He didn’t tell her about his girlfriend, or the child they were expecting. He didn’t ask her about her circumstances either. Their e-mails were never entirely serious, Julie’s especially were more playful than inquisitive. Hubert got a clearer sense of her, he was almost certain he would recognize her if they ever met.
When Julie asked him if he would paint her, his first thought was that she was just playing games again. He hesitated and asked her for a photo, but he wasn’t unhappy when she didn’t send him one. He had noticed he was spending all his energy on the exchange and thought perhaps he could invest that concentration in his work and get over the apathy that had been bothering him for months. No one else interested him.
A couple of days later he and Julie had met. When he saw Gillian sitting in the café, he wasn’t surprised. He had been familiar with her face from her television show for a long time, but it was only when they met in the studio that he had felt her uncertainty and curiosity, which weren’t so evident on the screen. He invited her back to his studio. While he was showing her his pictures, Gillian touched his hand, and he was this close to throwing his arm around her shoulder. He offered her a beer and watched her drink it. He saw the possibilities of her face, not so much its beauty as its variety, the many faces that were contained in it.
After Gillian had left, Hubert looked at the pictures he had taken of Astrid in the south of France again. He could remember their excitement when he stopped the car in the middle of the country road. Astrid got undressed in the car, while he looked around nervously. She tiptoed out on the pebbly ground, he framed the picture and took a shot. Once they were chased off by a farmer, another time Astrid got a thorn in her foot and they had to go to see a doctor. Astrid’s poses were classical, and in their stiffness there was almost something cubist about the pictures. In drawing from the photographs, he had given more care to the landscape than to her body. After that she hadn’t wanted to model for him anymore. One of the pictures had hung in their apartment for a while. Only when Hubert noticed how many of their visitors were embarrassed by it had he taken it down. Astrid hadn’t said anything. Then he had started painting the small-format interiors. The fact that there were no people in them wasn’t a concept, just lack of proficiency on his part.
The idea with the female passersby had occurred to him long before he ever told Astrid about it. You’d never get anyone to go along with that anyway, she said.
And at the beginning, it was true, no one had. Over time, Hubert got used to the refusals. From the way the women hesitated before rejecting him, he learned to see which ones he had a better chance with and how best to proceed. He left the city center and hung around the outskirts. The first time a woman consented was a rainy morning in spring. He stood outside a swimming pool and addressed a fit-looking woman of fifty or so, with short hair. When he had put his question to her, she laughed out loud and asked how could she be sure he wasn’t a pervert. He said she couldn’t, she would just have to trust him. He accompanied her back to her apartment. He was so excited that even while he was taking the photographs, he knew the pictures wouldn’t come to anything. Still, he used up four or five rolls of film before thanking her and saying he had what he needed. Hubert promised to send her an invitation to the opening, if there should be one. The woman had actually come, along with her husband, and had been disappointed not to see herself in any of the paintings.
With each new model, Hubert got a little calmer, and the pictures a little better. Eventually, the sessions became predictable, and he noticed he was beginning to get bored. This was shortly before the exhibition, and even as the pictures were praised and he spouted nonsense about them in interviews, he already knew that he would have to get going on something else. His gallerist told him about a series of paintings by an American artist who for fifteen years had painted the same woman, a neighbor. He hadn’t shown the pictures to anyone, not even his own wife or the woman’s husband had known about them. Hubert got hold of a catalog of the pictures and decided to concentrate on a single model. When Gillian visited him in his studio, he thought she might be the one.
The idea of painting Gillian didn’t let him go. As he went through the motions of completing his latest nude, he imagined how he would capture on canvas what he had seen in her face. Two weeks later she called. He disregarded the annoyance in her e-mails, he felt certain she was just as determined as he was. But the sessions went badly from the very beginning. Gillian had evidently imagined he would paint a portrait of her that she could put up on the wall at home, whereas he had no interest in just one picture. He had thought her presence would shape his paintings. He was on the point of throwing in the towel when she suggested posing for him naked. It wasn’t so much her nakedness that interested him as the hope that she might be unsettled by it. But it didn’t get any better. She struck attitudes. He had always left his models the freedom to be as they were, to make themselves comfortable. Gillian he forced into a pose that wasn’t her, really as a last desperate attempt to undermine her. But even that hadn’t worked, and he had given up.
Shortly after, Lukas was born. Once when Hubert took him to the pediatrician, he was leafing through magazines in a waiting room and ran into a short report on Gillian’s accident. He tried several times to write her an e-mail, but he couldn’t find the right words and gave up. The next time he was in the studio, several weeks later, he took the sketches of her off the walls.
Before setting off for the mountains, Hubert packed his outdoor gear he hadn’t used in twenty years and bought new hiking shoes and a waterproof. He was going on Monday. The weekend before, he had Lukas with him. They went to the zoo, and Hubert made pancakes, Lukas’s favorite. On Sunday he dropped him off a little earlier than usual. Astrid asked if he had time for coffee. While she put on water to boil, he looked at the notes on the fridge, a gynecologist’s card with an appointment marked in, Lukas’s timetable, a flyer for a tango evening. Dance to silence, he read.
Have you started going to that again?
Astrid tipped coffee into the filter. I talked Rolf into giving it a try.
And will you let him lead you? asked Hubert.
If someone knows what he wants, I’ll let myself be led, said Astrid.
She made the coffee, poured two cups, and gave one to him. He followed her into the living room where Lukas was playing with his Lego set. He wanted Hubert to play with him, but Astrid said there was something the grown-ups needed to discuss and went outside into the backyard. Hubert followed her across the little lawn and sat down under the sycamore on the rough bench he had built himself years ago. I’m amazed this is still in good shape, he said.
There are quite a lot of things of yours still here, said Astrid. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I’d be glad if you would take them away with you.
What would I do with a bench? said Hubert. I don’t have a garden.
I’m not talking about the bench, she said, I’m talking about your military uniform, your books, your records, your boyhood stuff, the telescope. The whole attic is full of your junk.
Hubert said he didn’t have much space in his apartment and asked why the sudden hurry.
What do you mean, sudden hurry? she said. You moved out almost a year ago now. She took a sip of coffee and stood up. I asked Rolf if he wanted to move in, she said as she walked off.
Hubert caught up to her by the garage. She opened the door. His things were all piled up inside.
You can come for them when you’re back.
Hubert drove home to finish packing for his trip. The whole time he was thinking about what he could possibly show. Late in the evening, he drove by the studio in the hope that his old stuff might inspire him, but it only depressed him. Astrid had asked him the other day for the photographs he had taken of her in the south of France. Hubert flicked through them and then put them up on a shelf with the other stuff. He had no intention of giving them to her.