Lion's Share

by Rochelle Rattner

  She slid the window open and let herself breathe in the fresh country air. She tried again to remember one time when her parents had told her she was pretty, but all she could hear was her aunt’s nauseating Queens accent. All the mirrors were covered that day after Grandma’s funeral—there was no way Jana could see herself. Two paintings she had given her parents, amateurish still-lifes with extremely flat surfaces, were the only things in that room to distract one’s attention.

  Last week some of the Yaddo crowd had gone over to the old mineral springs that once supplied this town’s livelihood. They’d invited Jana to join them, but she’d declined—for all she knew, people skinny-dipped. Even if they wore bathing suits or wrapped towels around them, she didn’t want her body that exposed.

  Last week was before the ache set in. Curled up in Ed’s lap, her body had been twisted and turned in completely foreign ways. She got more exercise that night than she usually got lugging canvases around, and ever since, her muscles had been getting back at her, making her pay for all their years of disuse. First her chest and arms ached. Now her neck and shoulders were killing her. Still, she’d probably decline a trip to the springs even if she were invited—what was one night of feeling comfortable with your body, compared to years of keeping it buried under baggy pants and padded jackets?

  She sat alone in her room, idly massaging her neck as she stared out the window at a half-moon. The night air helped her concentrate. “I want loving,” she used to demand. And her mother would stop whatever she was doing and take Jana in her arms. Jana reached her hand in at the neck of her sweatshirt, found the open collar of her blouse, reached down farther, and clutched her breast. But her hand was smaller than Ed’s, too small to contain it all.

  She shivered in the cold night air. That dream she’d had the first week at Yaddo flashed through her mind again, only finally she called it by its proper name: a dream and not a nightmare. That pain in her crotch wasn’t nearly as strange, or as frightening, as it had been at first. Touching herself right this moment, she could almost, but not quite, duplicate it. As hard as she might try to think of herself as a child, enjoying being cuddled in Ed’s arms the way she recalled being cuddled by her mother, there was no denying the fact that she’d become a woman.

  She leaned out the window to get a better look at the moon’s rays bouncing off the pond and felt her shoulders stiffen again. Love seemed to be having a field day with her body.

  No, this wasn’t love. “Obviously I love you right now, but I’m not going to say how I’ll feel tomorrow or the next day,” Ed had said. She wasn’t sure what this feeling was, but she had to be careful not to call it “love.”

  The chilly nights evolved slowly into days that lost the penetrating intensity of their heat, and Jana noticed other changes. Clad in shorts and a man’s dyed shirt, she lay in a hammock out near where Yaddo bordered on the harness track, lazily drawing flowers. The hammock rocked every time she drew a line on her sketch pad; her body rocked the way Ed had rocked it in his arms. Over the weekend Ed had driven to Connecticut for his cousin’s wedding, and when they’d spoken Monday he’d gone on and on about the flowers he’d seen: violets, brightly colored zinnias, a patch of roses. “I’ve been in the city so long I’d forgotten what it was like to see flowers cultivated on lawns,” he said. “They seemed the image of health.” She thought about how often this past week she’d walked the grounds, picking daisies and pulling off their petals: he loves me, he loves me not. Or on alternate days: I love him, I love him not. But no, she couldn’t tell Ed that quite yet.

  Jana sketched herself as a healthy flower. It was only a matter of time now. There was an urge in her body that cuddling could no longer satisfy. They would take it slow. For the first few nights, she would ask Ed to take precautions. She was sure now that he cared enough for her that he wouldn’t object. The free-sex craze had passed—people worried about AIDS and herpes—asking a man to take precautions was no longer an unusual request, Marilyn had explained. After she lost her virginity, Jana would make an appointment with a gynecologist. Maybe she would get pills, maybe a diaphragm; she didn’t have to decide at the moment.

  Various portraits of women played themselves in her mind, but her thoughts came to rest on the famous surrealist photograph of Duchamp as Rrose Selavey. How easy it had been for him to dress in drag and take on the woman’s identity. The finished image was nothing but a trick, a mental game which lent itself to photography. The distancing of that final print would be more difficult for a woman to attain, Jana realized now. Regardless what Marilyn said about frigidity, Jana knew no woman would want to be that out of touch with her emotions. She could no longer paint as she’d been painting for years—holding herself back, not letting her vision stray from the external object. She wanted to paint the portrait of herself as a woman, not a woman in some flower mask.

  She made a dash for her studio, grabbed a stubby piece of charcoal, and drew her eyes, a little below the horizon line: thick, black, almost closed. Then the heavy-set face (much heavier than the mirror revealed her, as if she were trying to let Ed’s heavier body share the picture). But no, there was something else about that heaviness, something significant she couldn’t pinpoint. She stared ahead, blankly. Ed’s words echoed through her mind—the number of calories in a potato chip, not having time to dream about food. Had he been trying to tell her he’d been fat not long ago?

  Jana recalled Matisse’s “Odalisque” series—the fat women reclining on couches, sensual, beautiful, and the women Titian painted, and Rubens. Fat men could be beautiful also. Any man was beautiful if you cared enough about him. The challenge was to make herself attractive.

  She drew her lips, thick and pressed firmly together, resolute. She drew a cap for the skull, reminiscent of the bathing caps she’d worn as a child. Responding to the pressure of that cap, she drew wrinkles on her forehead. She ran two dark lines along her left cheek, where she’d smudged charcoal a few minutes ago. She outlined the faint moustache that had grown back again, its shadow on the lip and chin. Finally, a little slower now, she placed the entire face in shadow.

  She stepped back to look—something was missing. “You have a wonderful body,” Ed had told her. Not until now did she recall the other half of his comment: “Too bad you have no mind.”

  “It’s like you’re making love with your mind,” Harriman had quipped thirteen years ago, in one of the last classes she’d taken with him. She’d been going through a crisis with perspective, every figure she drew seemed foreshortened. Gary Jeffreys, her closest friend in that class, had set up his easel next to her—she’d been guiding her arm to give her a sense of the follow-through. After Harriman’s comment, she looked down and saw the bulge in Gary’s jeans. If she hadn’t been absorbed by the painting she would have checked her responses before Gary got to that point, yet it was precisely that closeness, that sharing of the mind in the body, that had been important to her ever since. She’d used that memory to console herself every time she saw Natalie or Marilyn rushing about in their endless affairs.

  Now all of the sudden she found herself needing something more from Ed, and her mind was holding her back. She envisioned the brain lines shown in anatomy books, and drew them across the forehead, holding her breath with each stroke. The smudges on her cheek now seemed an extension of those heavy lines. Yes, that was how she felt: weighed down by mind, cowering, clenching her eyes against the weight. But things didn’t have to stay that way. With white paint she went over those horrifying brain lines, trying to blend them in, soften their effect. She ran her fingers roughly across to smudge them further, wiped the paint off on her shirt, then put her hand to her forehead as if trying to relieve a migraine, to free herself from that weight she’d clung to all these years. She had left no room for heart. The mind had covered over her body even, the body Ed had said was beautiful, the body she was suddenly, unexpectedly, proud of.

  At last she let her eyes open. The pictured self greeted her boldly, una
shamed. It was almost, but not quite, feminine—almost, but not quite, human. She reached for the can of unscented hairspray and sprayed the canvas. Hairspray was cheaper than the sealants sold in art stores—everyone she knew used it—but she’d fought against that reminder of femininity until this summer. Lost in thought, she sprayed much heavier than necessary. Yesterday a wasp had gotten into her studio and she’d sprayed it in precisely this manner. She’d watched the residue weigh down its wings, watched it struggle to fly, buzzing angrily, until it finally lay on its back, its legs kicking, dying slowly. She hadn’t thought twice about killing it.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Self-Portraits

  THERE WERE more self-portraits over the next ten days—strange, abstract works: the top of a head as if in a rear-view mirror, the side of a face reflected in a chrome doorknob—fragments of herself she was willing to accept now. Jana painted frantically, working directly on the canvas, without sketching, without much forethought whatever. The realization that she’d soon return to her normal routine, giving up these hours upon hours with nothing to do but paint, didn’t bother her. The work she was beginning now would hopefully carry over. She’d be able to spend all day reviewing drawings at The Paperworks Space or working on the forthcoming exhibition, then come home and concentrate fully on her own work. And maybe, just maybe, after a few hours of painting, she’d get together with Ed. New York City suddenly seemed packed with all the excitement she’d experienced when she’d moved there as a twenty-year-old.

  She decided to go back a day early. “I have to meet with APL’s PR department Monday afternoon,” she told the Yaddo administrators, keeping a delicate edge of regret in her voice. “I need Sunday to unpack and reorient myself.” A professional appearance, as guest curator as well as painter, couldn’t help but work to her advantage next time she applied for a residency. If the truth be told, she was going back on Saturday because of Ed. He’d be meeting her at Port Authority, “to help you home with your luggage,” as he put it. There was a good chance they’d have one night together before resuming their professional interaction, but she was determined not to set her hopes on that happenstance.

  Ed watched her step down from the bus, carrying her portfolio. She noticed his expression change to amazement as the porters handed her three suitcases and five canvases tied together, facing inward to protect their surfaces, which had been stowed in the luggage compartment. Lifting the suitcases immediately set him off balance. “What do you have in this one, rocks?” he asked.

  “Painting supplies,” Jana laughed. “What did you expect?”

  He hadn’t known what to expect this time. “You should have told me you had this much gear. I’d have driven up to Saratoga and gotten you.”

  “I guess I’m just used to managing by myself.” Jana laughed, hearing the echo of her comment from the time when Ed had offered to drive her back to the gallery. “Let’s not have a replay of that day,” she silently admonished herself.

  They’d barely set everything down in the corner of Jana’s studio when someone knocked on the door. Jana opened it to admit a young guy with blonde hair longer than Jana’s and Ed’s put together, tied back in a ponytail. “I thought I heard someone in here,” he said as he barged in.

  “You heard right. Niels, meet Ed. Ed was kind enough to help me schlep everything home.”

  “I just thought I’d bring your mail down,” Niels said after exchanging a few words with Ed. “There’s also a slip for a package at the post office—they refused to leave it with me.”

  “I’ll get it Monday, thanks. Want to sit down? I think there’s some cold beer in the fridge.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t stay, I’ve got to get to work.” With a quick nice-to-meet-you in Ed’s direction, Niels took off.

  “He’s an actor,” Jana told Ed when Niels left. “Works as a waiter between jobs. He’s on the road a lot too, and we’ve worked out an arrangement to take in mail and look out for each other’s apartments.” She leafed quickly through the mail, opening four or five pieces and putting them in a separate pile on the table.

  Niels’ intrusion reminded Ed that Jana probably had a million things she wanted to get done today. But he’d promised himself he’d invite her back to his place, and he had wine, bought the day before, chilling in his icebox. He had to at least give it a try.

  “Sounds good,” Jana said, getting up and pulling a few things together. “But why don’t we walk at least partway over? Even short legs get cramped from sitting in the bus.”

  “Fine with me,” he lied. The last thing he expected was that she’d agree so readily. He’d settled in to work this morning and had gotten more involved than he’d planned. He hadn’t even had time to change the sheets on his bed.

  Jana grabbed a sweater out of her suitcase. “Should I bring a nightgown?” she asked, almost as an afterthought, as they were leaving her apartment.

  “That might not be a bad idea. You’ll probably feel a little more secure if you’re wearing something.”

  She bit her lower lip. “Ed’s only looking out for me,” she tried to tell herself. “He has no way of knowing I sat by the window imagining him cuddling my naked body.”

  They sauntered over to the park and headed for the reservoir. Runners of all shapes and sizes approached and passed, along with walkers going in both directions. Most of the runners were unencumbered, wearing shorts or cut-offs and tee shirts, one or two with money belts on, many with earphones, one guy with a backpack. One runner dropped change out of her pocket, stopped to pick it up. A squirrel paced Jana and Ed’s walk for a moment, almost hidden in the tall grass sloping downhill beside the path. A little lower, a few bikes went by.

  “The park seems so much quieter on weekends, when the drives are closed,” Jana said.

  “It seems natural to me. I guess I only get here on weekends.”

  “When I’m trying to sketch, I come here in the middle of the week. There are fewer people, it’s easier to focus on one person or group without interruption.”

  They sat down on the benches facing the south gate. Two horses passed on the bridle path, below them. A few runners leaned on the building or benches and did stretching exercises. Others stopped for drinks at the fountains, splashed water over their arms. “Want a drink?” Ed asked.

  “Not here, thanks.”

  So they headed on. There were a dozen ballfields on the Great Lawn, with softball games going at right angles to each other. On a corner of grass beside the field, what looked like forty ten-year-olds in Cub Scout uniforms were goofing off as they did warm-up exercises, led by three men. Some of the boys were wearing their baseball gloves already. When the exercises ended, there was no open field, so they played in the same stretch of grass. “Where’s first base?” one boy screamed. And another: “That’s not where the catcher is.” Jana and Ed laughed at the interchange. Finally one of the men said he’d set up the bases.

  They wandered toward the children’s playground. Ed started for the benches to the left of the thick gates, but Jana sat on a swing, so he eased himself onto the canvas swing beside her. “This is the one place I never have to worry about sitting alone.” Jana let the ropes sway gently as she talked.

  “Worry no longer,” Ed swayed closer.

  “It never ceases to amaze me how children have to be taught how to play sometimes. That’s something I was totally oblivious to when I was growing up. I never played well with other kids, but nobody ever taught me how, either. I was ten or twelve before I learned how to pump my legs on a swing. Someone always had to push me.”

  Before Jana realized what was happening, Ed was standing behind her. “Do you want to go fast or slow?” he asked, giving a gentle push.

  “Fast.” Jana took firm hold of the ropes. “No, slow! Slow!” she shouted a moment later, laughing as Ed pushed with all his might, and she went zooming so high she could feel the bars holding the swing shake.

  “Say please,” Ed called, pushing as hard as ever. “Say
pretty please with hamburger on it.” And then, a moment later: “Say it like you mean it.” At last Ed gave in, the swing slowed, Ed walked to the front and Jana leapt into his arms.

  Jana saw there was no one in the sandbox. She wandered over, picked up a twig, and began drawing. She drew Ed’s face, half-portrait, half-caricature, then quickly rubbed it out. “I can’t draw well when someone’s looking over my shoulder,” she laughed, tossing the stick away.

  “You artists are never satisfied,” Ed teased. “I thought you caught my resemblance perfectly.”

  “If you’re nice, maybe I’ll draw you for real sometime,” she said, heading out the gate again. “When my parents used to take me to the beach, I remember drawing in the sand. They’d try to get me into the water or to hunt for sand crabs, but I’d just pick up a popsicle stick and start drawing.”

  “Your parents must have loved that,” Ed teased.

  “They wondered what was wrong with me,” Jana answered seriously. They walked along in silence once again. It was one of those in-between days when the walkers and the people sitting in the park were dressed for anything. Some wore long-sleeve shirts, a few men wore ties and jackets, one girl passed wearing a leather jacket. Many people carried sweaters or sweatshirts, some tied them around their waists.

  “I’m struck by the difference between those people who come to sit in the park, and those passing through on their way somewhere,” Jana commented as they sprawled on the grass near one of the entrances.

  “I never noticed it before.”