Robin Black - Life Drawing

A life’s work indeed. The work of life.

I took the canvas of Jackie playing chess, the very first one I had started, and I began to paint a shadowy portrait of another Jackie Mayhew over the one already there. Jackie in clothes a boy his age might have worn. Long wool pants. Suspenders. I covered parts of his uniform entirely, a white buttoned shirt obscuring long swaths of khaki, but I let the uniform bleed through his clothing at other points. Then I imagined a younger Jackie Mayhew, truly a boy, and made sketches of that face to layer into the one already there.

How do any of us walk across a room without tripping over our own multitudes? I’d wondered that at Thanksgiving, my arms still alive with physical, forgotten memories of another self.

It didn’t matter to me that night that the painting’s message could be seen as simple. Maybe to paint young dead soldiers is necessarily a simple thing. Maybe the depiction of tragedy is just that and should never be made more complicated. There really wasn’t much complicated to say about a boy being blown up at seventeen.

But the boys themselves deserved better than simplicity. They needed to be, as they were, as we all are, layers and layers and layers of selves. I doubted it would ever be a great painting, but that was what I could give them. That was what I was capable of bringing to their figures, this total and complete absence of precision. The mess and contradiction of what every human being is.

I painted until I could barely stay awake, and then I stumbled my way upstairs.

I’d only slept an hour or so when Owen woke me with the news that Nora had left in Alison’s car during the night, without a word. Alison was frantic, he said. Nora had been in a state. All of it had fallen onto the girl: my anger, Owen’s pity, her own humiliation. And then Alison had been furious with her, too. Whatever united front she’d constructed for my benefit, she had let Nora have it for betraying her confidence.

All this, while I still lay in bed, Owen snatching his wallet off the dresser, putting a belt into his pants. “Alison’s hysterical,” he said. “She’s convinced Nora’s going to do something stupid.”

I offered to go over.

“Not a good idea,” he said. “She isn’t thrilled with me, but I didn’t call her daughter a cunt and tell her to go fuck herself.”

I asked if there was anything I could do. “She’ll turn up,” he said. “She’s not as fragile as Alison thinks. She’s not as young as all that. Not in every way.”

“Good,” I said. “I’m sure you’re right. Where are you going?”

“I’m just going to drive around a bit. See if I can find the car. Maybe at a motel. It’s cold as hell. She has to be somewhere.”

“What about her father’s? She could have gone there.”

“Alison called. She isn’t there. And not with any of the friends Alison knows. Okay,” he said. “I’ll be back in a bit.”

“Good luck,” I said. “I hope you find her. Safe and sound.”

He didn’t find her, and she didn’t call. By nightfall Alison had phoned the police but it was too soon for anything official to be done. Maybe if Nora were younger, but a twenty-two-year-old who skips out for a day? They told her it happens all the time.

Owen went out looking again that night. When he came back, it was to our bed.

“No luck?”

“No luck.”

I asked him again the next morning if he was sure I shouldn’t go see Alison, certain that I really wasn’t welcome, but the answer was the same. She blamed me for what had happened. She blamed herself too, but mostly she blamed me.

“She doesn’t blame you?” I asked. “For encouraging Nora?”

He had been kind, maybe too kind; but kind. I had been vicious.

By the third day, the police were involved and had set up an alert. Owen divided his time between driving around every morning — to where, I couldn’t imagine — and then keeping Alison company. Alison, who by his account was almost too distraught to breathe. I would watch him walk over the snowy hill to her house and then a couple of hours later watch him come home, grim-faced, somber. I wondered if he adjusted his expression to something less frightening when he was walking toward her, just in case she was watching, trying to gauge his concern. He’d told me that all he did was keep reassuring her that things would be okay, but that really he was just there to distract her for a short while, until she wanted him back out searching again. “I tell her it would be different if she had been kidnapped. She’s just run away from home. And she’s fully capable of taking care of herself. She’s not a child.”

I didn’t ask him if he believed that. And I didn’t ask him whether if she had leapt off a cliff somewhere, he too would blame me. I knew the answer. He would blame us both.

For three days, everything stood still. Everything except worries and searches and worst-case-scenario nightmares. And then on the fourth day, she called. Just like that. Owen was at Alison’s when her cell phone rang. It was the father’s number. Nora was there. She was sorry. She had needed to hide out for a while, to get her head straight. She’d been staying with a friend Alison didn’t know. She knew it had been wrong. But it hadn’t occurred to her that anyone would think she had killed herself. They’d been drunk pretty much the whole time. She just couldn’t face anyone. Not even Alison. And she was never coming back there. Obviously. But she was safe.

The police were notified, the search called off. Owen immediately lent Alison our van to go see her. I couldn’t imagine her being in any shape to drive, but I had no role to play. He knew her history as well as I did. He made the choice.

And then we were alone.

Iwill always remember the lunch we had that day as if it were a wedding meal, special enough for every detail to survive, though in fact it was nothing out of the ordinary. A salad and some bread. A hunk of cheddar and a cold chicken breast, sliced and divided between our two plates. Beers for us both. A run-of-the-mill kind of lunch.

But that isn’t what my memories are like. In memory, each silken leaf of salad shines with a different green, new shades invented just for us; and the bread is symphonic in its textures, revelatory in its taste. The cheese, the chicken, each has somehow been saturated with flavors both comfortingly familiar and exhilaratingly new. We share our bites, we feed each other. And each time the scene is revisited it intensifies, becomes more beautiful, this simple meal of ours.

The crisis had passed. Nora’s crisis, yes, but more than that. Somehow in the hysteria and the fear, our old selves had emerged, recognizable, waiting for us like well-worn clothes into which we could step. Owen. My husband. The man with whom I had built a life and then destroyed it and then rebuilt it and then almost destroyed it again. Just Owen. The man whose body had memorized my own, whose heart had expanded to match the demands of mine. How long had it been since the last time I had felt this peculiar, familiar sensation of being alone by being together?

I knew exactly how long.

“Do you think Alison will ever come back?” I asked.

“Just for her things,” he said. “To return the car, I guess. She’ll have to. Unless she sends a friend.”

I wanted to say, It’s over, isn’t it? All of it. We’re back to normal, aren’t we? But I was worried that if I pushed too hard for reassurances, he would feel a need to withhold.

“It probably won’t be tomorrow,” I said. “I can’t see her rushing back.”

“Who knows? I’m just glad they’re both okay. And I’m glad they’re both gone.”