No. I won’t let myself go to that particular memory now. I stop myself. I tear my gaze away, struggle to rezip my boot. But he is holding her now, he leans back against a concrete planter. Now he’s pulling her to him, one leg between hers as they stand in this clench, and his hand is in her hair. I am impaled by the sight. The pronounced veins on the back of his hands. The twisted rope bracelet around his wrist. His hair sliding over her face as they kiss. And the way her body presses into his.
I just need to run. I grab my bag and eject myself from the bench, rushing past them without looking, my boots clicking away beneath me. Toes too narrow, heels too high.
And then I stop. I turn. The girl and the boy still stand in their embrace, more fervent now than before. I don’t know what to do next. And then I do. I walk up to face them. Excuse me, I say. Their heads jerk up.
I don’t understand why this is happening, I say.
You again, she says.
I turned to him. And you too.
A ring of paler blue around the irises. I’d forgotten.
You don’t understand, I say. I am seeing myself here. The timbre in my voice is rising, though I’m trying to hold myself together.
She clutches his arm. Let’s go, she says.
I’m ready when you are, he says. He stares at me, distressed.
I stare back. It is too much, seeing him here, standing in front of me again, after everything.
After the break. Because now, out of the murk, the void in my brain that swallowed our history, his and mine, comes a thought:
Eli Hammond no longer exists.
And then an image: his body, far below me, under the settling storm of dust.
Lying dead, in the garden, flung down in all his beauty.
The next thing I remember, I was five stops past home on the F train. My entire psyche was flooded with panic. No, more than that. With panic and terror. My head pounding with it, pulsating even—I felt as if my skull were expanding and contracting rapidly under its thin cover of skin and hair. It must be noticeable, must be ballooning in and out like the throat of toads I used to see, back in Massachusetts, in the damp summer evenings when they’d hop up from the little brook at the edge of the lawn and hunt bugs under the porch lights.
No one around me seemed to notice my head. The subway car was crowded, but they were all lost in their own lives. When the doors opened, I stood, steadied myself, crossed the platform, and caught a train the other way, toward home.
ABBY, APRIL 9, 2015
Mariah Glücksburg lives across from the Armory on Sixty-Seventh Street, in a carriage house with a rooftop studio enclosed in glass and a garage on the ground floor, in which she kept a gleaming black SUV and a vintage Vanagon that she used for summer painting excursions all around the country, sometimes driving herself all the way to the tip of the Yukon to find a certain yellow in the sky.
By the elevator at SVA, she’d punched in my cell number, and this morning, my phone flashed her address and an invitation for cocktails. Dennis wasn’t included. “Tell her I say hello,” he texted as I left my office to head uptown, and somehow I read the text as dismayed.
The night was cool, the house was warm. She showed me into a large lofty-ceilinged space, kitchen, living room with a black marble fireplace, miles of low white-suede sofas and immense windows opening onto an enclosed garden. “I’m stripping down,” she said, taking off her blouse, down to a simple navy camisole underneath. Her arms were alabaster, honed. “Indoor heat is so drying to your skin,” she said, scooping ice into two glasses, then pouring whiskey over the rocks. “Women our age, they get so avid, so kind of tightened up. But you, Abby. You seem different. You’ve held up well.”
She set the glass in front of me, dark gold liquid in sweating cut crystal. Heirloom crystal, I supposed, from the fallen Greek royals. A life-sized painted portrait hung over the mantel, a heavy-browed military man with medals and ribbons on a sash, a tiny poodle on his arm, a revolver on a columned pedestal. Next to that was a small portrait of a teenage girl in a pink frock. It could have been Mariah, with the dark upswept curls and the cheekbones. She followed my gaze.
“Both were painted by the studio assistant of John Singer Sargent, when the artist was a very old man in Vevey,” she said. “Not bad. That’s great-great-grandpop, and the little one is my great-aunt Thea.” She frowned. “She was known for sleeping with major Nazis.” She swirled her glass and flopped onto the sofa across from me, crossing her ankles on the vast coffee table, atop a stack of art books. “I prefer baseball players,” she said with a smile. “And you?”
“Well . . . Dennis and I are still together.”
“Ah,” she nodded. “That stuck.” I saw some subliminal flicker in her eyes. Maybe something had happened, then, between those two. I had never been certain. I chose not to say anything at this particular moment. Choosing to tuck that information away.
She sipped deeply, continuing to eye me. “You always gave off sort of a damaged-beauty vibe, a bit of a tragic heroine, when I’d see you around,” she said. “Back then.”
I laughed. “Hardly. I did arrive in a muddle, I guess. I had a rough time in this city, just before I came up to Providence.”
Could I tell Mariah about the young man who somehow died in the garden then rose again at Rock Center? About the year of Eli, just before I met her? No, I most definitely could not. “I wouldn’t be that age again for anything in the world,” I said.
“Agreed,” said Mariah. “I was a fucked-up little thing.”
“You?” I laughed. “You were a blazing inferno.”
She invited me then up to her studio, a soaring space with clerestory windows on three sides, through which one could see the swanky neighboring apartment buildings bowing over, almost in supplication to her work. The walls were covered with works in progress, mostly in shades of ivory, cream, white, layered and meticulous with brushwork that appeared tiled or woven, and floor-to-ceiling flat shelves were filled with paintings, which she listlessly pulled out, here and there, to show me. She had a period of stripes, a period of swoops, a period of circles. I’d seen many of these works before, in the Times, in ARTnews, when I’d been able to bring myself to look at ARTnews.
Then she turned to me. “And you’re back at it. I’d love to see your new work,” she said.
“Oh, not any time soon,” I said. “I’m really not ready.”
“Doll, you were born ready,” she said. She threw herself down on a lushly cushioned chaise and gazed at me. “You were always a better painter than me.”
I drained my sweating glass and said nothing.
“You knew that, right?” she said. “If you didn’t, Abby, you were the only one.”
ABBY, APRIL 14, 2015
What it feels like: my heart is a box with rusty hinges. Some change is forcing it to open, millimeter by recalcitrant millimeter. The hinges scream, painfully.
I don’t know enough about you, he texted.
What do you want to know?
What were you like as a girl, where’d you go to school. How come your kid is a commie.
Pete is not a communist.
Ha, I know. But come on, give me some history on Abigail Willard. I want to know more.
I’m sitting in my cubicle. I would like to flee my home, my family, my life, to paint, to wander, to experience this new man. I allow myself to imagine us tangled in warm, well-worn sheets, letting the city run outside, allowing the morning to drift into afternoon.
Just as she gets to do.
How much more? I text.
April 16, 2016
* * *
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
I can free up funds for data modeling. Not that I have a clue what that is. But for this case, whatever it takes. I officially apologize for calling you geekwad the whole time we roomed together freshman year. You read poetry, you talked about antimatter and entropy. I was a dumb shit.
/> ABBY, APRIL 19, 2015
Standing at my easel, I feel like an open bucket, a rain barrel. I like to imagine the top of my head open, and the colors pouring in from some higher plane, some great source. Not God, not the sky. Instead, it’s the bright storm of energy that clangs and sloshes over and around every existing thing, energy and light and the juice that powers us. In my best moments, I can almost feel it burgeoning, primed to release its bounty, to make life richer, and deepen into art.
The trick though is remembering to stay open to it. Our heads close off, in this twenty-first-century world. Every time you peer into a screen, direct your eyes there, the roof on your head slides shut. When you feel downtrodden, your whole being slides downward, and the lid closes. When stressed, anxious, angry, energy is pulled down, the door closes.
And who among us, the working stiffs, the frazzled parents, isn’t always contending with at least one or two of these down-dragging states, at almost all times?
The better painter, Mariah said.
If this were true . . . could it be true? Bremer, warning that I needed to honor my gift, to safeguard it. Why hadn’t I.
I had done instead what adults everywhere on the planet strove to do, dedicated themselves to securing a safe perch in a hostile world, and there was no dishonor in it.
But painting was my language, and I had fallen quiet all these years. That’s what Eli had said, he said, you don’t talk as much as some but you spill your feelings here, in this work. I can still feel his hand touching the surface of my painting, coming away wet, and how it made me so excited to see my oils on his fingers, though he’d marred the work, I didn’t care, I took his hand and pressed it to my black T-shirt and wore his mark, in pale blue and violet, for the rest of the year.
I knew now. I remembered. Eli didn’t break my heart by leaving. He broke it by dying. I tried to make sense of this notion, which shattered—all over again—the underpinnings of my present life. I failed to make sense of it.
And it was all so long ago.
My memory of it was just gone.
Like he was gone. Long gone.
How could it be?
On this Sunday April morning I stood at my easel. I tried to will the roof open. The household was warmed by the sleepy breathing of my family, a mellow early sunlight was seeping into the rooms, and Dennis was spread out in the bed behind me, dreaming with a faint frown. I picked up the palette, yellow into gold, inviting something soft, something like buttery milk. I began to lay down a ground.
ABBY, APRIL 20, 2015
An Evening on the Riviera arrived in spitting rain. The rain frizzed blow-outs, blurred mascara, disheveled the well-groomed. Joanie Werner stood under the arch at the top of the school’s front steps, her curls gone wild, the silver sequins on her tunic dress scattering the light from the streetlamps. She waved at us.
“My artists!” she cried. “Wait till you see! Your work looks museum-worthy in there.” She threw an arm around Dennis and kissed his cheek. He looked at me, baffled—he’d never met her before. Then she kissed me, rum on her breath.
She turned from us and gazed down the rainswept block. “Have you seen Stan the Weatherman? He’s calling our live auction. I’m his designated handler and he’s twenty minutes late.”
We left her to her vigil and hung our wet coats up on the rack by the door to the gym. Dennis looked dourly handsome in a dark blazer and black jeans. I had nixed the bolo tie.
“You don’t like me to have flair,” he’d complained.
“Not in your personal dress, no.”
He’d flung the bolo tie and one of its pronged longhorns left a minor gouge in the wall. We’d been arguing all day over one thing or another—who had vacuumed last and when, why our gas bill was so high, and who had forgotten to take Benjamin to the dentist. The nerves, I had to assume. Nerves about the auction—because it was the first time either of us had shown a work in public in years.
Cardboard palm trees and signs read NICE and SAINT-TROPEZ and CANNES; the bartender wore a striped T-shirt and a jaunty yachting cap. We both ordered vodka and tonic and took long first sips.
A man I recognized vaguely as the dad of one of Pete’s classmates approached and handed us each a numbered paddle. “For the silent auction,” he said. “Spend freely and often!”
“Actually, don’t,” Dennis whispered as we moved away.
He was shaky, more shaky than ever, about his job. He had heard from his boss’s assistant that expense accounts were being reviewed.
Gift cards from local boutiques, coupons for hot stone massage and waxing. Dennis wandered off to check out a pair of mountain bikes parked in a corner. I idly browsed the jewelry table, arrayed with pendulous necklaces made by some of the craftier moms. A hand-knit scarf, seed-stitched, in peacock blue. I made a twenty-five-dollar bid on that, to get my number on something, just to be able to say I made an effort to shell out.
Then. My painting—the black bird, on an easel in the corner. And next to it, Dennis’s steel sculpture from the coat closet, a stack of flat, raw-edged circles, four feet high, complex and surprising from many angles. It had been in the closet since Pete was about five and had almost pulled it over on top of himself.
No one was around, so I glanced at the sheets of paper, laid out on a nearby table, where prospective buyers were meant to scribble their bids. The uninterrupted whiteness was blinding, blizzard-esque, arctic. No one had bid for the black painting, and no one had bid on the circles.
Nearby, on a small easel, sat the only other artwork for sale. A little acrylic of a sailboat. It had at least fifteen bids, the highest $2,350.
I picked up the pencil laid atop the bidding sheet for Circles in Repose—that was what the closeted sculpture was called. It had earned Dennis the most prestigious grad-student award at RISD, the Huntington Prize, granting him a cushy job teaching undergraduate studio art and a stipend of ten thousand dollars. He’d won it at the end of our first year in Providence, right around the time we’d realized we might be in love. It had seemed a door opening to a far-flung vista of happy years, a winding ribbon of road that led to fulfilled expectations.
I glanced over at the bar, where I’d last spotted Dennis. He was nowhere in sight. I wrote down my paddle number, along with a bid: $2,400. Just to get the ball rolling. Just to give it some momentum.
Then I hit the bar myself, bought another vodka and tonic. I greeted a few people I knew, asked about their kids and their jobs and so on. I made another circuit of the gym, but couldn’t see Dennis anywhere. Finally, I headed out toward the coatrack and restrooms, and then I saw him standing in a back hall, where the door stood open to a loading dock. A dad with a long gray ponytail passed him a joint. It was the first time I’d seen him smoke in years.
“This is Larry,” he said. “Kind enough to share his medication.”
Larry saluted me with a finger. “To this type of event, I always bring a little something. Keeps me calm.” He offered the joint to me with a little bow.
I smiled and shook my head. “It makes me paranoid.”
“She used to love it,” Dennis said to Larry with a sigh.
“Didn’t they all,” Larry said. He took a long drag.
The weatherman’s voice boomed down the hall. The live auction had begun. The three of us watched the rain and listened to people spend their money—three thousand here, sixteen hundred there. A membership to a golf club on Long Island. A trip to Nova Scotia. Lunches with famous authors and backstage tours of Broadway shows.
Finally it was time to go. We bid Larry goodbye and Dennis helped me on with my coat.
Joanie Werner was huddled with some of the other parents of the auction committee, tabulating bids from the silent portion of the event. She looked up as we walked past. “Your painting sold for twenty-one hundred bucks!” she said. “And your sculpture, Dennis, sold at twenty-four hundred! So exciting!”
A genial dad seated at the next table asked for our bidding paddles to be return
ed and compared their numbers against the bidding sheets. “OK . . . my man, so looks like you won a painting. Untitled by Abigail Willard,” he said to Dennis. “And let’s check your number, madam . . . well, hey, you won a sculpture. Circle in Repose.” He smiled up at us. “Congratulations! That’s a nice haul. So will you folks be paying by cash or check this evening?”
ABBY, APRIL 23, 2015
Three days have passed. Time enough for us, Dennis and me, to process the idea that we paid almost five thousand dollars for our own work. The black bird went back on its nail, and I insisted his tilted circles should find a spot in a corner of the living room, but then yesterday, Benjamin knocked it over, leaving a splintery white gouge in the wood floor and severely bruising his big toe. It was stashed in the hallway closet again. And we have settled upon the idea, Dennis and I, that perhaps our work was too good for its setting, there among the paper palm fronds and poker chips of the ersatz Riviera.
Then today, Pete was crying, in the backyard, sitting wedged in a child-sized plastic chair, one of a pair we’d bought so many years ago, now muzzy with city grime on their backs and undersides. His long legs stretched into a blackened plastic kiddie pool, cracked on the bottom, bright colors and cartoony bunny faces managing to be both besmirched with black moldy stuff and faded by the sun.
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