The Life Room (8 page)

“Relax,” he said. “You’re so tense.” He placed his hands on her shoulders and massaged them. “I’m glad you’re here.”

She continued to study the paintings, particularly the haunting image of the young boy lying with his face half submerged in water.

“What do you think? Does he compel you?”

He moved closer, so that they were touching, nearly pushing her forward with the breadth of his body, and inhaled her perfume. She felt the tickle of his breath on the back of her neck. She thought she should not let her feet move from the wooden floor of the gallery or else she would fly forward into the painting. Adam lifted the hair from her neck and piled it into his hand, as if he were drawing it into a ponytail, and then he let it go. A chill ran down her back before he disappeared into the crowd.

At home in her studio apartment, she wondered whether she had felt Adam’s groin push against her or whether she had imagined it. She flushed. She saw his paintings in her mind, that naked little boy alone in the tub. She ached with desire.

The next day in his studio she let him unbutton her blouse, and he painted her showing just the hint of her bra. She wore a kilted navy blue skirt and stockings. At the end of three hours, after the alarm went off, she dressed, put on her coat, and said good-bye. When she arrived home she felt she could still smell the fumes on her clothes from the oils in his studio. She thought of the canvases against his walls in various stages of completion. She undressed, sat on her bed in a tank top and underpants, and held the blouse she had worn in his studio to her face. She was supposed to finish a paper that was due that week, but she couldn’t bring herself to work. She thought about Adam undressing her in his studio. The smell of paint intoxicated her. She remembered his words. “It’s this strange twilight zone between rationality and unreason where the artist hunts,” he had said, looking at her ravenously. His hands were rough and chapped from the strong soap he scrubbed with after he finished painting for the day, and they had been cold against her skin, sending a charge through her body. She held the longing inside her until it had reached its finest luster. In bed she thought about him a long time before she fell asleep. She felt a pain in her chest, as if it had cracked open just slightly, and her eyes filled with unexpected tears. She did not once think of William.

But William was in her dream, and in her dream she loved him the way she loved herself, so when he was gone she was missing. In the dream she felt vacant to herself, a stranger, and the long great tide of missing him formed a central artery inside her.

They were skating round and round in a large circle, feeling the wind tear at their face, and they circled the rink at least a hundred times—she had that many circles inside her with the boy
,
that many hours of being next to him, absorbed in the circles they made together, the thrust, thrust, thrust, glide, glide, glide of their skates on the ice. They were holding hands and then William pulled away from her and she felt confused, as if all the years of their being together laying side by side in the dark like two commas were over and she felt shame
.

When she awoke from the dream, she looked in the mirror and everything was different. She told herself she couldn’t work for Adam anymore. Her heart was committed to someone else. She was going home for Christmas, and she convinced herself that once William saw her again, they’d be back together. She took the subway downtown. She got off at the Spring Street station and walked briskly to Adam’s building. She planned what she would say, keeping it short and simple. She didn’t want to break up a marriage. She was going through something of her own. She was vulnerable. She had a life, and though it was mostly in her head, still it was her life. She didn’t want to get involved with anyone. She didn’t think it would be possible for her to continue working for him under the present conditions.

He buzzed her into the studio. He was still wearing the same clothes he had worn the day before, jeans and a torn white T-shirt. He was unshaven. He had slept in the studio that night. The smell of paint was inside and outside his body, mixed with his pungent scent—she didn’t know how to describe it, like wet leaves?

“You didn’t go home last night?” she asked.

“I camped out here. I wanted to be close to my work. I was looking at you all night, Eleanor.” He pointed to the canvas. “And you? Did you sleep well?”

She propped herself up on the daybed and her mind went blank. She realized it took more energy to resist a person than it did to give in. She was leaving the next morning to spend Christmas break with her mother. She told herself that she would continue to sit for Adam until he finished the series of paintings she had committed to, and then he’d have to find a new model. But she liked the way he looked when he had just woken up, his hair matted in the back, his sleepy eyes. Looking at him made her not want to go home anymore. She wanted to stay with him and not think about what faced her back in Chicago.

Even though she had refused to marry William, she thought he knew she was already married to him. It made her furious that he could not see what he needed to do and that she could not change him. She didn’t want to think about him or her mother and her migraines. She didn’t want to think about the piano that was no longer played.

“It’s the artist’s lot,” Adam remarked.

She looked up at him, her face in a question.

“Empathy from a distance.” He was cleaning some brushes in the sink. “To obsess on what you cannot have.”

Eleanor reached for her coat.

“Have a good Christmas.”

She reached to unlock the bolt on his door. He stopped, turned off the faucet, dried his hands on his pants, and handed her a present, a small box bound with a red velvet ribbon.

Her cheeks grew hot. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“Take it with you,” he said. “Put it underneath your tree.”

“But I’m Jewish,” she said.

She called William once she was back in her own apartment to tell him she was coming home, sure that he would end his foolishness.

“We can’t see each other, Eleanor. I have to do this. I have to prove it to myself.”

“Prove what?”

“That I can live without you. Only then will it be possible for us to be together. Don’t come home.”

“I don’t want to ever see you again,” she said, trembling.

In Chicago, William was like a silent shadow next to her. She pictured him slipping his hand into the back hip pocket of her jeans. She heard him say her name, in that intimate way, filling her with a quick rush.

Her mother invited her best friends, Joan, Celia, and Carol, for Christmas. They formed their own foursome, a group of women from the neighborhood whose husbands had either abandoned them, or died, or divorced them. She learned from them that you could fill an entire lunch talking about fabrics for your couch or the color to paint your walls. She also learned that it was possible to survive disappointment if you chose to, or disappointment could put a dam in the middle of your life and you’d never be able to move forward. She learned that love could last a lifetime or a day, that there were all kinds of possibilities for losing or finding it. She learned that if you did not have faith, if you did not fulfill your dreams, they might hibernate in your head, creating such friction you couldn’t lift it from the pillow. She learned to love the sounds of a piano reverberating through her house, and then the absence of sound.
Why won’t he call me
, she imagined asking these women.
Why do I still care for him? Why can’t I forget him?
But she knew she would put on her cheerful face and leave her questions to herself.

While her mother basted the turkey, she caught Eleanor up on gossip. Stephen Mason had moved back to town after dropping out of college. He doesn’t trust institutions, Carol had explained. He wants to be a
real writer
. Her mother said he was working for his girlfriend’s father, at one of the restaurants he owned downtown. She looked outside past the backyard at the empty plot of land where the playhouse had once been. Now it was filled with tangled weeds and dusted with a light snow.

Celia was telling stories about her divorce. “Since when is gaining weight grounds for divorce?” she asked. They had eaten dinner and were sitting by the fire, drinking coffee and still sipping wine. “If you were married to the son of a bitch, you’d gain weight, too.”

Half listening to the conversation, Eleanor felt sorry for herself. She wondered why she had refused William’s proposal of marriage. If she’d said yes, he would be just now coming to get her and she could forget her worries of always being alone like her mother, of whether she’d actually get through her orals and dissertation, or whether she’d eventually get a job.

It was the point in a dinner party when everyone senses it’s approaching time to leave, but they also want to linger, to sustain that moment of pleasure where nothing is demanded from you other than to enjoy conversation with friends, slightly intoxicated by wine and cuisine and familiar sentiments. A tap on the windowpane of the front door startled her. Stephen Mason was standing underneath the awning. His coat was wet with snow and his face lit up when she opened the door. She was struck by the incongruities of his face: his chiseled cheekbones, his cautious but intelligent eyes, and the soft, slightly feminine wave of his hair, framing a masculine jaw. Looking at him made her think that people don’t really change, they simply become more themselves.

“Merry Christmas.” He handed her a bottle of wine and leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. “Hey, Eleanor. How come we never keep in touch?”

The comment surprised her. “I don’t know.”

“I thought I’d stop by and see if my mom was still here. Is it too late?” He explained that he’d had dinner with his girlfriend Chrissy’s family.

“No, I’m glad you came,” she said, surprised by her own words.

When he entered the living room, his mother brightened—the love of her life had walked through the door. “A house full of beautiful women,” Stephen said. “I must have been a fool to have missed dinner. Seriously, it’s good to be here,” he said, looking earnestly at Eleanor’s mother, then at his own mother, and then at Eleanor.

“We’re glad to have you,” Eleanor’s mother said. “Look how happy you’ve made your mother. She says you’re writing?”

Stephen explained an idea he had for a novel. Something about a guy who reconnects years later with a girl who used to live in the house in front of him. He went on to intricately describe the characters, catching Eleanor’s glance as he spoke. Sort of like Pip and Estella in
Great Expectations
, he said. The girl is sophisticated and learned and the boy never feels worthy of her until he finally leaves home and proves himself. He described it as a twist on Thomas Wolfe’s
You Can’t Go Home Again
. “Sound familiar?” he said, and looked at Eleanor with a raised eyebrow and began to laugh. She liked his sense of humor. In the middle of his description—Joan said he should call it
Destiny
—Celia and Joan and Carol said they should call it a night. “Should I take this personally?” Stephen said, and the four women including Elizabeth broke into laughter, clearly charmed. Carol gathered her coat.

“Are you tired, Eleanor?” Stephen said.

“No. Not really.”

“Do you mind if I stick around for a little while, then?”

“That would be nice,” she said, noting in his eyes that same lost look he had when they were children. She was tired of hoping that William would seek her out. She was glad for Stephen’s company. In fact, when she thought about it, she realized she liked being with him again. Eleanor did not follow everything he said but was surprised by his down-to-earth intelligence and daring. She was curious about him. She saw something in him that she felt she shared: a loneliness that inhabited the space her father had left. Her mother had bravely assumed the responsibility of Eleanor’s care, but there was something vague and weightless about the way she moved through the world, as if she, too, had gone adrift. Earlier that night when her mother was setting the table for dinner, she’d accidentally taken down an extra plate, then put it back. Eleanor knew it was for her father. She still wore her wedding ring.

When the company left, her mother had said goodnight and went upstairs. Sitting beside Stephen on the sofa, Eleanor noticed Adam’s wrapped present on the French desk in the living room, along with the present she bought for her mother. Though she had wanted to open it the minute she left his studio, she had refrained, as if she’d known that once she was in Chicago, immersed in memories of her past, she’d need something to remind her of her life in New York. She already felt far away from that life. Adam and the world he embodied seemed completely foreign to the quiet circumference of her small childhood world. She chastised herself for having entertained thoughts of becoming romantically involved with him, for dreaming that one day she’d lead a passionate artistic life. She told herself that she had imagined the intensity that had gone on in his studio, that it was simply the synchronicity between painter and subject that had intrigued her, and that outside the studio they were strangers. It seemed suddenly clear to her that for Adam she was an object, a subject for one of his paintings; he had no real desire to know who she was apart from how he could frame her to fit his own reality. It was silly to have endowed him with such power. She told herself that when she returned to New York she would put some distance between them and that she would focus on her own work. Adam was married.

“Eleanor, I’m glad you came home,” Stephen said, knowing nothing of her thoughts. “Ever since we were kids I’ve felt like you’re the only one who knows me. Do you know that I used to dream about you?”

“Really?”

“You didn’t know that? I thought about you all the time. Even after I moved in with my dad. I wanted to call you a hundred times, but I didn’t think you cared much for me.”