Authors: Sandra Novack
T
HE MODEL SHOWS UP
the next Monday evening, a newspaper tucked under her arm. Sylvia guesses the girl is no more than twenty-two. She has a smooth, round face and a full mouth, and she’s very slender. She brushes back a wisp of long brown hair. “I’m Reese,” she says. “I spoke with your husband on the phone?”
“Is that a question?” Sylvia asks, thinking that there’s still time to tell this girl that she’s got the wrong address, the wrong husband, the wrong look. She lets out an embarrassing laugh before opening the door wider. She feels as if she has suddenly become transparent glass. “Can I get you something?” she asks. “Water, tea, bourbon?”
“No thanks,” Reese says. “I’ll just wait in the hall.”
“Of course.” Sylvia calls for Raulp. Reese slides awkwardly by, and it’s then that Sylvia notices the clubbish, sullen limp in the girl’s left foot. In the hallway, Reese stops at one of Raulp’s paintings, a moonlit landscape done in the style of the Romantics. She inspects it with interest. “This is good,” she says.
“I support my husband in his brilliance.” Sylvia closes the front door. She doesn’t have the faintest idea what to talk about that wouldn’t involve the subject of both her husband and nudity,
but she doesn’t want to leave this girl alone, either. She could be a scammer, Sylvia thinks. Anyone can answer a newspaper solicitation. So much deception can lurk under a clear complexion. So she stands next to Reese and pretends to admire the painting, and she’s relieved when Raulp eventually appears from his studio, shakes Reese’s hand, and introduces himself in a way that is much too exuberant for Sylvia’s taste. “Well, great!” he says, and shoves his hands anxiously in his pants pockets. “We can discuss payment in the kitchen.”
“Perfect.” Reese follows along behind him. “I’m in college, so I always need a little extra cash.”
“Raulp’s in night school,” Sylvia says. She trails after them both, listening, hoping in vain that Raulp will say he’s sorry but the gimpy leg is a deal breaker, though this, of course, does not happen. In the kitchen, instead, he pours them all iced tea while he and Reese work out schedules, payment, and sitting times. They talk about Raulp’s vision for his project—a series of sketches, then a painting. “Are you okay posing nude?” he asks. “I don’t want you to feel uncomfortable,” he says.
Reese leans toward Raulp in a confiding way. “To tell you the truth, I
was
nervous, because I’ve never done this before.”
“Right,” Sylvia says. “A modeling virgin.” She opens the kitchen cupboard and peers in, looking for something to eat. She pulls out a bag of chips and opens it.
“Like I said,” Reese continues, “I was nervous, but when we were talking on the phone I started to feel really comfortable with the idea. I thought, People get naked every day, so what’s the big deal, right? And I love painting. I’ve always wanted to paint, too, since I was a child.”
“How many years would that be?” Sylvia asks, shoving a few chips in her mouth, chewing too loudly. “Two?”
“Oh, forever,” Reese says, musing.
“Well, no time like the present to get started,” Raulp says. “We could do some preliminary sketches tonight if you have time.”
“No time like the present. I was telling your wife that the painting in the hallway is so good. Like Constable during his Barbizon days.”
“Actually, it’s a bit more like Rousseau,” Raulp says, flushing. Sylvia almost gags, seeing her husband so obviously taken with the idea of this girl. He looks like a man who has found some precious commodity in his backyard—gold, oil, a
T. rex
skull, a rare Picasso buried under the bushes. At this moment, Raulp looks the most inspired Sylvia has seen him in years.
W
HILE
S
YLVIA SITS AT
the kitchen table, finishing her iced tea and the last of the chips, she eavesdrops as Raulp, in his studio, does preliminary sketches of Reese, clothes still on. “Until we get to know each other a little better,” Raulp says, a comment that sends Sylvia’s heart thumping wildly in her chest. She listens as Reese discusses her “youth” and the time she spent sketching with charcoals mostly. “Faces,” she says. “I never get tired of looking at people.” She even took a year off after high school and traveled, alone, to Europe, for inspiration, but when she came back home, she enrolled in a nursing program at the college. “More job opportunities,” she said. “At least that’s what my mother told me.” Yes, she tells Raulp, she does think she’s going to like posing because the whole idea of it is actually quite liberating. This, in response to Raulp’s repeated inquiries. Oh, get over it already, Sylvia thinks. And it’s then that Reese tells Raulp about the accident after she’d come back home from Europe,
when she decided, impetuously, to take a road trip with her girlfriend to New York City. “A car just sped into oncoming traffic and crushed my compact,” she explained. “My foot was shattered. Six days in the hospital.”
Sylvia cannot remove her ear from the kitchen door. She waits for how Raulp will respond to all this, and what she hears in response is her husband’s conciliatory tone, his saying that tragedies can only make a person stronger. Sylvia’s stomach sinks. Everything within her turns brittle. She imagines Raulp taking in Reese’s form, the shared moment, the thrill of new disclosures. She also imagines other, more disconcerting things, such as her husband and this young woman having wild decathlon sex in the sunroom/studio, and for the first time in their entire marriage she wonders, too, what it would be like to find herself entirely alone.
T
HAT NIGHT IN BED
, Sylvia says, “Well, I think it’s great. She seems nice, really nice.” Raulp lies next to her, his eyes half closed in a dreamy way. “Tired?” she asks.
“A little. But mostly happy. It felt so good to work tonight.”
Sylvia turns off the light. “Work,” she says. “I’m sure the painting will be lovely. Not pornographic at all.”
“It’s not like that, Sylv.”
“What is it like, then? Because I’m thinking work never looked so good.”
“Oh, stop it,” Raulp tells her. “You know I hated my job. And what about you? You can’t like the bookstore much. What happened to saying you’d act again? There’s still the community theater. It’s not Broadway, but it’s something.”
Sylvia lets out an irritable laugh. “I couldn’t live with success.
I love the bourgeois thing. I mean, it’s not Broadway either, but, hey, it has its charm; marriage is still America.”
“Sometimes I think you just don’t care about anything anymore.”
Sylvia says nothing. After the baby, she did take on theater roles, one of which resulted in a brief write-up in the paper. She also took up some gigs, early on, one-liners in TV ads for cough medicine, and hay-fever relief.
Thinking about this all, Sylvia breaks into an involuntary grimace. “I gave up trying, is that it? Well, let me recap for you, since your memory is so very clearly going to pot. We were young. Then I got pregnant, with your help, I might add. Then the baby died. Then we were broke and had bills. Then we grew up and I didn’t think as much about art anymore. I thought about things like getting a car, and cable. I’ve always thought it was something of a virtue to be happy with what I have, and it turns out I like pricing books. And anyway, has it occurred to you that with all your newly found inspiration we haven’t had sex in about three solid weeks?”
Raulp turns his back to her. “Fine,” he says. “You’re upset and I’m sorry.”
“
You’re
sorry.”
“We won’t talk about it.”
“Fine,” she says. “Let’s not.”
“Do you want to have sex?” he asks. “Because we can have sex.”
“Jesus, not now. Now I don’t even want to be in bed with you.”
She stares out their bedroom window absently, wishes for sleep. After an hour passes, Raulp begins to snore. Sylvia gets out of bed, puts on a robe, and goes down to Ralph’s studio. It is
an act of desperation, she realizes, this snooping around. She rummages through the sketches of Reese that he’s laid out across a worktable. She studies the softened lines of Reese’s nose and chin, the tentative touch of Raulp’s hand as it shaped the curve of Reese’s cheeks and chest. In one sketch, Reese sits on the love seat, her gaze diverted in an embarrassed but nuanced way. In another, Reese leans forward, intently holding Raulp’s gaze. There’s something in this pose that reminds her of the painting Raulp had done of Sylvia so many years before. “Expectant yearning,” he had joked that evening when the chill hit Sylvia’s skin. “A precursor to sex,” she told him, and it was.
S
YLVIA WORKS
at Riverdale Ink, pricing books on bird watching and art and folk remedies for things like rheumatoid arthritis. The owner, Mr. Lesser, is a shy, eighty-year-old man, and every day when Sylvia arrives to work he says, without fail, “Good morning, Sylvia. I’ll be on call.” Then he nods and shuffles into the back office, where he spends the rest of the day devouring romance novels. Like an old married couple, she and Mr. Lesser have fallen into a predictable routine. Her entire job, really, is pleasingly monotonous. She
likes
the old-fashioned wooden signs hanging over the aisles that read Health Care, Psychology, The Occult. She
likes
the neatly stacked books, alphabetized according to subject and author. And how else but with a job like this could she become so dangerously knowledgeable about so many things? Where could she learn about tattooing, invertebrate zoology, entropy? Theories of the universe? She’d once gone on a quantum mechanics kick, explaining to Raulp over dinner the intricacies of physics, but she had to quit when, eventually, after about three minutes, she confused
herself. But that was life, there you go, the accumulation of useless and sometimes dangerous knowledge, pounds of it, in fact.
During the day’s usual afternoon lull, Sylvia sits perched on a stool and reads
A Tale of Sexual Behavior
. Monogamy, in nature, it turns out, is considered
deviant
. Lions aren’t monogamous. Caribou aren’t monogamous, nor are cows, nor are any of Raulp’s animal subjects. It all seems so evident when she reads it, and she feels that sort of desperation that comes on pre–middle age, when you realize that this is it—life is what it is and frankly, while it’s not so bad it’s not great either. She notes with resentment that Raulp has never painted a vulture, the one creature that is actually faithful to its mate. Of course they also spend their lives gorging on carrion, so what does that prove?
The door clangs and Sylvia catches sight of Reese, who smiles in a curt way. She sends up a little wave but then quickly averts her gaze. Reese wears a trench coat and jeans. She shakes rain off her oversized umbrella before pulling it down and leaning it against the trash can at the front entrance. Sylvia watches as Reese lumbers a few feet. She stops at a table towering with books. She picks one up absently and leafs through it.
“Can I help you?” Sylvia asks too brightly. “Coffee table read? Romance? Comics?”
Reese holds her shoulders in a rigid, determined way. She moves toward the counter. “Art,” Reese says. Her eyes are sparkling. “I wanted to buy a book for Raulp.”
“No kidding,” Sylvia says.
“Raulp’s a genius, don’t you agree?”
“Let me give you some advice,” she says. “Try not to act too smitten.”
“Excuse me?” Reese asks.
“Let’s not pretend,” Sylvia says. “Art!” she adds, in her ta-da voice. “Acting!”
Reese stands up straighter. “I’m sure I can manage to find the art section on my own,” she says. “Raulp is a good man. I don’t think you appreciate that, or know how much he wants approval.”
“Excuse me?” Sylvia asks. “You’ve known my husband a few hours and now you’re some expert?”
Reese pushes her hair back and stares at Sylvia in a steely way. “At least I can see when someone is disappointed in me.”
O
H, HOW SYLVIA WANTED
to throttle the girl. Absolutely throttle her. But instead she rang up Reese’s sale and made change, then spent the following hour complaining to Mr. Lesser. Why, she wanted to know, are kids such know-it-alls? Why, she asked, can’t men stay interested in one person? “All quite a quandary,” Mr. Lesser agreed, and he lent Sylvia a romance book for good measure.
Now, at home this rainy evening, she listens to Raulp as he sits at the dinner table and talks about Reese’s gift. “She brought it over this afternoon,” he says. Then, when Sylvia, fuming, makes ugly comments about Reese’s foot, he adds, mildly, “She’s a nice kid.” This, as if Reese weren’t perfectly old enough to sleep with, as if an affair was so far-fetched Sylvia might as well put it from her mind.
“They could end up in bed,” Sylvia tells her friend Martha over the phone later. “For Christ’s sake, they could end up marrying each other. It happens. It does!”
Martha, Sylvia knows, is no putz about the ways of the world and middle-age boredom—she’s been married four times. She’s one of those serial marriers, which Martha often good-naturedly claims gives her the benefits of the mutual admiration society, the support group,
and
more variety in bed. “Sylv,” Martha says. She exhales in a way that lets Sylvia know she’s been smoking even after she promised to quit. “I don’t see it in Raulp. He’s just not the wandering type.”
“Oh, really,” Sylvia says. “Well, have you seen him lately?”
“It’s a phase,” Martha tells her. “So maybe he likes sketching this girl and painting—you said she was pretty.”
“In a maimed sort of way,” Sylvia says miserably.
“Trust me. It’ll wear off and he’ll get over it.”
“Meanwhile there’s a nude girl sitting in what used to be my living room.”
“Just tell him how you’re feeling.”
Feeling
, because Martha herself has been seeing a shrink of late. “Tell him what you want, but do it
succinctly
, Sylvia, and nicely. That’s the key—to be nice and not act like a lunatic, like you’re acting like now.”
“Fine, then, lunatic out,” Sylvia says and hangs up on her friend.
In the days following, she begins to make excuses to come home during the afternoons. Menstrual cramps. Migraine. Flu. Stomach pain. On this fourth day: diphtheria.