Life Drawing (9 page)

And maybe I still had no right, but I couldn’t help myself. “I learned today that an old … an old … a man I once … I should begin at the beginning, I suppose. Five years ago, I had an affair … and Owen knows,” I added quickly—there still being a touch of pride in having fessed up, even though if I’d had it to do over, I might well have chosen to spare us both my unburdening myself.

Alison said nothing.

“It’s been over for a long time. And it didn’t go on that long. I mean, it wasn’t a weekend fling but it wasn’t years either. It was just one fall—in both senses, I suppose. One autumn though, is what I mean. And then into January, too.”

Because we were walking side by side, I couldn’t see her face. Maybe that was why my instincts had brought us outside, though it had felt more as though it would take all the vast sky, all that infinite space to make my disclosures feel small enough to bear.

As I told her the story, I sensed an elasticity to its form, realizing how very malleable a thing I needed my tale to be, how much emphasis I wanted on the terrible emotional state I was in after Charlotte’s death; how little I wanted to linger on the degree to which I knew exactly what I was doing. (That week between when Laine stopped taking lessons and when Bill finally called, how absolutely certain I had been about what was going on …) I could make it so much more comfortable a story with just a little stress here, a small elision there. It didn’t even matter that I knew I was editing, it felt good hearing it that way.

And then I told her what I had not told her before.

“Owen couldn’t have children. We’d just found out. A few months before Charlotte’s death. And that news, I didn’t handle it well. I mean, I said all the right things, and I felt terrible for him. I always did. I still do. But I just felt so bereft, and so confused.
No excuses, I know. But everything was such an unbelievable mess.”

“It sounds like a lot. A lot of hard stuff all at once.”

“And today,” I said. “Laine wrote me today that Bill’s remarrying.” We took another couple of steps. “I have no right to … to have any reaction to this. I know that I don’t. And I don’t even know really what my reaction is.”

But it wasn’t quite true. By then I did know. He was in love. That was it. That was the truth exploding again and again. He was in love. He was having
it
—the fresh start, the moments of joy, maybe even the children, for all I knew; and not the tired, battle-weary, tattered and stitched-together love I had settled back into with Owen. Bill had fallen in love. Again. And not with me. With a woman named Miriam.

“I can see why this would be hard,” Alison said.

“I honestly don’t know why it’s upsetting me so much. We haven’t so much as spoken in years. And I should tell you, I can’t let Owen know I’ve heard this, and definitely not that it’s got me all riled up. And truly not that you know a thing. This really has to be just between us. The fertility stuff, too. All of it.”

“No, no, I understand. Of course. And as for why you’re so upset …” She took my arm, a gesture that felt both awkward and welcome. “I’m not sure who wouldn’t be, Gus. You fall in love with a man and want to run off with him. He stays with his wife, and then, however many years later, he marries someone else. It doesn’t help that he ran back to you after his divorce. You never came first. That’s the thorn in the rose right there. The wife didn’t exactly come first either, but now … I can’t imagine who wouldn’t be upset.”

It was difficult to hear.
You never came first
. But it was true. Maybe it had been temporary insanity on my part, but he
had
come first for me. I would have thrown it all over for him. “I didn’t have children to think of,” I said out loud. “We had completely
different situations. Owen and I weren’t even married at the time. Maybe that did make it feel easier for me.”

“I don’t know about your heart,” Alison said, “but mine has never been particularly logical.”

“No,” I said. “Nor mine.”

We were on our fifth time around the pond by then. “I have always been a little irritated that Owen paced this off,” I said. “It … It takes some of the wildness out, some of that sense of just wandering in the countryside.”

We walked a bit more, still arm in arm.

“My husband hit me,” Alison said after a time. “That year after Nora went to school. He started hitting me. I became one of those women fidgeting with heavy makeup to deal with covering bruises.”

“Jesus, Alison. I’m so sorry. And here I am complaining about a paced-off pond.”

She shook her head. “That’s not why I’m telling you. You’re supposed to find Owen irritating. You’re his wife. But I wasn’t supposed to put up with being hit. Or before that. Even then, I shouldn’t have put up with being afraid of him. It’s just … it’s just so terribly difficult to admit that someone doesn’t really love you. Not in the way you thought. Not in the way you’d hoped. There were a lot of reasons I stayed as long as I did, Nora, of course, and also fear, but in part I just wanted to think he loved me.” She stopped walking, so I did too. We faced each other, and against the backdrop of tall marsh grass, her lips lacquered coral, her eyes that silvery gray, she seemed oddly vivid, a silver-haired figure from a surrealist painting.

“I’m so sorry, Alison. I had no idea you’d been through that. I knew about the temper. Not the hitting though.”

“I rarely mention it. I don’t like remembering, I suppose.”

“Does your daughter know?”

“Oh, that’s a long story,” she said. “For another day. The real point I’m making, the only reason I raised all that, is that I know
how heartbreaking it is to lose belief in another person’s love. It’s devastating. However it comes about.”

“That’s what I did to Owen. That’s what I put him through.”

“Maybe. But then Owen chose to stay. And he’s an adult, yes? He could have done otherwise.”

We started to walk again. “I couldn’t have, you know,” I said. “Done what Owen did. If it had been reversed, I would have been out the door. I couldn’t have borne it.”

“Trust me, Gus. One never knows what one will endure.”

A rabbit, neither baby nor fully grown, scampered across our path some ten feet ahead. Alison asked, “Do you want advice? Or just a shoulder? Because I can give you either. I can even give you both.”

“What’s the advice? I mean, all I can do is just try to forget Laine ever wrote. Not act like some kind of moony teen around Owen. Seal my heart back up.”

“That. Yes. But … maybe this is presumptuous of me but … Don’t try to get in touch with him. You may … you may feel tempted.”

“No.” I shook my head. “Not tempted. Not tempted at all.”

But it wasn’t true. I was already composing coded, chilly messages to send through Laine.
Please do tell your father how thrilled I am that he has found real love at last. Please do give your father my love—assuming he even remembers who I am
. “No,” I said. “I can see why you’d think so … but no. I have no temptation to be back in touch.”

“Well, that’s excellent, then.” Alison took my arm again. “So, do you feel as though you have to go the full seven laps? Because I confess, there’s something about knowing it’s a mile that makes me feel that. As though we’ll be shirking if we stop at five.”

“Bingo,” I said. “That’s exactly why it irritates me so.”

“But we’re going to do those two more laps, aren’t we?”

“Yes,” I said. “We are going to do the two more laps.”

A
t her porch, she hugged me. And I thanked her, meaning it. Two hours later, when Owen came in, he asked me what that had been all about.

“One minute I’m contemplating the indefatigable nature of a squirrel out my window, the next I’m watching my undemonstrative wife embracing our neighbor.”

“Oh, we had been walking around the pond. She had … she had told me some things about her marriage that were pretty terrible. I think she just needed a hug. Shocking, I know, but even I can be compassionate at times.”

“Shocking indeed. We’ll keep it to ourselves. I wouldn’t want your reputation ruined.”

It was an old joke between us. Or an old routine I suppose, since calling it a joke implies humor. And maybe there was humor there for Owen. For me, it was something else. I’d always doubted that Owen understood that slightly standoffish manner of mine, the motherless part, the part that didn’t know what to do with Alison’s arm in mine as we walked. The part that could accept that sort of affection only like an ill-fitting garment, a hand-me-down I suspected wasn’t truly meant for me.

“I’m thinking of putting a moratorium on work,” Owen said, reaching for his water glass. “On what passes for work, I should say. For a few days, anyway. I think I have reached the point where I’m just spinning myself into deeper mud. I need a holiday.” He looked at me and laughed. “You should see yourself, Gus. Don’t panic, I’m not suggesting we go anywhere. I know that you’re mid-project. I just think I may forbid myself access to the barn for a week. Work in the garden. Take long walks. Paint the front hall. Stop pushing so fucking hard—since clearly whatever it is can push back with greater force.”

“I think that sounds right,” I said. “God knows there’s always
more work that can be done around here. And you must need a break by now. I know I would. I think that’s very wise of you.”

“There must be a saying to cover this situation. Desperation is the mother of common sense? Something along those lines.” He began to drink, and I walked across the kitchen. I kissed his cheek, the glass still to his mouth.

“It’s a good move,” I said, thinking that it was good timing too.

W
hat followed was a more relaxed week than our home had been witness to in months. Owen was a creature of great will. When he decided to do a thing, he did it. And having decided to set his worries aside for a time, he seemed able to do exactly that. And while I didn’t stop working altogether, I slowed down, gave it less space.

More than once over the years, I’d wondered whether people as close as Owen and I were indeed telepathic. Was he responding to a distress call I didn’t know I was sending and that he didn’t know he was answering? Something grabbing his attention just in time to remind me of why this life of ours was no mere consolation prize?

We lingered over our meals. We played Scrabble after dinner. I wandered out to whatever patch of garden he was weeding, and would end up staying an hour, more, just talking to him, laughing. A couple of times we ended up in bed together, daytime sex. We never quite matched the drunken near-brawl of that night after dinner at Alison’s, but we rolled around and teased each other and we played. The only thing missing for me that week was that he still didn’t want to talk about my work. I tried once and he sank into an awful and eloquent silence. But I didn’t mind it so much. Because in many ways our house felt like home again to me. No longer like a place defined by paucity—paucity of happiness, of shared enjoyment, of conversation. It felt like a second spring had come.

But then, after exactly a week, he announced he was going back out to the barn again
—I can’t really just quit
—and before another week was up, we were right back where we had been.

“I
suppose I should be grateful for the days we had,” I said, sitting on the floor of Alison’s studio, surrounded by her paintings, those botanicals so outsized, each detail so vast, that I felt miniaturized among them all. The old, uneven pine floor, filthy and ridged, had produced a splinter in my palm that I picked at as I spoke. “I feel terrible for him. I know how this can just rip you up.”

“I wish I had some helpful experience.” She was standing behind her easel and I could only see her legs, tanned and muscular, her feet, bare, her toenails painted the same coral perpetually on her lips. “What do people do?”

I shrugged. “They suffer. They make bargains with gods in whom they don’t believe. They wait it out.”

“Maybe I should be glad I’m just a hobbyist.”

“If it makes you feel better to keep calling yourself that …” I looked at a painting I particularly liked, a four-foot-high watercolor of a broken piece of marsh grass. “Your work is good, you know. But if that’s going to make you all self-conscious, I take it back.”

“Thank you.”

“Alison, how do you not have splinters all the time?”

“What? Oh, I don’t know. My feet are probably too calloused. All those ballet classes I was forced to take.” Then, after a moment, she said, “You seem better, Gus. About that other thing, I mean. I hope you don’t mind my saying. I’m guessing the time with Owen helped.”

That other thing.

Was I better?

For all that I’d loved that week with Owen, for all that it might have minimized any lingering emotions about Bill, I still hadn’t
been able to bring myself to answer Laine’s email. Every time I tried, I reached the point at which I either would or wouldn’t acknowledge Bill’s marriage and balked at completing the task—as though my doing so would be giving it a closure I couldn’t bring myself to give. That news had reopened a landscape of memories from which I could not easily look away. A place unlike any real place on earth, where fertile hills abutted jagged glaciers, and deathly crevasses invited icy falls from sumptuous, sunny lawns. A place of beauty and danger that I pined for and despised and couldn’t bring myself to push back out of view.

“Yes,” I told Alison. “I am doing better. Thank you. It was a bad day or two, but in the end,” I said, “that was a different life. Years and years ago. I’m really okay with it now.”

I took her silence, just the few too many seconds before she said she was glad, to mean that she’d guessed I was only saying what I wanted to be true.

W
hen Owen had gone back to work, so had I. But while he had just walked straight into the old familiar misery, I was excitedly engaged with the process of using my sketches to block out some canvases. After visiting Alison, I turned to one I liked especially of an individual boy—Oliver Farley, dead at seventeen, in a hospital in France—sitting on our front step, elbows on knees, chin in hands. Just waiting. The image of a waiting boy. That’s what I wanted to convey, once I fully painted him in. All the time in the world. This was the theme that kept coming up for me, the strand I hadn’t quite grasped right away. It wasn’t that the boys were all engaged in childlike activities or in the adult ones they had missed by being blown from their own lives so young. It was that they moved in these rooms of ours, occupied this space, as though they had all the time in the world.
Let’s play a leisurely game of chess. Let’s linger over a breakfast cooked under the lolling gaze of a friend whose feet are up on the table. Maybe I’ll just sit here and do nothing much
.