If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This (6 page)

A
S CLARA MAKES
her way down Locust Street, after meeting the Parkers, she thinks glumly about the husband, John, about his silence and his evocation of that word
dull
. The truth is, she isn’t relishing the job. He doesn’t seem like a very interesting subject, to her. But then maybe nobody would at this time.

It’s a familiar route from the studio home, one she can walk with her mind entirely occupied, one she suspects she could walk in her sleep. Clara has lived for well over twenty years in her town house off Rittenhouse Square. After the children moved out to college, first Daniel, then Ellie, she spent a few years on her own in the big house out in Bryn Mawr. But it never felt like her own home, even then. It belonged to them all, to Clara, Harold, Daniel, and Ellie; to them and to the way their lives had unfolded there, intricately wound together, then pulled apart, in small and larger ways.

Family life. Looking back, it seems like a dance, a four-person minuet comprised of steps toward and steps away, approaches and retreats, ending, finally, with each of them standing entirely alone. By the time she was the sole occupant, the big, cold fieldstone house was more museum than home to her. Even the rooms themselves bore names that no longer applied. Harold’s study. The playroom. The au pair’s bathroom. Phrases, like old photographs, offering remnants of a different time, relics and evidence.

When she left, she took almost nothing. The children could have whatever they wanted. Goodwill could have the rest. A few boxes of papers, albums, some keepsakes from her own childhood, her mother’s candlesticks, her father’s pocketknife. Her own paintings, of course. Even the ones she no longer liked. That was all. It didn’t occur to her until after the move, everything long gone, that she might have offered Harold a pick at what he wanted. But when it did occur to her, the thought came without regret. Harold wasn’t her problem anymore.

The Bryn Mawr house had been done up in a somber, traditional style, the new bride following the old rules. But Clara drenched the place on Spruce Street with color, so it was giddy with color, as though all that mattered was a sensation of abundance. Too much. Too bright. It hardly looked like the home of a well-respected artist. Certainly not of the creator of the careful, muted portraits for which Clara was becoming known. No. It looked more like the set of a children’s television show.

“God, it’s like a paint store threw up,” Ellie said the first time she visited, and then apologized. “I shouldn’t have said that. I just don’t think I’d be able to sleep in this. That’s all I meant.”

“To each her own,” Clara said. “It doesn’t really matter what anyone else thinks. I find it cheers me up.”

But now, as she enters her home, Clara herself finds all that imposed cheerfulness jarring. She stands still in her doorway for a few moments—as though there’s an obvious next move to make and she just can’t remember what it is. This is a familiar sensation, since George’s death. She waits and nothing comes to mind. Nothing ever comes to mind. It is the sensation of absence, she knows, disguised as an impulse to act. There isn’t a damned thing to do, except see it for the trick it is.

She hasn’t eaten all day, and decides to make herself a tuna sandwich—the perfect, semiconscious kind of task. The body moving almost on its own. Bread in the toaster. Can opener from the drawer. Simple, simple, simple. Drain the tuna of its water in the sink. Take out a bowl. Find the mayonnaise, and check the expiration date. Unscrew the lid. Look for a lemon, and throw out the decidedly shriveled one in the fridge. Just enough thought required. The brain occupied, but not challenged in any real sense.

This is the best way to get through these days, she knows. Stay active. But not too active. Stay busy. But not frenetic. She is familiar with the routine. George Cooperman, old friend, lover too, isn’t her first loss. Not by any means. This isn’t even the first time she’s lost George Cooperman, though now, of course, he can’t come back. Still, she well understands that grief must take her as its plaything for a while—like a kitten with a mouse. A hopeless matchup.

Clara Feinberg doesn’t believe in God; she never has. She believes in time. Omnipotent, surely. Friend and foe both, as deities of all religions seem to be. Determining everything about one’s life, from the sudden absence of a man like George to the expiration date on a jar of mayonnaise. For now, time will be an ally of a kind, she knows. At the very least, it will soon take care of this sense of disbelief, this punch to the gut when she thinks of George and remembers again that he’s died. Given time, she knows, that will fade. A day, a day, another day, another day, and soon, she’ll be used to the idea. She won’t like it, but at least she will know it without having to keep remembering again.

She slices the sandwich from corner to corner, and corner to corner again, four triangles on the plate; then she brings it into the other room, over to the window, and she stares outside. Snow is falling, the first snowfall of the season, not yet sticking on the ground. It isn’t quite dark, but it will be soon.

She’s always loved this time of day. George also loved this time of day. Some of their best hours together had been passed sitting in this room, her living room, both of them reading, waiting for the sun to drop from view, the daylight to fade, staying there, in that early darkness together, not switching on a lamp, not yet. Tacitly agreeing to fight the evening off. Fight every ending off. Live within all transitions for every possible second. But then, as true darkness fell, they would be forced to look up from their books, forced into conversation, into each other’s company.

It had all been a great big tease, she understands now. Fighting off the moment of conversation had been like fighting off an orgasm, the delay designed to increase the pleasure.

A streetlight comes on. Clara waits to see how long it will take another to join it. A minute passes, two minutes. Nothing. They must have different levels of sensitivity, she thinks. They must believe different things about what darkness is.

When she leans back against the window glass, she feels the cold there and also the heat of the radiator below, on her thighs, on her rear. At this moment, there is a perfect absence of consensus in the world. The streetlights busily debating among themselves over definitions of night and day, while these parts of her own home argue over whether she should be warmed or chilled.

It’s close to ludicrous, of course. Imagining
things
in conversation.

Things having arguments. But it’s true that she sees the world around her as animated—spirited. Nothing truly dead. Nothing truly dead, except the dead.

A
RGUABLY, IT BEGAN
when Clara kept the Coopermans in the divorce. The house, the car, the dog, the children—for the most part—and the Coopermans, who said there was no real decision to be made. Not after what Harold had done to her. He was no great loss to them.

Janet had been particularly vehement on the subject. She called him a cad and a scoundrel and a bounder. She swore that she would never speak to him again, unless of course it was to tell him what she thought. Clara, listening in their living room, sipping none too judiciously at her scotch, had found herself irritated by the vocabulary with which Janet dispensed her loyalty. Janet sounded to her as though she had stepped out of some drawing room comedy.

Harold was not a
bounder
. Harold was not a
cad
.

“He’s an asshole,” Clara said. “He’s a prick.”

It had felt important to her at the time. This wasn’t some dinner-theater Noël Coward production, for God’s sake; this was her actual life. It deserved a coarse kind of discourse to match the coarseness of events. “He fucked all those other women,” she said. “Fucked them for years and is fucking them still. And not just strangers, but women I know. He’s a shit.”

It was only a small annoyance, but it heralded more to come. Maybe it was inevitable, Janet still living the life that the four of them had shared. Married, with children. Married to George. Stability personified, George. No shattered hearts to sweep up and throw away in the Cooperman home.

W
EDNESDAY MORNING,
the Parkers arrive on time, and without Clara having to prompt her, Katherine Parker volunteers a hesitant “Well, I suppose I have to go.” She’ll be just down the street, she says. She’ll shop a bit. She may have some coffee. She’ll be back in two hours. She looks at her small silver watch more than once. She blinks toward her husband, and then at Clara. She lists a few more things she may do during this time. She finally leaves.

It’s now time to get to work.

Clara has already decided that she’ll be damned if she’s going to try to make John Parker speak. If it’s his habit to be silent, she’ll paint him silent, then. And she’ll even view his silence as a relief. It’s often the most trying part of her profession—the chatter, as she thinks of it. Portraitists and hairdressers, both are expected to talk about irrelevancies when they should be concentrating.

In thirty years of doing this, Clara has not befriended a single subject. Not really. Nor has she painted her own family or friends. She never drew George, much less attempted a full portrait—not even a sketch, for which she’s now glad. She never drew him and she has no photographs of him, and the degree to which he exists only in her memories comforts her. Nothing left of their history, outside herself.

In the studio, she seats John Parker on the red velvet armchair. “I’ll just be sketching odds and ends,” she says. “You don’t have to sit still. Not today. I may take some photographs as well.”

His hands are resting on the arms of the chair, loose, not gripping. And his head is turned away, so she sees him from a three-quarter view. Clara spends some time, fifteen minutes or so, trying to understand the nature of the line that runs from his jaw down his neck, across his shoulder, and then through his left arm. It’s oddly difficult. There’s a sense of elongation to him that she hadn’t noticed on Monday, and it’s hard to capture without exaggerating it.

“The woman who brought me here… ?”

It startles her. He’s still looking away.

“Yes. Your wife.”

“Yes. My wife,” he says. “That’s right. We’ve been married more than fifty years.” Clara waits to hear more, but nothing comes. He shifts slightly, so that one hand falls away from the chair arm. After a moment, she gives up on the exchange and decides to start acquainting herself with his face. The smooth skin, the pointy chin. A small, round nose.

The word isn’t
dull
.

It’s
dulled
.

This quality she’s sensing—much like the lines crisscrossing his wife’s soft lips—seems like something he’s acquired. Something imposed. This is her instinct, that time has played a role here in blunting the man—somehow. Something has changed him. Her mind is wandering now, not wandering away but winding its way through this problem’s labyrinth. To capture each quality in equal measure or at least with an equal degree of acknowledgment—this is her challenge now.
Dulled
. A process. There’s a contradiction she wants to display. Or maybe a conversation she wants to depict. The debate between who he appears to be and who he appears to have been.

It would be good to discuss all this with George.

She’s written George two letters since his death. Two letters in seven weeks. The first was angry.
How could you leave me…
The second, contrite.
I know it isn’t your fault…
As she works, she thinks she may write him another one, this evening.
Since your death, I am obsessed with time…
There’s no one else with whom she wants to share any of this. No one else who will understand how important this business is of trying somehow to combat the static, still quality of her work. To
not
capture a particular moment in a life. To give up on that attempt. No; to fight it.

It does indeed sound sophomoric, she thinks as she draws. It sounds as though she is playing word games in the territory of third-rate philosophy. But then George would see past that. He would. He would recognize that underlying all these musings on time and death and portraiture, pretentious as they might seem, she is struggling.