Robin Black - Life Drawing

To paint a thing had always been a way for me to love it. And I was deep into a love affair with my own home; but not yet with the boys whose occupation of that home, of those pictures, was still only sketchy, who were themselves just blocked-out figures, bare, human-shaped white emptiness.

While I worked all that late afternoon, my thoughts drifted often to Alison and Nora. When I was actually painting, mixing colors, focused on a small task, I had no room in my head for anything else. But when I stepped away and tried to think through the larger scheme, the concept rather than the execution, my mind wandered to the house on the other side of the hill.

I tried to recall if there had been any resemblance between them. The eyes maybe? That same startling light gray? How could I not have noticed? But the differences were so overwhelming, the straight-lined body, the hanging blonde hair. All elongated. Nora, a Modigliani of her mother. I drew her, just a pencil sketch on a sheet of butcher’s paper that I kept unfurled to my right. Nora . I wrote it beside the picture, then erased the name, then erased the drawing too.

Only later did it occur to me that I had sketched a human figure with no self-consciousness, no hesitation, for the first time in many, many years.

Dinner was stew, thawed from the basement freezer where I stored double portions of everything I cooked in big batches — something I did every couple of months. The giant cooking day. The stew was in honor of the first breeze of fall. It wasn’t cold out, not even close, but there was a noticeably different quality to the air. Owen, after drinking his end-of-day glass of water, inhaled appreciatively. “Excellent choice,” he said. “That was the daughter, I presume? Out there with Alison? The evil ex-husband must be very tall. She has almost a Viking look to her.”

“I guess.” I ladled stew into our bowls, the same red stoneware we’d had for fifteen years, though we were down to only two from a set of twelve. “She wasn’t what I expected, for sure.”

“How long a stay?”

“I don’t know. The long weekend, maybe? A few days? Alison looked happy.”

“They came by?”

“Briefly,” I said. “Just for introductions.”

“Huh.” He sat across from me, ripped off a chunk of bread, dipped it in his bowl. And then we were silent for a while.

That one week of ease we’d had a month before seemed like years ago.

“It’s supposed to stay cooler like this for a few days,” Owen said.

“That’s good. It’s been a beautiful week. Nice for their visit, across the way.”

“How’s your dad doing? I keep meaning to ask.” He broke off another piece of bread. “No new episodes, I gather?”

“I spoke to one of the nurses yesterday. I should go back soon. But there’s nothing new. Not really.”

“I should go with you,” he said.

“It doesn’t matter to him. I promise.”

“Fucking nightmare,” he said.

“That’s for sure.”

After a couple more minutes passed, he asked, “So, what’s Alison like as a mother?”

“She seems … just as you’d think. Very maternal. Very happy. Beaming.”

He nodded. “That makes sense. She seems like a motherly type. You see it when she talks about the daughter.”

“Nora.”

“Right. Nora.”

We ate for a few more minutes.

“Things have changed a lot, haven’t they?” he asked; and for a strange moment I thought he meant between us; but then he said, “Since Alison got here.”

“I suppose. I don’t know. What do you mean?”

He frowned. “I mean, there’s obviously a big difference. Since for two and a half years we barely spoke to a soul and now we … we have a …”

“Neighbor?”

“Come on, Gus. There are neighbors and there are neighbors. I’m not sure you see how much time you spend with her. How much she occupies your thoughts.”

I took a bite of stew. “I don’t see the issue here. It’s time when you’re working—”

“Trying to work,” he said. “Let’s not elevate the activity.”

“I really don’t understand your problem with her. She doesn’t take away from us.”

“She doesn’t take away from our time together,” he said. “That’s true. Pretty much.” He stood, refilled his water glass. “Don’t make more of this than it is, Gus. I’m not attacking Alison. I just miss the days when we were out here all alone. There’s a part of me that’s looking forward to when her lease runs out. Except I’m afraid …”

“What?”

He turned from the sink and faced me. “Oh, you know,” he said. “How you gonna keep ’em down on the farm, after they’ve seen Paree? I just hope that when she’s gone, our solitary, rural life is enough for you.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “I couldn’t be any happier with what we have. Yes, I like Alison. I like having her here. And if every two years, a nice person moved in next door for a couple of months, I’m not sure that would be the end of the world.”

“I’m not blind, or stupid,” he said, sitting down. “It’s been a difficult summer. I just feel … I suppose in a way, I should be glad you’ve had someone to spend time with. I know I’ve been …”

I reached across the table for his hand. “This will get better,” I said. “I promise you.”

He looked at me with an expression so familiar I could almost feel it gather across my own face, a combination of disbelief and hope. “I promise you,” I said again.

“From your mouth to …”

“I promise you,” I said one more time.

In bed alone, around eleven, I heard them coming home, laughter slicing the country silence from all the way across the hill.

Owen was back out in the barn. I had been reading, but after their return, I switched off my light and rolled over to wait for sleep.

He hadn’t been entirely wrong. I couldn’t quite imagine myself returning to our solitude. Or rather I could imagine it all too well. Alone again in paradise with Owen. And his inability to work. And his need for me to tamp down my own excitement about my work. And his perpetual right to hate me for what I had done — a right he never seemed to exercise, a fact that somehow didn’t make it go away.

Had I been lonely for years? If I had been before Alison’s arrival, I hadn’t known it. There had been such a feeling of relief when we’d moved. And a feeling of safety. Until Alison brought me companionship and loneliness all at once, a package deal of some mean-spirited sort.

If Alison had never arrived … If Laine had never stopped being my student …

The only thing you are allowed to take from an affair is wisdom. You can’t say you are glad you did it or had moments of joy, but you can say that you learned a lot from your mistakes. And I did say that — to Owen and to myself. But in truth it was never clear that I had learned enough. After Bill, I spent so much time thinking about regret. Regret and its accompanying conviction that there is a perfect, placid life, one’s own alternate existence, pristine and simple, existing in a neighboring reality in which certain turns in the road were never set upon. And it isn’t true. Any of it. I knew that. I had learned it. But it is an irresistible fantasy, if only because it implies we have some control over our fates.

Owen came downstairs the next morning an hour or so after me. I was in the studio, but left my paints to join him. It was a cloudy day and in the kitchen, a space that tended toward dark, it could easily have been evening.

“Good morning,” he said, as I approached.

“You’re down later than usual.” I sat, keeping my paint-smeared hands and forearms away from the maple table, a local flea market treasure that I had somehow managed not to ruin in nearly three years.