Authors: Sandra Novack
Still, she assesses: Where they are is in the sunroom/studio, on an otherwise pleasant and bright Saturday morning in May. Raulp stands amid a clutter of Folgers cans filled with flat brushes that spread out like miniature fans. “Hello, husband,” she says good-naturedly, but Raulp’s c-o-n-c-e-n-t-r-a-t-i-n-g.
He’s been concentrating so much lately, in fact, that he’s finally mastered the age-old art of tuning her out. He’s also getting absentminded about things like showering in the morning or remembering to take lunch and sometimes dinner, and while other women might worry that both neglect and weight loss in a middle-aged man points to an affair, Sylvia knows better: Raulp is simply self-absorbed. He looks lean and careless in his slumping khakis and a black T-shirt that hangs out over his belt. A bohemian goatee has replaced his once fastidiously shaved face, and instead of looking like the businessman he once was, he now resembles a Beat poet, or a more muscular, hairier version of Bob Dylan, both of which aren’t entirely disagreeable to Sylvia, but neither of which she would want as a husband, either.
As she pulls at the cushions, Sylvia traces, for the umpteenth time, the path of Raulp’s midlife crisis and subsequent lunacy: First, there was the layoff from the bank, recent downturns, the housing-industry debacle and ensuing credit mayhem, followed by his prolonged use of the word
undervalued
, and his rather bizarre idea that fate had somehow saved him, at age thirty-nine, from a life of mediocrity and pushing through loan applications for newlyweds and pregnant couples. Then there came his decision to cash in stocks, take an evening class at the college, and paint again. Sometimes now when the mood strikes him he even speaks in French, talking about his
tour de force
and his
succès d’estime
.
It’s all sheer and utter madness. Sylvia misses the times when she could practically chart Raulp’s moods in accordance with the Dow Jones and the near sorcery-like predictions of Warren Buffett, but after years of marriage it is no longer so easy to figure
out Raulp. She watches as Raulp tucks a wisp of graying hair behind his ear and runs his hands over the blank canvas. A mercurial expression spreads across his face, and Sylvia becomes aware, once again, of the changeability of his moods.
“Oh, look,” she says, picking up the classified section of the paper. “Job listings.”
“Sylv,” he says distractedly. “You have your job at the bookstore, and I have a job doing this.”
“You have unemployment benefits, a retirement fund, and a hobby,” she tells him gently. Then, when he frowns, she adds, “Just kidding! Of course you have a job, sweetie. Of course!” She says all this in an animated, too-bright way, because, Jesus Christ, she reasons, she should at least try to be cheerful. Raulp is her husband, the man she loves, after all. And he’s dedicated himself to his art again. He has! She has watched his formal considerations change over the course of class, marked how his field of vision, once bent on abject realism, has grown to add new weight and shape, more irregular patterns, less repetition. She’s commended him on his earnest study because, she reasons, she should be supportive. And mostly she has been.
She stares out the window to fields lined with rickety fences and sagging wires. A familiar uneasiness settles in her, a familiar boredom. They live in Lancaster County, next to a dairy farm. “All that grass,” she once told Raulp, after he was transferred from the city to work as manager at the local bank in town. “Who needs so much lawn unless you have twenty children?” It’s the openness of the landscape that often leaves her strangely somber—a feeling she attributes to the region as a whole—but today, considering the unmowed grass shot through with dandelions and milkweed, she feels a crusty annoyance as well.
“Our yard looks like
Wild Kingdom
,” she says. “I know you’re busy with your art and everything, but I feel I’m waiting for the cows to come and graze.”
Raulp opens a tube of burnt sienna and smears it over his palette. He dips a camel-hair brush into the paint and makes a solitary stroke that looks to Sylvia like the start of a landscape, the jagged line of earth as it hits the sky.
“Hey,” she says. “I’ve got an idea. Maybe you could paint cows mowing the grass.”
Raulp swirls his paintbrush in deft, short strokes. “Sure,” he says absently. “Why not.”
O
N WEDNESDAY EVENING
, Raulp comes home from art class and stands in the kitchen, his yellow slicker still dripping rain. He announces that for his final portfolio he has decided to paint a nude. “I think it’ll really stretch my imagination,” he says. “I mean, what’s more complicated than the human form?”
A slight alarm shoots through Sylvia as she scrapes the last bits of lo mein from her dinner plate and into the trash. “What happened to the landscapes?” she ventures. “You know, cows, caribous, whatever. Look around you. Inspiration abounds in cow country. It’s so serene my brain frequently wants to split open, and oh my God, the smells! I’m throwing you zinger suggestions here, guaranteed A’s in class, and you’re talking nudity. It’s obscene.”
Raulp takes off his slicker, hangs it on the back of the door. He grabs a beer and sits down at the table. “I just feel like I need something new, Sylv. I’m landscaped out, and that’s the truth.”
“I’m landscaped out, too, but nudity is nothing new. Nudity is the oldest thing in the book. Have you read the Bible lately?”
He nods in a way that lets Sylvia know he’s simultaneously acknowledging and dismissing her arguments. “Crenshaw suggested something in the style of Ingres. He told me my landscapes are stiff and limited.”
“He said that—‘stiff and limited’?” She waves this off with her hand. Lee Crenshaw is a man Sylvia only met once before deciding that any more meetings were neither warranted or desired. He’s an elderly, cantankerous man of bow ties and banter. At the cocktail party Crenshaw threw at the start of the semester, the man’s hands glided over Sylvia as she squeezed by him on the way to the kitchen. “Excuse me,” he said, all while he groped her ass in a determined, robust way.
“You remember the party, don’t you?” she asks now. “I’m not posing naked and having Lee Crenshaw see it. The man of course would love nudes. Of course!”
“Liking your ass doesn’t make him a pervert,” Raulp says. “It makes him a man of good taste.” He folds his arms then and considers his next move. She recognizes the look—it’s strained, as if Raulp has popcorn caught between his teeth. “Actually,” he says, finally, “I was thinking of hiring someone.”
“Oh.”
“That’s it? Just ‘oh’?”
“Oh, great?”
“It’s not meant to be a slight, Sylv. It’s just that I know you too well. Familiarity would cloud my vision of you, and what I see.”
“What, like that I’m
round
, for instance?”
“You’re beautiful,” he tells her. “But there’s also the fact that Crenshaw knows you, and you just said you’re uncomfortable with him.”
Sylvia can’t help but feel rebuked by all this. Though she doesn’t worry about affairs necessarily, she still feels the effects
of marriage and the worry that can accompany fifteen pounds of weight gain and the effects of countless ice creams on her thighs. “Okay,” she says again, nodding.
“I knew you’d say that.”
“What? I didn’t say anything.”
“Exactly.”
“I
like
the caribou idea,” she says. “But, fine, if you want to paint a nude, hey, go for it. What else do you sign on for in marriage except to be supportive when your spouse needs it, right? Why else marry unless you form a mutual admiration society, or at the very least a support group?”
Raulp gets up from the table and moves to where she stands at the sink. He circles his arms around her waist. He says, “Thanks, Sylv. And just so you know, I’ve always
admired
you.”
“Oh, and I
support
you,” she says.
“Good,” Raulp says. He squeezes her sides. Then he goes and gets the paper. He opens to the classifieds.
“You’re advertising?”
“How else do you get someone?”
“I don’t know. Pick up a tall hooker?”
“That’s not very supportive.”
“I
am
supportive,” she counters. “I never complain about the smell of turpentine and paint drifting through the house. You know that stuff can cause brain damage.” She sticks out her tongue and makes a face. He would prefer, Sylvia believes, the same steadfast encouragement he displayed throughout their marriage when she decided she wanted to study macramé, or when she decided that, come pad thai or disaster, she was going to cook some exotic cuisine, at least once. He would prefer that she smile politely and just shut up.
“You’re weird, Sylv.”
“Some admiration,” she says.
W
EIGHT GAIN
and porker thighs aside, it isn’t totally an outlandish thing to think she’d be the subject of Raulp’s painting. First, Sylvia reasons, they
are
married, for Christ’s sake. And second, he painted her once before, in graduate school, back when she was a slimmer and tighter version of the Sylvia she is today. She’d first met Raulp when he was designing the set of
A Doll’s House
and Sylvia, then a wayward theater major, was learning the part of Nora—the backbreaking dialogue, the repetition of lines. In the end, she was only assigned the part of Helene, the Helmers’ maid, and after the cast assignments she came backstage to where Raulp was painting stage windows that revealed wispy clouds, tranquil cerulean skies. She sat down on the Helmers’ emperor chair, rubbed her temples, and moaned. “You know, it’s because the professor is sleeping with the lead,” she said.
Raulp stopped painting and stepped back to view his work. “I heard that rumor. But, hey, I’ve always thought the heart of the story was the person who makes the beds and orders the house.”
“Right,” Sylvia said. “I’m a domestic goddess.”
Raulp sat down next to her. He touched the tip of Sylvia’s nose with his brush, leaving a dab of blue paint. “It looks good on you.”
“In clown school,” she said, wiping her nose, “maybe.”
He stared for a moment longer than he should have, and she felt herself blushing. Sensitive Raulp. Beautiful, brown-eyed
Raulp. Dylan-esque Raulp who, really, all the girls, and a few of the guys, had noticed. After that, he’d come in early to watch rehearsals, and, when they ran late—which they almost always did—he’d offer to walk Sylvia back to her dorm. On their way across the quad, Raulp would often request that she perform mime routines, soliloquies from Shakespeare, musical numbers. Sylvia sang songs like “They Can’t Take That Away from Me” or “I Got Rhythm” despite the fact that she sounded a bit like Ethel Merman on speed. When she finished, she took long, swooping bows for Raulp, who would always offer a standing ovation.
“I’m awful,” she said, moaning, but she was secretly pleased by Raulp’s attention.
“So,” he asked her after a performance. “Are you dating anyone? An actor? A tree? A movie star?”
“Me?” she asked, surprised. “No. Why?”
“I’m auditioning right now,” he said. “To be your boyfriend.”
“Oh, that!” she said, laughing. “Well, you’re hired.”
After they started dating, he confessed that he’d been attracted to her angular jaw, her almond-shaped eyes, her thick, almost masculine eyebrows. Sylvia was surprised; she had always considered herself homely, her eyes set too far apart, her hair too thick and unruly. “You’re sweet to compliment the eyebrows, especially,” she said, though it frightened her, really, to so suddenly fall in love. There wasn’t anything Sylvia wouldn’t have done for Raulp, really, so when, after dinner one night, he invited her back to his dorm room and asked to paint her nude, she agreed. They hadn’t even slept together yet. Still, she stripped down naked and sat on the bed. She flushed with excitement as Raulp studied her. When she fidgeted, embarrassed, he sang his own, slightly off-beat version of “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?”
They were married by the end of their program. Sylvia became pregnant shortly after that. It was unexpected, and though she worried, though she’d never thought of herself as a “natural” sort of mother, Raulp took it in stride. “It’ll be a change,” Raulp said. “But I’ve always wanted to be a father.”
“But what about painting?” Sylvia asked. He had just gotten a gallery showing, and he’d managed to sell a few pieces at what Sylvia had considered a good, promising price.
“I’ll still paint,” he told her. He also took an entry-level job at the bank. “To supplement,” he said. “Until things take off.” She, too, applied for work. They needed health insurance, and, even with their small house, for which Raulp’s parents had generously cosigned, there were mortgage payments, water bills, trash removal, prenatal doctor visits. It was simple to trace, Sylvia knew, how one thing got in the way of another, and then something else followed, until another life—one you never dreamed of—suddenly was yours for the keeping.
They painted the spare room yellow. They rearranged furniture, picked out bedding. When she delivered, Raulp was there, helping her, urging her to push so hard she felt as though she might split open. Their daughter was born and taken right to intensive care. A respiratory complication, the doctor explained. In the days that followed, Raulp and Sylvia approached the baby’s incubator with all the hopeful trepidation of parents who wanted only for their sick child to be well. They reached through tiny holes and held their little girl’s hands, coaxing her to get better, to scream, to cry—anything—but after two days, the baby died.
They rarely discuss the baby now, though in the first years following her death Raulp periodically brought up the idea of having another child. When he did, Sylvia told him there was
time, that they were still young, but really, she wasn’t sure if she could go through it all again. She reminded him that they were still paying medical bills from their first pregnancy—Raulp’s insurance didn’t offer full coverage until after a year at the bank—and that for all the worry and all that time, they had nothing. But she still sometimes thinks about the baby, and how fragile things can be in the world, how there is, in everything, a desperate struggle to survive.