Robin Black - Life Drawing

“Gush.” She said it with a slur, with that wet, loose sound at the end. “Gush.” A sloppy word. As though she had always known the slosh and overflow of me, however I had tried to seem contained. She walked toward me, her left arm extended for a hug. It was the first time we had ever embraced. All through my occupation, as Len had called it, she’d kept the sort of distance a china doll ought to keep, as if for fear of being broken. But now, broken as she was, it seemed she had no fear.

“Don’t let the arm fool you,” Len said. “She’s still the same in there. And she’s still the boss. And when no one else is here, she talks my ear off. Some of this act is for show. Just to get everyone’s sympathy.”

She shook her head. “Don’t listen”—more slurred words. “I don’t. Can’t. But here …” She tapped her head, then made an okay sign with her left hand. “Me,” she said. “All there.”

“She’ll live forever,” Len said. “They haven’t invented the stroke that’ll take Ida down. She’ll bury us all.”

It was only then that I realized it was the arm in my painting that was paralyzed, the one part of her I had felt entitled to draw. For a moment I could imagine that I had put some kind of curse on her, spoiling what I had taken as my own; or maybe I had intuited somehow that this part of her was indeed the most human, the least perfect part.

But it was all ridiculous of course. Fairy-tale logic.

“I’m so sorry to hear about the stroke,” I said. “But I have a feeling Len is right. You’re obviously immortal.”

Ida said something I didn’t catch, then shook her head with impatience. “What brings you here?” Len asked. “I’m the only one who always understands her. Tough for her, being stuck with me.”

“You two seemed pretty stuck together before.”

Ida rolled her eyes. “My luck,” she slurred. She wore the same blue serge suit, or one just like it. A crisp white blouse. But her hair was cut short, maybe because she couldn’t style it anymore. And there was something else different, though it took me a minute to realize what it was: she had flat shoes on her feet, squared toes, Velcro tabs. No more perfect, tiny patent navy pumps.

“I really just came by to say hi,” I said. “I haven’t been to the city in so long. And …” I looked over at my old corner, the chair no longer there. “I was wondering, Ida. Len, you too. I was wondering if I could do a few quick sketches, that’s all. I so missed being here.”

Len, rolling a bolt of lavender tulle, laughed out loud. “Last time she said that, she stayed six weeks. Remember, Ida? Gus comes in telling us it’ll be an afternoon, and six weeks later, she’s still in that corner, the place stinking of turpentine.”

“That’s true,” I said. “You were both so patient and I was …” I let the sentence go. What had I been? Spiraling downward, in need of a safe place to hide, somewhere I could pretend I was only an observer, never an actor, never a part of any story, only a witness. “I was always sorry I hadn’t drawn the two of you.”

I expected Ida to shake her head no. I expected her to make it clear that the time for that had passed, but instead she nodded, looking at me, as though she had always known the request would come one day.

I told them I had a pad and some charcoal in my car. “I can sit in my old corner if I just move that chair. Only for a couple of hours,” I said. “I promise you.”

Years before, it had never once occurred to me to tell Ida the tale of my fall from grace. I had felt defined by shame. But that day, as I sat sketching them both, I knew, I was certain, I could have shared it all. And she would have shown compassion. Paralyzed, shorn, wearing shoes too clunky even for me, she seemed approachable. She seemed, for the first time, like a real human being.

But that view of her was also simple, I realized. She wasn’t a different woman because she’d had a stroke. She had never been perfect. She had been a beautiful woman who dressed well. A woman of style who seemed perpetually in control. A person in no danger of coming undone at her seams, from whose hands sprung masterpieces. But not perfect.

So why had I needed to see her that way? Why so entranced with this notion of a perfect older woman who would reject the real me?

The question had been a long time coming. The answer took no time at all.

As I sketched, the occasional customer stepped in. Len did most of the talking now, but Ida had a thousand ways to make her thoughts known. Her face, so serene and mysterious before, now, in partial paralysis, had turned expressive, fluent in a language of necessity.

I left them with about half the sketches that I did. I hugged them both and promised to be back sooner next time. Ida nodded, and Len declared himself disappointed that I really wasn’t moving back in for a month — minimum.

“Maybe next time,” I said. “You never know.”

Itacked the pictures of Len and Ida onto my studio wall that night. The Steinman brother and sister, patron saints of a sort for me. The drawings were undistinguished, no miracle breakthroughs, though the likenesses were there and it had tickled Len and Ida to see that. But the drawings weren’t on my wall as art. They were there as reminders of the example permeating every cell of Ida’s body now, of her unwavering, dignified integration of what she had lost into what still remained.

There was an ice storm on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve and our power went out, but only briefly. The lights came back on and the clocks did too, all blinking at 12:00—as if rushing through the last tattered scrap of the year. Neither of us reset them. Neither of us stayed up to see the year out.

I visited my father the next morning. He was talkative and insistent that I take to heart what he had to say, which was something very urgent about a dog. It had run away. It had been found. Or maybe it hadn’t been found. He wasn’t agitated, just set on being sure that I — whoever I was — know this about the dog. I recognized the mood, familiar to me by then. It was as though all pieces of information he could detect in his own thoughts, any knowledge, anything that felt like knowledge, had to be conveyed. The mere presence of a near-coherent thought gave it importance now.

“I’ll be sure everyone knows,” I said. “I’ll tell everyone.”

Out in the lot, while I was brushing the latest dusting of snow from my car, I saw the tall redheaded doctor. I reintroduced myself, knowing that he couldn’t possibly recognize me in my scarves, my wool hat; and I reminded him of my father’s predicament. “It’s been months,” I said. “There hasn’t been a sign of anything like those earlier episodes.”

Was it really impossible for him to be put back into a less confining setting?

The doctor’s demeanor showed evidence of his own months in this place. He seemed to have lost some of the enthusiasm he’d shown during the summer for the system and its rules. “It’s really difficult, I know,” he said. “But it’s not even physically possible. Those rooms have waiting lists. I’m afraid once a person’s been shifted out …”

“It’s just so sad,” I said; but I understood as I spoke that I was talking to someone who had chosen sadness for his career, who was not yet immune to it perhaps, but surely well on his way to accepting it as inevitable.

“I’m really sorry,” he said. “We had no choice at the time. This happens, once in a while. We err in the direction of safety and then, unfortunately, there’s no way to correct.”

I nodded, my lips closed tight, drawn into my mouth. I felt in danger of tears, so just muttered, “Well, thanks anyway,” and turned away, trying not to notice what a miserable start I was having to the year.