Restoration: A Novel (Contemporary / Women's Fiction) (14 page)

“Aye, Tess, you know there are some women you go out with
and some you bring home and introduce to mother.  If I misread you for the
first type I’m sorry, but it’s a mite bit late to be leaving me your phone
number now.”

“You son of a bitch.” 

“Can we call a truce and be friends?”

Sharon sashayed up to Conner and draped herself against
his back.  “Tess, if you don’t mind, I’m going to steal my date back.  Ingrid
is over there and I want to make sure she meets Conner.”

Tess controlled her urge to fling a drink at his back as
her eyes tracked them strolling over to Ingrid.  She watched Conner warmly
caress Sharon’s shoulder while they chatted with Ingrid.  Tess dropped her chin
and stared into her wineglass.  The overhead lights reflected from the burgundy
pool.

She closed her eyes and shook her head, silently scolding
herself for acting like a jilted lover.  They’d both known the rules of
engagement that night.  He’d played his part so well, delving into a swift
relationship with her, grounded in sex and unfettered by emotion, a
relationship without a past to draw from and no future to build on.  They’d
walked away from each other without being in servitude to their hearts.  It’s
what he’d wanted from her.  It’s what she’d wanted from him.  Goddamn him for
reminding her!

From the corner of her eye, she caught Francesca’s tan
dress moving through the room.  She raised her chin and watched Francesca join
them, telling Ingrid she was behind her with a wordless touch of her hand on
her shoulder.  Conner soon had Francesca laughing, and within moments she had
him laughing in return.  Ben would like Francesca, and Tess wished he could’ve
escorted her tonight until she heard another laugh spill out of Conner.

She wondered what Ben was doing tonight and winced.  Why
had he insisted on crossing the boundaries she’d set?  He should’ve recognized
them and acquiesced to the rules of engagement instead of becoming a casualty
of them. 

He’d wanted to make love to her.  It was a corny notion. 
You can’t make love.  You can be captured by it and held prisoner to it, but it
can’t be made.  She didn’t know of any such recipe.

The ache in her stomach began overwhelming her.  She
couldn’t shake the forlorn look on Ben’s face the last time she’d seen him.  It
was just before he’d walked out the door and out of her life.  Tess swallowed
her last mouthful of wine.  She’d done him a favor.  It was only a short-term
pain he suffered.  He was in the initial throes of what he called love.  It
would’ve been worse for him months from now. 

Suffer brief pain now or deeper pain later.  She’d chosen
for him and freed him to pursue someone who thought the same things possible
about love that he did. 

Yes, she’d done him a favor.  Maybe someday he’d even
recognize it.

Her fingertips slid into her small purse dangling from her
shoulder.  When she lifted them out, the key Ben gave her rested in the nook of
her curled fingers.  She’d tried mailing it back but for some reason had torn
open the padded envelope she’d addressed to him and stashed the key in her
pocket before she’d gotten to the mailbox. 

She carried the key with her everywhere and even kept it
on her nightstand when she slept.  It was silly.  She should just mail it back
before she got even more compulsive about it.

Francesca slipped away from Ingrid, Conner and Sharon. 
Tess dropped the key back in her purse, abandoned her wineglass and intercepted
Francesca before she became engaged in another conversation. 

“Francesca?” 

“Oh, Tess, there you are.  We have not yet visited this
evening.  I hope you are having a nice time.  Can I get you something? 
Something to eat?  More wine?  Water perhaps?”

“Actually, I think I’m going to be taking off.”

Francesca nodded.  “I am sorry you do not know more people
here.  It would be more enjoyable, I am sure.”

“You host a lovely party.”

Francesca chuckled.  “You are very diplomatic.  Let me get
your coat.”

They walked to the front door and Francesca retrieved
Tess’s coat from the closet and helped her into it.  From over her shoulder
Tess asked, “Francesca, we’re not lovers, so what are we?  Friends or
acquaintances?” 

When Tess turned around, Francesca arranged the collar on
her jacket, then smoothed her hands over Tess’s shoulders as if she hadn’t
heard the question.  

“You said the rules for lovers, friends and acquaintances
were different.  I want to know where we fit,” she pressed again.

“Where would you like us to fit?”  Francesca asked.

“No fair answering a question with a question.”

“I am sorry, Tess.  I am trying to figure out what you
want.”

“I want a friend.”

Francesca nodded and out of habit, as if she were peering
over bifocals she wasn’t wearing, raised her head and gazed at Tess.  “I see.”

“Francesca, my life is filled with acquaintances, and I’ve
had more lovers than I care to count.”

“Friendship is a shared journey, Tess.”

“I want to be a friend to you, too.”  A plea bled through
her words.

***

Tess passed another door in the unfamiliar building
searching for the apartment number on the door the key unlocked.  Finally, she
found it, inserted the key and steeled herself for what was on the other side
of the door as the lock’s tumblers clicked.  Withdrawing the key, she dropped
it in her bag, gripped the doorknob, turned it and stepped inside the
single-room apartment.

The streetlights outside draped the large room in shadows,
warping and altering the perspective of furniture and other objects.  She found
a light switch and flipped it on.  The shadows vanished and everything inside
assumed a new identity: a lamp, easels, a coat rack and canisters.  The studio
apartment was separated into two distinct areas: a living area and a work
area.  On the side where the absent artist lived, there was a small kitchen, a
table, two chairs, a bookshelf, an armoire and a mattress.  The tools of his
trade littered the side where he painted: drop cloths, easels, brushes,
sponges, rags and a paint-spattered table.

She wandered into the work area, closed her eyes, and
inhaled the lingering scent of paint and thinner.  She worked in a studio, but
it was more like a triage center where she bandaged and repaired the works of
artists decades and even centuries deceased.  Since college, she hadn’t
ventured into a studio where living artists created new works.

A partially painted canvas rested on an easel.  She
recalled how many of the students she took classes with dreaded facing an empty
canvas, only feeling at ease once they were well into their creations.  An
empty canvas always gave Tess an almost sensual rush as the possibilities for
it unfolded in her mind.  The moment her brush touched the canvas, it anointed
it with life.  In the course of creating her painting, it became a friend.  She
knew its mood and personality.  And where others felt euphoric finishing their
work, she always felt a certain melancholy knowing completion meant the end of
this unique relationship.

Her fingers ran along the table’s edge and over the paint
stains.  She drew her hand to her face and examined her palm as if expecting
the dried paint to smear on her hand, then picked up a tube of paint, uncapped
it and dabbed her middle finger with a dollop of red.  Slowly, she curled her
hand into a fist.  Closing her eyes, she pressed her nose to her fist and
inhaled the oily smell.  Her insides quivered. 

She uncurled her fingers and stared at her palm.  It
seemed to be oozing stigmata-like blood, a sign of impending sainthood, but
there was nothing blessed or holy about her life.  She closed her fist again,
pressed her knuckles to her lips and began weeping. 

Francesca sat on the sofa sorting through the same box of
mutilated artwork Tess had shared with Ben two weeks earlier.  Tess stood in
the kitchen behind the breakfast bar recounting her mother’s betrayal after
she’d told Alish how Randall Wright had violated her work.  Tess related her
inability to paint since and finished her story with her argument with Ben over
it all.

She tried reading Francesca’s face as she shuffled through
the papers, but her stoic expression gave nothing away.  Francesca returned the
stacks of papers to the box sitting on the floor next to the coffee table. 
“Ben gave you a special gift when he gave you that key.”

“You really think so?”

Francesca patted the seat next to her on the sofa. 
“Come.”

Reluctantly, Tess retreated from behind the breakfast bar,
sat next to her friend and allowed Francesca to pull her into her arms.  They
leaned back and Tess rested her head on the older woman’s shoulder, remembering
how her mother sometimes held her this way, stroking her hair while the two of
them sat in the living room gazing at the frequent thunderous downpours that
swept through Florida in the summer months.

“Why do you not call him?”  Francesca asked.

“He’s better off not hearing from me.”

“Is that what he would say?”

“Eventually he’ll come to know that.”

“He loves you?”

“Yes.”

“And you love him?”

“I choose not to be in love with anyone.”

“But are you?”

She nuzzled closer to Francesca without answering. 

“He is right,” Francesca said.  “You should paint.”

“You think they’re good?”

She looked over her shoulder at Tess’s paintings hanging
on the wall.  “I think they are a part of you, and you are denying that which makes
you whole.”

Tess closed her eyes, luxuriating in Francesca’s
comforting embrace.  She missed her mother’s arms.  She remembered her
adolescent phase when she didn’t want her father to touch or even speak to
her.  Although he was the only active parent in her life at that point, he was
still an intrusive nuisance, just like all the other parents of teenagers. 

There were moments of vulnerability during those moody
years when she wouldn’t ask to be held but wouldn’t shun an embrace if
offered.  She recognized now her father did his best to identify those fissures
in her teenage psyche.  He’d offered what support he could, but his arms never
bound her teenage wounds the same way her mother’s arms bound her childhood
woes.

When she’d needed her mother to hold her, Alish had been
too busy being Randall Wright’s wife.

During her times of teenage angst, Tess often found
herself hiding in the stifling Florida attic, huddled in a tight ball, her
knees pressed beneath her chin and her arms hugging her legs to her chest while
she rocked back and forth contemplating her loneliness.  She’d end her attic
exile with a sudden burst of creativity, pouring her pain into pictures, giving
form to what she felt inside.

“I loved drawing,” she whispered now.

Francesca brushed Tess’s copper-colored hair aside and
pressed her check to her forehead.  “What did you say?”

“I used to love to draw.  It was better than talking.  I
could say anything I wanted with a pen, pencil or brush; it didn’t matter the
tool.  They always stated things much better than I could ever say them.”

Francesca sat up, rested her hands on Tess’s shoulders and
squared them to her.  “Then take painting as your lover again.”

Her shoulders sagged, and her head dropped.  “I’ve taken
so many men to my bed that I don’t know if that’s a good metaphor.”

“Taken many, but loved none.  This, Tess,” Francesca said,
lifting Tess’s chin and turning her head toward her paintings.  “This you love,
passionately and completely.  You deny yourself love in so many other avenues
of your life.  At least give yourself the opportunity to embrace something you
know you love.”

She turned her face away from her paintings.

“You look troubled by what I say,” Francesca told her.

Tess shook her head.  “No.  It’s not troubling; it’s true,
except that when you say it, it sounds so full of wisdom.  Why is it that when
Ben expressed similar sentiments, it sounded so intrusive?”

“Because mine are not the words of a lover who you are
trying to resist.”

Tess slid back into the sofa and into Francesca’s embrace,
her arms folded beneath her breasts, her hands clutching her elbows and her
eyes staring off but focused on nothing.  The steady rhythm of Francesca’s
breathing soothed her.

“How old are you, Francesca?”  Tess shifted her eyes
upward to her friend’s face.  “Sorry, I’m just curious.  You don’t have to
answer.”

“To tell my age does not bother me.  I am fifty-one, and
each of those years is an affirmation I am still among God’s creations.”

“I love listening to you.  Concepts that are elusive to
others are so obvious to you.  You make life sound so simple when I know you
know that it’s not.  I hope I’m this wise when I’m your age.” 

“Age does not beget wisdom.”

“Oh I know, otherwise my mother would be wiser than the
both of us.  She’s fifty-seven.  Look at the choices she’s made.”  Tess closed
her eyes again and imagined Francesca’s touch was her mother’s.  “You have
comforting arms.”

“When I lived in Rome, my neighbor’s children would come
over and they would tell their mother they were going to Francesca’s villa. 
She thought they meant my apartment, and then she found out it was me they
called the villa.  If I held them like I am holding you, they would look over
one arm and call that side the garden and the other the porch. 

“And my lap was forever changing.  Sometimes it was the
dining room, sometimes the playroom and other times a ballroom.  We sat and
read and told stories, all huddled in Francesca’s villa.  They had such
imagination.”

“Do you regret not having had children of your own?”

Francesca paused, then said, “I had a child.  I regret
other things.”