“Good, just holler if you need a break.”
Melissa scratched her nose, flexed and relaxed both feet, and then settled into the pillows and the trough of the horsehair mattress. After sharpening her pencil, Gwen began to lightly sketch in the curves of the bed frame, of Melissa’s hip, of the heel of that dangling foot. This was always the hardest part, seeing the composition in her subject and deciding where to start on the page. But having a model was excellent motivation. A still life wouldn’t care if she stopped before she started. A bowl of apples beside an old boot doesn’t care if she had to have a snack and the smallest glass of wine and possibly a cigarette first. But with a model there was no room to stop, to judge herself. She just had to push through.
The light in the nursery was warm and gold coming in straight from the top of the ridge, shining in over the blueberries and the meadow, giving the whole room a sepia quality. Gwen sat with her back to the windows, the shadow from her easel falling across the amber wood planks between the two iron beds. They could smell coffee coming up the back stairs from the kitchen, and they could hear the soft murmurs of the classical radio station from Blue Hill. That would be Tom. She was happy to keep their little project from him. Gwen encouraged secrets, and in this case, it lent the scene that much more tension, that much more of a bordello flavor. As if just in the next room, removing his sidearm, was a young member of the French Foreign Legion back in his beloved city for just two days. Or better still, a poet whose wife, unable to put up with his self-loathing, kicked him out when he had writer’s block. He would turn to lovely Melissa, his muse, his Venus rising from the mist of her dust-filled apartment, the froth of motes around her, her bare mattress a shell. Gwen wondered if Melissa had any real secrets from Tom.
“Do you hear from Reed at all?” Melissa asked. Gwen looked up from her canvas and let her eyes focus on Melissa’s, not just on her subject, but on the person herself.
“The ex? No, we don’t do that,” said Gwen, circling her pencil in the air as if encompassing all that they no longer did. She had tried, but he wouldn’t return her calls. Well, he returned one, to say he’d never return another.
They had been married on the dock, just a few days before the Fourth of July nine years ago. She had married Reed, the attorney from Rochester, who promptly took her to DC. Their marriage lasted a total of eighteen months. Even Danny, at age twelve, had said she couldn’t live in a coat-and-tie town like that. She assumed he saw the city as suited men going into polished white buildings, where great shining machines turned out something known as Politics. Machines that all looked like the printing press in the mint he had seen on a class trip. Although, Gwen had been twenty-seven when she was married; her image of Washington wasn’t much different.
She had known Reed for a year and had some thought of helping him live out his thwarted creative side, being his muse so that he might feel connected to all the dreams he had sequestered, choosing law school over art school. She envisioned them as a balanced pair in a brick town house with a bright-pink door. She knew there was a problem when he refused to let her paint the door pink. She knew that she had fooled herself into thinking opposites could lead anywhere but opposition.
Reed had loved her spirit, her fire, all the things she wanted to inspire in him, but once married it became clear that they had each expected the other to change. She wanted to spend Saturdays posing naked for his figure-drawing hobby he occasionally fantasized about pursuing. He assumed she would turn her creative mind to more domestic ventures. That together they would renovate their crumbling town house, painting rooms that were “studies” or “guest” rooms in pale hues with convenient nooks for cribs and shelves for toys. But the house felt like a set piece to her, and then her life, their life, started to feel that way as well. The dust and billowing plastic curtains gave the place the feeling of a radiation quarantine. It was Silkwood, or Chernobyl, or the Eastern Bloc. It was only the suggestion of a home, like a black box theater. An armchair in a shaft of light was the living room, a skillet hanging from a hook and a bare wood table were the kitchen. She knew the renovations would end, that the place would become something real, and that a child could fill it all with light.
She knew a baby had the power. It had for her parents. It had the power to eradicate darkness from a relationship, to banish doubt and draw the two of them into the tightest of unions. But all of it—the union, the covenant, the oaths and promises and forms signed and gifts opened—they were all ropes around her, all pulling her deeper into some dark watery grave, no place for a baby. No baby deserved a pale and wavering mother, too long in the deep, too long underwater.
The whole city seemed to exist underwater, a place without color or air, beautiful and dead. And that, eventually, was how she saw her marriage, beautiful and dead. It took her eighteen months to swim to the surface, to turn on lights and pull back curtains, to dismantle the set and come home.
Her family actually seemed relieved when it happened. Even her father said to her simply, “Life is too short to stick with bad decisions.” Tom was the only one who seemed surprised, or not surprised so much as disapproving. Marriage, Tom told her, was not a convenience that could be tossed aside because it felt hard; often what people saw as a lack of love, he told her, was just an abundance of laziness. Reed had told her approximately the same thing as she loaded her favorite chair into the back of her Civic wagon with two suitcases, a lamp, and a can of pink paint. He had stood there, his briefcase in one hand, keys in the other, stunned.
“You don’t want me this way,” she had said. “You don’t want this pretend life.”
“Don’t tell me how I feel. I want you to stay. I’m not the one giving up. This is real. You’re the one who wants a pretend life. This is work, and you’re a fucking coward.”
She drove three blocks away and sat in the car for an hour before she was sure she wouldn’t turn around.
“This is dark, this is cold, but this is not nuclear winter,” she had said to herself sitting in her car. But she saw their house frozen and bent under the rush of a nuclear blast. She knew that she wasn’t a coward. She had done what he was afraid to do.