You Are the Love of My Life Read online

  After Lucy left for college, her mother returned to the city of Arles where she had grown up and where her sister, the aunt whom Lucy had never met, still lived.

  At RISD, out of the shadow of her mother’s shame and disappointment, Lucy invented a public self to live among strangers. A demeanor of mystery and whimsy, the promise of intimacy, but she was skittish if anyone came too close.

  “Untouchable,” she was called by the other students. She became a subject of conversation.

  LUCY MET REUBEN Frank when she was nineteen.

  She had gone to New York City at her art professor’s recommendation to show her portfolio of strange, supernatural animals painted in the brilliant colors of the desert to publishers of children’s books. She was sitting on a bench in the lobby of 555 Fifth Avenue where George Barnes Books, Inc., was located, gathering the courage to take the elevator to the seventh floor, when Reuben, carrying a bag with his lunch, the New York Times under his arm, rushed through the revolving doors into the lobby and saw her.

  Her shoes were what struck him first, her feet curled under a short orange flowered skirt, her shoes, red ballet slippers with satin ribbons, resting toe to toe under the bench.

  “Hello,” he said. “Can I help you?”

  “I am looking for Mr. Reuben Frank of George Barnes Books,” she said. “I have an appointment with him.”

  “You do?” Reuben asked.

  “More or less,” she said.

  She had found the name Reuben Frank in a book listing New York editors and publishers but had not called in advance to arrange an appointment, had not even thought to call. She simply expected that Mr. Frank would be happy to look at her work because her professor at RISD had told her she was an artist of unusual talent.

  “At least I hope I’ll be able to meet with him when I get upstairs,” she said. “I’ve brought my pictures.”

  “Luckily you’ve run into the right person,” he said, watching as she wriggled her feet into the ballet slippers. “I can arrange that meeting instantly.”

  In the elevator, Lucy leaned down to tie the satin ribbons around her ankles, her hair parting to expose a curve in the shape of a half-moon at the nape of her neck.

  “That did it,” he told her later. Just the sight of her small neck had moved him.

  On the seventh floor, the elevator doors opened and he led the way down the corridor, past the cubicles of editors, past the design room, the front desk with a young girl on the telephone, and into his office with its large window overlooking Fifth Avenue.

  “So,” he said clearing off his desk, “I’m ready to see your work.”

  There were six paintings, only six she realized when she saw that they all fit on the top of the desk looking more strange than she remembered—the color maybe too bright, the animals unnaturally thin and pointy.

  “So what do you think?” she asked quickly.

  “I don’t think about illustrations,” he replied, raising the venetian blinds behind his desk, picking up one of Lucy’s drawings. He held it at an angle in light that spread across the room from the south-facing window.

  “You don’t think they’re too queer to put in a book for children, do you?” she asked, sensing Reuben’s hesitation.

  He was leaning over his desk examining a hedgehog-like creature with brilliant yellow eyes.

  “I think I love them,” Reuben said, reassembling the portfolio, setting it on the edge of his desk. “I can’t tell you why exactly. I simply know what I love and what I don’t.”

  Lucy put her feet up flat against the side of his desk, flushed, her heart pounding.

  “So now what will happen?” she asked.

  “Now I’m going to be your editor.”

  “You are? And that’s that?”

  “More or less. You’ll go back to school and imagine a story for these creatures of yours and then we’ll do a book together.”

  “Not together,” she said quickly. “I do everything alone. Always completely alone.”

  “We’ll try it,” Reuben said. “If it doesn’t work between us, it doesn’t work.”

  He was falling in love. With Lucy. With the wild imaginative figures she had brought to him. With the possibility of flight.

  He was thirty-five and married and childless.

  “THIS IS VERY lucky, isn’t it?” Lucy said as they walked back down the corridor to the elevator.

  “Certainly lucky for me,” he said. “These wonderful original illustrations.”

  He reached over, running his finger lightly down the bridge of her nose.

  “Goodbye, my new surprise,” he said as the elevator doors opened.

  “Hello, my new editor,” Lucy said, stepping through the doors, her head down, looking at her red ballet slippers as the doors closed.

  For hours in the next months, she would lie on her back in the tiny single room of her group house at RISD imagining Reuben, his hand on her belly, his breath in her hair. There was no stopping the rush of feeling, no instinctive fear or hesitation in loving Reuben. He would leave his wife. They would marry as he had said would happen in their long conversations from his office. As he hoped would happen. Not a good fit with Elaine, he told her. It was as if the whole of her life since her father’s death had led to this particular man, gentle like her father had been, certain of himself. Her editor who could be counted on for everything.

  AFTER SHE GRADUATED from Rhode Island School of Design, after her mother was killed in an automobile accident outside of Paris, Lucy moved to the West Village, fifteen easy blocks from Reuben Frank. The geography was Reuben’s idea. Lucy was pregnant.

  Lying on her stomach in the apartment where she lived alone on Sullivan Street, Lucy spent hours on the phone with Reuben cloistered in his office.

  “Not that things won’t work out between us,” he said to her. “I didn’t know what it meant to fall in love, not with other girlfriends, not with my wife. I want to be with you always,” he said. “I can’t just yet imagine that conversation with Elaine. But I will.”

  He wanted her to be sure about the baby.

  “I am sure,” she said. “Whatever happens, I want the baby.”

  Of that she was certain. She wanted this baby for herself, is how she thought of it. She had no family except Reuben, and if things didn’t work out with him, if, in the end, he couldn’t leave Elaine, she would still have the child.

  At least, that was what she believed was possible in the magical way she had learned to construct a private world of parallel realities.

  MAGGIE WAS BORN when Lucy was twenty-two, the year her first book Belly Over the Banana Field was published about Belly, a too-small boy with a too-big belly dropped from the sky into a field of bananas, a book for which she won the Livingston for the best illustrated children’s book of 1962.

  On the title page of Belly, just under her name, Lucy had drawn a tiny broad-tailed hummingbird.

  “What little thing is this?” Reuben had asked when he got the final proof.

  “A hummingbird,” she said.

  A sign, she’d thought. She would draw a hummingbird on the title page of every book and mothers and fathers who bought her books, children leaning into their parents listening to them read a Lucy Painter story would think of Lucy and the hummingbird as one.

  She told Reuben about the days spent lying on the back porch in Santa Fe watching the hummingbird arrive at the hibiscus. So swift and small. Nothing in the still air, no sound of whirring wings and suddenly the hummingbird.

  The first night they were together, she drew a broad-tailed hummingbird on the palm of Reuben’s hand.

  “Indelible ink,” she said.

  THE YEAR THAT Maggie was born was the happiest one of Lucy’s life—so far, she told herself. She was a young mother with a baby girl, a successful book, and a love affair.

  “Soon,” Reuben had promised her about the eventual demise of his marriage. “Just you and me and Maggie.”

  IN MARCH OF 1963, two mon
ths after Maggie’s first birthday, Reuben’s daughter Nell was born.

  “This is a total surprise,” he said when he told her that Elaine was pregnant. “I don’t know what to say.”

  Lucy’s first reaction was fright.

  “What will become of us?” she asked.

  “We will continue our lives somehow,” he said, holding his head in his hands. He was tentative for the first time since they had been together and Lucy drew back, not wanting to alarm him.

  Months later, sitting across from Reuben at Belinda’s coffeehouse on the corner of Sullivan and Sixth, Elaine still in the hospital with baby Nell, Lucy asked about their future again.

  “I love you, Lucy,” he said. “This is extraordinary what we have together.”

  She wanted to ask him what “this” meant now that Nell had arrived, now that Reuben had the conundrum of a daughter with his wife and a daughter with his girlfriend.

  “I don’t know how but we will work this out,” he said.

  She wanted to believe him.

  It was still possible to persuade herself that someday Reuben would leave Elaine just as she sometimes imagined that one afternoon, she’d walk into a coffee shop and there her father would be sitting alone in a booth with a cup of coffee and a cigarette reading the morning newspaper.

  MICKEY CLIMBED IN the back of the truck with the two lamps from the living room, a poster announcing the publication of one of her books, and under his arm, a stuffed Dalmatian missing its tail.

  “Done,” Mickey said. “The apartment’s empty.”

  Reuben slid off the back of the truck.

  “So you can get on the road early, ” he said.

  “There are still boxes in storage in the basement,” Lucy said.

  Reuben pulled up the collar of his jacket. The wind had picked up.

  “Books and things I haven’t looked at since they were packed up in the house where I was born.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever been in the storage room,” he said. “I’ll go get them.”

  “I’m coming too,” Lucy said, leading the way down the narrow, winding stair, flipping on a light in the storage area where wire cages lined the walls in a room smelling of mold and the dank reminder of residential rats.

  “These are books,” Lucy said, unlocking the combination to her storage room. “And the boxes marked Lucy, 1951 are from the house on Capitol Hill where I used to live.”

  That morning before Reuben had arrived with the U-Haul truck, Lucy thought of opening the box with her father’s things to show Reuben the story from the Washington Post about his death. The story itself with the news she had already told him. He was the only person she had ever told about her life.

  The books were packed in boxes of ten, author’s copies from George Barnes Books—Fervid P. Drainpipe Lost in the Chinese Museum of Art was stamped on the side of one of the boxes and there were several boxes of Belly Over the Banana Field and two of Loop de Lupe and the Spider Monkey from Dordogne.

  Reuben lifted one of the old boxes, clouds of dust rising in the air collecting just above his head.

  “Have you ever even opened these, Lucy?” he asked, clearing his throat of dust. “The cardboard is actually disintegrating.”

  “Once at RISD I opened one box and taped it back up,” she said. “I didn’t want to look at my childhood then.”

  “You’re going to have to repack them when you get to Washington.”

  He struggled up the staircase, leaving Lucy to carry the smaller boxes which had followed her since they were packed, traveling from Washington, D.C., to Santa Fe to Providence, Rhode Island, to New York City, now back to Washington.

  “I hope you won’t be too lonely, Lucy,” he said. “Sometimes you keep too much to yourself.”

  “I’ll be fine,” she said, but Reuben knew her too well.

  She longed for company, for friends drinking tea in her kitchen, sitting in the window talking as dusk came on while the children played just within hearing. She wanted to be close in the way that she felt to the strange little characters she wrote about in her books, to lie in bed after the children had gone to sleep, alone as she often was, and shuffle through the playing cards of people she could call in the morning or ask to come when Maggie had the flu. A best friend. Someone she could tell about her mother and father. About Reuben.

  But always there was with Lucy a conditioned reserve.

  The closest she had come to the friendships she imagined beyond the casual gathering of telephone lists from Maggie’s school for bake sales and class trips and potluck suppers was walking through the Village with her children smiling at the people who knew her from her books.

  In Washington and without Reuben, she would change that.

  DARKNESS WAS COMING on early—not the ordinary slow-curtain fall of a winter day’s end but quickly, a storm-chased afternoon.

  They finished packing up the U-Haul and locked the back door. It was almost four in the afternoon and already dark, the storm threatening but no report of snow on the weather station. Lucy lifted Felix into the cab and Maggie climbed up behind him.

  “Do you want to check the apartment to see that everything’s okay for the next tenant?” Reuben asked.

  “I suppose I should.”

  “We’ll be right back, guys,” Reuben said, asking Mickey to stay with the children until they returned.

  The apartment was empty. Lucy’s breath caught in her throat. She wanted to leave quickly, to hurry down the stairs and out the door into the weather, to tell Reuben goodbye without lingering over what remained between them.

  “I’ll check around,” he said, leaving her in the living room, opening the closet doors, the kitchen cabinets, the tiny cupboard in the front hall where Lucy had kept the children’s toys. He was standing at the toy cabinet when she turned around, and headed towards the door.

  “Not yet.”

  He put his hand on the small of her back and pulled her towards him.

  “Your smell isn’t here any longer, is it?” he said. “It smells of cigarette smoke.”

  “You’re the one who smokes,” she said.

  He took her hand, a veil of dust between them, his hands dry.

  “Don’t say anything,” she said. “Not a word.”

  “I was just going to say it’s dusty in here.”

  “It was always dusty.”

  “I never noticed.”

  He kissed her sweetly, softly, pressing her body against him.

  But she turned, pushed his arms away, and headed down the steps and out the front door to the truck.

  FINALLY IT WAS beginning to snow.

  “Don’t forget to take the tunnel out of town,” Reuben called, standing beside the truck as it pulled away from the curb.

  Lucy could hear him from the open window but she didn’t check the rearview mirror for one more look. The traffic was heavy in the city and the trip was going to be long. Already, Felix had asked to stop to pee.

  Two

  WHEN THE HOUSE on Witchita Avenue became available after Thanksgiving 1972, the real estate agent called to ask if Lucy wished to sell it. It was possible she could get sixty to sixty-five thousand for the house. Maggie was ten, Felix was two, and Lucy’s hope for more of Reuben Frank’s time had slipped away.

  Not that she had ever expected Reuben to be as he would call it “yours forever.” They were always together, was how Lucy thought of it.

  But when the call came about the house, she didn’t even think.

  No, don’t sell. I’m taking possession.

  She had to take action. And so the house.

  They spent the first night in Washington in a hotel on Connecticut Avenue north of Dupont Circle, arriving late, after midnight. The roads, particularly the New Jersey Turnpike, were slippery with the kind of wet snow that sticks just enough to cause a problem. The wind whipped snow against the windshield. Lucy had never driven a U-Haul before so she drove slowly in the right-hand lane.

  The c
hildren slept, Felix happily curled into Lucy’s ribs, Maggie’s head against the window.

  Maggie was surprisingly silent, her feet on the dashboard, looking out the window into the snowy darkness. She was worried about the move, Lucy guessed. They had lived in the same apartment where she was born. She had gone to the same school with the same friends, the same pattern to her days—a mother with a career that allowed her to work at home and “Uncle” Reuben, a regular drop-by at her apartment. The eccentricities of their lives had been what Maggie thought of as normal.

  She had never asked about her father until she started nursery school.

  When Lucy picked her up after the first day, Maggie was thoughtful refusing her mother’s hand. She didn’t want to stop for ice cream at the shop on Houston.

  “I don’t like school so much,” she said as they walked up the steps to the apartment.

  “How come?” Lucy asked.

  “Everybody in my class has a father except Rosie and her father is dead,” she said. “Is my father dead?”

  Lucy should have been prepared. She should have had a story ready for this moment instead of scrambling to invent something sufficient.

  “He is not dead,” she said, taking milk out of the fridge. “But he’s not here.”

  “Then where is he?”

  Lucy took a box of animal crackers out of the cupboard and sat down across from Maggie, who was coloring a photograph on the front page of the New York Times.

  “I don’t know exactly where he is but I can tell you the story of how he got to be your father.”

  Maggie put the crayon down.

  “So tell me the story.”

  “It’s a fairy tale. My favorite kind of story,” she said.

  There was a very lonely girl, Lucy began. Her father had died and her mother had died and so she lived with her old calico cat in the middle of a wood. Maggie slipped off the chair and into Lucy’s lap. One night when the very lonely girl was sleeping, there came a knock on her door and the old calico cat meowed and the very lonely girl woke up and answered the door hoping it would be company which she seldom had. And it was company. To her happy surprise when she opened her door, there was a handsome man on the back of a huge black horse. He told her he had gotten lost in the wood and asked her could she help him find the way out. And so she put on her brown tweed jacket and her yellow hat and walked with her old calico cat limping behind her until they came to a large open field, the sky bright with stars and a cookie slice of moon.