Robin Black - Life Drawing

Owen spotted Alison’s car as he walked back from the barn at around five. I saw him coming, and I stepped away from the studio, through the living room, into the kitchen, to fill him in on the news.

“What you don’t know,” I told him, “is that she’s a painter who came here in part because apparently we are one of the features of the home. The artist couple next door.”

“Oh great. That’s just what I want to hear. Maybe we can charge people admission to watch me stare hopelessly at the walls.” He turned on the tap. His afternoon drink of water. I was never sure whether he knew that he filled the same glass each day when he came back from the barn. I stayed silent while he downed it, as though neither of us could speak with his mouth full.

At fifty-one, Owen had finally lost some of that boyishness. His face, well defined by a long straight nose, a sharp, just barely cleft chin, was acquiring an unmistakable cragginess. The lines on either side of his mouth had deepened, and the light brown of his eyes shined now from below a lowered brow. Though still lean, he had become more substantial in the way some men do, almost as though their bones, not their flesh, have gained heft. His hair, which I had been cutting for years to a running stream of Samson and Delilah jokes, was graying gradually, all over. No creeping silver sideburns, just a lightening from year to year.

“It’s hotter than hell out there,” he said, as he put the glass down. “We could use a thunderstorm.”

“We really could,” I said.

By then it had been about ten months that Owen had been unable to write anything he thought worthwhile. Since his early thirties he’d authored five quirky little books, all published by small presses, all embraced by whatever critics took notice, and, for the most part, all eschewed by all but a couple of thousand readers. His was the sort of career that earns you descriptions like underappreciated and a writer’s writer , serious, significant praise that presents itself tinged with an aura of befuddled disappointment. In the great race of professional life, he saw himself as the ultimate tortoise, waving on multiple hares while hoping for the eventual victory. His share of our income over the years had come from juggled adjunct and lecturer jobs, a bounty of which exist in the greater Philadelphia area — though the word bounty seems wrong to describe something with returns, of money, of prestige, that are so slight. But through it all, for years and years, he kept at it, the teaching, the writing, all with a calm and a confidence that made me feel like a broken barometer as I careened over highs and lows of hope and despair over my own extremely modest professional life.

But then, the fall before Alison’s arrival, everything for Owen came to a screeching halt.

The only time I’d felt that sort of vise grip of creative emptiness was the year after I told him about my affair; and it had been easy for me to connect the two occurrences. Over those months, pain had blossomed in me at every waking, a physical sensation in my gut, as though I had swallowed a malevolent flower, responsive to the rise of the sun. Nearly all of my energy, creative and otherwise, went into contending with that ache.

And my unspoken fear was that Owen’s blockage, years later, also related to that time.

When I’d told him about Bill, he was already embarked on two simultaneous projects, books four and five, one a collection of essays about his itinerant childhood as the only child of a pair of married archaeologists, the other a novel that used related material, reimagining a particular summer afternoon of his mother’s life, early in her career, on a dig in Morocco. Both projects were shelved for some months while we thrashed through whether to stay together, but then, once the decision was made, though I found myself creatively stilled, he went right back to work. Those books kept him busy through our sudden affluence and our first years in the country. When they came out they were praised to the sky by critics in obscure literary journals, and barely sold — just like all of his previous work. I never understood it. I loved it all. The gentle, acute sensibility, the quiet passion for getting things right; while at the same time, evidently, poignantly doubting that such a task is possible. Whenever I read his work, I thought that all his readers must fall in love, and maybe all of them did, but for reasons that eluded me there never were very many in that group.

Then, soon after the double publication, it became clear that he was struggling to come up with something new. It made sense that there would be a transition lag, but from the start this felt like more than just needing a break between projects. I saw panic in his eyes when he came back in from the barn. Occasionally, it would seem as though he was onto something, for a few days, maybe even a couple of weeks, but then he’d walk into the house with that unmistakable expression on his face. Another project revealed to be hollow. I doubt I’ll ever do anything worthwhile again .

I was keenly aware that this was the first time he’d had to generate anything new since my telling him about Bill, and it was all too easy for me to believe that a piece of what I had shattered then was a necessary component of his creative being. The betrayer doesn’t get much sympathy, not even from herself, but it is in fact a heavy weight to have hurt someone you love, and it can be difficult even years later, to detect any impermeable boundaries around the damage you may have done.

We didn’t discuss writing or painting on that day of Alison’s arrival — nor, of course, Laine’s email to me — as together we made a meal of grilled lamb, salad, and rice. By then I knew better than to talk about work, his or mine. Earlier, in the spring, he’d told me it wasn’t helping to have to report in to me every day — his term. So I’d stopped inquiring. And I forgave him the irritation in his voice, the nasty phrase, because I understood the terror that it’s all just disappeared. I felt tempted at times to try and encourage him, to say things like I’ve been there and I came back. You’ll come back too . But I knew it would only irritate him, as it would have me. And it was simply impossible to discuss my own projects, however well or poorly they were going, in the context of a prohibition on mentioning his.

“Did she say how long she’s staying?” he asked, as we ate.

“That seems to be unclear,” I said.

This taboo created a huge chasm in our days, a terrible change in our rhythm. So much of our shared life together, a life that began when I was only twenty-two, had involved processing our work, comparing sorts of creativity, commiserating through lousy days and celebrating triumphs. But that dialogue depended on our both wanting to have it, and he no longer did.

This wasn’t my first experience living under a regime of unspeakable subjects. I was well practiced. After my mother died, my father mandated that she not be mentioned, so by the time my conscious memory of childhood kicks in, I was already trained to short-circuit the flow between my thoughts and my voice.

There were very few ways in which Owen reminded me of my father — at certain points just the idea of any similarity would have horrified me — but in fact both had played this censoring role in my life, rendering my speech a kind of topiary, trimmed and trained and shaped to please.

“I have a terrible headache,” he said, as he put down his fork. “But I don’t think we can blame the new neighbor for that.”

“Why not?” I asked. “Why not blame her for everything from this point on?”

Why not, indeed. By then I was more than ready to cast someone else in the role of guilty party.