Life Drawing (27 page)

I stood. “I have no idea what to say.” The phrase
I thought you were my friend
came to mind; but it didn’t need saying; and I wasn’t sure how recently it had been true.

“Gus, I was certain it would never get that far.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t talk about this. I’m not sure I can. Jesus, Alison. You were certain it would never get that far? What does that mean?”

“I’m taking her away. We’re going to London. I told her … it doesn’t matter. But I told her we should go see my parents, and we’re going. She and I have to sort this out. But I know I’ve been a terrible friend. Not a friend at all.”

“For what it’s worth,” I said, feeling my own dignity make its demands, “Owen has been straight with me. I’ve known that she spoke to him. All of that. He hasn’t kept anything from me. And they aren’t … there’s no …”

“So you two are okay? I really hope so. I hope we haven’t …”

“I don’t know. What does ‘okay’ mean? Really? This is a bad time for us. You know that. You knew that all along.” I could sense my anger rising again. “When do you go?”

“Tomorrow. Back just after New Year’s. Though I’m … I’m hoping she’ll go stay with friends then.”

“Right.” There it was again: I wanted to say that I too hoped that Nora would never return; but I had promised Owen not to try and keep them apart. “I hope it helps” was all I allowed myself to say.

Alison left right after that. In the kitchen, as she put her coat back on, she said, “It won’t go on. She knows that it can’t go on.”

I nodded. I couldn’t bring myself to wish her a good trip, just mumbled a goodbye.

T
he next afternoon was a cold one, the sky banded with clouds. I watched from inside as Owen carried their suitcases out and lifted them into the back of Alison’s car. It was a strangely somber scene, the complexities within our quartet by now so well understood that nothing we did in any combination could be undertaken lightly anymore.

I didn’t say anything to Owen about Alison’s apology. I couldn’t see how her admission changed anything between us, or between him and Nora, either. If Alison succeeded in calling her daughter off, he would have to deal with that. My hands were clean.

During Alison’s and Nora’s absence an unmistakable aura of suspense hung over our lives. Something had been interrupted, not ended. We both worked, or anyway I tried to, though without much success. Owen seemed more productive than that, looking content when he left the barn; and I resisted the temptation to point out that he seemed to be doing very well without his muse by his side; but then realized he was probably getting frequent encouraging emails from her. We ate our meals together. We shared our bed, uneventfully.

Christmas came and went without a ripple. It could have been any of the other days that week. And then, on Boxing Day, I got an email from Laine.

I
left for Philadelphia around eleven-thirty the next day, taking the South Street exit off the Expressway, turning east. Once I’d crossed over Broad, somewhere around Tenth Street, the sidewalk grew more crowded, mostly young people, mostly in groups. It was the start of lunch hour and the traffic was slow and impatient, lots of honking, lots of drivers making sudden lunges to get around stopped cars. There was a sense of too much activity jammed in too small a space, a feeling, a phenomenon I hadn’t experienced in a very long time, this seething of people, this hive.

At Fourth Street, I turned right, driving south.

S
teinman’s looked very much the same, except that instead of a fabric shop to one side and an empty shop to the other, there was now a used bookstore where the empty store had been and an empty store where the fabric shop had been. Urban renewal and urban decay, bumping up against each other. During the weeks that I had squirreled myself in my corner of the store, I had heard endless discussions about the fate of the street, the neighborhood, the block, the building and also about the history of it all. That had seemed to be the subject every customer brought in, along with talk of colors and styles, angles of brims, opaqueness of veils. Len’s attitude had been that the area was on a fast downhill, while Ida had taken the view that through every generation, somehow, this street managed to survive and it would always do so.

And in general, nearly four years after my stint there, despite the replacement of one empty storefront with another, it looked a
little more occupied, a little busier than it had been back then. Steinman’s itself, its window an array of the most elaborate, colorful, even absurd hats, still carried that air of enchantment, like an outsized Fabergé egg mysteriously placed on a gray urban block.

I peered through the glass before going in, as if afraid I might have the wrong place or maybe the wrong proprietors; but there was Len, looking thinner, his face nearly gaunt, and that was enough to propel me inside. It took him a second after the tinkle of the door’s bell, but then he knew me. “Ach! It’s Leonardo!” he said. “Look who’s here. Ida!” he called. “Come out and see who’s visiting.”

“Hi, Len,” I said. “It’s good to be back. Good to see the old place. And you too.” While I spoke, Ida emerged from behind the black drape separating the public and private sections of the shop; and it was obvious right away that something was wrong. I had studied her too intently, too minutely for too many weeks not to detect the immobility in her right arm, the stilled expression on her face.

“Gush.” She said it with a slur, with that wet, loose sound at the end. “Gush.” A sloppy word. As though she had always known the slosh and overflow of me, however I had tried to seem contained. She walked toward me, her left arm extended for a hug. It was the first time we had ever embraced. All through my occupation, as Len had called it, she’d kept the sort of distance a china doll ought to keep, as if for fear of being broken. But now, broken as she was, it seemed she had no fear.

“Don’t let the arm fool you,” Len said. “She’s still the same in there. And she’s still the boss. And when no one else is here, she talks my ear off. Some of this act is for show. Just to get everyone’s sympathy.”

She shook her head. “Don’t listen”—more slurred words. “I don’t. Can’t. But here …” She tapped her head, then made an okay sign with her left hand. “Me,” she said. “All there.”

“She’ll live forever,” Len said. “They haven’t invented the stroke that’ll take Ida down. She’ll bury us all.”

It was only then that I realized it was the arm in my painting that was paralyzed, the one part of her I had felt entitled to draw. For a moment I could imagine that I had put some kind of curse on her, spoiling what I had taken as my own; or maybe I had intuited somehow that this part of her was indeed the most human, the least perfect part.

But it was all ridiculous of course. Fairy-tale logic.

“I’m so sorry to hear about the stroke,” I said. “But I have a feeling Len is right. You’re obviously immortal.”

Ida said something I didn’t catch, then shook her head with impatience. “What brings you here?” Len asked. “I’m the only one who always understands her. Tough for her, being stuck with me.”

“You two seemed pretty stuck together before.”

Ida rolled her eyes. “My luck,” she slurred. She wore the same blue serge suit, or one just like it. A crisp white blouse. But her hair was cut short, maybe because she couldn’t style it anymore. And there was something else different, though it took me a minute to realize what it was: she had flat shoes on her feet, squared toes, Velcro tabs. No more perfect, tiny patent navy pumps.

“I really just came by to say hi,” I said. “I haven’t been to the city in so long. And …” I looked over at my old corner, the chair no longer there. “I was wondering, Ida. Len, you too. I was wondering if I could do a few quick sketches, that’s all. I so missed being here.”

Len, rolling a bolt of lavender tulle, laughed out loud. “Last time she said that, she stayed six weeks. Remember, Ida? Gus comes in telling us it’ll be an afternoon, and six weeks later, she’s still in that corner, the place stinking of turpentine.”

“That’s true,” I said. “You were both so patient and I was …” I let the sentence go. What had I been? Spiraling downward, in
need of a safe place to hide, somewhere I could pretend I was only an observer, never an actor, never a part of any story, only a witness. “I was always sorry I hadn’t drawn the two of you.”

I expected Ida to shake her head no. I expected her to make it clear that the time for that had passed, but instead she nodded, looking at me, as though she had always known the request would come one day.

I told them I had a pad and some charcoal in my car. “I can sit in my old corner if I just move that chair. Only for a couple of hours,” I said. “I promise you.”

Y
ears before, it had never once occurred to me to tell Ida the tale of my fall from grace. I had felt defined by shame. But that day, as I sat sketching them both, I knew, I was certain, I could have shared it all. And she would have shown compassion. Paralyzed, shorn, wearing shoes too clunky even for me, she seemed approachable. She seemed, for the first time, like a real human being.

But that view of her was also simple, I realized. She wasn’t a different woman because she’d had a stroke. She had never been perfect. She had been a beautiful woman who dressed well. A woman of style who seemed perpetually in control. A person in no danger of coming undone at her seams, from whose hands sprung masterpieces. But not perfect.

So why had I needed to see her that way? Why so entranced with this notion of a perfect older woman who would reject the real me?

The question had been a long time coming. The answer took no time at all.

As I sketched, the occasional customer stepped in. Len did most of the talking now, but Ida had a thousand ways to make her thoughts known. Her face, so serene and mysterious before, now, in partial paralysis, had turned expressive, fluent in a language of necessity.

I left them with about half the sketches that I did. I hugged them both and promised to be back sooner next time. Ida nodded, and Len declared himself disappointed that I really wasn’t moving back in for a month—minimum.

“Maybe next time,” I said. “You never know.”

I
tacked the pictures of Len and Ida onto my studio wall that night. The Steinman brother and sister, patron saints of a sort for me. The drawings were undistinguished, no miracle breakthroughs, though the likenesses were there and it had tickled Len and Ida to see that. But the drawings weren’t on my wall as art. They were there as reminders of the example permeating every cell of Ida’s body now, of her unwavering, dignified integration of what she had lost into what still remained.