Dr. Tristane Kazemy, FEBRUARY 29, 2016
It is leap day. A movement exists now, a campaign, a meme perhaps, she’d seen it all over her feeds, to encourage one to take risks and adventures on this date. It happens only once every four years. A l’année bissextile. Once every four years, and so the thinking goes, why not take a leap?
Le Neuro opened at 7:15 a.m., and she was already there, waiting. Only a fellow, not a full staffer yet, so no key, not yet. In this wintry dark, the campus was deserted, bleak as tundra. She stood outside the entrance stamping her feet, waiting for the first keyholder to arrive.
The trees had turned metallic in the cold, trunks like steel columns, twigs like bent wire.
It’s 7:25 now, and she had to admit it, besides feeling deeply cold, she felt deeply angry. Perhaps this Willard case, when she broke it open, would force the attention of her bosses Laurin and Buccardi. Perhaps this incredible dossier, the bulging virtual folders of scans and transcriptions and analysis—perhaps it also contained the raw materials of her future. Certainly, it could be a career-making case; certainly, at last, it would bring the promotion that Buccardi kept saying she deserved. And with it, a copy of the entry key to Le Neuro.
She wasn’t the type to cry sexism. Still, Laurin. Always the Monday-morning murmurs about snowbound liaisons a Mont Blanc. A crisp “mademoiselle” tossed in her direction could tilt the weekly departmental like a veering ship. Laurin was most definitely a factor.
All of this must be forgotten in the lab though. By eight she had been allowed inside and already had immersed herself once more in the dossier. She gazed at the neurological scans, the contents of one woman’s head, luminescent blue-black and white, across two monitors. Today is leap day, she told her brain. You must leap.
3/3/3/3
ABBY, MARCH 2, 2015
I am forty-six, and Mariah Glücksburg is forty-six. I know this because her birthday is the same as mine. I recall a double party in her drafty old house down in the flats of Providence, near the water, an old rowboat in the backyard where, during the party, two people lay entwined, sleeping off the effects of mushrooms. Dennis was there—it was where we first talked, in fact. He knew Mariah, he had met her in a Latin American poli sci course; they were the type of art students who would take such classes for fun, back then. And of course he had been drawn to her, because she was ravishing. Thick dark hair, halfway down her back and sumptuously waving bangs around big turquoise eyes, petite, curvy, fetching in her paint-smeared overalls and many rings and ear piercings. Bewitching, really, we all were drawn to her, and she shared my birthday. December 20. Final projects were done, buses and trains would be caught out of town the next day, so what better time for a big wild birthday party in Mariah’s little wooden house by the bay.
Mariah had gone to Swiss boarding schools and Cambridge and had interned with Cy Twombly in Rome; her father was some kind of diplomat, and her grandfather was some kind of Greek royal, someone not on the side of the angels in World War II. That hint of sinister history just amplified her mystique, somehow. Obviously, she knew more than any of us about how to mix drinks, how to roll a joint, how to flirt with professors and lure them to attend your birthday parties. Even Bremer came by, in a windbreaker, with a cane, and sat for a while at the kitchen table, a jaunty smoke between his fingers, gingerly eating chips and dip and smiling in mild bemusement as his students attempted to charm him.
And yes, it was the night Dennis and I began. I’d seen him at that birthday party, in the kitchen churning with celebrants, pressed close to Mariah in the corner, mixing cocktails for the other guests, bumping hips, laughing and drinking from the same bottle. But later it was he and I who tumbled from the party into the cold street. I balanced on the back of his bike through wintry predawn Providence, and by the time we got to my basement apartment up on the hill he was winded and sweaty, I was half frozen, and remember how hot his skin was when I touched him with my painful fingertips. In the one-room hovel steam seemed to come off his body as he shed his coat, shirt, shoes, pants and I warmed myself in it, clinging to him.
A moment I can recall so clearly. It was when I began to emerge from the haze.
And so tonight, twenty-two years and two months and twelve days later, headed for my night class, I waited for an elevator and the doors opened. Mariah Glücksburg. Still stunning, more so maybe, a bit more sculpted and drawn with age, and a comely streak of gray in her hair, still a cascade of shiny black curls, and tight stovepipe jeans tucked into expensive boots and a gorgeous red leather coat. We regarded each other for a moment. Did she recognize me, after all this time? At this point, I was not sure who I even looked like at all.
But she grinned. “Well, it’s you,” she said. “The amazing Abigail.”
“Mariah,” I said. “How unreal.”
“You’re here to teach a class?” She stepped off the elevator, gave me a two-cheeked Euro air-kiss, buttoned her leather coat, so rich and soft-looking I was tempted to lean over and bury my face in it. “I just finished a guest lecture in Luis Iglesias’s seminar, god the students in this place, I mean, I believe in continuing education, but these people just make me sad. So what are you teaching—let me guess, it must be oil painting, right?”
I smiled faintly, “I’m taking a class, in fact. I’m a student.”
“No.” She put a hand on my arm. “But surely you don’t need to be doing this?”
My face felt rubbery so perhaps it came out more like a grimace. “I read about your new work, MoMA, I am so happy for you,” I said.
She squeezed my arm, let her hand drop. “Yeah, it was astounding, that. I mean, worse was the solo show at the Tate. A lot of hubbub. I’m still recuperating.” She pulled out her phone. “Give me your number, I’ll ring you. I’m racing.”
ABBY, MARCH 5, 2015
The Hull Foundation’s headquarters sit on a quiet block near the United Nations. The foundation is a shadowy organization. My general impression, uninformed, is that it carries out benevolent deeds in the world’s poorest places, but then I have a trace memory of ties to arms manufacturers and Arctic drilling.
At its heart is a jungle, a glass-enclosed public atrium. I brought my baby boys here, in strollers, to see the tall palm trees; sit in the lush humid silence on a midwinter’s day; use the large, spotless bathrooms finished in biscuit-hued stone.
Forest Versteeg has urged us to paint every day. The atrium has always been a fine place to sit during a lunch hour. On this Thursday, I entered through the south side entrance, my tote bag over my shoulder, containing brushes, paint, palette, paper, and a foil-encased turkey wrap tucked under my arm. As I tugged open the reluctant glass door, the air rushed to embrace me, lavish and soft, so memory-laden.
My favorite spot faced the small square pool. Tossed pennies freckling its floor, in one corner a small spout eternally convulsing. Toddler Pete dropping coins, watching them spiral to the tiled bottom, Benjamin nuzzling into his carriage, dreaming his infant dreams. My preferred bench was secreted, invisible from most of the walkways, enclosed in a maze of palmettos, date palms, and giant anthuriums. These latter, with their stiff blood-red blooms throughout the year, might offer a tasty opportunity to dab a bit of crimson into the green.
The spot is usually empty.
But this day it is not.
A small pad rests on one knee. She curls over it. Head bowed, hair hiding her face, but of course I know who it is. I can see her brush on the paper. I can see the paint on the paper. It is loose and lovely, quite good, really.
Wordlessly, I sit on the adjoining bench. She doesn’t look up. I set my turkey wrap down, pull my small collection of gear from my bag, open the little plastic container of water, wet a #6 round brush.
Our eyes meet. Abigail, she says.
That’s right.
She looks at the palette I’ve just removed from the tote. You’re painting?
I nod. I am.
She shifts her eyes to the palmettos she’s desc
ribing with a blackened viridian. I watch her brushstrokes for a long while.
I’ve forgotten how to be loose, I say. Like that. Like you do there.
I don’t know what I’m doing, she says.
The air is so green-smelling and thick, it’s dizzying. I squeeze a few drops of paint onto the palette. I’m not sure I can work in her presence.
Why are you following me? she says.
I am here to paint, I say. I will try entering the unimaginable slantwise this time, to sit calmly within it, so maybe I can steal a longer look.
She lifts her face. It makes no sense, she says. I don’t like it. She begins squeezing water from her brush into a baby-food jar (scavenged, I knew, from trash barrels at the little playground on Bleecker where the nannies tended their charges). Tossing her things into her messenger bag, black canvas with orange buckles and straps (purchased at that army surplus shop that once occupied an entire block on Canal).
You’re leaving?
This makes me very uncomfortable. She stands, holding her work flat, balanced on spread fingers in front of her, blowing on it. Are you really an artist? A working artist?
I’m . . . working. Yes. And you?
She turns and slips her bag’s strap over her shoulder, the wet paper teetering on her splayed hand. I’m thinking of applying to graduate school. With her free hand, she slips a brochure from the outside pocket of her bag and passes it to me. On the cover, a classroom shot. Hans-Dietrich Bremer, in a shabby cardigan, standing over a table full of students. I’m working on the portfolio, she says. Though it’s not due till . . . Flip that thing over, she says. When’s it due?
I check the back cover. November 29, I say. I look up at her. Well, you’ve got time, I say. Then I have to laugh. You’ve got lots of time, I say.
She is staring at me but oddly past me too, a glance one might give a lit lamp in a dark room.
I hand her the brochure. Listen, I say, that boss. You could file for harassment. You should file for harassment. You’re out of a job because of him.
She knits her brows, looking perplexed. He wasn’t harassing me, it was just . . . Her voice trails off. That’s not why I left my job, she says. I left my job because I’m going to be a painter. She walks away, her drying study still wobbling atop her outstretched fingertips. Then looks again, back over her shoulder. This makes me very uncomfortable, she says.
ABBY, MARCH 6, 2015
The following day. After work, instead of barreling on to Brooklyn, I found myself exiting the subway in the Village. I climbed from underground to wander West Twelfth Street again, a cold spring dusk filtering down the sky like silt. Trying to finally penetrate this weirdness. Figure it out. Should I get my head examined or sell my sensational tale on the internet. Should I try to steer her in some different direction. Or fix her to the path.
Along the low blocks, the once-shabby row houses are decked with glossy doors and careful plantings. The shops crammed with used records and secondhand junk have been replaced by spare and deserted boutiques. But even back then, when the streets were trash-strewn and gunpoint muggings were commonplace along the darker stretches of Washington and Greenwich Streets, underneath the tracks where the occasional freight car still rumbled, even then, though, the neighborhood had been wildly desirable. It was seen as a New York City triumph, to score a room on far West Twelfth.
It had happened only via faithful observation of a quasi-secret ritual. The initiated—the natives, or those who had an older sibling already ensconced—knew where and when to go. Each and every Tuesday morning, seven a.m. The Village Voice’s lobby on the Bowery, a small street-level cubby of dirty linoleum and gold-veined mirrors. Be there by 6:50, because the surly, huge-bellied man appeared with his damp-ink, finger-smearing bundle precisely on the hour. He glared at the mob for a moment. Fished slowly around in the pocket of his work pants, extracted a little pocketknife, bent uneasily to slice the plastic ties. The ties sprung away from the stack of tabloids with a crisp snap, the surly man took a wide step backward, and then the swarming began. Shameless shoving and elbowing. If you were agile, you might be able to secure your copy then nab one of the three pay phones right there in the lobby.
Share in WVill near Hudson, private room, futon included, no smokers, no pets, $275. I plugged my coins into the slot and started dialing.
It was Eleanor Boyle who’d tipped me off to the Tuesday morning Village Voice ritual. She finished Western New England U a year ahead of me; observing this ritual, she’d procured a mildewy basement room at the corner of Bethune and Washington Streets.
Peeking out her bedroom window at foot height, she could see the late-night businesspeople kicking at each other with their glittered man-sized stilettos.
My landing in the city had not been soft. I’d entered the week before this, two days after my graduation from Western New England U, where I’d taken every class in the anemic art department and earned a BFA without miring myself or my money-strapped parents in debt. I entered via the hot hellmouth of Port Authority. A fat, wobbly-wheeled suitcase teetering behind me on a little leash, a shopping bag of vinyl albums under one arm. In my purse, a four-hundred-dollar check from my grandmother Rosalie.
I swiftly discovered that I couldn’t cash this check at a bank unless I had an account, and that I couldn’t open an account without a fixed address or a job. At the fast-food chicken joint on Eighth Avenue, my distress must have radiated. Or perhaps they just wanted me to clear out, with my obese American Tourister and my rapidly disintegrating bag of music. A girl in a smiling-chicken paper hat led me out onto the sidewalk, pointed up the avenue: CHECKS CASHED. “They take their cut but you get the rest into your pocket.” And so, following her advice and Eleanor’s, I slotted myself into a closet-like fifth-floor room two blocks away from her place, 268 West Twelfth Street.
My roommate, Gregory, held the lease and the bigger bedroom. I didn’t see much of him. He worked noon to eight at a no-appointment-needed salon in Midtown and was out after that. At four a.m. I’d hear him crossing just outside my door, his spurred motorcycle boots scraping the wood floor as he paused at the fridge to swig out of my jug of skim milk (always marked with my name and DO NOT DRINK MY MILK) before turning in.
It was a place to sleep and hang my little dresses. Eleanor came over, sat in one of the two metal folding chairs that comprised the living room furniture, looked around, and pronounced it a proper New York dump.
But there was a balcony. Narrow, just space enough for two people. And a warped wooden bench and an ash bucket filled with dirty rainwater. Peeling plaster over concrete traced with cracks, and a rusted drain in one corner.
Still, a small place to perch high in the air, just under the open space of the sky. Below lay the interior of the block, where wealthier Villagers tended gardens. A young man in very short shorts was sunbathing on a tiny patch of grass, spread-eagle, zinnias bursting like cartoon fireworks all around him.
Eleanor and I ogled him, sharing one of her clove cigarettes. She was wiry and brazen, her Irish-red hair in a wavy bob, her long legs showcased in zebra-striped tights. She was already, after a year there, nonchalant about life in the city, even blasé, in a way that seemed enviable to me. She auditioned fruitlessly for acting gigs, worked temp jobs on the trading floors, and frequently dallied with the rowdy, smug boys who apprenticed in such places. Her impressions of their seduction lines and in-bed sounds made us squirm with laughter as we lay on the scratchy Bolivian blanket I’d bought to cover my bedroom’s stained carpet.
“You need to figure out what to wear to your job interview,” she said.
“I’ve got my cousin Carol’s suit.” I showed her the tan jacket and skirt hanging on the back of the bedroom door. Beige, the color of bread crust.
She looked unimpressed. “I’m taking you to that seven-dollar manicure place. You can’t get a job in this city without a professional manicure. It’s like a fucking New York law.”
When I think how I turned up for
that interview. My fingertips glowing magenta, the broad-shouldered blazer, the skirt fitted with a hidden safety pin at the waist, and my hair pulled up and piled away from my face. And a conviction about life, unexpressed and unexamined, but as present and real as my own body, that all avenues were open to me.
I marched into that office, sat down with Michael Hutcherson, nabbed that entry-level graphic design job. Twelve thousand per year, production department, a light-starved back-corner desk in the sky-scraping rookery of Grady Advertising. Three months later, he invited me out for a drink to discuss my prospects. Four drinks later, we were making out in a cab. How old had he been then? I did the math. Forty-six at the time.
The age at which I now found myself.
Yes, found myself. Because, again, here I stood, loitering on West Twelfth Street, regarding the same three stone steps that climb to the same entry door etched with the same numbers: 268. Thinking about pressing that buzzer again.
Instead, my phone trembled in my coat pocket. A text from Dennis: Where are you?
Such an excellent question, my love.
I scanned the streets, just to see if I might catch her returning home. But no. I drifted toward the man-made chasm two blocks away, where the staircase for the Brooklyn-bound descended.
March 13, 2016
* * *
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Swamped, but spent time over midterm break on the Willard matter. I’ve scribbled a few formulas that excite me quite a bit.
Conflicted woman, this Abigail, based on what’s in the file. And you clearly found her a person of interest, JL. How are things at home?
ABBY, MARCH 17, 2015
“Oh crap, I guess we should have windmilled,” Dennis said over the phone, when I told him that headmistress Elizabeth Vong had summoned us for an emergency conference.
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