Robin Black - Life Drawing

“What Gus really needs,” Owen said, “is to get back into her work. Gus is always at her happiest there.”

“It’s true,” I said, though vaguely irritated at the claim.

“Well then, I can also leave you alone to work. Whatever you need. This is such a difficult thing to go through.”

And so the evening wore on, worries about me alternating with more talk about the sorts of jobs Nora should be looking for back in Boston. She thought maybe something to do with early education —those jobs are still pretty available —though she really wanted to work in publishing, at least for a while. Owen, a whiskey or two in, proclaimed that that would be soul-destroying, unless she could find a small press filled with people who did it just for the love. She asked what he thought about people applying right after college for graduate programs. He said he thought it was a shame that she couldn’t just take some time to write before all the vultures set in . Alison thought she should consider whether she really wanted to be around little kids and their germs all the time.… And then someone would ask me how I was doing; and I would say fine, and that it was so interesting to watch someone teetering on the cusp of adulthood; or something equally inane. And as an hour passed, then another, I felt as though I were being aged, rapidly, like the beautiful princess in the fairy tale who is suddenly revealed to be an old crone, every aspect of me having to do with repair, while across the table from me sat the embodiment of potential.

Yet I didn’t hate Nora that night. Even if I envied her youth and her devoted mother and the amount of attention she seemed to accept without noticing. I felt I owed it to Alison and even to myself to get past all that. Yes, she was self-absorbed, but now that she had relaxed, it seemed less as though that was the result of ego and was instead entirely appropriate for a young woman excited about her life and also excited to have met someone to idolize. She was a bit short on boundaries, but to be otherwise at twenty-two might have been off-putting in its own way. For all her elegance and beauty, she clearly didn’t have her life figured out at all, and even the drunken barn episode, I decided, could be folded into this larger picture, as a typical overstep of youth. I noted that she stood to help her mother, clearing plates, wrapping food, slicing the pound cake, brewing the coffee. Alison had joked about her being well brought up and I’d had my doubts; but in some ways she clearly had been.

On the walk home, I said something nice about Nora to Owen, and he made a sound, an umhmm or a yep , which seemed a little distant, as though his mind was elsewhere. And then he put his hand on my back and said, “It’s been a long day, hasn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s been a very long day.”

Later, as I lay awake, sleep playing hard to get, it occurred to me to wonder if there had been anything in that sound he made, the umhmm or yep , to which I should have been attentive, whether in its indecipherable, preoccupied quality, there lay a clue to something worrisome. I had spent so long fearing that a young woman, adoring and beautiful, would make easy any need the universe might feel to even scores. And now one had shown up as if sent from central casting. But she would be leaving in the morning, I knew. And my tired mind longed to be at peace. So I shook the worry off.

The shouts from Alison’s yard drew me from my studio and Owen from the barn. A man. “Maybe if you weren’t such a FUCKING selfish cunt …” I could only see his back. Alison stood facing him, one step up on her porch. The ex-husband. Paul. It had to be. I thought Nora must be inside until I saw the window of the strange black car go down. “It doesn’t matter,” Nora yelled, her head leaning out. “Stop it. Just stop it! None of it matters anymore. Please … please just stop it. I want to go. Can we please just go?”

Owen and I, fifty feet apart, exchanged a look. Should we intervene? But then the man slammed his way into the driver’s seat and with more noise, more havoc, drove away; and Alison went inside.

“Jesus,” I said, as Owen and I met up. “That was … I thought someone else was picking Nora up. The friend. Martha. Or Heather. Heather, I think.”

He was still staring at Alison’s yard. “I thought so too.”

“I should go over there. See if she’s okay.”

“I don’t know.” He looked at me. “I don’t know if you should. Maybe let her settle down a bit?”

“That’s just wrong,” I said. “Why are you saying that?”

“I don’t know. I’m just not sure you want to get more involved.”

“Well, I’m sure I do. And you should be too.”

When I called “Hi there” into the house, Alison answered, “Up here.” At the foot of the steps, I said that I was just checking in. I said that I could go if she wanted me to, that I didn’t mean to barge in.

“No, come on up,” she called. So I climbed the stairs, trying to avoid tripping on the tattered runner as I did.

“I’m in the bedroom, toward the back. On the right.”

I had been in the hall often before, every time I’d gone into her studio. But it had a different feel to it with Paul’s bellowing voice still vibrating in the air. I wondered that I’d never noticed the absence of a light, the cracking plaster walls. When I reached her bedroom, I only peered around the door. She sat on the bed, leaning against a maple headboard, her legs straight, crossed at the ankles, her arms crossed too.

“I just wanted to check on you,” I said. “Be sure you’re okay.”

She was shaking her head. “He isn’t supposed to know where I am. And Nora knows that. He isn’t supposed to be here. Ever.”

“I’m so sorry.”

She patted the bed and I stepped into the room, sat beside her. “I had no idea,” I said.

“Thanks for checking on me.” She reached over, laying her hand over mine.

“You had told me, I just hadn’t …” Hadn’t what? I had believed her — in a sense. I certainly hadn’t thought she’d been lying about his hitting her. But there was some other way in which I hadn’t given it enough thought, hadn’t forced myself to imagine her being slugged, the power, the fear. The part about hitting had come up when I’d been so upset by Laine’s news about Bill, and all of my attention had been on that. My own little melodrama had allowed me to glide over what she had been through.

“I didn’t really get it,” I said. “I should have been more aware.”

“You have enough to worry about,” she said. “Your father … everything. I don’t understand how he got here. I know Nora wouldn’t have told him. She doesn’t … she doesn’t know every detail, but she knows enough. I told her, ‘I’d rather your father didn’t know …,’ and then how could she not tell me he was coming?” Her eyes were starting to brim.

“I’m sure it was just a mistake. She let something slip. Or he … maybe something about her cell? Maybe he could find her?”

She laughed, which pushed a tear down her cheek. “I don’t think even Paul is nuts enough to have her tracked on a GPS. I just … Oh well. It’s done. And you should know …” She was looking right at me. “… well, you saw. He’s awful. He’s so awful. I wanted a few months’ break from his rage.”

“I just hate that you’ve lived with that.” The room smelled like her, I realized, that distinctive lime perfume, but then also a little musty, the aging wood of old homes. “What was he so angry about, anyway? If I can ask.”