The Life Room (23 page)

“I’m freer than you are, Eleanor. My erotic life is here with you, not with my wife. Being married makes me love you more than if I were single.”

“That’s convenient.”

“If I wasn’t married I would expect more from you. This way we can be equal. You don’t have to put groceries in my refrigerator. I don’t have to pay your bills. There’s no hierarchy between us. If I paid for your dress, then I own it when you’re wearing it. It becomes harder for you to refuse me. You feel you have an obligation when you’re married, that you owe your life to someone even when you no longer feel the same attraction. Let me explain it another way. If you sacrifice your own work time to come home and make me dinner, I’ve deprived you of something. It’s a cruel institution, marriage.”

It was weirdly convincing logic. She thought about how even though William had asked her to leave so that she could get back to her life, she was still in love with him. Love wasn’t a choice.

“You can’t come into my studio wearing your vintage lace tops and blue jean skirts and red sandals looking like a teenager. You just can’t do it. You can’t let me get close to you and let me smell your perfume and then pull away. It’s killing me.”

“Adam, I have to finish this paper.”

“I can’t keep looking at you and not want you next to me.”

“But you promised.”

“Cancel the conference. Stay with me.”

She agreed to meet him back at her apartment after her meeting. It took too much work to say no. She thought about the time she had spent in his studio watching him work, modeling for him, and how complicit she was in his work. She was flattered that it was she he picked to immortalize. Even though she was his “study,” she felt like a partner in his work.

Adam drank a beer on the bed and listened to Bob Dylan while she continued to work at her desk. She could hear his heavy boots—paint-splattered in dots and slashes over the leather—walk her floor. He stood behind her chair and massaged her shoulders.

“Adam, I told you I have to finish this paper. It’s due tomorrow.” She was struggling with it. Even its title was proving burdensome: “The Tension Between Morality and Eroticism and the Quest for Selfhood.” In the paper she showed how desire for goodness and darkness were equally strong. “Do you think there are only two true objects of human love: God and the self?” she asked. “I mean, the self as man. Do you think that if we decide to love man over God then we are essentially doomed?”

“Why are they exclusive?”

“We can decide to love God over man, but if we forgo God and decide to love only man, to love only carnally, to exist only in pursuit of the flesh, then does that mean we are perpetual sinners?”

“What are you struggling with?” Adam asked, still impatient with her to finish. “Your desire for me and your devotion to William?”

She looked at him.

“Without darkness there can be no goodness. Man has to sin in order to be redeemed.”

“So are you saying that what we’re doing together is a sin?”

She thought of William. His sickness was a manifestation of a struggle inside him. He belonged to the forest. She wanted to lead him out of the darkened woods. But how? Was it ever really possible to reach another person? She didn’t want Adam. She was devoted to William.

“You can fight desires but they still exist inside us. If I make love to you in my mind, am I still unfaithful? And does it make a difference? Didn’t I sin against my marriage those weeks in my studio when I thought about touching you and my need to be close to you? I’ll teach you about sin. Then you can decide if you’d rather worship God or the body.” He tried to kiss her. “Or maybe you’d rather be with a boy rather than a man.”

He lifted the hair off her neck. His breath smelled like beer and onions from the hamburger he had eaten earlier in the night. He wanted to touch her. She moved away, and as she did she caught him staring at her with an almost sinister expression.

“I need you, Eleanor.” He cornered her again while she was at the sink filling up the kettle. He pressed his body into her back and kissed her neck. She was aroused by his desire for her, but she was tired of playing the part of the prepubescent lover. She was in her twenties. It occurred to her as he was trying to seduce her that this was central to his art. It would allow him to go further into his pathos, into his shame and desire, and by traveling further, it would allow him to push further into his work. Suddenly his desire for her repulsed her. It was purely carnal. How could she open herself to someone so foreign to her own nature? Adam was sophisticated and worldly and solipsistic. She was a girl from the Midwest in love with a boy who knew the name of every insect and bird but did not know how to navigate his own heart.

“I can’t do this, Adam.” She wiggled out of his grasp. “I told you. I’m back with William.”

Her bottle of perfume was sitting on the windowsill. Adam looked at the blue cobalt bottle and seized it. He put it in his pocket and walked out of the apartment. “Find a new job,” he said, under his breath. Or did he say “Find a new guy?” She wasn’t sure, and she continued to wonder once he had left. Her eyes focused on the windowsill where the perfume bottle had once stood. She conjured an image in her head of Adam in his studio opening the perfume and smelling it, and then smudging together colors from paint tubes to form a muted disturbing color, then taking the brush to his canvas, transforming his anger and desire into the texture of his subject’s hair.

He was too complicated. Everything he wanted from her seemed for his own benefit. She thought about William. He was the opposite. She opened the window. The drone of traffic was suddenly absent. She listened again. She heard the creak of the tree on her street when the wind pushed against it. She picked up the phone. It had been over a month since she had last seen him.

“It’s good to hear your voice, Eleanor.”

“I wanted to call you a hundred times.”

“I’ve been working again.” He grew quiet. “I’m back at the apartment.”

“Why?”

“The motherfucker moved back home. I can’t live in the same house with him. I don’t trust him, Eleanor.”

“But it’s too soon.” She paused. “I just wish you didn’t have to live there.” Eleanor thought about that dark apartment bordering on the ghetto.

“Can you believe she took him back? After what he did to her? I have to live here, Eleanor. Who else is going to look after these folks?”

She took the phone and lay down on the couch.
This is good, William is talking again
, she thought. “How are the dogs? Bear? Scout?”

“They’re good. But they’re going to die.”

“William, I’m coming home. I need to see you. Are you building the wall again?”

“I don’t have the strength to lift the stones.”

“I’ll help. If you wait for me.”

She couldn’t get the shape, touch, voice, image of him out of her system. They had that kind of telepathy with each other. She knew that the minute she looked into his eyes everything would be fine even though they’d been away from each other for more than a month. She surprised William and came in a day earlier than he expected. Usually she spent the first night she was home having supper with her mother, but that night she asked if she could borrow the car. She fixed herself up, putting on a skirt, the blue one with the white flowers, and a blue sweater that William liked her in. She fixed her hair the way he liked, taking the two front pieces and putting them in back with a clip, slipped in her favorite dangle earrings.

She drove downtown, parked her car in the apartment complex where William lived. Once she got out of the car, she pulled her long coat closer to her body out of fear, telling herself she had to get William out of that place. It was after 6:00, pitch black. The wind was tough. In the lobby, Eleanor told the security officer that she was here to see William Woods. She asked if he would let her up without buzzing so she could surprise him, and he went ahead and let her. She remembered exactly what floor William lived on, what apartment number. The door was locked. She knocked on the thick steel. There was no answer. She pressed the buzzer and then pounded on the door again.

But she had seen William’s pickup truck. It was parked next to where she had parked her mother’s car. Maybe he was taking out the garbage or tending to a problem with one of the units in the building. She stood in the hallway for a few minutes and waited. Then she stepped back into the elevator, went downstairs, and asked the security guard if he had seen William. She looked in the mirror in the vestibule. She thought to herself, as soon as William sees me we are going to be okay The security guard said he’d try to page him. When he didn’t answer the page, the security guard accompanied Eleanor back up the elevator. She thought how strangely yellow his coloring looked under the fluorescent light in the elevator. She remembered that security guard’s face as he proceeded to unlock William’s door. He suggested she wait out in the hall after he flicked on the light and smelled its stench. Eleanor couldn’t wait. She followed behind him. The room looked as if it hadn’t been cleaned in weeks. Dirty clothes were in a heap on the floor. A filthy towel was on the back of the kitchen chair. There were empty Coke cans, pizza boxes, newspapers stacked on the kitchen counters and piled on the floor and on the coffee table. It smelled awful. It was the sight of that room, the fact that he hadn’t cared enough about himself to clean up, that made her angry.
William, why can’t you take better care of yourself?
she thought. The security guard tried to usher her back out the door, but she wouldn’t go. On the table was an empty vial of painkillers William’s doctor had prescribed for a disk he fractured lifting stones for his wall.

William was slumped on the couch, his face pushed into the pillows, his back to her. She thought he was sleeping, even though the security guard tried to pull her away. “It’s okay,” she said to the guard. “I want to surprise him.”
Nothing is wrong. William’s sleeping
. She leaned over and kissed his cheek. It was cold. She put a blanket around him. He didn’t move. “William, wake up. Get up!” she screamed. The record player nearby was still on.
Everyone’s leaving. And sunny skies has to stay behind
. The needle was at the end of the record, scratching it. On the coffee table was the last letter she had sent him, telling him when she was arriving. Next to it was a brush filled with strands of his hair.

Days later she went to the woods by herself and sat on the stone wall. There was still snow on the ground and she sat in the cold to be close to William. She heard his voice in her head.
A dry retaining wall is constructed without mortar or adhesion. It depends upon the weight and friction of one stone on another for its stability. Nothing exists alone, Eleanor. There is always balance. The first
stones can be laid six inches below grade. There is no elaborate footing required for a dry wall since the stones are not bonded together and will raise and lower with the frost. In laying the first layer, larger stones should be used. A line should then be strung along the wall as a guide to keep the rest of the wall straight
. She had watched him drag the stones from one site to another in a piece of heavy canvas.
It’s about endurance. I think of it as battling with what pulls me down, what takes the life out of me, and then building something beautiful from it. This wall is ours. Remember. One stone on another
. She pictured the way he had pushed her to the ground and started kissing her neck.
Let me look at those eyes
, he said.
The blue one is brighter today, Eleanor
.

She picked up one of the lighter stones and laid it on the wall. The wall was perpendicular to a creek, and she heard the sound of the water moving through the stones, reminding her of the living world.
What happened to all the love letters I sent you when we were apart? Where are the letters, William? Nothing is private between two people
. She lifted one stone, and then another, placing each one on the wall the way he had taught her.
One life spirals into others. I thought God would protect you. But I made a mistake. You needed to watch yourself. To make your own covenant with God. Didn’t I mean anything? Why, William?
She held the blue stone, his favorite, close to her chest before she threw it into the wall, shattering it into little pieces.
How could you do this to me?

The air was turning moist. Darker. Clouds closed in overheard. Small animals scurried for cover. She could see the gleaming edge of a piece of red cloth in between two slabs of stone. It was the bandanna he wore around the crown of his head. She used it to wipe her eyes.

It’s my life to do what I want with, isn’t it, Eleanor? If I want to stay here in the woods, behind this wall?
She stood up straight and stretched her back.
No, it’s not okay, William
. Her muscles ached. Her hands were crusty with mud.
What about us—the people who loved you? We sat around the linoleum kitchen table in your mother’s house trying to figure out what would possess you to take your life. We talked about the coffin you built out of wood for the sick runt of your cat’s litter. Your dad was there. He was crying like a baby. We talked about the amazing care that went into the way you built the wall. What went wrong? We talked about how you liked to run in the woods with your dogs, the way you juggled for hours at a time
.

She propped herself on the wall and let her legs dangle over one side. William was part of God; she listened for his mysterious echo in the woods. Nothing. Only the wind sighed through the dense trees. The shadow of a slender deer. A hundred sparrows crowded in one tree. It began to rain—a drizzle so light she could barely feel it. In time the rain quickened.

She hopped off the wall and picked up a fistful of dirt.
I know you can see me, William
. The rain soaked her hair and jacket. Her wet pants stuck to her legs. She shivered. In her memory she saw the shape of him scoop up a handful of earth. He held it in his palm and sprinkled it into her hand.
Here, take this dirt in your hands. See all the minerals and crystals inside it. There could be souls in this dirt, fragments of bodies. We’re all inside each other
.