Imaginary Things

by Andrea Lochen

  We met in a church, of all places: the Basilica of St. Josaphat. My class was taking a field trip, and we were shuffling along the marble floors in our hideous uniforms (olive green polo shirts and unflattering gray skirts) like we were walking the green mile. Some of us clutched clipboards to our waists with worksheets attached that demanded the answers to such mind-numbing questions as: What church was the Basilica commissioned to resemble? What events led to the martyrdom of St. Josaphat? I had ditched mine almost immediately.

  My friend, Pippa, had just stepped outside for a cigarette, and I was contemplating joining her even though cigarette smoke made my eyes itchy and watery. It was oppressively quiet inside the church; I felt like the eyes of Jesus and all the saints were watching me from every which angle, and they didn’t like what they saw.

  Ahead of me, Marguerite Clemens and Billie Van der Wal, the two most popular—and therefore, most hated—girls in the junior class, were whispering and laughing behind their cupped hands. I followed their gaze, and there he was: lying on a pew, stretched out on his back, his leather jacket balled up beneath his head like a pillow. He was gazing up at the dome, furiously scribbling in a sketchbook.

  “Yum,” Billie Van der Wal breathed.

  “Sex on a stick,” Marguerite murmured.

  He was oblivious to our class, oblivious to everything really, except the kaleidoscope of saints rendered in the dome and the pad of paper in front of him, so I was able to memorize his every detail. I savored him in little pieces, sneaking sideways glances of him with my eyelashes lowered.

  “Earth to Anna,” Pippa sang in a cloud of minty breath. She had managed to wiggle back into her place beside me in line. “Do you want to check out the gift shop with me? I promised my mom I’d pick up a rosary for my little sister’s first communion.”

  The crowded gift shop gradually emptied out as Pippa dawdled over which rosary to buy and our classmates rushed to board the waiting bus. I studied the rack of postcards, thinking it might be fun to send some to my Salsburg and Lawrenceville friends. I imagined scrawling, Aren’t you glad you’re NOT here? This is what passes as a field trip at my new school!

  The postcard rack started swiveling, seemingly of its own accord. I reached out, stopped it, and turned it back to the column of Basilica exterior photos I’d been considering.

  “Oh, sorry.” The bad-boy-artist’s head appeared from the other side of the rack. “I didn’t know someone else was looking. Are you an art aficionado, too?”

  I couldn’t breathe. I’d been an expert at talking to boys since I’d budded breasts, but Patrick wasn’t your typical boy by any stretch of imagination. In my frumpy school uniform, I’d never felt more branded as a high schooler, when normally most of my friends said I could pass for twenty or twenty-one. Also, I wasn’t positive what “aficionado” meant, but I thought I got the gist of it.

  “I love art,” I said, looking at him flirtatiously from behind a clump of hair that I’d let fall in front of my face. “Just not this kind of art. I’m not really into angels and cherubs and gold-plated halos.”

  “Oh?” Patrick stepped around the postcard rack, and I could see that his tight jeans were covered in zippers and artfully placed rips. “What kind of art do you like?”

  I thought back to the art class I’d taken last year with Mr. Schneider and tried to remember the artists he was always going on and on about. “Mark Rothko?” I wagered. “Kandinsky?” I put my hands on my hips and tossed my hair out of my eyes.

  “Ah, so you prefer abstract art. Then I can see why this isn’t your taste.” He nodded and plucked a postcard from the rack and offered it to me. “But take a look at this and tell me that it’s not the purest, most humbling Madonna you’ve ever seen.”

  She wasn’t holding baby Jesus, as I’d seen her portrayed in most paintings, but being bathed in light by an angel and a dove. Mary looked young, younger than me, and pale, almost afraid. Her arms were folded across her chest, and her head was bowed, light brown ropes of her hair falling behind her shoulder.

  “It’s lovely,” I said, though I wasn’t sure I meant it. Something about the painting was vaguely troubling, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

  “Let me buy it for you. It’s a whopping fifty cents. My treat.”

  Before I could protest, he’d taken it to the cash register and paid for it. Then he handed me the postcard with a wink and hurried off, and it wasn’t until I was seated on the bus that I thought to flip it over. On the back he’d scribbled: I’m having a party tomorrow night. 719 N. 22nd St. Apt. 4. Ten o’clock. Please come? I’d never seen anything so suave; of course Pippa and I had to go. I told my mom, who had made the effort to send me to an all-girls school and had therefore absolved herself of any other attempts at parenting for the year, that we were going to see a late night movie.

  It was the first college party I’d ever attended. I don’t know what I’d been expecting—frat guys in togas hitting a beer bong, maybe—but it certainly wasn’t that. Instead, about a dozen people milled around the tiny, nearly furniture-less apartment drinking from real glasses, not disposable plastic cups. An old record player set up on the floor emitted a staticky never-ending guitar solo. Patrick and I sat cross-legged, face to face, knees touching knees, on the worn carpet and talked about art, for real this time. I didn’t try to impress him by dropping the names of artists and movements I knew little about. Instead, I described the way I felt when I brushed paint onto a canvas, almost like I was revealing its true image by stripping away the white, and he listened carefully to me, watching me, studying me, nodding, and murmuring his understanding.

  He was an art major. He showed me one of his sketchbooks, and though most of the drawings were of religious artwork he’d copied from churches and museums, there were a few striking originals. A man with a violin for a face. “My father,” he said simply. Two disembodied torsos tangled in the branches of a tree. The last page in the book was a hastily outlined face. It took me a moment to recognize it was mine. He had captured me, apparently from memory, in a way no camera ever had. My graphite-rendered eyes seemed to sparkle from the page, my upturned nose reflected a kind of haughtiness, but the set of my lips divulged my true insecurity. I asked if I could have it, and he laughed and said no. We talked and drank vodka with pineapple juice and ate peapods and dried apricots until Pippa demanded we go home; she was bored to death, and she thought she’d been a good friend and toughed it out long enough.

  I started sneaking over to campus to meet him weekly. And then daily. I spent whole weekends at his apartment, telling my mom I was going with Pippa’s family to their lake house in Muskego. Now when I looked back at those early months, everything seemed like a clue, a gigantic neon-lit arrow, and I couldn’t help wondering why I hadn’t suspected anything at the time. Patrick’s impulsiveness: buying me a kitten when I’d never mentioned wanting one, skipping classes and encouraging me to do the same so we could take the train to Chicago to visit the Art Institute. His overly grand gestures: sending a thousand dollars’ worth of orchids and lilies to my house, much to my mom’s rage (since she hadn’t known I was dating anyone), after our first argument. His firm belief that he was the next Raphael and I was his Muse, and the way he’d keep me up until five in the morning, alternating between making love to me and drawing me in various poses. Exhausted, I’d finally beg him to let me sleep, and he’d oblige and set about doing something else—banging out a history paper or walking to the nearby coffee shop—but never seemed to need his own rest.

  Perhaps it was just the way I’d always wanted to be loved by someone. Wholly, single-mindedly, almost to the point of obsession.

  Of course I got pregnant. I’d been so furious with my mom when she’d marched me into Planned Parenthood my freshman year of high school to get me on the pill, that I’d refused to take it and relied on Patrick for condoms instead. I wasn’t like her, I’d fumed. I was smarter. I was immune to the same weaknesses and mistakes that she’d made. When my p
eriod failed to come two months in a row, and the smell of bacon started to make me throw up, my illusion shattered and I hated myself, even more than I hated my mom, for once. Patrick didn’t believe in abortion, and he seemed so genuinely excited about our having a baby together, that I knew it was my way out, my way of being different from my mom. I would prove her wrong. I would have the baby and stay with its father and give it a loving and happy home.

  I spent my senior year at an abysmal Milwaukee public school, where at least I was in good company with ten other pregnant girls. I lived between my mom’s house and Patrick’s apartment. When my mom’s incessant litany of my failings got to be too much, I went to Patrick’s. When there was nothing left in his fridge or I couldn’t get any sleep or do my homework because he was constantly talking or wanting me to pose for him, I went to my mom’s.

  I had almost entered my third trimester when I returned to Patrick’s apartment one day to find his normally bare living room crowded with baby stuff. Bags of onesies, sleepers, bottles, pacifiers, plastic keys, and fuzzy caterpillars. An enormous mahogany crib still in its box. A stroller, a car seat, a bouncer, and a plastic bathtub shaped like a whale. A stuffed giraffe nearly as tall as me.

  “What is all this stuff?” I asked, struggling to make my way through the clutter to the bathroom.

  Patrick looked up from the pair of yellow baby booties he was holding in his palm. He rose from the futon and gestured to the crib box, where it was leaning against the wall, as if it might speak for itself. “I wanted to prepare for our child, Anna.”

  “That’s thoughtful, babe, but it must have cost a fortune! Your mom said she still has your old crib and some of your baby stuff and we’re welcome to it. The rest we can buy at rummage sales or Goodwill. This is too much, Patrick. Way too much.”

  He frowned. “Don’t worry about the cost. I’m going to support you and our baby. I know we don’t have a lot right now, but I’m really close to having my first exhibit, and once that happens, we’ll be set.”

  I headed toward the bathroom, rolling my eyes. He’d been saying the same thing since I had first met him. He was always on the verge of “scoring” an exhibit. “I’m about to wet my pants. I’ll be right back.”

  When I came out, Patrick gently tugged me onto the futon, lifted up my maternity shirt, and rested his cheek gently against the taut skin of my belly. “Hello, Baby Panna,” he said, a combination of our names that he’d taken to calling our unborn child, and then whispered something I couldn’t hear. He kissed my stomach and raised his face to mine, studying me with his somber, archangel eyes.

  “What do you think about turning our bedroom into a nursery? You and I can move the bed out here. I could paint the walls in the nursery to look like a farm—rolling hills and a sunflower patch, a little red barn, some sheep and cows.”

  I closed my eyes as he talked and let his words wash over me. I imagined the small, dingy bedroom transformed into a little piece of the idyllic countryside for my baby.

  The next morning I woke up to find the crib box unpacked and hundreds of tiny pieces and tools scattered about the living room, but no Patrick. It was a Saturday, and I imagined he’d gone to the coffee shop or grocery store to get us some breakfast. By noon, he still hadn’t returned, and I’d abandoned that hypothesis, replacing it with the more likely explanation that he was off drawing somewhere and had lost track of the time, which was oh-so-typical. When he didn’t show up by ten o’clock that night, I started to worry. He wouldn’t answer his cell phone, and none of his friends knew where he was either. I was close to calling the cops and reporting him as a missing person when he finally strolled in on Monday morning. He had buzzed most of his hair off.

  “Where were you?” I hissed through my teeth, too livid and relieved all at once to even look at him.

  According to Patrick, he had gone to the Basilica to look at “our dome” (as he called it) for inspiration and strength, when he’d stumbled upon a friendly tour group who’d invited him to join them. He’d tagged along with them to the Harley Davidson Museum and then the Miller Brewing Company, where he sampled a little too much beer. The tour ended at this point, but some of his newfound friends invited him to go downtown and get some more drinks. He didn’t remember much after that. He didn’t know where he had slept. He thought he’d gone down to the lake at some point because he had sand in his pockets, and he vaguely remembered looking in a mirror and realizing his blond hair with the black stripe was holding him back from reaching his true potential and therefore needed to go. That was all.

  “Patrick, you can’t do this! I can’t do this,” I shouted. “We’ve got a baby on the way. You didn’t even leave a note. Did you not think about me even once to wonder if I was worried sick about you? You can’t go wandering off on me like this and then drinking so much that you black out. You don’t even remember where you stayed? How do you know that you didn’t pick up some girl and cheat on me?”

  I left for my mom’s house and stayed there for an entire week before her diatribes got the best of me. I could tell he was trouble just by looking at him. I knew you were going to end up raising this baby all by yourself, just like I did. And if you think for one second that I’m going to be the one raising it for you, while you go about your glamorous life, you’ve got another thing coming…

  Patrick was sweeter and more devoted than ever when I returned—rubbing my swollen feet with lavender-scented oil and making sure the freezer and cupboards were stocked with my pregnancy cravings: waffle fries and powdered sugar doughnuts. He kept apologizing for his behavior and telling me that if he ever lost me, he didn’t know what he’d do. He started curling up in bed beside me and sleeping at night for the first time since I’d known him and even slept later than me most days. Then he stopped drawing, and I knew something was wrong.

  I got home one afternoon from the part-time waitressing job I’d picked up to find him in the nursery, still in the sweat pants and T-shirt he slept in, surrounded by the paint cans we’d bought for his farm mural, and crying.

  I wrapped my arms around him as best I could with my huge stomach between us. “What’s wrong, babe? Tell me what’s wrong.”

  “I’ve lost it,” he said. “I can’t see it anymore. It’s just gone. Even when I close my eyes, there’s nothing there.”

  “What’s gone? What did you lose?”

  But he couldn’t tell me. I ended up painting the nursery myself—a solid light blue since that was the color we had the most of—with a handkerchief tied around my face like a bandit to keep out the paint fumes.

  Patrick stopped leaving the apartment, even to go to his classes, and was suspicious of me and irritable whenever I went to work or any of my doctor’s appointments. When I got home one night, cranky and tired from being on my feet for ten hours straight, and he had the nerve to ask me if I’d been out with someone, I erupted.

  “God, Patrick! I’m not cheating on you! I’m hideously fat and seven months pregnant and busting my butt so we can have some sort of income while you stay home and do God knows what with God knows who.”

  Patrick tried to put his hand on my shoulder, but I shrugged it off.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just that I don’t know what I’d do if I ever lost you, Anna. I’d kill myself if you ever left me. You’re the only good thing in my life. Everything else is turning to shit. School. My art. My future.”

  It wasn’t the first time he’d threatened to commit suicide. His first few threats had flattered my ego and made me feel even more wretchedly in love, as if our fates were as tortuously entwined as Romeo and Juliet’s. But the next several threats had dragged me into my own black hole of depression. By now, I’d become practically numb to them.

  “Maybe you should talk to someone about it,” I said as gently as I could. As a college student, Patrick was entitled to at least five free sessions with a mental health counselor. I knew this because I’d looked into it after his period of going missing, but since then
I hadn’t found the courage to broach the subject with him.

  “I am,” he said. “I’m talking to you.”

  I took a deep breath. “Someone more qualified than me. Someone at University Health.”

  “God damn it, Anna. They can’t help me. They don’t know the first thing about me. The only person who can help me is you. Just promise me that you’ll never leave me for someone else. That you’ll always be my muse.”

  Even unshaved and disheveled, with the recent weight loss that made his arms nearly as thin as mine, he was still the most achingly beautiful creature I had ever seen. My heart was overwhelmed for him with love, pity, and guilt.

  “I love you so much, babe,” I said. “You know I don’t ever want to leave you, but you worry me, and I only want for you to get better. If you really loved me, you’d at least try for me and see a doctor.”

  “There’s nothing they can tell me that I don’t already know. I had a light inside me—I was tuned in to everything. I was so close to God, and every time I put my pencil on a page, this amazing energy flowed through me, and I saw the world as it really was. As it should be. But now that light is gone, and I don’t know how to get it back. But I know you’re part of it, and if I lose you too, I’ll have lost everything.”

  “You won’t lose me, babe,” I said and swallowed hard. “We’ll go to the doctor’s office together tomorrow. You can explain to them exactly what you just explained to me, and they’ll know what to do.”

  “You’re not listening to me!” He picked up a ceramic piggy bank that was sitting on the counter, a graduation/baby shower gift I’d gotten from Valentina, one of the other pregnant teens at the high school. I think I knew, even before he did, that he was going to fling it at me. I clutched my belly and felt the air next to my cheek stir. The piggy bank exploded into little shards against the wall behind my head. We both stared at each other in stunned silence.