And Again (18 page)

“Does he know that’s important to you?” Hannah asks. David looks at her a long time before he answers. It’s curious, to watch David and Hannah interact. They seem to have a language all to themselves, one that I can’t understand.

“I used to get the shit kicked out of me as a kid,” David says, looking at Hannah. Unflinching. “You should have seen where I come from. Dirt roads. Twenty-year-old cars. The best place to eat was the Arby’s in the next town over. And I was small. The worst thing you could be in that town was small. They wouldn’t just take your lunch money, they’d take your shoes. There was a time when the toughest part of me were the soles of my feet.” He pulls a hand through his hair. “Of course being tough is important to me. I’m afraid my son’s childhood won’t prepare him for something like that. Or worse,” he gestures around the room, at all of us beleaguered souls, “it won’t prepare him for something like this.”

I’ve been renting a small studio in Wicker Park since my fourth year as an undergrad at the Art Institute. The rent comes out of an artist’s grant I won for my senior thesis, a series of paintings of women being carried off by birds, to which one of the Art Institute’s many donors took a liking. The studio is small, in that it allows room for an easel and a stool, a few containers of art supplies, a set of wireless speakers, about thirty canvases, a coffee maker, and a mini fridge, while still allowing just enough space for me to turn around, provided the door is shut. The window opens about four inches, too, which is useful in summer because there’s no air conditioning. And sometimes it’s useful in winter as well, because the heat tends to go berserk, which leaves me painting in my underwear more than I’d prefer. And I love it, my studio, perhaps more than I’ve ever imagined loving any place in my whole life.

I have to push hard on the door to get it open at first. It warps in the summers, when the damp heat swells the soft wood in its frame, and it never seems to return to its correct shape come winter. When I put my weight into it the door pops open, and I’m face to face with myself again. The painting is still there. Of course it is.

I look scared, my large eyes a mixture of yellow ochre and burnt sienna, overlaid with shimmers of titanium white and warm gray and hooker’s green to show their fullness, wet with tears. My hair is dark—Payne’s gray, Mars black, and burnt umber—falling in silky waves around my shoulders. I think of the hours I used to spend at the salon under the dryers, breathing that harsh ammonia smell as the chemicals soaking my hair did their work, how straight
and glossy it was before the transfer, not the halo of tight curls it is now. My skin is pink blush and Naples yellow, flesh tint, a touch of pistachio, with raw umber and a hint of sap green blended in the shadows under my eyes. There’s softness at my jaw, my cheekbones don’t jut as much from the smooth surface of my skin, my face more rounded than it is now. My lips are cadmium scarlet and silk purple, dried and cracked with silver and process magenta. There’s a little ultramarine there, too, in my mouth. To show sickness. To show a lack of oxygen. There I am. That’s the face I remember. That’s the scared little thing still living inside of me.

It was a kind of therapy, at the time. Sam’s idea, of course. A self-portrait, a way of preserving what I was, in case the transfer eclipsed something or ruined something. Sam never said those things out loud, of course, he would never have vocalized the fears we shared. But when he suggested it, I knew what he was getting at.

And it helped, a bit, there at the end, in my last days before the pain became too great and I went into the hospital for good, to wait out the weeks until the transfer. It felt like I was capturing something of myself in a bottle, corking it tight, waiting to open it and breathe it in when I was on the other side of the cancer and the transfer and all the fear. Now, looking at the girl in the painting, I want to tell her that the fear isn’t gone. It’s still here but different, more diffuse, maybe. More systemic, not just sitting in the pit of my stomach as it always had. Now it sinks into my skin cells and the enamel of my teeth, my toes and the space between my hip bones.

I take the painting from the easel and put it with a group of others, facing the wall. I can’t look at her now. I sit on my stool, in front of my easel, the position that used to leave my back stiff and impossibly sore, full of knots that Sam would work on with his thumbs while we watched TV. I remember that feeling, that sweet, necessary pain, though I’ve never felt it, not in this body. I’ve never woken with a stiff neck. Never cracked my knuckles or my back. I can bend over from standing and place my palms flat on the ground. I’m no longer in the habit of crossing my legs, or slouching, or
tucking my hair behind my ear. My mannerisms have been scrubbed away, replaced with a profoundly sterling body, capable of things I haven’t yet thought to ask of it.

I find a large canvas and set it on the easel, adjusting the mirror clipped above it until I can see my reflection in the small, round pane of glass. I flick on the light next to it and pick up a pencil.

Dread drives its way through me. Where do I even begin? How can I take it all in, when my own face still looks so foreign to me, even after all these months? How do I draw myself when I still see disjointed features, a Picassoian sort of creature, every time I look in the mirror? Then the answer comes, as it always does, as simple as a breath, as plain as a handful of earth. You start with the eyes. Always, start with the eyes.

And then it’s easier, knowing that I don’t have to do it all at once. Knowing that the fear comes and goes in waves and all I must do is wait for it to recede before I charge on. I rough in the outlines of my eyes in four contoured strokes, two for the upper edges, two for the lower. The width of an invisible third eye is between them, showing me how far apart they should be spaced. Then the bridge of the nose, its rounded underside, the nostrils. The edges of the mouth align perfectly with the center of the irises, and I rough in the outline of its downturned fullness. Then the eyebrows, the ears, and how strangely it all comes into proportion, as if every human being were created using the same map, the same architectural schematics. When I finish with the faint pencil lines I begin mixing colors.

I pick up a brush, wetting the tip and dipping it into the paint, then applying it to the canvas, just the way I have a thousand times before. The brush feels clumsy in my hand. I watch the inky wet tones seep into the canvas, the taut fibers inhale them. I paint the undersides of my eyes, the sunken patches below my cheekbones, the shadows around my nose and below my bottom lip and under my chin. Stepping back, the image looks skeletal with only the darks colored in. I mix middle tones, layering them over the foundation of darkness I’ve laid down. I rough some taupe into my hair, the basis
of my rich brunette, a frizz of curls that now falls to my shoulders. It occurs to me for the first time that I haven’t cut it since the transfer, which means it has never been cut at all.

As I work I remember the art room in my high school, watching my teacher’s impossibly weathered hands, the paint that clung to the hair on his arms, the gray fullness of his beard. I always imagined in another life he would have been a fisherman, sketching in his bunk while being tossed by rough waves, instead of an art teacher in a suburban private school. He had the kind of face that made you imagine the wind.

I make tea while the paint sets by running hot water through my coffee maker, and it’s so bitter without cream and sugar that I can’t drink it. I return to the canvas and give myself skin, give myself burnt umber eyes, and rose-hued lips, and dark eyebrows that dominate the jagged moonstone of my face. She still looks skeletal, I find, even with eyes and lips and pink cheeks. Even with dark hair. She looks flawless and tired. A Victorian girl shut up in a tower. A waif. Primed for destruction.

And she’s not right. Not even close. There’s no life in it. There is nothing close to inspired, nothing close to what I used to be able to pull from a paintbrush. Nothing close to what it takes to get in to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, or earn a prestigious artist’s grant while a student there. I want to burn it, but the painting isn’t the problem.

I call Penny. I need her eyes, her honesty, the way I did in the hospital. She must hear the chord of panic in my voice, because she leaves a full grocery cart in the middle of Whole Foods to drive over. I chew all of my perfect fingernails off waiting for her to arrive.

“Oh, Hannah,” she says from the doorway, as soon as she sees it. That soulless painting.

“Yeah,” I say from my seat, feeling my bottom lip tighten over my upper, the tension in my jaw keeping everything else inside me at bay for the moment. “It’s gone.”

She shakes her head. “It’ll come back, this is your first try.”

“I don’t feel it anymore. It’s one of the many things I don’t feel now. I know what a dry spell feels like. This . . .” I swallow hard, trying to clear a path for the words. “It’s gone. My muse is hitchhiking down the fucking Jersey turnpike. Gone.”

“Honey, it’s just your first try.”

“Maybe it’s because it’s not even my goddamn face.” I pull the first painting away from the wall, shoving it onto the easel beside the second. The contrast is staggering, both in the quality of the work and the subject of the portraits. It’s painful to see them this way, my two selves. It’s painful to see that, even though the first is a brilliant painting, the second is clearly the more beautiful subject. Penny sees it too. It’s a bereft look. This seems like the end to a horrible fairy tale, the girl who traded all of her talent for a pretty face.

Penny offers to drive me home, but I need to be alone. To think, to wonder who I am, what I should be, if not a painter. The question has never really occurred to me until now; even in high school it was always apparent that I would be an artist, that my life would never be fit for anything else. Through everything, through the screaming matches I had with my parents about my disinterest in an Ivy League education, through Lucy’s quiet, placating disapproval, I never felt a single moment of doubt. Now that certainty feels so foolish it sours my stomach. I think of the practical things that I can do with a bachelor’s in 2D Art and Design, and most of an MFA from the Art Institute. I assume I could probably get a job at Starbucks. I blink back tears as I climb the stairs to the Blue line.

Maybe I should start over entirely, I think, as the train rattles up and the doors squeak open, releasing a gush of stale, slightly rancid air from inside. Become something that doesn’t take much skill, or education. An office assistant, or one of those hippie massage therapists, or a court reporter. I try to imagine myself in a pantsuit, showing up to some fluorescent office that smells like burned coffee and air freshener.

But then another image overtakes me, like a veil of fog eclipsing my vision. Me in an expensive dress, with perfectly manicured
nails and Chanel earrings framing my face. Me in pumps, pulling an oversized SUV up to a school’s pickup line. Wearing a sweater that strains over my swollen belly, making a cake for Sam’s birthday. Going into real estate, or interior decorating, or starting a blog about parenthood. It’s a life I’ve been drifting toward for the past four years; after I took out my nose ring and quit dying my hair, after I let Lucy take me shopping, after I convinced myself that only kids marked time with tattoos and wore clothing with paint stains and holes in them. It’s a life I could enter as easily as one drifts off to sleep. I could marry Sam, I could have his children. I could become the perfect housewife and do charity work and paint mediocre paintings that Sam would insist on hanging in our home. It would require nothing of me but to remain on the course my life has already taken. It would require nothing, save to forget the questions that I’ve been afraid to ask Sam, to repress the memories of waking up in the hospital and finding him gone, of seeing the effortless way he and Lucy smile at each other. It would be easy, to forget who I was before. The artist, the girl with all the talent, the one with the sharp edges.

Sam is making dinner when I get home. I’m exhausted; all I want is to fill our bathtub with piping hot water and submerge myself up to my ears, but he must have heard me come in because he appears in the kitchen doorway.

“Hey. Where have you been?”

I drag myself toward the kitchen, and its stainless-steel appliances, its huge basin sink, its chrome-and-glass splendor. I realize I’m hungry, and it only adds to my exhaustion.

“I stopped by my studio,” I say. Sam brightens immediately.

“Yeah? How did it go?”

“Fine.”

“Did you get some work done?” he asks, lifting a lid off a pot and stirring its contents. Curry, by the smell of it. It’s hugely pungent, a hot aroma, both familiar and shockingly foreign to me.

“A little,” I reply, fishing in the cabinet for a bag of pretzels and popping a few into my mouth.

“Dinner will be ready soon,” Sam says, not really looking at me. I take another handful of pretzels.

“You really think curry was a great choice?”