Everyone but You by Sandra Novack Read Free Book Online Page A

sitting times. They talk about Raulp’s vision for his project—a series of sketches, then a painting. “Are you okay posing nude?” he asks. “I don’t want you to feel uncomfortable,” he says.
    Reese leans toward Raulp in a confiding way. “To tell you the truth, I
was
nervous, because I’ve never done this before.”
    “Right,” Sylvia says. “A modeling virgin.” She opens the kitchen cupboard and peers in, looking for something to eat. She pulls out a bag of chips and opens it.
    “Like I said,” Reese continues, “I was nervous, but when we were talking on the phone I started to feel really comfortable with the idea. I thought, People get naked every day, so what’s the big deal, right? And I love painting. I’ve always wanted to paint, too, since I was a child.”
    “How many years would that be?” Sylvia asks, shoving a few chips in her mouth, chewing too loudly. “Two?”
    “Oh, forever,” Reese says, musing.
    “Well, no time like the present to get started,” Raulp says. “We could do some preliminary sketches tonight if you have time.”
    “No time like the present. I was telling your wife that the painting in the hallway is so good. Like Constable during his Barbizon days.”
    “Actually, it’s a bit more like Rousseau,” Raulp says, flushing. Sylvia almost gags, seeing her husband so obviously taken with the idea of this girl. He looks like a man who has found some precious commodity in his backyard—gold, oil, a
T. rex
skull, a rare Picasso buried under the bushes. At this moment, Raulp looks the most inspired Sylvia has seen him in years.
    W HILE S YLVIA SITS AT the kitchen table, finishing her iced tea and the last of the chips, she eavesdrops as Raulp, in his studio, does preliminary sketches of Reese, clothes still on. “Until we get to know each other a little better,” Raulp says, a comment that sends Sylvia’s heart thumping wildly in her chest. She listens as Reese discusses her “youth” and the time she spent sketching with charcoals mostly. “Faces,” she says. “I never get tired of looking at people.” She even took a year off after high school and traveled, alone, to Europe, for inspiration, but when she came back home, she enrolled in a nursing program at the college. “More job opportunities,” she said. “At least that’s what my mother told me.” Yes, she tells Raulp, she does think she’s going to like posing because the whole idea of it is actually quite liberating. This, in response to Raulp’s repeated inquiries. Oh, get over it already, Sylvia thinks. And it’s then that Reese tells Raulp about the accident after she’d come back home from Europe,when she decided, impetuously, to take a road trip with her girlfriend to New York City. “A car just sped into oncoming traffic and crushed my compact,” she explained. “My foot was shattered. Six days in the hospital.”
    Sylvia cannot remove her ear from the kitchen door. She waits for how Raulp will respond to all this, and what she hears in response is her husband’s conciliatory tone, his saying that tragedies can only make a person stronger. Sylvia’s stomach sinks. Everything within her turns brittle. She imagines Raulp taking in Reese’s form, the shared moment, the thrill of new disclosures. She also imagines other, more disconcerting things, such as her husband and this young woman having wild decathlon sex in the sunroom/studio, and for the first time in their entire marriage she wonders, too, what it would be like to find herself entirely alone.
    T HAT NIGHT IN BED , Sylvia says, “Well, I think it’s great. She seems nice, really nice.” Raulp lies next to her, his eyes half closed in a dreamy way. “Tired?” she asks.
    “A little. But mostly happy. It felt so good to work tonight.”
    Sylvia turns off the light. “Work,” she says. “I’m sure the painting will be lovely. Not pornographic at all.”
    “It’s not like that, Sylv.”
    “What is it like, then? Because