Life Drawing (21 page)

“Yes,” she said. “All those reopened wounds, indeed.”

I had the sense that she was talking about something else, not me and Owen at all; but if so, she wasn’t going to elaborate. She took my arm in hers. “Come on,” she said. “Buck up. We still have four more rounds to go. Think of it as penance, if you like.”

O
ver the next few weeks, I remained cautious and undemanding as Owen thawed—though more slowly than I had hoped. His body remained out of reach, and I knew I would have to wait. I couldn’t hurry the timetable of his hurt or of his anger, as much as I wanted to. Meanwhile, we lay side by side each night like figures on paired sarcophagi, and instead of stopping for a caress or a kiss when our paths crossed in the kitchen, or on the stairs, we muttered things like
excuse me
, and
sorry about that
.

At work, I alternated between painting the boys—humbling for me—and painting their surroundings, which gave me a sense of accomplishment. For every leg or arm I tried to make look less like a plastic toy, I rewarded myself with the details of a rug, or the bark of a tree. I didn’t feel that I made much progress with the boys, but I felt like I had struck a fair balance between pushing myself, as Laine had advised, and allowing myself the escape my work had always given me.

As the last weekend of October passed, I knew Bill’s wedding must have as well. I waited for my mood to plummet, but the knowledge only made me a bit contemplative, maybe wistful, for a day or so. Nothing more. And meanwhile, as the temperatures outside continued to drop, Owen continued to warm. Alison and I took regular walks, admiring the trees at the height of their annual show; and I spoke to Jan every few days, not only comparing notes on our visits to our father, but also chatting about other things, just a bit, a tiny glance of contact beyond the efficient absolute minimum to which we had previously held ourselves.

A
nd then one day I heard from Bill.

I’d been staring out my window watching rain begin to fall
when a bell on my computer dinged. And there he was, his name in my inbox like a hallucination.

As I read, I imagined him writing and deleting, phrasing and rephrasing. Just as I had done, writing Laine on the same topic, those weeks before. Polite. We had always been polite. But we hadn’t always been only polite, and I wondered (how could I not wonder?) what all this calm had required of him.

Right there. I could feel it, a crack in the sheen.

I read it several times. Then I responded right away.

Without rereading it, I pushed send. Then sat motionless for quite a time.

Outside, the rain slid over the turning leaves, watery paint drizzling hints of gold and red from the sky. This had been our season. Fall. September into January. Autumn days. A few winter weeks.

I stayed there for some minutes, doing something like checking my own emotional vital signs. Was my heart still in one piece? My mind still able to function? The answers were yes. I was misty, a bit, like the day, but I was okay.

I looked over again at the email, but with perfect timing, my computer set itself to sleep, the screen going black. I started to stand, to walk away, then remembered the old rules, the old ways, and woke it up, deleting the messages we’d exchanged, and then emptying the trash.

I
n the living room, the painting of the millinery shop caught my eye. Another marker of the end of our affair.

There I had sat, close to paralyzed with gratitude that after a year of mute brushes, silent paints, I was able to do anything at all again. With Bill, I had painted like a madwoman, like a woman possessed. Possessed by him and by the intoxication of secrecy. Secretly in love. Secretly in bed together. Secretly painting to please him. All of it, one magic spell. And then it was gone. All of it.

I’d been so certain that Ida would cast me away had she known
what I was really doing there, that she would have been shocked and unsympathetic. But standing in my living room that day, I wondered if I had been right about that. Maybe she wouldn’t have given up on me, she who could turn bits and pieces of fabric into things of exquisite beauty. Maybe she would have known how to quilt the scraps of me together, the edges still frayed and likely to come apart at whatever seams I had hastily sewn.

And I wondered, looking at that sleeve, about my mother. Would she have been the sort to make me feel worse for having transgressed, or the sort to love me harder, to help me through? Would I even have told her? Would we have been that close? I would never know. When you achieve something, a good grade, a new job, you can always tell yourself that the missing parent would have been proud. But what about when you fuck up? Arguably, that was the real test of a relationship, and as far as my mother went, I would never have a clue.

But I had been loved that way in my life. By Owen. Loved and accepted through every stumble, through every fall. I’d once assured Alison that I couldn’t have done the same for him, that I wasn’t as big or as generous a person as he, but standing again before that painting, I wondered if that imbalance was truly something that I should accept.

I told Alison about the email from Bill some days later while sitting in my usual spot on her floor, with my usual view of her legs, though with the colder weather she had taken to wearing black tights and long-sleeved shirts layered under those dresses of hers.

“Mostly, it reminded me of how I used to paint for him. How hard it was for me to claim it all back after that, to make it not be about painting to please Bill, and how easy it can still be for me to lose the thread of my own work.”

“Oh, I sometimes wish it were that complicated for me.”

“Don’t wish that.”

“Well, I do. Here I plod along. Reliable. Endlessly reliable. And uninspired. I might as well be making greeting cards. I wish I could paint the way I drive.”

“It might be better if you drove the way you paint. And that isn’t a criticism of your painting. If anything …”

“No. I understand. So, does it feel at all like a chapter closed? Was the email helpful in some way?”

I thought. “Maybe. Something has been. The chapter is closed, for sure. As closed as such chapters ever are.”

Alison’s phone buzzed. “Hold on,” she said. “It’s Nora.” She
stepped out from behind the canvas and left the room. When she returned, she was smiling. “She’ll be here in a few days and she’ll stay through Thanksgiving. Oh, she sounds so good.”

“I’m really glad,” I said, trying to seem sincere. I thought of adding that Owen and I never celebrated Thanksgiving, but caught myself before throwing cold water on the moment. “I know how you’ve missed her,” I said. “And worried too.”

“Yes, I have worried plenty,” she said. “But she sounds really good. I try not to pester her about Paul, but she volunteered that things there have been calm. It was all, ‘Oh, you know Dad, he’s not exactly easygoing.’ But she said there had been no incidents, certainly no more drunk driving. I think she may be in charge of the keys. And soon enough she’ll be here. At which point he can drive himself off a bridge for all of me.”

“I
t looks as though young Nora will be back with us for a while,” I told Owen when he came in at the end of the day. “She’s coming soon. An indefinite stay, at least through Thanksgiving.”

He sat on a kitchen chair, took off his jacket. Then nodded and said, “So I hear.”

“Alison seems happy,” I said. “Doesn’t she?”

But it wasn’t Alison who had told him. “Nora emailed me this morning,” he said.

Such a simple sentence really:
Nora emailed me this morning
.

“I don’t understand.”

He leaned over and began untying his boots. “I don’t understand what you don’t understand.”

“I don’t understand that Nora emails you her news. I hadn’t realized you were in touch.”

He pulled off one then the other boot before answering. “Oh, you know what young people are like,” he said. “They email everyone. It’s like breathing to them. Meaningless.”

“You hadn’t mentioned it.”

“You never asked.” He looked at me for just a second, then down again to line his boots up against the wall. “Anyway, there was nothing to mention. Until you told me she was coming back—and then there was. Since I already knew. So I mentioned it.”

“When … when did this start?”

“What?”

I looked at him, searching for a challenge on his face, any sign that he was picking a fight; but found nothing exactly like that. “Never mind,” I said. “I just hadn’t realized. And now you won’t have to email anymore, because she’ll be right next door.”

“I guess that’s right,” he said. “I think I’ll go upstairs for a bit.” He stood.

“Your water,” I said. “You forgot your glass of water.”

He looked at me for a moment, expressionless, then shrugged and left the room.

“H
e’s been such a help to her,” Alison said, as we walked the next day. I had brought the conversation around to the subject—pretending to have known all along that they’d been in touch. “I think he may have encouraged her to come back,” she said. “When it’s me advising her, she can’t help but see it as me getting between her and her father. I’m just so grateful for all Owen’s doing for her.”

“I’m just so glad he’s been able to,” I responded, for all the world as though Owen’s attentions to Nora were a gift I had bestowed.

I
visited my father soon after that, alone. I felt no interest in bringing Alison, whose failure or maybe refusal to question
Nora’s attachment to Owen was irritating me. And meanwhile Owen and I had somehow maneuvered ourselves into a standoff that I suspected neither of us understood or wanted. But there we were. So I didn’t invite Owen, and he didn’t offer to come along.

M
y dad seemed especially subdued when I arrived, maybe even asleep. I sat for a while taking silent inventory:
Bad painting of mine:
check.
Afghan of mysterious origin:
check.
Photo of three grimacing girls:
check.

The first time I’d seen his new room, during that long-ago week after Labor Day, it was just as I’d imagined it would be, complete with keypad lock on the door, opened for me by an unfamiliar nurse. She’d said there were good reasons for family not to have the code, a statement that immediately put me in a foul mood. The room itself felt both clinically cold and also somehow overstuffed—as if with scratchy wool. A space in which it would be impossible to find comfort but for contradictory reasons. Too empty, too filled. Too cold, too hot. Too small but then also somehow too big, my father rattling inside like a dried seed in a gourd.

I’d visited frequently since then, though he rarely seemed to know me, and I found the visits more and more upsetting. Not only because his disease was progressing, but because he had been mild as a lamb since they’d moved him, and I couldn’t bear that he was there for no reason, eternally punished for a one-time, maybe two-time, offense. At some point, I mentioned this to a nurse who said she’d pass on my concern, but as far as she knew no one ever came back from the lockup wing.

Bars on windows:
check.
Guard outside the door:
check.

And then suddenly my father spoke.

“Gus,” he said. “You were late.”

I was well steeled for his not knowing me, but not for this.

“I’m sorry, Dad. There was traffic.”

“So good with the excuses.” He smiled, glints of saliva at each corner of his mouth. “It’s only five minutes past,” he said. “Don’t look like that. I’m not going to ground you.”

I wasn’t late, of course. I hadn’t told anyone I was coming.

“I’m just glad to be here,” I said. “I like the new place.” He frowned, looked confused. “Maybe it doesn’t feel new to you anymore.”