If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This (5 page)

L
awrence House. It’s a low-lying building filled with heartbreaks, amongst whom my son looks like part of a crowd. And people like me and like Sam pass one another with guilty looks on our faces. The first year, I went to see him just when I was well enough. The second year, there was no sign of spread. I was off chemo and I went almost every day.

Maybe we could bring him home, I said to Sam. We managed before and I’m feeling fine now. He could come back.

Sam’s voice was quiet. He said, I don’t know if that’s something we should do. Remember how the two of you used to struggle? You were covered with bruises, Ruth. You couldn’t handle him at all.

Well, let’s think about it anyway. Let’s just not say that we won’t.

Okay. If you want. We won’t say that we won’t.

S
am deals the cards, counting quietly to himself. We’ve kept the same deck beside Todd’s bed for all these years.

Fives? I ask.

Go fish.

So I draw from the pile.

No, I say. Not a five. It’s your turn.

I look over at our boy. He is staring somewhere else.

M
y son is eighteen years old. His head is covered with thick black curls like my own used to be and his eyes are the same bright blue as Sam’s. He would have been a very handsome man. He would have been something wonderful, I’m convinced. But for the travels of a blood clot to his brain, while he burrowed small and silenced in my womb.

III.

It’s been two months now since your six-foot fence went up. Two months, more or less. From my bed, I can hear your children playing on the other side. Sometimes I turn the television up louder just to drown them out. It’s a terrible thing to feel yourself hate a child.

Sam didn’t want to go to work today but I argued him out through the door.

Nothing will be improved by you losing your job, I said.

He drives my car these days. It was always the more dependable one. It’s parked down the drive, near the street, of course—thanks to you. His is stowed in our garage. He argued when I first told him he should take my keys. We went through the game of my telling him not to be silly; it would just be until I felt stronger. It wasn’t a big decision at all. Stop being ridiculous, I said. You look like you’re murdering me. It’s just the better car. You should use it while I can’t. I’ll be taking it back soon enough.

And so he gave in.

I know that you go to work a little after he leaves—I hear your car door, the ignition. I know the hours you keep, can predict when you’ll come home. And I know you have a wife. A friend who visits me, brings us food, brings me gossip, has told me that your wife is very pretty, slender and naturally blond, in her thirties. She stands on the corner in the mornings and puts your daughter on the bus. Then an older woman comes in and watches your little boy, while your wife keeps herself busy, though no one in the neighborhood knows exactly what she does.

There are speculations about you. The new family on the block. There are rumors that you’re putting in a pool. But winter is coming now, I know, and it isn’t the right time. Maybe in April, when the world has thawed again so the ground will be soft enough to dig.

S
am drives out alone to Lawrence House now, every two or three days.

My last trip was two weeks ago. I said my goodbyes in silence, the language of my motherhood. There were other periods when I wasn’t there. There’s no way to explain to my child that this is different. And probably no reason that we should, though I still carry this awful fear that he’ll think, in whatever way he thinks, that I have given up on him.

I held his heavy head one last time, pulled it gently to my chest, no longer soft.

That day, in the car driving home, Sam was unusually talkative, telling me stories about a new coworker, and then about an old friend. Both of them had done hilarious things—as though everyone Sam knew had taken on an antic side, every situation holding a fistful of punch lines.

And it was funny, genuinely funny. I laughed out loud as he drove us both home.

I
don’t drink anymore. I lost the craving. But Sam brings the bottle upstairs now and he sits by the bed. Sometimes we watch television. Sometimes we just talk. He pours freely for himself on the understanding that I’m not keeping track. I pick through our lives, recounting good moments, like looking for treasures at the flea market. He listens, sometimes even smiles.

I know you must have heard by now that I’m sick. It’s that kind of town, that kind of neighborhood. Our story: the boy who was born so damaged, the mother who won’t make it to the spring, it’s all well known. We’re the kind of family people talk about.

S
am phones me from the office to let me know he’ll be late because he’s visiting the boy. I tell him that’s just as well. I’m feeling tired. But by the time he gets home, I say, I’ll be awake.

I say it, but who really knows?

The clock has lost its meaning. My relationship with time is more personal now.

Just take care of yourself, he says. I hate to have you there, alone.

I’ll just take a nap.

Just don’t go on the stairs.

I won’t go on the stairs. I won’t even go to the bathroom. I won’t get up. I’ll just rest.

Just take care.

J
ust
.

It’s a word we use a lot now—though in only one way that we might. As though we have lost our knowledge of the other meaning.

Just be careful. I’ll just do this tiny thing. Just move my pillows a little higher up. Just don’t worry. Just be good to yourself. Just take care.

If you’d just moved the damned fence just a foot…

It was the little note of grace that we both needed then.

I
sometimes think that when I’m gone Sam will drive his car right into your well-constructed fence. I can picture it so easily: Sam behind the wheel pulling up into the drive, gunning it; and veering left. If the tables were turned, there’s no doubt it’s what I’d do.

Because who is there left to be angry at? Except you? We used up all the other obvious candidates long ago.

W
hen he gets home, Sam climbs heavily to our room, the whiskey bottle and a glass in his hand. I have been dozing, but am now awake.

I hope he feels bad about what he did, he says.

If he were the type to feel bad, I say, speaking slowly, he wouldn’t have done it in the first place. If he cared a tiny bit about us and our lives he wouldn’t have acted as he did. He’s indifferent to us. It had all been decided before we met. There was never any hope.

I don’t tell him about these now-fading fantasies of mine. The ones that started early on. About trying to reason with you. Trying to make you believe in my life. The simple fact of my existence. I don’t tell him that.

I am so close now to being entirely erased. I see things that were invisible to me before.

Sam sits there, and he drinks, a flush beginning to spread through his cheeks.

He’s indifferent? he asks. Is that really what it is?

There is a universe of sorrow, wide and dark, in my husband’s staring eyes. An eternity built there, constructed over time, forged gradually of the realization that this is in fact our lives. This is what we have been dealt.

It’s possible, I say to him, that you were right. What you said about some folks just being bad.

But as I speak, I realize how little I want to say what I have learned. How reluctant I am to admit to Sam what indifference truly means, and has long meant to us both. I do not want to play a role in confirming that cruel universe that dwells inside my husband’s eyes. But I do love him. I do. I love him very much. And so to him—if not to you—I speak the truth.

Immortalizing
John Parker

I
T ISN’T A NEW SENSATION.
For the past many weeks, Clara Feinberg has found it harder and harder to paint human faces, her bread-and-butter task. Increasingly, she is struggling with what feels to her like a repugnance to the act. Though it’s all very sophomoric. Her own thoughts on the subject sound to her like the voices of pretentious but earnest youngsters debating the meaning of life.

It’s morning—again—and Clara is perched on the side of her bed, as though undecided about whether to stand or lie back down. Her hands grip the edge of the mattress, maybe to push her up and maybe to hold her there. She can see herself in the dresser mirror—if she lets her eyes drift that way. It’s not her favorite sight, not normally of particular interest to her. As drawn as she is to study others’ faces, she would be perfectly happy to go through life without ever seeing her own. Not because of anything amiss about her appearance. For a seventy-year-old woman, she looks better than well, straight and a bit stern and more handsome than ever. Age suits her. But she knows too well what a face can reveal.

As a child, if she caught a glimpse of herself when alone, she would stick out her tongue; and to her own surprise, she does it now. It’s an odd sight. An old woman making the face of a spiteful little girl. An oddly upsetting sight. She closes her lips and looks away, looks down to her feet, hanging bare and gnarled just above the floor. She still can’t quite force herself to stand. Not yet. Can’t quite force herself to dress, to leave the apartment, to walk among the living. Go to work, step into her studio. Smell the paint, the turpentine. Populate the blank canvases waiting there with her people, her creations.

The prospect pins her where she is.

It isn’t that she has tired of studying faces. Not at all. How could she have? She still thinks daily about how it felt thirty years ago, how like learning a precious secret it had been when she first discovered her longing to sit for hours and ponder another person’s features, to study their very particular texture. It was as though she had found a hidden primal drive in herself, something to align itself with hunger, thirst, sexual desire, the instinct to stay alive. And this drive has never flagged.

But the paintings themselves upset her now. The act of painting them upsets her now.

She forces her eyes to her own image again, holds her face steady, drains it of what expression she can. It’s this same eerie stillness she detects in her portraits now. A kind of death. Death, which used to seem so remote, now feels to Clara as though it is everywhere, like the universally disliked relative who arrives early to every gathering and shows no discernible sign of ever going home. She can sense it turning her against her own work, lurking in the notion of permanence surrounding portraiture, skulking around the very idea of catching a person at one moment and documenting them, just then. This is what death does, she thinks, stony-faced, staring right into her own eyes. Catches us all. Stops time.

“Pull yourself together,” she says out loud. “You still have a living to make.”

A
nd finally, that gets Clara to her feet. She is paid preposterously well for those paintings of hers; and so this recent repugnance must be overcome; and the day, the new clients, must be faced.

As if revealing a precious secret, Katherine Parker states that she and her husband—John—have been married for fifty-one years. Not that Clara has asked. She’s asked them very little since they entered the small sitting room adjacent to her studio. And when told how long they’ve been married, she doesn’t offer up much of a reaction. Divorced herself for nearly three decades, she can think of too many reasons, good, bad, and indifferent, why people might stay married half a century to assume that she knows the appropriate response.

“We didn’t make very much of our fiftieth. But then when this one came around, I realized I would like to have a portrait of John. That’s the gift I want. John, immortalized.”

Katherine Parker is a small woman, with suprisingly short hair, entirely white. The wrinkles that web her pouching cheeks run without a break or variation across her pale lips, as though a veil of lace has been etched into her face. When she speaks, her eyes blink rapidly, seeming to seek refocus every time. And the truth is, Clara realizes, she would rather paint her than him. It might be interesting to try to capture this topography of time and the sense of urgency that seems integral to her.

“Not of you both?” she asks.

“Oh, no. I had mine done years ago. I’d much rather be remembered that way. Young, and elegant. Not like this.”

Clara nods, skipping over her own arguments with this view. The point, it turns out, isn’t youth or beauty. The point is happiness. And to the extent that happiness ever came to her, it came to her late.

She looks over at John Parker on the sofa beside his wife. He hasn’t spoken at all. Not a single word. Nor is his face particularly expressive. His skin has an odd smoothness to it, a yellow tinge; his eyes are round, brown, and moist.

He’s dull, she thinks, that word stepping out of line, as if louder, bolder than the others in her thoughts. Sitting there, Clara recognizes this as something with which she’ll now have to contend. Often, with her subjects, there’s a first impression that dominates her ability to see clearly. And here is one, again. This quality of dullness she perceives will have to be continually questioned and examined. In the end she may conclude that it does define him in some way that deserves expression in the work. Or she may not. But for as long as she is painting him, she knows, she will be in a continual dialogue with this word.
Dull
.

“Do you want your portrait painted?” she asks and he startles a bit. Then looks over at his wife. Then he nods.

“Yes,” he says.

Clara sits back in her chair and begins to describe the process. How many sessions; how much time she’ll need; how much warning if a session is to be missed. And then she names a very high figure, to which neither of them reacts.

“And I’ll need to see you alone,” she says to him, sensing in herself an annoyance with his silence.

“Oh.” It’s a small sound that Katherine Parker makes, but an expressive one, an objection. “Is that necessary?”

“Yes, it is,” Clara says. She could go into an explanation—she could talk about the relationship between subject and artist, she could talk about any number of things that might justify this, some real, some made up. But she prefers simply to state the condition and not discuss her reasoning. Too much in her life has had to be justified.

“Well, then,” Katherine Parker says. “Then I suppose that’s what we’ll do.”

They have only the scheduling left. This is Monday. They’ll begin on Wednesday. As the Parkers leave, each shakes Clara’s hand, and the wife declares herself so excited, so grateful that Clara has time for this. It’s a gift she’s giving herself, she says. She rarely does that. But this one is different. This will be something very special.

I
F GEORGE COOPERMAN
could tell this story, he would doubtless start with a description of those portraits Clara paints. A psychoanalyst, he would sneak up on the events by walking through an exhaustive analysis of her work, which would lead naturally for him into an exhaustive analysis of her character. She paints like
this
, he would say, she invariably sees other people in
this
particular light. It doesn’t matter who they are. The portraits all share these characteristics. And you see, he would say, you understand, that is because she herself is
this
kind of woman. Her work is consistent with who she is. It is the key to who she is. It explains everything that she has ever done. That is how George Cooperman would start.

If Harold Feinberg were telling this story, he would unlikely make much mention of Clara’s work, largely because he’s never really thought all that much about it, not the work itself, not the way she sees and re-creates the people whom she paints. And also, he still resents the work a bit, still smarts at the way it seemed to make her happier than he ever did. So, Harold would doubtless talk first about the early days of their marriage. He would say that in the beginning she had seemed very intent on having what he thought of then as a proper home. It was 1966, he would say, and things were just beginning to loosen up; but not Clara. Not then. She had her trusty copy of
The Settlement Cook Book
out and opened every night. She had her hair done once a week, so it looked more like a wig than like hair. And whatever happened afterward, whatever she later felt or said, she had wanted the children, wanted them as soon as she and Harold were wed.

Oh, and the sex with her—if he’d had a couple of drinks, and odds are he would have, he would go into this—the sex with her was efficient and somewhat businesslike, but not prudish. He’d been with a few prudish women in his time, and that was never her. But there was an element of practicality to the act that always left him a little unsatisfied. It was all a little too hygienic for his taste. And then he would say that maybe that had something to do with what got into him back in the seventies. All of that infamous cheating he did. He was just looking for something a little more exciting. Not that that was any kind of excuse. Just the truth. He was bored.

But the funny thing is, he would say, the thing he has thought about a lot, is that he probably wouldn’t have been bored by the woman she became—after everything blew up. That was when she went a little wild. And of course that was when she started in with the painting seriously. That was when he would come by the house to pick up the children and see her in overalls and a man’s undershirt, braless as far as he could tell, bits of paint clinging to hair. Something changed in her, he would say. Something changed, and it wasn’t for the worse. Once or twice he even asked her if she would consider trying to make a go of it again, but the answer was always no. It wasn’t an unusual story, he would say. At least not in the beginning. Boy meets girl. Boy cats around. Boy loses girl.

In Clara’s mind, the story begins in January 1979 with George Cooperman giving her a lift to pick up her car. It begins with the odd realization that she might as well be sitting in the front seat of her own Volvo station wagon rather than his, that the cars are identical inside. Though she remembers then that in her own car she wouldn’t be in the passenger seat, not anymore, because since the separation in November, she has always been the driver and never the passenger when in her own car. This is where she used to sit when she was married to Harold.

It starts then for her with this odd mixture of familiarity and unfamiliarity, with a chain of thoughts set off by a particular shade of beige, and by the sensation of being back on the passenger side of a vehicle—riding shotgun, in the dead man’s seat, the wife’s place—and by the oddness of it being George Cooperman and not Harold at the wheel of the car, beside her, driving to the garage where she has had snow tires put on her car, though it’s probably silly this late in the season, another chore that got lost in the mess of the marital collapse.

It starts there, and then it shifts very quickly into discomfort, the scene being
almost
something she knows so intimately. It’s that unbidden intimacy that slips in and unsettles her. George has pulled into the wide oil-stained drive outside the garage and they are facing each other to say goodbye. She notices the precise shade of brown of his eyes. She sees how his upper lip is so much thinner than the lower. She understands exactly how she would paint that lip. Having known him for so many years, she is learning too much about him, in only seconds. As though she is seeing him for the first time now.

She hears herself mention Janet’s name.
I’ll call Janet in the morning
, she says. And he says,
I’ll let her know
. And as he speaks, she notices the different tones of darkness in his mouth. He asks her if she wants him to wait and be sure her car is ready, just to be certain she won’t be left here alone in this sketchy part of town. But she says that she’s already called and checked. The car is ready. She says,
Thank you, though
and opens her door and feels the coldness of the air outside.
Here
, he says, reaching over.
Don’t forget this
. And he hands her the pocketbook she’s left in the car.