by Robin Black
“I’m so glad you and Owen are still so happy,” Lillian told me on our last night, as she and I put dinner together. “You know, when he was a boy, I wondered if he’d find someone who could warm him up. He was such a serious little man. But here you are. An old, happily married couple and clearly still having fun.”
When we got home on Monday evening, I half expected Alison to be on her porch waving a big welcome, but no one emerged from their house.
I hadn’t really believed that the tide of physical desire would sweep us right past Nora and the issues embodied by her, but I was a little stunned at how smoothly Owen settled back into the routine of spending his days with her out in the barn. And up close to that reality, I no longer found it exciting or even remotely ennobling. I just plain hated it.
He needed her. Or thought he did. There wasn’t much difference that I could detect.
Nobody outside a marriage can understand it, everyone agrees. As if people inside a marriage can. I don’t know why I set myself against crying uncle, and ending what felt like daily cruelty, why I didn’t beg Owen to run away with me, to admit that our sanctuary had been fouled. But for just over a week I supplied myself with reasons to stay this terrible course. Briefly, I convinced myself it was indeed the greatness of my heart. That I was a larger, more generous woman than I had thought. And that theory got me through the first day.
Next, I decided that I wouldn’t give Owen the satisfaction of admitting I couldn’t handle the type of suffering that I had put him through; and so a kind of fierceness got me through another few days.
And what of him?
Was he really doing this because those months and months of having no words to put on the page had made him desperate? Desperate enough to ask this of me? Or, was he just trying to hurt me? Or, was breaking my heart the only way he could restore his own creative soul?
I doubt he knew the answer any more than I did. He was kind to me when we were together, rubbing my shoulders as he passed, offering me cups of tea, cooking dinner a few nights in a row. Almost as though I had the flu. But he didn’t ask how I was doing under this new arrangement of ours, and we never mentioned Nora.
On my own, I avoided her as much as I could, heading indoors with a quick wave if I spotted her while I was outside, making excuses to suspend our dinners for four. I’m not feeling well in the evenings these days, and Things are going so well. I haven’t been able to pull myself away from working, even after sunset.
All untrue. Physically, I felt fine. And my work had all but stopped by then.
It was a mystery to me where Alison stood in all of this. We did try a walk together again, our first in ages, but I wanted to wring her neck as she spoke of Nora’s work with Owen, alighting each time on the notion of the child needing a father figure in her life. I did not wring her neck, though, or even audibly question her view. To do so was to break my promise to Owen. So I just wondered, mystified. Had she really blinded herself so successfully to the fact that her daughter was in love with my husband and he half in love with her? Was it possible that she had? Likely that she had? I had no idea. What did I know of maternal delusions? The only person who had ever idealized me was Owen, and I could barely remember that.
“Can we talk?” Alison asked at my kitchen door, the afternoon of December twenty-first.
“Of course.”
She dropped her coat on a kitchen chair. It slid to the floor and she picked it up. “Let’s go in the living room,” I said. “There’s a fire.”
“Nora and I had a conversation yesterday.” She looked away while I settled on the orange chair. “I know you’ve been angry and I don’t know if you can understand this, but I only did what I thought … I just, I just honestly thought that … I believed everything I told you all along. I wasn’t lying to you.”
“Alison, I’m lost.” She looked distraught, and also drained somehow. Her clothes, a dark blue jumper over a black turtleneck, seemed askew, her curls, unbrushed, were a great unruly mess. And she wasn’t wearing lipstick, I realized. For the first time ever. Even when I had picked her up at the hospital, her lips had shone coral, light. Even when she had stayed at our house supposedly frightened for her life. “I don’t know what you’re telling me,” I said.
“Right. Of course.” She took a deep breath. “I haven’t encouraged her … Truly, I would never have done that. I’ve just wanted Nora to know there are men in the world who … who aren’t bad.”
I couldn’t tell where we were headed. “I know that,” I said. “You’ve been saying that for weeks.”
“I didn’t encourage her. But … Gus, I don’t have any excuses, I just so badly wanted her to stay here.”
“I don’t understand,” I said—meaning more than one thing.
“I saw what I wanted to see,” she said. “I … I should have done more. I … I wanted her here. Away from Paul.”
I didn’t speak, just tried to take it in.
“He loves you so much, Gus. I knew Owen would never cheat.”
“What do you mean you didn’t encourage her? What are you apologizing for, then?”
“She’s such a hurt person. I know she doesn’t seem it all the time. Or maybe ever, to you. But she is. She’s never had a steady platform. Not really. I just … Truly I never egged it on, I just didn’t tell her to stop. Not the way I should have. And I … I’m not blind. But I did think it was just a silly crush. And then, yesterday, she told me she had spoken to Owen. Before you and he went to the Cape. And I realized that even after she … declared herself, he still hadn’t sent her away. That he knew how she felt, and he hadn’t sent her away.”
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.
The 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.
20
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 b
een 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.
Augie, this is your conscience speaking. Are you doing the things we talked about? Are you sticking with those soldiers of yours? I have been thinking it over and I know this sounds weird coming from me and maybe I should be quiet, but I think it’s really important that you not give up on them. I mean, I DEFINITELY have no experience with this, but I’ll bet it sucks to be super good at something and then try something new. It must feel impossibly hard. Even when I try something new, it’s not like I’m giving up something I do amazingly well, like you paint landscapes and rooms. And I’m guessing it feels like starting over or something, which must be awful. But it would bum me out completely if you just gave up.
I’m really sorry if that’s obnoxious of me. I put off writing this for days. But then I thought, it’s not like you’ll cut me off for bugging you and maybe you need someone to push? So, like I said, this is your conscience speaking. Or something like that.
Here, I’m home for the holidays. Spending a while with Mom and then tomorrow out to Dad’s new household in Wayne for a week. Gulp. It turns out I have seriously mixed feelings about him getting married. I didn’t think I would, I thought I was okay, but then it happened and I realized I’m just like every other kid of divorce in the world. Somewhere in there I thought they’d get back together one day. Unbelievable. I could see how much it upset Mom, and I was pretty contemptuous, but it hasn’t been easy for me with the holidays and all. I haven’t felt this low in a very long time.
So wish me luck, out in the suburbs, flipping out.
I soooooooo loved seeing you. Send me pictures of your pictures.
Love,
Laine
Dear Laine,
You must have been spying on me. I have indeed lost my nerve, and been doing my old familiar work, but I promise to reread your note until I get my courage back. And then I’ll keep reading it. You’re right. Change is hard—for us all. But there’s no point fighting it. Not to go all Zen on you, but all of life is change, so we might as well decide it’s a good thing.
Let’s make a deal. You try to have a decent time at your dad’s and I’ll go back to painting my soldiers.
I’m really glad you wrote. Just let me know if there’s ever any way that I can help.
I loved seeing you too. You are incredible.
Love,
Augie
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.
Steinman’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.”
Years 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.
