“I’m in Boulder and I’m coming home,” she says. “It’s going to take a while. I have to stop a lot. Driving hurts my body like you wouldn’t believe.”
“Just get on an airplane.”
I’m not going to do that.”
“Get on an airplane, Sonia. We can get the car later. We can hire someone to drive it back.”
“Dick, I’m heading east today. Just give me some more time.”
“More time? More time?”
“You being pissy isn’t going to make me drive any faster or change my mind.”
“Don’t you care at all?” he says and she feels bad she called him at work, he’s so emotional. “About your own children? About … us?”
“I do. That’s why I’m heading back.”
“Why won’t you get on a plane? Believe it or not, you’re needed here.”
“Nicky’s son kills squirrels with a small gun and then they eat them,” Sonia says, because why not try to change the subject?
“That’s nice, Sonia. Come home.”
“I’m coming,” she says. “Bye.” And she hangs up and wonders, how awful will it be? Or will it not be awful? Why won’t she get on a plane? She gets up, takes a long warm bath in a beautiful pristine bathtub, a tub that in no way resembles the tub in Brooklyn. She thinks, feed the love. Nurture the love. How hard can that be?
19
Holiday Inn Expresses. Ramada Inns. A few Hiltons and not very nice ones. She now has a neck pillow she shoves behind her lower back, to ease the pain. Everything feels bad. Her ankles swell. It’s hard to reach the pedals and the wheel what with her belly in the way, and she hates it when her belly pushes up against the wheel, so her arms are outstretched and this tires them immensely. But she makes it to Wisconsin, and hours later, without calling first, she is driving to Philbert’s house. There is snow everywhere. Big piles of it. The road is pretty clean, but still. Snow, more snow, and then some more snow. Clean, country snow, unlike in Brooklyn. No yellow dog pee, candy wrappers, beer cans. Indeed, this snow has that sparkle to it, crystals refracting the light.
How could it be that he was listed like that? It was very unlike him, or her memory of him. But Philbert Rush would always be Philbert Rush. Surly, a bit paranoid, arrogant, gleefully vicious. As an infant — he’d told her this once — he screamed constantly, and thrashed about in his mother’s arms. Born raging. And yet, when Sonia calls information in Wisconsin — where she knew he’d moved from calling the Boston Museum School, a nice, young receptionist saying, he’s teaching at the University of Wisconsin — all she has to do is ask for Philbert Rush, and she’s given his phone number, as well as the route and town he lives in.
Phil Rush. “Outsider” artist, but of course, sought after because of his aloofness. Sonia always found that annoying. After ten years in New York he left — claiming no real art could ever be made in New York, that society destroys the artist. This, after conveniently spending enough time in society to secure Sonnebende as his venue for exhibition. So he moved to Boston where Sonia met him in his drawing class. His classes were famous because he rarely had anything nice to say to the students and all the students loved him for that.
On Sonia’s first day of class with Phil, she stood near the front, which was her way. A plumpish, breasty girl with red streaks dyed into her long brown hair was the model. She was beautiful, in that way that young women are, flawlessly fresh and round and she imbued the class with a sexual tension. Ten minutes into the class, Phil stood behind Sonia and she could smell him. It wasn’t a good or a bad smell, just a distinct, human odor. A salty, slightly sour smell. (Once she’d tried to paint how he smelled, for fun, at her studio in Boston. That one she threw out.)
He stood behind her on that first day, his arms crossed, his dark brow screwed into a deep V above his long, thin nose, his black hair standing straight up around his head as if he’d stuck his finger in a light socket.
He said, “You call that an arm? That is your idea of an arm? Where is the poetry in it? Where is the life? Throw that out. Throw it out and start over. God!” Shortly thereafter, she started fucking him.
He never let her spend the night. After dozing for a while on the floor, in the bed, wherever they’d landed, she’d get up, get dressed, and leave. He’d already be back in his studio. Fuck and paint. That’s what the man did. No matter what time of the day or night it was.
THE SKY IS DARK and she is nearly sweating from her copious body fat and the heat pouring out of the vents, but also, she knows it is cold out and this alone chills her blood. Fucking freezing cold dark Midwestern bleakness. Unending. And yet it does end, at least the trip part. She reaches a long, winding gravel driveway through some pine trees blanketed in a dull gray-white frozen snow and then — his house. An unassuming, wood-framed modern house. An outbuilding nearby in a cleared part of the woods that must be his studio. And everywhere else: purity, serenity, simplicity, seclusion. All of his concentration and flamboyance and originality reserved for the grueling, exalted transcendent calling. Sonia looks around and thinks, this is how I will live. Someday. Not now, not for ten years or more, but someday, this is how I will live. The sound of the wind on the icy trees sounds akin to the shriek of nails on a chalkboard. Before she knocks, he opens the door.
“You’re not invited. What are you doing here?” He stares at her with his lyrical almond eyes, his kissable expressive underlip firmly annoyed.
“I need to talk to you.”
“I should turn you away. My God. You are enormously pregnant.” His voice, deep but slightly grating. It’s as if he never could get rid of his Newark upbringing despite the sixty years spent trying.
“Let me in. You make yourself so easy to be found.”
“No one tries to find me here in Wisconsin. So I have no reason to make myself hard to find.”
“If you don’t want me to accidentally give birth here on your steps, then invite me in to sit down.”
He walks in the house and Sonia follows.
“Give birth on my front step. I love it. Rich. I could use that image, you know.”
THERE IS VERY LITTLE furniture. There is no couch. It is an ascetic environment, one created so he can work. It is not a home, really. It is a place where a man gets sustenance so he can work. A place to eat and sleep. Large, dark, abstract canvases lean against the walls. Rothko, without the color. The texture is thick. They are beautiful. How can something so simple take so much work? So much dedication? And yet, Sonia knows, it does. Sonia, exhausted and with intense back pain throws herself on the only comfortable looking piece of furniture she sees, a strange, black leather, S-shaped chair, a midcentury design. It’s not so uncomfortable. She starts, immediately, to tell him things. The boys at home. Her ambivalence. Even how she’d hoped to start painting again before this pregnancy began, and as the words come out, she’s hears their lameness. The falseness and meekness of her words. And she can’t stop herself. She’s making more excuses, they’re churning in her brain now.
“I went on a road trip. I went to Boston and then back to Indiana, and then out West, to visit my sister.”
“You hated Indiana. And your sister.”
“I know, but it’s where I grew up. I needed to go back for some reason.”
“And what reason would that be?”
Sonia thinks about getting high and the gum art. “It was a good thing, it’s good to revisit our pasts. You should try it some time. When was the last time you were in Newark?”
He ignores her, turning his back to her, picking up something from a side table.