Life Drawing (30 page)

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.

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 challenged 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.

The wonderful painter Perky Edgerton took time to help me with some of the “art stuff,” and for that I am most grateful.

Henry Dunow is flat out the best agent on earth and one of my favorite people, too. Working with him has brought me not only a brilliant professional ally, but also a dear, close friend.

Lifelong thanks to my family, my siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, in-laws, the living and the missed. Lifelong thanks, and much, much love. And a special, new-member-of-the-family thank-you to my son-in-law, Tom Faure, a writer himself, who reminds me, by example, of what dedication to this craft looks like.

All of my children inspire and strengthen me, and this book belongs to them and to my mother, who is also my first and best reader. But this time around, with my older two grown, it was my youngest, Annie, who got the brunt of having a mom in the throes of becoming a novelist. She encouraged me when I was blue, celebrated with me when I was hopeful, made me mac and cheese, and made me feel loved no matter what. I couldn’t have done it without you, my girl.

For Richard, only a riddle: In a life as full and as fortunate as mine, how is it that you are still my everything? I don’t have an answer. You just are.

Robin Black
,

October 2013

BY ROBIN BLACK

Life Drawing

If I loved you, I would tell you this

R
OBIN
B
LACK
is the author of the short story collection
If I loved you, I would tell you this
. Her stories and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including
One Story, Colorado Review, The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, O: The Oprah Magazine, The New York Times Magazine
, and the anthology
The Best Creative Nonfiction, Vol. I
. A recipient of fellowships from the Leeway Foundation and the MacDowell Colony, Black is a graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. She has taught at Bryn Mawr College and in the Brooklyn College MFA program.

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