Page 56 of Meet Me in the Garden

I drive past the apartment that was almost mine, park just a coupleblocks down and find the address. On a piece of cardboard taped to the wall inside, a black inked arrow points me upstairs. I pay admission and step into a room like a banquet hall, easels arranged in a circle. Other people come in. They shrug off sweaters. Unzip pouches. Turn large pages, wavelike, until blank ones appear. All I have is my small sketchbook. Already, I’ve gotten something wrong. But the teacher, a round man with a goatee, comes by to ask if I’d like newsprint, clips a few sheets of it to a board, and I’m breathing easier again, opening my new charcoal. A young man in a robe enters the center of the circle and the conversations around me stop.

“Welcome,” the teacher says. “We’ll start with some gesture drawings and then we’ll have two long poses. As usual, I’ll mostly leave you to it.” The model removes his robe. He’s fully nude, not what I expected. Heat rises and I hate that I’m this inexperienced, this easy to surprise. Around me, students are making lines to divide their large sheets of paper into sections. I do the same and soon see why. These first poses are quick, we work smaller. The model shifts positions before I’m ready. I glance to the easel next to mine and see free lines, the mere suggestion of a form. “Remember,” the teacher says to the class, “we draw with our whole bodies, not only our hands.” I loosen my grip on the charcoal and when the model shifts, I’m ready this time, my whole arm in it, my lines capturing motion. Then the model faces my direction, tilts his body to one side as though bracing for a gust of wind and holds still. We have forty minutes to draw. I rarely sketch people anymore and I have a couple false starts before settling into it. But soon I have the rough shape of him. I have his face and his shoulders and his slight biceps, his thighs and his feet—one partially raised, the other flat on the floor.

The teacher circles us, pauses next to me. “Your first class?” I nod. “Nice work. But don’t be afraid to look.” I go hot again. I’ve left a blankness at the model’s groin. “Shyness has no place here,” he says, and he moves to my neighbor. So I look, and I draw, and I understand that all the usual ways of being have no bearing when it comes to art.

The class ends and I go down the stairs with the others, exit the building to the bustling street. Music through a club’s open door. A coupledining in a lit restaurant window. A bicyclist passing me on the sidewalk, his hand on his head to keep his hat from flying away. I’m not ready to go home yet.

Pickwick’s Bookshop beckons, its door propped open. Inside, men and women are browsing, chatting. A laugh comes from somewhere deep in the store. I pick up a few novels from a table of new hardcovers, try out the first sentences, but they float away from me. I set them down again. Here’s a strange one—an image of spilled salt, black and red type.The Price of Salt, it says, and then beneath it:A Modern Novel of Two Women. I skim the first page—a department store’s coworkers’ cafeteria, a search for a seat at the long tables, the story of a working girl, new on the job. Who will the second woman be? I tuck the book under my arm, hopeful it’s a love story, carrying it discreetly in case I’m right. And then I’m onto the magazines. Ingrid Bergman holds a baby on the cover ofLook. And here’sARTnews, the last three issues. I have March and April’s already, open the volume from May.

“The Kandinsky exhibit is awful,” says a voice from over my shoulder. I turn to look at her. She’s maybe a few years older than I am, impeccably dressed in a skirt suit and emerald earrings, glowering at the open spread in my hands. She takes a drag off her cigarette, turns her face to exhale. “Everyone’s raving about it but it’s terribly depressing to see a retrospective of an artist who started off decent and gotworsethroughout his career. If you ask me. Which you didn’t. But just look at this. What is it, even? Derivative of Klee but not nearly as enticing.”

I consider the image. “There’s something to the geometrics, though. They’re playful. They appeal to me.”

“You and the rest of the world.” She shrugs. “I must be missing something. I’m Elise.”

“Odette,” I say.

“Lovely to meet you, Odette. I didn’t even mean to talk about the magazine. I was drawn to you because of that bright red spine tucked under your arm. It’s a fantastic novel. I assume you haven’t read it yet? Nowitis a work of art. I don’t buy that it’s written by some unheard-of first-time author. I keep hearing rumors that the writer is actuallywell-known, writing under a pen name, because, you know, one can never be too careful about these matters.”

So much for being discreet. “I don’t know much about it,” I say. “I just found it here.”

She smiles at me, conspiratorially. I’m not on a block of matching houses and perfect front lawns. I’m not at home with my children and Felix, a high fence separating us from the world. I’minthe world. Emboldened by it. I smile back at her.

“Of course,” I say, “I’m very much looking forward to discovering the story.”

“Well, you’ll have to tell me how you like it,” she says, reaching into her purse and pulling out a little gold card holder. She takes a cream card from it, hands it to me.Elise Eriksen, it reads, with a phone number beneath. “I’ve not had anyone to discuss it with yet. No one smart, I mean.”

“How do you know I’m smart?”

“Well…aren’tyou?”

NINETEEN

I’VE BEENon the Finishing line for four-and-a-half years now, supervisor for close to two. Years of long days on my feet, fast movements to keep up with the conveyor, soreness in my neck and my shoulders and my feet every night. Years of Gladys serving me sandwiches and coffee with a smile, of listening to Janine’s stories of bad dates and Claud’s good advice and Ivy’s wry takes on the management and communism and the latest pictures. Years of walking past the Listening booths, the job like a magazine ad for tranquility. But today, when I pass them, something stops me short.

The booths are just large enough for two people, with a glass door and a curtain you can pull shut from the inside. Most of the men leave them open, though—for light, I imagine—and it gives them the effect of being on display. Sitting back with their eyes closed. Bent forward, tapping their feet. Standing and stretching against one of the walls.

Today, in a booth close to the end, Kenny sits, legs crossed, with a paperback on his lap. He holds a pen near his mouth, considering something. Lowers it, writes. In all my time passing the booths, I’ve never seen anyone do anything with their hands. I find him later, at lunch, at a table with the other Listening men. “Kenny,” I say, pausing with my trayon the way to sit with the girls. “I noticed you working on something in the booth earlier. Mind if I ask what it was?”

“Crossword puzzles,” he says. “Just took them up. They keep my mind engaged. It helps me focus on the music.”

“Ah,” I say. “Clever.”

The day goes on and an idea takes root in me: If I worked in Listening, I could draw all day.

I obsess over it for a full week. Tell Felix one evening in the living room as he rubs the knots out of my shoulders.

“Has the plant ever hired a woman in the Listening Department?” he asks.

“Never. It’s a coveted job, rarely has an opening. You sit in a booth and listen to music—all day long—and get paid as well as we do for working on the line. Probably even better.”

He sighs, kneads with his hands, relieving the tightness. “Seems you’ve given the plant enough of your physical labor. Time for a job like that one.”

“I just have to convince Mike somehow.” I turn around and face him. “Any stories from the trip?”

“One,” he says, a sparkle in his eyes. “In New Mexico, the conductor saw something big blocking the track, far off in the distance. Slowed the train to a crawl to see what it was. Any guesses?” I shake my head. “Abison.”

“Really? I thought the bison were all but extinct.”