Authors: Jill Bialosky
Adam reached out and pushed her hand down gently. He made tea and offered Eleanor some dry biscuits from a box. “I want to look at your face. To see where it will take me. If you’re frightened I won’t be able to see clearly.” How much is there to see, she wondered, but she kept quiet. “Painting is about isolating the moment, reflecting the world back to us. I have to find the right moment.”
Another few minutes passed in silence.
“I’m interested in the relationship between men and women in my painting. I paint the middle class because they try so hard to hold the culture together. Because they’re so tragic and mystifying.” He spoke as if engaged in a long private conversation with himself.
“But aren’t you middle class? I mean your parents?”
“That’s not the point, Eleanor.”
She sat on the daybed, playing with the string of pearls. Remembering the work she had read about on microfiche at the library, it seemed to her he was interested in young girls and boys, but she wasn’t going to say anything. “I’m interested in exploring the hidden places, the secret of what draws men and women together, what repels us about each other.”
She moved her body, trying to get comfortable. She couldn’t find a position that let her relax. She discovered she was self-conscious watching another person staring at her. She was relieved he hadn’t asked her to undress.
He peered at her from behind his canvas. “As a painter I see with my eyes first. When I begin a study, the model possesses my childhood, my struggles. My obsessions. The person you see on the canvas isn’t the original subject anymore. She becomes my
métier
, my compass. She guides me. Slowly I allow myself to get closer, to close the distance.”
A wave of anxiety washed over her.
“You’ve been hurt,” he said. “I can see it in you.”
She took a lock of hair in her hand and twisted it. His ability to scrutinize her made her uncomfortable. And yet she didn’t
not
want to be in the studio with him. How did he know she’d been hurt? Was it etched across her face? Or was he being patronizing?
When she left his studio she was inspired and energized, filled with desire to create. She went back to her apartment and began to work on the essay she was writing, suddenly making connections in her head she had not dared before.
She went to Adam’s studio early in the morning, and sat quietly on his daybed each day for a week before he started the first painting. He paced the room, adjusted the collar of her shirt. He scrutinized every angle of her face and body. She felt his eyes on her ankle, on the little stretch of skin that showed above her calf. He asked if she would take off her stockings and shoes. He looked at her behind his easel without drawing his brush. “You have the most amazing bones in your feet,” he said. “I need to feel them in my hands so I know how to paint them.”
When he was quiet, his eyes looked only half opened. Underneath were dark circles. On days when he looked particularly tired, it might take an hour or two before his eyes would begin to grow wide and searching. She had studied him for a week, while he was studying her, alone in the quiet of the studio. Other days he looked angry or preoccupied, as if he had traveled far away in his memory. She learned how to gauge his moods, how not to take his moodiness personally.
Eleanor wore a navy blue skirt and a white blouse. Her pearls were tucked underneath her collar. Adam lifted her chin, just slightly, and then unbuttoned the first two buttons of her blouse so that the pearls were unleashed against her skin. She felt as if he’d taken off all her clothes.
Other days, as she sat on the daybed in Adam’s studio, she felt pulled into the trance he got into when he worked, losing her own luster in the process. And she thought,
Do I have this in me? One day will it be possible for me to achieve in my own work what Adam is achieving in his—that perfect synthesis of who one is and what one sees?
She sat on the daybed with the sunlight slowly diminishing, feeling him study her until her mind grew so blank she nearly forgot who she was, and she felt a little sick inside. The alarm clock on his shelf went off. Adam painted by it. He said as long as he gave himself three full hours, he knew he’d gotten what he could out of that day. Later in the afternoon, he returned to the studio and looked at what he had accomplished. Sometimes he adjusted certain details. Other times he stared at the work, as if he were waiting for it to tell him what to do the next time he took up his brush. “The trick is not to take yourself too seriously, and to take yourself very seriously, both at the same time. If you don’t think you can be as good as Rembrandt, why do it? Why even try? No one can be as good as Rembrandt. The whole point in creating art is to find what you have to offer, what’s special in your own soul.”
She took in the whole of his body. The gray strands of hair that sprung out from his thick, black locks—she imagined he had had even thicker hair when he was younger—the way the hairs on his thick eyebrows grew in different directions, his slightly discolored tooth that was chipped at one corner, the muscles that formed in his arms when he moved his brush. He was beautiful when he painted. Some mornings he poured scotch into his tea or coffee and she smelled the liquor on his breath when he leaned over. She told herself he was a cliché: the drunken painter who puffed himself up. And yet, she admired that he showed up every day, striving for greatness.
She thought of him when she was alone in her apartment. What was his life like outside his studio?
He was so different from William
. She fantasized about his wife, about the parties she imagined they attended together, the gallery openings they frequented. She imagined them walking hand in hand throughout museums and galleries in Paris and other European cities.
Initially she was enthralled by the way he talked about painting. She had never been around a real artist. “What are you looking for when you look at me so intensely?”
“I like to capture figures that have the look of spontaneity, almost as if they’re being illuminated in the middle of a conversation or after something devastating has happened, filled with the emotion of the moment. If you look closely at my work, study my paintings, inside them you’ll find all you ever need to know about me. Each figure, each representation grows out of the former.”
But he talked too much. He liked to give lectures on the films he saw, the artists he admired, what he considered sentimental or overexposed. He was judgmental, inflexible. When she grew bored with his monologues, he’d do something childlike and spontaneous. He asked her to take the subway uptown with him. It was a beautiful fall afternoon and he wanted to take a walk in Central Park. He wanted to see the color of the leaves. He had to see them, not to imagine them. He had to study the pigments, the fragmentation of color, the sky.
Once they were uptown he took her by the hand, sat her down on one of the benches. “Eleanor, I have a confession to make.” She had been modeling for him for a month by then. “I’m attracted to you.”
There was nothing she had revealed about herself that would draw his attention. It was the mystery in her that drew him. She did not trust him. “No, you’re not,” she said.
“I think about you all the time. You’re behind every thought, every gesture. When I see a painting, I think of you. When I watch a movie, I imagine you in every scene. My world is clouded by you. You’ve blinded me. I’m Orpheus. I can’t see if you’re not in the room with me.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“No, Eleanor. This is serious.”
Back in his studio he instructed her to recline on the daybed, curved on her side. He wanted her to be staring directly at him for this particular pose. Because it was so unnerving, she distanced herself by thinking of the shape of William’s body. She watched Adam work, but she thought of William. All those days she sat in his studio quietly thinking of another boy, she somehow must have willed Adam’s interest upon her. Had she wanted him to be interested in her to see what it would be like to be free of William? She had sensed an attraction, had watched it unfold almost from the first day, but she had categorized it as a painter enthralled with his subject. She preferred it in that category, where it would not create any disturbances.
“I love your shoes,” he said. They were an old pair of red Pappagallos. She thought,
He isn’t attracted to me, he’s attracted to who he thinks I am, for who he wants me to be, for the role I am serving in his studio, in his art. He’s attracted to my shoes
.
“I’d be all over you if you wanted me to,” he persisted.
“You’re married.”
“What does my marriage have to do with how I feel about you? Don’t be naive, Eleanor. Marriage is not ownership.”
“You can’t say you’re attracted to me and tell me that I’m naive.” She had many rules. “You never ask me what I want or think.”
“All behavior is dressing. I sit in the studio and I peel it away. Everyone is transparent. I see you.” He took her hands and grasped them in his. “You alone are real to me. All this learned behavior. All the ways we are taught to think and feel, the boundaries we construct for ourselves. I want to be free of them.” He twisted the cap off of a tube of paint. “It’s all learned, how we are supposed to be, but it has no authenticity.”
“But you don’t know me.”
“I know you.”
“And the fact that you’re married?”
“I didn’t say it didn’t matter. I said it has nothing to do with how I feel about you. Did you know you have these amazing yellow speckles in your eyes? Imagine the challenge it is to paint you.”
She
did
like the way he looked at her, how he examined her with fixed attention. She saw that she could do anything she wanted and he would still want her. It was powerful knowing how deeply he wanted her, especially since she was in love with someone else. It made her imagine she was free of being hurt by him. His curious logic appealed to her. She wondered whether she could ever again live without the intense way that he looked at her.
He invited her to go to the opening of his show. She was nervous about meeting his wife, but when Adam introduced them, Mariana only nodded, as if she were bored with Adam’s models, and walked away to talk with two other painters. She was an art historian from Romania teaching at Yale. Adam had given up his academic position once his paintings began to sell, though he still occasionally lectured. Mariana was the more practical minded of the two. She was petite and beautiful, with a cool air about her. She wore her short hair cropped around her heart-shaped face, and dressed that night in a short skirt with black tights and high heels and a Victorian high-collared lace shirt under a velvet blazer. She sipped a glass of wine, at ease with the other guests in the gallery. Eleanor watched as Mariana found Adam in the crowd and slipped her arm into the crux of his and wondered what it would be like to wake every morning next to him, to cook his meals, to wash his clothes.
The white walls of the gallery brought out the colors in Adam’s paintings. They were paintings he had completed before she began to sit for him. She studied the work, located the narrative energy from one painting to the next. His colors—shades of blue, gold, and crimson—compelled her. She wanted to look at the paintings endlessly, the way one looked at a person with whom one was in love. They showed provocative subject matter, at once painterly and accessible.
In one, a boy was in his bedroom asleep, his mother sitting on the edge of his bed, smoking, in a cocktail dress and with thick nylon stockings. The painting conjured a memory of her own parents coming home from a cocktail party. She must have been the same age as the little boy. She looked more closely into the painting, and it was as if she stepped through a window and entered the canvas. Her own mother and father were fighting.
“Why aren’t we enough for you?” her mother said. Or had she imagined it?
“I need to keep the people who are dearest away from me,” her father replied. Eleanor pictured him wiping his brow with his hankie.
“And that Sheila Feinstein, what about her? You can’t keep her away?”
Eleanor looked at the painting again. She smelled the dark odor of liquor on her father’s breath when he came in to tuck her into bed. She had pretended she was sleeping. “What to do with this gift God gave me,” he whispered. As a child she had failed to understand or connect the smell of the liquor on her father’s breath with the behavior it provoked in her parents, but as she stared at the painting, she was back in her bedroom (her bed like the bed in the painting) wishing her parents would stop fighting. The next painting was a triptych. In one frame was an image of a woman, dressed as Eleanor’s mother might have been years ago, in a tweed suit with a string of pearls around her neck. In the next frame a young girl sat in her bedroom reading. The painted eyes on the woman and the eyes of the child had the same shape and contour and the hollowed-out look of the eyes in a Modigliani painting. It was called
Twins
. Inscribed on the wrist of the mother in the painting was a serial number. In the last panel was the image of a tree with a car wrapped around its trunk. Another painting depicted a tranquil swimming pool where a boy floated in the pool on his stomach with his face in the water, leaving the viewer uncertain if he was alive or dead. The painting was called
Self-Portrait of the Artist as a Young Boy
.
She smelled the pungent scent that overwhelmed Adam’s studio for the three hours she sat for him each day, a scent deep and muscular.
When she turned to acknowledge Adam, the heat and sweat of his body breathed on her skin. His smile illuminated his dark green eyes and his discolored front tooth, snug against the other whiter tooth. He was sunnier once he was out of his studio. Instead of baggy painter’s pants and an oversized T-shirt, he was dressed in a black turtleneck sweater and black jeans. Eleanor experienced that strange disconnect of seeing a person in a setting different than usual. As she looked at him in a new way, no longer simply defined by her relationship to him as his study, she was overcome with admiration and another darker, more unpleasant and powerful feeling: that she wanted him. She quickly tried to bury the sensation.