Yes. Just keep talking. I was entitled to that, wasn’t I? A woman who did what was required, every waking minute of her life? Just keep talking.
Long ago, a therapist told me that keeping a diary was a good way to stay on course, emotionally. To gain perspective. And so, since the start of this strange new year, I’ve decided to start keeping a record. That’s what I’m doing right now.
And it does help, typing up these notes—but only up to a point. Because I still seem to be veering off course.
ABBY, FEBRUARY 6, 2015
“The whole family can get down on the floor and windmill. Windmill at home just like you’re doing now, that’s the way,” said Ms. Finch, the school’s movement coach, in her gentle north-England accent and gold-buttoned cardigan. Dennis and I locked eyes; I knew his would be filled with swallowed mirth, and they were. I felt a giggle rising in response. Alas, we are not a family that windmills. No. Dennis and I gazed at each other, struggling to remain appropriately solemn, certain that we would not be lying on the living room floor together like this, arms and legs waggling, not even to foster movement fluidity and improved classroom posture in our darling elder son.
“I never knew I could windmill,” said Dennis, slowly rotating one leg in the air. “It plays to my strengths.” He turned his head and winked at Pete, who returned only a look of angry misery.
As a toddler, Pete, inky-haired moppet of very few words, was diagnosed with a tongue-tangling set of learning disabilities and processing disorders. We’ve diligently pursued solutions ever since. This is why he and Benjamin are in this swank private school, after all, with its imposing Romanesque buildings, its kind and overeducated faculty, and charming administrators, so sweetly apologetic as they tack fees and charges onto their breathtaking tuition bills. Pete’s early trouble signs—the slow acquisition of speech, the stumbling, the biting. All a bit scary for Dennis and me, the shell-shocked new parents. We set our minds to do anything, everything, to make it right for him.
But now we were fifteen years on, prone on a musty Persian rug in the movement coach’s office, staring up into her nostrils and her yellowing spider plant. A bit jaded maybe. Windmilling wasn’t the answer to brick-throwing, we all knew that.
As we were getting ready to leave, Ms. Finch picked carpet lint off of my son’s sweater and said, “Well, the head of school was upbeat at assembly this morning, wasn’t she, Peter?” She opened her office door and turned to Dennis and me: “Application season just ended, record number this year.” She chuckled. “The way Ms. Vong shut down that police situation. If word had gotten out . . .”
“Word of what?” Dennis said.
“That horror show, the trash can. I’m right here down the hall from the vestibule, so I got a peek at the goings-on.”
“Can I go now,” said Pete. “I’m missing lunch.”
“They whisked it all away,” she said. She widened her milkmaid eyes at us, and leaned in, confiding. “A bloody awful mess.”
We watched him stride off, shoelaces trailing, and yes, her door was just a few steps from the vestibule, with its scrolled iron coat hooks and polished wainscoting. The trash cans were all gone.
ABBY, FEBRUARY 9, 2015
I arrived at work hungry and my lunch route took me yet again past the old lending library. A few days earlier, I’d even ventured in, even bought a membership. Slicked up, refurbished, but the old books still filled the stacks, still moldering mostly unread. Each aisle I walked along, each corner I peered around, she wasn’t there. I borrowed two books by Daphne du Maurier. And now they sat, unopened, on my desk at work. Rebecca. The House on the Strand. Perhaps I wouldn’t actually read them, but I did enjoy the look of them, the spooky pastel covers.
I checked my phone again. Two days since I’d heard from him, and then just a line— Life is short, I have been thinking of you.
Turned back to my tedious task of the day, tagging a design for production. A new drug for attention deficit disorders. One-eighth-inch margins, 2-point leading. Pantone color 4225 for the background. Alaskan blue.
Peeked at my texts, just to be sure.
Nothing.
Should I go past West Twelfth Street on my way home?
No, I should not.
Maintain a grip, Abigail. Consider how this man is a police officer, consider how he has a spouse and children. Consider how you do too.
Fifteen days have passed without me seeing her. And then, I am going to get my lunch down in the hold of the great barge of Grand Central, and there she is, exiting the Oyster Bar with a short-legged man, bit of a belly, with thick waves of brownish-gray over his collar and a scuffed leather messenger bag over his shoulder.
Michael Hutcherson? My first boss in New York City. How could it be.
He’s holding the door for her, she walks past him—the chunky shoes again, the blond-tipped waves, the eyelashes—and his gaze sweeps over her from the rear. And then she smiles back over her shoulder. They head up the ramp, through the tiled passageway toward the street level. I don’t think about it: I follow. Outside, at the corner of Madison, the corner of the Grady Advertising building, that towering paycheck factory of silver and blue glass, they stop. I stop a few yards behind them. He leans toward her, glances around a bit. Let me go in first, he says. It’s nobody’s business, right?
She smiles. Right. I’ll wait here for a few minutes. I’ll be up in a bit.
Hutcherson pushes through the revolving doors, sun flares on the glass.
The bastard.
That’s my voice, I realize. Did I just say that out loud? Did I just speak?
She looks over her shoulder, alarmed. Her eyes meet mine. Was there a flicker? Yes, just a flicker. Did she recognize me from the stairwell on West Twelfth? Or is she seeing who I was? Her.
She turns away and starts moving quickly toward the entry’s revolving doors, the flashing noontime glare again, and I’m following her, quickly, close behind, and I say, blurting it, breathless—
“This is strange for me too, but listen. We need to talk—wait—”
She’s at the spinning door, hurling herself at it, almost. And I follow fast, in the next quarter-slice, my eyes on her. The door ejects me into the lobby, I reach for her arm and then suddenly—whomp—I slam into something hard and I’m down flat, one hip afire with pain.
“Jesus, what’s the problem?” A security guard reaches over, pulls me up by my arm. “You OK?”
A waist-high white marble barrier, a desk-slash-fortress wall, extended clear across the echoing entry space. I’d barreled straight into it. “When did they put this thing in?” I asked, rubbing my throbbing hip and straightening my clothes.
“The barricade? Long time ago. Right after 9-11,” the guard said. The girl had vanished. She was nowhere. “You gotta have your flash pass to get by here now,” the guard said. “You got a flash pass?”
February 10, 2016
* * *
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
G, the Abigail Willard case—please put your brain on it asap. I know police work isn’t your turf, but a quantum physicist is supposed to explain the fucking inexplicable, right?
Hope you caught our Orangemen pounding Georgetown. A slaughter. A beautiful thing.
ABBY, FEBRUARY 11, 2015
TO DO THIS WEEK:
Research watercolor classes: Pratt. SVA, New School
Tax appt
Pete: vitamins
Ben: dentist
I record my to-do list to show what was at the top. Seeing her, of course. She appeared to be what my Aunt Louise, MSW, would call a harbinger of inner change.
I’ve decided she’s my new imaginary friend, sent to remind me of something. To remind me of what I am meant to be doing, maybe.
I sat in my cubicle, staring at my monitor, at a half-finished insert for an erectile dysfunction drug. I left the penis hanging and searched for the School of Visual Arts website. In
seven minutes, I was signed up for art school again. Just a night class, watercolors—but this was a step of some significance. If only for one evening a week, a dedicated return.
ABBY, FEBRUARY 13, 2015
The all-school sing under the vaults of the old chapel. The boys had been dreading it, complaining and asking to skip it. I had been anticipating it with a swollen heart, swollen with memories of them as cherubs, eyes gleaming and fixed on the music teacher, standing at her piano in red wool poncho and matching beret. “All You Need Is Love”—Pete, in kindergarten, piping up with “Everybody now!” Benjamin, running toward me as the second graders fanned out into the pews to present red carnations, dropping the flower in the aisle and then snatching it up again and throwing himself at my lap, eyes shining and his heart, I can still feel it, beating urgently against the top of my thigh like a minnow swimming, as he caught his breath for a few seconds before skipping back to his spot on-stage.
Velvet cheeks, wispy locks, marrow-tender skin. My little creatures.
Now at the sing my boys stood in the back row, barely mouthing the words with faces fixed in a carefully calibrated mix of boredom and sarcasm.
Seeing them, though, there amid their classmates, the boys ranging in heights and angles and skin eruptions, the girls so primped and poised, the children I’d been watching since they were small. The sight of them, a cluster of teen angels surrounded by stained glass and organ pipes, made me tear up, just as in earlier years I’d cried from the sweetness of it all. It was still so sweet, and so bittersweet.
I sniffled through “What the World Needs Now,” wishing Dennis had been able to make it. I’d stolen time from work, but he was under the gun.
Then it occurred to me to look for Dmitri. Was the antifascist warrior there? Yes, he was. Tucked in among some girls in the second row, matched by height. He appeared to be singing full-throatedly, I thought I could even pick out his bright treble in the mix.
After the concert, the parents clustered in the theater lobby, eating butter cookies and drinking Dixie cups of apple cider.
“Abigail, right? Benjamin’s mom?” A round woman in an orange sweater and outsized eyeglasses seized my hand in hers, warm, cushioned. “Joanie Werner. Serena’s mom. With the braids? And the attitude? So, Ben says you used to be an artist.”
Used to be an artist.
“Yes, that’s right.” I smiled at her. “My husband was also. I mean, I guess he continues to be. We both do.”
Her eyes widened. “Where do you show, the two of you? Which gallery?”
“Neither of us has representation just now. Dennis is full-time at an engineering firm.”
She nodded sympathetically. “And you’re in marketing, I think? Here’s why I’m pestering you. I got roped into soliciting donations for the spring auction. I’m hoping that you—or your husband or both”—she giggled—“could donate an artwork.”
“I don’t have anything new.”
“Any old one will do.” She had turtle-esque eyes and thick black brows that bounced as she unfurled more sentences. The auction committee and the building committee and digital microscopes for the new science lab. A theme for the fundraiser. Monte Carlo or Old San Juan.
I hadn’t shown a work in public in almost twenty years. It hardly seemed possible.
Only one of my paintings hung in our home, in the narrow hallway just outside Pete’s bedroom. He had titled it Black Bird. I had once upon a time titled it Shade Study #1. It was uncharacteristic. The blackness.
“So I can put you down for a donation? It would be a generous gesture. Such a uniquely generous gesture. For the cause.”
“Yes, I’ll find something.”
“And your husband? Something of his too?”
“I’ll have to ask him. I don’t know.”
“We’ll need it by March fifteenth.” She rested a hand on my arm and squeezed it. “Thanks so much for all you do, Abby. You are amazing.”
Someone started screaming then. A cluster of parents and children backed away from the building’s exit doors, moving in unison, fast as a sidewinding snake. “Was that a cat?” she heard someone say.
General alarmed murmurings. The word “decapitated” stuttered over and over. Joanie Werner grabbed the arm of a teacher rushing back into the lobby. The woman was breathless. “Animal cruelty!”
Elizabeth Vong appeared before the doors. “The item has been removed,” she called out. “They’re taking care of the situation, please stay put!” She looked around brightly at the now silent crowd. “Your scholars gave us a lovely spring sing, didn’t they?!”
Pete was nowhere in sight. I spotted Benjamin at the far end of the lobby, huddled on a staircase with some classmates, his hair covering his eyes. A jumble of elongated limbs and abandoned song sheets. A girl’s head resting on his shoulder. I approached, but, seeing me, he frowned, and I thought the better of it.
DENNIS HALF-LAUGHED, half-sighed when I told him that night about Joanie Werner’s request. “Shit, I’ve got nothing,” he said. He and I stood side by side at the kitchen table, folding laundry, a bottomless task—and, these days, our most reliable mode of creative fulfillment. For example, he liked to construct neat layer cakes of T-shirts, coded by color and logo content: music, sports, miscellaneous. He arrayed them across the table at precise intervals, in the manner of Donald Judd.
“There is that one piece of mine,” he said, “in the coat closet.”
“You’d sell that?” I hunted for color and pattern matches in the mountain of socks, then bundled them and arranged them in tonality order along the table edge. “I don’t think you should.”
Dennis chewed on his thumbnail and sighed. “I might get fired this week,” he said.
I didn’t know how seriously to take this. Yes, he had put a few things on his corporate card that weren’t, technically speaking, necessary for his job. That new surround-sound video projection system in our living room, though, yes, sometimes he did need to watch videos for work. But mostly he watched action movies with the boys and surfing movies on his own, late late at night. Yes, there were a few meals at not inexpensive restaurants in which I played the role of, for example, a building inspector from Trenton.
But this was part of life in New York, where you worked too many hours and never got paid enough, so you tried to pad out the sharp corners of life just a bit when and where you could. Isn’t that right?
This is how Dennis understood it, anyhow.
“So they fire you. You could get a studio again.”
“Yeah. And we pack the boys little cans of cat food for lunch.”
“We could squeak by, at least for a little while.”
“Squeaking by.” He stepped back and scowled at his fabric towers. “Sounds like death.”
He stacked the folded garments into a laundry basket and carried the load up the stairs, where they would soon be recirculated by the boys into heaps on the floor.
ABBY, FEBRUARY 20, 2015
“The inner smaller violets are factually alike.”
A crisp-mannered teacher named Forest Versteeg led the SVA class, and he began the first evening with a slideshow derived from Josef Albers’s observations on the perception of color. In my new sketchbook, I carefully recorded this line, the caption beneath a block of orange, black, and purple rectilinear shapes.
Of course, I had more or less memorized Interaction of Color during my studies in Providence. But after an interval of so many years, the images from Albers thrilled me again. My pulse raced to see those stacked and piled swatches, the flat fields of solid tones, so blunt and straightforward on the physical plane, yet so infinitely malleable in the mind. After all, as Versteeg reminded us, no color is the same for any two people. My rods and cones mix a different hue than yours do, my violet is not your violet. And these personal hues are, in turn, overlaid with a personal patina of emotion and memory.
The bars of blue and red, for example, on the cover of the Albers volume. They were visible from my
bed, the book splayed spine up on the milk crate I used as a nightstand, the first time Dennis stayed the night with me. I can see his yellow hair, pale and stiffened by sweat like the strands of a dried paintbrush, as he lay, exhausted, asleep. I can taste the pebbly old raisins I chewed on while he slept, all I could find in my student kitchen.
The first class ended with an hour of painting, value and color studies. I worked in a range of greens. Versteeg’s neatly cuffed jeans whispered rhythmically as he strolled behind us, watching us in our silent work. He paused for a long time behind me, each time he crossed to my side of the room.
Finally, the hour ended. A bustle by the sink as class members rinsed brushes and pallets and dried them with flannel rags.
“So . . . Abigail Willard?”
I turned away from the crowd at the sink to find him standing just behind me again. Steel-framed glasses, pale stubbled cheeks. I nodded. “Abby.”
“I was a gallery assistant at Broder and Wilcox. On an internship from the High School of Fine Arts. I remember the opening night of your solo show, so impressive—you must’ve been what, early twenties?”
I could feel my face reddening, a helpless sensation. Humiliating.
“Twenty-five or so.”
“I’m not sure what I can teach you, Abby,” he said, solemn. “Our roles should most likely be reversed.”
I tried to counteract with a broad smile and assured him I was desperately in need of review. I said starting back at the beginning felt so refreshing.
“It’s certainly your right,” he said.
I could feel other students listening with curiosity. Their bustle had gone hush.
“I used to search for your work online,” he said. “I always wanted to buy a piece for myself.”
He wondered why I’d vanished, he said. Why, he wondered, did I stop showing my work? What happened?
This should be astoundingly flattering, this whole thing. So how come I wished to melt, wicked witch–like, into the floor, leaving only my little brushes behind?
“Life happened,” I said, with what I hoped was a light chuckle. “See you next time.” I fled.
You Again Page 4
