And Again (10 page)

When Sam moved in, I participated in each decision that undid that former home and created this one in its place. I helped Sam strip the floors, repaint the walls, spent endless weekends at Home Depot picking out track lighting and fabric swatches and high-tech dishwashers. I did not mind it then, being the one to change. Sam’s inherent goodness, his love of justice, his idealism, made me believe that loving him could make me all of those things, too. I realized that if one of us had to change so we could be together, it should be me.

None of it feels like it belongs to me now. I feel like an intruder here, standing in the middle of the living room with my coat on, afraid to dispel any of the room’s silent perfection with my presence. It’s as if the apartment has shifted a few degrees from where it was, skewing my sense of direction.

“Want me to make you something?” Sam asks, turning on the baseboard heaters to dispel the cold. He is constantly in motion because, after all, it would be silly for us both to stand, useless, in the middle of the room. It seems we don’t know how to live around each other anymore, after my months in the hospital. We lost the knack for it that quickly. “I haven’t really had the chance to get to the store these past couple of weeks, but I could make you some oatmeal.”

“Sure.” Oatmeal is one of the few foods I’ve been able to stand lately. Flavors are so strong they’ve become intolerable, and I’ve been subsisting on French fries and hospital Jell-O, applesauce and Honey Nut Cheerios. Peanut butter and jelly on white bread. Packets of cocoa. Children’s food. I haven’t been able to stomach meat either, since the transfer. From the moment the nurse put a tray of grayish Salisbury steak in front of me, I knew I wouldn’t be able to get it down. It had some new association with death for me, one I never considered before the transfer, and I still haven’t worked it all out yet. There is simply too much to figure out so soon.

The apartment looks recently cleaned, as if Sam removed all evidence of his weeks of living alone here while I was in the hospital. I can imagine what it must have looked like before, with discarded dirty socks on the living room floor and dark flecks of shaved whiskers in the bathroom sink. I know his bad habits, the lazy little traits that we both keep in check for each other. I don’t know what it would be like to live alone for months in this place. I’ve never lived alone, and that fact feels more significant now than it ever has.

I sit on the kitchen counter and watch as Sam cooks. It’s one of my favorite pastimes, watching Sam in the kitchen. He moves with a deliberate expertise balanced with a casual, practiced ease. He
eyeballs the amount of milk he pours into the pot, chopping dried cherries as he waits for it to boil, then adds the oatmeal and stirs in a few shakes of cinnamon. It smells delicious. I sip weak tea that’s full of sugar and begin to feel warm again. Perhaps all we need is to keep busy, to not let the silence drag on for too long.

“I miss my tattoos,” I say, rubbing my wrist against the leg of my pants, as if I can unearth the design still hidden underneath my blank skin.

“Yeah, me too,” he says, holding up our nutmeg grinder. I shake my head, and he returns it to the cabinet.

“Liar,” I say. “What was it that you said when we first started dating? That I should consider what I’ll look like when I’m seventy?”

“I liked your tattoos,” Sam said, handing me a steaming bowl of oatmeal and a cup of brown sugar. I heap in a few heavy-handed spoonfuls.

He picks up my wrist and presses the blank skin of it to his mouth. There’s potential in this moment, the first time we’ve touched outside the hospital, in an apartment with a locked door and no chance of anyone banging in to draw my blood or clear my tray of food or test my memory. All of my nerve endings seem to rush to the surface of my skin, crackling with the electric potential to feel. An image of David comes forward, unbidden, the way he squinted against the sun before I kissed him on the roof. And then Sam is stepping back, looking as if he’s shaking off an ill-conceived impulse. He clears his throat and scratches at the nape of his neck, where his hair is just a bit too long.

“Do you think you’ll have them redone?” he asks, picking up the pot and rinsing it out in the sink. Keeping busy so he won’t have to look directly at me.

“What?”

“Your tattoos.”

“No,” I say, my voice too sharp, trying to turn my attention back to my breakfast, trying to ignore my own ill-conceived impulse, to throw my bowl and its steaming contents in his direction. All he has
for me is kindness and pity, and I want neither. The brown sugar melts into my oatmeal, and I eat a few hot mouthfuls to distract myself before I continue.

“It wouldn’t be authentic, if I just got them all over again. I wouldn’t be getting them for the same reasons. They wouldn’t mean what they used to.”

“Right,” Sam says, as if he understands. He acts as if he understands all of it, the bits of me that I’ve never quite been able to smooth out, the pieces that I never quite managed to fit into this life of ours. But the truth is, he never has.

Sam and I met for the second time during my fourth year at the School of the Art Institute. It was at a gallery in River North, during a posh up-and-coming event where my friend Trevor was showing one of his paintings. I had always liked Trevor’s work. He had a modern Egon Schiele thing going on, and I’d sat for him a couple of times when he wasn’t happy with his other models. Trevor said he always preferred to paint other artists anyway; he had a theory that painting another artist watching him created a double-mirror effect, opening a corridor of space that hadn’t existed in his work before. Of course, he would have had to pay one of the gamine young women who posted fliers on the SAIC bulletin board, whereas for a while I was willing to take my clothes off for him for free.

There must have been something to his theory, though, because it was one of his paintings of me that had created enough of a stir to get him into the show. I dragged Penny with me that night, unwilling to venture into a gathering of North Shore art collectors by myself. We tottered in on stiletto heels, looking like a pair of lost hippies in thrift-store cocktail dresses. The painting, of course, was on its own wall, seven feet tall and vibrant with color, me in purple knee socks and nothing else, lying on rumpled sheets and walking my feet up Trevor’s bedroom wall. My eyes peered right at the observer. Looking at it made me a bit dizzy, seeing myself the way he’d seen me in
his head, all swirls of color and those huge, demanding eyes. It made me wonder if all my mirrors had been lying to me my whole life, though I couldn’t exactly decipher the nature of the lie. I couldn’t tell if I was more beautiful or less, the way he’d painted me.

Penny, of course, was unimpressed. “In the future, please make sure the men who see you naked know how to use a paintbrush,” she said.

“All of them?”

“All of them. You want a drink?”

I glanced back up at myself. “I think I need one.”

As Penny floated off, I tried to put space between my portrait and me. I wandered toward a collection of photographs on the opposite wall, unimpressive shots of abandoned bicycle frames locked to various racks around the city. Trevor was across the room, holding court among a small clot of older women wearing perfectly tailored silk dresses and intricate jewelry, and when I caught his eye he winked at me. As I tipped my imaginary hat to him, I felt someone sidle up next to me.

“It’s you in that painting over there, isn’t it?”

“Not exactly,” I replied, glancing over and swallowing my next breath when I realized that the man next to me was Sam. His boyish features were the same as ever, the light shadow of stubble on his chin the only evidence of his age.

“You have the same tattoo,” he said, motioning to the lacy lines of ivy swirling their way from my left shoulder blade down to my elbow. Those same lines crawled their way over my bare shoulder on the canvas.

“You’re very observant,” I said, searching his face for any signs of recognition. I’d dyed my hair a faint lavender color in college and invested huge amounts of money getting it chemically straightened from its usual tight ringlets. He’d also never seen me in makeup, particularly not the kind of heavy eyeliner I was sporting that night. It was exciting, like wearing a mask, to stand in front of Sam as a stranger. It made me feel powerful.

“So it is you,” he said.

“Not really. It’s only what Trevor sees.”

“Seems like Trevor sees an awful lot.”

I laughed, peering at him from under my bangs. There were differences, when I looked at him long enough. His brown hair was shorter than it had been in high school. His jaw was a bit wider, his mouth broader. All of his lankiness seemed to have hardened, become more defined. Maybe he wasn’t the best-looking guy in the place, but he was mine, a little, by virtue of having been my sister’s once. That familiarity alone drew me to him.

Penny reappeared then with a couple of vodka tonics. “Who’s your friend?” she asked, handing me the cold, sweating glass. I took a sip, relishing the sweet tang of it, preparing to enjoy my new game.

“Penny, this is Sam Foster,” I said, watching the rush of confusion overtake his expression. To his credit, he recovered quickly.

“I’m sorry, have we met before?” he asked. I could almost see him pawing through his mental Rolodex, hoping to find my face.

“Ages ago. If I remember correctly, you gave me a bootleg of the Smashing Pumpkins farewell show at the Metro for my twelfth birthday. Which was nice, considering my sister got me a gift card to The Gap.”

“Holy shit,” he said, taking a step back, as if seeing more of me would draw everything into focus. “You’re Lucy Reed’s little sister. Hannah. Jesus, I can’t even remember the last time I saw you.”

This struck me as odd, because I could remember exactly when I last saw him. It was at his father’s funeral, only days before he ended his relationship with Lucy. But I smiled anyway, brushing off the memory. “Probably back before I got my braces off,” I replied as Penny watched with curious amusement. It was a break in my pattern. I didn’t usually go for the jacket-and-tie types.

“How is Lucy?” Sam asked.

“Married,” Penny replied, before I could. “To a banker, no less. They’re picking out their white picket fence next week.”

Sam’s face showed no discernable signs of disappointment, only
faint, polite interest. It was reassuring, to imagine how little Sam cared about Lucy and her banker husband in my presence.

“Well, tell her I say hello.”

“So what do you think of the show, Sam?” Penny asked.

“Can you keep a secret?” Sam asked. Penny motioned to him to indicate that he should proceed. “I don’t know much about art.”

“So what are you doing here on a Saturday night?”

“I’m writing up the show for the
Trib
.”

“You’re a reporter?” I asked, and he nodded.

“And they’re sending you here, even though you don’t know anything about art,” Penny said, and didn’t wait for an answer, waving her hands in front of her, as if she could fend off any additional conversation. “Christ, I don’t even want to know. You two have fun, I’m going to go rescue Trevor and pretend there’s still a thing called culture in this country.”

“Don’t let her bother you,” I said to Sam once Penny was out of earshot.

“She’s got a point. I’m new at the paper, paying my dues in Arts and Leisure for the moment, trying to work my way up.”

It’s the sort of thing that would one day bother me, the idea that my life’s pursuit was his purgatory, his stepping stone into more practical and important matters. That he would arrive at the gallery, fully prepared to write about the work, and yet harbor no desire to learn anything about it that wouldn’t fit into a page of text. But those concerns would come later. That night I would have overlooked anything to keep him talking.

“What do you want to write about?” I asked.

“Politics,” he replied. “Political corruption, really. How money and patronage influence the system.”

“So you’re a crusader then. Trying to make the greedy and corrupt pay for their misdeeds?”

“Maybe just trying to shine a little light into a system that’s the worst at serving the people who need it most,” he replied.

“An idealist.”

He shrugged, completely self-possessed. “Maybe.”

“Well, you’re certainly a better person than I am,” I said, feeling myself drawing closer to him by degrees, even if my body wasn’t moving. “I would want to make them pay.”

“Hannah Reed,” he said, as if testing out how my name felt in his mouth. “You’re not at all what I remember.”

“You’re a lot like what I remember,” I replied. “Well, except your hair is shorter.” I brushed my fingertips over the close-cropped hair at his temple, watching him twitch a bit at the contact. “It was always so curly.”

“And you were such a shy little kid,” he said, glancing back at my painting, at the burnt umber and gold Trevor used for my eyes, the peachy swirls of skin, the dark russet of my nipples.

“It’s easier than you think. Sitting for a painting,” I said. “Once you’ve painted a portrait yourself, you realize it’s just about what’s in the artist’s head. It’s not really about the subject at all. It could have been anyone up there.”