A Piece of the World(32)

Andy gives me a sardonic smile. “Who knows what motivates anyone, right? Humans are mysterious creatures.” He lifts his shoulders in a shrug. “Maybe it was a heart attack. Or carelessness. Or—something else. We’ll probably never know the truth.”

“You know you miss him. That’s pretty simple, isn’t it?”

“Is it?”

I think of my own parents—how sometimes I miss them and sometimes I don’t. “I suppose not.”

Rocking slowly back and forth, he says, “Before my father died, I just wanted to paint. It’s different now. Deeper. I feel all the—I don’t know—gravity of it. Something beyond me. I want to put it all down as sharply as possible.”

He looks over at me, and I nod. I understand this, I do. I know what it is to carry mixed feelings in the marrow of your bones. To feel shackled to the past even though it’s populated by ghosts.

WHEN HIS FATHER died, Andy was working on a life-sized egg tempera of Al leaning against a closed door with an iron latch, next to our old oil lamp. He started it the summer before, trying, in sketch after charcoal sketch, to render on paper the scratched nickel of the lamp and the solid weight of the latch. Then he pulled out his paints and asked Al to pose next to the door in the kitchen hallway. For hours, days, weeks, Al sat against that door as Andy tried, and failed, to translate the vision in his head onto canvas. “It’s like trying to pin a butterfly,” he said in exasperation. “If I’m not careful, the wings will crumble to dust in my hand.”

When Andy left Port Clyde at the end of the summer, the painting still wasn’t finished, so he took it back to his winter studio in Chadds Ford. After the accident, he started working on it again. When he returned to Maine, he brought the painting with him and propped it against the fireplace in the Shell Room.

I’m standing near the fireplace looking at the painting one morning when Andy arrives at the front door and lets himself in. Noticing me in the Shell Room from the hall, he comes to stand beside me. “Al hated sitting still like that, didn’t he?” Andy says.

I laugh. “He was so bored and fidgety.”

“He’ll never pose for me again.”

“Probably not,” I agree.

Half of the picture is in light and half in darkness. The oil lamp casts shadows across Al’s face, on the old wooden door, under the iron latch. A newspaper behind the lamp is stained and wrinkled. Al is staring into the middle distance as if deep in thought. His eyes seem clouded with tears.

“Did it turn out how you wanted?” I ask Andy.

Reaching out a hand, he traces the outline of the lamp in the air. “I got the texture of the nickel right. I’m happy about that.”

“What about the figure of Al?”

“I kept changing it,” he says. “I couldn’t capture his expression. I’m still not sure I did.”

“Is he . . . crying?”

“You think he’s crying?”

I nod.

“I didn’t intend that. But . . .” With a rueful smile, he says, “You can practically hear that wailing train whistle, can’t you?”

“It looks like Al is listening to it,” I say.

He moves closer, studying the canvas. “Then maybe it did turn out all right.”

ANDY HAS NEVER asked me to pose for him, but several weeks after this conversation he comes to me and says he’d like to do a portrait. How can I say no? He sits me down in the pantry doorway, arranges my hands in my lap and the sweep of my skirt, and draws sketch after sketch, pen on white paper. From a distance. Up close. My hair, each minute strand, swept back off my neck. With a necklace and without. My hands, this way and that. The doorway empty, without me in it.

Most of the time the only sounds are the scratch of his pen, the great flap of paper as he turns a large sheet. Squinting, he holds out his thumb. He sticks the pen in his mouth, leaving him inky lipped. Mumbles quietly to himself. “That’s it, there. The shadow . . .” I have the odd sensation that he’s looking at me and through me at the same time.

“I hadn’t quite noticed how frail your arms are,” he muses after a while. “And those scars. How did you get them?”

I’ve become so accustomed to dealing with people’s reactions to my infirmity—uncertainty about what to say, distaste, even revulsion—that I tend to clam up when anyone mentions it. But Andy is looking at me frankly, without pity. I glance down at the crisscrossing strips on my forearms, some redder than others. “The oven racks. Sometimes they slip a little. Usually I wear long sleeves.”

He winces. “Those scars look painful.”

“You get used to it.” I shrug.

“Maybe you could use some help with the cooking. Betsy knows a girl—”

“I do all right.”

Shaking his head, he says, “You do, don’t you, Christina? Good for you.”

One day he scoops up all the sketches and heads upstairs. For the next few weeks I barely see him. Every morning he comes toward the house through the fields, his thin body swaying off kilter from that wonky hip, his elbows and knees flailing out, wearing blue dungarees and a paint-splattered sweatshirt and old work boots he doesn’t bother to lace. He raps twice on the screen door before letting himself in, carrying a canteen of water and a handful of eggs he’s swiped from the hens. Exchanges pleasantries with Al and me in the kitchen. Thumps up the stairs in his work boots, muttering to himself.