“You and canvas? What canvas? When was the last time you were in front of a canvas?”
She’d told him she hadn’t been painting. She regretted that now. “The fucking canvas of my mind is rich. And soon enough, I’ll be in front of a real one. So I don’t get to be a young artist. Fine. But I’m going to start painting the minute this baby is out of me. So I don’t get to be a young artist.”
“You were once. You gave that up.”
“Youth is overrated in art. We might look better in the magazines, but very few people make interesting art before their forties.” Sonia had thought these very thoughts before, when Tom was born. When Mike was born. But then, it had been thirties, not forties, that had been the time when artists become interesting.
“Yes, you’ll start painting and later, I’ll be young again. I’ll be able to fuck like I used to fuck! Like I used to fuck you.” He smiles at her and even though ten years have passed, she realizes he hasn’t changed, despite his admitting he couldn’t fuck like he used to. He retains some sharpness, something youthful, that she knows is gone in her. He looks like sex — how men his age could do that, amazes her. His crazy hair, his eyes so alive, his lips hanging from his mouth, the memory of those lips on her. She’d fuck him in a heartbeat, although she could just imagine he would never, ever fuck a pregnant woman. “Painting isn’t something you can just pick up later. You used to know that once. You used to know more than you know now. I agree that as an artist ages, for the most part, his work becomes more interesting, but he must first go through all the early stuff, through it in art. Just being twenty or thirty isn’t enough. One must be creating and learning through that time, even if you are just producing a ton of crap.”
He sips his tea delicately perched on his stool. He has delicate but strong hands. He holds the teacup like an English society girl. “You’ve become stupid about art. Delusional. Maybe you need those delusions — you must. Pretend that you’ll get it all back, that drive, that need. The talent. Like talent isn’t something that needs so much nurturing.”
“There are no rules, Phil. You taught me that. You’ve become stupid about art, because that is all you have. You are blinded to the rest of the world, you have no perspective.”
“I have a life, you fool. I have more than my art. I have friends, I have lovers. I have this home and these woods that surround it. I have music to listen to, fine wine to drink. I have so much. But my life feeds my art, it doesn’t take away from it. That is the difference between you and me. My life is set up to inspire me. To accommodate my creativity. To nurture me. Who nurtures you? Who gives you anything? Don’t tell me your kids, the ones you’ve abandoned. They take and take and take. And what are you going to do with that? Suck the life out of them later? Mothers do that. They think they can get it all back later.”
“You ass.”
“You are so miserable I can barely stand to look at you. You are so full of lies. Your children, your children. The world doesn’t need your children. The world doesn’t want your children.”
“Oh, and the world really needs your art. Your fucking paintings. That is what the world needs.” She is so angry at him. She used to think the world needed his art. Needed art period.
“Ah, but here is the difference. Here is the truth, something you once knew something about, truth. I know what I do is a privilege, a construct. I don’t carry myself like a God or like a vessel of Nature. I don’t ever pretend that what I am doing is something sacrificial, something good. The good artist. The good mother. My life isn’t a lie.”
Sonia starts crying a bit now and it feels good. “My life is not a lie.”
“Your whole life must be a lie, or else you would be in jail for child abuse. You brought them here by fucking your husband. And that is something that you will lie to them about your whole life. You’ll pretend that you brought them here because you wanted them. That you, the mother, never committed some atrocious, mucousy, animal act and they were the accidental product of it. Unless, of course, you let them know that, and then, of course, you’d be a very sick woman indeed.”
Confused, tears running down her face, Sonia feels like she’s being bathed in his hate. “We grow up, we realize our parents had sex. It doesn’t kill us.”
“No, but pretending to be something we are not does kill us. You are the one who will be dead. You already are dead, in many ways.”
“I will not die, Phil. I will live a double life. I do already. And that is the real truth. It is. It really is. Bothness. The love and the hate. The mucous fuck and the tender innocent cheek of the baby. I will have it all and it won’t kill me because I’ll know the truth. Even if I can’t walk around saying it as I buy diapers and cookies at the store. There is public life and private life. I didn’t create the two things. There is an inner life and an outer life. There are layers and layers of ourselves. To be one thing is not to not be another.”
“What happened to the Sonia who couldn’t stand hypocrisy? Who felt she would burst if she pretended to like someone she didn’t like, who turned bright red and hyperventilated in the presence of all that social bullshit? Now you are a sorority girl, yes? And that is OK? It’s not going to kill your soul? Now that you can look like one thing and be another? What happened to your sensitivity? How do you think you’ll make art if you lost that?”
Sonia’s hands still lay on her belly. The baby has settled. The sense of this person inside of her has become more real to her now than ever before. She runs her hands from the bottom of her belly to the top and then stretches them over her head.
“A thicker skin won’t kill my soul. Maybe it’ll protect it. So I don’t walk around with my heart exposed to the world quite as much. I still have a heart. I do, I do.”
“I haven’t noticed it. I don’t sense its presence.” He smiles wickedly at her. He puts the tea to his lips, and warm smoke from the cup rises in his face.
“You didn’t offer me tea. You bastard. You make yourself tea and don’t offer me any.”
He laughs a big, hearty laugh. The sound of it makes Sonia cry again, freshly, tears of joy. To hear his nasty laugh! The sound of it!
“I didn’t invite you here. You show up at my doorstep, uninvited. And then you expect me to nurture you. You make yourself tea. And me some more, too. That’s how things work here.”
SONIA LURCHES HER HUGE, unbalanced body out of the S-shaped chair and hurls herself out of Phil’s house. It’s dark now, but the moon is so intense, the stars too, that everything glows, everything is visible. There’s a light on in the outbuilding, the studio. She stumbles in the snow as she heads toward it. The snow is nearly knee deep and her feet get immediately wet and cold as she trudges through it. She falls forward and as she rights herself, she looks down and sees the imprint of her stomach in the snow. Her snow angel, a big round circle, space enough to put a dead baby deer. Huffing — just breathing is so hard now that the baby is so big and taking up so much space — she manages to get to the outbuilding, which on closer inspection is an old, small barn, lovingly restored and painted dark brown. Phil is coming behind her. He’s yelling, “What the fuck do you think you’re doing? I don’t let just anybody in my studio!”
And Sonia grabs for the door, trying to open it. But it’s locked with a padlock. The wind sears her face and Phil’s coming toward her now, a key in his hand. He’s grinning and his hair whips upward in a huge black spiral, like Medusa, like a band of snakes, as the wind threatens to blow them both down.
“You want in there?” He yells over the noise of the wind. “You thief! You want to steal my soul. You would if it were possible. Anything, right? Anything to get what you want? You’d stop at nothing.”