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

though Clara suspects she knows. Or perhaps, she herself suspects and doesn’t want to know. It explains the protectiveness, and also this late-in-the-day desire to capture him in oils.
    He himself has spoken very little, silence remaining his dominant mode, and what he has said has had a fragmentary, illogical quality to it. The early comment about his wife, a couple of sentences about a case on which he worked when he practiced law God knows when.
    Behind her easel, Clara is distinctly clinical in her response to him, her sympathies taking a distant second to her interest in capturing the image of someone so caught up in a process. To convey that sense of transition and not merely try to characterize the man seems to her to be an infinitely compelling task. She has had other subjects whose bodies and faces seemed defined by sadness, but this is something else. This has become, for her, a portrait of time itself. The past, represented in the identity he is losing. The present, there in the glimpses still of someone trying to remain. And the future, well, the future is all too evident in the man.
    The desire to talk with George about this particular portrait has grown strong, strong enough to be painful. In these last two weeks, it has become the focus of her missing him. His absence is woven throughout her life. It is there, of course, in her bed, where they made love, and talked for hours on end. In her living room, as well. On certain streets where they would walk together. In the restaurants they frequented, to which she doubts she will return. But the pain of losing him, finally, this time, not in some way that can itself be fixed by time, has coalesced around her longing to talk to him about this.
    John Parker’s gaze shifts again, but Clara says nothing. She has had enough of it herself for today, enough of that unmoored stare of his.

    W HEN IT BEGAN AGAIN, it was as though no time had passed. And yet, in some ways, those twenty-plus years had changed everything. He would leave Janet now, he said. He didn’t like the thought of hurting her, but he would do it. He would marry Clara. Maybe too little, too late, he said. He would, though. He was serious.
    But Clara said no. She listened, noted his sheepish demeanor as he spoke; a marriage proposal, after all these years, the articulation of her own fantasies from the past. And then she said no. She had no interest in getting married. She preferred to live alone. She had come to value her independence. She now needed more solitude than a marriage would allow. The whole discussion took less than ten minutes. How funny it was. The very thing that had broken her heart, now no longer wanted. A trick of time.
    It was time too that made them able to justify all of it, to themselves. Time and death. Life so short, eternity so long. That and the decision that what Janet didn’t know, et cetera, et cetera. He had looked at Millie’s coffin, that April day. He couldn’t do it. Couldn’t face eternity without this. Without her.
    He was late getting there. But he wasn’t too late. They could have something still.

    H AROLD HAS CHOSEN a restaurant Clara doesn’t know, somewhere dark and clubby, up near Market Street. He’s a regular, it seems. The waiters call him Mr. Feinberg and suggest foods they claim to be certain he would like if he would only try something new.
    She watches his banter with them, and she tries to imagine herself as his wife. It would be forty years. Forty years this very month. She tries to imagine that they are married and they have gone out to dinner, in this place where he is a regular. This is the life they had planned, after all. They took vows, swearing to live this life. So, they’ll meet for this dinner and talk about their day apart. And then they’ll leave and head together to their home, where they’ll switch on the lights, read their mail, share a nightcap, perhaps, brush their teeth. Then they’ll undress. They’ll climb into bed.