The Sketching Date

Lonely people, in talking to each other, can make each other lonelier.

—Lillian Hellman

          

          I.          

          

          The email arrived in all caps.

          BILL, I HAVE AN IDEA [...] IF YOU BRING YOUR PAINTS, WE CAN HAVE LUNCH AND PAINT. YOU AT ONE END OF THE COUNTER, ME AT THE OTHER.

          I'd been so busy all month that the absurdity of it seemed like a divine relief.

          Aleksandra and her husband John had built the log cabin after camping on the land for years. They raised six kids in one of the mansions of Rye, New York. When they got ready to move to Maine they told each one—now adults—to put their name on whatever piece of furniture or artwork they wanted. The nine bedroom house was emptied, and Aleksandra and John started all over again.

          "This time, honey, can we have some red and blue?" Aleksandra had done the estate in pale coral, sugar snap pea pastel, and seafoam ivory, like mint cream candies.

          "L.L. Bean. I get it!" was her reply. John died in 2011.

          And it is consistent. Everything is scuffed, weathered, and like a theater stage nothing is added to disrupt the vast negative space of the single room with the wall of French doors staring out at Taunton Bay. Yet the eye keeps discovering picture frames and iron soap cradles and objects of delicate comfort arranged with great precision. It is L.L. Bean if it had turned slightly steampunk—then lunched at Bergdorf's.

          The massive fieldstone fireplace at the northeastern end of the room—behind which the stairway climbs—defines the space: a minimalist cathedral with a blue lacquer woodstove in the center.

          I had met Aleksandra at church and I was always slightly thrilled to know someone to whom life would surely never have otherwise permitted me access. She was 84 then, and she sat on one of the upholstered chairs in church in a low lying fog of perfume. She wore black leather opera gloves and a fur hat and she owned that room in the way women of a certain social class could do 60 or 70 years ago. I was besotted.

          She liked me instantly, without ever speaking of it or describing qualities. The connection, silently understood, was talent.  

          Her all-caps summons felt like a phone call from my mother—were my mother suddenly in possession of a freedom and elegance to which she only aspired.

          When you turn off 182 there are a couple of small houses and a barn—nothing special. Then you come to the sign: Private Property No Trespassing, and the paved road ceases, like a chattering bore. A narrow dirt road that seems miles long takes you through a deep woods with nothing in sight ahead, passing quarries and elephant-high boulders covered with lichen. Aleksandra drives this with ease, familiar with every rut and maintaining the car comfortably level with the skill of a ship captain.

          After she makes a tiny glass pot of coffee, we get straight to work. Aleksandra is painting a pear. Not an actual fruit, but a black and white magazine clipping of a pear. I'm drawing (from life) a wooden bowl of oranges with a couple of cloves of garlic tucked inside the rim.

          Goddamnit! 

          It seems that Aleksandra might be out of white.

          I always feel such comfort in the presence of people who use foul language. I live in a world of unfamiliar restraint and annoying placidity, and the smell of cigarettes, an alcoholic slur of speech, or the sudden, baseless ejaculation of curse words is a trip back to my childhood. 

          Half an hour later Alexandra has produced a pear on a large canvas while I am still performing my tentative cross-hatching, upper right to lower left—every line drawn with fear. She places her canvas on the floor against the wall and steps back. 

          "The bottom's too big!" 

          Indeed, it is a Roestenberg pear—splashed and colossal, no more important to the composition than the raspberry vanilla impasto that populates the formless background. It's bright and confident.

          She adjusts the perimeter of the rainbow-colored pear and returns it to the place of inspection.

          "The left side is too short!" 

          Another adjustment, and the painting is done. 

          "You're going to need to take my oranges home with you!"—then—"Keep drawing. I'll make lunch."

II.

          It has taken me the three years that I have known her to understand the function of Aleksandra's self-effacing remarks, her insistence always to be a dunce—her treacherous, disingenuous transparency.

          A year ago she gave me her copy of Larousse Gastronomique because she couldn't cook, and I pictured her living on Smart Ones and Lipton Cup-a-Soups. There were stories of inedible casseroles—always entertaining. 

          Combined with her zealous self-disclosure and a sort of innocent directness that sounded like naivete, one was left believing her only profundity was in the application of lipstick. Aleksandra could get lost easily in dinner table talk, and she combated this awkwardly, struggling to follow along.

          But in 10 minutes I had a perfect plate in front of me, arranged with all the care she withheld from her painting: a tablespoon of tuna salad on a half tomato surrounded by sliced cucumber, topped with yellow-orange sweet peppers and lounging on a bed of mesclun. Sitting at the picnic table facing the bay waters, we had non-alcoholic wine and blueberry compote served in a champagne coupe as the noontime sun barely mitigated the chilly breeze.

          Reading John's obituary, I see the couple were part of a famous potluck dinner group in Rye—I can only imagine the level of kitchen sophistication they must gotten up to.

          As I traced this deception back, in a few rare comments at book discussions, or some remarks during a dinner party with mutual friends, I remember a line that went something like this: It was all so easy. We had everything ... there was nothing else to want ... and I started to ask myself if this was all there was to life. 

          Sketchily, as throwaway remarks, bit by bit I learned that there had been quite a turn to Buddhism, perhaps in the 1990s—the attending of sanghas, work at meditation, and John's response of relief—"If it keeps you from having the blues, darling ..."

          Typical of an artist, she had started to go sour on the good life in the big house in Rye, at some point. I can imagine a few hysterics, or perhaps just excessive brooding, or frustration.

          Frustration?! John had been an advertising executive on Madison Avenue in the 1960s, with clients such as Proctor & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, and Lipton. Their yacht was christened the Extra Dry because Arrid Extra Dry had been John's own campaign. This was success and affluence on a serious scale.

          But the Eastern stuff had taught Aleksandra to live in the moment, and the stories were given away with the furniture—how I wish my name might have been put on a couple of them. 

          I keep my ear pressed to the wall, but I can't appear to be interested in someone who is not, in a sense, with me in the present moment—fixing one side of her foot-high pear. There are a few flashes of what was, and, of course, the attitude itself remains: we are all her staff—beloved but kept to serve. 

          And the scrim pulled down on her life with John—she freely tells the stories of her poor childhood in a Polish section of New York state—protects us, in a way, from handling some material that we are not, in our modest minds, able to digest. The vastness of that life, and the ease with which it was maintained, exacted its toll on her creative, restless personality.

          Now, perhaps, there remains out of that time a peculiar sort of loneliness for someone she perceives as ill-suited to his own life, emotionally transparent, creative—and a little sad.

          I once—pretty drunk—proposed to write her biography. She heartily agreed, but it never got going.

          Now I can tell when she's about to fib about something: she gets a secretive, knowing smile and narrows her eyes just a bit.

           Aleksandra is no more than what we see before us, in the avocado khakis and tartan Scottish tam she prefers in the cold months. She doesn't need to talk about how it was—much less brag.

          And that—as far as I am able to understand the term—is the definition of noblesse oblige.