Monday, Monday: A Novel (9 page)

“No, you are.” Turning the page, she stopped on a painting by Wyeth titled
Wind from the Sea,
which revealed a view through a half-open window to the bright landscape beyond. Airy, transparent curtains with embroidered birds along the edges fluttered inward on the wind, and down below, outside the window, a curve of tire tracks crossed the flat land toward the water.

“One problem with tempera,” Wyatt said, “is that roaches like to nibble the paint because of the egg yolk.”

She put the book back on the shelf. Looking out the window, she didn’t respond to anything he had just said. He wondered what she was thinking. Finally, with her back to him, she said, “I want you to see it.”

“To see what?”

“Where he shot me.”

He didn’t know what she meant at first, but when she glanced at him, he did.

“Is it … because I was out there with you?”

“I don’t know.”

He waited.

“I don’t know.”

He hesitated, watching her, and then reached over and closed the door.

She pulled her sweater off and felt as if she were ridding herself of something oppressive. Unbuttoning her shirt and shifting the cup of her bra, turning her face to the window, she exposed the scarred breast, aware of how ugly it was.

He wondered if she was testing him to see if he, also, would look away. But he couldn’t have done so. The light from the window lay across her, showing the purplish scars and creating a shadow in the indentation where the flesh was missing.

“There it is,” she said. “That’s what it looks like.” She repositioned the bra, buttoned her shirt, and pulled her sweater back on. “Let’s talk about something else.”

In that moment, Wyatt’s concern for Shelly’s emotions partially obscured what he was feeling. But he knew that his life was changed. By revealing herself to him, she had declared the absence of rules. She hadn’t seduced him in any way that either of them recognized, but she had laid herself bare, and the effect on him was immediate. Her trust bewitched him. He was confounded and bemused. Aroused and embarrassed.

Nothing he felt for Shelly at that moment was like anything he had ever felt for Elaine. He had never felt called on like this. Elaine was at home, unhappy with him for a number of reasons. He wasn’t a good provider; he was barely supporting his family. She didn’t like that he was in graduate school instead of out making a living. She didn’t believe he could make a decent living as an artist.

And here was Shelly Maddox, implying that just looking at her was enough, and would heal her somehow.

7

A PERFECT LIKENESS

They were drawn to each other, imprinted on each other. They had survived Charles Whitman, and the intensity of the experience had lingered in both of them. And the future was written the moment Shelly pulled her sweater off and averted her eyes.

They were not clueless or blameless. They were not their best selves in each other’s presence either. A certain helplessness and weakness settled in, and self-deception. Shelly knew her feelings sooner than Wyatt knew his, because she couldn’t escape them: when she thought of Wyatt, her heart pounded and her stomach knotted. Now when she walked with him across the plaza, she was unable to separate her anxiety about the tower from the anxious feeling of falling in love. She became keyed up and sleepless, nervous all the time. She knew she was trespassing. He was married. She was fretful every time she planned to see him. But when she was alone with him, in his car or in his office, she felt suddenly restful, as if nothing in her life could ever go wrong again. He had looked at her ruined breast and her twisted arm and hadn’t been bothered by them. Other guys might have turned away, but Wyatt was different. She had nothing to hide from him.

Wyatt, on the other hand, lied to himself, refusing to think he was falling in love. He believed he was in control of his feelings right up to the moment he suddenly knew he wasn’t.

The moment happened in November. Elaine had gone to Houston with a friend for the weekend and taken Nate with her, leaving Wyatt in Austin on his own with the car. He meant to spend the time on campus catching up on work, but Saturday morning he walked by Shelly’s dormitory, thinking he might see her. When he didn’t, he hung around the entrance and then walked around the dormitory and stood on the sidewalk under her window. He was about to ask himself what, exactly, he was doing here, when Shelly looked out and saw him. He waved at her, and she came down, and they sat in his car to talk. He mentioned that overcast days like this reminded him of days in high school when he and Jack would drive from San Antonio to Port Aransas during Christmas break and nearly freeze on the beach.

“I’ve never been to Port A in winter,” Shelly told him.

He pictured how she would look walking on the beach in the wind and the cold, and thought of the churning water, the cawing gulls and scampering sandpipers. The shells and seaweed tumbling in with the foam. And suddenly he wanted nothing more than to drive Shelly to Port Aransas. They could be back that same night.

She balked at the suggestion. “I don’t know. It doesn’t seem right.”

“We’re friends,” he said. “It’s okay.”

The drive took three and a half hours. When they passed through San Antonio, he turned off the highway into his old neighborhood and pointed out the old haunts—the stone wall of the cemetery at Fort Sam Houston that he and Jack used to climb over, and the street where they had grown up and where their parents still lived. He didn’t drive down the street, in case his parents or Jack’s parents might recognize the Cutlass, but he was happy talking about his childhood with Shelly.

On the ferry crossing from the mainland to Port Aransas, they got out of the car and stood at the rail, tossing bits of bread and crumbled crackers to seagulls flapping in the cold sky, and watching dolphins surface alongside in the gray water. Wyatt put his arms around Shelly, and that was the moment he knew. The wind and the salt air carried away the last of any pretense about what they felt for each other. Looking at the tugboats and shrimp boats moving slowly along the Lidia Ann Channel, Wyatt understood that his life, as he had known it, was slipping away at the same methodical speed.

On the cold beach they collected shells and sand dollars, and studied, up close, blue men-of-war that had washed ashore. They huddled against a sand dune watching the whitecaps gain speed and stretch outward and disintegrate into froth.

“It isn’t fair to you,” he said. “And Elaine doesn’t deserve this. I have to think about Nate.” But he didn’t let go of Shelly. He bundled her in his arms.

“Should we not see each other at all?” she asked. The wind drowned out the question, and she didn’t repeat it. She already knew the answer. “We should go home.”

Driving back to Austin, he held the wheel and stared through the windshield at the flat road under the darkening sky, the sinewy rows of dried cornstalks running along either side. He wanted to pull to a stop and make love to Shelly. Her hair was tangled from the wind. She had taken her coat and sweater off, and underneath was a peasant blouse, cobalt blue and smocked in a way that revealed the slope of her shoulders and the clarity of her skin.

“What are you thinking?” he asked her.

“That we shouldn’t see each other again.”

But her conviction was as doomed as the waves they had watched rolling in.

A month later, most of the students and faculty had gone home for Christmas break when Shelly met Wyatt in the art building and he took her to the studio to show her one of his paintings. They puttered around for a while, looking at projects in the room—clay sculptures, charcoal sketches, half-painted canvases sitting upright on easels. Shelly kept returning to a tempera painting Wyatt had done of a rocking chair beside a shuttered window. The painting lay flat on a table, and they were standing over it when they felt the absolute stillness of the building and realized how alone they were.

He resisted touching her. He had never kissed her. He watched the sweep of her lashes as she studied the painting, and looked at the pink tint to her lips, and said, “Let me paint you.”

She didn’t look up, and didn’t respond for a long time. He wondered if she had heard. She kept looking at the painting.

What she actually saw was his hand resting beside it. The shape of his knuckles, and the blue paint under his nails. “How do you mean?” she asked.

“A portrait.”

“What kind?”

“Without your clothes on.”

That was when she looked at him.

“I won’t touch you,” he told her.

She could see the specks in the irises of his hazel eyes, and pictured what he would see if she stood in front of him naked—the ugly breast and the twisted arm.

“You would only have to pose for a few minutes,” he told her. “I would make sketches and take pictures, and paint from those.”

“And what would you do with the painting?”

“The painting isn’t the point.”

“What is the point?”

“Just that I could look at you.”

“What would be the point for me?” She said this with a half smile. “I look at myself all the time.”

“Not through my eyes. You would love yourself through my eyes.”

Eventually she took off her blouse and bra, and he locked the door, and she stood in front of a wooden screen that was painted a chalkboard green, in the cold, moderate light from a bank of windows. She left her scarred breast visible—“You’ve seen that one already”—but covered the other with her hand.

Wyatt studied her, mesmerized by the softness of her face, and the breast, and the cold light pooling in the hollow of her shoulder. There were goose bumps on her arms. He loved the way she was made. The curve of her hip. “The blue jeans?” he asked.

“I’m scared to.” But she leaned over and unlaced her shoes, and pulled them off, and took her jeans off and hung them over a chair.

“The underwear?”

She pulled them down and sat in the chair to pull them off, and then sat looking at him, her legs pressed together and her hands clutching her knees. “You’re sure you locked the door?”

He walked backward to test it, unable to take his eyes off her as she got up and stood in front of the screen, wearing nothing but the ribbon in her hair.

“This is impossible,” he told her. “I want to make love with you.” He walked around her and looked at her from different places, and admitted to himself solemnly that he was in love with her to the point that he was no longer in love with Elaine. Every second he looked at Shelly was a danger to his marriage. And he was betraying Shelly as well as Elaine. He knew he was wrong to do this. But the light shimmering in over the treetops turned her skin opalescent.

He sketched her in pencil, and photographed her, asking her to turn, and to move her hand, and reposition her arm, and relax her fingers. Half-joking and half-hoping, he said, “Now sit down in the chair again and open your legs.”

It frightened her how close she came to doing what he said. She was ashamed of herself, and tried to quiet her conscience. She was only a model for his painting, she told herself. He had seen women do this before. She wasn’t the first. And there would be others. He was an artist, and she was the object. She was the bruised apple.

Half an hour later they heard voices in the hall, and Wyatt put his camera and his sketches away.

And the following day, when Shelly’s parents had come to take her home for Christmas break, Wyatt began a week of feverish painting. He smoothed the gesso with a wooden block and painted at odd hours, alone, in secret, stoned sometimes, creating what for him was almost a spiritual icon. Stroke by stroke of the brush, Shelly became visible as he layered colors one on top of the other. Setting her image onto the Masonite board was the closest he could come to taking hold of her. He made his paint from dry pigments and water and combined the colors—cadmium and earth reds, yellow ocher and terre verte—with yolk from eggs he’d plucked from under the warm bellies of chickens on a hippie farm east of town. He stared at Shelly’s photographs until her face was so familiar that the face of his own wife, when he looked at her across the kitchen table or in their bed at night, began to seem foreign to him. He ground his own malachite from chunks of raw mineral, washing and grading it himself, and formed the blossoms of her cheeks with cadmium red, modeling the shadows in the dark green of verdaccio and applying the pink flesh colors, working from midtones up into the highlights with titanium white, and down into shadows again. His brushstrokes were gently possessive, the paint diluted and thin. Shelly appeared in the soft tones of the early layers like a ghost. His fingertips made her breathe. At times he painted through the night. He wanted to go on painting her for the rest of his life.

The portrait was on an easel covered by a sheet when Shelly returned to Austin and Wyatt brought her into the studio early one morning. It was small for a portrait but large for a tempera painting—eighteen by twenty-four inches. He apologized for the lingering odor of souring eggs in the paint, and pulled the sheet away.

And Shelly confronted herself. The image extended down below her waist. She was posed in front of the green board, facing the viewer directly, her ribbon dangling over her shoulder, her skin smooth. The scars wove back and forth across her arm and her breast. Her elbow was bent, and her hand lay on her upper chest, the fingers resting in the crevice at the base of her neck.

“Do you like it?” Wyatt asked her.

Even the fingernails were hers. She blinked. Nodded. She didn’t approach the painting or touch it. Her posture, as she stood surveying herself, was the same as it was in the portrait—her forearm lying upward between her breasts.

“You’re beautiful,” he said.

She loved the painting so much, she was speechless. Wyatt thought he had failed her. “It’s all right, Shelly, if you don’t like it.”

“I love it too much,” she whispered, turning to look at him. “And everything I feel for you is wrong. And I can’t make it right, and I can’t keep any of it.” She waved her hand at the painting, a look of heartbreak on her face. “I wish I had left my clothes on. I wish you could paint them on.”