The Life Room (26 page)

“They never liked Mariana. She’s too cold for them,” Adam said, when Eleanor asked what his parents thought about their separation. They were in his studio working. “She never wanted to go see them. She had no patience for them.” He had explained that his father was once a renowned professor in Budapest. In America he owned a pawnshop. “They want me to be happy. My happiness seems to be their only ambition now.”

“My father’s parents never made it out of Europe.”

Adam wiped his hands on his pants and went to a drawer in an old pine bureau in a corner of his studio. He took out a prayer shawl wrapped in cellophane. “My father gave this to me on my bar mitzvah. It was given to him on the boat over. He was sick. A stranger took it off his own back to keep him warm. He doesn’t want me to forget.”

“My father won’t talk about his past. I can’t imagine what they lost. How they survived.”

“I’ve been trying to get my father to start writing, now that he’s sold the shop. But he’s stubborn. He says he’s made his peace with the past, but I’m not sure.”

Adam left the studio to get fresh bread for lunch at the bakery around the corner. Some paintings he was arranging for a new show were stacked in a corner. They were paintings he had done before she began modeling for him. Eleanor wondered why he hadn’t yet shown them to her.

They were part of a series of a family. Around the dinner table sat a mother and father and a boy who resembled Adam, and hiding under the table, a young girl. All you could see of the girl were her legs sticking out from the damask cloth. The look on the parents’ faces was anguished, as if Adam had found a way to drain his own sadness into them. On their wrists were serial numbers. Another painting was of a portrait of a young girl, wearing the same red tights and shiny shoes as the girl in the former painting. The girl had Adam’s black eyes and curly black hair. Strangely, the girl bore a resemblance to Eleanor. Her look was unnaturally ethereal. When Adam came back, he saw her looking at it.

“I’m painting for my parents,” Adam said, putting down the bag of groceries. “So it won’t be lost.”

“The girl in the paintings?”

“My sister.”

“You’ve never mentioned her.”

“She was killed in a car accident when she was twelve. The Weiss family’s Greek tragedy.”

Eleanor had thought the painting of the girl under the table was about Adam’s isolation from his parents because the boy in the painting, almost ghostly, was staring into the canvas, oblivious to the other two figures in the composition, but she had read it wrong. It was the absence of the girl that had been the painting’s focus, as if she would always be hiding under the table, always in the background. Eleanor thought about Adam’s family and how it would feel to lose a child and a sister. Tears filled her eyes. She put her arms around him and hugged him.

“I want you to have the prayer shawl, Eleanor. Give it to your father. He should have something.”

“I couldn’t take that. It belongs to you. To your family.”

“To my father we’re all fathers and sons and daughters. All of us who are Jewish. Besides, you’re my family now.”

The prayer shawl was dirty white. Delicate light blue threads made a stripe in the cloth. She undid the cellophane wrapping and touched the cloth. She thought of the rabbi’s words she had heard as a child when she went to synagogue on the high holy days.

The Lord said to Moses: Instruct the people of Israel that in every generation they shall put fringes on the corners of their garments and bind a thread to the fringes of each corner. Looking upon these fringes you will be reminded of all the commandments of the Lord and fulfill them and not be seduced by your heart or led astray by your eyes. Then you will remember and observe all my commandments and be holy before your God
.

The afternoon had illuminated a corner of Adam’s inner world. His continual need to layer his paintings with more paint was, to him, like bringing a lost world back into focus.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I paint for freedom from pain.”

Eleanor tried to mention his sister and his paintings and what it evoked for her, but he wouldn’t let her.

“Don’t read me into my work. It makes me feel too exposed,” he said, and then, as if realizing that he’d been harsh, he reached for her.

A gallery was hanging Adam’s series of paintings, and he asked her to help him write the catalog for the show. The largest canvas was the portrait of his sister. She liked collaborating with him on the catalog and was happy that the upcoming show had raised his spirits. He accompanied her to poetry readings and lectures and she felt that he had become more a part of her world, too.

Mariana receded from their lives, though occasionally Eleanor felt her in the room with them the way history impinges upon the present, as if she were a presence peering in at them from a window. Adam was oblivious to everything but his canvas, as if his past was obliterated. But when she peered back at Adam, she recognized that no one escapes his past. There were too many days and nights, at least ten years, recorded in Mariana’s and Adam’s bodies. Once he had taken Eleanor to visit another artist’s studio, a friend of his from graduate school. She built small boxes, little caskets with pillows inside that had the word “shamed” written on them in black ink. She was going to bury the boxes in Central Park. Eleanor understood wanting to bury shame. She still felt guilty for taking Adam from Mariana.

There was talk among Adam’s artistic circle that Mariana was seeing another painter. Adam and Mariana still kept in touch. One night when Adam was out, Mariana called.

“Tell him he needs to call his dealer in London,” she said.

“I’ll give him the message.”

“I won’t call again,” Mariana said. “I can tell it makes you uncomfortable.”

Eleanor looked up at one of Adam’s early paintings he had brought with him when he moved out of Mariana’s apartment. She felt diminutive next to it. She was sure the figure in the painting was inspired by Mariana. She could see a suggestion of Mariana’s knowing, ironic eyes in the portrait. The canvas was divided by a wall. On one side of the canvas the woman sat in a chair. On the other side Adam’s self-portrait sat in an identical chair, the two chairs back to back.

Once his show opened, his dealer arranged for Adam to give a lecture at Pratt and he invited Eleanor. After the lecture he went out drinking with some of the graduate students, and she tagged along. One of the students began talking about another recent show in a gallery in Soho that was garnering considerable critical attention. Adam hated the show and talking about it soured his mood.

“Tension is what gives a work its pathos,” he said, holding court at the table. “You can’t teach a painter about pathos. It’s either in the work or it isn’t.” He said that when he was teaching he could tell on the first day of class which students had it and which students didn’t, and it annoyed him that he had to waste his time with students who would never be artists. “What really pisses me off,” Adam said, still raging, “is how these young punks can splash paint around on a canvas and think they’ve achieved greatness.” It angered him that certain artists were more recognized than he was and that because he was still a figurative painter, he was out of vogue. Eleanor had learned to tolerate his rants. She saw them as a reflection of his commitment and his talent. She didn’t try to fight with him anymore. But she was embarrassed at the way he was acting around students.

“It’s because you’re a purist that you take it so personally,” she said, hoping it would pacify him. But as the night wore on he was getting increasingly drunk. One of the more earnest in the bunch asked him what his work was about. He said he didn’t understand it. Adam thought for a moment. “It has its own language,” he said. “Its own rationale. You don’t ask a painter what his work is like. He can tell you about how he applies the paint, who his influences are.” He grew solemn. She saw that he was struggling to think about how to describe his work outside the context of his own personal life, and the struggle made him angry. And he was drunk. “It’s like fucking,” he finally said, loud enough that everyone in the bar turned around to look at him. “My paintings are about fucking.”

Eleanor left the bar and walked home alone.

She was late getting to his studio the next morning, and when she arrived he was in a foul mood, still drunk from the night before. After an hour, he took a razor and began to slash at the painting.

“What are you doing?”

“It’s a piece of shit. I can’t look at this garbage.” He slashed at two other canvasses that had been hanging on the wall for months in a state of half completion. She felt as if he were lacerating her own body.

It didn’t take long to discover what was at the root of Adam’s despair. A critic had savaged his show in the
New York Times
. He left her apartment and was gone all night. She went to find him in his studio the next morning, but the studio was empty. He was nowhere.

He came back to her apartment later the next afternoon, still drunk.

“When those motherfuckers assault your work it’s as if they’ve stolen your soul.” He went to the kitchen cabinet and took out a bottle of whiskey and sat at Eleanor’s black-and-white flecked linoleum table with the crack down the center.

She put her hands on Adam’s shoulders. She saw a defeated look in his eyes.

“Eleanor, I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but I need to do this now. When I’m like this you have to wait it out. You asked me once why Mariana and I never had children. This is why. I’m like this. I’ve been like this my whole life.”

“And Mariana?”

“How did she deal with it? She knew that eventually I’d come around again. She knows that before I do.”

“You’re going to go back to her, aren’t you?”

He looked up guiltily.

“She knows me, Eleanor.”

She thought she saw his eyes tear up, but then it could have been induced by the alcohol or his nights of insomnia.

“What will I do without you?” he said.

“How can you miss what doesn’t exist?”

“You exist.”

“Only in your studio.”

She wondered if anyone would ever look at her so intensely again.

The red light on her phone was blinking when she walked into her office. Stephen had called. “Eleanor, I’m coming to New York next week. Will you have lunch with me?” It was October. Five months had passed since she’d seen him in Paris. She was unsettled by his last phone call, but of course she could have lunch with him.

She was writing the morning they were to meet and it was going well again. In the current chapter she was raising questions: Had Anna Karenina ever loved her husband? Had she loved him and had not known until she met Vronsky that her capacity to love was deeper than she had realized—so that once she met Vronsky it seemed as if she had never loved her husband at all?

As the chapter evolved, Eleanor had become more sympathetic to Anna. Anna had loved her husband but she could not reach him. She had accepted his aloofness and thought herself content until she met Vronsky She was not frivolous or malicious. She had not married her husband vindictively. But if she did not open herself to Vronsky, she would have died inside.

When Stephen opened her office door she almost mistook him for one of her students. He had grown a goatee and was dressed in a tight black T-shirt and blue jeans. She was disarmed by his rugged physicality. They hugged awkwardly. He had come from a meeting with an editor at a new men’s magazine. He had pitched a story about America’s fascination with pilots, and the editor liked the idea and had assigned the piece. He wore a pair of black high-tops, the kind she would have bought for her boys.

Stephen took the chair across from her desk. She liked the sense of control and authority it created, having him on the other side of her desk. But she barely registered what he was saying, distracted as she was by his physical presence. He filled the room. As he spoke she studied a pendant that hung from his neck. He hadn’t worn it in Paris. In fact, in Paris he had appeared more grown up, professional. He seemed different in New York, less confident, less mature, and she was relieved to find herself less enamored. Or was she just telling herself that? He talked excitedly about the story he was going to write. He said that pilots were a symbol of sexuality and danger (she thought the conceit obvious, a cliché). His face was animated when he talked. He was going to interview pilots from several different airlines. He stood up and walked around her office, studied her bookshelves, picked up
Paradise Lost
, looked at the title, put it down.

“My God, Eleanor,” he said. “Professor Cahn. Who would have thunk it.”

She didn’t know whether she was offended or not.

“You were always the smart one but you tried to hide it. You didn’t like to make the rest of us feel stupid.”

“Is that how you saw me?”

“You were one of those intense girls. I remember sitting at the table in your mother’s house, listening to you. I was pretty obsessed with you then.”

He picked up the framed picture of Michael and the boys. “These are your sons?”

She nodded. Her eyes went to the laces on his shoes. They were untied.

“Good-looking kids.”

Watching Stephen hold the photograph of Noah, Nicholas, and Michael made her slightly queasy. Why hadn’t she put the photograph away? She tried to remember whether she had told Michael she had seen Stephen in Paris. When she and Michael began to get serious with each other and had cataloged past lovers, she hadn’t mentioned Stephen. There hadn’t been much to say. Their relationship had never been defined. Surely she couldn’t say they’d been lovers. She hadn’t told Michael she saw him in Paris and that he had called her in New York and she was going to meet him for lunch. But there had been a moment when she considered telling him, almost had the words formulated on her tongue, and she nearly deceived herself into thinking she had.

It was raining outside; she could hear it slash her office window. It had rained for almost a week straight. She was cooped up, unsettled. She was sure if they had one streak of good, warm weather she’d find her center again. Stephen still held the photograph of her family in his hand. He stared at it again, and then resumed his pacing around the room.