The Life Room (13 page)

Noah woke up. I took him out of the harness. My father stared at him. His eyes watered. They were smiling and crying at the same time. His look said,
This is what you’re running away from, you shmuck. This beautiful baby. This life
. He hunched over. He was a mess. He took out his handkerchief and patted the perspiration from his forehead. He could not hold my son in his arms.

I’ve never really ever understood my father. I need to remember so I have a story about their grandfather I can tell to my children. If I think about him too long I want to cry.

The anger always began once he left, when I realized that I might not hear from him for months, maybe years on end.

It rose inside me like a wave. It took me weeks to recover.

In my mind I recalled everything he said and didn’t say. I realized that for him once we’d parted, he’d fall back into his life. That he had learned how to tuck his fatherly instincts away.

Now that I’ve recorded the dream, I don’t want to think about him anymore. I want to go back outside and walk along the Seine and then stop in an outdoor cafe and have an espresso and feel the pulse of the city surround me. I want to hold my sons in my arms. I wonder, is it the act of writing itself that releases so many memories?

Later I’m going to hear a lecture on Shakespeare titled “The Tragedy of the Human Soul.”

It is 11:00 in the morning in Paris. I’ve just left the Louvre with John. We stood in front of a painting by Delacroix, the wonderful, complicated
The Baroque of Dante
.

Adam loved Delacroix’s work. He was moved by the somber, dramatic use of the canvas and the dense execution he said was borrowed from Michelangelo or Rubens. He told me it was that kind of painting that could make you want to give up your career as a painter. Delacroix was only 24 when he painted it. It was wonderful to finally see it, instead of seeing the reproduction in a book. John and I sat on a bench together and looked at it. In the painting the tender hand of Virgil is leading Dante through hell as the damned souls of the Florentines writhe in the water, struggling to get into the boat. John saw Delacroix’s work as an absolute manifesto of Romanticism. The poet leading Dante through darkness. I thought as I looked at the painting that at some point in life we all have to journey through the past to reclaim our future.

“What is your darkness?” John asked. I’ve only known him for a few days, but it seems as if we’ve known each other longer.
My father
, I wanted to say, but I kept quiet.

In spite of not wanting to think about him any longer, my father has been with me all morning. Something about that last dream. Do children always carry the pain of their parents? It was my father, in fact, who—though he would certainly have no knowledge of it—sealed my fate with Adam. I met my father at a bar shortly after the Christmas Adam had given me the black pearl necklace. It was one of his rare visits in New York. I hadn’t seen him in two years. He was in town for a meeting and wanted to take me to dinner. I put on a nice dress and heels and the black pearls and met him at Tavern on the Green—he loves expensive restaurants, expensive hotels, expensive suits. He wore gold cuff links. He was waiting for me at the bar having a cocktail (when wasn’t he having a cocktail?). He told you things you didn’t want to know when he drank, details about his girlfriends, which ones he walked out on, which ones made him feel good, that sort of thing. I had no idea how long he had been sitting in the bar when I walked in. He was distracted. “Eleanor,” he said, when he saw me. “You’ve grown up.” I sat next to him and he ordered me a Kir Royale. He told me the best Kir Royale he ever had was in Paris in Harry’s Bar. Perhaps I’ll have to go to Harry’s and have one in honor of my father. If you hadn’t known we were father and daughter you would think we were two people, maybe even a couple, slightly in love. We were going to have dinner, and my father was going to take me to the philharmonic. I rarely went to concerts. I couldn’t afford them and I was delighted. But shortly after I sat down at the bar he explained that we couldn’t have dinner after all, something had come up; he had to take the 9:00 plane back to Miami. I tried not to look disappointed. No matter what, he was going to get up in a few minutes and leave and I didn’t know when I’d see him again. He asked me about my mother. “I see her when I look at you,” he said. He always asks about her but he never has the patience to hear how she is. He touched my hair. He fingered my pearls. He touched the skin on my wrists. He asked me if I was in love. William and I had broken up. There was no one and I said so. I didn’t want to talk to him about Adam. He told me that my face was glowing. That he didn’t believe me; there must be someone. He was distracted. He played with a book of matches. He asked me what I was doing over the summer.

He told me that he could tell I was happy. That he’d done the right thing by leaving us. “I’ll take you to the south of France. We’ll rent a house, anything you want,” he said. “You’ll come. Everything will be fine. I’m going to rent a piano. I’m going to go back to my music. We still have our chance. See, it’s okay,” he said, touching my hair and squeezing my hand a little too forcefully, like he always did every time he saw me.

He was between girlfriends. He always looked slightly unhinged when there wasn’t a steady woman in his life. He was wearing an elegant navy suit with a paisley tie and a crisp shirt. Daddy always dresses beautifully, no matter if he’d just lost his shirt in a business deal. But his eyes had that sad look in them. His face made me want to take care of him.

I was worried about him. I was afraid he was in debt again or had nowhere to go. I remembered how my mother told me how she’d learned they were in debt. She had gone to use one of her credit cards and it wouldn’t go through. She went to the bank to withdraw some cash from their account and discovered that everything was gone. Daddy hadn’t a penny to his name, only our house that he’d saddled with a second mortgage. My mother was furious that he hadn’t told her how bad off they were, apparently he’d lied about things not even worth lying about and things he shouldn’t have lied about. How he used one loan to pay off another or how when he said he was working late he was in another woman’s apartment having a cocktail. He was into grandiose schemes and investments. His philosophy was that if you threw enough darts against a wall eventually one would stick. My mother said she would forgive him. They’d start over again. He could teach piano lessons. She didn’t care. It was okay. She understood. “I don’t want you to understand,” she told me Daddy said.

Before he left me at the bar of Tavern on the Green he reached in his pocket and handed me two $100 bills and said he’d plan that trip to France. (There was never a trip.) He looked tired. I asked him if he was eating. “Look at me,” he said. “Is this a face you have to worry about? Lighten up, Eleanor. Don’t be so serious.” He reached back into his wallet and left a few bills at the bar. “Men don’t like it when women fuss all over them,” he said. “Daddy, it’s okay,” I said. “No, it’s not okay, Eleanor. None of it’s okay.”

He lifted my chin up to his face the way he had done when I was a little girl. I thought about the story he had told me about his parents in Hungary, about how he’d lost everything, how his entire childhood was wiped out, erased. He planted a kiss on my forehead. “Daddy,” I said. “No, Eleanor.” “Daddy,” I said again. “Please.” I told myself that maybe something really had come up and he had to get back to Miami. How would I ever know? How would I know anything about his life? He didn’t ask me about school, about how I was getting along in New York.
Daddy
, I wanted to say,
look at me
.

Only in writing this am I making all the connections. I miss my boys but I’m glad I’m here on my own and have the time to write. It’s a beautiful day in Paris. I’ve just been to the Louvre. And still I can’t forget my father. The
memories
keep unfolding.

It was after I saw my father that I felt a burning desire to see Adam. I felt if I didn’t see him I couldn’t exist, the desire was that powerful. After Daddy left I stayed at the bar and ordered another drink. Most of the clientele at the bar were older men, my father’s age. It wasn’t a young person’s place. A man sat next to me. His hair receded on each side of his face, making an island in the middle of his forehead. He wore shiny gold jewelry, a thick bracelet around his wrist, the same color gold square ring on his left hand, and a similar ring with a diamond on his pinky finger. I let him buy me another drink and listened and laughed when I was supposed to, though I don’t remember really listening. I heard the quality of his voice but not the words he was saying. As the evening wore on he touched my arm when he spoke to me. I excused myself to find the ladies’ room and went down the back staircase. I took a coin out of my pocket, put it in the pay phone, and dialed Adam’s number. Mariana answered. My heart jumped, but it was too late to hang up. I asked for him. Her voice was icy. She said he wasn’t home. That he was rarely home. She asked me not to call there again. I went back upstairs and thanked the man who had bought me a drink and left the tavern. I began walking uptown to my apartment and then I turned around and decided to take a cab to Adam’s studio. I was a little wasted from the drinks, but I knew what I was doing. I thought about Mariana sitting in her apartment. I thought about her petite, heart-shaped face. She was an exile from another country and Adam was the reason she was in America. He had gone to Romania on a Fulbright. Some of his paintings were being shown in Prague, and he took advantage and decided to look up a Romanian painter whose work he admired. He met Mariana and they fell in love and she came back with him to the States and eventually got a job at Yale. The country was under Communist rule then. I think it must have appealed to the romantic in him, saving a woman from the cruelty of a regime, giving her hope in a new world, the cruelty of a new regime (his). I thought about Mariana and Adam in the cab, but my own desires and needs were more important. Thinking about Mariana seemed to fuel my urgency to see Adam.

How did Mariana know it was me on the phone? We had never spoken. My stomach was queasy. I remembered how titillated I grew in his studio just a few days before, when he unbuttoned my blouse and kissed me—the almost sandpapery imprint of his lips on my own. I took off my leather gloves and brought my fingers to my lips, leaned my head back against the seat, and wanted him to kiss me again.

He told me he was in love with me that day. He told me that I was all he thought about. That my innocence was refreshing. I’m not sure I believed him. He sat down next to me on the daybed and we kissed and I let him hold me. “I fantasize about you,” he said. The thought felt private and seductive and it half thrilled me and half made me ashamed. Was I in love with him? I always thought I was still in love with William, that William would be the only boy I could ever love, that I was still saving myself for him.

In the cab ride I thought about being in the studio with Adam. I thought about how I listened as Adam explained to me his relationship to art. How painting was all about light. “You must learn to watch for it,” he said. “How it brightens and withdraws and changes direction. Learn about it when you wake up in the morning. When you are eating your breakfast, getting dressed. You learn to know how it will make you feel and whether you can enter the dream of it when you work. Whether it will be good for penetrating inside.” I liked being in the light under Adam’s watchful gaze. I thought about how everything he did was passionate, even the way he reached for an orange in a bowl on the table and peeled it open and the room filled with the intense, fresh scent. He detached one segment from the orange and popped it in his mouth, and as I watched, I could taste the juice in my mouth. He took another slice in his hand and fed it to me, and I tasted the orange on his finger on my lips.

In the cab I thought about the quality of his voice, the inflections as he spoke. I remembered the last time I had been with him. I looked at his fingers, his calloused, brutal-looking hands. He had kissed my neck, lifted up my blouse to stroke my bare skin, and I was irritated by the softness with which he approached me. I knew I had to be very careful around him, that I had to be sure of myself, and I wasn’t sure at all what I was doing or even if I wanted to sleep with him. His touch was like the feel of sand on my skin at the beach. I rose. I was going to be late for class. I told him I couldn’t do it. I left Adam’s studio filled with nostalgia for something I could not claim. Once I was in class I heard his words again. “I’ve been looking at the spot above your breasts all night, just this one tender spot,” he had said and then he kissed my chest lightly with his lips. I wondered if I had made a mistake by saying no. If I’d ever have the chance again, and the thought preoccupied and disturbed me.

When I returned home that evening there were three messages on my machine. All of them were from Adam. He had to see me again. He couldn’t work. I was all that he thought about. In the last message he said it wasn’t fair, that I was torturing him.
But you’re married, you’re the reason
, I thought and even as I thought it a part of me questioned my own logic. I did want Adam, but he was married. I didn’t understand what it meant. But after I had drinks with my father at Tavern on the Green, I was overcome with a burning compulsion to see Adam again, and in the cab I was overcome with anxiety. I had not seen him in a week. I couldn’t see anything else in front of me. Images of my father sitting at the bar, holding his scotch, the glass sweating on the cocktail napkin, stayed with me and I wanted to forget them.

When I arrived at his studio it was nearly 11:00 in the evening. “Balthus said ‘to paint is not to represent, but to penetrate, to go to the heart of the secret,”’ Adam whispered in my ear. Jesus, fucking God, who cared about Balthus? I wanted him to undress me. Adam was on top of me, kissing me. I wanted him to bear his weight over me so that I could no longer see any object in the room. I did not want him to be gentle, I wanted him to be brutal and I told him so. He hadn’t shaved in a few days and I felt the coarseness of the bristles on my skin when he kissed my neck. “Harder,” I said. I was still struggling with the fact that he was married, and the struggle was part of the way that we made love. I felt him touch me everywhere, how eager he was to work his hands and face and tongue over every part of my body. I didn’t touch him back. I only kissed him. I wanted him to do whatever he wanted with me. It was very seductive to be made love to that way, to give up all control; it seemed that I had spent so much of my life trying to control my emotions. He spoke in one long litany about how long he had waited, how long he wanted me, and I was wrapped inside every word. I had the ridiculous notion that I could stay there forever, that there would be no light the next morning to draw me out, reminding me of those we had betrayed.