by Robin Black
It does indeed sound sophomoric, she thinks as she draws. It sounds as though she is playing word games in the territory of third-rate philosophy. But then George would see past that. He would. He would recognize that underlying all these musings on time and death and portraiture, pretentious as they might seem, she is struggling.
The two hours quickly pass. It is a luxury indeed to work in silence, she decides.
HOWEVER IT BEGAN, it didn’t go on for long. Not then.
George made his decision in early August of that year. August 1979. He would stay with Janet. He would end the affair.
Only six months in. That was it. No amount of time at all.
But long enough. Long enough to have given Clara Feinberg a glimpse of joy.
For the good of the children.
The phrase covered her heart like a shroud.
THAT AFTERNOON, heading home, Clara spots Harold in the bakery where she’s stopped to buy bread. Harold, of all people. It shouldn’t be a shock. He’s lived fairly close for years. But it is a shock, and the sight of him brings on a kind of exhaustion. Here is something else to do, another piece of history to navigate.
She taps his arm, tugs gently at the navy cloth of his storm coat. He turns toward her, a look of confusion in his eyes; and then surprise, then something strangely like gladness.
“Clara!”
“Hello, Harold.”
Leaning in, he kisses her on the cheek. Like an old acquaintance, she thinks. As though there had never been any passion, nor love, nor rage, nor anything much, just some traces of innocuous familiarity between them. Live long enough, it seems, and every fire can burn itself out.
His narrow, gaunt face looks thinner than ever. His cheekbones jut out under ruddy skin, mapped with purple capillaries. Drinker’s skin. How long since they’ve seen each other? More than a year. Since the newest grandchild arrived, and they stood together, side by side, compatibly squeamish and tipsy at the bris.
“How are you, Harold?”
“Oh, you know. Not bad. I’m doing fine. Not bad at all. Given everything.”
“That’s good,” she says. But she wonders. He looks like an old man, to her—every day of his seventy-four years. Much older than George ever did. His posture seems a bit crumpled. And his brows have grown so bushy that if she were still his wife, she decides, she would insist that he deal with them—somehow. If necessary, she would cut them herself, in his sleep. She finds it ridiculous the way they trail down over his eyes, so one has to look at him as though through an upside-down, overgrown hedge. She wouldn’t be able to live with them, she’s sure. For a moment, she is sure. But then something else occurs to her. Maybe she would love them, she thinks. If she still loved him. Maybe she would want him as he is.
It’s a painful thought. The ravages of time rendered irrelevant by love. It’s something she will never find again, she understands.
As she and Harold exchange fragments of information about their children, each buys a baguette—his sourdough, hers not. Did she hear that Ellie’s youngest won a statewide spelling bee? Does he know that Daniel is considering a move back East? Yes. Yes. It seems they’ve been told the same things. This is their peculiar mix of intimacy and distance. In many ways, it is the opposite of the mix she shared with George, their families separate, themselves so intertwined.
In the bakery doorway, as they part, they chat a little more about the children before he mentions George. “Terrible news about George, wasn’t it? George Cooperman? You heard, I assume?”
Clara nods. “Yes. I heard.”
Her voice is steady, though she feels many kinds of unease. Not only the opened wound; there is an ancient, weary guilt at work here, too. Because Harold never knew a thing. Not back then, and surely not when she and George started up again. It was always Harold in disgrace, Harold who had cheated, Harold who had skulked around the outskirts of her life, hangdog for years and years. Clara was the injured party. Always. Clara was deserving only of sympathy and only Harold deserving of contempt. It’s a hook she’s never let him off—in part because she’s never trusted him with the information, and in part because she’s never quite wanted to let him off that hook.
“Poor old George,” Harold says.
“Poor old George,” she echoes.
“I don’t suppose you’d have dinner with me sometime?”
“What?” But she’s heard him, of course. “Dinner? When? What’s the occasion?”
He frowns, and the eyebrows lower, threatening to obscure his eyes entirely. “No occasion,” he says. “Just feeling a bit lonely. Everyone seems to be dying. Maybe that’s the occasion.”
After a moment, she nods. “Yes. We could have dinner. I suppose. I don’t have my book with me, though.”
He’ll call, he says. Maybe they’ll find a night next week. And then, somewhat awkwardly—a peck on her cheek, a few more mumbled words—they part at the doorway, walking in opposite directions toward their homes.
The weather has turned, and freezing rain begins to fall, stinging Clara’s face. It’s a typical November sensation, a time of disheartening weather, disheartening events. The month of her wedding, back in the dark, dark ages. And also of her miscarriage, between the children. And then of her divorce—not the final papers, but the true dramatic end, Harold’s two suitcases stuffed with random underclothes and shirts, his MacArthur-like stance on their front porch. I shall return! Oh no. No, you will not.
As she turns onto Spruce, hurrying past the brown-stones, she wonders what it would be like to tell him everything, finally. She could write him a letter now that she’s taken up letter writing. Dear Harold, There’s a little something that you don’t know…
He would hate her, she decides. It might be the generous, right thing to do. It would even up the score in a way. She’s no better than he. She and George both. Not just years ago, but then again, their shared secret life, for the past five years. Harold would hate her—not for the love affair, but for the smarminess with which she’s treated him all this time. He would be entitled to. He might even tell the children. He might tell Janet, drinker that he is. He wouldn’t be able to keep it to himself.
It would do more harm than good, she decides.
IT BEGAN AGAIN, the second time, with a chance encounter at the funeral of an old friend. Millie Davidson, a woman in the same set back in the suburbs all those years ago. Clara attended alone, but sat in the church beside Harold, and soon spotted the Coopermans a few pews away.
It was hardly the first time she’d seen them since the summer of ’79. There had been years still to get through of living close by, of having their children sing in school concerts together, running into one another at the grocery store. There had been one high school graduation they had all attended—Ellie and the middle Cooperman boy.
The encounter, inevitable, took place in the vicinity of the receiving line. The four of them stood in a group—she and George, she and Harold, George and Janet—the four of them and the weights of history and secrets and judgments and of so, so many forms of love abandoned now, all crowded in together, in the cool of this church.
She didn’t look at the others, not really, just in a fleeting, disconnected kind of way. She listened to the words that seemed to float among this uncomfortable quartet, and contributed a few. She engaged only enough to be attuned to the proper moment to say her goodbye, not so soon as to be rude, not long enough for ancient pains to surface. She made her excuses and walked alone outside, into the air and light.
But then he called her that night. More than two decades after the fact. He called to say he’d like to get together for lunch, that he expected her answer to be no, that he knew she would say no. But then look at poor old Millie, he said. Look at them all. How much time did any of them have? He’d decided it was a call he had to make. He had to try.
He said nothing about his emotions. The word love did not come up. And if it had, she might well have said no. That word would almost certainly have
angered her—after twenty-one years. But he didn’t say love; he said lunch. And she said yes.
JOHN PARKER IS wearing a soft gray suit and a pale blue tie. This is the outfit in which his wife wants him immortalized. She’ll probably have him buried in it too, Clara thinks. It’s the third session, the third week, and she’s almost finished with the initial oil sketch.
She’s asked him to look toward her, to stare directly at her as much as he can. It isn’t often that Clara paints a subject with his eyes engaged like this. She’s never been all that interested in the kind of portraiture that results in a viewer trying to read the expression, the Wow, it really looks like he’s looking at me pictures, as she called them to George. This is part of what George found so characteristic of her, about her work, this slight sense of disengagement. “You see, they’re always looking someplace else. Because Clara herself prefers to keep her distance from most of the world.” But in this case, she early on decided that the only route through that dullness she detected in John Parker, back to whatever had preceded it, would be through his gaze.
Fifteen minutes or so into the session, his stare shifts away. “I’m sorry,” she says. “Could you just look here again? It won’t be long.” And obediently, silently, he does.
She’s become quite engaged in this portrait of John Parker. There’s a challenge here that interests her, in large part because she’s become convinced that there’s something wrong with the man, something desperately wrong. He’s lost, and growing more lost by the moment. That’s what the eyes of her painting will show, she hopes, a man in the process of becoming lost.
Possibly, she thinks, this is just another portrait George would characterize as disengaged. The direct gaze there, but the response it will elicit not It really looks like he’s staring at me but Where has he gone?
Alzheimer’s, maybe. Some other form of dementia, perhaps. The wife has said nothing, though Clara suspects she knows. Or perhaps, she herself suspects and doesn’t want to know. It explains the protectiveness, and also this late-in-the-day desire to capture him in oils.
He himself has spoken very little, silence remaining his dominant mode, and what he has said has had a fragmentary, illogical quality to it. The early comment about his wife, a couple of sentences about a case on which he worked when he practiced law God knows when.
Behind her easel, Clara is distinctly clinical in her response to him, her sympathies taking a distant second to her interest in capturing the image of someone so caught up in a process. To convey that sense of transition and not merely try to characterize the man seems to her to be an infinitely compelling task. She has had other subjects whose bodies and faces seemed defined by sadness, but this is something else. This has become, for her, a portrait of time itself. The past, represented in the identity he is losing. The present, there in the glimpses still of someone trying to remain. And the future, well, the future is all too evident in the man.
The desire to talk with George about this particular portrait has grown strong, strong enough to be painful. In these last two weeks, it has become the focus of her missing him. His absence is woven throughout her life. It is there, of course, in her bed, where they made love, and talked for hours on end. In her living room, as well. On certain streets where they would walk together. In the restaurants they frequented, to which she doubts she will return. But the pain of losing him, finally, this time, not in some way that can itself be fixed by time, has coalesced around her longing to talk to him about this.
John Parker’s gaze shifts again, but Clara says nothing. She has had enough of it herself for today, enough of that unmoored stare of his.
WHEN IT BEGAN AGAIN, it was as though no time had passed. And yet, in some ways, those twenty-plus years had changed everything. He would leave Janet now, he said. He didn’t like the thought of hurting her, but he would do it. He would marry Clara. Maybe too little, too late, he said. He would, though. He was serious.
But Clara said no. She listened, noted his sheepish demeanor as he spoke; a marriage proposal, after all these years, the articulation of her own fantasies from the past. And then she said no. She had no interest in getting married. She preferred to live alone. She had come to value her independence. She now needed more solitude than a marriage would allow. The whole discussion took less than ten minutes. How funny it was. The very thing that had broken her heart, now no longer wanted. A trick of time.
It was time too that made them able to justify all of it, to themselves. Time and death. Life so short, eternity so long. That and the decision that what Janet didn’t know, et cetera, et cetera. He had looked at Millie’s coffin, that April day. He couldn’t do it. Couldn’t face eternity without this. Without her.
He was late getting there. But he wasn’t too late. They could have something still.
HAROLD HAS CHOSEN a restaurant Clara doesn’t know, somewhere dark and clubby, up near Market Street. He’s a regular, it seems. The waiters call him Mr. Feinberg and suggest foods they claim to be certain he would like if he would only try something new.
She watches his banter with them, and she tries to imagine herself as his wife. It would be forty years. Forty years this very month. She tries to imagine that they are married and they have gone out to dinner, in this place where he is a regular. This is the life they had planned, after all. They took vows, swearing to live this life. So, they’ll meet for this dinner and talk about their day apart. And then they’ll leave and head together to their home, where they’ll switch on the lights, read their mail, share a nightcap, perhaps, brush their teeth. Then they’ll undress. They’ll climb into bed. Their bed. Maybe they will make love, and if so, they will see each other forgivingly, as she and George did. Eyebrows and all.
Harold orders steak and the waiter smiles, teasing that someday they’ll get him to change his predictable ways. Someday. She orders lamb. They’ll both have Caesar salads, an afterthought. Each of them already has a hefty scotch on the rocks, not an afterthought at all.
“Health,” Harold says, lifting his glass.
“Health,” she responds, and they clink. It sounds a little bleak, she thinks. The bar has surely been lowered, if health is now the most for which one can ask.
“This last one was the worst,” he says, and she has no idea what he means. She raises her own brows in a question. “George,” he says, then takes another sip. “Jesus, I’m seventy-four years old. I should be used to people dying. But I’ll miss him, that’s all. And it was so fucking sudden. Now you see ’em, now you don’t. Hell of a game we’re in.”
Clara looks down at her drink, and at her hand wrapped around it. There’s a speck of light blue paint on the knuckle of her index finger, a trace of John Parker’s tie. The ice cubes, hollow cylinders, are melting quickly, the whiskey near them at the top lighter in color than that below. “I had no idea that you and George were in touch,” she says, as she shakes the glass gently, so the amber of the liquid evens out.
“George and I? Oh, yes. For some years now. We were close, I’d say. I suppose that after enough time, all that ancient business, well…”
She had kept the Coopermans in the divorce, but apparently something else happened after that. “And Janet?” she asks, looking up. “Are you and she also close?”
He shakes his head. “No. No. No, indeed. Janet would never have a thing to do with me. I attained permanent pariah status, there. Loyalty to you, I suppose. I was never welcomed back. Didn’t even go to the funeral. Didn’t think she’d want me there. You?”
“No,” she says. “I didn’t go. She and I haven’t spoken in years.”
The waiter has appeared with their salads. It takes some time for him to leave, as Harold decides on a glass of wine, and Clara declines one.
It’s ridiculous for her to feel anger at George, she knows, to feel betrayed. But she does. How could he have rekindled a friendship with Harold, after what Harold had done to her? She wants to ask him—to ask George. How could he have said nothing to her? She
wants to dial him up and have him explain this, have a fight about it, if it comes to that.
“They make a good Caesar here,” Harold says. Lifting her fork, Clara forces herself to take a bite. “The thing about George,” he says, “the thing I’ll really miss, is that clarity of his. You remember? That way he had of just seeing a thing for what it was.” He’s chewing as he speaks, wipes a bit of dressing off his lip with the back of his hand. “Maybe I’m just a grouchy old man, but it seems to me there’s even more bullshit around than there used to be. But not with George. Clear thinker. Straight shooter. It always surprised me, because in general I think of psychoanalysts as slippery characters. But not George.”
It is unbearable.
“Harold,” she says, putting down her fork. “There are things you don’t know.” He is looking directly at her. “Things about George.” she says. “He and I were…”
We were lovers. Twenty-six years ago, after I threw you out. And then, again, for the past five years. He was, he is, the love of my life. He was, he is, the only possible reason a woman of my cynical nature would ever think to use a phrase like that.
“He was a good man, Clara. Wasn’t he?” Harold lifts his wineglass. “To George Cooperman.”
“We were lovers.”
And so. It is done. She sees that Harold’s face has stilled. He is as still as a portrait, as though she has painted him with this news. Seconds pass.
“When?” he finally asks.
When? It is always about time, she thinks. Why does it matter when?