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

analysis of her work, which would lead naturally for him into an exhaustive analysis of her character. She paints like this , he would say, she invariably sees other people in this particular light. It doesn’t matter who they are. The portraits all share these characteristics. And you see, he would say, you understand, that is because she herself is this kind of woman. Her work is consistent with who she is. It is the key to who she is. It explains everything that she has ever done. That is how George Cooperman would start.
    If Harold Feinberg were telling this story, he would unlikely make much mention of Clara’s work, largely because he’s never really thought all that much about it, not the work itself, not the way she sees and re-creates the people whom she paints. And also, he still resents the work a bit, still smarts at the way it seemed to make her happier than he ever did. So, Harold would doubtless talk first about the early days of their marriage. He would say that in the beginning she had seemed very intent on having what he thought of then as a proper home. It was 1966, he would say, and things were just beginning to loosen up; but not Clara. Not then. She had her trusty copy of The Settlement Cook Book out and opened every night. She had her hair done once a week, so it looked more like a wig than like hair. And whatever happened afterward, whatever she later felt or said, she had wanted the children, wanted them as soon as she and Harold were wed.
    Oh, and the sex with her—if he’d had a couple of drinks, and odds are he would have, he would go into this—the sex with her was efficient and somewhat businesslike, but not prudish. He’d been with a few prudish women in his time, and that was never her. But there was an element of practicality to the act that always left him a little unsatisfied. It was all a little too hygienic for his taste. And then he would say that maybe that had something to do with what got into him back in the seventies. All of that infamous cheating he did. He was just looking for something a little more exciting. Not that that was any kind of excuse. Just the truth. He was bored.
    But the funny thing is, he would say, the thing he has thought about a lot, is that he probably wouldn’t have been bored by the woman she became—after everything blew up. That was when she went a little wild. And of course that was when she started in with the painting seriously. That was when he would come by the house to pick up the children and see her in overalls and a man’s undershirt, braless as far as he could tell, bits of paint clinging to hair. Something changed in her, he would say. Something changed, and it wasn’t for the worse. Once or twice he even asked her if she would consider trying to make a go of it again, but the answer was always no. It wasn’t an unusual story, he would say. At least not in the beginning. Boy meets girl. Boy cats around. Boy loses girl.
    In Clara’s mind, the story begins in January 1979 with George Cooperman giving her a lift to pick up her car. It begins with the odd realization that she might as well be sitting in the front seat of her own Volvo station wagon rather than his, that the cars are identical inside. Though she remembers then that in her own car she wouldn’t be in the passenger seat, not anymore, because since the separation in November, she has always been the driver and never the passenger when in her own car. This is where she used to sit when she was married to Harold.
    It starts then for her with this odd mixture of familiarity and unfamiliarity, with a chain of thoughts set off by a particular shade of beige, and by the sensation of being back on the passenger side of a vehicle—riding shotgun, in the dead man’s seat, the wife’s place—and by the oddness of it being George Cooperman and not Harold at the wheel of the car, beside her, driving to the garage where she has had snow tires put on her car, though it’s probably