Robin Black - Life Drawing

During the first week or so of Alison’s tenancy, if we hadn’t known she had moved in, we would barely have noticed she was there — except for the car in the drive. True to her word, she left us alone, and we didn’t hear a sound. The only practical change I made to accommodate her presence was no longer traipsing around my own yard half undressed, and though I complained to Owen about that, it wasn’t, in fact, a big deal.

But then, one day, she appeared at the kitchen door.

“Knock, knock,” she called in. “Hallooo?”

She wore the same purple dress. She looked so exactly as she had, it was as though she hadn’t actually existed during the intermittent days. An apparition. She apologized for intruding, and I shook the apology off, saying something about having meant to check in on her, but … I gestured at the air as if it were crowded with unfinished tasks and obligations. “I’m afraid we haven’t been very welcoming. It’s been an oddly busy time for us.”

“Actually,” she said, “I’ve come by to ask if you and your husband might come over for drinks one night. Even tonight. Or any night. But please don’t hesitate to say you’re busy. I realize … I know what it’s like to want quiet and solitude. I just thought … Well, I thought I would ask …”

“And so it begins,” Owen said at dusk, as together we crossed the hill between our homes.

And so it began.

Two women and one man, middle-aged, reclining on gaudy, sunflower-patterned vinyl-covered chaise lounges. The porch supporting them is redwood, and has been smacked, ugly, against this dainty old farmhouse. The day is thinning into darkness, the light evaporating, so the fat, green midsummer trees not fifty feet away seem to be receding, excusing themselves from the scene. Only two patches of brightness remain. The spill from the lighted kitchen, some two dozen feet down the porch, and the fluid, silver hair of one woman, oddly immune to the dropping sun, glistening, glowing, like a fallen, restless moon.

On a table nearby are bottles, alcohol, enough for a party of fifty, as though the other guests have all left. Or as though they have never arrived.

“I wasn’t sure what you drink, so I just set everything out on the porch.”

The three people speak quietly, earnestly. They occasionally laugh — but not too heartily. They laugh knowingly. As though they have stumbled over a clue or a bit of evidence or a coincidence. Oh, yes! A laugh of recognition. That is so true .

Their reclining bodies add an air of intimacy to the scene as the conversation murmurs on.

“I was twenty-eight when I had Nora. I thought I was very grown-up, which of course I wasn’t at all.”

“We did a lot of work on the house. We are still doing work on the house. We will always be doing work on the house.”

“Before my marriage, I planned to be a doctor, but then life had other plans. For better and worse so to speak.”

“Owen uses the barn. I have a studio inside.”

Soon, they begin to slap at their skin. Bare ankles. Necks. Occasionally the man claps the air. One of the women makes a quick fist, opens her hand and examines it. The rhythm of this becomes more frequent, until the clapping and slapping, the odd skirmishes with the invisible, are drowning out the conversation. But still no one rises. Not for some time, as the sun drops more decisively and the last traces of color fade.

“I suppose we could go inside,” the silver-haired woman says. The others look at one another, a question passing between them. “Or you two probably need to get home,” she says. “I don’t want to keep you.”

“We really don’t need to leave,” the other woman says. “But we don’t want to impose …”

“Oh no. I would love it if you could stay.”

They begin to rise, each taking a few bottles from the table, a couple of glasses. They go inside, their arms filled.

Sometimes, when you do something for the first time, you’re aware it will be the first of many. When I first slept with Owen, I knew. I thought to myself: this will always have been the first time, even when we have had sex a thousand times, a million times, this touch will always have been the first. And this. And this. (With Bill, two decades later, I never had that thought. Every time was to be the last — especially the first time, when I was still comparatively innocent. Just this once. This was a mistake. Never again .)

“We’ll just go this once,” I had said to Owen, when conveying Alison’s invitation. “Just to get it over with.”

But I had been talking about a reality that evaporated right away.

Her kitchen floor had the same terra-cotta tiles as ours, but cracked and broken along the edges. And her appliances looked very much like the ones we had replaced. Too old to be in good working order, too new to be vintage. We’d dumped the electric stove in favor of propane, but she still had those awful black coils. Yet there were some nice things about the room, things more intrinsic than old appliances or shoddy tiles. The windows were much larger than ours, and I spotted a massive walk-in pantry that I immediately coveted.

“How much of the furniture is yours?” I asked as Owen and I sat at the oak drop-leaf table.

“Almost none,” she said. “Nothing in here. It’s an odd array too. Some very nice pieces and then some absolute bombs.”

“This kitchen is lovely though,” I said. “Great bones.”

She made us spaghetti as we sat bemoaning the bug bites we now had, all of us saying what a lovely evening it had been, meaning the beauty of the fading light and the mild air, meaning that the beauty had seduced us from worries about being eaten by mosquitoes; meaning too, how surprising, how fun.

We all offered more scraps of information about ourselves. A quilting circle of sorts, putting it together. We knew by then that Alison had been divorced for two years — and that there was something ugly there, though she didn’t go into detail. We knew that she had lived in Boston for the past nineteen years, but was originally from London, and had spent some of her twenties in DC. “I hear this is a big country, but I only managed to get from one end of the Northeast Amtrak corridor to the other in nearly thirty years.”

We learned that she worked as a high school science teacher at a private school, initially for the tuition break for her daughter, just graduated from Tufts — Laine’s age, I realized.

“I always assumed I’d stop teaching when she was finished with high school, but then my marriage ended. Empty nest, empty marriage. So I needed a way to support myself.” She stirred the sauce she had concocted of tomatoes, basil, garlic, as she told us she was on sabbatical from her job. It was the kind of school with a fund for its teachers to take sabbaticals, a wealthy school, for wealthy children. “The timing was perfect. Ran away to the woods to be an artist. For a time, anyway.” Her former husband was a philosophy professor. “But not what you’re picturing,” she said. “Not the tweedy, muddling sort. Not at all.” Her daughter — Nora — was traveling in Europe for the summer, and would be visiting for a few days at the end of August or maybe over Labor Day. “She’s hoping, well, she was a creative writing major in school, and I suppose she’s hoping to follow through with that. But for now she’s got to be looking for work,” she said. “Some sort of nonprofit, I suspect. She’s a bit of a do-gooder type.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” Owen said. “Or with creative writing, of course. Unless of course you plan on being happy.”