You walked in long after the sun had set. The only light on in the apartment faced my easel. You had undone the top button of your shirt and slung your tie around your neck like a sash.
“A butterfly,” you said. The sudden sound of your voice startled me.
“I didn’t hear you come in,” I said and touched my cheek with the back of my hand. “Right. Yes. A clown at the paint store did it.”
You placed your hand on my neck. It was cold and stiff, like you’d been writing on a chalkboard for too long. It made my shoulders tense.
“I won’t ask about the clown,” you said, amused. “What are you painting?”
Surrounding me were four canvas faces staring back at us, all at various stages of dry.
“I’m just practicing right now.”
“Practicing? These look like more than just practice.”
You began to reach for one, but I held on to your hand.
“Can we not just yet?” I said. “I don’t feel ready.”
You gave me a bothered look and pulled your tie from your neck, then shrugged and left for the kitchen to find the dinner that Marta had prepared. Potato and ghee soup.
Marta herself was very pleased, I think, that I had found a way to occupy my time so that she could occupy her own time as she pleased. When she arrived at the apartment in the morning, I was already settled in at my canvas, and would continue to be there until after she left for the day. I felt as though I had found a time portal within the canvas—a day passed with the same energy as fifteen minutes. Marta and I interacted only when she checked to see if I needed food, water, or coffee.
You and I, however, had not reached the same symmetry. The further I slipped into my painting world, the more curious you grew, as I had discovered something that didn’t involve you, and this provoked your interest.
And what was it that I had found? For the first time in perhaps all my life, I had the space to explore my own thoughts without guilt or anxiety. As I constructed a woman on the canvas, visualizing her face in parts, memories entered my mind in flashes: the smell of my mother’s travel-sized Dior perfume, which I wasn’t allowed to touch; her taking me to see All About Eve at a vintage movie theater with red velvet curtains; the biting tug on my hairline as she gave me French braids. Slowly I was reconstructing a past that I had always neglected.
I remembered the first time I went to the beach. My father decided to bring our family to Cape Cod. The sun was deliriously hot and we’d forgotten the umbrella, which he couldn’t make sense of. “I rested it against the trunk,” he kept saying, and spent the day swatting away seagulls trying to steal the marshmallow–and–peanut butter sandwiches my mother had packed in tinfoil wrap.
I must have been about eleven, and I remember it was the first time I wore a bikini. I had growing thighs, new stretch marks, painful breasts. I’d found a pubic hair sprouting the week earlier. When I saw my father wasn’t paying attention, I looked down at my body’s transformation, now visible to the world, and pinched the inside of my arm to restrain the discomfort. My mother sat reclined on a beach chair, refusing to take her clothes off. She wore a pair of camouflage pants, an oversize T-shirt with Mickey Mouse on the front, and a floppy hat.
“I’m too skinny,” she told me, and lit a cigarette.
Not even a year later, she met a rancher through a personal ad in the newspaper, divorced my dad, and moved to the ranch. Her body swelled, even her nose and the skin underneath her eyes, like she had been filled with something she didn’t have before. She grew her hair out and wore it in a gray braid that swung between her shoulder blades. I spent my teenage years living with my father in Hartford. I saw my mother on alternating holidays, and every time we did see each other, we were each surprised by how much the other had changed.
* * *
—
One morning I woke up to find you standing in front of my easel, your face a few inches from one of my paintings, inspecting the woman reclined on a couch, her breasts conical and splayed to the sides. I recoiled.
“What are you doing?”
You turned and took a sip of your coffee.
“Just looking.”
Then you gave the room a sweeping pass with your hand.
“These are incredible, Lin,” you said and offered your assessment of each painting.
I stood silent in my pajamas. All I could think to say was thank you, then I moved closer to try to wedge distance between you and my work.
You pointed at a smaller canvas, one of the first faces I’d done, and took another sip of your coffee.
“Who is she?” you asked.
“Who is who?” I asked back.
“The woman in these paintings.” You pointed to each, one by one, showing me the similarity in the hair and the eyes and the turn in her nose. “It’s the same woman over and over again.”
“Oh,” I said, and leaned in closer to inspect them myself. That’s when I saw what you saw—the lithe frame and full features, the wildness in her gaze. It was Celia. How had I not realized before? I felt my face flush and tried to conceal my embarrassment by covering my neck with my hands.
“It does look like the same woman.” I frowned, pretending to be bemused, and told you I didn’t know. I scrambled, plotted an escape. “I think I need some coffee,” I said and boiled more water in the kitchen.
* * *
—
Once you’d made me aware that I had been unconsciously rendering Celia in my paintings, I felt increasingly that I was hiding in plain sight. I stacked the canvases with their backs facing out so that you couldn’t look at them, then would steal glances at night after you’d gone to bed. I’d stop painting midstroke with the sensation that you or Marta was standing behind me. A few times I honestly thought I’d felt a breath blow against my shoulder and would turn to find no one there.
Your interest in my Celia paintings didn’t wane. It was the first thing you’d ask when you got home from school. “How did painting go today?” Every time you asked, I felt the warm space inside me, open and tender from a day at the easel, begin to constrict.
“I’m making progress,” I’d say, and you’d nod with approval.
You collected flyers from the university bulletin board advertising campus art contests.
“They’re open to the public too,” you hinted. You inquired about me auditing art history lectures and fine art classes. You brought me supplies I didn’t need: elaborate measuring tools, organic cotton rags, and artisanal brush cleaners.
I couldn’t distinguish between what was genuine support, and what was your competitiveness hidden behind enthusiasm. “Why can’t you just leave it alone?” I wanted to say every time I saw you look at a half-finished painting. Your push to get my art into the world began to feel like a desire to expose me, like you didn’t want painting to be precious and safe, that you wanted to make it public so I would flounder in a way you never had. I imagined the exposure would prove to you that you were comparatively better at your craft than I was at mine; that you had won the awards I was incapable of winning. But I didn’t confront you, I couldn’t, because there was a part of me that knew I was overreacting. Whenever I pictured the conversation in my mind, you appeared as an innocent cherub boy only wanting the best for me, and I appeared as a warted witch, lurching over my paintings, waving my cane at anyone who came near. Maybe you just wanted to help and I had taken you for granted. The multiple conflicting possibilities, the dialectic of it all, made the confusion even worse.
Painful memories began to surface as I painted, old, stupid fights we’d never resolved, and so they remained wedged in my hippocampus, incapable of loosening their grip. We were at the bank in Hartford. My mother had called me from Ohio earlier in the day, a rare occurrence, while I was at my father’s. His health had noticeably declined since the previous week—his skin looked like th
e yellow underbelly of a snake—and he was refusing to eat the creamed corn I had made him at his request.
“Come on, Dad,” I said and tried to shove the spoon in his mouth, more forcefully than I should have, and he began to cry from frustration.
Then my mother called. I had forgotten Mother’s Day, she said. She told me that I cared about my father more than I cared about her, when she was the one who had looked after me when he was drunk. I hung up the phone, put my father to bed before the hospice nurse arrived, and left the creamed corn on the table. Then I picked you up and we went to the bank.
It was a Friday and I was depositing my last check from The Courier for an article I’d done on back-to-school fashion. I waited in line for a teller while you sat on the bench behind the partition.
“Next,” said the teller.
I patted my back pocket, but my wallet was in my purse with you.
“Dennis—” I said and saw that you were now standing on the other side of the bank talking with Bruce and Genine Skinner, both of whom taught at St. Gregory’s.
“One second,” I said to the teller, who leaned back in her chair and waited for me to return.
As I approached, everyone turned toward me, smiling, and Genine said, “There she is!” in her usual passive candor.
“I was just telling them about how you’re writing for The Courier now,” you said.
Genine and Bruce were both grinning wildly, like two bystanders held captive, trying to signal to me with nonverbal cues.
“Oh, yes. That. It’s keeping me busy.” They smiled some more. “Dennis—I need my wallet.”
Crossing the parking lot on our way to the car, I held you by the arm.
“Why did you tell Genine and Bruce that I’m writing for The Courier?”
“Because you are.”
You sat in the passenger’s seat and began fiddling with the radio.
“If they look for an article they’re not going to find one. That was my last check, remember? They let me go.”
You landed on a classic rock station and turned down the volume.
“They asked what you’ve been doing and I told them. Who cares about The Courier? You’ll find another newspaper.”
“I wish you’d just avoided the topic.”
You turned your head to the window and pressed two fingers against your chin.
“How’s your dad doing?” you asked.
“Not great. He’s refusing to eat. And he cried again.”
“I’ll go check on him later today.”
“Thank you,” I said.
I thought you were going to say more, but you didn’t, so I turned on the ignition and drove.
We didn’t talk for the ten-minute trip home. When we pulled into the driveway you opened the door halfway and said, “I won’t talk about your writing until you tell me I can,” then went into the house.
You kept your promise. You didn’t mention my writing again, and I never did find another newspaper. My father died a month later, and six months after that we were on our way to Brazil.
The Provost had been enthusiastic, if not emphatic, that we meet his wife for the first time at the Mercado Municipal. He described it as a cultural epicenter—where life in São Paulo happened. When we approached him and Melinda at the gray-stone entranceway, it was clear that they had been in an argument. The aftermath of bickering rested on their faces. Eduardo extended two arms and embraced you. Melinda gave you her hand, which you kissed (something I’d never seen you do before), and you introduced me as your wife, Linda, who didn’t speak Portuguese but would try.
You kept telling me how much Melinda and I had in common. Melinda, the Provost’s wife, the wealthy socialite, the Paulistana. I didn’t see how that connected us, but you insisted. I think it had to do with the fact that we were both wives of historians, which meant that she too knew this particular isolation, when you left the present for the past, hundreds of years back, hundreds of pages back, with no return in sight.
“I think you’ll understand each other,” you kept saying. “She’s intelligent and very connected in São Paulo. She knows some fascinating people.”
We both sensed that, between the two of them, Melinda had the money. Eduardo brought in a good salary as Provost, but not enough for a penthouse suite in Morumbi, a chalet in Saint-Malo, a vintage wine collection, and a library. Melinda exuded an overprescribed wealth, as though the world’s sharpness had to be dulled just to manage the injustice. Why her and not the millions of others?
The first thing I noticed was her impatient, anxious energy, as though she was already late for a board meeting she needed to attend next, when in reality, she had nowhere else to be. She shifted her weight from one stiletto to the other, looked side to side, up and beyond.
We entered and you joined Eduardo ahead of us, while I stayed behind with Melinda, who walked with restraint. She lit a cigarette next to a fruit stand inside the market hall.
“Keep an eye on your purse, Linda,” she said and adjusted my strap for me. “The pickpockets will rob you if you leave it hanging like that.”
We followed you to various stands—cured meat hanging from chains, woven shoes and bags, large barrels of nuts and spices—but Melinda always stayed a few feet outside. She said it was because of her cigarette (she tapped one after the other from a soft pack in her purse), but I sensed that it had more to do with association. The entire building smelled like smoked cod and mandioca; not even her Chanel No. 5 could mask it. I asked her if she wanted to come outside with me for a change in scenery. It was the first time I saw her smile.
“I would like nothing more,” she said.
I suggested we lean against the building, out of the way of the pedestrians hurrying down the sidewalk. She reminded me of a flower that had been pressed inside a book to preserve its beauty, so she had to present herself at an angle to mask her flatness. Maybe that’s why it bothered me that you implied she and I had something in common. I always considered myself planted, not yet plucked.
“You’re beautiful,” she said, more like an accusation than a compliment. “You know your name, it means beautiful.”
“Thanks,” I said and twisted my hair over my shoulder. “I’ve heard that.”
“This part of the city is very dirty,” she said and squinted at the passing cars. “I’m sorry Eduardo brought us here.”
Compared to Moema, the area outside the market was heavily traversed and wore a sooty sheen. But I didn’t see any trash on the street, not even a gum wrapper accidentally dropped, like I had in U.S. cities.
“I’m happy we got to meet,” I said. “Dennis really appreciates Eduardo and everything he’s done for him.”
“Eduardo loves Dennis.” She looked over at the market entrance. “He is like a son.”
She fumbled inside her purse, searching for the cigarette pack. When she pulled it out, I noticed a photograph of a stillborn infant on the back.
“Do you want one?” she offered.
“Sure,” I said. “Why not.”
She lit a flame for me, cupped inside her hands, and the two smoke streams converged in front of us.
“You are just the right amount of beautiful,” she continued. “You’re not so beautiful that you could make money from it. You’re not a model. But you are beautiful enough that people will treat you well in restaurants and stores.” She scanned my face. “You have good skin.”
“I guess I’ve never had trouble in restaurants.”
“I hope Dennis tells you you’re beautiful.”
The comment made me feel like I had to hurry to remember the last time you did say it, which made me feel self-conscious, and then absurd. I took a drag.
“He does.”
“My daughter is a model,” she said. “She looks like me when I was her age.”
“D
oes she live in São Paulo?”
“Milano,” she said in a feigned Italian accent.
“You must miss her.”
“She went to boarding school, then university in London, then Milano. I don’t remember what it is like not to miss her.”
Two children approached us with fistfuls of shell necklaces. The younger one held out her hand, offering them to us for fifty centavos, while her older sister spun behind her like a ballerina. Melinda bought a necklace and then shooed them away. Once far gone, the older sister threw a stone in our direction.
“Let’s walk,” she said. “If we stand here it will be like chocolate cake to a fly.”
We walked for a few blocks, slowly, at Melinda’s pace, and talked at length about her swim and yoga regimen. When the conversation reached a lull, she asked me about the apartment, if we had everything we needed, if the bed was comfortable, if we had enough towels and cutlery.
“Yes,” I said. “We brought a lot with us from the U.S. We probably have too much.”
“And how about Marta?” Her tone made me think that this was the question she had wanted to ask all along, and that her concern about bath towels was just a gateway.
“Marta? She’s doing fine, I think.”
“Is she treating you well?”
“Very well,” I said. She waited for me to say more. “If anything, I wonder if I’m treating her well.”
Melinda flicked her eyebrow. “What do you mean?”
The comment wasn’t meant to mean much more than that. I wondered if we were good hosts, but for some reason I found myself searching for a deeper explanation. The way Melinda framed her questions felt unobtrusively intrusive. She didn’t ask much, but I felt I’d already given her too much.
“I didn’t understand how this relationship worked, between her and me. How we were supposed to coexist. And so it was a little bit awkward at first.”
“Awkward?”
“Yes, awkward. I’ve never had a maid before, I’ve never had to share household responsibilities, and so I thought maybe it would be helpful if I helped her. But she didn’t seem to like that.” I trailed off, worrying now that I’d opened a vulnerability for Melinda to prod. “But anyway, I started painting and now things are good. She doesn’t have to worry about me meddling.”
It Is Wood, It Is Stone Page 5
