Life Drawing: A Novel

by Robin Black

  Except suddenly what should have been easy has become impossible. Everything has become impossible as we sit together, Laine painting her own portrait some thirty feet away. It is unacceptable to leave seeing each other to chance. But to make a date … there is no kidding ourselves. To make a date is to make a date.

  And we do not make a date. But I know that we will make a date. Laine gives me a huge, heart-rearranging hug goodbye; and as I tidy up, forestalling going home; as I walk the six blocks, then add six more; as I eat dinner with Owen; moving through every activity of that evening, that night, the next two days, I am both agitated and disturbingly calm. Because I know what is going to happen. And it scares the hell out of me. But it also feels right. And good. And deserved.

  … And my work is going well. At least I think it is. I hope yours is too and I hope the country life is still good. You have to tell me everything. It’s been way too long. You owe me a full report.

  Love,

  Laine

  Deserved.

  To what exactly had I felt entitled with Bill? There is an answer: Joy. Not happiness, which by that time seemed a fantasy one had to agree to give up in order to keep from going mad. By forty, is there anyone who hasn’t had to recognize that happiness, as understood by youth, is illusory? That the best one can hope for is an absence of too many tragedies and that the road through the inevitable grief be, if not smooth, then steady? Daily life was a pale gray thing, it seemed, and to expect otherwise was to be a fool—at best.

  But there could be moments of joy. And there had been something like joy in those afternoons with Bill and Laine. There had been hours for me so restorative, so critical to my vitality that the thought of never again felt like death. And it had been enough. As long as Laine was there and I could have her as my protégée, my girl, and her father for my partner, it was enough.

  If only time had been forced to a stop.

  We were a distortion of the married couple whose marriage collapses when their child leaves home—as Bill’s to Georgia did not even two years later when their son went off to school. Our child left us and we fell in love.

  By the day of Alison’s arrival, I wasn’t in love with Bill anymore, but I was tender still, tender the way a bruise is tender; and it wasn’t a feeling I wanted that day, a day destined not for melancholy memories, but for the comic if also irritating potential of a new neighbor materialized across the hill. I typed a hasty response.

  So good to hear from you, Laine. The class sounds good. The boy like a good one to dump. Much more soon, I promise. Lots of funny stuff going on here, along with some less funny stuff. I will have to catch you up. All love …

  And then I stopped, just for a moment, before signing Augie, Laine’s nickname for me, born of her refusal when we met to do anything asked of her. “Why call yourself by your second syllable? People should call you Augie. Has anyone ever called you Augie?” No. No one ever had. And no one ever did—except for Laine and Bill.

  “Augie,” I wrote, and pushed send, then returned to my work.

  As if to shock myself back into the project, I picked up an obituary from the pile of papers, John “Jackie” Mayhew, killed at seventeen, in action in France; and I began to sketch his face in charcoal. I got the shape, the wide forehead, balanced by a wide jaw. And I could replicate his eyes, round and a little close together; the small lips, set for the photograph in that serious, straight line. All correctly copied. All distances between the features accurate. But as I drew, I felt the familiar sag of mediocrity travel down my arm, through my fingers, into the charcoal, onto the paper, stiffening my lines, emptying him of life.

  “Of course,” I said out loud, as I viewed the result. “What did I expect?”

  The western wall of my studio faces the pond. The eastern faces our front lawn. If you stand at the corner where east meets north, you can see scraps and pieces of Alison’s property about an acre away through the trees; and as I drew I knew that she was there, that I might see her carrying boxes and who knows what, if I looked. I also knew that if I looked, I wouldn’t stop looking. So, instead of crumpling the sketch, my first impulse, I pushed forward, softening a line here and there with a finger, using my reliable companions, light and shadow, to create more interest in the composition, if not in Jackie Mayhew’s emptied face.

  Owen spotted Alison’s car as he walked back from the barn at around five. I saw him coming, and I stepped away from the studio, through the living room, into the kitchen, to fill him in on the news.

  “What you don’t know,” I told him, “is that she’s a painter who came here in part because apparently we are one of the features of the home. The artist couple next door.”

  “Oh great. That’s just what I want to hear. Maybe we can charge people admission to watch me stare hopelessly at the walls.” He turned on the tap. His afternoon drink of water. I was never sure whether he knew that he filled the same glass each day when he came back from the barn. I stayed silent while he downed it, as though neither of us could speak with his mouth full.

  At fifty-one, Owen had finally lost some of that boyishness. His face, well defined by a long straight nose, a sharp, just barely cleft chin, was acquiring an unmistakable cragginess. The lines on either side of his mouth had deepened, and the light brown of his eyes shined now from below a lowered brow. Though still lean, he had become more substantial in the way some men do, almost as though their bones, not their flesh, have gained heft. His hair, which I had been cutting for years to a running stream of Samson and Delilah jokes, was graying gradually, all over. No creeping silver sideburns, just a lightening from year to year.

  “It’s hotter than hell out there,” he said, as he put the glass down. “We could use a thunderstorm.”

  “We really could,” I said.

  By then it had been about ten months that Owen had been unable to write anything he thought worthwhile. Since his early thirties he’d authored five quirky little books, all published by small presses, all embraced by whatever critics took notice, and, for the most part, all eschewed by all but a couple of thousand readers. His was the sort of career that earns you descriptions like underappreciated and a writer’s writer, serious, significant praise that presents itself tinged with an aura of befuddled disappointment. In the great race of professional life, he saw himself as the ultimate tortoise, waving on multiple hares while hoping for the eventual victory. His share of our income over the years had come from juggled adjunct and lecturer jobs, a bounty of which exist in the greater Philadelphia area—though the word bounty seems wrong to describe something with returns, of money, of prestige, that are so slight. But through it all, for years and years, he kept at it, the teaching, the writing, all with a calm and a confidence that made me feel like a broken barometer as I careened over highs and lows of hope and despair over my own extremely modest professional life.

  But then, the fall before Alison’s arrival, everything for Owen came to a screeching halt.

  The only time I’d felt that sort of vise grip of creative emptiness was the year after I told him about my affair; and it had been easy for me to connect the two occurrences. Over those months, pain had blossomed in me at every waking, a physical sensation in my gut, as though I had swallowed a malevolent flower, responsive to the rise of the sun. Nearly all of my energy, creative and otherwise, went into contending with that ache.

  And my unspoken fear was that Owen’s blockage, years later, also related to that time.

  When I’d told him about Bill, he was already embarked on two simultaneous projects, books four and five, one a collection of essays about his itinerant childhood as the only child of a pair of married archaeologists, the other a novel that used related material, reimagining a particular summer afternoon of his mother’s life, early in her career, on a dig in Morocco. Both projects were shelved for some months while we thrashed through whether to stay together, but then, once the decision was made, though I found myself creatively stilled, he went right back to work.
Those books kept him busy through our sudden affluence and our first years in the country. When they came out they were praised to the sky by critics in obscure literary journals, and barely sold—just like all of his previous work. I never understood it. I loved it all. The gentle, acute sensibility, the quiet passion for getting things right; while at the same time, evidently, poignantly doubting that such a task is possible. Whenever I read his work, I thought that all his readers must fall in love, and maybe all of them did, but for reasons that eluded me there never were very many in that group.

  Then, soon after the double publication, it became clear that he was struggling to come up with something new. It made sense that there would be a transition lag, but from the start this felt like more than just needing a break between projects. I saw panic in his eyes when he came back in from the barn. Occasionally, it would seem as though he was onto something, for a few days, maybe even a couple of weeks, but then he’d walk into the house with that unmistakable expression on his face. Another project revealed to be hollow. I doubt I’ll ever do anything worthwhile again.

  I was keenly aware that this was the first time he’d had to generate anything new since my telling him about Bill, and it was all too easy for me to believe that a piece of what I had shattered then was a necessary component of his creative being. The betrayer doesn’t get much sympathy, not even from herself, but it is in fact a heavy weight to have hurt someone you love, and it can be difficult even years later, to detect any impermeable boundaries around the damage you may have done.

  We didn’t discuss writing or painting on that day of Alison’s arrival—nor, of course, Laine’s email to me—as together we made a meal of grilled lamb, salad, and rice. By then I knew better than to talk about work, his or mine. Earlier, in the spring, he’d told me it wasn’t helping to have to report in to me every day—his term. So I’d stopped inquiring. And I forgave him the irritation in his voice, the nasty phrase, because I understood the terror that it’s all just disappeared. I felt tempted at times to try and encourage him, to say things like I’ve been there and I came back. You’ll come back too. But I knew it would only irritate him, as it would have me. And it was simply impossible to discuss my own projects, however well or poorly they were going, in the context of a prohibition on mentioning his.

  “Did she say how long she’s staying?” he asked, as we ate.

  “That seems to be unclear,” I said.

  This taboo created a huge chasm in our days, a terrible change in our rhythm. So much of our shared life together, a life that began when I was only twenty-two, had involved processing our work, comparing sorts of creativity, commiserating through lousy days and celebrating triumphs. But that dialogue depended on our both wanting to have it, and he no longer did.

  This wasn’t my first experience living under a regime of unspeakable subjects. I was well practiced. After my mother died, my father mandated that she not be mentioned, so by the time my conscious memory of childhood kicks in, I was already trained to short-circuit the flow between my thoughts and my voice.

  There were very few ways in which Owen reminded me of my father—at certain points just the idea of any similarity would have horrified me—but in fact both had played this censoring role in my life, rendering my speech a kind of topiary, trimmed and trained and shaped to please.

  “I have a terrible headache,” he said, as he put down his fork. “But I don’t think we can blame the new neighbor for that.”

  “Why not?” I asked. “Why not blame her for everything from this point on?”

  Why not, indeed. By then I was more than ready to cast someone else in the role of guilty party.

  3

  During the first week or so of Alison’s tenancy, if we hadn’t known she had moved in, we would barely have noticed she was there—except for the car in the drive. True to her word, she left us alone, and we didn’t hear a sound. The only practical change I made to accommodate her presence was no longer traipsing around my own yard half undressed, and though I complained to Owen about that, it wasn’t, in fact, a big deal.

  But then, one day, she appeared at the kitchen door.

  “Knock, knock,” she called in. “Hallooo?”

  She wore the same purple dress. She looked so exactly as she had, it was as though she hadn’t actually existed during the intermittent days. An apparition. She apologized for intruding, and I shook the apology off, saying something about having meant to check in on her, but … I gestured at the air as if it were crowded with unfinished tasks and obligations. “I’m afraid we haven’t been very welcoming. It’s been an oddly busy time for us.”

  “Actually,” she said, “I’ve come by to ask if you and your husband might come over for drinks one night. Even tonight. Or any night. But please don’t hesitate to say you’re busy. I realize … I know what it’s like to want quiet and solitude. I just thought … Well, I thought I would ask …”

  “And so it begins,” Owen said at dusk, as together we crossed the hill between our homes.

  And so it began.

  Two women and one man, middle-aged, reclining on gaudy, sunflower-patterned vinyl-covered chaise lounges. The porch supporting them is redwood, and has been smacked, ugly, against this dainty old farmhouse. The day is thinning into darkness, the light evaporating, so the fat, green midsummer trees not fifty feet away seem to be receding, excusing themselves from the scene. Only two patches of brightness remain. The spill from the lighted kitchen, some two dozen feet down the porch, and the fluid, silver hair of one woman, oddly immune to the dropping sun, glistening, glowing, like a fallen, restless moon.

  On a table nearby are bottles, alcohol, enough for a party of fifty, as though the other guests have all left. Or as though they have never arrived.

  “I wasn’t sure what you drink, so I just set everything out on the porch.”

  The three people speak quietly, earnestly. They occasionally laugh—but not too heartily. They laugh knowingly. As though they have stumbled over a clue or a bit of evidence or a coincidence. Oh, yes! A laugh of recognition. That is so true.

  Their reclining bodies add an air of intimacy to the scene as the conversation murmurs on.

  “I was twenty-eight when I had Nora. I thought I was very grown-up, which of course I wasn’t at all.”

  “We did a lot of work on the house. We are still doing work on the house. We will always be doing work on the house.”

  “Before my marriage, I planned to be a doctor, but then life had other plans. For better and worse so to speak.”

  “Owen uses the barn. I have a studio inside.”

  Soon, they begin to slap at their skin. Bare ankles. Necks. Occasionally the man claps the air. One of the women makes a quick fist, opens her hand and examines it. The rhythm of this becomes more frequent, until the clapping and slapping, the odd skirmishes with the invisible, are drowning out the conversation. But still no one rises. Not for some time, as the sun drops more decisively and the last traces of color fade.

  “I suppose we could go inside,” the silver-haired woman says. The others look at one another, a question passing between them. “Or you two probably need to get home,” she says. “I don’t want to keep you.”

  “We really don’t need to leave,” the other woman says. “But we don’t want to impose …”

  “Oh no. I would love it if you could stay.”

  They begin to rise, each taking a few bottles from the table, a couple of glasses. They go inside, their arms filled.

  Sometimes, when you do something for the first time, you’re aware it will be the first of many. When I first slept with Owen, I knew. I thought to myself: this will always have been the first time, even when we have had sex a thousand times, a million times, this touch will always have been the first. And this. And this. (With Bill, two decades later, I never had that thought. Every time was to be the last—especially the first time, when I was still comparatively innocent. Just this once. This was a mistake. Never again.)

&
nbsp; “We’ll just go this once,” I had said to Owen, when conveying Alison’s invitation. “Just to get it over with.”

  But I had been talking about a reality that evaporated right away.

  Her kitchen floor had the same terra-cotta tiles as ours, but cracked and broken along the edges. And her appliances looked very much like the ones we had replaced. Too old to be in good working order, too new to be vintage. We’d dumped the electric stove in favor of propane, but she still had those awful black coils. Yet there were some nice things about the room, things more intrinsic than old appliances or shoddy tiles. The windows were much larger than ours, and I spotted a massive walk-in pantry that I immediately coveted.

  “How much of the furniture is yours?” I asked as Owen and I sat at the oak drop-leaf table.

  “Almost none,” she said. “Nothing in here. It’s an odd array too. Some very nice pieces and then some absolute bombs.”

  “This kitchen is lovely though,” I said. “Great bones.”

  She made us spaghetti as we sat bemoaning the bug bites we now had, all of us saying what a lovely evening it had been, meaning the beauty of the fading light and the mild air, meaning that the beauty had seduced us from worries about being eaten by mosquitoes; meaning too, how surprising, how fun.

  We all offered more scraps of information about ourselves. A quilting circle of sorts, putting it together. We knew by then that Alison had been divorced for two years—and that there was something ugly there, though she didn’t go into detail. We knew that she had lived in Boston for the past nineteen years, but was originally from London, and had spent some of her twenties in DC. “I hear this is a big country, but I only managed to get from one end of the Northeast Amtrak corridor to the other in nearly thirty years.”

  We learned that she worked as a high school science teacher at a private school, initially for the tuition break for her daughter, just graduated from Tufts—Laine’s age, I realized.