouquet of blue flowers. He intended it as an unspoken promise that though she was blue now, she would flower—although he feared he’d gone from too obvious to too subtle.
He wondered did he sound selfless, as if he cared more about her art than about losing her. But he feared that he’d lose her forever if he didn’t get her back to work.
“Look, maybe I’ve ceased being an inspiration to you,” he wrote her. (Was the doorman delivering his fucking notes?) “What about the Art Students League? You need to be with people your own age.”
She mailed him back a two-liner: “The Art Students League is loaded with old codgers. Maybe you’re the one getting sick of dealing with me.”
He thought she might have two points. He stayed away. Made love to his wife, which he did every so often anyway. She was not unwilling; neither was she enthusiastic. They were friends, there hadn’t been passion between them for a long while, not for several years before he’d met Leda. Was Sigrid—dark haired, blue eyed, still a good-looking woman—having an affair? Halevai. It should only be. For a while before they’d met, she’d been with a woman; he’d once timorously suggested a threesome, but she refused. He hoped at least she wasn’t having an affair with a student—that could be dicey, might blow her career wide open.
And her career was flourishing: she was writing her fifth book, she had been interviewed twice on PBS, there was talk of giving her a named chair at Columbia. He loved her enough to be curious about her, but didn’t want to intrude, didn’t want to stir things up. It was selfish of him, he knew: at all costs, he must not jeopardize his work. Which was going well.
But he couldn’t get Leda out of his head. Was it only lust? Well, there was that aplenty. But there was also a tenderness he felt toward her, he liked watching her bite into the brave new world, sour as it sometimes seemed to him. Was she his third daughter? But his daughters, dear as they were, were not artistic types. His world did not excite them. He frankly did not fully understand it, but he ached for Leda in a way that both pained him and made him feel alive. Was he old King David in love with Bathsheba? At least he hadn’t had to murder anyone to get to Leda. At least not yet. He worked, wondered, and waited.
It was two months before she phoned, telling him to ring her doorbell, and then they fell on each other. He tried to hold himself back despite his urgency. She was silent and tense, and downed two glasses of white wine. When she finally came, she wept. “God, I’m a crybaby.” He had an impulse, which he resisted, to cry with her. They napped deeply in each other’s arms. Afterwards she brought out stale whole-wheat crackers and a lopsided chunk of cheddar cheese, the edges of which had hardened. At the thought of the feasts his wife served up, she was downcast. “I haven’t gone shopping much. It’s been a bad time.” She paused. “I’ve been thinking hard about the trouble I have disciplining myself.”
He tried to keep his eyes off her lovely breasts. The sight of the stiff pink nipples started his tongue gliding over his teeth, and—he was delighted to note, although his timing wasn’t good—his cock rising yet again. She was an antidote to middle age.
“I don’t want to sound like I’m on one of those daytime television talk shows,” she was saying, “the ones where the contestants babble on about their troubles—you know, pop-psych shit. But I’m miserable when I’m not painting. Yet at the same time I have this impish feeling, this sort of glee. I don’t know how to explain it, but it’s as if I’m pulling the wool over somebody’s eyes.”
My eyes, Murray wanted to cry out. But he wasn’t going to call attention to himself and his erection.
Lately he had had the frantic feeling she had made him into her jailer. Leave me out of it, he longed to tell her. But he kept silent, the blanket and his hands over his nether parts.
“Even my grade school teachers told me ad nauseam, ‘Why don’t you apply yourself?’ As if I were paint.” She laughed at her own meager witticism. “Look, I think I’m carrying on some kind of lifetime fight with my bossy mother.”
Murray’d met the mother at graduation, a home ec teacher maybe five years older than he. Wearing small gold-stud earrings and a sleeveless black dress, she shook hands forthrightly—she had shapely arms—and thanked him when Leda introduced him as her professor. He felt uneasy about the deception, knew he would not like a fifty-year-old married man shtupping one of his daughters. Later he saw her mother lean over an
d whisper something, to which Leda responded with a vehement—in fact, an indecorously loud—“Will you let me alone, for God’s sake?” The next day Leda told him that her mother had suggested she use the bathroom before the ceremony.
“You’re probably thinking my mother’s not so bad”—was the girl clairvoyant? what else was she aware of?—“and that I am one sick cookie and should maybe see a therapist.” Leda held out her bitten nails and cuticles.
“I wasn’t thinking anything. Of course, if you think therapy would help—”
“No money,” Leda said.
“I could contribute.”
“Ah, so you do think I need it.” She wagged a finger.
He shrugged his exasperated shoulders. “I’m no expert. I know about paint.”
“Anyway, I’m not from the talkers. I’ll lick this. You’ll see.”
She did finish three good paintings that year, a reasonable if not exuberant number, and got two of them into the NYU show. Then, hoping that a new medium might make her pour forth, she turned to collage, and crafted out slowly and painstakingly four pieces (but only four) that were later hung in a gallery in Provincetown, “in the provinces,” as she put it. Murray said she had reason to be proud: she was very young, and someone bought two of the collages, and she was mentioned a few times, favorably, in local reviews. Not everybody …
His career had meanwhile skyrocketed—he’d gotten his solo show at the Whitney, and several of his works had been bought by MoMA. Murray’s fecundity was extraordinary for a careful man. He went so far as to quote Lear, “Ripeness is all,” to show her there was nothing wrong with artists talking a little now and then, and also to assure her that her time would come. She had only to keep working.
Was she jealous?
Yes.
On an unseasonably hot day in May, Murray was driving Leda around the Hamptons in his wife’s brown Volvo (Sigrid was doing research in more temperate Norway—alone?), the two of them looking for a bungalow to rent for a couple of weeks and drinking red sangria out of a gallon thermos—Murray abstemiously, Leda with her usual abandon—and fanning themselves with museum catalogues. On the back lawn of a large estate were bushes, twenty or thirty of them, bursting with lilacs. Nobody seemed to be around, and Murray cut a few sprays of lilacs for a still life. One white bush was stunning, the size of a young tree, but massive, and heavy with sweet, dense clusters of tiny white blossoms, and it had a pure radiance to it, a kind of shimmering white almost hallucinatory brilliance in the hot afternoon. They took a branch or two from several other bushes as well, their flowers exquisitely gradated hues of purple from palest blue to almost black, and just as Leda was about to get into the car—Murray was already in the driver’s seat—she went back across that long long lawn in the heat to the white lilac bush and began cutting off more and more flowers, and then she started stripping the tiny blossoms and shaking the branches with such force that the blossoms came apart and the huge bush seemed to be snowing itself and she tried to cut some more but she was so drunk by then and hot she could hardly handle the clippers, and she began ripping off leaves and branches with her hands.
Murray had to pull her away from the denuded, crippled bush. He hustled her into the car, fished some stained purple ice out of the sangria thermos for her cut fingers. “What’s the matter with you? What is it?”
She felt anxious and frightened and heat dazed and watched him hurriedly cover the back seat and floor of the car with newspapers, then pile in the cut branches and flowers, and gun the car the hell out of there.
“What got into you? We could have been picked up for vandals—which we are.” And he said something about a man his age carrying on with a child, he ought to have his balls examined.
It was getting toward late afternoon and he had her throw the rest of the ice from the thermos onto the lilacs. He bought more ice on the way home—“Are you trying to cool my brains?” she asked him—and she held some chips to her smarting fingers and some on her face and her eyelids and in her hair. But she was never able to tell him why she’d carried on, because she didn’t know; and she laughed uneasily and they drove and after a while she fell asleep.
She awakened as he got her out of the car, walked her to her place, her throat dry, gut uneasy. He stood over her at the kitchen sink, insisting that she drink glass after glass of cold water to avoid a hangover—“Can’t you learn to limit yourself?” And she drank shamefacedly, silently annoyed: You a puritan? A preacher?
That night she twisted the stems and leaves and flowers together and twined them through with clear picture wire and twisted it all around herself down her arms and legs and into a kind of gown or sheath and she looked in the mirror and began to feel better. And that was what she would wear with Murray to a big party that night in the Village—a pale-white silk slip, and then lilacs, mostly white, and nothing else. In the taxi on the way there he fretted aloud about having permitted her to leave the house looking like that—it was mad to go about half naked, even to a gathering of painters and poets.
“Permit me!” she shouted. “Who are you to permit me?!”
She was right, of course, and also he found her beauty so moving merged with all those flowers—and the white strappy slip was something like a (flimsy) dress, after all—that he was incapable, had she permitted him, of standing in her way. Unsubtle as her outfit was, God Himself was not very subtle—look at the Grand Canyon, he told himself, or even the leaves that blazed up every fall in New England.
For a while Leda went to work on her body. She gained ten pounds, she lost fifteen. Every few months she changed her hair color and plucked her eyebrows now this way, now that. He didn’t understand why she was dissatisfied with her natural beauty, but he loved her, cymbals or cello. She modeled for him in all her manifestations and tried to let herself bask in the radiance of his attention. “Your soul glows in you,” he told her once, and for weeks afterwards whenever she felt gloomy, she reminded herself of her lit-up soul.
How a man who never changed a stroke of his painting to please anyone managed to live a double life she didn’t know. He seldom spoke about his wife—to protect her? Which her? She believed he rarely slept with Sigrid (once he let slip that she complained about his bad breath—Leda sniffed prodigiously, but detected nothing) although Leda imagined Sigrid accepted him dutifully when he (dutifully?) offered himself. Unasked, Murray told Leda twice that he would never leave his wife—her mother had died when she was four, and Murray did not think she could survive another abandonment. Hey, my father died when I was twelve, she thought to say, but didn’t, she wasn’t sure why. He also told her that in the twenty-eight years since he’d met Sigrid, he’d never loved anyone as much as he loved Leda. What Murray did not tell Leda, although she had half intuited it, was that he was afraid of her, of her dissatisfactions with herself, of her inability to organize herself, commit herself to her work in a thoroughgoing way. He feared that he might somehow be undone if he married her, his ability to concentrate destroyed.
She was hurt that he didn’t ask her, although she half believed she had never really thought about marrying him herself—he was fifty-one now, and had liver spots on his hands, and was growing ever more orderly. Was she a star fucker? Yes. Yet she’d soothed him through a few bad reviews—it amazed her that he was still so vulnerable to them. Who were the reviewers anyway? Nobodies, she told him, compared to him. Besides running errands and making occasional mediocre meals, she had provided (and received in full measure) steady honest admiration. Truth was, he was the best company she’d ever known; going to a gallery with him was like seeing with five eyes, her two and his three. He was the background music of her life, and the foreground music, although she knew she should be her own foreground music.
Despite the tensions she carried within herself, and the tension that mounted now and again between them, there was often a rush of days when they worked comfortably together in silence and went their separate ways to meet later, a couple vaguely underc
over from the world and from each other, for a late supper at some modest-or-worse Mexican or Chinese place his wife would never frequent. And maybe he’d discuss a Topic with Leda, say, the Jewish attitude to the painted image (although his “raising her consciousness” had begun to grate on her) or they related (carefully) what they’d seen of each other’s work that day and she’d be touched anew by how respectfully he listened to her criticism, as if she might also teach him a thing or two, which she might. Or they would go to the theater if he could get away in time, or to a concert—he loved music. And he felt bad he couldn’t take her out in public more—his photo was regularly snapped nowadays—give her more … At least he would get her to a late-night movie, sometimes two, and then they’d come “home” and make love until three in the morning. He still had considerable sexual stamina and seemed able to awake refreshed after half an hour’s sleep and ride his bicycle home.
Her few remaining friends asked her, though she asked them not to, how about babies, and a man who’d be there at four in the morning to change a diaper? And didn’t she feel guilty toward Murray’s wife, who was old enough to be her mother? She did sometimes, but mostly she tried not to think about her. It made Leda feel like a shit. Well, he was the one who should feel like a shit, not Leda.
One day when Murray was in Paris with his wife for an opening, Leda met a medical student in the emergency room where she’d gone to get a splinter taken out of her foot. As he leaned over her, the smoothness of the skin of his hands and the tightness of the flesh of his chin and neck affected her powerfully. In bed his taut shapely rump delighted her, and she never once closed her eyes, came with them wide open, so she could keep seeing him. Although she refused to go out with him again, she dreamed several times of his well-muscled thighs and upper arms.
Six months later, when Murray and Sigrid had gone to Barcelona for yet another opening—was he wearing the gold cuff links Leda’d given him? she didn’t want to think about it—Leda picked up a young dentist in Washington Square Park. Well, he was technically a dentist, he explained to her, although not yet practicing—he was studying to be a periodontist. He wore shorts, and had swarthy, dark-haired legs and a lush summer wilderness of black hair that curled onto his shoulders. His name was Rafael, and Leda was sitting in bed kissing the forest on his head when the doorbell rang.
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