Free If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This by Robin Black

to keep it to himself.
    It would do more harm than good, she decides.

    I T BEGAN AGAIN, the second time, with a chance encounter at the funeral of an old friend. Millie Davidson, a woman in the same set back in the suburbs all those years ago. Clara attended alone, but sat in the church beside Harold, and soon spotted the Coopermans a few pews away.
    It was hardly the first time she’d seen them since the summer of ’79. There had been years still to get through of living close by, of having their children sing in school concerts together, running into one another at the grocery store. There had been one high school graduation they had all attended—Ellie and the middle Cooperman boy.
    The encounter, inevitable, took place in the vicinity of the receiving line. The four of them stood in a group—she and George, she and Harold, George and Janet—the four of them and the weights of history and secrets and judgments and of so, so many forms of love abandoned now, all crowded in together, in the cool of this church.
    She didn’t look at the others, not really, just in a fleeting, disconnected kind of way. She listened to the words that seemed to float among this uncomfortable quartet, and contributed a few. She engaged only enough to be attuned to the proper moment to say her goodbye, not so soon as to be rude, not long enough for ancient pains to surface. She made her excuses and walked alone outside, into the air and light.
    But then he called her that night. More than two decades after the fact. He called to say he’d like to get together for lunch, that he expected her answer to be no, that he knew she would say no. But then look at poor old Millie, he said. Look at them all. How much time did any of them have? He’d decided it was a call he had to make. He had to try.
    He said nothing about his emotions. The word love did not come up. And if it had, she might well have said no. That word would almost certainly have angered her—after twenty-one years. But he didn’t say love; he said lunch . And she said yes.

    J OHN PARKER IS wearing a soft gray suit and a pale blue tie. This is the outfit in which his wife wants him immortalized. She’ll probably have him buried in it too, Clara thinks. It’s the third session, the third week, and she’s almost finished with the initial oil sketch.
    She’s asked him to look toward her, to stare directly at her as much as he can. It isn’t often that Clara paints a subject with his eyes engaged like this. She’s never been all that interested in the kind of portraiture that results in a viewer trying to read the expression, the Wow, it really looks like he’s looking at me pictures, as she called them to George. This is part of what George found so characteristic of her, about her work, this slight sense of disengagement. “You see, they’re always looking someplace else. Because Clara herself prefers to keep her distance from most of the world.” But in this case, she early on decided that the only route through that dullness she detected in John Parker, back to whatever had preceded it, would be through his gaze.
    Fifteen minutes or so into the session, his stare shifts away. “I’m sorry,” she says. “Could you just look here again? It won’t be long.” And obediently, silently, he does.
    She’s become quite engaged in this portrait of John Parker. There’s a challenge here that interests her, in large part because she’s become convinced that there’s something wrong with the man, something desperately wrong. He’s lost, and growing more lost by the moment. That’s what the eyes of her painting will show, she hopes, a man in the process of becoming lost.
    Possibly, she thinks, this is just another portrait George would characterize as disengaged. The direct gaze there, but the response it will elicit not It really looks like he’s staring at me but Where has he gone?
    Alzheimer’s, maybe. Some other form of dementia, perhaps. The wife has said nothing,