Life Drawing (13 page)

Stepping through from the living room and seeing it all gave me a flash of great pleasure. It wasn’t often that Owen and I bothered to eat in surroundings that honored the activity. For the most part we sat in the kitchen, which I also loved, but which was dark and hardly celebratory. Or we shared the couch and stared together into a fire. And all of that was good, it was companionable
and certainly convenient, but I had almost forgotten the pleasure of giving a room a magical aura like this one now had.

“This is lovely,” Alison said.

“Cool chairs,” Nora said. “I love how nothing matches but somehow everything does.”

“Thanks. I like to think I was shabby before shabby was chic.”

When Owen appeared, he stopped at the door to take it all in, the table and the three women then sitting at it too. He smiled at me and nodded just once, barely at all, a private tip of his hat to the tableau.

“No one makes a table like Gussie does,” he said, as he sat.

“I’ve made baked chicken, nothing fancy, but lots of garlic. And salad. And there’s some bread that’s just the frozen stuff from the grocery store that you throw in your oven but is actually surprisingly good.” As I spoke, I noticed Nora briefly close her eyes and lower her head. “So eat up,” I said. “It’s simple but it’s plentiful.”

We began passing dishes, and it was obvious even in candlelight that Nora was blushing her way through meeting up with Owen again. She, who hadn’t struck me as the least bit shy earlier, was suddenly bashful and stiffly formal as she apologized to him for her visit. He assured her it had been absolutely fine, but an element of discomfort hung in the air until Alison intervened. “There’s clearly only one way to manage this,” she said. “So we can all move on. Each of us has to tell an embarrassing story about something we did when drunk or otherwise impaired.”

Owen laughed. “I don’t think we have enough time,” he said. “There was a good two years in there where I mostly made a fool of myself, full-time. Right before I met Gussie. Not that you made a fool of yourself,” he added to Nora. “Anyway, luckily, I’ve forgotten most of those days.”

I took some salad and passed the bowl. Every embarrassing episode I could remember had something to do with throwing
myself at someone, flirting outrageously with a professor, kissing the boyfriend of a friend. I couldn’t see how parading a series of disinhibited-crush stories was going to help. “Nora, why don’t you tell us what you have planned, now that you’re back stateside? Are you working? Do you have a job?”

“Well, I’m looking,” she said. “It’s not a great time to be your basic generic English-major college grad. It used to be if you were willing to work for pretty low pay, you could get a job, but it’s not that easy now. It’s really hard.”

“I’m sure you’re underselling yourself,” I said.

“She is,” Alison said. “Nora’s got all kinds of things she could do.”

“And you’ll never regret having read all those books,” Owen said—which I thought sounded a little pompous and not really like him, even though it was a sentiment he doubtless believed.

As we ate, the conversation continued to revolve around Nora. We heard about her trip to Italy and, prompted by Owen, she talked about the writing she had done in college—blushing again, all through that topic.

“I did a modern take on
The Decameron
,” she said. “That was my thesis. A reconsideration of the stories, as if they were in current-day America. I read Italian, so that part was fun.”

“That sounds ambitious,” Owen said. “You must have something like a book.”

“Well, maybe it’s like a book, but it’s definitely not a real book. They’re pretty bad. I mean, it was a good experience, but it’s not anything I’d want to work on ever again.”

She didn’t remind me of Laine—not at all, Laine with her tattoos, her exploding enthusiasms, and her longing for badass creds—except in the unself-conscious way the young can talk so obsessively about themselves, sometimes charmingly, sometimes tediously. I wondered if Alison had any impulse to redirect the topic or nudge her daughter to ask us some questions about our
lives, but she seemed entirely happy just listening. Occasionally, she would beam my way, as if to say
Isn’t she just amazing? Isn’t she lovely?
And I would beam back, all the while feeling a steadily growing emotional pressure in myself. What must it feel like to be so adored? To be able to change how a parent carries herself? To produce such expressions of joy? My father had rewarded our accomplishments and expressed a quiet pride in us. But was he ever blinded by love? Would he ever have just basked in the sound of my voice? Heard every word I spoke on a flattering frequency?

And then, as the minutes passed, the inevitable, ancient question: Would my mother have? Would she have given me this devoted attention, this unchallenged right to center stage? It was easy enough to think so, sitting there. Charlotte, all of seven when our mother died, had often told me stories about the fun we all had baking cupcakes, singing in the car, playing in the park.
She loved pushing us on swings
, she would say, trying to slip her memories into my soul.
She kissed us goodnight every night, in bed. She woke us up with kisses, too
. In a sense it had worked. I carried distinct images to go with every story Charlotte told, each snippet hovering in the generous space where imagination and memory blur.
She sang songs in French sometimes
. But since Charlotte’s death, I had felt those images fade as well. And my father was now incapable of having the conversations that he had always refused to have—unless his roulette-wheel mind happened to spin that way one day.

Watching Alison and Nora, smiling at them when appropriate, asking questions as needed to keep the conversational flow, I realized that there was no one left who could remember my mother. Maybe a cousin somewhere, an old neighbor. But not anyone close to me. Not anyone I could find. It had turned out to be a three-stage death: first hers, then Charlotte’s, and then this horrifying slow leak taking place in my father’s brain. And then there were none.

“Y
ou looked preoccupied at dinner,” Owen said, as we lay in bed later in the dark, both of us just too drunk to consider trying to work. “You looked a little blue.”

“I may be a little blue,” I said. “It will pass.”

“Anything I can do?”

It turned out that there was, though until he had asked, I hadn’t known. Darkness and sex. Desire poured from me in a way I didn’t expect and I’m sure he didn’t either as I wrapped my arms around his back, pulling him close enough that at moments the goal became barely sexual, but only an embrace so intense that I could feel nothing else.

I stopped then. Because I had surprised myself with that word. Did I feel unhinged? Not at that moment. But I left it in.

I deleted that.

I deleted that.

I settled on that and went on,

I
might never receive the adoration I’d watched young Nora receive all night, but I didn’t have to ignore the one person alive on whom I could lavish it.

From my studio, all that Sunday, I caught glimpses of activity by Alison’s house and toward the barn and on the path between, but I tried not to keep close track of the comings and goings—of anyone. The two women out in the car. The younger popping in to ask her new favorite author for some advice. The man crossing over the hill, a book in hand. I tried not to keep track. I didn’t altogether succeed. Not at first. But gradually it all faded into background.

When I was a child, long before it occurred to anyone to be sensitive about such things, my sisters and I had special parent visiting days at our school.
Celebrate Mom!
It wasn’t always that bad; but we were almost always the only children without a mother, and in the 1960s, the ’70s, a visiting parent still meant a visiting mom. Each of us dealt with it differently. Charlotte, the ultimate lemonade-from-lemons girl, would try to share a friend’s mother for the day, and when asked at dinner how it went would say, “Fine. It was fun,” as though there were no reason to imagine otherwise. Jan, the youngest and probably the smartest of us all, would announce matter-of-factly that she would be staying home, interrupting our father’s gruff offer to wander over from his own classroom, before he could get all the words out. And I would take
the middle path, the compromise solution that so often means misery. I would go to school. And feel sorry for myself. Not pretend I had a mother. Not pretend my father was an acceptable substitute. Not pretend at all. But tough it out.

That was the idea anyway, but we can be more self-protective than we intend. I don’t remember the earliest events, first grade, second grade, not clearly, not beyond the regular pulse of self-pity and jealousy beating through my heart. But I do remember a parents’ day when I was eleven or so and realized that I could be there and still not be there at all. I only had to draw. Or paint. Or not even do either of those things, but just imagine doing them; think about what my next picture would be; and look around me, no longer seeing mothers and children, only objects, subjects, surfaces. Light.

During the second day of Nora’s visit, I retreated again to that place.

I worked on the boy on my front steps again, Oliver Farley, using my drawings for early reference, continuing to paint around the empty canvas I thought of as him. Our rarely used front door is black, and I worked a good long time that day defining the raised panels, catching the gleam of the large brass doorknob, then muting it, as in real life, showing it worn and softened with age. That doorknob, barely a third of an inch on my canvas, took me the better part of two hours—and I knew I might need to change it later if another look outside revealed any missteps.

I sometimes think of such visual details as deep, private pools of water into which I dive alone. I am oblivious at those times to anything beyond my sense that there is a way to communicate to others exactly how the world appears to me. This is the precision for which I strive. Some kind of commitment to accuracy, my belief that the appearance of a thing can flow right through me and out to another set of eyes. And not just the appearance, but the beauty to be found—even in things not inherently beautiful.
There is an urgency I feel, maybe with its roots in those early childhood days of using art as an escape, but maybe not. Maybe just a part of me, whatever the history of my life.

I went through a period, in college, and for a while after then, of accepting that my work was old-fashioned—and fretting over the condemnation of that term. I had friends who were conceptual artists, of course, friends who did bizarre, socially disruptive installations, friends who were blessed—I believed—with the conviction that they could reinvent not only art, but thought. And I could do neither, I knew, which knowledge deflated me. But in the end I understood that I had no choice. I knew what I was, this vessel for taking in, holding, and then releasing again the facts of what I saw.

And there were arguments of course, late-night debates with our ever-present artist friends, since that word,
facts
, is not itself an accurate one. Each observation I have and then try to convey—always, that word,
convey
, always that desire to communicate—was warped and altered by my perspective. But it was an accurate enough way to describe what I understood myself to be, and an accurate enough way to describe the sensations that created the isolated trance into which I would fall while at work.