Eighteen
AT FIRST, what Felix and I notice is the absence of a house.
The other places we toured were like Claire’s and Adele’s: neat front yard, path cutting straight to the door, clearly visible from the street.
But here, all we see is a tall fence and the bitter bean tree out front, an old cactus in bloom by the locked gate.
“This is Willowbrook,” our real estate agent, Jim, tells us.
“There’s still a lot of farming land here, even though it’s right in the middle of the city.
A lot of horses, and a whole group of colored cowboys who ride them through the streets.
The houses here tend to be a little older, and unlike Compton and Watts, it isn’t all flat.
Occasionally, you’ll find a sloping lot, like this one. ”
He consults his notes and undoes the combination lock.
He lets himself in first, as he always does, shepherding us into the unknown, pointing out tripping hazards, showing us areas of concern or possibility.
Felix follows Jim, I follow Felix. For several strides, the ground is level, and then there appears a shingled roof below.
We take a flight of garden stairs down to where the land evens out again and the house sits.
“It’s a small place,” Jim says. “That’s why I wasn’t going to show it to you.
Two bedrooms, just about eight hundred square feet.
But with some work, your yard would be the envy of the neighbors.
There’s room behind the house, too, in case you’d be interested in expanding. ”
We step inside. Find a layer of dust on the old wood floors.
Yellowed curtains. A staleness in the air.
It’s very small. But the windows are large, and the ceilings are higher than those of the newer houses, almost as high as the ceilings in the blue house.
There’s no formal dining room, but the bathroom has a deep, pink-tiled tub.
“The children would love baths in this old thing,” I say as we test the water pressure.
In the kitchen, Felix says, “We could put a patio in right outside this door. Eat dinner there every night.”
“With weather as good as ours,” Jim says, “it’d be a crime not to.”
Neither of us mentions the privacy, as though doing so would give too much away.
Imagine, owning a house half a mile from my sisters, so close we could walk home after parties, so tucked away that we could leave the curtains open at night with the lights on, knowing not a soul would be looking through the windows.
Imagine, sitting on the front porch and having a conversation without the neighbors overhearing.
To cast open the front door while the children play in the yard even if it’s messy inside, even if I haven’t yet brushed my hair.
I stop in the doorway and run my hand across the flaking gray paint of the front door. Out of nowhere and with tremendous force, the pink plaster of the living room back home appears to me, and my fingers itch with wanting.
As soon as it’s ours, we take the door off its hinges, sand it.
I test shade after shade of pink until it’s right.
Al and Bernard and Lionel build us a patio off the kitchen as a housewarming gift.
We purchase four twin beds, arrange them in the rooms—Nathalie’s and Clément’s on opposite walls, Felix’s and mine next to each other, a small gap between them.
I find pleasure in homemaking. Once every month or two, my sisters and I go shopping for fabric.
Claire and Adele have a knack for knowing what patterns and styles will be in vogue in a few months’ time, move through the store with quick decisiveness.
But I learned about fabric from Hattie. I take my time, ask no opinions, run my hands over the bolts, climb the ladder to see what’s kept up high.
I’m after something riskier, the feeling of pushing to the edge of things.
My pink door, the sofa I reupholstered in a gold brocade velvet, the indigo and silver lampshade I found at a Beverly Hills yard sale and paired with a wooden base, carved to resemble a tower of rabbits.
Papa’s paintings hang on the main living room wall.
The house takes time to come together, but a year and a half into living here, while Felix is away on the train, Lionel comes over to help me hang a heavy, gold-framed mirror from a rummage sale.
We center it above the fireplace, and now all that’s left is an open space where a chair should be.
It’s early evening. Spring. A heat wave.
Macaroni salad for dinner, chilling in the refrigerator until it’s time.
I pin clothes onto the line while Nathalie and Clément play downslope, on the far side of the yard.
They dart from place to place, engaged in one of their imaginary games.
They’re orphans on the run from pirates or stray kittens hiding from dogs.
Occasionally, they peek out from where the trees and shrubs grow wild and unruly—the “forest part,” they call it.
I clip the last shirt to the cord and take a seat on the patio with my pencil and sketchbook.
Leatherbound with three hundred blank pages, a wedding gift from Felix, the most thoughtful thing he could have chosen for me.
Drawing came back like an old friend. A few fumbling moments, some regret over lost time, and then familiarity, a settling back in.
Soon it became instinctual, compulsory, my hand reaching for my sketchbook whenever I was idle or something caught my eye.
I drew our house—the stairs set into the front slope, the kitchen windows from the outside, the forest part.
I drew the bowl of fruit on the counter and the stack of dishes in the sink.
The children regarded it as a magic trick at first, part awe, part mistrust. They peered over my shoulder.
“How do you make it look like that?” Nathalie asked.
“Lots of practice.”
“But I’ve never seen you practice,” Clément said.
“I stopped for a long time.”
“If I knew how to draw like you, I would never stop,” Nathalie said.
“I believe that,” I told her. “You’re far too wise to forget the things you love.”
This evening, I draw the clothes on the line.
A subject I keep coming back to. No matter the time of day or the position of the sun or the temperature, no matter if it’s Felix’s shirts or the children’s school uniforms drying, I always associate it with the night Nathalie came to us.
I still have Delphine’s clothes from their final load of laundry, packed safely away.
I’m shading the folds of a skirt when Felix comes home through the gate and down the steps with The New Yorker rolled up in his hand.
“There’s a piece in here you might like,” he says. “About a painter.”
“Look,” I say, showing him my place in the sketchbook. “Only a few pages left.”
“You’ll need a new one,” he says, and together we set out the dinner.
The next week, I fill my last page with a drawing of Nathalie’s shoes.
Felix is back on the train, so Adele says she’ll keep the children through dinner while I stay out and shop.
I haven’t stepped foot in an art store since leaving New Orleans—drawing doesn’t require much in the way of supplies—and I’m enraptured.
The sheer selection of sketchbooks alone.
I choose a slimmer one this time, black leather with smooth pages, small enough to slip into my purse.
I choose pencils and charcoal, pluck a gray kneaded eraser from a glass jar.
And then I turn a corner and I’m in the paint aisle.
So much color. Tubes of yellow ochre and cobalt green and indigo.
Reds and pinks and oranges. My breath catches from wanting.
But I force myself to walk away. I don’t have the time to paint, or the space in my little house.
I carry my new sketchbook and supplies to the counter and the clerk rings me up.
Next to the register is a bulletin board posted with flyers advertising studio spaces for rent, artists’ groups in search of members, watercolor classes, a drop-in figure drawing class that meets on Tuesdays at seven.
It’s Tuesday today. I check my watch. I could make it.
I drive past the apartment that was almost mine, park just a couple blocks down and find the address.
On a piece of cardboard taped to the wall inside, a black inked arrow points me upstairs.
I pay admission and step into a room like a banquet hall, easels arranged in a circle.
Other people come in. They shrug off sweaters.
Unzip pouches. Turn large pages, wavelike, until blank ones appear.
All I have is my small sketchbook. Already, I’ve gotten something wrong.
But the teacher, a round man with a goatee, comes by to ask if I’d like newsprint, clips a few sheets of it to a board, and I’m breathing easier again, opening my new charcoal.
A young man in a robe enters the center of the circle and the conversations around me stop.
“Welcome,” the teacher says. “We’ll start with some gesture drawings and then we’ll have two long poses.
As usual, I’ll mostly leave you to it.” The model removes his robe.
He’s fully nude, not what I expected. Heat rises and I hate that I’m this inexperienced, this easy to surprise.
Around me, students are making lines to divide their large sheets of paper into sections.
I do the same and soon see why. These first poses are quick, we work smaller.
The model shifts positions before I’m ready.
I glance to the easel next to mine and see free lines, the mere suggestion of a form.
“Remember,” the teacher says to the class, “we draw with our whole bodies, not only our hands.” I loosen my grip on the charcoal and when the model shifts, I’m ready this time, my whole arm in it, my lines capturing motion.
Then the model faces my direction, tilts his body to one side as though bracing for a gust of wind and holds still.
We have forty minutes to draw. I rarely sketch people anymore and I have a couple false starts before settling into it.
But soon I have the rough shape of him. I have his face and his shoulders and his slight biceps, his thighs and his feet—one partially raised, the other flat on the floor.
The teacher circles us, pauses next to me.
“Your first class?” I nod. “Nice work. But don’t be afraid to look.
” I go hot again. I’ve left a blankness at the model’s groin.
“Shyness has no place here,” he says, and he moves to my neighbor.
So I look, and I draw, and I understand that all the usual ways of being have no bearing when it comes to art.
The class ends and I go down the stairs with the others, exit the building to the bustling street.
Music through a club’s open door. A couple dining in a lit restaurant window.
A bicyclist passing me on the sidewalk, his hand on his head to keep his hat from flying away. I’m not ready to go home yet.
Pickwick’s Bookshop beckons, its door propped open.
Inside, men and women are browsing, chatting.
A laugh comes from somewhere deep in the store.
I pick up a few novels from a table of new hardcovers, try out the first sentences, but they float away from me.
I set them down again. Here’s a strange one—an image of spilled salt, black and red type.
The Price of Salt, it says, and then beneath it: A Modern Novel of Two Women.
I skim the first page—a department store’s coworkers’ cafeteria, a search for a seat at the long tables, the story of a working girl, new on the job.
Who will the second woman be? I tuck the book under my arm, hopeful it’s a love story, carrying it discreetly in case I’m right.
And then I’m onto the magazines. Ingrid Bergman holds a baby on the cover of Look.
And here’s ARTnews, the last three issues.
I have March and April’s already, open the volume from May.
“The Kandinsky exhibit is awful,” says a voice from over my shoulder.
I turn to look at her. She’s maybe a few years older than I am, impeccably dressed in a skirt suit and emerald earrings, glowering at the open spread in my hands.
She takes a drag off her cigarette, turns her face to exhale.
“Everyone’s raving about it but it’s terribly depressing to see a retrospective of an artist who started off decent and got worse throughout his career.
If you ask me. Which you didn’t. But just look at this.
What is it, even? Derivative of Klee but not nearly as enticing. ”
I consider the image. “There’s something to the geometrics, though. They’re playful. They appeal to me.”
“You and the rest of the world.” She shrugs. “I must be missing something. I’m Elise.”
“Odette,” I say.
“Lovely to meet you, Odette. I didn’t even mean to talk about the magazine.
I was drawn to you because of that bright red spine tucked under your arm.
It’s a fantastic novel. I assume you haven’t read it yet?
Now it is a work of art. I don’t buy that it’s written by some unheard-of first-time author.
I keep hearing rumors that the writer is actually well-known, writing under a pen name, because, you know, one can never be too careful about these matters. ”
So much for being discreet. “I don’t know much about it,” I say. “I just found it here.”
She smiles at me, conspiratorially. I’m not on a block of matching houses and perfect front lawns. I’m not at home with my children and Felix, a high fence separating us from the world. I’m in the world. Emboldened by it. I smile back at her.
“Of course,” I say, “I’m very much looking forward to discovering the story.”
“Well, you’ll have to tell me how you like it,” she says, reaching into her purse and pulling out a little gold card holder. She takes a cream card from it, hands it to me. Elise Eriksen, it reads, with a phone number beneath. “I’ve not had anyone to discuss it with yet. No one smart, I mean.”
“How do you know I’m smart?”
“Well … aren’t you?”