I still cannot pinpoint the moment it shifted—how it became what it did.
I did love your mother. People ask, but were you in love? Or out? In or out. As if it is so clear-cut. I always loved Rachel, though it was honestly a more gentle love that had turned into friendship and familiarity. You know our story. College sweethearts, met when she took an art class on a whim. She always says she was a terrible artist, but she was not. She had a wonderful eye. Still does, I imagine. She and I grew up together in a sense, roaming around New York, she far away from her Midwest childhood and me removed finally from my lonely adolescence. The theater, art shows, clubs, waiting tables and living off soup and crackers and Chinese leftovers. We were not planning to have you when we did. Though we were old enough, we wanted to get ourselves established, get ready. Still, it was the happiest day of my life, Dani, when I got to hold you for the first time. We knew we could not stay in that loft on Wooster Street in SoHo, living off scraps; those were heady times in the art world, but we knew we had to change. Rachel got her position in Sycamore and we bought that sweet little house on Pi?on and there we were. She had a good stable job, and I had, what? I did not know. I had you. I got my Realtor’s license, and that became a way to contribute. I set up my “art studio,” where I could pursue my pedestrian paintings that nonetheless fulfilled a restlessness in me. I was not unhappy.
Why not just say, I was happy? Well, I was not unhappy but I was not happy, either. A shifting, in-between place. Adulthood is full of such uneasy spaces, as I am sure you know. Happiness comes in waves, not as a permanent state. If I had to describe that time, I would say I was holding steady. I was helping raise you, a joy every day. I was helping Rachel, who was so busy and exhausted in her teaching and work that some weekends after a show she would sleep a full day without waking. I felt some days as though I was the kickstand of our marriage. My job was to prop Rachel up, to keep her—and you—from falling over. Which meant I could not teeter; I had to stand straight. Perhaps that is not a fair description. I’m not sure I felt this at the time, only in looking back. I’m not sure I was able or ready to admit we had a problem. A real problem.
Part of that problem, I know now, was my perception of how Rachel had begun to see me. That is, in my view, she no longer did. There was a time when she lit up when I entered a room, when we were two artists together, not one successful and one struggling—one failed, in fact. Before I was a man who could not finish a painting because he saw that it could not—should not—be finished because it would never be good enough. She would never admit it, but I knew: she had given up on me. I could see it in her face, a face I knew by heart: how it pinched up when I told her I’d started a new piece, the flare of her nostrils and cut of her eyes when I said I was going upstairs to work. I had lost her faith, if not her love. This was no one’s fault but my own, but it was devastating if I allowed myself to think of it. Further, in my failure, she thrived. That symbiosis was not easy to know. I am not blaming your mother. Please understand that. My actions are to blame. Yet I think she and I both know now there were things we should have voiced. I should have voiced them.
I want to be clear, though: problems or not, I believed in that life. I saw it before me like a well-made table. Stable, sturdy, welcoming, a place of refuge and peace. I had no intention of leaving it. Until Jess, the most I envisioned for us was more travel, seeing more of the world.
That is part of what happened. But there is more.
When everything exploded at Thanksgiving, Rachel asked me, Is this about your mother? I denied it. Of course not. Why would it be about her? You know some of that story, most of it probably, though we have never spoken about it. My mother left my father, older brother, and me when I was fourteen—when I was that beaky boy who held his elbows. She was a painter, and she became famous in the years after she left. She did not stay in touch. No letters, no postcards, no phone calls. I believe now that is the only way she could live with herself for abandoning us—for choosing herself and her work over her children. My brother was seventeen, on his way out, already nearing adulthood, so perhaps she did not see it as abandonment, or us as children. I do not know. I know that he and I both struggled, though he turned away from her in anger, shut her out, while I tried desperately to get her back. Letters, postcards, unreturned calls. After a couple years I stopped trying to contact her, but I always followed her career. Her work hangs in the Museum of Modern Art, in the Art Institute of Chicago, many places. I knew she had left New York. I knew she lived in Colorado, not ten hours from us in Sycamore, on a small ranch outside Durango. The image I have of her, the one that persists, is a photograph taken when she was in her forties, about ten years after she left us. She sits on a tree stump outside her cabin, looking away from the camera, her dark hair swept by the wind. Frances Barnes. My mother, a beautiful stranger. She was not mine. I cut out the magazine page and kept it folded in a dresser drawer.
I never saw her again. I always believed someday I would. I did not.
When she died, at only sixty-four, she was alone. Alone in a small house on a large swath of land. They did not find her for three days. By that point, she had little money, but she had a number of paintings, which I kept with me for years. My brother and I have since sold them and divided the estate—the money I send you is from those sales, from an account I set up for you.
The irony is not lost on me. Here I am, alone, cabin in the woods, estranged from my child and former wife. History repeats itself.
So if you were to ask me the question now—Was it about my mother?—my answer is less emphatic. Because of course it was. How could it not be? She is the reason I wanted to paint. She is the reason I will never be good enough. She is, in a sense, the lost love of my life.
While I understand this truth now, it is also too easy to chalk my behavior up to the idea that I was traumatized, I was deranged by her absence, I was grieving, I was seeking my mother in a new love. That is only part of it.
Still there is more.