The High Season(79)

As Ruthie painted, she told herself it didn’t matter. Artists used projections, used assistants, and nobody cared, they just wanted the work. It was still Peter’s eye, his mockery, his line, his color, his wit. She could easily have painted this twenty years ago.

She found several photos of a younger Adeline online, scanned and studied them. He had painted her only once, but there was also a beautiful suite of drawings that had made up a small, gorgeous exhibition at MoMA a few years ago.

Adeline’s face was the same, her penchant for turning a quarter to the left, tilting her chin for a photograph in that way that beautiful women know their best angle. It wouldn’t be a nude, the canvas was too small, so it would just expose bare shoulders. Besides, if she had to paint Adeline’s nipples she would go crazy. Ruthie stared so long into the serene gaze of her nemesis that she began to feel as though she knew the woman Adeline had been, knew what the expression in her eyes meant. I found my chance and I am taking it, even if it farts in bed.

She had three canvases, one with the word C U N T scrawled on it. She saved that one for last. She practiced on the first two. The first was not good. The second, close. Loose, precise. Good but not quite there. She covered the last canvas with primer, whiting out the word. Making invisible how he’d made her feel, how he’d whittled down her confidence. While she worked she remembered things she’d wanted to forget. Once he’d admonished her to be sure and always “wash down there” before she was with a man, because he’d been with a woman the night before who had “stunk like an afterbirth.” He’d told her that her breasts were too small, he’d told her that she would have been prettier if her eyes weren’t brown. He’d told her that he hoped she knew how to give a decent blow job.

    The female assistants had talked about him over beers, but the guys had laughed at them, called them pussies. That word was allowed because Peter said it all the time. The girls knew this job would get them places, and so they’d just gone back to work.

How strange, twenty years later, her hands would shake when she thought of it.

She pictured Peter shouting into the phone on the other side of the studio. She listened to Eat a Peach and Dark Side of the Moon. She thought of him saying that she was only a magpie.

The magpie is back, motherfucker.

So why did she come here, down the alley, toward the pier, finding the tiny place with the whitewashed sign OYSTERS. The night they’d spent together still thrummed inside her. Sometimes it filled her up with such urgency she’d dash outside and keep running until she came back to herself and saw she was standing on the beach, or on the road.

Inside she could see him at work, shucking with a sharp knife, wearing a blue rubber glove. Placing the oysters on shaved ice, the lemon just so. Smiling at the customer, saying something as he delivered the platter and the beers.

She watched without the nerve to go in.

If she hadn’t had so much to hide now, she would push through the door and ask him. How did you learn how to do this, whittle the complex down to simple?

Outside the picnic tables were full. It was a roaring Friday happy hour, a perfect summer evening. Giddy people, drinking beer, eating cold oysters, looking forward to picnics and pools, beaches and cocktails.

    He saw her through the window and stopped, then lifted his hand in a half wave. He leaned over to speak to the waitress, and walked outside.

“Did you come for that Muscadet? I promise not to call it gorgeous.”

“I came to apologize for my atrocious behavior.”

“Okay.”

“And my cowardice. Ducking your calls.”

“Only two.”

“What did you want to tell me?”

He shook his head, smiling. “Doesn’t matter now.”

“How did you do it? How did you throw your life up in the air to see where it landed?”

Joe thought about this. What she loved about him was his attention to questions. “I really do believe we can choose to be happy,” he said. “I made a list.”

This was a disappointing answer, somehow. “Oysters make you happy?”

“They’re a simple food. They filter out a ton of crap.”

“That’s a useful skill.”

“Exactly.”

The server popped her head out. “Joe?”

He half turned to her, then back to Ruthie. He reached for her hand, and her pulse jumped. He only pointed to a mark on her third finger. “You’re painting again.”

“Not seriously.” She rubbed at the paint. She couldn’t get it off. She heard a helicopter buzz overhead, flying out toward Plum Island so it could loop back to East Hampton. The noise was loud and she moved her lips. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“Me too,” he said.

Then he walked back into the restaurant, and she walked away.



* * *



—

THERE IS NO difference between my canvas and the air.

I would paint on water if I could.

    Women are mired in the body, it’s why they can’t be artists. All they see is themselves.

Men sit astride the world. Women are afraid they’ll fall off.

Peter in her head again.

Every time I paint a woman I am painting myself. How can I hate myself?