“That big shipwreck picture, you know, it used to hang over the hall table in the Maine house, next to the barometer,” he told her one day, for the second time. “You see the woman screaming and drowning there in the corner, and the big wave coming for her? When I was a kid I used to imagine I was just outside the painting, in a rowboat, and I was going to throw her a rope —”
“Listen.” Unable to stop herself, Polly interrupted the story, though the sale catalogue in which this picture appeared was already at the printers. “Excuse my asking, but why are you selling this painting, if you like it so much? ... I mean,” she went on when Jim didn’t answer, “couldn’t you work something out with your grandmother? For instance, maybe you could have it appraised, and then buy it from her gradually.”
“I guess I could. But the thing is, I don’t figure I have a right to a picture like this. It ought to be in a museum or somewhere it could be appreciated properly. I don’t really know anything about paintings.”
“Says who?” Polly asked, turning around from the shipwreck to confront Jim.
“I don’t know. I guess it was my mother who pointed it out first. ‘Jim’s a scientist,’ she always said. ‘He has no feeling for the arts.’ ”
“Oh, bullshit. Listen, it’s not like that. There isn’t any race of special privileged people who deserve to own paintings because they’re so damned sensitive and aware. You like this picture, you should hang on to it.”
Jim Meyer, typically, gave no sign that her argument had convinced him; but the following day, to the great irritation of Polly’s boss, he withdrew three of his grandmother’s pictures from the sale. He also invited Polly to dinner to thank her; and that was how the whole thing started.
All Polly’s feminist friends liked Jim because he was so agreeable and good-looking and well informed, so obviously crazy about her, so respectful of her work. When she admitted that back in high school and college she’d wanted to be a painter herself, he was impressed and enthusiastic. It was a goddamn shame that she’d never had the time to go on with it, he said.
For the first time in nearly twenty years, as Polly had later explained to her therapist, she felt really happy and secure. Jim appeared to be all any liberated woman could want. He read the books and articles Polly lent him, and agreed with their conclusions; he supported the hiring and promotion of women at his lab. He tried unfamiliar dishes, and went with her to look at the work of new artists.
In return Polly made an effort not to shock Jim’s colleagues and family with her language, or lose her temper. In fact, Jim was so patient with her outbursts that she gradually gave them up. Yelling at him was like punching the tan beanbag chair in their bedroom; he didn’t argue or answer back, only sagged and looked deflated.
There was only one problem: though she loved and trusted Jim, he didn’t always turn her on. His gentle and affectionate lovemaking was sometimes almost on the verge of boring her.
For years, Polly tried with some success not to notice this. She blamed herself for still being susceptible to a stupid false adolescent idea of the desirable male — the Gothic myth of the Dark Stranger: reckless, willful, undependable. In the daylight hours she mocked this myth, deploring those of her friends who seemed to have bought into it. But sometimes late at night, as she lay in bed beside Jim Meyer and listened to his regular, almost apologetic snoring, the phantasm returned, and carried her into hot, windy, luridly lit regions whose existence her husband did not suspect.
Jim was completely faithful — unlike Polly, who twice when her husband was away at conferences let the hot winds blow her into bed with the wrong sort of man. After these episodes she was furious with herself and nervously guilty. She longed to be exposed and forgiven; but she had the good sense to realize that confession would hurt Jim far more than it would help her.
Though Polly went on working at the auction house after the wedding, with Jim’s encouragement she had begun to hope that she was an artist after all. Four months before Stevie was born she quit her job and tried to start painting. She cleared most of the boxes out of the narrow little room with the north light that had been meant for a maid when the apartment was built, and set up her easel.
But she had waited too long. Standing up for hours at a time exhausted her and made her legs ache and her belly feel swollen and heavy. When she sat down she couldn’t reach the easel properly. Her arm and leg muscles twitched like worn-out rubber bands; she grew restless and then angry. The one or two canvases she completed seemed to her ugly, clumsy, and empty of meaning.
Polly assumed it would be easier after the baby came, but it wasn’t, though Jim not only paid for a part-time housekeeper, but took equal responsibility for the remaining housework, and spent as much time as Polly did with their son. Stevie was a great kid; but he took up a lot of emotional energy. When she went back to the studio after feeding or changing or cuddling him, the spontaneity of her impulse was gone; she found herself scrubbing at her work and fucking up something that had begun well.
It was a bore staying home all day, too, talking only to Stevie and the housekeeper, both of whom seemed to have a mental age of about four: Stevie of course precociously. She missed being in touch with the New York art world; she missed using her mind and having grown people to talk with. So when Stevie started nursery school she took a part-time job at the Museum, which in a few years became full-time. Soon she was going to meetings, working on catalogues and exhibitions, seeing artists and dealers and collectors and critics. She painted less often; then not at all. The studio, though it was still called by that name, became a storeroom again.
As soon as Stevie was a little older and needed her less, Polly told herself and everyone else, she’d get back to her art. Meanwhile her life, if not exciting, was fun and satisfying, her marriage solid. Or so she thought.
Then, a year ago last spring, when Stevie was twelve, everything fell apart. One day when Polly was showering after work Jim came bursting in on her. She knew something extraordinary, maybe something horrible, must have happened, because he was usually so careful of her bathroom privacy. At first, all she felt was relief and joy when there turned out to be no disaster. Instead, Jim had just been offered an important job and a really big research budget in Colorado. With an impulsiveness Polly hadn’t seen in years, he threw out his arms, embracing both her and the yellow shower curtain printed with abstract designs, exclaiming that he couldn’t believe it, God, he had never expected anything like this.
For a while Polly shared his euphoria. She had been feeling a little stale; Denver would be an adventure, a change. It would be good to get out of Manhattan, which was becoming more crowded, expensive, dirty, and dangerous every year. And, as Jim said, it’d be great for Stevie: he could meet real kids and have a normal American childhood — which simply meant, Polly thought now, that he could have the kind of childhood Jim had had.
Then, slowly, it dawned on her that she wasn’t going to find a decent job in Denver. For Jim, it would be “the chance of a lifetime,” as he put it, sliding into cliché in his enthusiasm — but it wasn’t the chance of Polly’s lifetime. And after all, Jim didn’t have to go to Denver. He already had colleagues he liked, a good lab, adequate research funds. Whereas she had just got a raise at the Museum, and was working on an important exhibition (“Three American Women”). Was it fair to ask her to give all that up?
Jim, it turned out, thought it was fair. If Polly didn’t get a job right off, she could go back to her painting; wasn’t that what she’d always wanted? Anyhow, with the money he’d be making she wouldn’t need to work anymore. They could live well, travel, have full-time help. It was true, Polly said (or lied? — she didn’t know now), she did want to paint, but for that reason, too, she had to stay in New York, where the artists and galleries and collectors were.