Life Drawing (3 page)

I recrumpled some, to get the feel of doing that. Just the act of bringing the names of the slaughtered into focus and then obscuring them again; then back into focus. I began to jot notes about permanence and impermanence. I began to imagine the newspapers themselves in other forms. Things that could not be crumpled. Chiseled in stone. Etched into metal. I took one and burned it in a small copper bowl I had and saved the ashes. Why? I didn’t know why. I’d stopped thinking sensibly—which is
not
how projects usually begin for me. But from the beginning, this was different. This was about ideas, about intuitions, something intriguing me that I didn’t understand. And in the beginning, that felt right.

I took pictures of the bathroom still under construction, of the space between the walls where the papers had been entombed. I thought about the papers having been used for warmth and of the heat of the iron bringing them back. I tried to make something of that. I thought of the tiles popping off, of the pressures exerted not
by the fluctuations of temperatures over years but by the words and images themselves.

There are moments in a creative life when you understand why you do it. Those moments might last a few seconds or maybe, for some people, years. But whatever the actual time that passes, they still feel like a single moment. Fragile in the way a moment is, liable to be shattered by a breath, set apart from all the other passing time, distinct.

But then it changes. And what seemed unimaginably exhilarating gets bogged down, even when a project is going well. It is a gradual, inevitable sobering during which your right to be passive diminishes. What the ether has given you, now in fact belongs to you. And then it is work. Then it is hard.

By the time Alison arrived, I had moved into that second stage. The one that requires not only that boundless sense of possibility, but practical decisions. What form was this project to take? All my life, even in childhood, I had drawn and painted views of one kind or another. Landscapes. Streetscapes. Buildings. Interiors. Whatever happened to be outside a window. Since we’d moved to the country, it had been mostly rural views, the occasional village street. To the modest circle of people who knew my work, my canvases were distinctive for their minute detail and precision. And I had always had a way with light, an essence that seemed to speak a language in which I was fluent, a vocabulary of projection and shadow. But I had never been much for portraiture. I could manage simple likenesses, as any decent art student might, but human forms, human faces, were not for me.

Yet it was these boys, caught in these obituary photographs, and the fact of their cannon-fodder deaths that drew me in. Not a vista, as usually inspired me; but something more like a story. Their deaths and then their utilitarian haunting of my home.

I didn’t understand the project yet, nor what it would grow to mean to me over time, but I was already somewhat wary of my attraction to these stories of death, aware of my capacity to define
myself by what I had lost when my young mother lost her life; aware that my sister Charlotte’s death had echoed my mother’s, compounding that capacity in me. Painting had always been a shelter from those wounds, my canvases both unpopulated and unapologetically beautiful, a salve for the uglier realities of human life. That those realities seemed now to be finding their way into my work unsettled me; but I could not ignore the pull.

These were the problems I was worrying about in the morning, just before I met Alison, problems on which it wasn’t easy to concentrate after our encounter in the garden.
Halloooo
 … The intrusion, as I thought of it, as if it were clearly a negative event, though underlying that peevish stance toward any interruption of our solitude lay a curiosity about her presence that bordered on excitement.

Unable to focus, I gave up and checked my email. And there, among the political petitions I might sign and the notices of gallery shows back in Philly I wouldn’t attend, I found a note from Bill’s daughter, Laine. Laine, who was the reason Bill and I had met. She’d been one of my private students, back when she was in high school. By the time of Alison’s arrival, she’d just graduated NYU a few weeks before, staying on in New York, working at temp office jobs and taking a studio class. We exchanged emails regularly, every couple of months, a fact I kept hidden from Owen, though I didn’t like to think of it that way. I had just never mentioned it, I preferred to tell myself. I was always happy to see her name there in my inbox, though always too, inevitably, her emails carried a wave of sadness back to me.

Our work together had started in the spring of 2005, soon after Charlotte’s death. Just seventeen years old, Laine had been a handful then. It was her mother (Georgia, about whom I would
later have emotions like battling weather systems) who’d made the first call, describing Laine as very sweet
underneath it all
. And artistic—they thought. They were looking for something for her to get into, something to keep her from becoming a completely disaffected, messed-up kid. She was about halfway there, halfway to fully checked out, her mother said; and I’d felt a lot of respect for Georgia’s straightforward approach. Most of the kids I taught who were heading for trouble had parents with their hands over their ears, saying
la-la-la-la-la
dawn to dusk. I looked forward to meeting a mother who seemed ready to see her child for who she actually was.

But then it wasn’t the mother who brought Laine that first Friday afternoon. It was the father. It was Bill.

It was always Bill.

Laine and I worked together for eighteen months, a time during which she grew from being a surly, hostile kid hell-bent on pissing off all adults, to being a hardworking young woman anxious to please; and a damn good painter too. And all that time, all those months, all those Friday afternoons and then later Fridays and Tuesdays both, Bill brought her and Bill picked her up—because Laine hadn’t yet learned to drive and because this was their special time together; and because now and then the universe just insists on changing your life in ways you didn’t ask it to.

Sometimes a teacher and student click, even though their work is very different, and that was our story. While I had never been drawn to figures, Laine saw herself, even then, as a portraitist of a kind. While I could find it oddly unsettling to stare at faces, Laine
became increasingly aware that doing so both soothed and inspired her. And since the models most readily available were me, Bill, and also Laine herself, reflected in a mirror I had supplied, many of her paintings were of one or two or sometimes all three of us. She would also turn up occasionally with sketches of her mother, meaning Georgia watched over us all during some weeks. Once in a while, I would shift Laine’s gaze out the window toward the skyline of Philadelphia, or take her into Fairmount Park and ask that she broaden her view, think more about the big picture, the interaction of light and something other than a face; but soon she would turn back to what she loved.

“It’s the only thing that interests me,” she would say. “People.”

“Well, me too, I suppose. But there’s more to people than the people themselves.”

Over the time that she and I worked together and argued and grew—both of us—
something
developed between me and Bill though we never crossed any lines, never did any more than talk. And we never talked about anything even remotely inappropriate. I had blurted word of Charlotte’s death early on, maybe using the fact to excuse some mistake in scheduling I’d made, my thoughts still scattered, my brain not quite functioning; and it turned out he too had lost a sibling—a brother, when they were small. A house fire, Bill in the home as well, but rescued in time. I remember how his telling me seemed to freeze the scene we were in, just for a moment, as if I needed a pause in reality to recast him, to
reconfigure us all. I had been so quick to dismiss his suit, his briefcase, his clean-cut, lawyerly presence, and to mistake it for his real self. I had been so wrong. We didn’t speak exclusively or even often about grief for all those months, not by any means, but we shared an intimacy with it that I did not with Owen. And we shared Laine increasingly too. His daughter, whom I was also raising—in a way. Who needed me. Who had taken on some of my outlook, some of my being. I would never have said she belonged to us, together, but I felt it in my body, in my blood.

“Neither Georgia nor I has the least creative talent,” he would say. And he would marvel at my work in a way I was unused to, traveling as I did in artistic circles where it was just assumed that everyone had talent of some kind. To Bill, the fact that I could fill a canvas with oily goo from tubes and have the result be both beautiful and—as he would say and say—emotionally compelling, was nothing short of a superpower. That I could help his daughter do the same he looked on as a miracle. There was an innocence to him, an innocence of my world, that ultimately attracted me enough to rob us both of any claim to innocence we might make.

Sometimes, when Laine used us for subjects, she would ask that we sit motionless while we spoke, and occasionally would insist that we stop moving even our lips—almost as though she sensed something might be happening that she should try to avert.

But nothing could avert what was to come.

Watching Laine over those months was like watching a slow-motion film of a driver who damn near swerves off the road, but then corrects course just in time. Watching me, I suppose, was like some kind of reversed reel. At the time, it felt like the relationship that Bill and I developed was helping me heal—from Charlotte’s death; from learning that with Owen I would never have the children I had decided I wanted after all. I felt not only grief-stricken then; I felt incapable. I had been unable to save a
sister. Unable to become a mother. What was I able to do? What powers did I actually have? I was right up close in a staring contest with the undeniable fact that for all the little things over which we have some control, for the most part we have none; and I was at a loss to know how to respond.

It’s a lesson I might have learned when I was two and my mother died. It’s a lesson that should perhaps have been etched into me then, whatever my conscious memory of events, but it felt newly true after Charlotte’s death, after my own empty body remained unfilled.

This is us on the afternoon of Laine’s last lesson:

Bill and I are seated on wobbly old stools at the end of my studio, all rough-hewn factory space. And we are suddenly awkward with one another. Because it has happened in a flash. A look has passed between us, a sudden, irreparable change. And it has stifled the flow of our speech. For weeks now, for months, we have been engaged in excitement over Laine’s next step. She got into the school she wanted to attend. She put together a senior project of paintings so eloquent they seemed eternal; they seemed like real art. It is all so exciting. I am filled with pride, as though she were my child. Maybe I exaggerate my own role—my push back to the universe.
Look! Look, it does matter what we do. It does
.

But in all the excitement, in all of the pride, one fact has gone unrecognized.

It shouldn’t be hard to manage—not if we really are, as they
say, just friends. It should be easy.
Well, we’ll just have to meet for coffee from time to time
.

Except suddenly what should have been easy has become impossible. Everything has become impossible as we sit together, Laine painting her own portrait some thirty feet away. It is unacceptable to leave seeing each other to chance. But to make a date … there is no kidding ourselves. To make a date is to make a date.

And we do not make a date. But I know that we will make a date. Laine gives me a huge, heart-rearranging hug goodbye; and as I tidy up, forestalling going home; as I walk the six blocks, then add six more; as I eat dinner with Owen; moving through every activity of that evening, that night, the next two days, I am both agitated and disturbingly calm. Because I know what is going to happen. And it scares the hell out of me. But it also feels right. And good. And deserved.

Deserved.

To what exactly had I felt entitled with Bill? There is an answer: Joy. Not happiness, which by that time seemed a fantasy one had to agree to give up in order to keep from going mad. By forty, is there anyone who hasn’t had to recognize that happiness, as understood by youth, is illusory? That the best one can hope for is an absence of too many tragedies and that the road through the inevitable grief be, if not smooth, then steady? Daily life was a pale gray thing, it seemed, and to expect otherwise was to be a fool—at best.