The Life Room, page 18
“I witnessed a woman kill herself today. I can’t stop thinking about those poor children.” She looked at him. “I’m sorry.” She remembered he had lost a patient.
“Come over here. Please,” he said. “I have my rights, too, you know.”
She moved closer to him and put her arms around him, longing to be able to connect. “Have you ever lost your bearings?”
“I’m not like that, Eleanor. Are we talking about the woman who died today?”
She thought about the dirty pavement of the subway platform stripped of nearly all natural light. About what must have been the last thing that woman might have seen: men carrying briefcases, a teenager looking at the text messages on his cell phone, the image of her holding Noah’s hand, and what she herself had stepped away from—the gleaming subway tracks—waiting for the train. She thought of the light through the long tunnel signaling the train’s approach. Had she ever wanted to die? There were hours in her past she was anxious, or at a loss, not knowing how to stop her restless mind, but not knowing how to ask for what she wanted. Did she know what she wanted? But usually her despair slowly dissipated once she pushed herself out of bed, out of the house and into the brightness of the day. No, she never wanted to die. She wanted to learn how to live with contradictory emotions and longings, with all the passion inside her. She thought of the train growing louder, how Noah clapped his ears closed against the shrill of it. In her mind she imagined the woman’s feet in her boots moving toward the yellow line, saw her skirt rise up slightly, the wind on her face from the train’s approach.
She clung to Michael as if she had fallen over the edge into the darkness of the rails and he was saving her from the approaching train. She made love to him fiercely, wanting something from him she didn’t quite understand. Afterward she curled into his damp, sleep-filled warmth until she woke up uncomfortable, with a crick in her neck. The feeling of unease and emptiness remained.
16
Mrs. Woods greeted Eleanor in the reception area of the hospital, and tears filled her eyes when she went to hug her. She had called to tell her that William was in the hospital, and Eleanor had taken the first flight in. Mr. Woods was watching the television in the waiting room. He looked like he’d been up all night. His clothes were slightly crumpled and the back of his hair matted where he had fallen asleep against the back of a chair. He stood up when Eleanor walked in. “He’ll pull himself together,” he said, his voice tensing with emotion. He patted Eleanor a tad too forcefully on the back. “He’s a little mixed up right now.”
William looked pale and tired. He was wearing a hospital gown, robe, and a pair of white sports socks and pulled an IV pole as he came to the waiting room to find her. The last time she saw him she was putting him in a cab on the streets of New York City more than a month ago. “Please be okay,” Eleanor said, pressing her face into his neck, hugging him with all her might. They walked slowly back to William’s hospital room and lay down together on the hospital bed with its perfect corners. His hair had lost its shine. “What happened?” she finally asked.
“I kept thinking about what that man said about Jesus and hell and not being saved and I started feeling funny. It was like being so far down in your head you don’t know how to climb out. I forgot my name. Where I lived. I looked at my hands and my face in the mirror and they were not my own. I couldn’t leave the apartment. I realized that a week had gone by, and I hadn’t eaten or done anything that I could remember. I picked up the phone and called an ambulance.”
“But what happened? I don’t get it,” Eleanor said again.
He looked at her blankly. “I’m worried about the dogs. Will you make sure they get fed?”
“Of course I will. Whatever you want, William.”
Eleanor went to the hospital every day She sat in the lobby when William went to group, and had his private sessions with the doctor, and then joined him in his room when they brought in his lunch and supper. She picked up the tin lids and said, “Today you’re having turkey and mashed potatoes,” and she moved the tray close to William and watched him try to eat. They watched television together. Eleanor held his hand. She looked at him for signs. The doctor called it depersonalization. What did it mean? That William was not a person anymore? That he had no self? She said nothing. She kept looking for William in his eyes, but the anger and spark had vanished. Why are we here in the first place? I wish there was an alternative universe we could live in, Eleanor. When I’m building the wall I think about it. About where we could live where no one will harm us. She thought about those words looking at the grayish hue to his skin.
He stayed in the hospital for a month. When he was released, he went to his mother’s house to recuperate. Eleanor went with him, sleeping in one of his older brothers’ empty bedrooms. She called the chair of her department and explained the situation. She’d have to make up her work when she returned. During the day she sat next to him on the couch in the family room and held his hand. His loyal dogs were at William’s feet. It was like they were in high school again, only they were in their twenties, living together in his mother’s house. “Eleanor, you’re holding my hand too tight,” William said. “Can you let go for a second?” The days passed this way. It was so quiet they could hear the leaves shudder, the dogs whimper, and the cats meow.
“You have to go back to New York,” William said, after another three weeks had passed.
“I’m not going back.”
“You can’t stay here and watch me.”
“I’m not leaving.”
“Stop looking at me that way.”
“Where are you?” She pulled him by the shirt. She was angry. “You’re not in here anymore.” She pointed her finger in his chest.
“I’m right here. This is me now.”
She moved closer to him on the couch.
“I can’t breathe, Eleanor. I have to do this on my own.”
“What about the wall? Who’s going to finish it?”
“I’m not strong enough.” He looked at her, his eyes sad and lifeless. “You’re crushing me.”
“I’ll go back.” She touched his arm. “If you promise it will help you get better.”
“The only thing that will make me feel better is if you go on with your life. You have to do this for me.”
Was the pain in her body William’s or her own?
“William took the dogs out today.” “William went to work.” “William ate beef stroganoff for supper,” Mrs. Woods said, with forced cheeriness when Eleanor would call from New York to get a report on his state of mind.
Eleanor went back to the synagogue to see the rabbi. “My daughter,” the rabbi said, “the mind is fragile. You have to have faith in God and what God has willed.” She didn’t mind being the rabbi’s daughter. She left his chambers and sat in the synagogue, watching the light fight its way through the stained glass. She began to pray. It was what she understood one did when there was nothing else to be done.
17
Her neck itched. The daybed in Adam’s studio was hard. To avoid scratching her neck she thought about the paper she was writing on The Inferno. Virgil takes a journey through darkness. He doesn’t know who he is or what his life means. She thought of William walking through the woods, circling the fields, the dogs trailing after him. She thought of the stone wall. The wall had come to define the life they had together, who they were with each other, the way each stone began to fit, stone by stone, next to each other, securely, without mortar, over time molded to each other, forming a barricade against the world.
“What’s in your head, Eleanor? Where are you?” Adam looked up from the canvas.
“I’m right here.”
“What are you thinking about? You seem distant.”
“I’m thinking about William.” She had told Adam about what had happened. Ever since she’d reconnected with him she insisted that their relationship be platonic. In a way she’d always wanted to know whether she and Adam could be friends—whether their connection was real and not just sexual. He said he understood, he would try and restrain himself, but sometimes he weakened. She found herself torn, too. In her heart she was loyal to William, but she was beginning to feel more her true self with Adam. And yet she didn’t completely trust him. “I don’t know how to reach him anymore.”
“I can’t bear disconnection.”
“Did you always feel disconnected from Mariana?”
“I married her because I never expected connection. This way she could never disappoint me.” He left the canvas and sat next to her on the daybed. “Where were you last night? I tried to call you.”
“I should be asking where you were.”
“I’m freer than you are, Eleanor. My erotic life is here with you, not with my wife. Being married makes me love you more than if I were single.”
“That’s convenient.”
“If I wasn’t married I would expect more from you. This way we can be equal. You don’t have to put groceries in my refrigerator. I don’t have to pay your bills. There’s no hierarchy between us. If I paid for your dress, then I own it when you’re wearing it. It becomes harder for you to refuse me. You feel you have an obligation when you’re married, that you owe your life to someone even when you no longer feel the same attraction. Let me explain it another way. If you sacrifice your own work time to come home and make me dinner, I’ve deprived you of something. It’s a cruel institution, marriage.”
It was weirdly convincing logic. She thought about how even though William had asked her to leave so that she could get back to her life, she was still in love with him. Love wasn’t a choice.
“You can’t come into my studio wearing your vintage lace tops and blue jean skirts and red sandals looking like a teenager. You just can’t do it. You can’t let me get close to you and let me smell your perfume and then pull away. It’s killing me.”
“Adam, I have to finish this paper.”
“I can’t keep looking at you and not want you next to me.”
“But you promised.”
“Cancel the conference. Stay with me.”
She agreed to meet him back at her apartment after her meeting. It took too much work to say no. She thought about the time she had spent in his studio watching him work, modeling for him, and how complicit she was in his work. She was flattered that it was she he picked to immortalize. Even though she was his “study,” she felt like a partner in his work.
Adam drank a beer on the bed and listened to Bob Dylan while she continued to work at her desk. She could hear his heavy boots—paint-splattered in dots and slashes over the leather—walk her floor. He stood behind her chair and massaged her shoulders.
“Adam, I told you I have to finish this paper. It’s due tomorrow.” She was struggling with it. Even its title was proving burdensome: “The Tension Between Morality and Eroticism and the Quest for Selfhood.” In the paper she showed how desire for goodness and darkness were equally strong. “Do you think there are only two true objects of human love: God and the self?” she asked. “I mean, the self as man. Do you think that if we decide to love man over God then we are essentially doomed?”
“Why are they exclusive?”
“We can decide to love God over man, but if we forgo God and decide to love only man, to love only carnally, to exist only in pursuit of the flesh, then does that mean we are perpetual sinners?”
“What are you struggling with?” Adam asked, still impatient with her to finish. “Your desire for me and your devotion to William?”
She looked at him.
“Without darkness there can be no goodness. Man has to sin in order to be redeemed.”
“So are you saying that what we’re doing together is a sin?”
She thought of William. His sickness was a manifestation of a struggle inside him. He belonged to the forest. She wanted to lead him out of the darkened woods. But how? Was it ever really possible to reach another person? She didn’t want Adam. She was devoted to William.
“You can fight desires but they still exist inside us. If I make love to you in my mind, am I still unfaithful? And does it make a difference? Didn’t I sin against my marriage those weeks in my studio when I thought about touching you and my need to be close to you? I’ll teach you about sin. Then you can decide if you’d rather worship God or the body.” He tried to kiss her. “Or maybe you’d rather be with a boy rather than a man.”
He lifted the hair off her neck. His breath smelled like beer and onions from the hamburger he had eaten earlier in the night. He wanted to touch her. She moved away, and as she did she caught him staring at her with an almost sinister expression.
“I need you, Eleanor.” He cornered her again while she was at the sink filling up the kettle. He pressed his body into her back and kissed her neck. She was aroused by his desire for her, but she was tired of playing the part of the prepubescent lover. She was in her twenties. It occurred to her as he was trying to seduce her that this was central to his art. It would allow him to go further into his pathos, into his shame and desire, and by traveling further, it would allow him to push further into his work. Suddenly his desire for her repulsed her. It was purely carnal. How could she open herself to someone so foreign to her own nature? Adam was sophisticated and worldly and solipsistic. She was a girl from the Midwest in love with a boy who knew the name of every insect and bird but did not know how to navigate his own heart.
“I can’t do this, Adam.” She wiggled out of his grasp. “I told you. I’m back with William.”
Her bottle of perfume was sitting on the windowsill. Adam looked at the blue cobalt bottle and seized it. He put it in his pocket and walked out of the apartment. “Find a new job,” he said, under his breath. Or did he say “Find a new guy?” She wasn’t sure, and she continued to wonder once he had left. Her eyes focused on the windowsill where the perfume bottle had once stood. She conjured an image in her head of Adam in his studio opening the perfume and smelling it, and then smudging together colors from paint tubes to form a muted disturbing color, then taking the brush to his canvas, transforming his anger and desire into the texture of his subject’s hair.
He was too complicated. Everything he wanted from her seemed for his own benefit. She thought about William. He was the opposite. She opened the window. The drone of traffic was suddenly absent. She listened again. She heard the creak of the tree on her street when the wind pushed against it. She picked up the phone. It had been over a month since she had last seen him.
“It’s good to hear your voice, Eleanor.”
“I wanted to call you a hundred times.”
“I’ve been working again.” He grew quiet. “I’m back at the apartment.”
“Why?”
“The motherfucker moved back home. I can’t live in the same house with him. I don’t trust him, Eleanor.”
“But it’s too soon.” She paused. “I just wish you didn’t have to live there.” Eleanor thought about that dark apartment bordering on the ghetto.
“Can you believe she took him back? After what he did to her? I have to live here, Eleanor. Who else is going to look after these folks?”
She took the phone and lay down on the couch. This is good, William is talking again, she thought. “How are the dogs? Bear? Scout?”
“They’re good. But they’re going to die.”
“William, I’m coming home. I need to see you. Are you building the wall again?”
“I don’t have the strength to lift the stones.”
“I’ll help. If you wait for me.”
18
She couldn’t get the shape, touch, voice, image of him out of her system. They had that kind of telepathy with each other. She knew that the minute she looked into his eyes everything would be fine even though they’d been away from each other for more than a month. She surprised William and came in a day earlier than he expected. Usually she spent the first night she was home having supper with her mother, but that night she asked if she could borrow the car. She fixed herself up, putting on a skirt, the blue one with the white flowers, and a blue sweater that William liked her in. She fixed her hair the way he liked, taking the two front pieces and putting them in back with a clip, slipped in her favorite dangle earrings.
She drove downtown, parked her car in the apartment complex where William lived. Once she got out of the car, she pulled her long coat closer to her body out of fear, telling herself she had to get William out of that place. It was after 6:00, pitch black. The wind was tough. In the lobby, Eleanor told the security officer that she was here to see William Woods. She asked if he would let her up without buzzing so she could surprise him, and he went ahead and let her. She remembered exactly what floor William lived on, what apartment number. The door was locked. She knocked on the thick steel. There was no answer. She pressed the buzzer and then pounded on the door again.
But she had seen William’s pickup truck. It was parked next to where she had parked her mother’s car. Maybe he was taking out the garbage or tending to a problem with one of the units in the building. She stood in the hallway for a few minutes and waited. Then she stepped back into the elevator, went downstairs, and asked the security guard if he had seen William. She looked in the mirror in the vestibule. She thought to herself, as soon as William sees me we are going to be okay The security guard said he’d try to page him. When he didn’t answer the page, the security guard accompanied Eleanor back up the elevator. She thought how strangely yellow his coloring looked under the fluorescent light in the elevator. She remembered that security guard’s face as he proceeded to unlock William’s door. He suggested she wait out in the hall after he flicked on the light and smelled its stench. Eleanor couldn’t wait. She followed behind him. The room looked as if it hadn’t been cleaned in weeks. Dirty clothes were in a heap on the floor. A filthy towel was on the back of the kitchen chair. There were empty Coke cans, pizza boxes, newspapers stacked on the kitchen counters and piled on the floor and on the coffee table. It smelled awful. It was the sight of that room, the fact that he hadn’t cared enough about himself to clean up, that made her angry. William, why can’t you take better care of yourself? she thought. The security guard tried to usher her back out the door, but she wouldn’t go. On the table was an empty vial of painkillers William’s doctor had prescribed for a disk he fractured lifting stones for his wall.
