Ellis watched from a cushioned window seat across the room,
as yet another grad student managed to push his way into the crowd surrounding
her husband. Amusing, she thought, the way he drew people to him
like metal filings to a magnet. Zzzzzzzzt!
They became attached to him for the evening. Yes, he remained
erudite and charming. Yes, he was still handsome for a man of advancing
years and yes, he continued to radiate an aura of scholarly gravitas that
managed to intimidate them.
She was elderly, the oldest woman in the room and the only
one carrying a handbag. She
kept touching it as if to make sure it hadn’t vanished from the pillow next to
her. She massaged her
temples for a moment - academic social gatherings still tended to give her
migraines.
Her friend, Max Richter, head of the Anthropology
department, had been one of the few people able to resist becoming ensnared in
the net of charisma cast by her husband, the Pulitzer Prize winning author.
That was the single reason Ellis had slept with Max off and on over the
years, until his death ten summers ago.
The rest of them knew her husband, Charles Brinkman, as the
shape-shifting persona he summoned for them. And,
they adored him. Of course,
they didn’t have to share a house with him, bear his children, put up with his
bullying anger -- his “creative angst” as he referred to it --and nurture his
monstrous ego for all these many years.
She smiled as she observed him lean in close to the
Dean’s young wife, as if to encourage an intimate tête-à-tête, when in fact, he was both
having trouble hearing her, and hoping for a glimpse of her breasts.
He wore his thinning, white hair long, and pulled back into
a short ponytail. A style he had first adopted in the sixties and never
abandoned. His carefully trimmed, full, white beard and mustache, burly
physique and apple-hued cheeks often led children to mistake him for Santa.
Ha! She
thought, Santa indeed.
Ellis Barrett had already been discovered when they met at
one of her openings. Charles
resembled a prizefighter in those early years. Big, barrel-chested, legs
most often positioned in a combative stance. He was working on his PhD in
English Literature and Creative Writing. MFA’s had not yet been invented.
She was a painter of growing consequence, nine years older
than he, known for her sophisticated, mind-searing abstracts. Ellis, just
out of her first marriage, was tall, a slender, dark-haired, blue-eyed
beauty with opalescent skin. The sexual and intellectual attraction
between them was intense, immediate, and all encompassing. They married
within the month.
Once more, she rubbed at the expensive, supple
leather of her handbag. Charles moved around the room with his admirers
hanging on his every word. Jockeying to be the one closest to the
award-winning writer, some came too close, and he waved them back with a
graceful gesture and a playful grin.
There was a time when Ellis was the only one he wanted
clinging to his arm. He wore her like a striking spray of
long-stemmed, calla lilies. Charlie, as he was known then, was just
beginning to ascend the steep staircase of his ambition. He needed her by
his side to validate him in some obscure way, like a stamped parking ticket or
a gold star on a school paper.
Within a year of their marriage she was pregnant. Ellis painted less and less as his
need for her constant adoration subsumed her.
After their twin sons were born, she was much too
tired and irritable for daily worship at the altar of his successes.
That’s when he began sleeping with a student here or another professor’s
wife there. The public knowledge of these first few infidelities
humiliated her. They raked at her heart. She soon got over the hurt and began
her friendship with Max. Max
Richter, her husband’s best friend. The
irony of their relationship was not lost on either of them.
The two male children she and Charles produced were
certainly not shining examples of anybody’s parenting skills. Ellis
sometimes thought it was harder for creative people to parent successfully.
Difficult to scour through the overlay of profound intellect to access
the tenderness, patience and self-sacrificing love required to raise children.
She didn’t much care for hers. They were spoiled egotists and often
quite cruel.
When her husband began to travel each summer, to pacify his
publisher and woo his readers, Ellis started to paint again. She was
exhilarated by the extravagance of the Kolinsky sable brushes, and the
brilliance and luminosity of the sumptuous oils. Pilbara Red, Flinders
Blue-Violet, Viridian and Italian Pink. She spewed her feelings of
anxiety, inadequacy and impatience onto each prepared canvas.
She hired nannies for her toddlers and locked herself in
the carriage house at the back of their property. She made it clear that
any interruption, except for that of a death, would result in immediate
termination. Even Max was barred from her studio when she was working.
Ellis painted with a swiftness and determination that both terrified her
and emboldened her.
A New York gallery solicited a showing of
her larger pieces through her agent. Sales were quite brisk. Other
exhibits were arranged, and Ellis found herself fêted by the international art
intelligencia. She became a woman of substantial means. Independent
and famous all over again.
After a time her children were sent off to boarding schools
and then moved on to universities in London . She knew
she had not been a good mother. At this point she was not sure she would
recognize the boys if she saw them passing on the street. She’d been
uncaring and selfish in her efforts to save herself. Somehow, in the
throes of creativity, the shame this might have engendered soared above her
like a cloud of starlings, briefly darkening the sky.
Charles had
met someone he deemed important to him while teaching abroad for a
semester. He petitioned for
a divorce. She startled him by agreeing at once. He mumbled and
hovered for a month, then asked if they might continue on together. He said
he couldn't go on without her. Ellis laughed and tried to discern when
she had last thought of herself as part of a couple. They remained
legally married still. Once in awhile she cataloged the reasons for
staying. They were scant, but she did not leave.
Charles wrote rarely now. He had been made Chair of some
department or other at the college where he’d taught for nearly forty years,
and assumed responsibility for two or three seminars a month. He still
needed her, but she no longer cared.
Ellis stood, picked up her bag and walked toward her
husband. He smiled at her slow-paced approach and put his arm around her,
kissing the top of her head. Claiming her for effect in front of the
others. She told him she
was tired and wanting her bed. Charles said she should take the car, as
he was going to stay on for a bit. One of the boys, in the crush of those
encircling him, offered to drive him home.
She murmured her farewells as she walked to the hallway.
Once on the sidewalk, she fingered the airline ticket to France and the passport in her handbag. Their driver gently took her arm to
help her into the car. Ellis
saw, in her mind’s eye, the house she’d purchased in the tiny, seaside village of Cabourg
Ellis breathed a sigh of relief. Breaking the constraints of so many
years left her feeling light-headed. Her innate selfishness
had been her salvation after all.
She knew that to study the Impressionists who had painted
on the Côte Fleurie, and linger in solitude by the sea, would suit her
perfectly during these last few years of her life.
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