The Life Room (9 page)

“I cared,” she said, suddenly realizing the truth of her words.

“I always liked being around you. You made me feel that it was okay to be sensitive. I don’t have to pretend around you like I have to around Chrissy.”

She looked at him carefully.

“I’m not kidding.”

He explained that he was only working in Chrissy’s father’s restaurant for the money. “I have to get out of Chicago. I mean, how many more hamburgers can I flip? I want to make something out of my life. Chrissy doesn’t understand what’s at stake. Her father’s dangling the keys to his business in front of her face. He manipulates everyone with his money. She doesn’t get the writing thing. She thinks it’s something I’m going to get out of my system.”

“I didn’t know you wanted to write.”

“Yeah. I heard Ginsberg read from
Howl
once in San Francisco. It blew me away. He’s the only poet who can write that ‘the world is a mountain of shit’ and get away with it. There was something about the rawness of what he was doing that I connected to. Same with Kerouac.”

She’d never read Ginsberg or much of Kerouac, but she thought, compared to many of the pompous, entitled graduate students in her department, Stephen’s passion for their work was refreshing.

“I don’t think you really can come home again. I mean, and be the person you once were. That’s why I need to leave Chicago, Eleanor. I don’t like who I am here.” They sat in front of the fireplace and watched the fire consume the wood. “I have ideas. But I can’t do it in Chicago. I’m frozen here. All the memories. The pain.”

She looked at him with recognition, thinking of her own parents. She knew exactly what he meant. She suddenly felt very close to him.

He was quiet for a moment. “Eleanor?” He paused. “What if I can’t?”

“Can’t what?”

He shook his head, not wanting to finish the sentence, and she let it go.

Outside it had begun to snow. From the window, it was a field of white. “You have to do what’s going to make you happy. You can’t live for other people,” she said, thinking of William again.

“What about you, Eleanor? Are you seeing anybody?”

“Not really. There’s someone here in Chicago. But we’re really not together anymore. We’re taking a break.”

“I’d like to move to New York one of these days. I’m going to do it, Eleanor. I want it so badly I can taste it. I want to be a journalist. Travel the world. Write something so moving it will bring tears to your eyes. I have to turn this painful stuff inside me around. You know what I mean. Don’t be surprised if I show up at your door.”

He stretched out his legs and their thighs touched. She
did
know what he meant. It was the reason she had needed to leave Chicago, in spite of how painful it had been to leave William. The snow formed a ledge against the outside of the window, imbuing the house with a feeling of warmth and safety. She allowed herself to hold the calmness inside her. She looked at Stephen again; it seemed as if there was more he wanted to say. He exuded closeness and intimacy and invitation. He made her want to take his hands and bring them to her lips to relieve their coldness. But when she looked again she saw distance and study, hurt and promise and misunderstanding, and she didn’t know if she could quite trust the way he absorbed her when he talked. It seemed practiced, intended to draw her further into the conversation so he could stay one step removed. She felt she had to be on her guard against it.

They sat in the darkness without talking. Eleanor leaned her head back on the sofa, closed her eyes, and tried to quiet her mind. His hand found hers, as if he’d understood and read what she was thinking, and for a moment she no longer felt the loneliness that had defined her life in Chicago. He stroked her hand as if he wanted to know her more intimately She liked the feel of his hand touching hers, and felt herself shutting off all sensations save his touch. But then something about the feeling his touch inspired made her cautious again.

She wondered if Stephen was always alone, even inside himself, just like William. Some men were always alone and others were a part of the world, and she wondered why in the past she had given herself to the boy who was alone. Was she also like that? As she continued to hold Stephen’s hand, the heat began to rise in her face, and she was aware that she wanted him to kiss her; it became uncomfortable sitting next to him. From the living room window, it was getting lighter. And as the sky lightened, the distance moved between them. She knew once he left she’d be alone again, and she felt the need to pull away in order to make space inside herself for his leaving.

“I like sitting here with you, in the dark,” he said. “I hope this won’t embarrass you. When I first saw you tonight I could barely speak. You’ve grown up, Eleanor. You look great.”

He suddenly rose and gathered his coat and scarf from the chair where he had left them. The expression on his face changed. “Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to see each other,” he finally said.

“Why?”

“It won’t be the same. Still being here in Chicago once you’re gone.”

Eleanor walked him to the doorway, though she didn’t want him to leave. He moved his face very close to hers. She thought for a minute he was going to kiss her, and she was surprised when he stopped. It made her draw further inside herself, instead of reaching toward him. It nearly made her turn her head when he said he was sorry he had to go, without any mention of whether they would see one another again. They said goodbye awkwardly, and she closed the door a little too forcefully after him, stunned that his leaving troubled her.

Long after Stephen left, Eleanor lay in bed thinking. She thought about his desire to be a writer and how he had seemed more open than she had remembered him. They seemed to share a bond. She watched the light of dawn slowly come into her bedroom, and she thought about how she wished he had kissed her. She almost felt the imprint of his lips on her own as she remembered how he had moved toward her and then stopped. Why had he turned away, just when she was opening herself to him again? Her disappointment and self-doubt turned into self-punishment. Perhaps she had not adequately expressed to him her own feelings, thinking he had intuited how she had felt. And her self-punishment turned to longing again, and it was inside this circle of emotion that she was caught. In the morning the grass was frosted, the branches on the tree that connected her house with his mother’s sealed in a sheet of ice.

Inside the blue Tiffany’s box Adam gave her that Christmas was a strand of beautiful black pearls. White pearls represented purity. Black pearls were seductive. She took them as a sign. When she returned to work the day after the new year, she flashed them outside her white blouse. She was sick of her midwestern self who grew up believing that she must be good and nice and reward anyone who approached her with a smile. She longed to be detached and indifferent and to command attention the way self-possessed, detached people did.

She was glad to be back in New York. Enough of the boy at home. She had called William, but he would not answer her calls. The entire seven days she had been in Chicago, she had hoped they would see each other. It was as if she had been testing him without having been aware of it, and the fact that he hadn’t sought her out—if he truly loved her he would have—hurt her deeply. She convinced herself she had no other alternative but to forget him. She didn’t want to think about Stephen, either. She wasn’t going to romanticize their attachment. She had carried the evening with Stephen back with her on the plane, and then to her little apartment in New York City, but he had a girlfriend. She guessed that he had quarreled with Chrissy at her parents’ house earlier that evening and had sought her out as a distraction; that supposition became her reality. She told herself that he must have been lonely that night, as she had been, and that her sudden feelings for him were a way for her to combat her feeling of loss over William.

Her mother had looked tired that Christmas. Eleanor sensed sadness in her routine: her small breakfast on the little table in the kitchen, a cup of tea, a slice of toast with jam, a piece of fruit as she sipped her tea and read the paper. Her migraines were more frequent.

“You have to move on,” her mother had told her, when Eleanor admitted she wished William would call. There was a secret world inside her mother. You could hear it in the way she breathed and sighed, see it in the way she brought her fingers to her temple, suddenly, when she was washing the dishes. “Do you really think you can be in love with one person your entire life, even if you’re not together?”

“Are you talking about William or Daddy?”

“It was a hypothetical question, Eleanor.”

It was cold inside Adam’s studio, but she didn’t care. She was glad to be back to the life room, where something new was being created. Adam had an electric space heater he kept near the daybed, but the studio space was so vast and drafty that it barely warmed up. “Do you mind taking off your cardigan?” he said, once they exchanged pleasantries, after she had thanked him for the pearls.

She remembered afresh that morning how hard modeling was. Her neck began to hurt. She had to stop herself from rotating her head from side to side. Her foot fell asleep and she had to resist shaking it. It was a subtle art, to be able to open up enough to allow the artist to draw what was inside. Adam wanted more. He wanted an emotional exchange. He wanted an attachment.

“Tell me how you work,” she said.

“When I initially coat the canvas, the subject is tentative. It’s as though there is a screen, a distance between the artist and the subject. There’s an aloof quality to the look in my subject’s eyes, as if she is embodying my distrust, until I begin to know her better. As the painting develops I begin to see her clearer. She becomes my focus. My
raison d’être
. If I don’t put everything I have in her, I see the falseness in the work. I look at the painting and it’s not honest.”

“How do you know what’s honest?”

“We’re all eventually transparent, Eleanor.”

While Adam painted, she imagined the waves of the sea building and receding. She sat for nearly an hour without moving, her mind focusing on the imaginary drift of the sea and the current of Adam’s gaze.

“You can’t imagine how sexy it is having you in my head. All the hours when I’m painting and not painting your image is inside me.”

She was startled.

“Your skin is soft. I want to paint it like velvet. And your hands. They’re petite but strong. Are they your mother’s or your father’s?”

“My father’s. I think.” She tried to recall her father’s hands. They were elegant, with long fingers that he had taken care to protect. They were hands with fingers that moved across a keyboard. She conjured her father’s hands cupping her cheeks when he kissed her goodnight. She felt them against her skin as he fastened the Star of David around her neck. She held on to the things she remembered about her father to remind her that she was still his daughter.

It had been a long time since anyone asked her about her father. After he left, she and her mother learned through the postcards he sent that he had moved to Florida, then California, then cities in Europe; each time he wrote from farther away. “I’m listening to Wagner. To
The Ring
,” he wrote. “The music matches my mood, Eleanor. Listen to it. Feel my soul in the music.” The summer Eleanor was fourteen, he was living in Miami, and he sent her an airline ticket to visit. The trip was a disaster. He lived in a hotel. She remembered the connecting door between their two rooms. From her own bed she could hear him twist the caps off of the miniature bottles of scotch from the minibar; the creak of the room service cart; and his long, convoluted business conversations over the phone. It was always those connecting doors she remembered, and the dark hallway in between, and her fear of crossing over the threshold into his room. If she were a painter, that is the image she would paint. The empty hallway. All night he listened to music by Chopin, Beethoven, and Mahler from a portable tape recorder. He never took her to see the beach. “The sun’s too hot,” he had said, his skin nearly white.

“Here, Eleanor. Listen to this. ‘The Flight of the Bumblebee.’ I recorded it for you.”

“But Daddy, it’s a beautiful day.”

“You go, Eleanor. I can’t bear the brightness.”

“I don’t want to leave you, Daddy,” she had said, and put on the headset to be closer to the language of her father’s heart. A swarm of bees.

“You’re pissed at your father, aren’t you? You can talk to me, in here, when we’re alone together. You can say anything.”

“I worry about him. He doesn’t take care of himself.”

“Be angry. I’m giving you permission.”

“My father writes me letters about his girlfriends. One wanted him to settle down with her in Florida.
In Florida
, he had written, as if it were the tundra. About another girlfriend he met in Paris, he said she wasn’t passionate enough for him. He said a woman has to be slightly irrational. I hope you haven’t taken after your mother. I mean, doesn’t he get it? How it would make me feel? I really don’t see the point.”

“The point?”

“You know what I mean.”

Adam put his brush on the table where he kept his palette. He moved toward her to adjust a strand of hair that had fallen in her face. “I do know,” he said, in a warm voice. “Now may I unbutton your blouse?”

“I’ll do it.” Inside she was trembling.

“We need to get closer.”

She stood very still as he unbuttoned the last two buttons. She felt the coldness of his hand on her chest. Slowly the blouse slipped from her shoulders, exposing her white cotton bra.
That was all
, she thought, wanting him to open other places inside her, wanting to be free of her wants.

He went back to the canvas. “When you’re my age, you’ll understand.”

“Are you condescending to all your models?” She was twenty-three. She thought she understood perfectly.

He said nothing.

“Then you’re happy?” She was thinking about the fact that he was married but didn’t act married.