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of the head and shoulder. But she was nothing like the lady of his attic. She had short blond hair and light eyes and wore a college soccer jersey. Only her beautiful body and the square cut of her jaw provided her any sisterhood with the curly-headed woman I'd first seen in a sketch from his pocket. Furthermore, Robert seemed unabashed by my appearance, greeting Ingrid and me with kisses and introducing the girl as one of the regular studio models, a student job. The girl herself seemed a good deal more entranced with Ingrid and the fact that exams were almost over than with Robert. He was clearly just using her for the pose, and I knew as little as before.
I remember only a couple of moments from Robert's departure for New York State in early January. He held Ingrid for a long time, and I realized that she was so tall now that she could wrap her legs partway around his waist--the child with Robert's own long body, his crisp dark hair. The other moment I remember is going back in the house after his car disappeared down the drive into the woods--it must have been after, unless I refused to stand on the porch in the cold air for even a second longer to watch him go. I remember going inside to finish cleaning up our breakfast and asking myself in crisp, clear words, although silently, Is this a separation? But there was no answer in my own head or in the warm kitchen, with its smells of applesauce and toast. Everything seemed normal, if bleak. There was even a breath of relief in the house. I had managed before, and I would keep managing.
Robert's notes were usually scrawled on a postcard and addressed to Ingrid as much as to me, and his phone calls, too, came in an uneven rhythm, although frequently enough. The winter in upstate New York was fierce, but the snow was wonderful, Impressionist. He painted outside once and almost got frostbite. The college president had welcomed him. His room was in faculty guest quarters and had a good view of woods and the quad.
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His students were mostly ungifted, if interesting. The studio space was too small, but he was painting. He'd gone to bed at four that morning.
Then a little space, a short silence, and the notes would begin again. I liked his postcards better than his calls, which were full of unspoken tension between us, a chasm even harder to cross when we couldn't see each other's face. I tried not to call him any more often than he called me. Once, he sent a sketch for Ingrid, as if he knew she could understand this language best. I taped it to the wall of the nursery. It showed Gothic buildings and heaps of snow, bare trees. If Ingrid cried in the night, I brought her into bed with me, and we woke the next morning in a tangled pile. In late February, Robert flew home for his winter break and Ingrid's birthday. He slept a great deal, and we made love but didn't talk about anything difficult. He would have a break in early April as well, he said, but he'd decided to spend it painting up north. I didn't protest. If he returned in the summer with more work done, he might be easier to live with.
"When Robert was gone again, my mother came for a stretch and sent me to the campus pool to swim every day. I'd lost much of my baby weight that year, and the rest came off as I plowed through the water, remembering how it had felt, such a short time ago, to be young and optimistic. On that visit, I first saw the trembling of my mother's hands and the little burst capillaries in her cheeks, the slight swelling of her ankles. She hadn't slowed in her helping me--when she was there, the dishes were always clean and drying in the rack, Ingrid's endless cotton suits washed and folded, and Ingrid read to as much as she could wish for.
But something had begun to slip in Mom's physical confidence, and after she went back to Michigan she started telling me she was afraid to walk on the ice. She would step out the front door to go to the grocery store, or to the dentist, or to volunteer at the library, and she would see the ice--and then she would go back inside and eventually call me. One day she told me she hadn't been
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out of the house in nearly a week. I didn't want to wait, alone, with the question that woke me in the early mornings now, and when I asked Robert, he said yes, without hesitation, that Mom should come to live with us.
I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was. I think I had forgotten his quick generosity, his use of yes instead of no, his habit of giving jackets to friends or even strangers. It made love quicken in me as I stood there waiting for him, far away from that cold New York State campus. I thanked him from my heart, told him about the azaleas beginning to bloom, the green leaves everywhere. He said he'd be home quickly, and we both seemed to be smiling over the phone.
When I called Mom, she didn't protest as I'd thought she would--instead she said she would think about it, but that if she came, she would want to help us buy a bigger house. I had never known she had that much money, but she did, and someone had offered to buy her house in Ann Arbor the year before, as well. She would think about it. Maybe it wasn't such a bad idea. How was Ingrid's cold?
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CHAPTER 32 1878
In May, Yves insists that his uncle accompany them to Normandy, first to Trouville and then to a village near Étretat, a quiet place they have visited several times in the past and loved. It is Papa's idea to return with his brother, but Yves puts his own force behind it. Béatrice demurs; why should it not be just the three of them, as before? She can look after Papa by herself, and the house Yves always rents has only one small room for guests, with no parlor for Uncle Olivier if Papa stays in his usual quarters. If they move Papa, he will not be able to find anything, or might fall down the stairs in the night. It is hard enough for Papa to travel at all, although he is patience itself and relishes the feeling of the Channel sun and breeze on his face. She begs Yves to reconsider.
But Yves is firm. He may be called away on business in the midst of the vacation, so she will at least have Olivier to assist her. Strange -- Olivier is even older than Papa, but he seems fifteen years Papa's junior in health and agility. Olivier's hair was not white before the death of his wife, Yves told her once, but that occurred a couple of years before she met the family. Olivier is strong, vibrant for his age; he can be helpful. Insisting that Olivier accompany them is the closest Yves ever comes to complaining about having the care of Papa on their shoulders.
She protests again--feebly this time--and three weeks later they are on a train moving slowly out of the Gare Saint-Lazare, Yves tucking a lap robe over Papa's legs and Olivier reading aloud the art news in the paper. He seems to avoid Béatrice's eye. She is
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grateful, since his presence fills the small space until she wishes she could sit in another car. He appears to have grown younger in the months since their correspondence began; his face looks tanned even before they reach the coast. His beard is thick silver, neatly trimmed. He tells them he has been painting in the Forêt de Fontainebleau, and she wonders if he thought about her as he walked along those paths with his easel or stood in glades she will probably never see. For a moment she envies the trees that gathered around him, the grass that probably lay under his long frame when he rested, and she turns her mind at once to other thoughts. Is she merely jealous of his ability to travel and paint at will, his constant freedom?
Outside the train window, cinders blow by between her and the newly green fields, the glimpses of winding water. Yves keeps the window shut against the coal smoke and the dust, although the compartment grows too warm. She watches cows under a grove of trees, the dusting of red poppies, white and yellow daisies across a field. She has removed her gloves, her hat, and its matching jacket, since they are alone, all family, and the curtains are drawn between them and the corridor. When she leans back and closes her eyes, she senses Olivier's gaze and hopes her husband will not notice. But what is there to notice? Nothing, nothing, nothing, and that is the way she will keep it--nothing between her and this white-haired man Yves has known since birth, now her own relative.
The steam whistle blows far ahead, at the front of the train, a sound as hollow as she feels. Life is going to be long, for her at least. Is that not a good thing? Hasn't she always felt time st
retching ahead of her in a lovely expanse? What if--she opens her eyes and keeps them resolutely on a distant village, a pale smudge, a church tower far away in the fields--what if that expanse contains neither children nor Olivier? What if it contains no more of Olivier's letters, his hand on her hair--she looks directly at him
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now, while Yves opens a second newspaper, and is gratified to see she has startled him. He turns his handsome head toward the window, picks up his book. There is so little time. He will die decades before she does. What if that in itself were enough to compromise her resistance?
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CHAPTER 33 Kate
It actually took Mom several years to decide what to do, then to sell her house and go through all those books. Robert and I stayed in the cottage on campus during that time. Once, I went up to Michigan to help her give away most of my father's possessions, and we both wept. I left Ingrid with Robert, and he seemed to take good care of her, although I worried that he would forget where she was or let her wander around alone outside.
In the fall, Robert went to France for ten days, his turn to get away. He wanted to see the great museums again, he said--he hadn't been there since college. He came back so refreshed and excited that I felt it had been worth the money. He also had a rather grand show in Chicago the following January, an invitation of one of his former instructors--we all flew up there at horrifying cost, and I saw in the course of a day or two that he was becoming something bordering on famous.
In April the flowers Robert and I liked came out on campus again. I went into the woods to find the wild ones, and we walked around the college gardens so Ingrid could see the blooming beds. At the end of the month, I bought a little kit in the supermarket and watched a pink line soak across a white oval. I dreaded telling Robert, although we'd agreed to try for another child. He was so often tired or discouraged, but he seemed pleased with my news, and I felt that Ingrid's life would be complete. What was the point of having only one child? This time we found out it was a boy, and I got a boy doll for Ingrid to hold and to diaper. In December we drove to the birth center again. I had the baby with a kind of
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fierce, efficient concentration, and we brought him home--Oscar. He was fair-haired and looked like my mother, although Robert insisted he looked more like his own mother. Both mothers came to help for a few weeks--mine was still in Michigan--staying in our neighbors' spare rooms, and they enjoyed debating the question. Now I was pushing the stroller again, and my arms and lap were constantly full.
I have an indelible picture of Robert from the time when our children were small and we were living at the college. I'm not sure why I remember him so well from that period, except that that time was a kind of perfect peak of our lives, although it was also the time when Robert began to really go to pieces inside, I think. Even someone you've inhabited rooms with, and seen naked every day, seen sitting on the toilet through a half-opened door, can fade out after a while and become an outline.
But Robert, from that whole time when the children were toddlers and before Mom came to live with us, is all filled in for me, color and texture. He had a thick brown sweater that he wore almost daily in cool weather, and I can remember the strands of black and chestnut, seen up close, and the other things that got caught in it--lint and sawdust, sticks, all kinds of little bits of roughness that came from his studio at school, from his walks and painting excursions. I bought that sweater for him secondhand soon after we met--it was in great condition, from Ireland, knitted by someone's actual strong hands, and it lasted for years and years--outlasted us, in fact. The sweater filled my arms when he came home. I stroked its sleeves when I stroked his elbows. Under it, he wore an old long-sleeved T-shirt or a stretched cotton turtle-neck, always in a color that vibrated with the sweater--frayed scarlet or deep green, not necessarily matching but compelling somehow. His hair got long or short--it curled over the collar of the sweater or it was shorn in soft bristles across the back of his neck, but the sweater was always the same.
My life was mostly touch in those days--I suppose his was
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color and line, so that we couldn't see each other's worlds very-well, or he couldn't quite feel my presence. All day long I touched the clean plates and bowls as I put them away, and the children's heads slimy under shampoo in the tub, and the softness of their faces, and the scrape of poop off their goose-pimpling backsides, the hot noodles, the heavy wet laundry as I threw it into the dryer, and the brick front steps as I sat reading to myself for eight minutes while they played just beyond the page in the prickling new grass, and then when one of them fell down I touched the grass and the mud and the scraped knee, and the sticky Band-Aids, and the wet cheek, and my jeans, and the dangling shoelace.
When Robert came home from teaching, I touched his brown sweater and his curling, separating locks of hair, his stubbly chin, his back pockets, his calloused hands. I watched him lift up the children and felt just by seeing it how his rough face brushed their delicate ones and how that pleased them. He seemed completely there with us at those moments, and his touch was the proof of this. If I wasn't exhausted from the day, he touched me to keep me awake a little longer, and then I reached for his smooth, hairless flanks and the soft, crisp hair between his legs, his flat, perfect nipples. He seemed to stop looking at me then and to finally enter my world of touch, in that moving space between us, until we closed the gap with a fiery familiarity, a routine of release. In those days I always felt covered with secretions, the dripping milk, the spray on my neck when I changed Oscar a few minutes too early, the foam on my thighs, the saliva on my cheek.
Maybe this was why I was converted to touch and left the world of vision, why I stopped drawing and painting after all those years of doing it nearly every day. My family, the way they licked and chewed me, kissed me and pulled at me, spilled things on me--juice, urine, semen, muddy water. I washed myself again and again, I washed the mountains of laundry, I changed the beds and the breast pads, I scrubbed and wiped the bodies. I wanted to get clean again, to clean all of them, but in the moment before I
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had the energy to wash everything, there was always another kind of goodness, an immersion.
Then we were shopping for real estate, like grown-ups, and sending my mother photos of front porches, and finally we moved into our house the summer Ingrid was five and Oscar was one and a half. It was what I had wanted in the first place--two lovely children, a yard with a swing that Robert finally put up after I'd asked him for a couple of months to please do it, a small town whose very name was green, and at least one of us employed at a good job. Should we ever get what we think we want? And I had my mother. In the first years with us, she gardened and vacuumed and read for an hour or two a day in the shade on the terrace, where an elm tree threw the shadows of small leaves over her silvery head and the white pages of her book. From there she could even watch Ingrid and Oscar hunting for caterpillars.
In fact, I think those years were good ones for us because my mother was here. I had company, and Robert was at his best in her presence. Occasionally he stayed up for a couple of nights or slept at school and seemed tired afterward, and now and then he went through a period of irritability and then slept late for a few days. On the whole, things were peaceful. Robert had voluntarily painted over the chaos of his studio attic before we'd left the campus. I didn't know how much of that was due to the orange plastic bottles in our medicine cabinet. Once in a while he mentioned that he'd been to see Dr. Q, and that was enough for me -- Dr. Q couldn't help me, of course, but he was apparently helping my husband.
During our second year in the new house, Robert taught at a painting retreat in Maine. He didn't talk about it much, but I thought it had done him good. We laughed together about the children, and sometimes at night, if I was not too tired, Robert reached for me, and things were the way they had always been. I
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used some of his shirts, torn into thirds, t
o dust the furniture--I could have pulled one of them out of any pile of rags and known it was his, known it was him, his lingering smell, his fabric. He seemed happy in his work, and I had started some part-time editing, mostly from home, to help with our part of the mortgage while my mother watched the children.
One morning after she had taken them to the park and I had done the breakfast dishes, I went upstairs to make beds and start work at the desk in the hall, and I saw the door to Robert's studio open. He had left with his coffee mug in one hand as I was getting up--he was in a phase of waking very early and going to school to paint. This morning I noticed he'd dropped something on the floor, a scrap of paper, which lay near the open door. I picked it up without thinking about anything in particular. Robert often scattered paper--notes, reminders, bits of drawings, crumpled napkins.
What I found on the floor was about a quarter of a sheet of writing paper, torn off, as if the writer had gotten frustrated. The writer was Robert--it was his handwriting, but neater than usual. I still have those lines hidden in my desk, not because I kept the original piece of paper--in fact, I eventually wadded it up and threw it at his head, and he caught it and put it in his pocket, and I never saw it again. I have those lines still because some instinct made me sit down at my desk and copy them over for myself and hide them before I confronted Robert. I suppose I was thinking vaguely that I might need them in court someday, or at the very least want to have them for myself later and might begin to forget some of the details. "My dearest one," the note said, but it was not a letter to me, nor had I ever seen any of those words before, lined up in this particular order and flowing from Robert's black pen.