The Life Room, page 6
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.
“Relax,” he said. “You’re so tense.” He placed his hands on her shoulders and massaged them. “I’m glad you’re here.”
She continued to study the paintings, particularly the haunting image of the young boy lying with his face half submerged in water.
“What do you think? Does he compel you?”
He moved closer, so that they were touching, nearly pushing her forward with the breadth of his body, and inhaled her perfume. She felt the tickle of his breath on the back of her neck. She thought she should not let her feet move from the wooden floor of the gallery or else she would fly forward into the painting. Adam lifted the hair from her neck and piled it into his hand, as if he were drawing it into a ponytail, and then he let it go. A chill ran down her back before he disappeared into the crowd.
At home in her studio apartment, she wondered whether she had felt Adam’s groin push against her or whether she had imagined it. She flushed. She saw his paintings in her mind, that naked little boy alone in the tub. She ached with desire.
The next day in his studio she let him unbutton her blouse, and he painted her showing just the hint of her bra. She wore a kilted navy blue skirt and stockings. At the end of three hours, after the alarm went off, she dressed, put on her coat, and said good-bye. When she arrived home she felt she could still smell the fumes on her clothes from the oils in his studio. She thought of the canvases against his walls in various stages of completion. She undressed, sat on her bed in a tank top and underpants, and held the blouse she had worn in his studio to her face. She was supposed to finish a paper that was due that week, but she couldn’t bring herself to work. She thought about Adam undressing her in his studio. The smell of paint intoxicated her. She remembered his words. “It’s this strange twilight zone between rationality and unreason where the artist hunts,” he had said, looking at her ravenously. His hands were rough and chapped from the strong soap he scrubbed with after he finished painting for the day, and they had been cold against her skin, sending a charge through her body. She held the longing inside her until it had reached its finest luster. In bed she thought about him a long time before she fell asleep. She felt a pain in her chest, as if it had cracked open just slightly, and her eyes filled with unexpected tears. She did not once think of William.
But William was in her dream, and in her dream she loved him the way she loved herself, so when he was gone she was missing. In the dream she felt vacant to herself, a stranger, and the long great tide of missing him formed a central artery inside her.
They were skating round and round in a large circle, feeling the wind tear at their face, and they circled the rink at least a hundred times—she had that many circles inside her with the boy, that many hours of being next to him, absorbed in the circles they made together, the thrust, thrust, thrust, glide, glide, glide of their skates on the ice. They were holding hands and then William pulled away from her and she felt confused, as if all the years of their being together laying side by side in the dark like two commas were over and she felt shame.
When she awoke from the dream, she looked in the mirror and everything was different. She told herself she couldn’t work for Adam anymore. Her heart was committed to someone else. She was going home for Christmas, and she convinced herself that once William saw her again, they’d be back together. She took the subway downtown. She got off at the Spring Street station and walked briskly to Adam’s building. She planned what she would say, keeping it short and simple. She didn’t want to break up a marriage. She was going through something of her own. She was vulnerable. She had a life, and though it was mostly in her head, still it was her life. She didn’t want to get involved with anyone. She didn’t think it would be possible for her to continue working for him under the present conditions.
He buzzed her into the studio. He was still wearing the same clothes he had worn the day before, jeans and a torn white T-shirt. He was unshaven. He had slept in the studio that night. The smell of paint was inside and outside his body, mixed with his pungent scent—she didn’t know how to describe it, like wet leaves?
“You didn’t go home last night?” she asked.
“I camped out here. I wanted to be close to my work. I was looking at you all night, Eleanor.” He pointed to the canvas. “And you? Did you sleep well?”
She propped herself up on the daybed and her mind went blank. She realized it took more energy to resist a person than it did to give in. She was leaving the next morning to spend Christmas break with her mother. She told herself that she would continue to sit for Adam until he finished the series of paintings she had committed to, and then he’d have to find a new model. But she liked the way he looked when he had just woken up, his hair matted in the back, his sleepy eyes. Looking at him made her not want to go home anymore. She wanted to stay with him and not think about what faced her back in Chicago.
Even though she had refused to marry William, she thought he knew she was already married to him. It made her furious that he could not see what he needed to do and that she could not change him. She didn’t want to think about him or her mother and her migraines. She didn’t want to think about the piano that was no longer played.
“It’s the artist’s lot,” Adam remarked.
She looked up at him, her face in a question.
“Empathy from a distance.” He was cleaning some brushes in the sink. “To obsess on what you cannot have.”
Eleanor reached for her coat.
“Have a good Christmas.”
She reached to unlock the bolt on his door. He stopped, turned off the faucet, dried his hands on his pants, and handed her a present, a small box bound with a red velvet ribbon.
Her cheeks grew hot. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“Take it with you,” he said. “Put it underneath your tree.”
“But I’m Jewish,” she said.
She called William once she was back in her own apartment to tell him she was coming home, sure that he would end his foolishness.
“We can’t see each other, Eleanor. I have to do this. I have to prove it to myself.”
“Prove what?”
“That I can live without you. Only then will it be possible for us to be together. Don’t come home.”
“I don’t want to ever see you again,” she said, trembling.
8
In Chicago, William was like a silent shadow next to her. She pictured him slipping his hand into the back hip pocket of her jeans. She heard him say her name, in that intimate way, filling her with a quick rush.
Her mother invited her best friends, Joan, Celia, and Carol, for Christmas. They formed their own foursome, a group of women from the neighborhood whose husbands had either abandoned them, or died, or divorced them. She learned from them that you could fill an entire lunch talking about fabrics for your couch or the color to paint your walls. She also learned that it was possible to survive disappointment if you chose to, or disappointment could put a dam in the middle of your life and you’d never be able to move forward. She learned that love could last a lifetime or a day, that there were all kinds of possibilities for losing or finding it. She learned that if you did not have faith, if you did not fulfill your dreams, they might hibernate in your head, creating such friction you couldn’t lift it from the pillow. She learned to love the sounds of a piano reverberating through her house, and then the absence of sound. Why won’t he call me, she imagined asking these women. Why do I still care for him? Why can’t I forget him? But she knew she would put on her cheerful face and leave her questions to herself.
While her mother basted the turkey, she caught Eleanor up on gossip. Stephen Mason had moved back to town after dropping out of college. He doesn’t trust institutions, Carol had explained. He wants to be a real writer. Her mother said he was working for his girlfriend’s father, at one of the restaurants he owned downtown. She looked outside past the backyard at the empty plot of land where the playhouse had once been. Now it was filled with tangled weeds and dusted with a light snow.
Celia was telling stories about her divorce. “Since when is gaining weight grounds for divorce?” she asked. They had eaten dinner and were sitting by the fire, drinking coffee and still sipping wine. “If you were married to the son of a bitch, you’d gain weight, too.”
Half listening to the conversation, Eleanor felt sorry for herself. She wondered why she had refused William’s proposal of marriage. If she’d said yes, he would be just now coming to get her and she could forget her worries of always being alone like her mother, of whether she’d actually get through her orals and dissertation, or whether she’d eventually get a job.
It was the point in a dinner party when everyone senses it’s approaching time to leave, but they also want to linger, to sustain that moment of pleasure where nothing is demanded from you other than to enjoy conversation with friends, slightly intoxicated by wine and cuisine and familiar sentiments. A tap on the windowpane of the front door startled her. Stephen Mason was standing underneath the awning. His coat was wet with snow and his face lit up when she opened the door. She was struck by the incongruities of his face: his chiseled cheekbones, his cautious but intelligent eyes, and the soft, slightly feminine wave of his hair, framing a masculine jaw. Looking at him made her think that people don’t really change, they simply become more themselves.
