Life Drawing: A Novel

by Robin Black

  I had been given another chance. Again. We had been altered. Again. And we would go on. Again. Somehow.

  “We are a life’s work, aren’t we?” Owen had asked.

  A life’s work indeed. The work of life.

  I took the canvas of Jackie playing chess, the very first one I had started, and I began to paint a shadowy portrait of another Jackie Mayhew over the one already there. Jackie in clothes a boy his age might have worn. Long wool pants. Suspenders. I covered parts of his uniform entirely, a white buttoned shirt obscuring long swaths of khaki, but I let the uniform bleed through his clothing at other points. Then I imagined a younger Jackie Mayhew, truly a boy, and made sketches of that face to layer into the one already there.

  How do any of us walk across a room without tripping over our own multitudes? I’d wondered that at Thanksgiving, my arms still alive with physical, forgotten memories of another self.

  It didn’t matter to me that night that the painting’s message could be seen as simple. Maybe to paint young dead soldiers is necessarily a simple thing. Maybe the depiction of tragedy is just that and should never be made more complicated. There really wasn’t much complicated to say about a boy being blown up at seventeen.

  But the boys themselves deserved better than simplicity. They needed to be, as they were, as we all are, layers and layers and layers of selves. I doubted it would ever be a great painting, but that was what I could give them. That was what I was capable of bringing to their figures, this total and complete absence of precision. The mess and contradiction of what every human being is.

  I painted until I could barely stay awake, and then I stumbled my way upstairs.

  I’d only slept an hour or so when Owen woke me with the news that Nora had left in Alison’s car during the night, without a word. Alison was frantic, he said. Nora had been in a state. All of it had fallen onto the girl: my anger, Owen’s pity, her own humiliation. And then Alison had been furious with her, too. Whatever united front she’d constructed for my benefit, she had let Nora have it for betraying her confidence.

  All this, while I still lay in bed, Owen snatching his wallet off the dresser, putting a belt into his pants. “Alison’s hysterical,” he said. “She’s convinced Nora’s going to do something stupid.”

  I offered to go over.

  “Not a good idea,” he said. “She isn’t thrilled with me, but I didn’t call her daughter a cunt and tell her to go fuck herself.”

  I asked if there was anything I could do. “She’ll turn up,” he said. “She’s not as fragile as Alison thinks. She’s not as young as all that. Not in every way.”

  “Good,” I said. “I’m sure you’re right. Where are you going?”

  “I’m just going to drive around a bit. See if I can find the car. Maybe at a motel. It’s cold as hell. She has to be somewhere.”

  “What about her father’s? She could have gone there.”

  “Alison called. She isn’t there. And not with any of the friends Alison knows. Okay,” he said. “I’ll be back in a bit.”

  “Good luck,” I said. “I hope you find her. Safe and sound.”

  He didn’t find her, and she didn’t call. By nightfall Alison had phoned the police but it was too soon for anything official to be done. Maybe if Nora were younger, but a twenty-two-year-old who skips out for a day? They told her it happens all the time.

  Owen went out looking again that night. When he came back, it was to our bed.

  “No luck?”

  “No luck.”

  I asked him again the next morning if he was sure I shouldn’t go see Alison, certain that I really wasn’t welcome, but the answer was the same. She blamed me for what had happened. She blamed herself too, but mostly she blamed me.

  “She doesn’t blame you?” I asked. “For encouraging Nora?”

  He had been kind, maybe too kind; but kind. I had been vicious.

  By the third day, the police were involved and had set up an alert. Owen divided his time between driving around every morning—to where, I couldn’t imagine—and then keeping Alison company. Alison, who by his account was almost too distraught to breathe. I would watch him walk over the snowy hill to her house and then a couple of hours later watch him come home, grim-faced, somber. I wondered if he adjusted his expression to something less frightening when he was walking toward her, just in case she was watching, trying to gauge his concern. He’d told me that all he did was keep reassuring her that things would be okay, but that really he was just there to distract her for a short while, until she wanted him back out searching again. “I tell her it would be different if she had been kidnapped. She’s just run away from home. And she’s fully capable of taking care of herself. She’s not a child.”

  I didn’t ask him if he believed that. And I didn’t ask him whether if she had leapt off a cliff somewhere, he too would blame me. I knew the answer. He would blame us both.

  For three days, everything stood still. Everything except worries and searches and worst-case-scenario nightmares. And then on the fourth day, she called. Just like that. Owen was at Alison’s when her cell phone rang. It was the father’s number. Nora was there. She was sorry. She had needed to hide out for a while, to get her head straight. She’d been staying with a friend Alison didn’t know. She knew it had been wrong. But it hadn’t occurred to her that anyone would think she had killed herself. They’d been drunk pretty much the whole time. She just couldn’t face anyone. Not even Alison. And she was never coming back there. Obviously. But she was safe.

  The police were notified, the search called off. Owen immediately lent Alison our van to go see her. I couldn’t imagine her being in any shape to drive, but I had no role to play. He knew her history as well as I did. He made the choice.

  And then we were alone.

  I will always remember the lunch we had that day as if it were a wedding meal, special enough for every detail to survive, though in fact it was nothing out of the ordinary. A salad and some bread. A hunk of cheddar and a cold chicken breast, sliced and divided between our two plates. Beers for us both. A run-of-the-mill kind of lunch.

  But that isn’t what my memories are like. In memory, each silken leaf of salad shines with a different green, new shades invented just for us; and the bread is symphonic in its textures, revelatory in its taste. The cheese, the chicken, each has somehow been saturated with flavors both comfortingly familiar and exhilaratingly new. We share our bites, we feed each other. And each time the scene is revisited it intensifies, becomes more beautiful, this simple meal of ours.

  The crisis had passed. Nora’s crisis, yes, but more than that. Somehow in the hysteria and the fear, our old selves had emerged, recognizable, waiting for us like well-worn clothes into which we could step. Owen. My husband. The man with whom I had built a life and then destroyed it and then rebuilt it and then almost destroyed it again. Just Owen. The man whose body had memorized my own, whose heart had expanded to match the demands of mine. How long had it been since the last time I had felt this peculiar, familiar sensation of being alone by being together?

  I knew exactly how long.

  “Do you think Alison will ever come back?” I asked.

  “Just for her things,” he said. “To return the car, I guess. She’ll have to. Unless she sends a friend.”

  I wanted to say, It’s over, isn’t it? All of it. We’re back to normal, aren’t we? But I was worried that if I pushed too hard for reassurances, he would feel a need to withhold.

  “It probably won’t be tomorrow,” I said. “I can’t see her rushing back.”

  “Who knows? I’m just glad they’re both okay. And I’m glad they’re both gone.”

  And then we talked about the house. Our house. About a shingle that had come loose over the past couple of days, flying onto the snow where it lay, a strangely regular black square in an otherwise wild landscape. And we finished our beers. And he said he was heading out to the barn and I said I would work for a bit and he touched me on my shoulder
as he left.

  I heard the car, then saw it, but didn’t recognize it until Paul got out. I couldn’t think why he was there, parked in our drive, but I felt immediate fear. He left the door open and went straight for the barn, his body taut with intent. I grabbed my cell and called 911 as I ran outside. “There’s an intruder, an attacker,” I said. “Send someone quick.”

  But when I got to the barn, Owen was already down, blood flowing from his head onto the stone floor; and Paul was kicking him. “Don’t you ever fuck with my daughter again. Don’t you ever fuck with my daughter again.” He said it over and over. I ran toward them, tried to stop him, but I was a fly, a flea he swatted away almost casually, though with a force that landed me hard on the floor. I tried again, and again hit the floor.

  “Don’t you ever fuck with my daughter again.”

  “Stop it! Stop it! For God’s sake!”

  Finally I heard sirens and I screamed, “Stop it! The police are here! Stop it!” But Paul didn’t stop until they were practically in our yard. “Well, I guess you learned a lesson,” he said, walking out of the barn, directly into the oncoming officers.

  By then, I was next to Owen, on him, beseeching the heavens to let him be all right, though in my heart I already knew. There was too much blood, the back of his skull shattered, his eyes emptied. An ambulance came, but there was nothing to be done except make it official and then try to calm me down.

  22

  Owen was Owen. Owen was me. I was Owen. And then Owen was gone.

  Owen is gone.

  I remember blood and I remember snow. To those I can attest. The rest I believe, but do not remember. Not with any precision. Of course. It is a story. It is the story I tell—mostly to myself. But also to my father, who lives on and even at times emerges from his haze, like a bashful planet that has been hiding behind its own clouds.

  For about two months after Owen’s death, I didn’t visit my father. I barely left the house at all. But then I began to go see him several times a week, sometimes many days in a row. Jan, who had taken to calling me daily, thought it was unhealthy for me to be with him so much, but I found it soothing in a way.

  And no one was much in the mood to tell me what to do. For those first two months it had been unimaginable that I would ever want to do anything again. I only stared and stared out that window. And I walked around the pond—seven times, fourteen times, twenty-one times. I wept fountains. I stopped painting. For whom would I paint? I barely even ate.

  And I might have disappeared entirely (I can still easily imagine that, imagine myself just fading out of existence) except for Laine, who would not let me go. She came to stay with me in the spring, barging into my life—her word—setting herself up in the room down the hall; and she—her word again—mothered me. And slowly I began to live. “It’s only what you did for me,” she would say whenever I sputtered my thanks. “What goes around comes around.”

  She didn’t ask me many questions, which was just as well as I could never have told Bill’s daughter the whole story. And maybe that was part of why I needed my father’s company, the one person in the world to whom I could, finally, finally, talk about anything.

  So now, I tell him my stories.

  I tell him this story of how Owen died. The way I couldn’t close my eyes for weeks without seeing the black, bloodstained stone. How I clung to him, until they pulled me by my shoulders and held me back. How I screamed as they carried him away; and then for hours more; and then for days. And I tell him about the yellow crime scene tape left across the barn for so long, how the color of it became a thing of fear for me—for me, a painter who until that day had loved every imaginable hue.

  I tell him too about the summer day when I finally reentered the barn, Laine by my side, to look for the work he had been doing, but found nothing there. No files I could identify as significant. No great project. Just the same starts and stops I had known about before. Or, sometimes, when I want it to be a happier story, I tell him about the stunning manuscript I found out in the barn. In one version it’s a book about a man whose heart has been broken; in another, a man who has fallen in love; or a man who strikes out on his own to climb a mountain and begins to see God around him, everywhere.

  I can tell my father anything.

  I tell him, only him, about the email Bill sent, formal in its composition, tender at its heart. I’m so sorry to hear this. If there’s ever anything I can do … And about poor Lillian and Wolf, about the calls I still get from them, and the ones that I make, calls in which we each remember for a time that the other is suffering too, in which we all reach out beyond ourselves.

  And on my darkest days, I tell him the story of the neighbor I let myself love and how, months after Owen’s death, she came asking me to forgive her daughter, pleading that the girl had been punished disproportionately for what she had done. That she shouldn’t have to carry the weight of her father’s crime on her back for all her life. And in one version of the story I forgive them both, explaining to the child that we’re none of us so innocent, that we all had a hand in what happened, that her sins, for all they resulted in tragedy, were everyday, collaborative ones.

  But in another version I only shout at the mother until she becomes frightened and drives away in that reckless, wreck-risking way of hers; then I stand outside my house, just where I met her, wondering if I have become entirely empty inside, a void and nothing more, so much of me spilled out it seems impossible that anything is left.

  On better days, I tell my father how Laine convinced me to paint again, to finish the pictures of the boys, so on Armistice Day that year, all the local families came to see. I tell him how very hard I worked to find a balance, depicting the soldiers not as saints but also not as ordinary boys, how I had labored to convey that death does not bestow upon its hosts perfection, yet does, must, elevate them above our muck and our worry and our pain. And sometimes when I tell this story, I say I painted my mother and Charlotte among the boys, that these are the pictures of all of the ones we loved and still love, the ones who haunt our homes.

  And when the paintings were complete, I tell him, the families gone, Laine helped me crumple the newspapers again and return them to the walls, she and I working late into the night, swinging mallets and hammers, shattering tile, stuffing the paper into gaps; then discovering when we awoke that the wall had rebuilt itself, the tile adhered itself, the mess swept itself away.

  But my father’s favorite stories, I am sure, are the ones in which Owen does not die, in which I do not awaken every morning looking for him in our bed, finding only emptiness. The police have come in time. Or Nora has never told her father what happened between us all. Or Alison has not revealed my secrets to her daughter. Or she doesn’t lease the house next door. Or she does, but she’s aloof. Or she befriends us, but not in so very intimate a way. Or I never did betray Owen’s faith in my loyalty to him.

  And on that January day after lunch, he and I separate for only a few hours, to work through the short afternoon, apart but together, energy flowing between us, unmistakable and necessary to us both. And then, when the sun has fallen into the pond, I thaw some stew for dinner and we share it, sitting on the couch in front of a fire, the chaos and beauty of a milliner’s shop before our eyes.

  For my children,

  Elizabeth, David, and Annie

  &

  For my mother,

  Barbara Aronstein Black

  Acknowledgments

  This book first came to life while I was on an annual retreat with writer friends, and so to them I express my first gratitude. Thank you so much, my dear Ladies of Avalon: Carlen Arnett, Catherine Brown, Shannon Cain, Helen Cooper, Janet Crossen, Marcia Pelletiere, J. C. Todd, and Lauren Yaffe. I feel blessed to be among you.

  I am blessed too by the exquisite skill and insight of my editor, Kate Medina. I have absolutely loved watching and listening to her as she turns her unmatched editorial acumen on a passage, a plot point, a character. I feel both ch
allenged and trusting in her care.

  Heartfelt thanks also to Lindsey Schwoeri, Anna Pitoniak, Sally Marvin, Avideh Bashirrad, Erika Greber, Barbara Fillon, Vincent La Scala, Deborah Dwyer, designers Kimberly Glyder and Jo Anne Metsch, and all the wonderful people at Random House who gave this book (and me) their attention and enthusiasm and expertise. Thanks also to Nina Subin for her patience through our photo shoot and for the result. Her giant talent vanquished both my habitual grimace and my stunningly bad hair day.

  The ever gracious, endlessly kind Paul Baggeley, Kate Harvey, Sophie Jonathan, and Emma Bravo, all of Picador Books, U.K., are a delight and a source, always, of wisdom and support. I have learned to love the time difference between my city and theirs just because it’s so lovely to find their emails waiting for me when I wake up.

  While writing this book, I taught at Bryn Mawr College and at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver, two very different places connected by their seriousness of purpose and generosity of spirit. My students at both have helped me in ways they might never guess. Loving thanks to Daniel Torday at Bryn Mawr, and also to Andrea Dupree and Michael Henry at Lighthouse, for these homes away from home—and for much-cherished friendships, too.

  Jim Zervanos, Bonnie West, Jane Neathery Cutler, Erin Stalcup, John Fried, Marta Rose, Karen Russell, Alice Schell, Randy Susan Meyers, Nichole Bernier, Kathleen Crowley, Julliette Fay, Jane Isay, and Steven Schwartz, you have been my readers, my buddies, my wise advisers, and are some of my favorite writers. Thank you for everything you’ve given me, which is more than I can say. And enormous thanks too to my Beyond the Margins blogmates past and present. I feel such respect for you all, your creative work, your generosity, and your contributions to the literary community.

  Eleanor Bloch and Fay Trachtenberg, my dear friends and my hand-holders-in-chief, enormous thanks to you both.