Light of Day (21 page)

Jack didn't hear the doubt, he didn't hear the need for reassurance, although surely it was there, that summer in Loubressac. He only answered, “We're doing all right,” while Danny giggled, or made sounds that sounded like giggles.

“He does try to ingratiate himself,” Anne said, “doesn't he?”

Later that month when they returned to New York, they walked through Central Park with Jack's parents. His mother said Danny was “the best little baby. So much easier than you were.”

“And very cooperative,” Anne said.

“Cooperative?” Jack's mother asked.

“He never makes a fuss when I'm working, or cries.”

“Cooperative,” Jack's mother repeated.

“He's also very alert.” Jack's father lifted Danny out of the stroller. “Look at that face. I wouldn't be surprised if he's talking before he's a year.”

“His first word will probably be
cinema
,” Anne told them.

“Chiaroscuro,” Jack said.

“Duchamp,” his father said, and laughed. He lowered Danny into the stroller and pushed him along the path.

“So it's working out?” Jack's mother said in a way that made Jack tell her she sounded less than convinced.

They stopped to pose for pictures with Danny smiling atop Jack's shoulders, Jack believing it would always be like this. It was there on his face, in the photographs, but there was something else in the photographs, in the expression on Anne's face while she looked at Danny, if only for that moment, that could have been mistaken for confusion, as though something had thrown her off, and it wasn't the first time Jack
had witnessed it. He'd seen that same expression when Anne sat at her easel and Danny slept in the cradle next to her. And sometimes when Danny was playing on the floor, and Anne sat on the couch sketching him or simply watching him. And sometimes when Danny wasn't even in the room.

Jack would ask, “What is it?”

Anne would shake her head and say, “It's nothing. I'm just thinking.” But she didn't say what it was that she was thinking. Only, “It's not important,” the inflection in her voice suggesting that it was anything but unimportant, which Jack pointed out.

“It's really nothing. Nothing at all.”

And he asked her again one night, after they'd dropped off Danny at Jack's parents' apartment. They were sitting in the back of a cab, on their way to a dinner party.

Anne told him, “I'm thinking of the new paintings.” And a few seconds later, “I'm thinking of naming the series ‘One Foot on the Platform, One Foot on the Train.' That's how I've been feeling lately.” She turned her head and looked out the window. The sparking of the street lamps, the red and green of the traffic lights, the quick flash of amber, burst against her reflection. “I don't mean about
us
. You and me. But I don't always know how to feel about Danny. About being a mother.” She looked over at him. “I don't mean just in the moment when I'm with him. I'm talking about something more pervasive. I can't really give it a name, except that I want to be Danny's mother and at the same time I don't want a child at all, and all the while I don't ever doubt that I love him. It isn't about that. And it isn't about being nostalgic for when it was only the two of us.”

Jack said he had a pretty good idea of what she was talking about, and that he'd sometimes felt the same way.

Anne said, “All parents do, I suppose. Once in a while.” She said she really believed that, “even if half the time I don't know
what
I feel, or
how
I feel, except confused and it frightens me.” She shook her head. “God, Jack. He's the best little boy.”

There were mornings when the three of them would lie in bed, Danny nuzzling his cheek against Anne's neck and kicking his small feet
against Jack's hips, and they would laugh and sing songs. Times when Danny would roll across Anne's lap and burrow his head in the crook of her arm. Or she would sit on the floor with him and make toys out of cardboard, old socks and yarn. There didn't seem to be any confusion then. Anne would look at Jack and smile, then look over at Danny and scoop him up and swing him around her hips and declare, “You are the best little boy.”

There were times when Anne told Jack that she wanted to protect Danny from any doubts she had. She said, “I know it's only a phase I'm going through. I know it will pass.” Those were the times, she said, when she had no doubts at all.

But there were those other times when that look returned, and not just when Danny was running around the loft, making noise, talking to himself, while Jack worked on his book and Anne painted—there always seemed to be a work-in-progress back then, propped on Anne's easel, stacked on Jack's desk—but when they were doing nothing at all, and Anne told Jack that she wondered if Danny could sense how she was feeling and how worried she was. But that winter, Danny did not behave like a little boy with any worries, not when he rolled around in the snow, or chased the pigeons in Washington Square. Or when he spent the weekend with his grandparents so Jack and Anne could spend the weekend alone. Jack's mother said Danny was the most contented little boy she'd ever seen, and then, with no small amount of displeasure, “I assume he's still
coop
erating.”

Danny was still cooperating.

And he was still cooperating in late March, a few weeks before his second birthday. That's when Anne said, “I think all that concern was over nothing. I couldn't be happier.” Maybe it had something to do with her upcoming show. Maybe she really believed, “It must have been one of those phases mothers go through.” She told Jack, “I know we made the right decision.”

Later that month, the gallery mounted Anne's “One Foot on the Platform…” show. The art critic from the
Times
said Anne's palette had grown deep and expansive over the past two years.
ARTnews
crowned her “the Queen of Postmodernism.”
Art in America
praised
her for the “ontological autonomy indicative of her entire body of work.” It was 1983. A lot of people were throwing money at art. Some of that money came to Anne. That summer they went back to France. To the country house in Loubressac.

Anne was going to work on paintings for two private collections. They were commissioned for September. Jack was under contract to write his third book. They hired a local woman, Isabelle Pujol, to be Danny's au pair. It was very hot that June. There were no fans or air conditioners in the house, no screens on the windows, which were kept open day and night, the shutters pulled back; the shade, and whatever cooling it managed, came courtesy of the old trees in the yard. The kitchen hummed with flies. At least once a day a sparow came swooping into the big room and quickly flew out. It was never less than warm inside. The best time to work was late afternoon, break for supper with Danny, work until sunrise while Danny slept, and sleep during the hottest time of day, while Danny was off with Isabelle. Some nights their friends George and Catherine came by for drinks.

Anne worked downstairs in the big room off of Danny's bedroom. Jack worked upstairs, shirtless in cutoffs, where the clacking of the typewriter would not keep Danny awake. In the morning, they both kept Danny company while he ate his cereal or the egg Anne scrambled for him. Danny was walking and talking now, in the clutches of the “terrible twos.” Fighting toilet training. Curious about everything, and defiant. His word of choice was
“No.”
Anne said maybe Danny was finally acting out feelings he hadn't expressed back in New York. He needed help drinking his milk, but when Anne tried to show him how to hold his cup, he shouted “No” and splashed the milk in her face. He demanded their attention, but when they gave it to him he yelled, “Don't look at me,” and threw the nearest object, a pencil, a plate, at them.

“Isabelle has a big day planned for you,” Anne would say, “so finish your breakfast.”

“No.”

“She's taking you to her uncle's farm,” Jack would tell him. “Isn't that exciting?”

“No.”

“You'll see lots of animals. Horses and—”

Danny would kick his feet against his chair, shriek, “Don't
want
to go,” take a handful of scrambled egg and throw it on the floor.

“Do you want to stay here with Mummy and Daddy?”

“No.”

“Don't you want to go for a ride with Isabelle?”

“Hate Isabelle.” Danny would pound the table and scream.

“What do you want to do?”

Danny would reach for another handful of eggs, but if Anne beat him to it and took the eggs out of his hand, Danny would start to cry.

So it went: Danny kicking and screaming, throwing his food, behaving, well, like a two-year-old.

“But you said—”

“No.”

“But you
asked
—”

“No.”

“But you wanted—”

“No. No. No.”

Some mornings, Anne would scream back at him, and when Danny threw eggs at her she'd snatch the plate and shout, “Then,
don't
eat your breakfast,” and scrape the food into the garbage. Or Jack would grab Danny's bowl of cereal just before the small hands pushed it to the floor, and leave Danny sitting in his high chair kicking and screaming at the empty room.

By the time Isabelle arrived, Jack and Anne were dripping sweat, exhausted and in no mood to coddle or charm their little boy. They warned Isabelle about Danny's present mood—they all spoke French so Danny wouldn't understand. “L'enfant terrible,” Anne explained.

Isabelle smiled, lifted Danny to her ample bosom and a moment later he was sitting on her lap, eating what remained of his breakfast, drinking milk out of his cup and, after hugs and kisses to Mummy and Daddy, grinning happily and handsome from inside Isabelle's pickup truck.

“Not exactly sleep-inducing,” Anne said, as they walked upstairs to their bedroom.

The evenings, after supper, were the most difficult. Danny, tired but too excited to go to bed, hurled himself through the house, distracted for a moment by a toy, then zipped through the big room, yelling, banging books together, throwing them in the air, jumping at whatever caught his attention, laughing, screaming, hopping along the furniture. Anne managed to keep her brushes on a shelf beyond his reach, or Danny surely would have scattered them on his way upstairs to Jack's room, where he banged on the typewriter, doing little damage to the work-in-progress, until he mastered the technique of turning
on
the typewriter—the law of averages notwithstanding, Danny never managed an actual word, let alone a masterpiece.

Anne told Jack, “I can't say that this is turning into the summer of my dreams,” and propped her canvas on top of the table, away from their curious little boy.

“Nor mine.”

“Everyone says it's supposed to only last a year.”

“The question is, will
we
?”

They sat in momentary silence contemplating the odds of their survival.

Jack wondered if Anne had any of the doubts she'd talked about in New York, and when he asked her, while they sat exhausted and exasperated, she only shook her head and told him, “It's nothing like that.”

 

The light was brightest in the big room. The air held the odors of linseed oil and paint. When Jack took a break from writing he would sit on the stairs and watch Anne work. He watched her as she drew the grid on the primed canvas, as she held the brush in her hand, her fingers supple and relaxed—the tensile connection of hand and eye—as she applied the thin line of color, the line becoming a form, the form a three-dimensional image born on the two-dimensional plane. The trick of perspective, of color and light, light and space. Anne painting over the painting, and with the sweep of her hand wiping the work clean and starting again; and starting over again the next day, and painting over that day's painting two days after that, and starting over again. The silent concen
tration melding afternoon to night, progress measured not by the hour but by the week.

In the early morning, while Danny slept and the sun slipped slowly across the floor, Jack and Anne talked about their work—somehow, they always found time to talk.

“I read the first two chapters,” Anne said, meaning Jack's manuscript. “They're good. I like that they don't read like a sequel to your last book.” She drew her bare legs up to her chin and wiped the damp strands of hair away from her face. “But I'm not sure you need to devote so much space to the Hays Office.”

“I was wondering about that. But I don't know where to cut it.”

“Do you have a title yet?”

Jack told her three that he'd been considering.

“You don't want to make it sound too academic,” Anne warned him.

“How about ‘Kissing in the Dark'?”

“The right idea but not catchy enough.”

“‘Nude in Black and White'?”

“Be serious.”

“May I take a look at the new painting?”

Anne turned the canvas toward him.

He told her, “The composition is excellent, of course, but the style seems more remote than your usual work.”

“Remote?”

“Maybe unfinished is more accurate.”

“I was going for that effect.” She stepped back and considered the canvas for a moment. “Maybe I did overdo it a bit. Do you find it off-putting?”

He shook his head. “But it looks accidental and makes the work seem unsure of itself.”

“You mean, it makes
me
seem unsure of myself.” She yawned. “I'm sleepy. Let's go upstairs.”

 

When they awoke, it was four in the afternoon. The sun had moved to
the other side of the house. Their room was dark and cool but their bodies were warm and slick. Jack curled into the soft fullness of Anne's thighs and felt her buttocks press against him. Her hand went around to lift, then push him inside her. When she turned her head and kissed him, her breath smelled of ripe country air. They were alone in the house, and they knew it, so they made love carelessly, the way they used to when it was just the two of them in the attic apartment in Gilbert and in the loft on Crosby Street; loud and forceful, kicking the covers, twisting the sheets, their bodies draped over and inside each other under sweet, yellow sunlight. They made love like that nearly every afternoon—Jack remembered the swell of Anne's breast, her hand gripping his shoulders, her body tensed to orgasm. It never felt like stolen moments. They had woven Danny into their lives. He could still feel Anne's hair sticking damp to his skin, and sense her body, which smelled of sex and sweat and sleep.