They had withstood this night for the most part, but what about the next one and the one after that?
She had the taste of him now. She had the feel of his body. They had said things you couldn’t forget and couldn’t take back. All the ordinary boundaries between them lay in ruins. What was going to keep them apart now? She feared they had both seen the place where they could have turned back and, knowingly, they had passed it by.
Leo looked surprised to see Lena at the door of his loft on Sunday morning. She was surprised to be there.
“I wasn’t sure you’d come,” he said.
“I wasn’t either.”
“I’m glad you did,” he added. He did look happy, and also uncertain. He was looking at her in a different way.
“I’m nervous,” she said honestly. “But fair is fair.”
His eyes on her were different. She couldn’t say why. “You are fair,” he said. “But you don’t have to do it.”
She smiled nervously. “Thanks.”
“Do you want a cup of coffee?”
“Sure.” She considered the state of her nervous system. “Maybe tea,” she mumbled, following him into the kitchen.
He put the kettle on and sat down. Northern light—artists’ light—fell all around them from the high windows.
“Where’s your mom?” Lena asked.
“She volunteers all day at our church,” Leo said. “I thought the privacy might make it easier.”
She nodded.
“But I understand if you don’t want to.”
“Okay.”
She sat and thought.
He looked at her, his elbow resting on the table, his chin in his hand. When she saw him looking, he smiled. She smiled back.
She thought of drinking her tea and going back home. She thought of staying here and taking off her clothes and letting Leo paint her. The second alternative didn’t seem possible, but in a strange way, neither did the first. She had the odd sense of pushing off the edge into unknown territory. She had already let her mind travel. There were possibilities now. It wasn’t enough to go back and forget. She wasn’t the forgetting type.
“I think we should try it,” she said.
“You do?”
“Do you?”
“I do.”
“So let’s.”
“If you’re uncomfortable, we’ll stop.”
She shrugged with a laugh. “I will be uncomfortable. We’d have to stop before we start.” She breathed deep. “But I think we should try it anyway.”
Leo’s bedroom was spacious and skylit. He had dragged a small ruby-colored couch into the center and draped a pale yellow sheet over it. His easel was folded in the corner.
“I was thinking of here,” he said a bit sheepishly. She could tell he’d made the effort to set it up more like a painting class, not just put her in his bed. “We could do it somewhere else, though.”
The colors glowed. The light dusted over the drapery in a beautiful way. She could almost see the painting. “No. This is good.”
He disappeared for a moment and came back with a robe, probably his mother’s. He handed it to her with a question on his face. Do you really want to do this? “I really won’t be upset with you if you don’t,” he said.
“I think I might be upset with me,” she said.
He nodded. “It’s just a painting.”
It wasn’t just a painting for her. She needed to do it anyway.
“I’ll give you some privacy,” he said.
“Not for long,” she joked nervously. It was like when the doctor left the room as you undressed and dressed again. As if the nakedness weren’t embarrassing if you could transition into it alone.
She took off her clothes quickly, before she could think about it and stop. Tank top and loose yoga pants and flip-flops in a pile on the floor. She was too nervous to fold them. She had dressed herself like she’d observed the models did—loose clothes for easy on and easy off. No weird red marks from a tight waistband or pinching bra strap. She’d thought to shave her stubbly parts so she was smooth and unremarkable.
She hurriedly propelled herself into the robe. To what end? she wondered. She just had to get right back out of it. But models always had the robe. Maybe it could be like Superman’s telephone booth. She’d go into the robe a terrified and prudish virgin and come out of it a seasoned artist’s model.
She took the robe off. She sat on the couch. She lay on the couch. She rearranged herself on the couch. Leo knocked on the door. “You ready?”
Every one of her muscles contracted. She felt her shoulders, neck, and head fuse into one ungraceful mass. Apparently she had come out of the robe the same way she had gone in.
“Ready,” she whimpered.
“Lena?”
“Ready,” she said a little louder. This had the quality of a bedroom farce. She wished she could find it funny.
He was nervous too. He didn’t want to affront or embarrass her by looking too quickly or too much. He occupied himself with his easel as though there weren’t a naked girl in the room. She said some things about how it was hot out, also pretending there wasn’t a naked girl in the room.
“Okay, my friend,” he said. His paintbrush was poised in his hand. He was ready to work. He looked at her through his painter’s eyes.
“Okay,” she breathed. This “my friend” business might be doing it for him, she thought sourly, but it wasn’t doing it for her.
He moved the easel to the left. He pushed it a couple of feet closer to her. He came out from behind it. “Head up a little,” he said, coming closer.
She did.
“Perfect.” He came closer still. He was looking now. “Okay, hand more like this.” He did it with his own hand rather than touch hers.
She obliged. She wished she could make her muscles soften a little.
“Beautiful,” he said. He kept studying her. “Legs a little…looser.”
She let out a nervous laugh. “Yeah, right.”
He laughed too, but vaguely. She could tell he was starting to really think about painting now. Why hadn’t she been able to do that when it had been her turn to paint?
“Okay. Wow.” He went back to his canvas. He raised his eyebrows. She could tell he was excited. He was excited about his painting.
Bridget was crouched over her cereal bowl the next morning groggily spooning in the Frosted Flakes when she noticed the unfamiliar car pulling into the makeshift parking area. She didn’t make anything of it at first. Her mind was too full and unkempt as it was.
She dimly registered the slams of a few car doors and some stir at the other end of the tent. Slowly it made its way to her.
“Have you seen Peter?” Karina asked her.
She blinked and swallowed her mouthful of cereal. “Not this morning,” she said. Something about the question started the slow tick of alarm. At the far end of the tent an unfamiliar woman was talking to Alison. Then into Bridget’s view bounced a very small person, a little girl with a messy ponytail that had migrated to the side of her head. It was unusual to see a child here.
None of the pieces stuck together until she saw Alison marching toward her looking agitated, which doubled for excited in the case of Alison. “Do you know where Peter is? His wife and kids are here to surprise him.”
His wife and kids. They were here to surprise him. The ticking accelerated into a wild knocking. His wife and kids had popped out of their theoretical ether and appeared here. To surprise him.
For his birthday, Bridget realized, her thoughts bumping and scraping along. His secret birthday, which she had somehow believed belonged to her. It did not belong to her, she acknowledged with a messy ache in her chest. It belonged to them.
Peter’s wife and kids were far enough away and backed by flooding sunlight, so she couldn’t really see them.
“No. I don’t know where he is,” she said robotically. Suddenly she felt the shame of Eve. Why did everybody keep asking her? What did they know? What did
they suspect? She wished she hadn’t stayed up late all these nights. She found herself wanting to be sure that her cabinmates knew she’d woken up among them every morning.
How would his wife feel with everyone seeking information about her husband’s whereabouts from the tired blond girl with the kissed lips and the starry expression? She felt the urge to defend herself, but to whom?
She was stuck there in her chair, midchew, unable to swallow her cereal or spit it out, when she heard Peter’s voice somewhere behind her. She realized she needed to get out of there before this reunion took place. For her sake, but even more for Peter’s. She didn’t want him to see her there. She crouched lower. She momentarily considered crawling under the table and hiding.
He had a wife. A wife. Theoretical and now real, with dark brown hair and a canvas bag over her shoulder. A wife like you had in a real family. Kids like you had in a real family. Kids who jumped around and needed things.
In her mind she switched from identifying with the wife to identifying with the daughter. A daughter like she was a daughter. A person with wishes and disappointments of her own.
These were dangerous places indeed.
Tibby finally let Brian come that Sunday, but not for the reasons he hoped.
She intercepted him in the lobby. It would be worse if he came up to her room.
“It’s pretty nice out. You feel like taking a walk?” he asked her gamely, innocently.
She used to adore his innocence. Now she wondered about him. Was he a bit stupid? No, not stupid, really. She didn’t mean that. He had a high IQ and all. But was he kind of like an idiot savant?
“Yes,” she said dishonestly.
Maybe, Meta-Tibby suggested, she liked his innocence better when her own heart wasn’t so black.
They didn’t walk far. She turned on him in the middle of Astor Place.
“Brian, I think we should take a break,” she said. That was the phrase she had decided upon.
He looked at her, his head cocked like a Labrador retriever’s. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, I think we shouldn’t see each other for a while.”
“You are saying that…”
The sadness and surprise was beginning to wear through his trusting expression, but she couldn’t feel anything for him. She saw it, but it didn’t go past her eyes. There were times in her life when she felt his pain more acutely than he did. Why not now?
“But why?” he asked.
“Because. Because…” This was such an obvious question and she hadn’t thought up an answer for it. “I just think…because of the long distance and everything…”
“I don’t mind coming up here,” he said quickly.
She glared at him. Just protect yourself and go away, would you? She felt like shouting at him. Get mad at me. Call me a bitch. Walk away from me.
“I don’t want you to,” she said flatly. “I want to be by myself for a while. I can’t even explain it very well.”
He was processing. His T-shirt blew against his body. He looked thin.
Brian didn’t confine himself to the mirror dance. He did what he did, he chose what he chose in the bravest possible way. She used to love this about him. But now the best thing had turned into the worst thing. She thought he rejected the dance as small-minded and fearful, but now she wondered if he even knew it. Was it rejection or total ignorance? Why, for once, couldn’t he just follow her lead?
There is no such thing as too much love. That was what a doe-eyed and slightly creepy friend of her mother’s had once said to Tibby, seemingly out of the blue. Well, yeah, there is, Tibby thought now.
“Is it because of—” he began tentatively.
“I don’t even know what it’s because of,” she snapped. “I just know that I don’t want to keep going like this.”
He looked up and then he looked down. He watched people cross Lafayette Street. He considered the banner snapping over the entrance to the Public Theater. Tibby was worried he would cry, but he didn’t.
“You don’t want me to come up and see you anymore,” he said.
“Not really. No.”
“You don’t want me to call you?”
“No.”
Had Brian ever taken a hint? Had he always required a total clubbing over the head to make him comprehend even the most obvious point?
Suddenly she felt an insidious suspicion. She saw this version of Brian in the eyes of the world, and she saw herself, too. Did people think he was basically a moron? Did they laugh at her for being with him?
Tibby hated herself for this cruelly disloyal thought. But who in the world has a brain she can force to think only the acceptable things?
Do I hate him? she wondered about herself. Did I ever really love him?
On that fateful night they’d had sex, it seemed to her that she’d fallen asleep one person and woken up another. She couldn’t remember the hows and whys of who she used to be. It was bewildering. Like hypnosis or a magic spell or a dream that had broken on her waking.
“Then we should say good-bye,” he said.
Her head shot up. She could see by his face he understood now. She could see it in his eyes. They were no less hurt, but they had stopped questioning her.
“Y-yes. I—I guess,” she stammered. If anything, he had gotten ahead of her.
She hadn’t pictured him storming away, though she might have wanted that. But neither had she figured on his sticking around for a proper eye-to-eye good-bye.
“Good-bye, Tibby.” He wasn’t angry. He wasn’t hopeful. What was he?
“Bye.” Stiffly she leaned in to kiss his cheek. It felt wrong, and midway through she wished she hadn’t done it.
He turned and he walked toward the subway, carrying his worn red duffel bag over his shoulder. She watched him, but he didn’t turn back to look.
He walked in a way that struck her as resolute, and she recognized that she was the one left standing alone and confused.
She realized all at once the deeper thing that bothered her, the thing that made him not just irritating but intolerable: how he kept loving her blindly when she deserved it so little.
Lena realized a strange and comforting fact of life: You could get used to almost anything. You could even get used to lying naked on a ruby-colored couch under the gaze of a young man you hardly knew while he painted you. You could do that even if you happened to be a Greek virgin from a conservative family whose father would die if he knew.
For the first hour, Lena agonized.
Sometime in the second hour, her muscles began to unkink, one at a time.
In the third hour, something else happened. Lena began to watch Leo. She watched him paint. She watched him watch her. She saw how he looked at her different parts. She kept track of which part he was working on, feeling a thrill in her hip when he painted that and along her thigh when he got there.
As much as she ordinarily dreaded being looked at, this felt different. It was a different way of looking. He looked at her and through her at the same time. He only held any one image long enough to get it onto his canvas. It was like water through a sieve.
His intensity built and she began to relax. His relationship, she realized, was with his painting. He was relating to his version of her more than to the actual her. It freed her mind to wander all around the apartment. Were all relationships this way, to some extent? Whether or not they involved any artistic representation?
She liked the way the diffuse sun felt on her skin. She began to like the way his eyes felt on her skin as she became free to wander.
He put on music. It was Bach, he said. The only instrument was a cello.
In the fourth hour, he looked at her face at a moment when she was looking back. They were both surprised at first and looked away. Then, at the same moment, they both looked back. He stopped painting. He lost his way. He looked confused and then found his way back.
In the fifth hour, she stopped taking breaks. She was under a spell. She was languor
ous. Leo was also under a spell. They were under different spells.
In the sixth hour, she thought about him touching her. The blood that came to her cheeks was a different blood. It came for a different reason.
He put on more Bach. It was music for solo violin this time. It sounded raggedly romantic to her.
He was painting her face. “Eyes up,” he said. She looked up. “I mean at me,” he clarified.
Was that really what he meant? She looked at him.
And for the next hour, he looked at her and she looked back. And like in a staring contest, the stakes seemed to rise and rise until it was almost unbearable. But neither of them looked away.
When he finally put down his brush, his cheeks were as flushed as hers. He was as breathless as she. They were under the same spell.
He came over to her, still not breaking eye contact. He put his hand lightly on her rib cage and leaned down and kissed her.
In the past when Bee was overwhelmed or depressed she took to her bed. But this was too awful even for her bed. This was a more active misery, a hunt-you-down-and-find-you kind of pain. In her bed she’d be a sitting, lying duck.
Barefoot, she walked from the dining tent. Once in the clear, she spit her mush of Frosted Flakes into the grass. She was afraid she might throw up what was in her stomach as well.
She was so grateful she had left the Pants on her cot. She didn’t want them to see her like this.
She walked from the camp and kept going toward the sun. She would just keep going. If you set out for the east, you could walk practically forever. To India, China.
She walked and walked and her feet grew sore. How sore they would be when they got to China.
Sometime later the sun passed over her head and she realized she was walking away from it now. She didn’t want to walk away from it, but if she walked with it, she would have to turn back around, and she couldn’t turn around. She shivered. Was it cold in China?
She felt like a reptile, relying on the sun to warm her blood. She didn’t feel the capacity to generate her own warmth.