I turned to the couch in a fury, although whether I was angry about the woman in the painting, or Robert's extreme talent, or his sleeping through calls from the job on which we would depend for future yogurt and diapers, I couldn't have told you at that
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moment. I shook him. As I did it, I remembered that he'd told me never to shake him awake--it frightened him, he'd said, because he'd once heard a true story about someone who'd lost his mind when startled out of sleep. I didn't care, this time. I shook him roughly, hating his big shoulder, his oblivion, the world in which he slept and dreamed and painted--and admired other women, those with slender waistlines. Why had I married such a slovenly, selfish person? It occurred to me for the first time that this was all my fault, my having such poor judgment. Robert stirred and mumbled. "What?"
"What do you mean, what?" I said. "It's four in the afternoon. You missed your morning classes. Again."
I was gratified to see him look stricken. "Oh shit," he said, sitting up with apparent effort. "What time did you say it is?"
"Four," I repeated crisply. "Are you planning to keep your job, or shall we raise this baby in abject poverty? Up to you."
"Oh, stop it." He slowly peeled the old blankets off his body, as if they weighed fifty pounds each. "There's no need to be righteous."
"I'm not being righteous," I said. "But the Art Department may be, once you call them back."
He glared at me, rubbing his head and hair, but said nothing, and I felt a lump begin to rise in my throat. I might be alone, as things turned out--or perhaps I was already alone. He got up and put on his shoes and started down the stairs, while I followed cautiously, afraid of slipping, off-balance, miserable. I wanted to stay as close to him as possible, to kiss the back of his curly head, to hold on to his shoulder so I wouldn't sway and fall, to berate him and scratch his back with my fingernails. For a moment I even felt a flash of long-subsumed physical desire, an awareness of the swelling of my own breasts and middle. But he was well ahead of me, and now I could hear him hurrying down to the kitchen. When I arrived, he was on the phone. "Thanks, thanks," he was saying. "Yeah, I guess it's just a little virus. I'm sure I'll be over it by tomorrow. Thanks, I will." He hung up.
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"You told them you had the flu?" I had meant to go over to him, put my arms around his neck, apologize for being short-tempered, make him some soup, start over. After all, he worked hard, he painted hard--of course he was tired. Instead, my voice came out flat and nasty.
"It's none of your business what I told them, if you're going to talk to me like that," he said, and opened the refrigerator.
"Did you stay up painting?"
"Of course I stayed up painting." To my further disgust, he pulled out a jar of pickles and a beer. "I'm a painter, remember?"
"What's that supposed to mean?" Now I was folding my arms in spite of myself. I had an entire ledge to rest them on.
"Mean? It means what it means."
"Does it mean painting the same woman all the time?"
I had hoped he would turn to me and scowl, tell me coldly that he had no idea what I was talking about, that he painted whatever he was painting, whatever he felt the need to paint. To my growing horror, he looked away instead, his face frozen, and began to open his beer without speaking. He seemed to have forgotten the pickles. It was hardly the first time we'd quarreled in our nearly six years together, or even in the past week, but it was the first time he'd ever looked away.
I couldn't imagine anything worse than his expression of guilt, his avoiding my eyes, but a moment later the worse thing happened--he glanced up without seeming to see me, his gaze fixed itself on some point just over my shoulder, and his face softened. I had the awful, creeping feeling that someone had soundlessly appeared in the doorway behind me--the hair actually began to rise on my neck. I struggled not to turn around while he stared, his face blind and gentle. Suddenly I was afraid to know more. If he had fallen in love with someone else, I would find out soon enough. I wanted only to lie down, to hold my baby close and rest myself.
I left the kitchen. If he lost his job through his own irresponsibility, I would go back to Ann Arbor and live with my mother. My
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baby would be a girl, and we three generations of women would simply hunker down and take care of one another until she could grow up and find a better life. I went to our bedroom and lay down on the bed, which squeaked under my weight, and pulled the comforter over me. Tears of weakness seeped out of my eyes and ran down my cheeks. I wiped them away with my sleeve.
After a few minutes I heard Robert approaching, and I closed my eyes. He sat down on the side of the bed, making it sag further. "I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't mean to be mean. I've just been really wiped out from the term and from working at night."
"Why don't you slow down, then?" I asked. "I never see you anymore. Anyway, it seems as if you're sleeping most of the time, not working." I stole a glance at him. His face seemed normal again. I thought I had been mistaken about the strange look.
"Not at night," he said. "I can't sleep at night. I just get on a roll, a big roll, and I feel as if I need to use every bit of it. I'm thinking about doing a new series, something with a lot of portraits, and I just feel as if I can't sleep until I get some of it done. Then I get really tired and I have to sleep it off. I guess I was up for three nights."
"You could slow down," I repeated. "You'll have to slow down when the baby comes anyway." Which could be any minute, I added to myself, although I was too superstitious to say it aloud.
He stroked my hair. "Yes," he said, but it sounded absent-minded and I felt he'd already drifted again. Some of my mother-friends at the sandbox had told me that husbands occasionally "flipped out" before the baby arrived--they laughed about it as if it were nothing serious. "But when they see that baby --," they would add, and everyone would nod. Clearly the first glimpse of a baby fixed everything. Perhaps that would fix Robert, too. He would become a morning person, paint at reasonable times, hold down his job automatically, and go to sleep when I did. We would take walks with the stroller and put the baby to bed together in the evenings. I would become a painter again myself, and we could
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work out some shifts, take turns caring for the baby and painting. Maybe we could keep the baby in our room for a while after all, and use the second bedroom as my studio.
I thought about how to describe this to Robert, how to ask for it, but I was too tired to search for the words. Besides, if he didn't do those things with and for me of his own free will, what kind of a father was he going to be? It worried me already that he never seemed to have any idea how much or little money we had--usually how little--or when the bills needed to be paid. I had always paid them myself, licking the stamps and putting them on straight in the upper corner of the envelope with a sense of satisfaction, even if I knew that when they were deposited at the other end our account would plunge nearly into the red. Robert squeezed my shoulder. "I'm going to finish my painting," he said. "I think I can finish it by tomorrow if I get going again."
"Is she a student?" I made myself ask it, fiercely, afraid I would be unable to ask later.
He didn't seem startled. In fact, he didn't even seem to register the question--there was no guilt. "Who?"
"The woman in the painting upstairs." Again, I made myself form the words, sorry already. I hoped he wouldn't answer.
"Oh, I'm not using a model," he said. "I'm just trying to imagine her." It was strange--I didn't believe him, but I didn't think he was lying either. I knew with a feeling of dread that I would be scanning all the young faces on campus from now on, all the curly dark heads. But this made no sense. He had already been sketching her before we left New York, or at least just as we were leaving. I was certain it was the same face.
"It's the dress that's so hard to get right," he added after a moment. He was frowning, scratching the front of his hair, rubbing his nose--normal, perplexed, absorbed. God
, I thought. I am a paranoid fool. This man is an artist, a true artist, with his own vision. He does what he wants, what occurs to him, and the result has been brilliant. It doesn't mean he's sleeping with a student, or
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with a model in New York. He hasn't even been back there since we moved. It doesn't mean he isn't going to be a good father.
He got up, bent from his height to kiss me, paused at the door. "Oh, I forgot to tell you. The department elected me to do the faculty solo show next year. We take turns, you know, but I didn't think they'd let me go so soon. The museum in town is getting involved. I'll get a raise at the same time."
I sat up. "That's wonderful--you didn't tell me."
"Well, I found out yesterday. Or maybe it was the day before. I want to have this painting done for it, for sure, maybe the whole series." He was gone and I was left smiling, pulling the comforter over me for half an hour. Perhaps, like Robert, I had earned a nap.
But the next time I went to the attic to hunt for him, I found he had scraped the canvas down to its bones, preparatory to cleaning it for a new image--maybe the red-striped dress had not really worked in the end. I almost felt I had imagined that face a second time, that expression full of rueful love for him.
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Mon cher oncle et ami:
How good of you to come yesterday just as the rain was beginning to Jail, which always promises a dreary evening. It was lovely to see you and hear your tales. And today it's raining again! I wish I could paint rain--how would one actually do that? M. Monet has managed it, no doubt. And my cousin Mathilde, who loves all things Japanese, has a series of prints in her drawing room that French artists can only dream of emulating--but perhaps rain is more uplifting in Japan than in Paris. How I would love to know that all nature was open to my brush, as it seems to be to Monet's, even if people are unkind about him and his colleagues and their experiments. Mathilde's friend Berthe Morisot exhibits with them, as you may know, and she is already well known (too much exposed, perhaps, in public exhibitions; that must take courage). I wish it would snow again -- the beautiful part of winter is all too slow in arriving this year.
Fortunately, there is your note this morning. It was dear of you to write to me as well as to Papa. I don't deserve your kind words about my progress, but my porch studio does help; I while away the hours there when Papa sleeps. We also learned by this morning's post that Yves will be delayed out of town at least two weeks, a blow for us all but especially for Papa. It must he better to have no children, like us, than only one, as my father-in-law has, when that one is so dear and yet constantly called away from home. I feel for Papa, but we sit by the fire and hold hands and read our Villon aloud. His hand is so frail now that it might serve as a study in old age by Leonardo or some ancient Roman sculptor. How wonderful that your big canvas progresses and that your articles will find an even wider sphere--I must insist on my right to be as proud as any blood relative. Please accept the congratulations of your doting niece --
Béatrice
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CHAPTER 23 Kate
Ingrid was born on February 22 at the birth clinic in Greenhill. Nothing ever dims that moment for me, when I realized she was alive and well--exquisite, in fact--or the later moment when I found her hand wrapped in a knot around my finger. And I had not been killed by my ride through flame. Robert stood touching her, the tip of his own finger nearly as big as her nose. I was crying, too, it turned out, and when I looked at Robert I felt a love for him so radiant that I had to avert my eyes from his face, which shone like a gilded ring. I hadn't understood before what it meant to be in love--I couldn't choose which of these two people, the very small or the towering, I loved more. Why had I never noticed Robert's divinity, reproduced now in the tiny head that lay on my skin, the hazel eyes gazing around with such disbelief?
We named her for my long-dead grandmother from Philadelphia. Ingrid was a reasonably good sleeper, and our pattern continued after that first night. Robert and Ingrid slept, and I lay watching them, or reading, or walked around the house, or cleaned the bathroom, or slept with them. Robert seemed too tired to stay up painting--the baby woke us three times every night, which was nothing, I assured him, and he found that exhausting. I offered to let him nurse her, and he laughed sleepily and said that he would if he could, but he thought his milk wouldn't taste good even if he could produce any. "Too many toxins," he said. "All that paint."
I felt a twinge of annoyance that could have been jealousy-- did I hear self-congratulation in his tone? There wasn't any paint in my bloodstream, only healthy foods and the postnatal vitamins
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I still felt we couldn't afford but didn't want to deny the baby. That feeling I'd had of love, almost worship, for Robert in the delivery room had slipped away from day to day, fading with the soreness in my stomach and leg muscles, and I'd watched it go, conscious of the loss. It was like the visible end of a teenage crush but far sadder, and it left a gap because now I knew what I'd been capable of feeling, not at fifteen but at past thirty, and it was gone, gone. But I watched Robert holding the baby in the crook of his arm, rather expertly now, and eating with his other hand, and I loved them both--Ingrid was just beginning to turn her head to look up at him, and her eyes were full of the surprise I had always felt myself at the sight of this monumental man with his angular face and heavy, curling hair.
I didn't ask much of Robert at home. He was teaching the early-summer session to bring in some extra money, and I was grateful. After a while, he began to paint late in the attic again, and sometimes he stayed overnight at the school studio. He didn't seem to sleep during the day anymore, at least not that I knew of, despite our night wakefulness with Ingrid. He showed me a small canvas or two, still lifes with sticks and rocks he'd been setting for the students and trying himself, and I smiled and refrained from remarking that to me they seemed dead. Nature morte --they reminded me of the French term. A few years before I might have argued with him about them, goaded him a little, debated with him because he liked that kind of attention, told him he lacked only a limp pheasant to complete his canvases. Now, I saw our bread and butter in them rather than just the wood and stones, and I held my tongue. Ingrid needed baby food, preferably organic carrots and spinach, and eventually she might want to go to Barnard, and my only pair of pajamas had worn through the knee the week before.
One morning in June after Robert had left for his class, I decided to go into town to do some unnecessary errands, mainly to break
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my routine of walks with the stroller around campus. I got Ingrid ready and set her in her crib to play for a few minutes while I collected sweater, car keys, purse. My keys were missing from their hook by the back door, and I knew at once that Robert must have taken them while I was finishing breakfast. Occasionally he drove down to his classes if he was running very late, and he seldom knew where his own keys were. Annoyance rose in me like heat.
As a last resort, I mounted the attic stairs to see if Robert's keys might be in the pile of personal effects on his table, which was often a still life of crumpled paper, pens, cafeteria napkins, phone cards, and even money. I was so intent on my search that I didn't understand at first what I was seeing--I was still looking toward the messy table, the hope of my keys, my outing, as sight registered in the soft gloom. Then I pulled the light string, slowly. It had been a couple of months since I'd been all the way up here, I realized, perhaps even the four months since Ingrid's birth. It was an old house, rustic, as I've mentioned. The underside of the roof was unfinished, the beams and roof slats exposed; the attic ran the short length of the house and was an inferno on hot days, which were fortunately few in the mountains. I glanced hopelessly away, toward the table where the familiar pile of junk lay, then looked around again.
I can't really describe my first impression, except that it had made me give a little scream out loud before I could stop myself, because it was a vision of a woman everywhere, a woman spread across t
he surfaces of the attic in small parts and versions, repetitions--dissected, cut into pieces, although without blood. Her face I knew already, and I saw it dozens of times around the room, smiling, serious, painted in different sizes and different moods. Sometimes she wore her hair piled up on her head, sometimes with a red ribbon in it, or a dark hat or bonnet, or a low-cut dress, or her hair down and her breasts bare, which gave me a further shock. Sometimes it was a hand by itself with small gold rings on it, or an old-fashioned high-buttoned shoe, or even just a
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study of a single finger, a bare foot, or, to my horror, a puckering nipple meticulously delineated, a curve of naked back or shoulder or buttock, a deep shadow of hair between spread thighs, and then--even more startling by contrast--a neatly buttoned glove, the somber black bodice of a dress, a hand holding a fan or a bouquet of flowers, a body cloaked and mysterious, and then her face again, in profile, three-quarters, full-face, dark-eyed, sorrowful.
The wood he'd painted on had been sanded smooth--the attic was unfinished but not rough--so that he'd been able to put in fine detail. He had covered the background of this collage with a soft gray-blue and worked in borders of spring flowers, less sharply realistic than all the scattered images of the woman but exquisitely recognizable--roses, apple blossoms, wisteria--flowers we had here on the college grounds, in fact, and which Robert and I both loved. The beams were ornamented with long twisted ribbons of red and blue, a trompe-l'oeil effect that reminded me of wallpaper in Victorian bedrooms.
The two shortest attic walls were given to landscapes, painted freely enough to be called a tribute to Impressionism, with the same lady appearing in each. One showed a beach, with high cliffs rising up on the left side. She stood alone, at a distance, staring out to the sea. She had a parasol over her shoulder and a flower-laden blue hat on her head, and yet she had to shade her eyes--the sun was dazzling on the water. The other landscape was of a meadow, floating with spots of color that must have been summer flowers, and she half lay in the tall grass reading a book, her parasol propped above her and the glow from her pink-patterned dress reflected off her lovely face. This time, to my surprise, there was a child next to her, a little girl perhaps three or four years old, picking at the tops of flowers, and I wondered immediately if this variation had been inspired by Ingrid's presence in our lives. It brought a slight unclenching of my heart.