I exhale slowly. God, I’m more relaxed than I’ve been in days. To win over Nicholas, I may be fighting a force that is greater than myself, but I’m beginning to see that I’m part of a force that is greater than myself. Maybe I do have a chance after all.
I smile at Astrid and pick up the pencil again, quickly fashioning on paper the naked knot of branches that hangs above Astrid’s head. She peers at the pad, then up at the tree, and then she nods. “Can you do me?” she asks, settling herself back in a pose.
I rip the top sheet off my pad and start to draw the slopes of Astrid’s face, the gray strands laced with the gold in her hair. With her bearing and her expression, she should have been a queen.
The shadows of the peach tree color her face with a strange scroll-work that reminds me of the insides of confessionals at Saint Christope="ဆher’s. The leaves that are starting to fall dance across my pad. When I am finished, I pretend that my pencil is still moving just so I can see what I have really drawn, before Astrid has a chance to look.
In each leaf-patterned shadow of her face, I have drawn a different woman. One looks to be African, with a thick turban wrapped around her head and gold hoops slicing her ears. One has the bottomless eyes and the black roped hair of a Spanish puta. One is a bedraggled girl, no older than twelve, who holds her hands against her swollen, pregnant belly. One is my mother; one is myself.
“Remarkable,” Astrid says, lightly touching each image. “I can see why Nicholas was impressed.” She cocks her head. “Can you draw from memory?” I nod. “Then do one of yourself.”
I have done self-portraits before but never on command. I do not know if I can do it, and I tell her this. “You never know until you try,” Astrid chides, and I dutifully turn to a blank page. I start with the base of my neck, working my way up the lines of my chin and my jaw. I stop for a second and see it is all wrong. I tear it off and turn to the next page, start at the hairline, working down. Again, I have to begin all over. I do this seven times, making each drawing a little more complete than the last. Finally, I put the pencil down and press my fingers against my eyes. “Some other time,” I say.
But Astrid is leafing through the discarded drawings I’ve ripped off the pad. “You’ve done better than you think,” she says, holding them out to me. “Look.” I riffle through the papers, shocked that I didn’t see this before. On every one, even the pictures made of threadbare lines, instead of myself I have drawn Nicholas.
chapter 38
For the past three days Nicholas has been the talk of the hospital, and it’s all because of me. In the morning when he arrives, I help ready his patient for surgery. Then I sit on the floor in front of his office in my pale pinafore and draw the portrait of the person he is operating upon. They are simple sketches that take only minutes. Each shows the patient far away from a hospital, in the prime of his or her life. I have drawn Mrs. Comazzi as a dance hall girl, which she was in the forties; I have drawn Mr. Goldberg as a dapper pin-striped gangster; I have drawn Mr. Allen as Ben-Hur, robust and perched on his chariot. I leave them taped to the door of the office, usually with a second picture, of Nicholas himself.
At first I drew Nicholas as he was at the hospital, on the telephone or signing a release form or leading a gaggle of residents into a patient’s room. But then I started to draw Nicholas the way I wanted to remember him: singing “Sweet Baby James” over Max’s bassinet, teaching me how to pitch a Wiffle ball, kissing me on the swan boat in front of everyone. Every morning at about eleven, Nicholas does the same thing. He comes back to his office, curses at the door, and rips both pictures off. He stuffs the one of himself in the trash can or his upper desk drawer, but he usually takes the one I’ve done of the patient and brings that during the postoperative checkup. I was offering magazines to Mrs. Comazzi when he gave the picture to her. “Oh, my stars,” she exclaimed. “Look at me. Look at me!” And Nich olas, in spite onte d‡f himself, smiled.
Rumors spread fast through Mass General, and everyone knows who I am and when I leave the drawings. At ten-forty, before Nicholas arrives, a crowd starts to gather. The nurses drift upstairs on their coffee break to see if they can figure out the likeness and to make cracks about the Dr. Prescott I tend to draw, the one they never see. “Jeez,” I heard one profusionist say, “I wouldn’t have guessed he even owned casual clothes.”
I hear Nicholas’s footsteps coming down the hall, quick and clipped. He is still wearing his scrubs, which might mean something has gone wrong. I start to scoot out of his way, but I am stopped by an unfamiliar voice. “Nicholas,” the man says.
Nicholas stops, his hand on the doorknob. “Elliot,” he says, more a sigh than a word. “Look,” he says, “it’s been a pretty bad morning. Maybe we can talk later.”
Elliot shakes his head and holds up a hand. “Didn’t come here to see you. I came to see what the fuss is with the artwork. Your door is becoming the hospital gallery.” He looks down at me and beams. “Scuttlebutt has it that the phantom artist here is your wife.”
Nicholas pulls the blue paper cap off his head and leans back against the door, closing his eyes. “Paige, Elliot Saget. Elliot, Paige. My wife.” He exhales slowly. “For now.”
If memory serves me right, Elliot Saget is the chief of surgery. I stand quickly and offer my hand. “A pleasure,” I say, smiling.
Elliot pushes Nicholas out of the way and stares at the picture I’ve done of Mr. Olsen, Nicholas’s morning surgery. Next to him is the image of Nicholas singing karaoke at an Allston bowling alley, something that to my knowledge he has never tried but that probably would do him good. “Quite a talent,” he says, looking from the picture to Nicholas and back again. “Why, Nicholas, she almost makes you seem as human as the rest of us.”
Nicholas mutters something under his breath and turns the key in the doorknob. “Paige,” Elliot Saget says to me, “the hospital’s communications director would like very much to talk to you about your artwork. Her name is Nancy Bianna, and she asked me to tell you to stop by when you aren’t busy.” He smiles then, and I know immediately that I can trust him if need be. “Nicholas,” he says into the open doorway. He nods and then he lopes away down the hall.
Nicholas bends over, trying to touch his fingers to his toes. It helps his back; I’ve seen him do it before, after a very long day on his feet. When he looks up and sees that I am still here, he grimaces. He crosses to the door and rips off the two pictures I’ve drawn, crumples them into a ball, and tosses them into the garbage.
“You don’t have to do that,” I say, angry. The pictures-however simple they are-are my work. I hate watching my work be destroyed. “If you don’t want yours, well, fine. But maybe Mr. Olsen would like to see his portrait.”
Nicholas’s eyes darken, and his fingers tighten on the doorknob. “This isn’t a garden party, Paige. Mr. Olsen died twenty minutes ago on the opery. ñ€†ating table. Maybe now,” he says quietly, “you can leave me alone.”
It takes me forty minutes to get back to the Prescotts’, and when I do I am still shaking. I pull off my jacket and sag against a highboy, which jabs into my ribs. Wincing, I move away and stare at myself in an antique mirror. For the past week, no matter where I am, I’ve been uncomfortable. And deep down I know this has nothing to do with the sharp edges of the furniture, or with any other piece of decor. It’s just that the cool hospital and the elegant Prescott mansion are not places where I feel at home.