“When do we move, Dad?” Matilde asks.
“That’s a very good question, Matilde. A logical question.”
Matilde shoots Tom a triumphant glance.
“We’ll move sometime during the summer,” says Charles. “So you’ll have a little time there before school starts to get to know the place and meet some kids.”
“Charles,” I say as calmly as I can, “what about the Shore?”
“We’ll have to skip it this year, Lainie. Everything is changing. For the better.”
“Charles, we always go to the Shore for the summer, that’s the deal. That’s always been the deal.” My voice is hard, crisp. I’m counting on the jetties, the strong sun of summer, the smell of seaweed, the clam beds, surf fishing. Swimming.
My husband stands up and Tom and Jack do the same. They are directly in front of my work, and although it is enormous, they are ruining a view of the lower frame made of seashells and sea glass, turtle backs and debris.
“Well, maybe we could rent the house out for a month. I’m thinking aloud.… Maybe put that money toward the house in Elliot that we’ll rent first … while we shop for houses.… Getting some income from the Shore house would be useful.”
“Useful,” I repeat. I walk over to the couch to sit between Matilde and Claire. The three of us melt into it, our human skin branding to the fabric.
“I’m tired, Mom,” says Matilde. “Like a grandmother must feel.”
“I know,” I say.
“Mommy, what happens to the prettiest selkie?” asks Claire. “Where does she go?”
Charles is at the doorway and the boys are beside him. Candy is outside holding up a wooden spoon and the lid to a pot. “Do I need to bang?” she asks. “Dinnertime for the little ones!”
Charles looks at his watch. “Dinner, Lainie?”
“Yes, we have an eight-thirty. With Jane and Robert.”
“Don’t go.” Claire grabs my arm. “Mommy, please don’t go. You have to finish the story. Where is the prettiest one, the selkie mother?”
Charles turns to us and then he leaves without another word, moving down the wooden hallway with his methodical step.
“Ah, the prettiest one.” I straighten up.
“Hey, Mom? Do you think you’ll have to wear nail polish once we move to this place?”
“I’m sorry, Matilde?” I examine my short fingernails with their residue of charcoal.
“You know, be like the other mothers. Dad said he’s going to have a big job.”
“Mommy!” Claire shouts. “The selkie mother?”
“She has children and she loves them very much, Claire. For years she tends to them and is a good mother and a good wife. There are days when she almost forgets her sealy skin and she seems resolved to life on land. Other days she visits the rocks and remembers her selkie roots: a distant memory for her until one morning there is a rainstorm and the ceiling starts leaking. The mother climbs up to the rafters to plug the leak and she finds her sealy skin that her husband has hidden away. She cries over her old coat that has stiffened and is withered and dry. Her sad salt tears moisten the coat so it looks more like a seal coat.”
I stop speaking and the room gets cold.
“Then what?” asks Claire. “Mommy, what?”
“Later, Claire,” Matilde says. “Claire. C’mon, Candy has dinner on the table and the boys will eat up the good stuff. Mommy and Daddy are going out with friends. Mommy has to get ready.”
“The prettiest one jumps into the ocean!” says Claire. “I know she does, Mommy. I know already! But she has to come back, right, Mommy, back to her children!”
Matilde scoops Claire into her arms. Claire is struggling, pounding on Matilde’s shoulders. Matilde looks at me and I give in.
“She does come back, my darling girl.”
Claire cries anyway; her face is blotchy. Then Matilde cries and so do I.
* * *
“No, Charles, not tonight.” I am as far away from him as possible in our queen-size bed, not far enough to keep me from his ever-magnetic pull. Lying in bed with Charles is a reminder of our shared history and the private currency we trade in. Before children, before the idea of children. Those days we used to trek along the coast, those nights we read Yeats, mostly “The Song of Wandering Aengus” and the Maud Gonne poems to each other. Sometimes there were no stars in the sky and only a silver moon. He pledged to be my friend, my best friend. Charles, who once kept me safe.
He sits up, switches on the light, and looks at me. I look away. He takes my head in his elegant surgeon’s hands, runs his fingers down my jawline, and turns me to face him. He leans down and kisses me.
“Lainie. Lainie. We’re not moving to Minnesota. We’re moving an hour out of the city.” If only what Charles said could influence me.
“I don’t want to leave New York,” I say.
“You might change your mind,” Charles says.
“I don’t want to leave my life.”
“What life? What will you be giving up? You can have anything you want. You can have everything you want, Lainie.” He starts kissing my earlobe, a preliminary move.
“Why is that?” I ask.
“You would have your very own studio. A large studio.” A smart bait for me, his first method of conviction. I’ve worked at my dressing table or in a corner of the living room ever since we converted my studio into Tom’s bedroom two years ago.
“You’ll make new friends. There’s an Arts Council right in town to join, get to know some other artists. Elliot is where people go when they are successful, Lainie. You’ll be getting a new life, a greener life—isn’t that what we strive for?”
I grew up on the Jersey Shore and know nothing of a backyard—who needs a backyard when your front yard is the beach, the ocean, infinity? A place I stay in the summer with the children while Charles comes and goes, bobbing on his own raft and never a swimmer. If Charles is not enamored with the seaside, he appreciates Cape May enough for our family to go every summer.
There I spend hours painting by the jetties, facing the open sky. Along the coastline I’m in search of scraps of beach life. Each day I swim wherever and however I can. If it’s the ocean I do the Australian crawl beyond the lifeguards’ buoys and fight the undertow; in the bay I swim on my back and the minnows beneath tickle me. In a pool I take over the fast lane. I smash through, doing a butterfly, while dreaming of bodies of water, the ones you cannot claim as your own.
Charles is neither a New Yorker nor an island child and has been a bystander since he arrived in the city. That’s what comes of growing up in Utica, on his grandfather’s dairy farm. He has some twisted form of Heidi inside him. He drinks whole milk with abandon, not fat free, eats Swiss cheese, and believes in a simple life that he isn’t able to define. He was going to be a veterinarian until he realized the only way to be a luminary in medicine was to be a surgeon. Cutting humans, not animals. While Charles hungers for farm life, to this day I long to jump out of bed and race along the ocean. I want nothing more than to dive in and swim until I forget about places enclosed by land and privilege.
His eyes bore into mine. He begins his mantra, one I have heard for what seems years but with a new spin. “Lainie, we have our chance. The city isn’t an ideal place to raise kids, you know that. Remember the pervert on West End Avenue when you were with the twins? Wasn’t there that child stalker by Gracie Mansion? Tom has been mugged twice. Matilde sees a rat family right on Broadway and Ninety-first Street almost daily. The children need fresh air, room, nature, pets—a real life. New York isn’t real. I have been asked to chair a department.”
I listen to his persuasion, knowing that when Charles speaks to an audience, most heads in the room nod in approval at his words, whatever they are. I’ve been in the marriage for too many years; I have radar for false promises, I’m not part of his constituency. Besides, what is he talking about and how does he know where the other artists will be?
He tugs at my camisole and
pushes my boxer shorts to the floor. He starts stroking my breast. I open my eyes and his face is precariously close to mine. I can’t recognize his bone structure in the shadows and I’m confused for a brief second. Has Charles’s affection not seen me through the ups and downs of our marriage? Being close to Charles is a sensation that I crave, a method of outlasting the lost hours, the frictions over money, children, his work, my work, in the same order. I settle in. Sex has always worked between us. I surrender to his caress partly because I’m hooked on the sex, partly because I won’t win this one. I want to be like other wives, where the passion fades first, not last.
His voice has that raspiness that I know too well in sleep or in the waking hours. “You are beautiful,” he says.
The moonlight is low through the largest window to the right of our bed, facing west. Charles doesn’t appear to be in husband mode. He climbs on top of me and I place my hands on his neck and then on his biceps. I move toward him, hoping he means it about being beautiful since yesterday he remarked that I was tired and wan. My body yields to what was; I sell out in the midst of Charles’s master plan. I bend into him as best I know how.
After Charles falls asleep and exhales a rhythmic, satisfied breath of a paramour, I have a sense that I’m on a sailboat that is rocked by the winds that blow in an unpredictable direction. I close my eyes and float on my back against the tide.
I decide it’s okay to put our apartment on the market, a home that we both love, despite his complaints. Charles wins as if I have no free will. Or too much free will. I hand over the only existence I know, remembering a lesson of my grandmother’s is that the future is preordained. Nothing is coincidence, each of us experiences many lives.
TWO
“Elliot, New Jersey?” Isabelle asks the next afternoon. We are at the Guggenheim to see the Zarina Hashmi exhibit Paper Like Skin, a retrospective of her work since the sixties. Having perused the show, we are now sitting in the restaurant, ordering espressos. The group—Isabelle, Cher, Gillian, and I—meet weekly to talk about our art, our lives, and artistic integrity. We usually choose women artists to view and then fantasize that women artists garner more and more authority.
“You aren’t pregnant, are you, Lainie?” Cher asks. “You’re not moving because you need more room in the city, right?”
“No, no, I’m not,” I say. “It’s Charles. He has a new position.”
“Your keeper,” Isabelle says. “Every goddamn year Charles is more and more your keeper.”
“Am I missing something? Lainie is okay … she is working.” Gillian defends me since she has three children and is forever trying to finish a project herself.
“You shrunk because of Charles. Men are jealous,” Isabelle says. “They want wifey. Charles doesn’t care what it costs you. You should have been a rock star.… I’ve watched the entire landslide—from day one Charles didn’t grasp your talent or how close you were to fame.”
Cher turns to me. “Lainie, tell Gillian since she’s only been with us for what … a decade? Isabelle and I were there at the Cosmo Gallery eighteen years ago. That’s how we met—in a group show. Lainie was the youngest.”
Isabelle scrolls around on her iPhone. “Look, here’s what they wrote about you, Lainie—I’ve googled your first review. ‘Lainie Smith transports water and natural elements in a style that she owns. In her largest work, Trespassing: Driftwood, her magical use of sea and shoreline creates an emotionally charged tale. This is shown to us as a hybrid of canvas, collage, and sculpture. We expect more thrills ahead from this vibrant young artist.’”
“Charles and George were medical residents at Columbia Presbyterian who came to the show. Roaming around with the serious collectors.” Cher clucks her tongue.
“Right, and Charles asked about my medium, the figures in my work—why the piece was massive.… He cupped his hand in mine and didn’t let go. I told him the form encompassed the story—the theme was loneliness for women … women as travelers … boundaries, driftwood as a barrier … the sea, sky.…” I look at my three best friends, who are neither nostalgic nor convinced of Charles’s early enthusiasm.
“Love is blind,” Isabelle says.
“You should have known then, right then,” Cher says. “He was just flirting with you.”
“I’m the one who let go of his hand—to meet the Greys. Patrons who launched young artists. I thought for sure they’d buy my work. Then the three of us went to the Odeon after the opening, and Charles and George materialized—they came to our table. Charles announced that he’d bought Trespassing: Driftwood, that he’d paid more than anyone else and the gallery owner couldn’t refuse. George said that Charles would be piss-poor for the foreseeable future—they were both in their second year of residency,” I say.
“I called Charles a turd that night while Isabelle decided his purchase would not benefit Lainie’s career,” Cher says.
“So she married him a year later,” says Isabelle. “You know the rest, Gillian. Lainie’s masterpiece hangs in her living room, where no one except family members and friends see it.”
“I had my first child.… Somehow it was easier to have fewer accolades, fewer collectors chasing me. The smaller scale—I began my twelve-inch squares with flora and seashell frames, and while not exactly incendiary, they seemed more … manageable. I could do it while Tom was napping when he was a toddler and I was pregnant with Matilde.…”
“Lainie, your compromise is somewhere between a Hallmark greeting card and a lightweight painting,” Cher says. “You were the next Judy Chicago in size and scope.”
“I’m working.… I’m selling the miniatures on Etsy. I’m repped by a quiet gallery that gets the job done.… It’s fine. Besides, the children…”
“Etsy? A form of paying for your sins.” Isabelle shakes her head.
“You might as well move to goddamn Elliot,” Cher says. “You’ll have tons of clients there.”
“I hope that you’ll come back for our group meetings,” Gillian says.
“I’m not so sure. Now I’m never more than a subway or cab ride away. Once it’s a commute of over an hour in each direction, especially with the twins in a half day of kindergarten, it won’t be easy.”
They are looking at me with pity in their eyes, and an unspoken fear creeps into my soul.
* * *
The time until we move to Elliot is like clamming in muck and mud, clams buried under your toes and the crabs nipping at your ankles. Finding a pediatrician and a dentist, moving the children’s health records and school records, and giving away clothes and old toys becomes a furious nightmare that infiltrates my waking hours. Within a week of Charles’s announcement we are house hunting sans children. A constant humidity trickles into the sterile, purified interior of Charles’s vintage BMW those afternoons that we roam the streets of Elliot. His car is much neater than my vehicle—why wouldn’t that be, given who drives the children around the city? Elliot is already etched in his mind while I despise looking at houses I never want to rent, let alone buy. I have two paintings due by the first of next month, both for private clients. I should be working.
Instead we arrive at these properties, drive forward, back up, and narrow it down to two minimansions, one Dutch Colonial and one Georgian. My imagination is filled with silhouettes and shadings of backyards for potential purchase. The Elliot broker, Christina, a woman about my age with blond hair, long legs, and stilettos, is extremely peppy and enthusiastic. We travel through the famous horse country. Every few acres produces another perfect house flanked by assorted flower beds, making its own statement. While she and Charles sit in the front of her car to chat endlessly about school systems, barbecues, the beauty of neighboring towns—Bedminster and Far Hills—the easy commute, I try to conjure up what people do in these houses all day. Christina pushes for us to skip the rental house and commit to buying now. At least Charles is sensible enough to reject that plan, to explain that the move is a process.
He is drawn t
o the elitism of Elliot, like a moth to a flame. It deludes him and eludes him—the high ground and sprawling if understated homes—and he believes that he has arrived. The many acres between houses—a breath of fresh air after apartment dwelling. The brew of doctors, nurses, administrators in a pristine hospital, saluting his surgeries.
“I don’t want to live here,” I divulge to no one who could hear me or could change the course. “I love the city.”
Elliot has a small but real artistic community. On our second visit there, Charles and I walk an open field where local artists are showing. We check out the stalls together—the work is high quality and varied—portraits, landscapes, oils, watercolors.
“One day, I hope, Lainie, you have a one-woman show in Elliot. It could be a big deal,” he suggests as we walk around. I briefly wonder how it would be to live in a place that is tame enough to have your art count.
The windshield wipers make a soothing swish/swipe sound as we drive back from Elliot. I’m considering that Charles’s thoughts today about big fish, small pond might be prophetic. Talent in the town, unlike the city, where it is cutthroat and competitive, where artist friends might or might not be enamored of your success. Is it possible that Charles is right? That in Elliot one stops pushing for a gallery and embraces the purity of painting without tension? Is it of another order than merely papering an art opening with faces you know? Charles surely wants me to believe it is so.
He who earns the gold rules, my grandmother always said. Although he has cornered me, Charles continues to cheerlead and cajole. He stirs the pot to get me to concede, to forget my favorite haunts, those that can’t be replicated in the middle of New Jersey.
* * *
The last morning, when the movers come, I imagine being carried with my mouth taped shut, kicking and screaming, into their large, overstuffed truck. I imagine that I’ll be craning my head for my final views of the river from the fourteenth floor of our apartment. Views that are soon to be forever erased.
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