Entropy (29 page)

My skin is now so insulated, and no longer soluble to the supple pressures of the esoteric yet didactic movement of your hands. I rub my shoulders as if they were unfamiliar to me. I notice some blue ink on my neck. I moisten a cloth and wipe away the unwanted flaw from my skin. Should I have left it there? Was the small, foreign imperfection a reminder that everything beautiful will inevitably collapse into a cold chasm of ruin and extinction? Was it not a perfect example of disillusionment? No, it is up to them out there to baptize me in the colors of the corrupted.

The hue that I am saturated in from the fluorescent lights of the dressing room roll across my shoulders and trickle down to the edges of my water-colored anatomy. I had been undressed by your actions and the actions of others, abandoned and pulled down unwillingly into the most unprocessed of emotions. I had felt raw and scared, like a child missing in a blinding winter storm. I remove my wristwatch and set it down on the edge of the sink. I then realize that your art auction is scheduled for later this evening in New York. I'm not sure if I can bring myself to see you one last time. So much has happened. You have tortured me in such a way that is unthinkable, unspeakable.

You have tainted our love by the savageness of your infidelity. But I can't forget you so easily. We once shared so much. I remember how you painted me in a room like this one, before I had showered after jogging. There should have been nothing spectacular about it: a simple woman, baptized in her body's perspiration, undressing after running outdoors. I saw that it wasn't listed in the catalogue of your retrospective which I had absentmindedly brought with me. Tossing through its first few numbered pages, I struggle to understand who the woman in those pieces is, and why I can't recognize the characteristics of her face and cheekbones. However, it is the painting that is first listed in the catalogue which surprises me most. This work represented more of our ending for me, but perhaps it was the beginning of what you may have honestly wanted all along.

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It was easy to see your cutting discontent for our life together in what you had painted. The paint had been placed unevenly and with the subtlety of the leaden colors, insinuated a cruelty and brutality in the matter-of-fact commonness of the winter landscape. I always thought that the painting looked incomplete, that there was more that you wanted to say, but didn't. Perhaps I never gave you the chance.

I remembered that day, the morning after that violent snowstorm. It was so cold. Everything you painted onto that canvas was so dark, so raw, and with complete apathy and indifference. The bleak unhappiness that you must have felt because of me reached the outside edges of the withered canvas. Your mood had not have been driven by only the season. We had, after all, experienced some of our happiest times during winter, such as the time our daughter licked her first icicle. I remember you were helping her build a snowman. Even now I can recall with some clarity how blissful you both looked. I wished you had instead captured her excitement at the first time that she had seen snow. God, I wish I could see her again, her wide-eyed innocence and sheer glee as she played in our yard. I am at a loss at how I will cope when the next winter breaks with both of you gone.

Bit by bit you had helped her mold the snowman's shape, but did not build it so tall that she couldn't reach. You tried to teach her how to shape it perfectly, to use proper technique and distance, and to not just put the old carrot straight in for his nose, but to maintain the right lineage, so that people could see what he was feeling by the way the shadows moved across his face as the sun passed over his differently sized button eyes.

Jenni had taken the buttons from my sewing basket, spilling them across the floor of the living room. It didn't matter to her what color she had picked, but I watched you crawl beside her, and talk to her about what size and shade she should use. I shamefully remember being irritated by the mess. The purple scarf she later pulled out of the closet that belonged to me was way too big for her. But she took care not to let it rest on the ground before she wrapped it gently around the snowman's neck.

As I remember these happier times, I am left shaken to the core, realizing that I will never again experience the emotion of being a mother.

The tips of the trees in the painting look like indistinct fingers, extended and yet stunted, giving them strength to endure the brutality of the oncoming seasons. Never once do I remember you sculpting flowers with your fine brush. And this painting is no different. There is nothing to give hope to the landscape; that change would come, and that our purpose could endure.

I wondered if you had felt this way through the entire aggregation of our marriage: misplaced and disinterested among the impetuously arranged debris in an incomplete foreground. You painted our loss so casually, so matter-of-factly. You portrayed the sudden evaporation of our family with such simple discernment, that I could feel your scorn and belief that our lives together had been a misguided emotional waste. I felt that I would be forever immured in the fragile mythology of your silent winter.

Although I do wonder that if Jenni was still here, whether I would look at that painting differently.

***

A bell was chiming in the empty hallways. It sounded distant, like a ship lost at sea, trying to find its way back to the shores of a loved one. The first art class will start soon. I am not really sure what I am doing here. But after so much loss, I need to feel beautiful and at least in some way, wanted.

I open the door to the classroom studio, and walk into the center of the room. I feel cold, even though sweat is forming in the small of my back. I shouldn't feel nervous. I exhale heavily and pulling on the sash of the robe, let it collapse against the top of my feet. The material slightly irritates the skin on the side of my ankle. I raise one leg and stand on a small pedestal, a wooden box that has been draped with a satin cloth that is cut too long so that it spreads wildly across the floor like a beautiful, raging weed in one of
Monet'
s paintings. I stretch my torso and briefly admire the definition of my stomach as my hair spreads across the crest of my back.

I raise my eyes slowly and study the artists, who with their concentrated expressions, are trying to elucidate the pensive sultriness that I am desperately trying to convey. They shouldn't be able to look at me and look
into
me this easily. I should be a privilege for them, a rare discovery.

I look down at my body and fixate upon the scar that adorns the small, round bone on my ankle. The color always seemed pretty to me, a light pink lemonade shade; the color of bubble gum.
My bubble-gum ankle
I thought. It always started to itch though when I remembered how it happened, when I saw that trail of blood flow across the fleshy skin between my toes and underneath the front porch.

I break from my statuesque position and arch my body back, my arms reaching towards the light coming in through the window. This movement gives my breasts a more defined shape, tightens my abdomen, and allows my ribs to become visible beneath my skin.

“Hold it!” The teacher tells me to stop and hold the pose.

“Look at the hope,” she instructs the class, as she traces her hands across my stomach.

It feels like what they are painting is a forgery, a clever reproduction concealed by untold truths and silence, no matter how pure the intimacy of the representation turned out to be. However, I remember how you had the rare chance to experience the full fragility of my undertones, to see the characteristics of who I really was, and who I had been, but would never be again.

I close my eyes and allow the recollection of your touch to overtake my thoughts. It is as if you are standing behind me, tugging on the material of the sash around my neck, trying to understand the perspective of my body, your chin nestled in the small pocket of my collarbone, gently taking hold of my wrist and passing it though the soft space between my breasts. My train of thought is quickly disrupted by the teacher who has got up and flicked a light switch behind me. Suddenly, the room falls into darkness, apart from a small spotlight that is trained on my upper body.

As the artists study me in the muted darkness, the teacher asks them to examine the contrast of the shadow and the light upon my body. I close my eyes and feel the short hairs of your paintbrush stroking the inside of my thigh. It makes me want to taste you, there in the dark. The seconds pass beside me, behind me, underneath me.

As the seconds pass I convince myself that I can see you trying to hide amongst the neophytes, critiquing their work, the light on your face changing continuously as you move around, each time more arousing, each time more sensual. However as those seconds pass and the vibrant paints dry and scatter like pollen, I feel alone, save for the image of your face that is all at once beside me, behind me, and inside me.

I notice that it has started to rain outside.

***

After posing and being studied, analyzed and painted by several different classes, I finally left the classroom building feeling tired and sore. I sat down against wall seeking shelter from the rain and saw the brazen color of your eyes staring out from the catalogue. A few students walked past me, not noticing the light tears that were gathering in the corners of my eyes. As I watched the students walk past, I was struck again by the thought that I would never see my beautiful little girl grow into a teenager. I wondered what those students would see if they looked long enough and close enough while they painted me; savage beauty or violent imperfection? I wondered if they could see my loss. I wondered what my daughter would look like if she had lived and was their age? When I had earlier dressed in front of the mirror my reflection had a haunted look, a look of isolation and collapse. In the catalogue, that look was referred to as the theme of “gentle ruin.”

Wrapping my arms around my thighs, I pulled my legs closer towards my body. My black dress slacks rose higher up my calves, and I again noticed the imperfection on my ankle, my little pink scar. I breathed the heavy air into my lungs and held it. I felt as if my insides were going to collapse under the weight. There was a smell that hung in the air that reminded me of the rotting fruit that had been left inside a wicker basket that summer, when I first hid underneath the front porch of my childhood home.

***

I had only gone there that afternoon, to try hide from the lies and the secrets, the struggling ambiguity, and the betrayal of adolescence. I had slid my slender body under the loose sideboard, and pressed my flushed cheeks against the arid soil. There wasn't much room to move around. It looked as if no one had ever been under there since the house was built. There was nothing underneath me except an unknown history of soil, decay and some stones.

I wondered if my father knew, or even cared where I had disappeared to.

The temperature rose and I sweltered in the intense heat, listening to the transistor radio my father had, the jazz music echoing through the floorboards. It played some contemporary selections, but mostly pieces from another era. The man on the radio said the names of the artists after each song. I had never heard of them. The salt from my sweat moistened my lips. Through a crack in the floorboards, I could see my father holding the glass of lemonade that I had poured for him. He took a long sip from the glass, the ice cubes sounding like church bells, and placed it across the gap between the boards. Some of the condensation on the glass dripped through. I reached out my hand, balancing the momentary coldness on the tips of my fingers before placing it to my lips. It tasted lonely, like the bitter, hard taste of metal.

Even with the consistent radio static and the distant hum of neighboring farm equipment, my father appeared quiet and tranquil. Under that porch, I hoped that he would whisper his secrets out loud. There were so many things that I never learned from him. He never talked to us much, my sister and I. He never talked to us as young women about our intricate and delicate biology, and he never talked to us about our mother, who we felt had abandoned us when she died.

Whenever we tried to talk about her, he would simply sigh and politely change the conversation. People called him stoic, and as I didn't understand what they were talking about, I went to the library to look it up. It meant indifferent or unaffected by pleasure or pain.

After that first time I would often wiggle under that porch, sometimes for hours, so as to be close to him in some way. I always hoped that at some point that he would need me, need us. But he never opened up. During those hot summer days he rarely even moved, and if he did, it was to casually sip his lemonade or to occasionally step out of the rocking chair to water his pansies. He took exceptional care of them and really nurtured those flowers. My sister said that our mother had originally planted them before she died and I think that's why he gave them such unadulterated care, it was his way of trying to keep a part of her present and close.

Once I inched closer to the opposite end of the porch, just below the window leading into my older sister's bedroom. There were sounds coming through the break in the glass. All I could hear were slight moans and I couldn't tell if she was in pleasure or pain. Her boyfriend had snuck into her room again. There were times that I know that he abused her, but he said he would never hurt her again. I heard him murmur that he loved her. She said she didn't want anyone to hear them …

Let's run away! Shh! I don't want to talk about it here ... Let's leave right now ... We can't, but I want to be with you … But what about your father? ... He doesn't care about me … We could be careful, leave when he's at work … I don't want to talk about it right now … What is keeping you here?

I wanted her to say that it was me, that I was the one person that mattered to her most. However, the words I wanted to hear never came. Instead she parted her lips and kissed him. All I heard her say was that she loved him, and nothing would change.