Still Life With Bread Crumbs: A Novel

by Anna Quindlen

  Kevin didn’t like Jim Bates and Sarah couldn’t figure out why, but that’s because she hadn’t been at Ralph’s the night Kevin was playing pool and making jokes about Sarah. They all sounded like old jokes, the kind that seventy-five-year-old comedians made on television: my wife is so fat she has her own zip code. My wife is so fat that when she wears yellow in New York people try to hail her. My wife is so fat she brought a spoon to the Super Bowl. Kevin was the only guy laughing at the jokes, laughing hard, like a cross between a cough and a bark, and he was in midlaugh when Jim Bates, who had been having a beer with a siding guy and working out a schedule on a building project, walked by and said, “It would be good if you stopped insulting your wife in front of strangers.”

  “Who the hell do you think you are?” Kevin had said, looking down the length of the bar and then at the bartender, who was stocking the beer fridge and didn’t look up.

  “It would be good,” Jim said.

  “Mind your own damn business,” Kevin said, and from one of the tables in the dim back of the bar someone muttered, “At least he’s got a business.”

  “What?” But everyone was looking innocent and Jim Bates was walking out. Not everyone liked him, mainly because they recognized in him a man who didn’t cut corners or do deals under the table. But virtually all of them had roofs on their houses, which meant Jim was indispensable, while Kevin was an outsider and a known scamster.

  “Hey!” Kevin called, and finally the bartender looked up. “Leave it alone,” said the bartender, who had played catcher in high school when Jim Bates was shortstop.

  “Asshole.”

  “Pay your tab and call it a night,” the bartender said.

  Kevin had stopped making comments about Sarah’s weight, and her hair, and her chin and her conversation, when other people were around. But it didn’t stop him from doing it at home. Jim Bates sometimes thought he should have the kind of conversation with Sarah about her marriage that he’d had with her about her business, but he was smart enough to know that downing watercress sandwiches and downing a woman’s husband were two different things. He, too, had once been married to someone to whom he had felt mysteriously and irrationally attached, until she’d unattached herself.

  Sarah kept trying to fix Jim Bates up. She’d write names and phone numbers on paper napkins and tuck them into the little flowered folder with his lunch check inside. He’d put the napkins in his pockets, and then on Sunday afternoons, when he did the laundry, he’d toss them in the trash, along with the occasional Sheetrock nail.

  But Sarah never thought of fixing him up with Rebecca.

  “One, she’s too famous and sophisticated, and, two, she’s too old for him.”

  “Maybe the old ones are more willing to go along,” Kevin said. “Besides, she doesn’t look that old. She looks better than most of the forty-year-olds around here. She probably does one of those exercise deals.” Sarah hoped he wasn’t going to start in on her again. She knew she should work out but she started baking every morning at five. She figured they were never going to have children because Kevin never wanted to have sex.

  (At least not with Sarah. Jim had wadded up the napkin with the skanky weekend bartender’s number on it with particular venom and lobbed it into the toilet by the washer because he knew she and Kevin hooked up at her apartment at least once a week.)

  “She isn’t good-looking, I gotta say,” Kevin added. “She’s got that long face and that weird mouth.”

  “Oh, you’re so wrong. She’s beautiful. Not in that kind of cheerleader way, but she has such a strong face. The mouth is the best part of it.”

  Kevin shrugged. “I don’t see it, but what do I know? Maybe it’s one of those things women like and guys don’t, like, I don’t know, sweaters?”

  “Guys don’t like sweaters?” Sarah said.

  “Nah. Guys like shirts. Girls like sweaters.”

  REBECCA’S MOUTH

  It so happened that while Jim Bates did not like sweaters—he always found them itchy and preferred flannel shirts and old T-shirts laundered to near-tissue—he had come to admire Rebecca’s mouth. At first he had found it strange. It was very wide, with a strongly delineated upper lip that looked as though it had been drawn with a sharp pencil. The lower lip was completely different, thick and slightly drooping, and in recent years young female photographers had speculated about whether Rebecca had had it plumped up for reasons of vanity. In fact she had had it all her life; in baby pictures it made her look a little simple-minded, and her mother had told everyone that she had no idea what part of the family had a mouth like that but she assumed it must be her husband’s.

  When Rebecca was in art school one of her classmates had asked to paint her, and he had made her mouth the centerpiece of the painting, enormous and epicene. It was cruel, her small eyes and slightly pointed nose crowded to the center of what was, after all, a rather long face, all completely obliterated by the huge lips across the center of the canvas. But Rebecca was forced to be of two minds about the painting, which showed her in a yellow turtleneck—although of course the one she had worn for the sittings was black—with a long braid of hair slithering down one shoulder, reminiscent of the Modigliani Girl with Braids. As a personal matter she was slightly insulted and repelled by it, but as a professional one she knew it was very fine, and the young painter, Josef Gourdon, would go on to become as famous a portraitist as Rebecca was a photographer. “My muse!” he would cry extravagantly at a gallery or a gala, his arm around whichever young male escort he was painting nude at the time, usually exaggerating the genitalia as he had Rebecca’s mouth.

  Over the years it developed that the painting was especially cruel because her mouth seemed to promise something Rebecca did not deliver, a kind of louche attitude that drew men to her when her face was in repose. It made you attend to her lips, and her lips made you attend to what her lips might do. In this way she had been importuned by a number of imaginative men in the two decades since her divorce—although not before it, when she was inclined to keep her lower lip tucked under the upper in a gesture that was characteristic of her youth. She had spent about a year halfheartedly seeing an intellectual property lawyer, who in his insistence on talking only about himself finally reminded her so much of a cut-rate Peter that she had simply stopped returning his calls and messages. She and another photographer with whom she had always had an easy friendship became a couple for a while, but then he moved to San Francisco and married a nice Chinese woman young enough to give him children. She had broken the heart of a short story writer to whom Dorothea had introduced her; he was good-looking, in an odd and arresting way, and smart, too, but he was crazy about her, even talked about moving in together. This made her both suspicious and claustrophobic, and after a while he just gave up. “You’re making a terrible mistake,” he told her, and in the abstract she thought he was probably right.

  She was bad at breaking up with people once she got involved, and so now she was less and less likely to get involved. It was always so difficult to put into words exactly what was wrong without sounding mean or trivial. She remembered one evening so vividly that she could see the food in front of her—rosy tuna tartare, with some elaborate radish decoration around the rim of the white plate—and a handsomish man who had begun a long disquisition on the German character, on how there was a certain order and linear thinking that prefigured so much that had happened in literature, music, and of course world affairs. And as he raised his fork and said, “The rise of fascism was inevitable,” she had heard a sort of click in her head that said, “No. Absolutely not.”

  “May I come up?” he’d said nicely as the doorman pretended not to eavesdrop.

  “No,” Rebecca replied. “But thank you for dinner.”

  That was her last date. Unless you counted sharing coffee from a thermos in a tree stand at dawn and eating a nine-hundred-calorie grilled cheese sandwich. Which she most certainly did not. That thought had not seriously crossed her mind, no
r the suspicion that every time Jim Bates looked at her lower lip he had an impulse to take it gingerly between his front teeth. She had seen him flush more than once in the tree stand, and had wondered a little, then finally concluded that because of his fair complexion he was especially sensitive to changes in temperature. But actually he was especially sensitive to Rebecca Winter’s lower lip. Luckily she hadn’t a clue. Like the deer, you had to sneak up slowly on Rebecca or else she would bolt. Considering her marriage, that wasn’t surprising.

  A WOMAN WITHOUT A MAN

  From The New York Times Society section, October 2, 1980:

  Rebecca Grace Winter, the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Oscar Winter of Manhattan, was married at her parents’ home yesterday to Peter Soames Symington, son of Richard and the late Rachel Symington of Oxford, England.

  The bride is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College and the Art Students League, where she holds a certificate in painting. Her father is the president of Freeman Foundations, a manufacturer of women’s undergarments, which was founded by the bride’s maternal grandfather.

  Professor Symington graduated from the University of Cambridge and has a doctorate in comparative literature from Harvard. He is a professor of English literature at Columbia University and is the author of “Medieval Iconography and the Body Triumphant,” published by W. W. Norton & Company. His father was vice-master at Balliol College, Oxford. His previous marriage ended in divorce.

  FISH, BICYCLE

  The last time Rebecca had seen her former husband was at Ben’s college graduation. She was delighted to see that he was losing his hair, especially in the rear crown, so that what he had left in the front looked like an afterthought. Of course Peter was easing up on seventy, an age when a man might be forgiven follicular failure. But Rebecca forgave him nothing. She told herself that this was not because he had betrayed her but because he had betrayed his son. It was one of those statements that sounded sensible until you compared it against actual human psychology.

  “I don’t know why you have such a hard time admitting that you are just plain pissed,” Dorothea said.

  “The man didn’t deserve you, sweetheart!” said her father.

  “I always liked Peter,” her mother said.

  The minuet of their marriage was, in memory, mortifying to her: Peter would do something—miss dinner, make a slighting comment or a mess—and she would gather up her shreds of dignity and respond with the silent treatment. Except that Peter liked the silent treatment—he found it restful. In a rage she would have long imaginary conversations in the shower in which she would confront and unnerve him. Eventually she would try to lure him back, disgusted by her determination to be pleasant at all costs, to avoid conflict. But Peter liked conflict, too, at least the edgy understated intellectual sort. Their relationship was like playing chess except that one person had all the larger pieces and the other—her—a line of sad little pawns. Check check check. Checkmate.

  All that meant that she had forgotten how much she had actually enjoyed being married in the beginning. When the stratum of her earth had rearranged itself, after the dust storms of Ben’s infancy and childhood, the tornadoes of her marital upheavals, and the tsunami of their divorce, it had covered over forever the memory of the way he had once run his long fingers, with their savagely bitten nails, up the insides of her legs and around her pelvis until her eyes lost all focus and she gasped helplessly. She had lost all memory of how they had lain on the long uncomfortable settee on Sunday mornings talking about what was in the Times. Or, more often, Rebecca listening while Peter talked. Sometimes Peter was in the paper, a review, a quotation, and she would read aloud while he repeated, “Oh, come now. Come now, Becky Sharp,” as though it was just all too much, being significant, being revered. When Peter was in the Times they almost always had a long afternoon of inventive sex. It never occurred to Rebecca to wonder how Peter would respond to seeing her name in the Times.

  That was later.

  Eventually it turned out that Becky Sharp was Becky Dull, her knees and thighs familiar country. The biggest difference between the two of them was in fact the biggest difference there could be between two people. Rebecca disliked change, and Peter lived for it. It was why he was such a successful academic. Every September, every January, a brightly patterned carpet of upturned faces would materialize in his seminar room or lecture hall, and he would set out to win them over. Deft seduction was his most conspicuous character trait.

  Rebecca had met him at a dinner party; the guest who was meant to sit to his right had broken an ankle falling down the escalator at Saks, and Rebecca had been recruited in her stead. On the way down to the street in the small mahogany-faced elevator she had been so focused on what she imagined was Peter’s breath on the nape of her neck—which was, in fact, Peter’s breath on the nape of her neck, a technique that he found had never let him down—that she failed to move when the doors slid open to the rococo lobby, and as Peter stepped forward he had been pressed against the back of her. That was part of the technique, too.

  That Saturday he took her to lunch in Little Italy. Naturally, he spoke Italian. He was, at the time, still married, although only nominally, he said. She would learn that Peter was always more or less nominally married. But that was later, too.

  Rebecca had little experience with men, although she was nearly thirty. A nice high school boyfriend who was a truly terrible kisser. A number of brief entanglements in college. An art school lover she would run into at an opening a decade after, only to discover what she ought to have suspected, that he preferred men.

  Her junior year she had spent a semester in Florence, but she had heard so many warnings about Italian men—“So much for Catholic morality!” her mother had cried at the end of one sermonette, as Sonya snorted like an angry bull—that if one so much as smiled absently at her in a trattoria she chugged her double espresso and fled. Her biography had all the trappings of sophistication but no actual sophistication at all.

  Otherwise she would have realized that some of Peter’s technique was a little shopworn. Otherwise, when he sent his first wife and their two young children back to England in first-family exile and persuaded the university to shift him from one apartment building to another, with better views and light, so he and Rebecca could start afresh, she would have seen the inevitable shape of her own future.

  “He didn’t break the glass,” said Rebecca’s grandmother on her wedding day, sitting in a corner of the entrance hall in a floral dress that smelled of camphor.

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake,” Rebecca’s mother had whispered.

  Her grandmother’s distress that Peter had not smashed the traditional glass underfoot at the end of the ceremony, that there had been no chuppah and no rabbi, had been muted somewhat by the wedding announcement. “You don’t know what a big deal it is for a Jew to get one of these things in The New York Times,” her grandmother had said in a loud whisper. Rebecca’s mother was miffed that the paper, after doing a bit of investigating, had refused to describe her as a concert pianist, or even as a pianist at all. Peter had looked at the misty photograph of Rebecca and read the copy below and said, his accent sharp as a paper cut, “And so we mark the first time that the words ‘Balliol College’ and ‘women’s undergarments’ have appeared in print in tandem.”

  There are two kinds of men: men who want a wife who is predictable, and men who want a wife who is exotic. For some reason, Peter had thought she was the latter. But even if that had been the case, the problem inherent remains the same—once she becomes a wife, the exotic becomes familiar, and thus predictable, and thus not what was wanted at all. Those few women who stayed exotic usually were considered, after a few years, to be crazy.

  Rebecca learned this over time, and to her sorrow. As with many marriages, hers was based on essential misconceptions. In her case she had been misled into thinking Peter was reliable, perhaps because he was very careful always to put cedar shoe trees into his shoes and because he always wor
e the same cologne, a bay rum that could be had only from a shop in a London arcade.

  It turned out that he was not reliable, just finicky about small personal things like that. He still used a shaving brush and a straight razor.

  But Rebecca had liked being married to him for a long time, or at least had liked being part of a pair, having someone to talk to even if he did not seem to be listening, having someone to warm the bed beneath the duvet on cold nights when the old radiators knocked more than they burned. She liked taking an arm on a slick street, having someone pay for the cab. Perhaps she used the words “my husband” more often than many women. She liked reading his manuscripts and didn’t much mind that he was not as delighted by the paintings she produced. She was not delighted by them much, either. They had a flat, lifeless quality. It was not until one of her professors told her the photographs she was taking as the basis for some of her paintings were much more interesting than the paintings themselves that she had shifted permanently from painting to photography and found her calling.

  Perhaps that was the beginning of the end. Or maybe it was the baby. Or maybe it was simple numerology. At thirty he had married his first wife. At forty he had married Rebecca. At fifty he married the assistant curator with whom Rebecca had surprised him in the back bedroom at a cocktail party farewell for a university colleague. They were in the room with the coats piled on the bed, so they certainly meant to get caught. When Rebecca arrived home Peter refused her demand that he sleep on the couch in his study. “I have a perfectly fine bed in which I intend to sleep,” he said, unbuttoning his shirt and releasing a whiff of secondhand Diorissimo, and sex.

  So Rebecca had slept on the couch instead. “Mommy,” Ben had said sternly next morning, “you’re in the wrong place for you.”