Robin Black - Life Drawing

“Neither Georgia nor I has the least creative talent,” he would say. And he would marvel at my work in a way I was unused to, traveling as I did in artistic circles where it was just assumed that everyone had talent of some kind. To Bill, the fact that I could fill a canvas with oily goo from tubes and have the result be both beautiful and — as he would say and say — emotionally compelling, was nothing short of a superpower. That I could help his daughter do the same he looked on as a miracle. There was an innocence to him, an innocence of my world, that ultimately attracted me enough to rob us both of any claim to innocence we might make.

Sometimes, when Laine used us for subjects, she would ask that we sit motionless while we spoke, and occasionally would insist that we stop moving even our lips — almost as though she sensed something might be happening that she should try to avert.

But nothing could avert what was to come.

Watching Laine over those months was like watching a slow-motion film of a driver who damn near swerves off the road, but then corrects course just in time. Watching me, I suppose, was like some kind of reversed reel. At the time, it felt like the relationship that Bill and I developed was helping me heal — from Charlotte’s death; from learning that with Owen I would never have the children I had decided I wanted after all. I felt not only grief-stricken then; I felt incapable. I had been unable to save a sister. Unable to become a mother. What was I able to do? What powers did I actually have? I was right up close in a staring contest with the undeniable fact that for all the little things over which we have some control, for the most part we have none; and I was at a loss to know how to respond.

It’s a lesson I might have learned when I was two and my mother died. It’s a lesson that should perhaps have been etched into me then, whatever my conscious memory of events, but it felt newly true after Charlotte’s death, after my own empty body remained unfilled.

And to be honest, after faux Dean, I think I may be done with relationships for a while. I mean, the whole “we’re going out together” thing is kind of a joke. I know you’ve been with Owen your entire adult life, but the truth is that basically no couples my age make it past a year. So why even pretend it’s some kind of lifelong thing? I would much rather put that kind of commitment into my work.…

This is us on the afternoon of Laine’s last lesson:

Bill and I are seated on wobbly old stools at the end of my studio, all rough-hewn factory space. And we are suddenly awkward with one another. Because it has happened in a flash. A look has passed between us, a sudden, irreparable change. And it has stifled the flow of our speech. For weeks now, for months, we have been engaged in excitement over Laine’s next step. She got into the school she wanted to attend. She put together a senior project of paintings so eloquent they seemed eternal; they seemed like real art. It is all so exciting. I am filled with pride, as though she were my child. Maybe I exaggerate my own role — my push back to the universe. Look! Look, it does matter what we do. It does .

But in all the excitement, in all of the pride, one fact has gone unrecognized.

It shouldn’t be hard to manage — not if we really are, as they say, just friends. It should be easy. Well, we’ll just have to meet for coffee from time to time .

Except suddenly what should have been easy has become impossible. Everything has become impossible as we sit together, Laine painting her own portrait some thirty feet away. It is unacceptable to leave seeing each other to chance. But to make a date … there is no kidding ourselves. To make a date is to make a date.

And we do not make a date. But I know that we will make a date. Laine gives me a huge, heart-rearranging hug goodbye; and as I tidy up, forestalling going home; as I walk the six blocks, then add six more; as I eat dinner with Owen; moving through every activity of that evening, that night, the next two days, I am both agitated and disturbingly calm. Because I know what is going to happen. And it scares the hell out of me. But it also feels right. And good. And deserved.

… And my work is going well. At least I think it is. I hope yours is too and I hope the country life is still good. You have to tell me everything. It’s been way too long. You owe me a full report

.

Love

,

Laine

Deserved.

To what exactly had I felt entitled with Bill? There is an answer: Joy. Not happiness, which by that time seemed a fantasy one had to agree to give up in order to keep from going mad. By forty, is there anyone who hasn’t had to recognize that happiness, as understood by youth, is illusory? That the best one can hope for is an absence of too many tragedies and that the road through the inevitable grief be, if not smooth, then steady? Daily life was a pale gray thing, it seemed, and to expect otherwise was to be a fool — at best.

But there could be moments of joy. And there had been something like joy in those afternoons with Bill and Laine. There had been hours for me so restorative, so critical to my vitality that the thought of never again felt like death. And it had been enough. As long as Laine was there and I could have her as my protégée, my girl, and her father for my partner, it was enough.

If only time had been forced to a stop.

We were a distortion of the married couple whose marriage collapses when their child leaves home — as Bill’s to Georgia did not even two years later when their son went off to school. Our child left us and we fell in love.

By the day of Alison’s arrival, I wasn’t in love with Bill anymore, but I was tender still, tender the way a bruise is tender; and it wasn’t a feeling I wanted that day, a day destined not for melancholy memories, but for the comic if also irritating potential of a new neighbor materialized across the hill. I typed a hasty response.

So good to hear from you, Laine. The class sounds good. The boy like a good one to dump. Much more soon, I promise. Lots of funny stuff going on here, along with some less funny stuff. I will have to catch you up. All love …

And then I stopped, just for a moment, before signing Augie , Laine’s nickname for me, born of her refusal when we met to do anything asked of her. “Why call yourself by your second syllable? People should call you Augie. Has anyone ever called you Augie?” No. No one ever had. And no one ever did — except for Laine and Bill.

“Augie,” I wrote, and pushed send, then returned to my work.

As if to shock myself back into the project, I picked up an obituary from the pile of papers, John “Jackie” Mayhew, killed at seventeen, in action in France; and I began to sketch his face in charcoal. I got the shape, the wide forehead, balanced by a wide jaw. And I could replicate his eyes, round and a little close together; the small lips, set for the photograph in that serious, straight line. All correctly copied. All distances between the features accurate. But as I drew, I felt the familiar sag of mediocrity travel down my arm, through my fingers, into the charcoal, onto the paper, stiffening my lines, emptying him of life.

“Of course,” I said out loud, as I viewed the result. “What did I expect?”

The western wall of my studio faces the pond. The eastern faces our front lawn. If you stand at the corner where east meets north, you can see scraps and pieces of Alison’s property about an acre away through the trees; and as I drew I knew that she was there, that I might see her carrying boxes and who knows what, if I looked. I also knew that if I looked, I wouldn’t stop looking. So, instead of crumpling the sketch, my first impulse, I pushed forward, softening a line here and there with a finger, using my reliable companions, light and shadow, to create more interest in the composition, if not in Jackie Mayhew’s emptied face.