Part 3 (1/2)

I say it, but who really knows?

The clock has lost its meaning. My relations.h.i.+p with time is more personal now.

Just take care of yourself, he says. I hate to have you there, alone.

I'll just take a nap.

Just don't go on the stairs.

I won't go on the stairs. I won't even go to the bathroom. I won't get up. I'll just rest.

Just take care.

Just.

It's a word we use a lot now-though in only one way that we might. As though we have lost our knowledge of the other meaning.

Just be careful. I'll just do this tiny thing. Just move my pillows a little higher up. Just don't worry. Just be good to yourself. Just take care.

If you'd just moved the d.a.m.ned fence just a foot...

It was the little note of grace that we both needed then.

I sometimes think that when I'm gone Sam will drive his car right into your well-constructed fence. I can picture it so easily: Sam behind the wheel pulling up into the drive, gunning it; and veering left. If the tables were turned, there's no doubt it's what I'd do. sometimes think that when I'm gone Sam will drive his car right into your well-constructed fence. I can picture it so easily: Sam behind the wheel pulling up into the drive, gunning it; and veering left. If the tables were turned, there's no doubt it's what I'd do.

Because who is there left to be angry at? Except you? We used up all the other obvious candidates long ago.

When he gets home, Sam climbs heavily to our room, the whiskey bottle and a gla.s.s in his hand. I have been dozing, but am now awake.

I hope he feels bad about what he did, he says.

If he were the type to feel bad, I say, speaking slowly, he wouldn't have done it in the first place. If he cared a tiny bit about us and our lives he wouldn't have acted as he did. He's indifferent to us. It had all been decided before we met. There was never any hope.

I don't tell him about these now-fading fantasies of mine. The ones that started early on. About trying to reason with you. Trying to make you believe in my life. The simple fact of my existence. I don't tell him that.

I am so close now to being entirely erased. I see things that were invisible to me before.

Sam sits there, and he drinks, a flush beginning to spread through his cheeks.

He's indifferent? he asks. Is that really what it is?

There is a universe of sorrow, wide and dark, in my husband's staring eyes. An eternity built there, constructed over time, forged gradually of the realization that this is in fact our lives. This is what we have been dealt.

It's possible, I say to him, that you were right. What you said about some folks just being bad.

But as I speak, I realize how little I want to say what I have learned. How reluctant I am to admit to Sam what indifference truly means, and has long meant to us both. I do not want to play a role in confirming that cruel universe that dwells inside my husband's eyes. But I do love him. I do. I love him very much. And so to him-if not to you-I speak the truth.

Immortalizing John Parker

IT ISN'T A NEW SENSATION. For the past many weeks, Clara Feinberg has found it harder and harder to paint human faces, her bread-and-b.u.t.ter task. Increasingly, she is struggling with what feels to her like a repugnance to the act. Though it's all very soph.o.m.oric. Her own thoughts on the subject sound to her like the voices of pretentious but earnest youngsters debating the meaning of life. For the past many weeks, Clara Feinberg has found it harder and harder to paint human faces, her bread-and-b.u.t.ter task. Increasingly, she is struggling with what feels to her like a repugnance to the act. Though it's all very soph.o.m.oric. Her own thoughts on the subject sound to her like the voices of pretentious but earnest youngsters debating the meaning of life.

It's morning-again-and Clara is perched on the side of her bed, as though undecided about whether to stand or lie back down. Her hands grip the edge of the mattress, maybe to push her up and maybe to hold her there. She can see herself in the dresser mirror-if she lets her eyes drift that way. It's not her favorite sight, not normally of particular interest to her. As drawn as she is to study others' faces, she would be perfectly happy to go through life without ever seeing her own. Not because of anything amiss about her appearance. For a seventy-year-old woman, she looks better than well, straight and a bit stern and more handsome than ever. Age suits her. But she knows too well what a face can reveal.

As a child, if she caught a glimpse of herself when alone, she would stick out her tongue; and to her own surprise, she does it now. It's an odd sight. An old woman making the face of a spiteful little girl. An oddly upsetting sight. She closes her lips and looks away, looks down to her feet, hanging bare and gnarled just above the floor. She still can't quite force herself to stand. Not yet. Can't quite force herself to dress, to leave the apartment, to walk among the living. Go to work, step into her studio. Smell the paint, the turpentine. Populate the blank canvases waiting there with her people, her creations.

The prospect pins her where she is.

It isn't that she has tired of studying faces. Not at all. How could she have? She still thinks daily about how it felt thirty years ago, how like learning a precious secret it had been when she first discovered her longing to sit for hours and ponder another person's features, to study their very particular texture. It was as though she had found a hidden primal drive in herself, something to align itself with hunger, thirst, s.e.xual desire, the instinct to stay alive. And this drive has never flagged.

But the paintings themselves upset her now. The act of painting them upsets her now.

She forces her eyes to her own image again, holds her face steady, drains it of what expression she can. It's this same eerie stillness she detects in her portraits now. A kind of death. Death, which used to seem so remote, now feels to Clara as though it is everywhere, like the universally disliked relative who arrives early to every gathering and shows no discernible sign of ever going home. She can sense it turning her against her own work, lurking in the notion of permanence surrounding portraiture, skulking around the very idea of catching a person at one moment and doc.u.menting them, just then. This is what death does, she thinks, stony-faced, staring right into her own eyes. Catches us all. Stops time.

”Pull yourself together,” she says out loud. ”You still have a living to make.”

And finally, that gets Clara to her feet. She is paid preposterously well for those paintings of hers; and so this recent repugnance must be overcome; and the day, the new clients, must be faced.

As if revealing a precious secret, Katherine Parker states that she and her husband-John-have been married for fifty-one years. Not that Clara has asked. She's asked them very little since they entered the small sitting room adjacent to her studio. And when told how long they've been married, she doesn't offer up much of a reaction. Divorced herself for nearly three decades, she can think of too many reasons, good, bad, and indifferent, why people might stay married half a century to a.s.sume that she knows the appropriate response.

”We didn't make very much of our fiftieth. But then when this one came around, I realized I would like to have a portrait of John. That's the gift I want. John, immortalized.”

Katherine Parker is a small woman, with suprisingly short hair, entirely white. The wrinkles that web her pouching cheeks run without a break or variation across her pale lips, as though a veil of lace has been etched into her face. When she speaks, her eyes blink rapidly, seeming to seek refocus every time. And the truth is, Clara realizes, she would rather paint her than him. It might be interesting to try to capture this topography of time and the sense of urgency that seems integral to her.

”Not of you both?” she asks.

”Oh, no. I had mine done years ago. I'd much rather be remembered that way. Young, and elegant. Not like this.”

Clara nods, skipping over her own arguments with this view. The point, it turns out, isn't youth or beauty. The point is happiness. And to the extent that happiness ever came to her, it came to her late.

She looks over at John Parker on the sofa beside his wife. He hasn't spoken at all. Not a single word. Nor is his face particularly expressive. His skin has an odd smoothness to it, a yellow tinge; his eyes are round, brown, and moist.

He's dull, she thinks, that word stepping out of line, as if louder, bolder than the others in her thoughts. Sitting there, Clara recognizes this as something with which she'll now have to contend. Often, with her subjects, there's a first impression that dominates her ability to see clearly. And here is one, again. This quality of dullness she perceives will have to be continually questioned and examined. In the end she may conclude that it does define him in some way that deserves expression in the work. Or she may not. But for as long as she is painting him, she knows, she will be in a continual dialogue with this word. Dull Dull.

”Do you want your portrait painted?” she asks and he startles a bit. Then looks over at his wife. Then he nods.

”Yes,” he says.

Clara sits back in her chair and begins to describe the process. How many sessions; how much time she'll need; how much warning if a session is to be missed. And then she names a very high figure, to which neither of them reacts.

”And I'll need to see you alone,” she says to him, sensing in herself an annoyance with his silence.

”Oh.” It's a small sound that Katherine Parker makes, but an expressive one, an objection. ”Is that necessary?”

”Yes, it is,” Clara says. She could go into an explanation-she could talk about the relations.h.i.+p between subject and artist, she could talk about any number of things that might justify this, some real, some made up. But she prefers simply to state the condition and not discuss her reasoning. Too much in her life has had to be justified.

”Well, then,” Katherine Parker says. ”Then I suppose that's what we'll do.”