The Life Room, page 7
“Merry Christmas.” He handed her a bottle of wine and leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. “Hey, Eleanor. How come we never keep in touch?”
The comment surprised her. “I don’t know.”
“I thought I’d stop by and see if my mom was still here. Is it too late?” He explained that he’d had dinner with his girlfriend Chrissy’s family.
“No, I’m glad you came,” she said, surprised by her own words.
When he entered the living room, his mother brightened—the love of her life had walked through the door. “A house full of beautiful women,” Stephen said. “I must have been a fool to have missed dinner. Seriously, it’s good to be here,” he said, looking earnestly at Eleanor’s mother, then at his own mother, and then at Eleanor.
“We’re glad to have you,” Eleanor’s mother said. “Look how happy you’ve made your mother. She says you’re writing?”
Stephen explained an idea he had for a novel. Something about a guy who reconnects years later with a girl who used to live in the house in front of him. He went on to intricately describe the characters, catching Eleanor’s glance as he spoke. Sort of like Pip and Estella in Great Expectations, he said. The girl is sophisticated and learned and the boy never feels worthy of her until he finally leaves home and proves himself. He described it as a twist on Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again. “Sound familiar?” he said, and looked at Eleanor with a raised eyebrow and began to laugh. She liked his sense of humor. In the middle of his description—Joan said he should call it Destiny—Celia and Joan and Carol said they should call it a night. “Should I take this personally?” Stephen said, and the four women including Elizabeth broke into laughter, clearly charmed. Carol gathered her coat.
“Are you tired, Eleanor?” Stephen said.
“No. Not really.”
“Do you mind if I stick around for a little while, then?”
“That would be nice,” she said, noting in his eyes that same lost look he had when they were children. She was tired of hoping that William would seek her out. She was glad for Stephen’s company. In fact, when she thought about it, she realized she liked being with him again. Eleanor did not follow everything he said but was surprised by his down-to-earth intelligence and daring. She was curious about him. She saw something in him that she felt she shared: a loneliness that inhabited the space her father had left. Her mother had bravely assumed the responsibility of Eleanor’s care, but there was something vague and weightless about the way she moved through the world, as if she, too, had gone adrift. Earlier that night when her mother was setting the table for dinner, she’d accidentally taken down an extra plate, then put it back. Eleanor knew it was for her father. She still wore her wedding ring.
When the company left, her mother had said goodnight and went upstairs. Sitting beside Stephen on the sofa, Eleanor noticed Adam’s wrapped present on the French desk in the living room, along with the present she bought for her mother. Though she had wanted to open it the minute she left his studio, she had refrained, as if she’d known that once she was in Chicago, immersed in memories of her past, she’d need something to remind her of her life in New York. She already felt far away from that life. Adam and the world he embodied seemed completely foreign to the quiet circumference of her small childhood world. She chastised herself for having entertained thoughts of becoming romantically involved with him, for dreaming that one day she’d lead a passionate artistic life. She told herself that she had imagined the intensity that had gone on in his studio, that it was simply the synchronicity between painter and subject that had intrigued her, and that outside the studio they were strangers. It seemed suddenly clear to her that for Adam she was an object, a subject for one of his paintings; he had no real desire to know who she was apart from how he could frame her to fit his own reality. It was silly to have endowed him with such power. She told herself that when she returned to New York she would put some distance between them and that she would focus on her own work. Adam was married.
“Eleanor, I’m glad you came home,” Stephen said, knowing nothing of her thoughts. “Ever since we were kids I’ve felt like you’re the only one who knows me. Do you know that I used to dream about you?”
“Really?”
“You didn’t know that? I thought about you all the time. Even after I moved in with my dad. I wanted to call you a hundred times, but I didn’t think you cared much for me.”
“I cared,” she said, suddenly realizing the truth of her words.
“I always liked being around you. You made me feel that it was okay to be sensitive. I don’t have to pretend around you like I have to around Chrissy.”
She looked at him carefully.
“I’m not kidding.”
He explained that he was only working in Chrissy’s father’s restaurant for the money. “I have to get out of Chicago. I mean, how many more hamburgers can I flip? I want to make something out of my life. Chrissy doesn’t understand what’s at stake. Her father’s dangling the keys to his business in front of her face. He manipulates everyone with his money. She doesn’t get the writing thing. She thinks it’s something I’m going to get out of my system.”
“I didn’t know you wanted to write.”
“Yeah. I heard Ginsberg read from Howl once in San Francisco. It blew me away. He’s the only poet who can write that ‘the world is a mountain of shit’ and get away with it. There was something about the rawness of what he was doing that I connected to. Same with Kerouac.”
She’d never read Ginsberg or much of Kerouac, but she thought, compared to many of the pompous, entitled graduate students in her department, Stephen’s passion for their work was refreshing.
“I don’t think you really can come home again. I mean, and be the person you once were. That’s why I need to leave Chicago, Eleanor. I don’t like who I am here.” They sat in front of the fireplace and watched the fire consume the wood. “I have ideas. But I can’t do it in Chicago. I’m frozen here. All the memories. The pain.”
She looked at him with recognition, thinking of her own parents. She knew exactly what he meant. She suddenly felt very close to him.
He was quiet for a moment. “Eleanor?” He paused. “What if I can’t?”
“Can’t what?”
He shook his head, not wanting to finish the sentence, and she let it go.
Outside it had begun to snow. From the window, it was a field of white. “You have to do what’s going to make you happy. You can’t live for other people,” she said, thinking of William again.
“What about you, Eleanor? Are you seeing anybody?”
“Not really. There’s someone here in Chicago. But we’re really not together anymore. We’re taking a break.”
“I’d like to move to New York one of these days. I’m going to do it, Eleanor. I want it so badly I can taste it. I want to be a journalist. Travel the world. Write something so moving it will bring tears to your eyes. I have to turn this painful stuff inside me around. You know what I mean. Don’t be surprised if I show up at your door.”
He stretched out his legs and their thighs touched. She did know what he meant. It was the reason she had needed to leave Chicago, in spite of how painful it had been to leave William. The snow formed a ledge against the outside of the window, imbuing the house with a feeling of warmth and safety. She allowed herself to hold the calmness inside her. She looked at Stephen again; it seemed as if there was more he wanted to say. He exuded closeness and intimacy and invitation. He made her want to take his hands and bring them to her lips to relieve their coldness. But when she looked again she saw distance and study, hurt and promise and misunderstanding, and she didn’t know if she could quite trust the way he absorbed her when he talked. It seemed practiced, intended to draw her further into the conversation so he could stay one step removed. She felt she had to be on her guard against it.
They sat in the darkness without talking. Eleanor leaned her head back on the sofa, closed her eyes, and tried to quiet her mind. His hand found hers, as if he’d understood and read what she was thinking, and for a moment she no longer felt the loneliness that had defined her life in Chicago. He stroked her hand as if he wanted to know her more intimately She liked the feel of his hand touching hers, and felt herself shutting off all sensations save his touch. But then something about the feeling his touch inspired made her cautious again.
She wondered if Stephen was always alone, even inside himself, just like William. Some men were always alone and others were a part of the world, and she wondered why in the past she had given herself to the boy who was alone. Was she also like that? As she continued to hold Stephen’s hand, the heat began to rise in her face, and she was aware that she wanted him to kiss her; it became uncomfortable sitting next to him. From the living room window, it was getting lighter. And as the sky lightened, the distance moved between them. She knew once he left she’d be alone again, and she felt the need to pull away in order to make space inside herself for his leaving.
“I like sitting here with you, in the dark,” he said. “I hope this won’t embarrass you. When I first saw you tonight I could barely speak. You’ve grown up, Eleanor. You look great.”
He suddenly rose and gathered his coat and scarf from the chair where he had left them. The expression on his face changed. “Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to see each other,” he finally said.
“Why?”
“It won’t be the same. Still being here in Chicago once you’re gone.”
Eleanor walked him to the doorway, though she didn’t want him to leave. He moved his face very close to hers. She thought for a minute he was going to kiss her, and she was surprised when he stopped. It made her draw further inside herself, instead of reaching toward him. It nearly made her turn her head when he said he was sorry he had to go, without any mention of whether they would see one another again. They said goodbye awkwardly, and she closed the door a little too forcefully after him, stunned that his leaving troubled her.
Long after Stephen left, Eleanor lay in bed thinking. She thought about his desire to be a writer and how he had seemed more open than she had remembered him. They seemed to share a bond. She watched the light of dawn slowly come into her bedroom, and she thought about how she wished he had kissed her. She almost felt the imprint of his lips on her own as she remembered how he had moved toward her and then stopped. Why had he turned away, just when she was opening herself to him again? Her disappointment and self-doubt turned into self-punishment. Perhaps she had not adequately expressed to him her own feelings, thinking he had intuited how she had felt. And her self-punishment turned to longing again, and it was inside this circle of emotion that she was caught. In the morning the grass was frosted, the branches on the tree that connected her house with his mother’s sealed in a sheet of ice.
9
Inside the blue Tiffany’s box Adam gave her that Christmas was a strand of beautiful black pearls. White pearls represented purity. Black pearls were seductive. She took them as a sign. When she returned to work the day after the new year, she flashed them outside her white blouse. She was sick of her midwestern self who grew up believing that she must be good and nice and reward anyone who approached her with a smile. She longed to be detached and indifferent and to command attention the way self-possessed, detached people did.
She was glad to be back in New York. Enough of the boy at home. She had called William, but he would not answer her calls. The entire seven days she had been in Chicago, she had hoped they would see each other. It was as if she had been testing him without having been aware of it, and the fact that he hadn’t sought her out—if he truly loved her he would have—hurt her deeply. She convinced herself she had no other alternative but to forget him. She didn’t want to think about Stephen, either. She wasn’t going to romanticize their attachment. She had carried the evening with Stephen back with her on the plane, and then to her little apartment in New York City, but he had a girlfriend. She guessed that he had quarreled with Chrissy at her parents’ house earlier that evening and had sought her out as a distraction; that supposition became her reality. She told herself that he must have been lonely that night, as she had been, and that her sudden feelings for him were a way for her to combat her feeling of loss over William.
Her mother had looked tired that Christmas. Eleanor sensed sadness in her routine: her small breakfast on the little table in the kitchen, a cup of tea, a slice of toast with jam, a piece of fruit as she sipped her tea and read the paper. Her migraines were more frequent.
“You have to move on,” her mother had told her, when Eleanor admitted she wished William would call. There was a secret world inside her mother. You could hear it in the way she breathed and sighed, see it in the way she brought her fingers to her temple, suddenly, when she was washing the dishes. “Do you really think you can be in love with one person your entire life, even if you’re not together?”
“Are you talking about William or Daddy?”
“It was a hypothetical question, Eleanor.”
It was cold inside Adam’s studio, but she didn’t care. She was glad to be back to the life room, where something new was being created. Adam had an electric space heater he kept near the daybed, but the studio space was so vast and drafty that it barely warmed up. “Do you mind taking off your cardigan?” he said, once they exchanged pleasantries, after she had thanked him for the pearls.
She remembered afresh that morning how hard modeling was. Her neck began to hurt. She had to stop herself from rotating her head from side to side. Her foot fell asleep and she had to resist shaking it. It was a subtle art, to be able to open up enough to allow the artist to draw what was inside. Adam wanted more. He wanted an emotional exchange. He wanted an attachment.
“Tell me how you work,” she said.
“When I initially coat the canvas, the subject is tentative. It’s as though there is a screen, a distance between the artist and the subject. There’s an aloof quality to the look in my subject’s eyes, as if she is embodying my distrust, until I begin to know her better. As the painting develops I begin to see her clearer. She becomes my focus. My raison d’être. If I don’t put everything I have in her, I see the falseness in the work. I look at the painting and it’s not honest.”
“How do you know what’s honest?”
“We’re all eventually transparent, Eleanor.”
While Adam painted, she imagined the waves of the sea building and receding. She sat for nearly an hour without moving, her mind focusing on the imaginary drift of the sea and the current of Adam’s gaze.
“You can’t imagine how sexy it is having you in my head. All the hours when I’m painting and not painting your image is inside me.”
She was startled.
“Your skin is soft. I want to paint it like velvet. And your hands. They’re petite but strong. Are they your mother’s or your father’s?”
“My father’s. I think.” She tried to recall her father’s hands. They were elegant, with long fingers that he had taken care to protect. They were hands with fingers that moved across a keyboard. She conjured her father’s hands cupping her cheeks when he kissed her goodnight. She felt them against her skin as he fastened the Star of David around her neck. She held on to the things she remembered about her father to remind her that she was still his daughter.
It had been a long time since anyone asked her about her father. After he left, she and her mother learned through the postcards he sent that he had moved to Florida, then California, then cities in Europe; each time he wrote from farther away. “I’m listening to Wagner. To The Ring,” he wrote. “The music matches my mood, Eleanor. Listen to it. Feel my soul in the music.” The summer Eleanor was fourteen, he was living in Miami, and he sent her an airline ticket to visit. The trip was a disaster. He lived in a hotel. She remembered the connecting door between their two rooms. From her own bed she could hear him twist the caps off of the miniature bottles of scotch from the minibar; the creak of the room service cart; and his long, convoluted business conversations over the phone. It was always those connecting doors she remembered, and the dark hallway in between, and her fear of crossing over the threshold into his room. If she were a painter, that is the image she would paint. The empty hallway. All night he listened to music by Chopin, Beethoven, and Mahler from a portable tape recorder. He never took her to see the beach. “The sun’s too hot,” he had said, his skin nearly white.
“Here, Eleanor. Listen to this. ‘The Flight of the Bumblebee.’ I recorded it for you.”
“But Daddy, it’s a beautiful day.”
“You go, Eleanor. I can’t bear the brightness.”
“I don’t want to leave you, Daddy,” she had said, and put on the headset to be closer to the language of her father’s heart. A swarm of bees.
“You’re pissed at your father, aren’t you? You can talk to me, in here, when we’re alone together. You can say anything.”
“I worry about him. He doesn’t take care of himself.”
“Be angry. I’m giving you permission.”
“My father writes me letters about his girlfriends. One wanted him to settle down with her in Florida. In Florida, he had written, as if it were the tundra. About another girlfriend he met in Paris, he said she wasn’t passionate enough for him. He said a woman has to be slightly irrational. I hope you haven’t taken after your mother. I mean, doesn’t he get it? How it would make me feel? I really don’t see the point.”
