Chapter 7: From Life

I went home at first light, back across the grass the way I’d come, and came back that evening through the front door — invited this time, a guest at the birthday. Her fifteenth, the block’s Fourth barely four days behind us. Because that was the version we were all playing now — the good dad, the nice birthday, the friend invited over.

There was a cake with her name on it in his blocky careful hand, and lemon in the air from the thing he made her every birthday, and two little kids from down the block there for the cake, wound up and loud. He sang loud and off-key. Cass blew out the candles. “Fifteen,” he said over the little kids’ clapping, shaking his head like it amazed him. “Fifteen years old. Where’s it all go.”

“Best birthday ever,” she said to me under the singing, deadpan, and rolled her eyes, and I loved her so much in that second I couldn’t breathe.

By eight the little kids were gone and the paper plates were in the trash and the house had gone quiet room by room, and I let myself think, for a couple of hours, that maybe it was going to be nothing. A cake. A movie. Then he came to the foot of the stairs where Cass and I were pretending to pick one and said, easy, wiping his hands on a dish towel, “Come on out to the studio, you two. I want to do the thing I’ve been planning.”

Cass looked at me. I’d promised her. I’d promised her I wouldn’t let him, and there was nothing in me that knew how to keep it, because you can’t refuse a man who hasn’t done anything, who’s only asking you out to a room to make some art on his daughter’s birthday. We went.

He’d made the studio ready. The daybed pulled to the center under the good lamp, the throw smoothed over it, a stool set out for me with a fresh pad on it and the charcoal open in its box beside it. He’d lined the sticks up. He’d sharpened them for me.

“Here’s the idea.” He rubbed his hands, warm, a man laying out a treat. “I want a series. Tonight. You sketch — fast, like you do; I’ve watched you get a whole figure down in the time it takes me to finish a coffee — and we flesh them out later, real paintings, take all the time we want. Anything you don’t catch, we hold it, we do it again till you’ve got it. That work?”

“Sketch what,” I said. My voice came out level. I don’t know how.

“Us.” He was already unbuttoning his shirt. “Me and Cass. You get us down.” He smiled. “The three of us, making something together.” He looked at me, patient, kind, waiting, and it was such an ordinary question — a question about my work, the one thing about me anybody had ever taken seriously — and God help me the answer was yes before he’d even finished asking. “Yeah,” I said. “I can sketch fast.”

That was me saying yes to it — to all of it, though I told myself it was only the sketching.

Cass undressed without being told. She didn’t look at me while she did it. She lay back on the daybed the way she’d lain a hundred times that summer, one knee up, open to the lamp — the pose that used to be mine — and he set a hand on her knee and moved her an inch and said, “There. Hold that. Get the first one, June. Just her. Before.”

Before. Like there was a before and an after and he was the line between them.

“Marcus—” I said. Once. It was all I had. He looked up, unhurried, the space heater ticking, and waited for me to finish it, to say the thing out loud — and I couldn’t. There was no word for it that didn’t blow the roof off the whole summer, off Cass being fine, off him being the good dad, off me being allowed in this room at all, and he knew there wasn’t, and he watched me not find it. “Nothing,” I said. “Never mind.”

And I put the charcoal to the paper and drew my girl naked and open under her father’s lamp, and it came out of me clean and quick and true, and I hated every good line of it.

He knelt at the foot of the daybed and took her by the hips, dragging her down to the very edge of the cushion until her knees bent up and fell open on either side of his head. Then he put his mouth on her, right where I’d had mine.

I know what it looks like when Cass is getting what she needs. I learned it by heart. This wasn’t it. He went at her too hard and too high, a big man doing a rough job with no idea where she was. Her body did what he’d taught it to do — a slick she couldn’t help and hated — but that was the whole of what he could drag up. He could make her leak; he couldn’t make her climb. He didn’t know where she lived, couldn’t take that helpless reflex and build it into anything real the way I knew how to, and past that Cass lay with her jaw set and her eyes on the skylight and gave him nothing — nothing that was hers to hand over. For one savage second I was glad. There it is, I thought. That’s the one thing. He built the room and bought the charcoal and took the whole summer and there’s still the one thing only I can —

He lifted his head. Wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. The warmth had gone out of his face.

Cass’s eyes came off the skylight and found mine, and even then — even then — the ghost of it crossed her face, the gallows thing, ours: he’s bad at it. He’s bad at it and we both knew it, and for a breath the room still had us in it, the joke, ours.

Then he stood up.

“Fine,” he said. Not angry. Worse than angry. Decided.

He straightened up off the floor and stripped the rest of the way — the open shirt shrugged off his shoulders, the belt, the jeans and the boxers shoved down and stepped out of and left on the floor — and whatever was left of the man who fixed the block’s kitchens went off with them. There was only the size of him then, out in the lamplight, hard and flat up against his own belly, the flushed head of it already wet — a bead of him welling at the tip and sliding, so worked up over what he was about to do that he’d started to leak with it. I’d drawn him all summer — out of his shorts, in her hand, in her mouth — but never the whole of him bared like this, and never this worked up: thicker and heavier than I’d ever had to get down on paper, a weight to it that shifted when he moved. Cass looked at it and the last of the sass drained out of her face all at once.