The Reluctant Nude - Meg Maguire [62]
“What are you thinking?” she murmured, turning her face to his.
“I’m thinking about how you might feel,” he said simply. He released her after a couple of seconds, picked the bags back up and began the walk to the studio.
Fallon followed, shocked. She had no clue whether to take his strange proclamation personally or chalk it up to his anatomical fixations. It sobered her.
She caught up and flanked him. “You’re so weird.” This time the observation was largely a fond one.
“Probably. I have learned not to ask strangers if I may touch their bellies.”
“Is it the baby or the biology?”
“It’s the miracle of it, I think. And the miracle of something so normal.”
Fallon thought about it—childbirth—as something simultaneously miraculous and mundane. “I guess it is normal.”
“You’re always telling me I am weird,” Max said, staring off into the distance. “And you’re right. Something as normal as a family… Sometimes I wonder if I am too weird to ever have such a thing.” He looked over at her, and his eyes transmitted the most intimate warmth and vulnerability and sincerity she thought she’d ever felt.
She tried to picture Max with a toddler and was surprised to find she could. The idea made her feel oddly and acutely immature.
“I’m sure you could,” she said. “Even if you are weird, I mean, plenty of people weirder than you have marriages and kids. You’re as qualified as anyone else.”
“Thank you. That compliment means a lot to me. I began to worry a few years ago, after all the chaos subsided, if I had forfeited my chances at ever having a regular kind of life. Sometimes now I think maybe not.”
“Nah. You can have as boring and normal a life as you want.”
“Thank you.”
“You’d probably have to cut back on your art, though,” Fallon offered.
“Yes, I would imagine so. But I have a suspicion that if I ever found myself creating and cultivating some new life with some remarkable woman one day, I would feel quite fulfilled indeed. I do not think I would miss all of my selfish freedom very much.”
“No, maybe not.”
“But it is all beside the point. Finding the remarkable woman is the problem.” He gave Fallon a look so poignant that she chose to write it off as sarcasm. “I would have to find a woman who could put up with all of my weirdness.”
She nodded. “Yeah. That’s a liability, I suppose.”
“And we are having chicken fricot for dinner, since you asked.”
There was a twisting in her chest, as if unseen hands were wringing her heart. Not a good feeling. As unlikely a conclusion as it seemed, Fallon decided then that Max would make as good a parent as she would make a lousy one. Bingo, the comedown. The inevitable tree that snagged her kite from its thoughtless, happy drifting.
Fallon fixed her eyes on the long stretch of gravel as they turned off the main road. Max stopped at his mailbox and pulled out a few envelopes and circulars. So utterly normal, for an instant.
As they returned to the studio and Max flipped on the lights, the unfinished statue greeted him like a resounding accusation. He set the mail and groceries on the counter while Fallon arranged her pumpkin in the bay window. He wondered if she had any clue how far he’d fallen behind their schedule.
Next week it would be November. Soon after, December, and at this glacial rate that statue would still be weeks from completion, even then. He glanced fearfully from Fallon to the marble and back again. She smiled at him from across the studio. She wouldn’t be smiling like that if she knew how extravagantly he was failing her.
Each chip, bringing them closer to the end of this affair. Each sliver ticking away the moments until this statue was delivered into the hands of some horrible man that neither of them could stand to speak of. Each knock of a hammer against a chisel bringing closer to fruition some terrible, mysterious compromise Fallon was making for some unknown reward.