The Sunshine When She's Gone: A Novel (15 page)

Annalena, full of reverie since graduating from Winterthur, turned and raised a finger to silence her. “Be patient,” she whispered. “And you’ll see. You may not ever come back here.” And so she studied Annalena’s rapturous face. Giving up, she looked back to the mammoth gray in front of her—there was nowhere else to look—and fell into it. Her fear petered out like it did right before she fell asleep. The hard bench beneath her fell away. She was not in Texas, she was not a daughter, she was not a girl, she was not herself; there was only this world of the painting and its tides, a subtle connection that she rode. She fell into time and space. She was removed—for that was how it seemed when her mother finally summoned her out and back to the car—and she was sure she had found something, an experience, a way of seeing, that was all hers.

Her grandparents died soon after, and David Edelson became fully a New Yorker, who never needed or wanted to go back to Texas. Her mother had been right: Veronica never returned to the chapel. But she often dreamed of the paintings and the feelings they’d produced, the disembodiment and that unnameable higher connection.

In the beginning of labor it was those colors, that undulation, that she felt along with the pain. Vision was transcendence, a gift. She had lived by this idea from the time she was six and all through her adult life. She had confided to John that seeing was the thing that made life good for her. If you could see deeply, if seeing could alter you, you were lucky.

After Clara, she could no longer see the same way. Their new world was comprised of bodily needs: Veronica was grounded in pain. Clara’s hunger was continuous. And Veronica no longer had time to stare at a painting for very long. Instead, she stared at the baby’s mysterious face. That face, whose every gesture and movement she strained to interpret, had become her chapel.

After, Veronica sometimes had dreams of color—zooming reds, electric blues—but when she woke up there wasn’t time to see, only time to respond. She’d worried that, if you stayed in that dream, you might never emerge and reach another person.

Wasn’t Annalena evidence of this encapsulation? But Annalena was not beyond convention; she did appear in the recovery room when Clara was born, bearing a large purple hyacinth.

“Sniff,” she’d said, holding the plant close to Veronica’s face.

“Hi, Mom,” Veronica had said, overwhelmed by the cool earth scent of the flower.

“It’s as if you can
see
purple when you close your eyes. How are you feeling?”

“Tired. The baby should be here in a minute. They’re bringing her back from the nursery.”

“I was worried about you,” Annalena said, as she made room on the bedside table for the plant. A nurse shuffled in, holding the bundled baby, and Annalena watched as Veronica took Clara back into her arms.

“Do you want to hold her?” Veronica asked her mother after a few moments. She, too, wasn’t beyond convention.

“I do. I definitely do,” Annalena had said. “Look at her!” Yet she didn’t make any motion to take Clara. “She’s a stunner.”

Veronica adjusted Clara’s hat—her head was terribly coned from three hours of futile pushing—so her mother could see only the baby’s face. Annalena reached out and touched Clara’s cheek with a dry finger. Veronica shifted the pillow in her lap; the baby was too heavy on her incision.

The essential transfer, what she knew was supposed to happen—the baby passing gently from her arms to her mother’s, who had once held her—was not happening. Annalena clutched nervously at a strand of pearls around her neck, fiddling with the clasp.
Do you want to hold her?
Veronica had been foolish to even ask. She hadn’t harbored hope as much as need. It was like wanting water in a desert. “Just look at those tiny eyelashes!” Annalena said, her blue eyes darting intently as she appreciated Clara’s beauty; for Annalena, perhaps there was no higher calling than finding beauty. Veronica pressed the button in her hand, and a rush of morphine suffused her body. Almost right away, the awkward triangle softened.

*   *   *

They paid the driver and slammed the doors. Veronica tried to maintain attention as Ines talked about CVS versus amnio. “The prior can be done sooner, but it’s much more painful and the results are not as accurate. Amnio is done later but tells you a lot very accurately. Why are you nodding?” Ines asked.

“Well, I did both, remember?” Both options were fraught in their own ways. She didn’t know what to recommend. “What does Art think?” He was walking a few paces ahead of them.

“He’s crazy and doesn’t want to do either.” Veronica’s tipsiness was fading, but the image of a red painting dogged her, tempted her. How she wanted to dive into the moving tide. Images were encroaching now; the line between seeing and love was beginning to blur. But Ines needed advice, and Clara, in Irvington, needed the bottle in Veronica’s purse.

“I guess I’m leaning toward the amnio,” Ines said, pulling on one of her curls before tucking it back up under her thick hat.

“They’ll probably make you do everything.”

“I
like
everything, remember?”

Outside the restaurant, a tall man leaned against the side of the building with one long leg bent, his foot resting on the wall. Despite the cold, his white shirt glinted beneath his open coat. Damon. He wore no hat, and his bristly short hair looked almost platinum in the dark. He’d come as he’d said he would, regardless of her lack of response.

“What’s wrong?” Ines asked, then followed Veronica’s gaze. “Oh shit, the photographer.” Because he had crushed Veronica, Ines had decreed she would never again utter his name.

“It’s fine,” Veronica said, a smile playing on her lips, wishing she’d suggested a different place to eat. For a moment, John’s absence, Clara’s distance, colors blurring, all of life, was supplanted by Damon; that old Damon soreness returned to her, like the secret spot where a tooth is loose that you have to keep checking over and over again. As they continued walking, she felt her face grow hot. Ines turned and looked at her sternly. “Are you okay with this?” Art had already ducked into the door of the restaurant to get out of the wind.

“I knew he was in New York, but I was going to ignore him. Do I look all right? Can you tell I’ve been crying?”

“
Have
you been?”

“I’m fine. I guess I just miss Clara.” Damon was laughing on a cellphone, throwing his head back as if he’d never heard anything funnier.

“You were
crying
?” Ines said. “Get on a train and go to Irvington.”

“It’s too late.” Veronica took off her wool hat and adjusted her hair. She made the mirror face, which she was embarrassed to see Ines notice.

“It is
not
too late. Skip dinner and go,” she said.

But a force had begun, surrounding her, pulling her in.

“Oh no!” Ines said. “Do you want to go somewhere else?”

“You know what? I’m fine. This is good for me. It’s been three years at least. It’s sobering. This afternoon I was crying about my whole life for the first time in a long time; seeing him, I can compare now with then and see that even though I don’t know what the hell I’m doing, I know more than I did
then
.”

Ines squinted. “Liar.”

A sort of bravado—she was not young and
totally
insecure anymore—seized her. She was a parent. Everything was possible. As she approached Damon, he looked up, and his face brightened. “You! My God. I’d thought I’d lost you forever. You look great!” He spoke as if they’d been separated against his will. He had always gushed when she ignored him. He grabbed her two hands with an old hint of propriety. His hands were so warm that she wasn’t aware of her own reply, couldn’t wriggle away, couldn’t remember that she was now someone else, because with his hands he
did
own her. They stood there beaming.

“Hey,” Ines said coolly to Damon, before she addressed Veronica. “I’m heading to the table. Meet me there.” Veronica heard herself say to Damon, “Well, you should join us, because my husband isn’t here and we have a table for four.”

“I couldn’t,” he said, a faux demurral.

“Sure you could.”

“I’ll come say hi while I wait for my takeout.” Damon put his hand on her back as they walked to the table, as if they were a couple, and then he cut it by saying, “My girlfriend is home with a cold, but she wants me to pick up some of their meatballs. Have you met Carmela?” He knew she hadn’t. The name Carmela: It was as if he were dangling a piece of candy before her, a sweet caramel.

“I haven’t met her, no, but I’ve had the meatballs. They’re the best.”

“And your husband, what’s his name again?” Damon said, and winked as they approached the table and sat down.

She hit his arm because he knew. “His name is John,” Art said, looking up from the table. Art detested Damon on John’s behalf. This would be more than awkward, so Veronica pinched Damon’s elbow, an old signal they had that could mean all sorts of things. She knew he’d get it. He would get her. Someone had to
get
her.

Thus prompted, Damon said, “Hey, Art, Ines. Veronica invited me to join you, but my girlfriend is home sick and I need to pick up the meatballs she likes, so…” He scratched the back of his neck as if he were abashed. “I should probably go.”

“Right,” Ines said. Art nodded.

“Are you sure?” Veronica asked, popping up, enjoying the automatic intimacy between them. “I’ll walk you to the door.”

When they stopped at the door, he looked at her, his gray eyes dancing. “I can tell your friends still adore me. I want to catch up with you, though.”

“Me too.”

“I have to wait for the meatballs,” he added, as if to remind her that he was not
that
disappointed, and then he crushed her. “Once Carmela eats, she’s always sleepy.”

“Maybe I have met her—the food writer?”

“That’s Constance.” With Damon, there were always lots of women. “Carmela has the worst cold. I’m actually heading over to the Parlour after, if you guys want to meet up for a drink—”

“Okay,” she said too quickly. “I mean, I don’t think we have any plans.”

“What’s-his-name is welcome to join us.”

“Can you stop?” she said playfully. Shame consumed her; what’s-his-name who was suddenly gone, what’s-his-name whom she had spent all afternoon missing. For years she had counted on John. How had that sense of certainty been ripped away in one day? Well, he was not here, and Damon stood before her, playing with one of her hands, and there seemed very little to stop that melt-in-your-mouth sensation. “You don’t even know about Clara, do you?”

“Clara,” he said, almost delectably, as if he may have dated a Clara once.

“I had a baby—my daughter. She’s six months old.”

“Go get a picture,” he commanded, and she went back to the table to get her purse. Ines rolled her eyes.

“Wow,” Damon said when she returned. “I adore her. She’s beautiful.” They held the edges of the picture as if she were their child together. After some obligatory questions about the baby, he said, “Listen. So, so,
so
good to see you. You look—okay, I can tell you’re not coming out later, but, like, email me or something, even though you’re
married
and everything, and with a kid!” he said, as if being married in your mid-thirties were especially goofy.

She walked back to the table, safe. She imagined gorgeous Carmela, languid with a fever, craving meat as she sprawled on the couch in a silky white nightie. If Damon was out buying her favorite dish, they were in that first phase of infatuation he plunged into in the beginning, before he grew abruptly cold.

“Good riddance,” Ines said as Veronica sat down.

Veronica said, “Yup,” sort of quietly as she maneuvered in her seat.

“Why are assholes always named Damon?” Art asked, and then looked at Ines for confirmation. “It’s true, or
Damien
. It means Satan in Latin.”

Ines and Veronica ignored him and started looking over the menu.

“Of course, you always have
Angus
 … as a name,” Art continued. The two women talked about getting artichokes. Ines was hungry; Veronica wanted to get to another topic, to still the fluttering that made her want to race out the door and catch up with Damon. Ines and Art decided to split a salad.

When the food came, she checked her phone and found nothing. She abandoned her artichoke after a few leaves. She could not go to John. She wanted very sharply, for the first time, to hurt him. Her brief insight about seeing and love and how they could perhaps coexist grew muffled; Damon had nothing to do with love. He was stationed firmly in aesthetics, on the side of seeing.

*   *   *

His apartment was the same. Three cameras hung from hooks in the dark hallway, their huge lenses like trunks. There was a mess of newspapers and magazines on a glass coffee table and the red IKEA sofa where they used to fool around. He had one toothbrush and a tube of French toothpaste with Arabic letters on the back. Veronica opened it and squeezed some onto her fingertip. It tasted like licorice. She spread it around her tongue and gums. Her eyes were shiny in the mirror and she looked away. She was too fuzzy and wanted to be sharper. Art had ordered two bottles of red wine and Ines had abstained. After dinner her friends had promptly gone home, offering her the first cab, which she declined, saying she felt like walking a little bit. She watched them speed off; then she walked uptown. She could see the neon of the Parlour a few blocks away, and, as if in a dream, she had walked there. He’d been sitting alone when she found him, reading Friday’s
Financial Times
by candlelight.

In a few minutes she would come out of his bathroom—ostensibly to see some of his new work—and they would kiss. That was all that would happen, a reminder of a prior life. She untwisted and smoothed her bra straps, cupped her hand over her mouth to check her breath, then sniffed her underarms. She smelled salty. His old tiles were clean, as if he knew that sodden ladies would sit here alone and stare at the grout before they fucked him, as if Damon, oddly domestic despite his itinerant lifestyle and dread of intimacy, had been in here during his time off with a tiny brush and a special grout cleaner from the hardware store.