The Light of Paris(92)

Finally, I pushed myself away and found the stairs. As I climbed, they clanged underneath my feet, the sound of music growing louder as I approached the second floor, and then fading again as I reached the third. It was warmer up here, the sun trapped by the windows deliciously greenhouse-hot, as though I were back in Magnolia. I heard people working as I walked to the far end of the hall—I passed the steady whir of a potter’s wheel and the rich, sharp smell of wet clay, and through another door I heard someone humming along with a series of steady, slow taps I couldn’t identify. And finally, I slipped the key into the lock of 314.

The warehouse had clearly been an open floor that had now been subdivided into these smaller studios, and this one was tiny—if I stood in the middle, I could have touched both walls with my arms. But the back wall was taken up by a wide, clean window, and though the light had faded, it would be bright and sunny in the mornings, and there was enough room for a table and a cabinet for supplies, and an easel or two. I imagined myself coming here early, closing the door to keep the blur and buzz of the city outside, sipping orange juice while I laid out brushes like a surgeon’s tools, letting the light paint the canvas and show me where to draw. Virginia Woolf had said writers needed a room of their own, and maybe artists needed them too. Maybe everyone needs a room of one’s own where there are no expectations, and no compromises, and you can be the person you know yourself to be.

The music coming muffled or tinny through the walls, the smell of clay and paint and charcoal, all that meant it was possible. All these people were making the things they wanted happen. I wasn’t the only one. I didn’t have to be afraid. My grandfather had been a painter, my grandmother, a writer. My creativity wasn’t a fluke. It was my destiny.

? ? ?

By the time I got home, I was late, I suppose, but we had never really had a dinner time. Phillip often ate at the office or out with clients, and I pieced together meals from bits and pieces I found in the refrigerator—yogurt and two small pieces of steak left over from a dinner Phillip had gone to, and a handful of macadamia nuts and a pickle. Except apparently that night he had expected my arrival, had been planning, bringing things home from work, and he was angry at being delayed.

“Where have you been?” he asked.

I didn’t want to tell him. He would not see my wanting to paint again as the compromise I needed to make to stay here, as the reward for enduring all the things I did not want to do. But I was done with lying. I had tried it his way, my mother’s way, and it had never worked. I couldn’t go on like this forever, not now that I knew there was the possibility of something more. “I was looking at an artist’s studio.”

“An artist’s studio?” He said this as though I had told him I had been hunting one-legged unicorns. “What for?” His confusion was understandable. I don’t think he knew any women who had hobbies, other than shopping and complaining about their daughters-in-law. And the only hobbies any of the men he knew had were golf and infidelity. I was fairly sure he hadn’t taken up either, but it was only a matter of time.

“You know. For making art.”

“Like painting?”

“Yes, painting. And drawing. And, I don’t know, collage. Whatever I feel like.”

“Who’s going to pay for that?” he asked sharply, and now I knew he was angry. He never questioned the way I spent money—probably because I hardly spent any. My joy began to fade and the room grew darker around me. Phillip paid the bills. If he didn’t want to pay for it, he didn’t have to, and who was I to object? This is why women should have their own jobs, their own money, I thought. This is why I want my own. Like my grandmother had.

“I don’t mind working,” I said quietly. “I wanted to work. You were the one who didn’t want me to.” I could have argued a dozen things, compared myself to the women I knew who shopped their boredom and their pain away. But this wasn’t a financial reckoning. This wasn’t about fair. This was about control.

He didn’t respond. Instead, he looked around the kitchen and said, “I’ve been waiting. I’m starving. You should call if you’re going to be late.”

“Wait, what are you talking about? Did we have plans? How am I late?”

He sighed in frustration, as though I were asking for clarification on some basic tenet of our relationship. “Past dinner time.”

“I’m sorry?” I wasn’t entirely sure what I was apologizing for. I sat down on the arm of the sofa, as though I were only staying a moment.

“If you’re not going to try, Madeleine, I don’t know why I’m bothering.”

“Try what?” I asked. I was becoming genuinely confused. It was as though Phillip were having an entirely different conversation and not letting me in on it.

“This.” He lifted his hands in frustration. He was standing behind the island in the kitchen. A bottle of wine, a half-empty glass, the opener, and the cork were lined up beside him in a tidy row. Everything about Phillip was so neat. It was fascinating, in a way, as though he had been molded from plastic. When we were first married, I had watched him endlessly, wondering at the way his hair fell perfectly into place as soon as he brushed it and stayed that way the entire day, how his suit jackets remained unwrinkled, even at the insides of the elbows, and how he never seemed to spill anything when he ate, whereas my every encounter with food was a battle in which my clothing was likely to end up as collateral damage. “Us. This relationship. You can’t go running off to—I don’t know, move in with your mother or become a painter or whatever every time you have a bad day.”