Chapter Sixteen
Sixteen
I draw Vin’s boots on Wednesday night and Thursday night too.
Each drawing is titled Vin Home from Work. The Thursday night drawing I spend almost an hour on. I try my hand at cross-hatching and turn the paper into a smudgy indecipherable hair ball.
Vin Home from Work. I’m building him from nothing. Conjuring him from thin air onto white paper. When I look at these drawings, I can hear the groan he does when he steps inside and the workday is done. I can feel how hungry he is for dinner. I can hear the front door locking behind him.
Vin Home from Work. Vin, my husband who retreated away from me because I’d retreated toward his brother.
“Oh, cool,” Vin says from behind where I stand at the kitchen counter, filling in the last few lines on my drawing. His voice makes me jump a foot in the air.
“Why are you sneaking around?” I’m irrationally, hotly angry at him for making me jump and I’m clutching my drawing pad to my chest like a shield.
“Sorry?” He’s got one hand on the back of his head. “I thought you’d have heard me come into the kitchen.”
“Well…okay!” And that’s all I got.
“I didn’t mean to…” He clears his throat. “I liked your drawing.”
“Oh.” The drawing pad comes down half a foot and I peek at my drawing to see what he saw. One is bad and one is good. “Which one?”
He points to the good one. “But…I thought that you only drew people?”
I’m frowning and grumpy. “Your boots basically are people.”
His brow furrows in (very reasonable) confusion.
“I mean…they have a lot of personality. They…are like an extension of you, or something.”
“Ah.” He’s nodding like he understands, which would be a miracle considering I don’t understand. “Like your glasses.”
“My glasses?”
“Yeah. Whenever they’re lying around, I feel like you can see me still. When you leave them on the bathroom counter, I face them toward the wall.”
I burst out laughing at this very delightful piece of trivia. “Are you serious?”
He shrugs, half-embarrassed and half-pleased at making me laugh. His hands are in his pockets and he’s rocking back on his heels, looking at his toes. “Are you…in the drawing mood?”
“Are you…offering to model?”
He shrugs again. “Yes. I mean, I know we said once a week, but I’m…not busy.”
“Okay, yeah. Same setup as before? Did that work for you?”
He’s nodding, already headed toward the hall closet for a towel, already pulling his T-shirt roughly off over his head. This time we both plunge right in. This is old hat, you know, for us. Me, the seasoned artist. Him, the seasoned…nude.
Vin jumps right into a seated pose with his legs extended and crossed at the ankle, leaning back on his palms, and I jump right into absolutely botching this drawing. Draw, Roz, draw! Michelangelo would be so proud of this yeti whose feet get chopped off by the nothingness at the edge of the paper.
On to the next. He’s standing, one arm up, palm at the back of his head.
I like this pose because it comes naturally to him and I see him do this all the time, clothed.
But I never realized before that it tipped his rib cage to one side like that, compressing half his midsection and elongating the other half.
I never realized that his armpit stretched so open like that or that he’d have to shift his weight to the opposite leg of the hand in his hair.
This time it’s his arm that runs into the edge of the paper.
He does another seated pose, a lying-down one, and then one last standing. In this one he’s twisting around, like he’s looking for something over his shoulder.
“Vin…” The only thing that moves are his eyeballs in their sockets as he brings me into his eyeline. “Did you…research poses?”
Now the only thing that moves is the rush of color to his cheeks. The timer dings and he shrugs, shaking out his hands and feet in preparation for the fifteen-minute pose.
I switch to a clean sheet of paper, leaving all the chopped-up Vins in the past. I don’t know why I can’t keep any of them within the framework of the paper today.
This is the long pose, so I expect him to go for something lo-fi. But instead he hits one knee. And then I expect him to lean his elbow on the other knee, at least. But he doesn’t. His torso remains upright and straight. He puts one hand on his thigh, and the other hand he extends, palm up.
“Vin.” I’ve got my hands on my hips.
“Hm.”
“Your muscles are going to be screaming by the end of these fifteen minutes.”
“Hm.”
He’s got his stubborn face on, so I walk to the couch and grab a throw pillow. “At least put this under your knee.”
He catches it, places it, and then resituates into the same position.
It’s a complicated one. The legs are making the same right angles but extended from the pelvis in different ways.
His shoulders look level at first, but the extended arm turns out to be lifting one side up.
His back toes are turned under, lengthening the bottom of his foot and jutting his heel backwards.
One hand disappears against his thigh but the other hand is unforgivingly stark against the negative space.
There are hollows under his collarbones, the hips talk to the shoulders, the shoulders frame the neck, the neck cradles the head, the head houses his face, which has a dark and plaintive expression.
He’s…remembering something. I’m sure of it.
What are you thinking about? I need to know.
But I can’t know.
So instead I draw.
I imagine.
I create an idea that exists somewhere halfway between Vin and me.
My brain is calm and productive, I’m churning through this pose, this leads to that, leads to oh, nope, draw that again, lower, sharper, there, good.
There’s the network of the knee that has his scars from his past ACL surgery that I can’t actually see from here but I know they’re there.
There’s the stepladder of hip, spine, shoulder, where he’s piggybacked me so many times.
There’s the dip between his shoulders where my chin sits when he’s carrying me.
His hand lowers an inch in the air and then lifts back up. His muscles are starting to strain with the work of it, but his facial expression doesn’t change.
This pose, I realize, isn’t an idea. This pose has a story.
It’s the classic will-you-marry-me pose, sure, but that has no history with me and Vin.
So what is this story? In his mind, is there something in his extended hand?
Is he offering something? Or is he holding his hand out expectantly? Waiting for something he’s owed?
The time is ticking down. I get lost in the whorls of his ear, the hairline, the connection of nose to brow, the shadows where his eyelid lovingly curves around his eye.
No, it’s not will-you-marry-me. So what is it?
Maybe it’s the strain of holding the pose, but I think his hand might be actually extended farther than when he started. He’s definitely not handing something over in this story, no…he’s reaching for someone. I’m sure of it. In his mind, his fingertips are centimeters from someone else’s.
I’m on to toes, toes, and more toes, who ever needs this many toes, and then back to the rise and fall of that hidden hand against his thigh. I know it’s a hand, you know it’s a hand, so how do I make a few simple lines look like a hand?
Twenty seconds left now, and I feel his eyes on me. At the top of my gaze, I feel his chin rise. A question, for me. I finish the skateboard of a shin, correct the railroad of his sternum, and then let my eyes take in the entirety of the pose, one last time.
Just five seconds left now.
And I see it. The whole structure of the pose, all its illustrative details, the way he melted into it, like he was partially resisting at first, but can’t fight it anymore. His eyes on mine. His hand out for me. He’s waiting. He’s patient. No. It’s not will you marry me. No. It’s simply:
Will you.
“Wow, you’re kind of a nightmare today,” Raff says cheerfully as he tears into the enchiladas I brought over. It’s an early dinner for the two of us because I’ve got to head out to art class in a minute.
“Rude!” I start to say, and then reconsider. “Fair!” I amend.
I worked at Harvest this morning and it was a special treat because the computer system was down, so I did all of the volunteer juggling by hand.
There will be approximately nineteen mistakes, I’m sure, and I don’t even want to consider what that means for the rescue food.
When I got home, I slapped the shit out of two pans of enchiladas and then decided that I simply could not sit around and wait for Vin to get home.
I took one of the pans and absconded to Raff’s.
“So.” Raff finally comes up for air, chewing and then actually swallowing before he stuffs more food in his mouth. “What’s your deal?”
“What’s your brother’s deal is more like it.”
I say it playfully but this is the closest Raff and I have ever gotten to actually addressing my marital problems, and it makes my heart kick into gear. Vin hasn’t told him, and I haven’t told him, but hinting around is kind of telling him, so urgh!
“Trouble in paradise?” There’s a lightness in his tone that belies the anxiety behind it.
I decide to swerve this and get straight to the heart of the matter. “When you were kids…I mean, as someone who has known Vin for the longest…did he ever used to say one thing and do another?”
Raff pushes his lips out and considers. “Growing up, Vin used to say nothing and do everything.”
“Right.” He was putting Raff to bed and getting him up for school and then taking him to school, going to school himself, going to work a part-time job, doing his homework, and then doing the whole thing over again. All, apparently, without much discussion. “Wasn’t that…lonely for you?”