Somebody Else's Daughter by Elizabeth Brundage

Author:Elizabeth Brundage
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2010-03-30T19:00:00+00:00

22

Golding couldn’t bring himself to tell her what he did. And for good reason, because he knew she would stop seeing him and even worse she would begin to hate him. But it was too late now, because she would demand to know. What had started as a whim was now something else, something complicated. He didn’t like having feelings for the women he fucked, but he had feelings for her.

He admired Claire. She was elegant in the way of a forest, how you will come upon moss or the startling beauty of a white birch and become transfixed. After making love they would eat something in her kitchen. Using a very sharp knife, she would slice apples or pears, the good smoked cheese in the green wax. Springwater with lemons. There were mannerisms she’d inherited from her mother, a woman he had seen in photographs around the house, regal, elegant, her neck wrapped in strands of pearls. Claire knew certain things that his wife did not—how to fix a martini, how to set a table, how to use the silver, how to place the knife on the plate when she’d finished using it, at precisely the right angle, how to read Ulysses. He would watch her work sometimes, if she let him. In the chilly barn, she would vanish before his eyes, her face soft in a kind of dream-state. She made a woman and scattered feathers at her feet. She wrote on the woman’s body with Magic Marker. It seemed to him that she was a true artist. He had never met one before, and there was something exciting about watching her work. Although his conscience told him he was wrong for wanting her, he did not feel that it was wrong, but he knew it could not last.

In her work, she made connections about the body and sex and desire and, in a way, he did the same thing in his work. His work was considered illicit, and they were on opposite ends of the decorum highway. In art, you could present a naked woman and a dog in the same scene, but when you did it in porn, it was considered obscene. It was something he would have liked to discuss with her. In her work, you could put the images out there and ask the public to make their own connections, banking on the fact that those connections would venture into the lurid and perverse—or you could show them porn and do it for them—and sometimes the porn was less perverse, just people fucking. Either way, the images came from the same dirty place. On the other hand, maybe it wasn’t dirty— maybe they’d all been sold a bill of goods by a couple of uptight Puritans and their lives, incredibly, still adhered to the same rules.

One afternoon they went for a drive. They took the convertible, and the sun shone on her hair. It reminded him of the fields of sunflowers in Provence, where

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