Apelman doesn't know I haven't done this at all since Olivia died. Sketched or painted. He doesn't know, either, that I've been seeing her everywhere. Today, though, I saw my daughter. And she saw me. Maybe for the last time. Why am I drawing? Apelman would love the idea: painter turns to art to redeem suffering. Sometimes, if the hand moves, the mind can rest. But not this time. I'm drawing to grab hold of her. If the hurt's all I have left of her, I want to keep it, keep it alive — hurting — because right now I think I need everything I have.
It was her handwriting. Unchanged in four years. She called me by my name.
It starts drizzling outside. The room darkens. Water condenses and runs down the full length of the windows, spills over the curved limestone caps. There's an exhaustion in the quality of the light. On the street, leaves catch moisture, gleam like the scales of dead fish. The gutters go black and wet.
A dot. Another dot. A line between them. I remember the last face I drew. Believe it or not, she, Olivia, was the only one. My single dalliance — through five years of matrimonial, blue-balled freeze-out. She was my risk. When my wife found out about her and blew the country, dangling our daughter from her broom, Olivia told me, "You've made your choice. Don't keep on choosing. Not every day you're with me."
Young women fuck like they're running out of time. It's like they know something. When her time ran out, I sat there, weeks, sketching her. Wondering if she could hear me, sense me, through her coma; if, when she slept, she completed a thought with each breath. An old man and a beautiful, serious young girl. I wondered how long she'd known about the diagnosis. I wondered whether — if I'd known — it would have made a difference. But all I had known was her perfect hunger, the painful playing out of her imperfect satisfaction.
At the hospice, I frightened away her visitors: mostly young people holding tight-bunched, crinkle-wrapped flowers, fuzzy toys, heart-shaped balloons. They came with nothing to say, stretching their lips as though smiling to me. They leaned over her machine-lived body with their face piercings and earplugs and iPods and cell phones and I wanted to rip all their things off, throw them away, and show them — show them — if they wanted so badly to plug the sockets of their bodies-what it was to be fixed upon that bed.
Only Apelman stayed, sitting by me as they pumped cocktail after cocktail into her polluted veins, her self-savaging body, watching me as I watched her…
The drizzle turns to rain. Outside the glass wall, the last of the color is sucked out of the air. The streets are filthy with debris and the wind picks up papers, plastic wrappers, dead leaves — tosses them on its invisible surf. Holding my hands up, I immerse my head in the bathwater. Suddenly the plumbing of the whole building comes alive, like the massive groaning of the earth itself. I can hear the rain drumming on every exposed surface. Olivia taught me that trick.
I sit up, look out through the glass. I like the rain, how it makes monochrome of things. Even its own noise. People pass by, faces darkened under black umbrellas. Feet mutely slapping shallow puddles. Some caught unprepared: rushing arms crossed, heads bowed, as though shouldering their way out of an emergency room. Others slow down, look up, faces spotted with raindrops, mouths agape, pretending they're actually enjoying it. Chumps.
The drawing takes shape. She's looking at me and her mouth is open. Her hair so dark it looks wet. My wife's sitting on a suitcase crying. They'll be staying, she says, at her friend's place in Bushwick. In her carriage, Elise is asleep, features clouding in dream. She lets out a slight gargle as I pick her up. "Don't," my wife says through her sniffling, "she's sick." I put her back down and tuck her in. It's a relief; she's the only thing that can make my hands feel graceless. Now I see the perfect little beads of sweat on her forehead. Her body giving off warmth like a hot-water bottle. I think about kissing her but don't want to scratch her awake with my whiskers. To the dramatic sounds of my wife's surfacing, strangled sobs, I duck my head and go upstairs. Leaving them on the front stoop. Not knowing that the taxi that comes will take them not to a friend's place in Bushwick but to JFK. Not knowing that it will smuggle my daughter seventeen years away from me. But all that night — night after night — my dreams are filled with the image of her doll-small body on the stoop, burning, fevered with her father's sin.
I try to capture her eyes on the page. In my head — my mind's eye-they're stern, accusing. But then it was either-or, either-or, and knowing what I knew, feeling what I felt, how could she have expected me to choose differently? How much does a moment carry? Across a gap of seventeen years, now she shows me shame again? Blood made hard and broken to bits. On the stage, her eyes were so clear and deep and large and true. The light from them-if she had turned them fully on me-could have made even a dirty old man like me look new again.
I throw down the pad and charcoal, stand up, clean as a corpse. Olivia always got a kick out of that, standing naked in full view of passersby on the street. Apelman's right. Family is family. I look at the floor, at the drawing, her gray-sketched face made bleary by spots of bathwater. As I climb out of the bath I feel warmth dribbling down my legs. I look down and see it — for the first time — blood — in the water: suspended, its pink wisps shifting like the petals of a flower.
Here's what I'll do: Look at myself in the mirror. My face stark white, a shock of bone and skin and hair. My teeth yellow, carious. The valves of my body corroded. Get your clothes on and get working. The order of the day: Get dressed — she's coming today.
Something swanky, maybe the white-tie suit. The satin peak lapel, besom pockets, with the white piqué vest. I pad my underwear with Kleenex to catch the blood. Outside, it's still raining — I skate the sidewalk, finding my way by the light of office buildings. The streets vacant, dark as a lung. When the wind is up it sounds like the trees talk to each other above the noise of a crowd.
I'm late. The performance has already started. In fact, it's almost over. The ticket clerk repeats this before he trots out his supervisor. I tell them who I am. There's a buzzing in my head — the sound of a fluorescent tube — as we argue, and then, finally, I have it in my hands — my ticket.
Side balcony. The signs leading up and up. The carpet is red-plaided and oil-darkened and feels like freshly mown grass — each step sinking in a bit. My footsteps leave damp craters. Music, all the while, audible from behind the neoclassically reliefed walls, floating to me as though from a distant boat. The stairs get steeper. I imagine I can hear it, her centuries-old cello. By the time I reach the top my legs feel weak, hollowed out, flush with hot bathwater and whiskey. My cummerbund is up underneath my nipples, my collar like wet cardboard, every seam in my shirt stamping itself into my skin. Sweat spurting out of every furrow.
"Sir," the gilt-brocaded usher begins, but I stare him down. I recover my breath. Then, slowly, I lean open the heavy door. The sound sudden, heart-flooding. She's onstage, the four of them forming an almost closed circle: playing as though only to each other.
The people in my row half rise, half brace, anything to avoid touching me as I sidle to my seat. My ass smarts when I sit down. There's a buttress blocking half of my face. I imagine the Leech in the front row, the hatchet silhouette of his head, his gangly legs all stretched out. It doesn't matter, though — I can still hear her, the sound of her cello, full, sonorous, rising through my body and slowly transmuting the pain into warmth, the carry of it through the auditorium, and it's as though my body is without substance and I'm dissolving into the sound she scratches out of her contraption of wood and steel and hair. The concert hall the space inside my skull.