Light of Day

by Jamie M. Saul

  There were days when she would dress up in makeshift costumes and do quick self-portraits; stretches of time when she was so engrossed in her work she missed supper three nights in a row. Time itself seemed to belong only to her. She said the feeling was liberating.

  She told this to Jack when she came back to the loft on Crosby Street, not immediately, not when she walked in that night. Danny was still awake and he jumped around and tugged on her arms, pulled on her sweater, burrowed his face into hers, sat in her lap and kissed her face. She clutched him and smelled his hair and his skin. She called him “my darling little boy. My angel baby.” When she raised her face she was crying.

  “Are you sad, Mummy?” Danny wanted to know.

  “I’m very happy.”

  “Why are you crying?”

  “Sometimes when you’re happy you cry tears of joy. And tears of love.”

  Danny stayed up with them until midnight bouncing around and tugging on Anne; acting shy, then acting bold; watching Anne unpack her clothes while she told Jack about Yaddo, about the people she’d met, the conversations she’d had at breakfast, at cocktails in the evening with other artists and writers.

  She lay in bed with Danny and told him a story about tigers and bears that danced and played musical instruments, and which ended with her giving him a tin tiger that played the cymbals and a little tin bear that banged a tiny drum. She hadn’t forgotten to bring Danny his surprise.

  Jack never felt closer to Anne than he did the night she came home and Danny fell asleep with his tiger and bear and later when they sat together on the floor. The loft seemed to have been another place without her, a different place, and she had restored it.

  Anne said, “I missed you very much. I want to tell you everything.” She pulled herself close to him. Her hair fell across her eyes when she leaned forward and rested her face against his face and whispered, “I always want to tell you everything.”

  She told him that it was so quiet up there at night she got lost in the silence, that in the morning the air smelled like damp cedars. She curled her feet under herself and described the way the light broke over the windowsill in early afternoon, “like a satin drape,” and how each day the sunset shifted a little further to the north “and the day lasted that much longer.”

  They sat at the table and drank two bottles of wine that Jack bought just for Anne’s homecoming, Margaux ’81—Danny’s year—and ate a lot of rich food.

  Anne asked, “Was it much trouble, taking care of Danny without me?”

  Jack said it was no trouble at all.

  “Were you able to do anything?” She was talking about his writing.

  He said he’d written two pieces for American Film. She said she was looking forward to reading them. He said he wanted to see the work she’d done.

  She spread the drawings on the couch and floor. He told her they were bright and whimsical. “I like the way you’ve gone back to using the blank spaces.”

  She laughed softly. “I thought about that while I was working. An homage to our first year at Loubressac.”

  They made love quietly in the dark, Anne pulling Jack deep inside her.

  She touched his neck with the softness of her lips. She whispered, “Your skin smells like Jack Owens.” She whispered, “I love being close to you.” They took comfort in the familiarity, the sureness of the way they held each other and moved together. Their intimacy excited them.

  In the morning, Danny found them awake, sitting on the floor in their bathrobes. He rolled onto Anne’s lap and laughed for no apparent reason. He pulled on Anne’s ears. He squeezed her chin with his small fingers.

  “You’re happy to see Mummy, aren’t you,” Anne said to him.

  Danny didn’t answer, only buried his head in the crook of Anne’s armpit.

  “I think he’s happy,” Anne said, and caressed the top of Danny’s head.

  After they’d had breakfast with Danny, and Madeline had taken him uptown to visit his grandparents, Anne sat on the windowsill in the kitchen, her back against the glass pane. She told Jack, “I thought being away like that would, I don’t know, ease the feelings I had, make everything seem less imminent.” She shook her head. “Imminent isn’t the right word. I thought I’d catch up with myself, or slow down, or get ahead. I wanted everything to change. But nothing’s changed.”

  Jack was leaning against the wall, maybe he’d gotten up to get a cup of coffee or put something in the sink, but now he was leaning against the wall, looking at Anne framed against the gray light and the brown bricks of the warehouses across the street. She was wearing a dark green sweater and jeans, her feet were bare. It made him think of the time he’d seen her sketching by the ruins.

  She said, “I still feel overwhelmed. I still feel that I have to choose between doing my art and being Danny’s mother. It’s more than a feeling, Jack. It’s a fear.”

  She walked over to him and put her arms around his shoulders. “However,” she said, sprightly, “I think I’ve found a solution. You know what we talked about before I went away? About my taking a small studio somewhere? That’s what I want to do. I really think that should settle things.” She pressed her head against his chest. “I was very confused, Jack, when I left. I cherish my time alone with my work, and at the same time I missed you and Danny so very much and looked forward to being with you both and talking to you about everything. I want it to be the three of us so very much. I think having my own studio will settle everything. I really do.” She looked up at him and the look on his face made her ask, “What? What are you thinking?”

  He didn’t tell her what he was thinking, because whatever it was was not clear to him, and not just then but since she’d gone away, like an object far away at the rim of the horizon whose shape keeps changing, and color, until it seems to vanish entirely into the light.

  All Jack said was, “I think it’s the right thing to do.”

  Anne smiled at him. “Do you really?”

  “Really.”

  She said, “I’m afraid I’m going to need a bit of reassuring,” the way she’d said, “Can we always be like this, loving each other…” all those years ago in the voice which Jack hadn’t understood and which had confused him.

  That June, Anne moved into her new studio. It was a one-bedroom apartment on the top floor of a five-story walk-up on Stanton Street on the Lower East Side. It had plenty of northern light and a view of the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings. She’d found the place through a woman she’d met at Yaddo whose husband had bought the tenement and was selling apartments to artists for fairly reasonable prices. The other nine apartments were already taken when Anne bought hers.

  “There are a lot of conditions to the sale,” she told Jack. “Most of it has to do with capping the percent of profit if I sell, and the stipulation that I can only sell to another artist.”

  Danny was very upset with the move. He was used to Anne working in the loft, being there when he came home with Madeline. Now he stood in the empty space where Anne’s drafting table had been and shivered and wept. Anne tried to assuage Danny’s fears. She explained that the studio was only for work and she’d come home to him every night. She gave him her phone number and told Madeline, “Danny can call me whenever he wants.”

  When Anne took Danny to see the place, he wanted to know, “Will you live here?”

  “No, it’s like an office.”

  “It has a bed,” Danny pointed out.

  “That’s so Mummy can rest if she gets tired.”

  “And a kitchen.”

  “Don’t you worry. Mummy lives with you.”

  “Can I live here with you?” Danny asked.

  They didn’t go to Tuscany that summer. Instead, Anne worked on the new studio, doing a major renovation, transforming the rooms into an art space. She stripped decades of paint off the floors and buffed the original wood to a high sheen. She peeled and sanded the walls and molding in the living room and bedroom, lifting off a century’s wort
h of grime, restoring the plaster to its original state. She removed layers of paint and wallpaper from the kitchen, leaving behind the strata of all the colors and textures that had been applied over the past hundred years, from the first coat of paint to the last, like rings in an old tree, the lines in sedimentary rock, gauging the passage of time, baring decades of humanity.

  She worked tirelessly and alone, and came home exhausted and dirty, but she always woke up in time to eat breakfast with Danny.

  She said it wasn’t her original intention to get so involved, but once she got started the project took over. This was more of an apology than an explanation told to Jack a couple of times a week over the telephone, or when he stopped in to say hello and walk through the plaster dust while Anne showed him all that she’d accomplished, smiling, looking excited while she exclaimed, “I love it here. I really, truly love it here.” Sounding proud of herself.

  Jack said he loved it, too. “This was a great idea. I’m very happy that you bought this space. I’m very happy for you.”

  The other artists in the building came by to admire Anne’s progress, a few were inspired to do similar excavations. By then, it was autumn. Anne was finished with the renovations. She was working in watercolors and tempera.

  But the summer hadn’t been all work. Anne found time in late July to take day trips to the beach with Jack and Danny. They spent a week in Maine visiting Yoshi and Nick.

  In September, Anne spent long afternoons with Danny. Twice a week Madeline brought him to the studio and he would go out for lunch with Anne, just the two of them. On rainy days, they ate lunch inside. Danny napped on the narrow bed. He sat on the floor and played with his toys, talking and singing to himself, talking and singing to Anne. Some nights, Anne came home in time to give Danny his bath and tuck him in. On Sundays she and Jack took Danny to the children’s theater for puppet shows, and for rides on the carousel in Central Park, to his grandparents’ apartment. There seemed to be enough time now, time for work and time for Danny.

  Anne told Jack, “I’m so pleased with the way this has worked out.”

  They had a dinner party for their friends that October. Avril Stone, Brenda Susmann, Steve Morgan, Nan and Barry Roth, Greg Moffit and Louise Crenner, two artists from the Stanton Street building.

  Avril said she was very impressed with what Anne had accomplished. “You make it look too easy.”

  Anne was making it look easy, Jack agreed. He told her so a few nights later over dinner at a little bistro on Grove Street. It was unseasonably cool but the dining room was warm with the aroma of roasted meat and wine. Anne leaned across the small table. Her eyes flashed in the thin stream of candlelight, her cheeks were flushed. “We’re doing all right, aren’t we?” She sounded more than a little surprised.

  “We’re doing all right. You’re making it look easy.”

  “That’s only because I don’t let the sweat show.” She laughed the Carole Lombard laugh, the way she had before she’d ever heard of Carole Lombard; the way she had when they’d sat in the car and looked at the house with the wraparound porch.

  All that month, they both made it look easy. Jack would meet Anne for supper after he was finished teaching. Or they’d stay in her studio, make love on the narrow bed and eat a late meal in Chinatown. Some nights, they would go home together, some nights Jack went home while Anne stayed behind and worked. He would feel her slide into bed just before dawn, curl up against his back and drape her leg over him. She was still getting up to have breakfast with Danny, Danny was still coming to her studio twice a week.

  That January, the Times did a feature in its Home section about Anne’s studio and used photos in a full-page spread. The article talked about how Anne was influenced by “the famous Capp Street Project of San Francisco,” and how she “turned found objects into sculpture: a child’s rusted tricycle, an old boot stuck in a bucket of cement, relics taken from the trash heap of the urban landscape.” The writer called the space “a work of urban archaeology, a postmodern commentary on the constancy of Time and the transitory nature of Art and perception.” He compared Anne to Duchamp.

  Anne had the article framed and hung it on the wall by her easel.

  She was also invited to exhibit three paintings at the Whitney Museum’s Biennial, and was hard at work meeting the deadline. That same month, Danny got sick.

  It started out as one of those colds kids pass among themselves, but then it took a turn for the worse and Danny caught pneumonia. It laid him out and for a while his high fever had everyone worried. Although Madeline was always there, Anne stopped working to stay home with him. She thought up little games to get him to take his medicine. She baked special treats for him. That’s when she made the cutout animals and little puzzles to cheer him up. She’d get him giggling and laughing until she couldn’t help but nuzzle her nose against his and say, “You are my darling little boy. You’re my angel baby,” and a minute or two later Danny would fall asleep. Anne would watch him, sometimes with a look of pity on her face, and sometimes there’d be another look. It was the same expression she showed that night in the cab when she talked about having one foot on the platform and one foot on the train. Then she’d take a deep breath, rub her eyes, and when she saw Jack standing there, grin sadly and shrug her shoulders.

  Danny was always a little disappointed when Jack took care of him at night and on weekends while Anne went to her studio for a few hours’ work. Danny tolerated Jack’s attention but that was all. He wouldn’t go to sleep until Anne called to say good night.

  It was only after Danny got well that Jack realized he’d been worried that it was Loubressac all over again. Which is what he told Anne.

  Anne said, “It was just the opposite of Loubressac, really. I had a difficult time staying away from him.”

  That February, they registered Danny for preschool.

  “I suppose this is some sort of milestone in our lives,” Anne said, “but I don’t—it’s got to be more than waiting for him to grow up, we agreed to that, and I don’t want us to just count the years until we rush him off to college, use him to measure out our lives until he’s gone.”

  “We haven’t so far.”

  “But sometimes, I don’t know—when he was sick, he needed me so much and I had that same feeling I had before Yaddo. I had all that work to do for the Whitney and here Danny was needing me like that. I began to feel—smothered is the only way I can describe it. I had all that work to do and this little boy to take care of and I wanted to do both, no, I had to do both, each had its own imperative, and I felt as if I had to choose between the two.” She was sitting on the couch in her studio. They were listening to Gershwin—there was always music playing in her studio—two new paintings leaned against the wall, a work-in-progress was secure on the easel. Some of her drawings which she’d done at Yaddo and which she’d decided not to sell were framed and hung. She stood up to walk across the room, her shoes were loud against the bare wood floor. “I couldn’t wait to get away. Maybe I just wanted to get away from feeling so conflicted, maybe I wanted to get away from Danny. I don’t know.” She took a deep breath.

  “He’s a little boy,” Jack said. “We’re his parents, for Christ sake. This is what we have to do.”

  Anne turned quickly and looked at him. “Don’t you think I know that? That’s what I’m talking about.” She did not say this argumentatively. “And don’t you think I’m feeling like the most self-absorbed piece of garbage when what I should be thinking about is what Danny’s feeling?” She walked over to the couch and sat down. “Sometimes,” she said, “I’m afraid that he feels things deep down, deeper maybe than he should. And sometimes I’m just plain afraid.”

  It was a damp night with rain in the air, although the predominant odors coming through the windows were exhaust fumes and garbage.

  Anne said, “There are days when I’ll work for hours and hours and not really crack the problem until well after dark, and I stay here all night but I’m always awar
e of Danny, always aware that he’s waiting for me. It’s like he’s here telling me, ‘I need you, Mummy.’ Even when he’s asleep he’s waiting for me, and sometimes I don’t know how to cope with it. Sometimes I find it just makes me feel all twisted up inside, and those times are when I resent him for needing me and resent myself for resenting him.” She wrapped her hand around Jack’s hand. There was green paint on her fingernails. “The other day at his school, when that pretentious Jennie Slackman was explaining how important it was to get Danny comfortable with a ‘learning environment,’ a ‘learning environment’? and all the other mothers were looking so alert, so bloody damned impressed with the place, so bloody boring, chattering on and on about their children, the bores. Chattering and chattering about how important the right preschool is for the right private school and the right goddamned—Preschool. Grade school. And—and I thought, I can’t do this. This is not what I want my life to be, chattering with adoring little mums about their adorable little children. I broke out in a sweat. And at the same time, at the same time I want us to share all of that time with Danny and with each other. I want to share it and I dread it at the same time.” She lowered her eyes and stared at the floor before she said, “And there are times when I listen to him, the time I spent with him when he was sick, and it was like watching him becoming more of his own person, growing into himself, like a little man, and I thought I’d burst apart with love.”

  That’s when Jack told her about his time alone with Danny, about all the incomprehensible things that had happened in their home. That’s when he told her—maybe he’d been waiting for this very moment to tell her—“I feel the same things you do. And I can only wonder what we’d be doing, how we’d be living if we’d—if Danny hadn’t been born. You wouldn’t need Yaddo or this studio. I wouldn’t—Oh hell, Anne, you’re not doing this alone and it isn’t only you.”