A House Among the Trees

“This one.” On impulse, she chose the largest sheet of paper, the one divided into three cells: Ivo in the basement, so engrossed in his painting that he doesn’t notice the earthquake. “Oh, thank you,” she added. “Really?” Why oh why, she thought, did she add that caboose of verbal insecurity? What a girl she sometimes was.

After a short, awkward silence, he said, “Tell you what, Meredith. I’d like to see your museum. So how about we make a lunch date. I’ll bring the drawing with me. You give me a tour. I promise not to change my mind. And lunch is on me.”

She wanted to snatch the drawing and bolt. Thank you! Yes! Contract to follow! Don’t want to miss my train! Not that he could ever have simply let her walk out with it. She reminded herself to breathe. “I suppose you need to consult your agent.”

For an instant, the look on his face alarmed her. “I don’t actually need to consult anyone, Meredith.”

When he beamed at her then, she had a strange dropping sensation in her gut, the kind of inner collapse that signifies falling suddenly and hard, a feeling she knew from Fede, her first grown-up boyfriend, and earlier flames; from, most recently, Benjamin. Lear was twice her age, but when he smiled like that, she could see in his face the roguishly magnetic younger man, the one whose picture was tucked inside all his books published after the first edition of Colorquake.

“You have gumption,” he said. “I look forward to our date in the city.” He asked for her card, which she fumbled from her wallet (which she fumbled from her bag). “I’ll call you,” he said. “I will.”

He saw her out. “No car?” he commented, looking around. “Or did you park out on the street, to be sly?”

“Well, yes,” she lied—although what if he insisted on walking her to the road?

He didn’t. She hurried, suddenly aware how lucky she had been not to be waylaid by the assistant. (When she said no, had the woman even consulted her boss?) As she turned onto the road, a car turned in behind her, from the opposite direction. Merry quickened her pace, afraid she might be stopped, but she wasn’t.

He did call her. He brought the drawing, with paperwork drawn up by the assistant. He took her to lunch, where they drank a bottle of wine (or perhaps he drank a glass and she drank the rest). Lunch lasted nearly the entire afternoon, and when Merry returned to Benjamin’s apartment, she was still tipsy. She made love to him that night with a ferocity that pleased yet alarmed him. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you’re falling in love with somebody else,” he said, afterward, in the dark.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, laughing through her innocent lie. Because she had in fact been imagining Lear beneath her, and not the younger, bygone Lear but the fleshy man in the tweedy jacket who had flirted over lunch the way only gay men flirt with women: safely (unless the woman harbors false hope) and dangerously (because he can still, if chastely, break her heart).

Over the next ten years, she had come to see her relationship with Mort like a meta-marriage. Even Benjamin could tell when she was dressing not just for work but for lunch with the Great Man. And once she knew she was losing Benjamin, she had assured herself, however pathetically, that she was secure in the consolation of Mort.

But clearly she wasn’t.

Through the window across from the bed, cars, unseen three stories below, cast a pulsing tide of bluish light onto the ceiling as they turn toward Gramercy Park. She shifts her gaze lower and sees the glint of the glass in the frame that protects the drawing she brought home last month, just as a covert loan. Now it taunts her. It’s the picture of Ivo in the forest, his outstretched arms adorned with flying creatures, their feathered and gossamer wings filling with color. If she were never to return it to the museum, especially now that the collection must be returned to Orne (or must it?), she wonders if anyone would guess its whereabouts. She would never sell it, of course. She could live out her husbandless, childless years, with Linus and then another dog, and one or two others beyond them if she’s lucky, and even if she were to leave the drawing displayed openly in her bedroom—her next bedroom, wherever that will be once she’s forced to move—who would ever see it?

She gets up and turns on a lamp. She goes to the framed drawing, takes it from the shelf, and carries it back to her bed, where she holds it in her lap. “Ivo as Saint Francis,” some people call this image. But what a beautiful child. So—there—she would have a child after all, wouldn’t she?





Three


1972

Tomasina was twelve when she decided she would rather be Tommy. This was the year she became fully conscious of how much she disliked being lumped together with other girls, being seen as typical in any way. Her mother called her an “obstinate nonconformist,” making it obvious that her daughter’s individuality pleased her. “I’m an ist, too,” she said. “A leftist optimist activist feminist!” Tommy’s father laughed, kissed his wife, and said, “Call me a recidivist hedonist satirist anarchist!” Out came his guitar—he loved any clever exchange that might inspire a song—and he improvised some verbally gymnastic goofball lyrics. The singer-mathematician Tom Lehrer was his idol.

Tommy’s parents loved making music, but to “pay the avaricious piper,” as Dad put it, they ran a travel agency on Bleecker Street. They worked every weekday till six o’clock and took turns on the weekends. After school, Tommy looked after her brother. He was in kindergarten that year, and it seemed like all he ever wanted to do was run, climb, and leap—often from a sidewalk into the street. Looking after Dani was like being in charge of a raccoon or a cheetah, a wild animal prone to mischief and speed. Dani couldn’t stand the confines of their apartment, so Tommy took him as often as she could to the library (her preference) or the playground (his).

So of course she hated that she hated math, because girls were supposed to hate math. This was the source of her quiet fuming as she sat on one of the playground benches, watching Dani go up the ladder, down the slide, up the ladder, down the slide, over and over until Tommy began to wonder if she could hypnotize herself simply by watching. But the alternative—dividing fractions—might just kill her.

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