ABBY, FEBRUARY 23, 2015
As it happened, the former Broder and Wilcox gallery was now a gourmet grocery, just across from the sporting goods store where I took Benjamin to buy new cleats, the spring sports season approaching and his feet, as ever, lengthening. The big window was slapped with paper signs advertising Tuscan olive oil and cheese from the Pyrenees.
I sent my son ahead. Try things on, I said. I lingered in front of the grocery.
A February night in 1994. Almost three years had passed since I’d left New York for grad school, since the time of Eli. The debris of it still shifting, settling, inside me. But somehow, I’d landed back in the city, with Dennis, our twin MFA diplomas drifting somewhere in our messy sublet on Flatbush. And then, this show at Broder and Wilcox. Jillian Broder’s gallery was not messy, it was not on Flatbush. It was a blinding white box with wood floors on Broome Street, prime SoHo, cast-iron columns painted white, and a spotless acre of window overlooking the street. That night, a soft dry snow started falling just as the plastic cups were being stacked on a card table and the jugs of wine were being unscrewed. Within minutes, powdered sugar frosted every branch of every tree on the street, revealing their shapes, giving them glamour, so they looked like a line of skinny wild-haired girls. The snow gently covered the dirty cars with clean blankets. I remember feeling grandeur, momentousness, as I stood before that expansive and towering window, waiting for the first guests to show, looking out at the snow. The purple shadows fell down from the buildings across the way and I remember exactly what I thought: I was thinking, so this is a beginning, this is a kind of birth too, and it’s every bit as miraculous and world-altering as the kind when a squinting little newborn comes slipping out of its mother’s body. A new life is being born in this gallery tonight, and god it’s embarrassing now but it really felt that way to me. Like the moment the gallery’s double glass doors swung open and the first strange pair of eyes in a stranger’s face rested on my work, the cosmos would register my arrival. Maybe the snowflakes might pause mid-fall so that I could go outside and walk between them, view them from all sides, and know that, yes, I’ll always know that this moment happened, and that everything else sprang from it.
One work sold. A small still life of grapefruit, painted in the classroom of Hans-Dietrich Bremer. I never even learned who bought it. But that’s what you hope for, when you set brush to a new canvas, that it will at some point sail away, this vessel of your soul, into the wider world. The other paintings from the show are wrapped and buried in those racks in the basement.
“I’m starving, Ma.” I went into the grocery and bought Benjamin a tiny five-dollar bag of chips. Then I went across the street and bought him the shoes.
And as I sat on the subway headed for home, jostling shoulder-to-shoulder with my younger son, who was lost in some television show on his phone, I told myself: you made the correct choices, you did what was required. There’s a nobility, surely, in unrealized dreams. Are the blossoms on that weeping cherry tree in our backyard any less beautiful because they don’t bear fruit? Dreams that don’t come true are not any less dreamed.
I was exhausted, with a pounding headache, by the time I got home. Benjamin kick-boxed around the backyard to test his new cleats. I threw up in the toilet and lay down for a nap.
ABBY, FEBRUARY 25, 2015
For Forest Versteeg’s class, I decided, I needed new boar’s-hair brushes and tubes of M. Graham watercolor paint, the kind with a little honey blended in for extra unctuousness. Cadmium red, of course. Naples yellow. Prussian blue and raw sienna—these two mixed together, I remembered, create a deep, cool-hued green-blue-black, the color of a pond in dense shade.
I walked into New York Central Art Supply on Third Avenue, and the ancient floors under my feet creaked in some dormant sector of my brain. I would know that sound anywhere. I would know it from my grave. And then the smell wrapped around me like a hug. Acrid and penetratingly clean. The sharpness of the pigments, the dry dusty scent of pine wood and canvas.
I declined a clerk’s offer of help, preferring to examine the racks of brushes at my own pace, pulling them from their labeled slots, running their exquisitely soft tips on the back of my hand. I chose a wide flat one and a skinny round one and was turning to choose a plastic palette for mixing paints—I knew just the kind I wanted, with the row of dimples along one edge.
And there she is. End of the aisle. Pulling down a box of charcoal pencils from a high shelf.
Hello, I bleat, surprising myself.
She looks up from the box—she’d been reading the label on the back. She nods uncertainly. Black diamond-patterned tights, flat white sneakers. A pale-pink denim jacket.
Do you know who I am?
A tiny frown. She shakes her head.
You. This sounds insane. I moved a step toward her. She is sidling back, away. I mean, you later.
Okay. She hugs the long flat box to her chest.
My name is Abigail Willard.
Her eyes grow all wide and wary, eyelashes loaded up with mascara, lids precisely edged with liner. I spent a lot of energy on makeup back then. The long sessions in front of the mirror. Pleased at what I saw.
And your name is?
She says very slowly, hesitantly, People call me A.
A for Abigail. Right? I understand that I may sound demanding, or scary, but I continue. Am I right?
She stares at me.
Listen to me, I say.
She stares. Her eyes replicate Pete’s, the brilliant lit-from-within brown slivered with black. Unnerving.
You will take steps and make choices, I say, my voice cracking now. They could be the wrong ones. They could be.
You’re out of your mind, she murmurs, backing away. She drops the box, which unlids itself in midair, the black pencils raining in a clatter, dark hashmarks all across the floor. She’s gone. I’m slowly picking them up, and she’s gone.
I don’t recall how I got back to my desk. I sat through the 2:30 marketing meeting as if deaf and dumb.
SESSION NOTES
* * *
A left the shop without completing her purchase.
She says it’s not surprising that you’d encounter disturbed people at an artists’ supply store.
The strange woman might be some kind of omen, she says. Perhaps having to do with poor choices. Says she should end the affair with her boss, though she now realizes this could pose difficulties.
ABBY, FEBRUARY 26, 2015
At a baleful hour on this midwinter night, a mom named Katherine Erdmann called to say that Pete was passed out in her sunroom. “He’s so big, I can’t budge him. And Jeffrey is on business in Sao Paolo.”
Annoyingly, she pronounced this place name with a perfect Portuguese inflection, though it was three in the morning and Katherine Erdmann was not Portuguese.
She opened the door, in a long zip-up robe, squinting. I’d never seen her without her glasses. They made her look much smarter. “I think they were drinking. I’m not sure what they were doing. Eliza is crying in the bathroom and the rest of the kids have gone home.”
Pete’s cheek was pressed up against an enormous ceramic pot, the stems and leaves of a sizable peace lily bent over him as if to tend to him. Spittle gathered in the corners of his mouth, and he snored softly.
“Look at our darling sprout,” said Dennis. “Christ.”
“I was out at my book club. Go Tell It on the Mountain.” Katherine looked at me and whispered, “James Baldwin.”
“I know, I know.” I reached down and waggled his foot. He whimpered.
“Who brought the booze?” said Dennis.
“Oh, I’m sure it was that Dmitri,” Katherine said with a shake of her head.
Again. Dmitri Petimezas. Troubling urchin. I’d asked around about him at school. No one knew exactly who his parents were, they never showed up for anything. I’d spotted him lately, a few times, on the front steps in the morning, dressed in an expensive puffer coat, always the lates
t basketball shoes. I even searched online. His Instagram profile photo caught his pretty face laughing, covered in paintball splatters. In the few posts, he posed in various European cities.
“Dmitri was questioned by the cops that morning, that whole incident last month, the vestibule thing.” She frowned at them. “But then so was Pete.”
My stomach plunged, Dennis and I exchanged grimaces. “How do you know he was questioned?” I demanded. “I didn’t hear that.”
She shrugged. “I’m lucky. Eliza tells me everything.”
“Pete, can you get up?” Dennis grabbed one of his arms. It flopped like a rubber tube.
Bushwhacking through the peace lily. I got behind him and tried to lift his head and shoulders. Dennis grabbed a foot in each hand. On his dirty white sneakers, handwritten letters, in red marker: ANTIFA. RAGE BRIGADE. We budged him about six inches, he stirred. “I don’t like tequila,” he moaned.
ABBY, FEBRUARY 27, 2015
It was a long night of ruminating, sitting by my delinquent child’s bed, making sure he didn’t choke on his own spew. Eyelids radish-red. Strands of hair snaking wetly across his forehead. Maybe a little drool at the lips, reminding me of baby days, until a tequila-infused belch jolted me into the now again. Plenty of time to think and rethink. Visit and revisit.
Pete, questioned by the police. Again, the police and my boy.
Antifa? What on earth.
And speaking of police. The detective and I were texting every day now. In the space of a month, it had become rampant flirtation. He joked about showing me his favorite Caribbean beaches. “I have family there, the islands. I know the sweet spots they don’t share with the likes of you.” Sometimes the conversation strayed into serious confessions of our frustrations around marriage, kids. Harmless, or not?
The sightings. Five times in two months. That seemed harmful. Terrifying.
The foundations of my life seemed to be sliding, hairline fractures appearing.
My long trail of ruminations led to Eli Hammond.
Eli and that girl.
He’d pull a paperback—Down and Out in Paris and London or The Sheltering Sky—from the back pocket of his jeans—remember how people walked around with soft, worn books in their back pockets, volumes sized and bound to be kept close in just that way, ready to be thumbed and wielded like totems?
Romania, Gaza, Somalia. We need to go. See it through our own eyes. Don’t you want to see it? he asked.
His eyes were the color of a clear sky sinking into darkness. When he talked this way, when I was lying there gazing into them, I wanted to see it all.
Instead, he left me behind. The returning memory of his eyes made tears come to mine, as I sat there over my sleeping son.
She was not merely a reminder, this girl. I was beginning to see: she was some kind of destroyer.
Finally, I left Pete’s bedside to dress for work. My face felt frozen with exhaustion as I sat on the train, arching over the canal and the rooftops and the scrap-metal yard. You don’t have to recalculate the losses and the gains, refigure the cost of everything in your life, I told myself. All you have to do is get through this day.
ABBY, FEBRUARY 28, 2015
“Is that a cricket bat?”
“Yeah,” Dennis said. “That’s a cricket bat.”
I played the videos over and over, sitting up late on the sofa with Dennis: black-hooded marchers, clamoring signs and slogans in many languages, DEATH TO COMPLACENCY, NAZIS RAUS, ALIANZA ANTIFASCISTA. Brutish weapons in their gloved hands, sledgehammers and wooden cudgels. Footage of shattered shop windows, burning trucks, the soundtrack of foreign sirens, wailing, strident. These antifa, these global antifascist brawlers, who fought in the streets and sometimes committed violent and dangerous acts in the name of freedom and justice. Our sixteen-year-old dabbling in this? Could we forbid it? Ground him? After dinner, we had cornered him in his room to talk about the drinking at the Erdmann house, and Pete had assured us he was finished with that. “I’m not really interested in that kind of partying,” he’d said. “You don’t have to worry about it.”
But surely there was reason to worry about this other, unnerving new interest. “Let’s just stay on top of it,” said Dennis now, as I clicked on Antifa Square Off with Riot Police in Hamburg, a nighttime action, orange flames flaring, whistles, chanting, police impassive behind plexiglass shields. The footage ended abruptly when a protester blocked the camera with a black-gloved hand. Dennis shut the laptop’s cover and turned to me. “We just keep close tabs, make sure homework gets done, no more incidents. I mean, you can’t mandate a person’s beliefs, right? Look, it’s antifascism. At least he’s not, like, pro fascism.”
Yes, I agreed that would be worse.
“And at least he has a passion?” he said. “Isn’t that what the school’s always saying—encourage your kids to develop a passion?”
“I doubt this was what they had in mind,” I said. Dennis offered a tired smile, kissed the top of my head, and went up to bed. I opened the screen again, stared at figures scrolling by, a pixelated frieze, wavering in and out of focus. One video after another, over and over. Finally I fell asleep there, the laptop dying alongside me.
In the morning, I dragged myself up to our room, bare feet shuffling up the stairs, and Dennis and I dressed, tugging our clothes from the grip of the ornery little closet, as if all were normal, just another workday.
As if all of this were normal. Normal, that some kind of international strain of rage had infected our child.
Normal, to be indulging in a strange semi-dalliance with the law officer assigned to a case against this firstborn son.
Normal, to see yourself, as you were then. Talk to yourself even.
Normal, to be teetering with every step you take, on your path to the office, to the supermarket and the bank and the school, skirting the abyss between true and false, past and present, dream and reality.
Normal, to be passing Bryant Park, rushing through gathering dusk on your evening commute and see yourself there, on the steps, sitting, smoking a cigarette. Right under the lion. In your pencil skirt and a pair of puffy white sneakers.
Grabbing a cigarette before getting on the train.
Freeze in mid-stride, practically fall over.
You see the brand of smokes. Marlboro Reds. You’d picked up this habit, the first week you met Eli, stealing his Marlboro Reds.
You hesitate. You notice the almost-plump hands, the bitten fingernails. The tender wrist stacked with thin metal bangles.
Then, a nausea hits you again, a fear that you’ll vomit right there at the corner of Forty-Second and Fifth, with the rush-hour mobs swirling around you.
The feeling passes. The girl rests her cigarette on a ledge, now she reaches into her messenger bag and pulls out a wand of lip gloss.
And then you remember this moment, this day. Yes, you see the file box next to her, overstuffed with ragged houseplants and a mess of papers. She has just quit her job at Grady Advertising. She has decided that office life is not for her. Not for her, sitting in a cubicle all day.
She is free.
She has quit the job to pursue her desire to be a serious painter. This is what she tells herself. But you also recall: you’d just met him. The first flash of intensity. So fresh, so powerful. It was hard to get out of his bed.
She applies the lip gloss, tosses it back into her bag, and straightens up. The lion, above, watches you with stony skepticism.
I need to talk to you.
You realize you haven’t said this out loud. So you rush up to her, say it again. I need to talk to you.
She pins you with her gaze now. You again, she says.
All around the two of you the rush continues, as if there has not been a massacre of time and space, right here in their midst; they don’t seem to register that laws of the universe are bending as they dodge around with stress and love and anger on their faces.
Their faces are infinitely different. Only two are the
same. Yours and hers.
Let’s go somewhere and sit down, you say. If we could just figure this out.
We? There is no we. I’m not going anywhere with you. She stabs the cigarette out on the plinth beneath the lion’s paw. His pupil-less eyes, regarding this, and everything so wrong that is happening here.
I’ll give you my card, you can see our name.
You fumble in your bag, searching, open your wallet, dig around hoping to find a stray business card. No one uses business cards anymore, but the corporation still insists you have one.
And yes you locate one single card, corners dog-eared. You hand it to her; she reads it with a furrowed brow. Novapharm? That’s where you work?
It’s a good job, you say. A good paycheck.
She looks up at you. I’m done with paycheck jobs, she says. Never again.
It works, you say. This life works.
But do you love it? Do you love this life?
Her eyes, set wide, opened wide, questioning. You have to look away from them, to try to formulate a response.
You’ll see, it’s not like you think.
The card flutters to the ground. She has dropped it.
Maybe because it’s your only card it seems important that second to rescue it, but it’s just past five on Fifth Avenue and the sidewalk is jammed, and brogans and pumps are stepping on it now, it is skidding across the pavement. Finally you retrieve it. It’s your only one.
You straighten and return to her, but she has gathered up her box and purse and is slipping into the stream of people, slipping away.
But did you read the name, you hear your voice shout. Our name. I am trying to help you. Save you!
You realize you have no idea why you’ve said this. Save her from what?
As she disappears, your eye comes to rest on a pack of teenagers just down the block from the library. A kid with a shock of blond hair—your shock-headed second son—locked in a kiss with a girl. Green parka, gray corduroys—that must be him.
Voice out loud again. Benjamin! Or was he a figment of the imagination too? The kids seem to hear it, the call of a watching parent. They scatter like pigeons, disappearing into the park.
You Again Page 5
