Life Drawing (15 page)

The shouts from Alison’s yard drew me from my studio and Owen from the barn. A man. “Maybe if you weren’t such a FUCKING selfish cunt …” I could only see his back. Alison stood facing him, one step up on her porch. The ex-husband. Paul. It had to be. I thought Nora must be inside until I saw the window of the strange black car go down. “It doesn’t matter,” Nora yelled, her head leaning out. “Stop it. Just stop it! None of it matters anymore. Please … please just stop it. I want to go. Can we please just go?”

Owen and I, fifty feet apart, exchanged a look. Should we intervene? But then the man slammed his way into the driver’s seat and with more noise, more havoc, drove away; and Alison went inside.

“Jesus,” I said, as Owen and I met up. “That was … I thought someone else was picking Nora up. The friend. Martha. Or Heather. Heather, I think.”

He was still staring at Alison’s yard. “I thought so too.”

“I should go over there. See if she’s okay.”

“I don’t know.” He looked at me. “I don’t know if you should. Maybe let her settle down a bit?”

“That’s just wrong,” I said. “Why are you saying that?”

“I don’t know. I’m just not sure you want to get more involved.”

“Well, I’m sure I do. And you should be too.”

W
hen I called “Hi there” into the house, Alison answered, “Up here.” At the foot of the steps, I said that I was just checking in. I said that I could go if she wanted me to, that I didn’t mean to barge in.

“No, come on up,” she called. So I climbed the stairs, trying to avoid tripping on the tattered runner as I did.

“I’m in the bedroom, toward the back. On the right.”

I had been in the hall often before, every time I’d gone into her studio. But it had a different feel to it with Paul’s bellowing voice still vibrating in the air. I wondered that I’d never noticed the absence of a light, the cracking plaster walls. When I reached her bedroom, I only peered around the door. She sat on the bed, leaning against a maple headboard, her legs straight, crossed at the ankles, her arms crossed too.

“I just wanted to check on you,” I said. “Be sure you’re okay.”

She was shaking her head. “He isn’t supposed to know where I am. And Nora knows that. He isn’t supposed to be here. Ever.”

“I’m so sorry.”

She patted the bed and I stepped into the room, sat beside her. “I had no idea,” I said.

“Thanks for checking on me.” She reached over, laying her hand over mine.

“You had told me, I just hadn’t …” Hadn’t what? I had believed her—in a sense. I certainly hadn’t thought she’d been lying about his hitting her. But there was some other way in which I hadn’t given it enough thought, hadn’t forced myself to imagine her being slugged, the power, the fear. The part about hitting had come up when I’d been so upset by Laine’s news about Bill, and all
of my attention had been on that. My own little melodrama had allowed me to glide over what she had been through.

“I didn’t really get it,” I said. “I should have been more aware.”

“You have enough to worry about,” she said. “Your father … everything. I don’t understand how he got here. I know Nora wouldn’t have told him. She doesn’t … she doesn’t know every detail, but she knows enough. I told her, ‘I’d rather your father didn’t know …,’ and then how could she not tell me he was coming?” Her eyes were starting to brim.

“I’m sure it was just a mistake. She let something slip. Or he … maybe something about her cell? Maybe he could find her?”

She laughed, which pushed a tear down her cheek. “I don’t think even Paul is nuts enough to have her tracked on a GPS. I just … Oh well. It’s done. And you should know …” She was looking right at me. “… well, you saw. He’s awful. He’s so awful. I wanted a few months’ break from his rage.”

“I just hate that you’ve lived with that.” The room smelled like her, I realized, that distinctive lime perfume, but then also a little musty, the aging wood of old homes. “What was he so angry about, anyway? If I can ask.”

“Money,” she said. “Stupid, minor things about selling the house. But it could have been anything. It’s really about me walking out on him—probably. Who knows. It’s two years. More. And before I did that, it was a million other things.”

The windows were open, white curtains floating in a breeze too mild to be felt. The furniture, mismatched, some maple like the bed, some mahogany, looked as though it had been in the house for eighty years or more. So did the wallpaper, yellowed, vertical stripes of tiny flowers buckling so few of the lines appeared to be straight.

She seemed to read my mind. “The website made it sound a bit less shabby than it actually is, but I don’t care. I love it here.”

“No, I wouldn’t care either.”

She sat up a little straighter. “You know, he’s never been at all that way with her. Nothing like he is with me. I just hate for her even to see it.”

“That’s good that he’s better with her.”

“And she uses the religion, you know. It keeps her tied to him. ‘Honor thy father,’ all of that. I figured it out a while back. I’m sure that’s part of why she took to it. It’s a system. Rules. You know, children almost never do break off. Not really. This just gives her a reason to hang in with him, I think.”

It was so difficult not to stare at her, just trying to take it in as real. Even as I could hear his angry voice still ringing in my ears, it was impossible to imagine. Her beauty had everything to do with a certain delicate quality. He must once have seen that clearly, must once have loved it in her.

Alison was staring toward the motion of the curtains, two white flags fluttering. “I know Nora spent a lot of her time here with Owen. And I was really glad for that. Your Owen is so calm and so reassuring. He seems … unflappable. And he was very gentle with her about her literary ambitions. I kept thinking it had to be good for her to be around a man like that. I hope he didn’t mind. I hope she wasn’t a bother for either of you.”

“Oh, Lord. Owen enjoyed the ego boost. It’s been such a rough period. Workwise, I mean.”

“Well, he certainly got that.” She turned back toward me, a real smile hovering. “Nora seems to worship him,” she said. “She was entirely star-struck.” But then the smile fell. “I just don’t understand how Paul found us. And where the hell is Heather? How did the plans get all changed around? It makes no sense at all.”

“You’ll find out. You’ll talk to her.” I was pondering Owen as a father figure. A positive male influence. Maybe something like the role I had played for Laine.

“I should go paint,” she said. “That’s what you would do,
right? I should stop feeling sorry for myself and go make something.”

“Maybe. Though …” Did I stop feeling sorry for myself when I worked? In a way. Often, I stopped feeling much at all. “You should paint if it will help. Or, I don’t know, we could go out? It’s Tuesday, you know.”

“Right. That’s not a bad idea.” She sat up a tiny bit. “That might be just the thing.”

The fact that the local farmers’ market fell on Tuesday afternoons had been information haphazard in my consciousness until Alison’s arrival; but by then it was woven into the rhythm of every week. We agreed to meet on the hill at two forty-five.

“I’ll drive,” she said, and I feigned horror, but agreed. As I stood, I considered leaning to kiss her. She would have, had the roles been reversed, I knew. But I only said, “See you in just a bit.”

W
hile I painted that afternoon, I thought about violence. I hadn’t been around much in my life, yet when I’d heard it outside my window I had known it right away, known the difference between a raised voice anyone might use and the sort that carries physical weight behind it, the sort that seems somehow connected to tissue, to muscle, in a seamless continuum that could lead to impact. In this case it had been only the slam of a car door, the screech of tires, the foot too hard on the accelerator. Nobody hurt. But violence nonetheless.

I was back to working on Jackie and his chessboard that day, fiddling with the light coming in through the window—a west-facing window, so low, falling light. Violence had killed these boys, every one of them, but violence of a chillingly impersonal sort.

The paintings were tender ones, and I wondered if more evidence of violence should be found. The word
potential
came to
mind. That was really what had been in that terrible voice. The potential for violence. Like the wild animal slipped beneath my father’s skin, staring at me through his eyes. Was it something I wanted in the pictures? Some glimpse of the tension produced by that potential in the air? How would I do it, if I wanted to?

It was all outside my experience. Even when decimated, Owen had never shown the palest hint of a threat in his voice or demeanor. And Bill. Bill and I had been tender with each other in the way only lovers with stolen time can sustain. Even in parting, gentle, gentle, gentle, like the tedious people who must unwrap every present slowly, leaving the paper entirely intact.

I looked around the studio, at the paintings, the sketches leaning against the wall and taped to boards, and I realized that these weren’t depictions of potential of any kind. Not for violence and not for love and not for happiness or misery or disloyalty or forgiveness. They were something else, something far more resonant for me. “Consequence.” I said the word out loud, and went back to work.

W
ith Alison at the wheel, I braced myself.

It was a cool day for the second week of September. We talked about the surprising early signs of fall—surprising though they arrived at this time each year. The scrubbier maples, we agreed, were always the first to turn and never made it beyond yellow. The Japanese would be the last to go out in their scarlet, phosphorescent blaze. But this summer had been a wet one, so the whole show promised to go on a long time. Well-nourished trees were always slow to drop their leaves, I said.

“I hope I’m still here then,” Alison said. “I have some decisions to make. I’d been counting on being lost, I suppose. Lost to him, anyway.”

“Oh, you have to stay.”

“We’ll see. That’s very nice of you.”

“Just don’t think about it today,” I said. “Just enjoy being here.”

“Okay.” And then after a silent stretch, she said, “I’ve had days here when I can almost forget about Paul, you know.”

“Another reason for you to stay.”

“Yes. If I still can.”

As Alison drove, she told me more about him than she ever had before: how they had met back in London, how surprisingly happy they had been in those early days. “He was the most magnetic man I’d ever known,” she said. “And romantic. Very good at the big gestures, the bouquets, the thoughtful gifts. I’ve never been sure how much he changed and how much I started noticing more of what he really was. Probably some of both.”

By the time Nora was born, she said, they were already caught in a terrible cycle of fights and then those grand, sweeping declarations of love. “Those good moments always seemed like windows to a whole new life. I was constantly looking for the turning point. Eighteen years in, I was still telling myself that things were going to improve. And the sad part is I could read about it in any book. I would. I would go to bookstores and sneak into the self-help section, and I knew, at a certain level I knew that all couples become the same couple. There I’d be. Page sixteen. The enabling spouse. Exhibit A. I saw it. Even before he started hitting me. I knew it. I did. But I didn’t accept it. Not for a very long time. To be defined by something so … so ultimately not about me. To see myself staring out from a page. It felt impossible in some way. I thought I should be more my own person. It sounds odd, but I found it insulting.”

“That’s how I feel about my father sometimes,” I said. “I’m not saying it’s the same, God knows. It’s not. But just … just the way it’s all taken his … his particular nature away. There’s no conversation anymore about what he might do or how he might react.
Him: Sam Edelman. It’s all how an Alzheimer’s patient might react. The things Alzheimer’s patients say. He’s become generic.”

“Maybe at the stress points we all become generic.” She told me about pictures she had once seen of people on roller coasters. As soon as they were terrified, they all looked exactly the same. “That was the salvation though—in my case, I mean. What saved me was finally admitting that I was no different from every other abuse victim. There was no special skill I had that would make him change, no exemption because he was my husband and not some other woman’s husband. We were just another married couple stuck in roles you could hear about on half a dozen talk shows any given week. And I couldn’t stand the idea of having had my … my will taken away. My self. Once I admitted the truth, I had to leave. And once it became physical, I stopped being able to fool myself. Though even that … Even that didn’t happen right away.”

“I’m just glad you got out. I admire your strength.”

“Well, it certainly felt like strength at the time. Like an enormous act of heroism. Which in retrospect …” She didn’t finish the thought, but with a vigor I had come to expect swung us into the gravel parking lot and slammed to a stop.

T
hree o’clock on the Tuesday after Labor Day weekend was a quiet time at the market. The local mothers were back to picking their children up from school or waiting for them at bus stops near home; and the after-work rush—a country-style rush of maybe twenty, twenty-five at a time—was still a few hours off. That day, we had the place almost to ourselves, just an elderly couple; a young man; a younger couple. A little more than half a dozen of us, against the backdrop of stalls, bright signs, rough-hewn wood tables, aluminum ones, canvas roofs.

Alison always brought a list. I never did. She had particular
vendors she preferred, and knew things like when the spinach was due for harvest and who was slaughtering chickens that week. She would ask questions and get advice on her own little garden patch, while I always hung back a bit, wandering from stall to stall like a child waiting for her mother to be done. I did make occasional purchases, but those were impulse buys and generally based on something visual. I loved the garlic scapes, the odd elongated green of them, the strange irregular curves, and so always bought a bunch when they were there, though I’d never found a way to cook them that I liked. And the mushrooms, driven over from Kennett Square; I loved their shadows and mysteries and swells, the sense of secrecy they carried, little embodiments of life lived in the dark. That day, I bought two zucchini largely because I felt sorry for the long-faced farmer drowning in his bumper crop; and then a dozen eggs, and a wheel of local Camembert that I knew Owen liked.