Romance: The Art of my Love: a story of betrayal, desire, love, and marriage (11 page)

“What, don’t you remember? You walked away from that conversation every time. Literally walked away. Out of the room, the house, or the café. All I had to do was make the smallest remark about what we did the night before and you’d blush like crazy and try to change the subject, or think up an excuse for leaving that very second. And I stopped trying. I was terrified of losing you, understand? Isn’t it ironic? The result of my fear of losing you is that I’m losing you right now.”

There. He had said it. What we were both thinking about. Our future. Did we have a future together?

“So how did you manage? If I was so ignorant and didn’t understand anything about sex, how did you satisfy your needs?” Now there’s a completely unnecessary element of sarcasm in my voice. Apparently that untouchable princess he had mentioned had not completely died off inside me.

“Simple. The Internet. You can find anything there. Any kind of porn.” Paul wipes a hand across his eyes, like he’s trying to rub out whatever remains of what he saw online, and walks over to me. “Why don’t you tell me what you’re going to do now?”

“What do you want me to do?” I ask the question very quietly, because I’m frightened. Frankly, I am terrified that if I say what I’m thinking out loud, our relationship will be shattered, forever. Does that mean I want to protect it? My relationship with Paul?

“I want you to finish this commission and come back home. To me. I need you. You are mine, and I am yours. I can’t live without you.” Paul articulates every word calmly and evenly while looking me directly in the eye. His voice is steady, no trembling. He sounds absolutely confident in what he is saying. I know him too well, though, and I notice a muscle twitching in his cheek. It must take all his willpower to appear calm and confident.

“But why, why, why, if I mean so much to you, did you fuck Rachel? More than once!” Yes, I’m screaming now, and saliva is flying out of my mouth. I’m hurt and scared.

“You want to know why? Everything? How she set it all up? Should I give you all the details?” Paul is yelling now, too.

“No. Please. Don’t tell me. I can’t.” I sit down at the table, hide my face in my hands, and start to cry. Paul is quiet. After a little while, I calm down. He hands me a tissue, and I blow my nose and wipe my eyes. I need caffeine, right away. I stand up again and go to the coffee maker.

“I need to think this over. How to move forward, what to do next. I need time.”

“Fine,” responds Paul, quickly. Too quickly. I thought he would argue. It hurts that he agreed with me so promptly. As if he couldn’t wait to get away from me as soon as he could. Would he go to Rachel?

“Are you going to see her anymore?” I blurt out.

“No. It was actually her seeing me, not me seeing her. And I think I managed to explain to her convincingly enough that I only want you. Even after what happened between you and John. Are you planning to see him again?”

“No. There’s no reason. We had a very intensive course in sex ed. But I never felt anything for him and I still don’t.” I pour myself some coffee. “Want some coffee?”

“Sure. I’ve been drinking so much lately I’ve got coffee running through my veins where the blood used to be.” Paul plops down tiredly in his chair.

“Aren’t you sleeping? Conscience bothering you?” I can’t help taking some pleasure in his pain.

“Yeah, it is. And I keep working long hours.”

We sit quietly and drink our coffee. Then Paul stands up and walks out onto the terrace. I hear him exclaim in surprise, and I walk out to where he is.

“Wow! Emmy, these are great!” Paul is looking at my paintings.

“Yeah, I think it’s true what they say, that artists need bleed to paint well. When I’m suffering, I do much better work.”

“I don’t want you to suffer – ”

“Too late,” I interrupt.

“I don’t want you to suffer, but if it helps you to paint so well, then maybe it’s for the best. Anyway. I guess I’ll head home. Or do you want me to stay?”

“No, I don’t,” I answer, quickly. “I need to spend some time alone.”

“That’s what I thought. I’ll be waiting for you at home.” Paul stands quietly for a little while, looking at me.

“Okay.” I don’t feel like saying anything more. It irks me somehow that he isn’t insisting, trying to convince me to let him stay. He turns and goes. I watch after him, watch him walk to his car, get in, and drive away. I watch after him for a long, long time.

The whole next week I work feverishly fast and virtually all of the time. I hardly eat or sleep. By the end of the week, all the landscapes are finished. Paul and I communicate by short text messages: “How’s it going?” “Fine, alive and well. How are you?” Once Tom calls from the gallery to ask when I’m bringing the paintings. We agree on Friday evening. He has good news for me. The customer Tom and Rachel had mentioned, from Seattle, I think, the one interested in monochromatic art, had bought all of my black-and-white paintings, and he wanted to hire me to paint a mural in his office building, too. “The paintings he bought are for the same building,” Tom explains. “Can you do a sketch for a mural? Then I’ll send it to him for approval. If he likes it, you’ll need to spend some time in Seattle.”

I’m surprised and overjoyed. A trip far away from here is exactly what I need! I thank Tom effusively and incoherently.

“Don’t mention it, honey,” he reassures me. “I’ve got my own reasons. You wouldn’t believe the kind of bargaining I did over these paintings of yours. You’d be so proud of me!” Tom’s voice is high-pitched and girlish. It feels like talking to a girlfriend. I grill him about the mural – What size? What’s the deadline? How much does it pay? Tom answers all my questions in detail, very businesslike. Something comes alive inside me. Something very much like hope. If I get this commission, I can go away for a while, and maybe that will be enough to help me understand what I need to do next.

On Friday afternoon, I lock up the cabin, hide the key back under its pot, and drive straight to the gallery. It’s a pretty long drive, but I hardly notice the road. My poor head is bursting with thoughts. I wonder if Cinderella ever cheated on her prince while they were living happily ever after. Did she? With some stable boy or woodcutter when the prince was off slaying another dragon? And during his travels, did the prince ever meet a peasant girl, or a shepherdess, or a serving girl, who helped him forget his troubles for a while? 

I have no idea how I’m going to talk to Paul when I get home. I’m so frightened at the thought that I’m shaking inside. For that reason I drive straight to the gallery without stopping at home. I want to put off that unpleasant moment as long as possible.

At the gallery, Tom greets me joyfully. I look around with suspicion and ask about Rachel.

“Our birdie has flown the coop, the cat’s away, she’s in San Francisco till the end of next week. Nevertheless, you have an incredible, incomparable seller of paintings and creator of artistic websites – me! – right here at your service.”

“Look, I made a sketch for the mural.” I pull the drawing out of my folder and hand it to him. Tom goes right to the scanner to make a copy for the buyer, and I head back to my truck to get the paintings. Tom catches up with me outside.

“So, how was your trip?” he asks, trying to glance inside the car over my shoulder. I shrug. Did I have a good trip? Depends on how you look at it. I had painted like a woman possessed, and I think I had produced my best landscapes ever. My paintings had finally started to sell. I had experienced an unbelievable orgasm – no, several different unbelievable orgasms. I now know what people mean when they talk about passion and lust. And maybe best of all, I had started to see the world in color again. From that point of view, luck had smiled on me. Meanwhile, I had betrayed my husband, the person closest and dearest to me of all. And he had betrayed me, too. With somebody else’s wife. That could hardly be called good fortune. There it was, my grandmother’s good-and-bad luck, catching up with me and knocking me off my feet.

Tom looks my paintings over without a word, tilting each one this way and that, moving them closer to his eyes, then further away.

“Good work,” he says, quietly. His gaze shifts to me. “But why do you look like a car ran you over, more than once, even?”

“It wasn’t a car. It was life,” I sigh.

“That bad? Let’s take these inside and then go and have dinner. You can tell Uncle Tom what’s bothering you.”

We bring the paintings inside and lock up the gallery. Tom brings me to a tiny restaurant nearby with a bar.

“What will you have to drink? You look like you really need one.”

I remember how I acted after two margaritas and decide to refrain.

“I think I’ll just have water. Otherwise I won’t make it home.”

“As you wish. I don’t need to drive anywhere, so I’m going to drink.” Tom heads over to the bar and comes back with a cheerfully-colored orangey drink, decorated with a rainbow-striped umbrella and a slice of pineapple.

“Why don’t you need to drive? Do you live nearby?” I realize I know absolutely nothing about him.

“I live right there in the gallery. Well, not right in the exhibition hall, nobody’s coming to see
me
, but in the back. There’s a small apartment back there, more like a cubbyhole, really, with a shower and a tiny kitchen. That’s where I live.”

“Why?”

“Because Rachel let me live there when I first moved to LA, and I liked it. She doesn’t charge me rent – she’s an
angel
, what can I say! – and it also saves me a ton of time. I get up in the morning and I’m already at work. Lovely!”

Tom starts to tell me about himself. It turns out that art is in his blood, you might say. His father came from a long line of expert art restorers. His grandfather had worked at restoration, and his great-grandfather, and on and on. Tom’s father was famous, renowned in the museum community. When somebody needed something very expensive and rare restored, he was the one they called. Tom’s mother was an art historian who had written many books about art. They lived on the East Coast.

“You know how some kids love comic books? Well, I always loved paging through books with reproductions of famous paintings. I spent the best years of my life doing that. I could look for hours at those books, thinking up stories about all the paintings. Even before I could read enough to see what the titles were.”

Tom’s father was often away on long trips, and he would take Tom with him. He lived in France for a long time, and even learned French there. “I can order coq-au-vin or pot-au-feu in a restaurant with no accent at all, can you believe it?” he boasts.

Meanwhile, he orders me some food, and when it comes, he insists that I eat it. “Go ahead, girlfriend, listen to my sweet stories and eat, or else I’m going to stop entertaining you with this pleasant conversation.”

I eat. I really haven’t eaten for a long time, and to my surprise, the food tastes wonderful. I like listening to Tom and watching him. He knows how to raise one eyebrow to express surprise, and my whole life I’ve wanted to learn that trick, but never could. Tom is talking now about how they lived in Germany and how he went to school there.

“Do you know the drills they put us through?
Ein, zwein! Ein, zwein!
” Tom sips from his brightly colored drink. His cheeks are gradually taking on the same hue as the liquid in his glass.

“So you speak German, too?”

“Well, really, I’m multifaceted, like...” He wrinkles up his forehead hilariously, trying to think of the word. “Like a diamond, that’s what!”

It seems that Tom has always wanted to sell art rather than make it. Tom’s mother asked Rachel to take him on as an intern for the summer after his freshman year in college. She and Rachel were old friends. After that Tom worked for her every summer, and after graduation, he moved to Los Angeles for good.

“Why didn’t you find a job somewhere out there on the East Coast, closer to your parents? They must miss you. If I had a mom and dad, nothing would make me move so far away from them.”

“No, they split up. My mother has a new family now.” Tom looks down into his glass. Must be a sore topic.

This is a familiar story. It means that Tom is one of us. The lonely castaways. It’s probably even more painful for him. I never did have a family like that, with both a father and a mother. I don’t even know what it’s like to have two parents who love you and care for you. I could only dream about that when I was little, jealous of the other kids. Tom used to have it all – a happy childhood, and loving, fascinating parents who showed him the whole world. Losing your family is a difficult thing, at any age, and under any circumstances. My thoughts ran full circle and returned right back to where they had started: what about me and Paul? What about our family? What would happen to us?

“There! You’ve finished eating, so now it’s your turn to entertain me. I’ll order myself a little something before I fall under the table.”

“What do you want to know?” I ask, after he orders his dinner.

“First tell me why you look like you’ve spent two weeks in a maximum security prison getting beaten and tortured instead of two weeks in a cabin in the mountains by the lake. Who has hurt our little Emmy? Tell Uncle Tom, let me wipe away your tears.”