Life Drawing (29 page)

I frowned. “Maybe. Maybe it doesn’t. But … we’re our own kind of universe. And I always knew there’d be some kind of reckoning.”

We sat silent for a long time after that.

“I don’t trust you, Gus,” he finally said. “And I’m torn.”

“Okay. But torn is a start. Right?”

“I can’t imagine life without you. Not at this point. But I am so fucking angry at you. Do you understand that? Do you get it that I’m too angry even to sound angry? I am weary with it all. Wearier than I have ever been. Too weary to think about what it’s going to take to glue this back together again.”

I started to cry.

“This isn’t going to be fun,” he said. “I need that to be clear. This isn’t me forgiving you. Or saying you’ll ever earn back my trust. This is … this is something else. I thought for hours today.”

“Eleven hours,” I said.

“I tried to figure out why I didn’t just walk out on you back then. Because that was the one upside of not having kids, wasn’t it? That we could just call it quits. Nothing holding us together. Except us. And I thought today, maybe I should have.”

“No. You shouldn’t have.” I wiped my nose on my sleeve.

He pulled a paper napkin out from the holder. “Here,” he said. “Use this. I don’t know, Gus. Maybe I should have,” he said. “But I didn’t. And that’s a mystery to me. That’s the mystery at the center of it all. And that’s what’s keeping me here still. That mystery. I just couldn’t have been so wrong. And there’s something else.” He paused, as if I might guess. “Back then,” he said, “you didn’t have to come back to me. Even if what’s his name didn’t want you. You didn’t have to come back. But you did. You did even though … even though it meant no children, not mine anyway. You … you had to love me. And that’s the thing, Gus. We both stayed. Really. I just don’t understand all this. Why we’re still us, unless we’re truly meant to be. But I am so, so …” He closed his eyes. “… So, so unbelievably sick of not being able to believe the things you say.”

“I know.”

He opened his eyes. “And I owe that girl an apology.”

“Oh, Owen, I really don’t think you do. She isn’t a child. She tried … she almost succeeded.”

“I used her,” he said. “And I owe her an apology. I just don’t know if it makes it better. Or worse.”

“I yelled at her, Owen. After you left.” I didn’t want to tell him, but I wasn’t going to start anew with another cover-up. “I pretty much called her a cunt and told her to go fuck herself. Alison too.”

He frowned a bit, then nodded. “Yeah. I should have guessed that.” He put his hands on the table and stood. “I’m going to sleep, Gus. Out in the barn. I don’t know about tomorrow. I’m not making some kind of policy decision, so don’t freak out. I just need a little space tonight. It’s like … it’s like all of a sudden today I realized there’s this giant overwhelming task that belongs to me. To us.”

“You make it sound pretty joyless.”

“Do I?” He frowned. “I don’t mean to. It isn’t joyless. You
aren’t joyless. For me. We aren’t. But we are a life’s work, aren’t we? We are, like you said, we are a universe. You and me. Our own fucked-up, beautiful, inexplicable universe.” He walked toward the door, as if to leave on that note.

“Good night,” I said.

He turned back around. “You are my family, Gus,” he said. “That’s all. Now, go get some sleep.”

I
didn’t sleep much that night. I went to my studio to paint. It was the only answer I could give. To try to let Owen’s love be the source of more art. Good, bad, or indifferent. That was all I could think to do. Maybe I was tired—I was surely tired—and incoherent in my thinking, but I wanted to make up for the work I had done for Bill.

I had been given another chance. Again. We had been altered. Again. And we would go on. Again. Somehow.

“We are a life’s work, aren’t we?” Owen had asked.

A life’s work indeed. The work of life.

I took the canvas of Jackie playing chess, the very first one I had started, and I began to paint a shadowy portrait of another Jackie Mayhew over the one already there. Jackie in clothes a boy his age might have worn. Long wool pants. Suspenders. I covered parts of his uniform entirely, a white buttoned shirt obscuring long swaths of khaki, but I let the uniform bleed through his clothing at other points. Then I imagined a younger Jackie Mayhew, truly a boy, and made sketches of that face to layer into the one already there.

How do any of us walk across a room without tripping over our own multitudes?
I’d wondered that at Thanksgiving, my arms still alive with physical, forgotten memories of another self.

It didn’t matter to me that night that the painting’s message could be seen as simple. Maybe to paint young dead soldiers is
necessarily a simple thing. Maybe the depiction of tragedy is just that and should never be made more complicated. There really wasn’t much complicated to say about a boy being blown up at seventeen.

But the boys themselves deserved better than simplicity. They needed to be, as they were, as we all are, layers and layers and layers of selves. I doubted it would ever be a great painting, but
that
was what I could give them.
That
was what I was capable of bringing to their figures, this total and complete absence of precision. The mess and contradiction of what every human being is.

I painted until I could barely stay awake, and then I stumbled my way upstairs.

I
’d only slept an hour or so when Owen woke me with the news that Nora had left in Alison’s car during the night, without a word. Alison was frantic, he said. Nora had been in a state. All of it had fallen onto the girl: my anger, Owen’s pity, her own humiliation. And then Alison had been furious with her, too. Whatever united front she’d constructed for my benefit, she had let Nora have it for betraying her confidence.

All this, while I still lay in bed, Owen snatching his wallet off the dresser, putting a belt into his pants. “Alison’s hysterical,” he said. “She’s convinced Nora’s going to do something stupid.”

I offered to go over.

“Not a good idea,” he said. “She isn’t thrilled with me, but I didn’t call her daughter a cunt and tell her to go fuck herself.”

I asked if there was anything I could do. “She’ll turn up,” he said. “She’s not as fragile as Alison thinks. She’s not as young as all that. Not in every way.”

“Good,” I said. “I’m sure you’re right. Where are you going?”

“I’m just going to drive around a bit. See if I can find the car. Maybe at a motel. It’s cold as hell. She has to be somewhere.”

“What about her father’s? She could have gone there.”

“Alison called. She isn’t there. And not with any of the friends Alison knows. Okay,” he said. “I’ll be back in a bit.”

“Good luck,” I said. “I hope you find her. Safe and sound.”

H
e didn’t find her, and she didn’t call. By nightfall Alison had phoned the police but it was too soon for anything official to be done. Maybe if Nora were younger, but a twenty-two-year-old who skips out for a day? They told her it happens all the time.

Owen went out looking again that night. When he came back, it was to our bed.

“No luck?”

“No luck.”

I asked him again the next morning if he was sure I shouldn’t go see Alison, certain that I really wasn’t welcome, but the answer was the same. She blamed me for what had happened. She blamed herself too, but mostly she blamed me.

“She doesn’t blame you?” I asked. “For encouraging Nora?”

He had been kind, maybe too kind; but kind. I had been vicious.

By the third day, the police were involved and had set up an alert. Owen divided his time between driving around every morning—to where, I couldn’t imagine—and then keeping Alison company. Alison, who by his account was almost too distraught to breathe. I would watch him walk over the snowy hill to her house and then a couple of hours later watch him come home, grim-faced, somber. I wondered if he adjusted his expression to something less frightening when he was walking toward her, just in case she was watching, trying to gauge his concern. He’d told me that all he did was keep reassuring her that things would be okay, but that really he was just there to distract her for a short while, until she wanted him back out searching again. “I tell her
it would be different if she had been kidnapped. She’s just run away from home. And she’s fully capable of taking care of herself. She’s not a child.”

I didn’t ask him if he believed that. And I didn’t ask him whether if she had leapt off a cliff somewhere, he too would blame me. I knew the answer. He would blame us both.

For three days, everything stood still. Everything except worries and searches and worst-case-scenario nightmares. And then on the fourth day, she called. Just like that. Owen was at Alison’s when her cell phone rang. It was the father’s number. Nora was there. She was sorry. She had needed to hide out for a while, to get her head straight. She’d been staying with a friend Alison didn’t know. She knew it had been wrong. But it hadn’t occurred to her that anyone would think she had killed herself. They’d been drunk pretty much the whole time. She just couldn’t face anyone. Not even Alison. And she was never coming back there. Obviously. But she was safe.

The police were notified, the search called off. Owen immediately lent Alison our van to go see her. I couldn’t imagine her being in any shape to drive, but I had no role to play. He knew her history as well as I did. He made the choice.

And then we were alone.

I
will always remember the lunch we had that day as if it were a wedding meal, special enough for every detail to survive, though in fact it was nothing out of the ordinary. A salad and some bread. A hunk of cheddar and a cold chicken breast, sliced and divided between our two plates. Beers for us both. A run-of-the-mill kind of lunch.

But that isn’t what my memories are like. In memory, each silken leaf of salad shines with a different green, new shades invented just for us; and the bread is symphonic in its textures, revelatory
in its taste. The cheese, the chicken, each has somehow been saturated with flavors both comfortingly familiar and exhilaratingly new. We share our bites, we feed each other. And each time the scene is revisited it intensifies, becomes more beautiful, this simple meal of ours.

The crisis had passed. Nora’s crisis, yes, but more than that. Somehow in the hysteria and the fear, our old selves had emerged, recognizable, waiting for us like well-worn clothes into which we could step. Owen. My husband. The man with whom I had built a life and then destroyed it and then rebuilt it and then almost destroyed it again. Just Owen. The man whose body had memorized my own, whose heart had expanded to match the demands of mine. How long had it been since the last time I had felt this peculiar, familiar sensation of being alone by being together?

I knew exactly how long.

“Do you think Alison will ever come back?” I asked.

“Just for her things,” he said. “To return the car, I guess. She’ll have to. Unless she sends a friend.”

I wanted to say,
It’s over, isn’t it? All of it. We’re back to normal, aren’t we?
But I was worried that if I pushed too hard for reassurances, he would feel a need to withhold.

“It probably won’t be tomorrow,” I said. “I can’t see her rushing back.”

“Who knows? I’m just glad they’re both okay. And I’m glad they’re both gone.”

And then we talked about the house. Our house. About a shingle that had come loose over the past couple of days, flying onto the snow where it lay, a strangely regular black square in an otherwise wild landscape. And we finished our beers. And he said he was heading out to the barn and I said I would work for a bit and he touched me on my shoulder as he left.

I
heard the car, then saw it, but didn’t recognize it until Paul got out. I couldn’t think why he was there, parked in our drive, but I felt immediate fear. He left the door open and went straight for the barn, his body taut with intent. I grabbed my cell and called 911 as I ran outside. “There’s an intruder, an attacker,” I said. “Send someone quick.”

But when I got to the barn, Owen was already down, blood flowing from his head onto the stone floor; and Paul was kicking him. “Don’t you ever fuck with my daughter again. Don’t you ever fuck with my daughter again.” He said it over and over. I ran toward them, tried to stop him, but I was a fly, a flea he swatted away almost casually, though with a force that landed me hard on the floor. I tried again, and again hit the floor.

“Don’t you ever fuck with my daughter again.”

“Stop it! Stop it! For God’s sake!”

Finally I heard sirens and I screamed, “Stop it! The police are here! Stop it!” But Paul didn’t stop until they were practically in our yard. “Well, I guess you learned a lesson,” he said, walking out of the barn, directly into the oncoming officers.

By then, I was next to Owen, on him, beseeching the heavens to let him be all right, though in my heart I already knew. There was too much blood, the back of his skull shattered, his eyes emptied. An ambulance came, but there was nothing to be done except make it official and then try to calm me down.