Free The Life Room by Jill Bialosky Page A

of being next to him, absorbed in the circles they made together, the thrust, thrust, thrust, glide, glide, glide of their skates on the ice. They were holding hands and then William pulled away from her and she felt confused, as if all the years of their being together laying side by side in the dark like two commas were over and she felt shame
.
     
    When she awoke from the dream, she looked in the mirror and everything was different. She told herself she couldn’t work for Adam anymore. Her heart was committed to someone else. She was going home for Christmas, and she convinced herself that once William saw her again, they’d be back together. She took the subway downtown. She got off at the Spring Street station and walked briskly to Adam’s building. She planned what she would say, keeping it short and simple. She didn’t want to break up a marriage. She was going through something of her own. She was vulnerable. She had a life, and though it was mostly in her head, still it was her life. She didn’t want to get involved with anyone. She didn’t think it would be possible for her to continue working for him under the present conditions.
    He buzzed her into the studio. He was still wearing the same clothes he had worn the day before, jeans and a torn white T-shirt. He was unshaven. He had slept in the studio that night. The smell of paint was inside and outside his body, mixed with his pungent scent—she didn’t know how to describe it, like wet leaves?
    “You didn’t go home last night?” she asked.
    “I camped out here. I wanted to be close to my work. I was looking at you all night, Eleanor.” He pointed to the canvas. “And you? Did you sleep well?”
    She propped herself up on the daybed and her mind went blank. She realized it took more energy to resist a person than it did to give in. She was leaving the next morning to spend Christmas break with her mother. She told herself that she would continue to sit for Adam until he finished the series of paintings she had committed to, and then he’d have to find a new model. But she liked the way he looked when he had just woken up, his hair matted in the back, his sleepy eyes. Looking at him made her not want to go home anymore. She wanted to stay with him and not think about what faced her back in Chicago.
    Even though she had refused to marry William, she thought he knew she was already married to him. It made her furious that he could not see what he needed to do and that she could not change him. She didn’t want to think about him or her mother and her migraines. She didn’t want to think about the piano that was no longer played.
    “It’s the artist’s lot,” Adam remarked.
    She looked up at him, her face in a question.
    “Empathy from a distance.” He was cleaning some brushes in the sink. “To obsess on what you cannot have.”
    Eleanor reached for her coat.
    “Have a good Christmas.”
    She reached to unlock the bolt on his door. He stopped, turned off the faucet, dried his hands on his pants, and handed her a present, a small box bound with a red velvet ribbon.
    Her cheeks grew hot. “You didn’t have to do that.”
    “Take it with you,” he said. “Put it underneath your tree.”
    “But I’m Jewish,” she said.
     
    She called William once she was back in her own apartment to tell him she was coming home, sure that he would end his foolishness.
    “We can’t see each other, Eleanor. I have to do this. I have to prove it to myself.”
    “Prove what?”
    “That I can live without you. Only then will it be possible for us to be together. Don’t come home.”
    “I don’t want to ever see you again,” she said, trembling.

8
    In Chicago, William was like a silent shadow next to her. She pictured him slipping his hand into the back hip pocket of her jeans. She heard him say her name, in that intimate way, filling her with a quick rush.
    Her mother invited her best friends, Joan, Celia, and Carol, for Christmas. They formed their