“And once the truth is revealed, Eema? I will be hated and despised. I’ll have no husband nor home. I’ll lose everything I have and be shunned, an outcast. The police will find me sleeping in rags on a park bench with newspapers for a blanket and take me away.” Her eyes are filling with tears. “And what’s worse is I’ll deserve it all.”
Of course. My selfish child. Always thinking of herself, poor thing, her eema says, but not as an indictment. More like a sad, simple little fact. You believe the monstrosity belongs to you alone? You’re wrong, tsigele.
A sob breaks over Rachel. “You don’t know what I did, Eema. You don’t know the crime I committed.”
I don’t care about crimes, Daughter. You’re not listening. Your ears are blocked by your own self-pity. Look at that canvas, Rokhl. Look at it! Do you have the slightest conception of how I long for one more hour—one more moment—when I could touch a brush to my palette and paint even a single stroke? To feel the strength of that? But art is for the living, not the dead. So stand up and live, child. Your paintbrush is a weapon! Use it! Defend yourself against yourself.
Rachel liberates the easel from the hallway closet. The Woolsey standing floor easel, collapsed and stowed behind the vacuum. The tarp is there too, a shop tarp from a factory floor, saved from Aaron’s days slaving for his uncle in the leather goods workshop, already stained with tanning solution before she stained it further with paint, though it still smells of both. The rusty tin of turpentine is under the sink, but her oil paints, her brushes, those are harder to find, till finally she remembers.
She must muscle out various boxes full of clothes and board games from Aaron’s childhood, the lamps that came from Webster Avenue but need rewiring. The dusty debris that’s too much trouble to pitch. Would her mother-in-law be upset if they threw out the tarnished brass floor lamp with the lion crest? Probably not, but why risk it? She shoves aside a box marked KIDS’ BOOKS: AARON and finds it. The scuffed and paint-stained Winsor & Newton painter’s box. Inside are the crusty tubes of oils, the bundle of wooden-handled brushes, the paint-stained palette and palette knives, the broad brushes for priming. They’re all waiting for her. The smell rises into her nostrils like an ancient perfume released from a pharoah’s vault.
The canvas she bought at Lee’s Art Shop is already primed, but she still lays down a dry-brush underpainting of umber followed by the Dead Layer. La couche morte. She mixes it generously at the center of the palette. Then she must sit back. Oils require patience. They require a geological approach to time and art. Each layer must be permitted to crust and then harden, so she sits back and watches the color fix. She is still sitting on the sofa, wearing one of Aaron’s old dress shirts as a smock, already blotted with paint, her hands already stained, her brushes soaking in turp, when the key turns in the lock. The door opens, and she hears Aaron before she sees him. “Holy mackerel, you spill the silver polish or something? It stinks in here.”
And that’s how it starts.
Aaron has always encouraged her to do what makes her happy, as long as maybe it doesn’t smell up the place. Or as long as it doesn’t interfere too much with eating a meal. Going out for a movie maybe. You know, everyday life. As long as they can still live everyday life, then it’s fine, but really the smell, criminy.
“Open a window for cryin’ out loud,” he says. “Forget that all the heat will go right out the fucking windows. How can a person breathe, huh?”
“Paint. Smells.” That’s her reply.
“I guess that on that particular point, we agree,” her husband tells her. Aaron slumps onto the sofa with an exhale of breath. They have not been doing so well since the birth of the Weinstock child. Most times, under daily pressures, something simply feels detached between them. Other times, though, it’s a kind of stewing impatience, or even anger that heats up for an instant and then simmers away into silence. But now her husband looks bleached.
“You know, Rachel. I don’t know what else to do,” he tells her. He is sitting on one end of the sofa, and she is seated at the other end, holding Kibbitz hostage on her lap. “I try to make you happy. Well, maybe that’s too much to imagine, but at least I try to make you less miserable. You wanted a cat? We got a cat. You wanted to buy expensive mail-order oil paints because the ones at the store weren’t good enough? I say not a problem. Buy ’em. You deserve to have expensive oil paints. And then you need time to work on your painting and stuff? Great! It’s not like I expect to have a meal cooked when I come home. So we live in a pigsty? Whattaya gonna do? You’ve got other priorities.”
And that’s how it starts.
“So you missed him,” Dr. Solomon confirms.
“Yes.”
“With the ashtray.”
“I think the sugar bowl was close.”
“And then you threw the toaster?”
“Yes.”
“Did it break?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you really intend to hit him with any of these objects?”
“He was gone by the time I threw the toaster.”
“I see.”
Rachel’s eyes tear bleakly for a moment, and she wipes them. “No. I don’t think I hoped to hit him. Not really,” she says.
“And this argument. It started because?”
“Because it would kill me to wash a window. Because I open a can and dump it into a pot instead of cooking. Because I don’t vacuum the drapes.”
“Okay. So once again. Housework was the catalyst.”
“Aaron thinks I am a bad housekeeper. He wishes he had married his mother instead.”
“You said that to him?”
“He said it to me. Though,” she admits, “maybe not exactly in such words.”
“So I believe you know about my opinion concerning arguments over housework.”
“They are never about housework,” she reports, still a good little goat.
“That’s correct. So after the argument, you left the apartment?”
“No. He left.”
“And didn’t come back?”
“There’s a couch in Leo’s office at the restaurant. A big, brown-leather, pleated chesterfield from the thirties. It wouldn’t be the first time he slept there. Charades has always been his second home anyway. He keeps a shaving kit, suits, and fresh shirts there. When the waiters’ union went on strike, he didn’t come home for days.”
A pause to examine her. “When was the last time you ate something?” the good doctor wants to know.
“Ate something? I don’t know. I’m not hungry.”
Her hair is stiff and flattened on one side while bristled on the other. She is still dressed in the same clothes that she was wearing under the painting smock. She hasn’t changed since the day before yesterday. Her skin feels gritty against her blouse. Her mouth tastes of dead cigarette smoke. She had stopped at a diner on Lexington Avenue and swallowed a single cup of scalded black coffee, sitting at the counter with the crowd of men on their lunch break, wolfing down their sandwiches and meat-loaf specials. The Wonder Bread deliveryman and the beat cop in their ill-fitting uniforms, and the middle-aged drummers with chapped faces, stopping off just long enough to stuff a B.L.T. into their mouths and gulp down coffee as they glare at the headlines of the daily papers.
“You look completely done in,” the doctor observes.
“I don’t want to talk about how I look. I didn’t come all the way up here to talk about how I look.”
“So tell me, Rachel. Do you feel you live… How did you say he put it? In a pigsty?”