“Milo is taking us to the Rally for Reading,” he yelled back, over the din.
Dmitri popped out of the car’s passenger side. “It’s a door-to-door fundraiser in Queens, Abby,” he shouted. “For Twiz, she’s opening a tutoring center at the Brigade. Positive action!”
The driver had buzz-cut black hair, a squared-off beard. He nodded at me, eyes hidden behind aviator shades. “Nice day, Mrs.,” he called.
Milo. He co-owned a business in Queens (“Olives, aluminum, funeral statuary,” Dmitri had explained once when he was over, “kind of import-export”) and made the interborough crossing every day from the Petimezas manse in Mill Basin.
Now he gave me the thumbs-up. “I will give them a ride home. Not too late.”
“Don’t you have a bio test tomorrow?” I said.
Dmitri chirped, “We’ll quiz each other on the way!”
“Test isn’t till Monday,” shouted Pete. “And Dmitri’s sleeping over!” The car’s engine revved and they were off before I could respond. I watched the car’s taillights sink away down the slope. My son had just roared off with a menacing stranger. Why hadn’t I thrown myself in the way, or at least thrown my jumbo bag of Meow Mix in the way?
Maybe because I have become a menacing stranger, too.
The house sat empty. Benjamin was off with Gianna, and Dennis was at work in his studio. Yes, he had rented a studio somewhere in Bushwick. I had yet to see it. Freed from his job, he’d descended quickly and deeply into the maelstrom of his art-making. Sometimes he’d stay until one or two a.m., showering late at night—his work had always left him with a sheen of sweat and burned metal. Once in a while he stayed all night, catching a bit of sleep on the cot in his studio. “It’s taken me so long to get back to it, Abby,” he texted me. “I hope you won’t mind if I just stick with it.”
One night when he stayed away late, I wandered again down into the basement, to the racks of paintings. We’d moved them here when I’d shut down my last studio, the space I’d rented at the back of a textile factory in Chinatown, after RISD. When I’d lost the lease, two years after the Broder and Wilcox show, Dennis had helped me cut sheets of glassine and brown shipping paper, snapping lengths of packing tape. He helped me load the paintings into a borrowed van. With frigid water, all that ever came from the sink taps, I’d scrubbed the paint remnants from the porcelain basin and tossed my old tin-can paintbrush holders in the trash. That was the last time I’d had a work space to call my own.
Now I pulled a wrapped rectangle from the shelf and tore back a corner of the paper. Pale-green celadon and a stroke of orange. The vibrancy packed into a few square inches. My hands were shaking as I ripped the rest of the covering away.
And then I was back there, an afternoon in August, a stretch of bay, a boathouse mostly unused. A rusting rack of old canoes listing under an oak tree. Dennis had driven me down to paint because my old Honda refused to turn over. We’d fucked with considerable success that night of Mariah’s birthday, but since then, I had been avoiding him. I was still crawling from the wreckage of Eli Hammond, I guess. Not looking for attachments.
But this day, by the water, things changed. Unpacking my paints and easel, late-day heat, insect buzz, and lapping water. He pulled the canvas, wrapped in muslin, out of the trunk. He asked if he could have a look. When I nodded, he eased the cloth away.
He studied it for a long while. I set up, I pretended not to be watching. “Your colors,” he finally said.
“Too much?”
He set it on my easel with relaxed ceremony. I’d worked hard on the willows, and I saw now I had captured some of their verdant complexity. It was good work. “I wish I could see the world like this every minute,” he said. Then he turned and put both hands on my shoulders and pulled my mouth to his. In milliseconds, it seemed, we were down on the ground.
“Someone might see,” I murmured, when we were clinging together, clothing shed. “No one here,” he whispered.
“I think I’m too messed up for anyone.”
“Nah.” He propped himself on an elbow. His green-gold eyes meandered along my body. I could feel them on me, as strange and strangely pleasant on my naked skin as the sun’s rays and the breeze were. “Not for me.”
The painting sat above us on the easel, I gazed at it, and it gave me a green gaze back. Maybe that gaze held some foreknowledge?
In a year’s time, this square of painted canvas would hang in Jillian Broder’s place on Broome. It would be much commented on—“Luminous brushwork and a confident description of nature’s quieter moments,” said ARTnews.
In five years’ time it would be sealed away under glassine and tape.
In twenty years’ time, the emerald would shimmer at me under a bare bulb in our basement at 2:13 in the morning.
I smoothed the torn paper over the canvas again and propped it on a shelf by the stairs. Maybe, I thought, I’d bring it along to Forest Versteeg’s place this summer. The invitation for a weekend in the country had been extended.
I climbed two flights, washed my face in the bathroom. I was feeling woozy again, the nausea. I lay down again between the sheets of the empty bed that smelled of my marriage, the mingling of two bodies over many many years, and I fell fast asleep.
Dennis woke me at dawn. “Holy fuck,” he screamed from downstairs. He bounded up to our room, an envelope tumbling onto the floor as he held up a single letter torn open. “The Viennarte show,” he said. “Me.”
ABBY, MAY 28, 2015
CT scan rooms are arctically cold. My arms goose-pimpled in the paper gown as I lay on the table waiting to begin. Dennis stood over me. He was still vibrating with the news, this stupefying invitation—how was it possible?—to the exclusive annual show in Vienna, where astronomical money was spent, and art careers were launched and relaunched. He sought my hand and squeezed it. “You’re hurting me,” I said.
Dr. Singh had sent me to an imaging specialist named Dr. Arminbutt. The boys found it hilarious. Dr. Arminbutt was scanning my brain. A first look inside. They shooed Dennis out, shot some contrast fluid in my arm, offered me a sedative, which I accepted gratefully. Then the table moved, and like a needle into a buttonhole, I was threaded into the white plastic scanner ring, which would map my brain sliver by sliver. I don’t think I fell asleep, but I fell. I mean, I saw myself falling.
There in the thrumming ring. Falling.
The balcony, breaking. The railing, collapsing.
A falling boy. With him, a falling girl.
The old cracked balcony that buckled under our weight. Boy and girl in a clinch, locked in an embrace, leaning against the rail. We were intertwined when we fell.
We tumbled together.
He fell, and I fell too. Now I remember. How could I have forgotten?
I fell too.
I survived. He did not.
I am rolled out of the ring. We will send the report to your primary, said the doctor with the comical name.
May 27, 2016
* * *
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
The best way to explain what I’m beginning to think: Imagine your life as a stack of photos. All the pictures in the stack exist all at once, but you may view them only one at a time. Maybe Abigail Willard’s stack includes a few multiple exposures—sequences captured with some degree of transparency, one atop the other. Multiple spacetime moments visible all at once.
But visible solely to her. That’s the why. Why her.
ABBY, MAY 31, 2015
I write this in a hotel room, the harsh glittering mosaic of Brooklyn out the window, and I feel as if I could peer through the night and see the smoking ruins. The day is a horrendous jumble in my mind, a mess I can’t untangle just yet. But it began like this: with Dmitri Petimezas, who’d slept on an air mattress alongside Pete’s bed, eating a giant portion of cornflakes out of a mixing bowl, watching CNN. Dmitri’s hair was flicked in odd angles. Pet
e ate cornflakes from a mixing bowl too. Their clothes were wet. I asked them what they’d been doing. They said they’d been out for a walk and got caught in a passing rainstorm, and in fact it had been raining on and off. There was a strange smell in the air, something like lemon-scented cleaner and chlorine, a faint whiff of indoor pool, almost. A smell I had never before smelled in my kitchen.
An hour later I caught Gianna sneaking down the stairs, my new ankle boots in one hand, and Benjamin’s underwear in the other. “I was just going to borrow the boots,” she whimpered, handing them to me. I held out my hand for the underwear. “These are mine,” she said, clutching them to her chest with a gesture I’m pretty sure I’d seen her do with a Styrofoam baguette when she was playing the street waif Cosette in the school’s production of Les Mis. “Does your mom know you spent the night here?”
She nodded. Then shrugged. “Well, my mom knows I was sleeping at a friend’s house,” she said. “She may have not been clear on whose house, but she probably doesn’t care, because she likes all my friends,” she said.
“Where’s Benjamin?” I said.
“Oh, he’s still asleep, I think?” As she headed out the door, she called back, “And I told him that scented candles might be romantic but they are full of toxins and cause indoor air pollution!”
Just then Dennis came stumbling down the stairs, running a comb through his hair, his nice sports jacket in one hand and the other bandaged from a nick he’d given himself with the circular saw. He wore a pristine white shirt with a sharp collar and a tie I’d never seen before, slashed with green stripes that matched his eyes. He kissed me distractedly. I remembered that he was meeting with the Viennarte curators that morning, that he had asked me to drive him there, and here I was still in my robe and bare feet. I promised him I’d be ready in four and a half minutes, tore up to our room, yanked on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, and rifled around looking for my purse and sunglasses amid the debris of Dennis and me. Then I saw, on the floor near a pile of his tossed-off clothing, a single key, with the letter M written on it in permanent marker. I put that in my pocket, and then the car keys too.
I waited behind the wheel as he met with the curators at a severely plush restaurant in Midtown. I sat in the car, his chauffeur, double-parked, in my flip-flops and shorts, and I took the key with the M scribbled on it, and then without knowing why, I was driving up Lexington. I turned onto Sixty-Seventh and careened to a stop in front of the carriage house and damn if that key didn’t open the door. The house was empty, as I knew it would be—because Memorial Day had passed, May was ending with a soaring heat wave, and I knew Mariah must’ve decamped to her Sag Harbor house. As I entered, her work seemed to watch me, so strong and eloquent in its slashes and stripes and silence.
A pounding reverberated from the base of my throat all the way through to my shoulder blades. To steady myself, I perched on one of the long suede sofas. Several different smells curled around me like discordant music. Tire rubber: that must have been from the collection of mountain bikes hung on hooks in the hallway that led to the living room. I couldn’t imagine Mariah on a bicycle, so perhaps they belonged to her man, as she called him. The frames were enameled in hard bright aquas and yellows and tangerines, and inscribed with Italian names—Volarini, Scalfata, and so on. I imagined this man, narrow-waisted, biker’s legs.
So tire rubber, yes, but also a trace of paint and solvents, and fruit—the open kitchen was just to the right and I could see a bowl of summer stone fruit, decaying aromatically, gracefully, a sensual marker of the passage of days—and then, underneath, there was an unmistakable aroma of Dennis. And then I saw: right there on the coffee table, atop a lavish program from the Tate show, with a Mariah painting on the cover, a sultry deep red spiral, a whirling gyre one could plummet through forever. And at the center of the vortex sat a package of his distinctive Indian chews. I pick it up and inhale. This smell is Dennis, gingery, toasty, slightly sweet.
And then the day begins to refract. Various scenarios present themselves, as I look back on this slice of hours, this segment of a life that most of the world would agree to call the final day of May in the year 2015. Which scenario happened, which did not. At the moment, I really could not say. I can only present a series of bullet points.
Here is me, Abigail Willard, rising from the sumptuous white suede, padding in my soiled flip-flops over the white carpet as thick as marshmallow. And I enter the kitchen with its bowl of lusciously decomposing fruit and few signs of cooking, and yet I see a gargantuan aluminum chef’s stove and a stack of crisply folded linen dish towels, and I stand there and I stare at these things with my brain feeling as if it is sliding down my throat to my gut and my hands begin to shake. I flick one of the gas burners on and off. A blue flower of flame leaps into being. Roars like a thing alive. Gutters out.
And then here I am again, back in the car, sitting outside the lunching place of the arbiters, the curators who have been granted the right to decide the fates of those somehow driven to spill their souls onto the walls and floors of empty white rooms. I am sitting in the car in my shorts, my thighs stuck with sweat to the vinyl seat of our cheap and battered car. I pick out a text on my phone: Meet me? Tomorrow, maybe? I want to see you again. I push send just as Dennis emerges from the restaurant. I say not a word, he says not a word but seems to be in some transported state, I can see it in his faraway gaze, he smiles at me absently and finally says, well that went well, and as I drive him home, forging a slow path against the obstinance of early-rush-hour, I am stuck on the fact that the sentence starts and ends with well.
Here is the family Willard, walking home from Szechuan Palace, four people and one bag of leftovers, the boys of gleaming messy hair and bold brows and large athletic footwear, the blond-graying man with his softening but still fit body and torn T-shirt from a Laguna Beach date-shake stand, and here is the mother, widening but still retaining some loveliness of shape in her striped sundress and sandals but something lost and deeply distracted in her eyes, each of which is set deep above a pillowy blood-darkened half-moon of skin, badge of months of poor sleep and decades of toil and devotion.
And she is distracted, the mother, because she thinks she sees the girl, A, herself, disappearing around the corner down the block, her honey-tipped curls a-bounce and a-sway and a slender ankle in a red sandal, just kicking up slightly as she darts out of sight around the corner of the avenue, the avenue at the end of the block about eight or nine houses beyond where the Willard house sits. The mother thinks she sees this but is unsure because it has been a day already full of befuddlement.
And now they are in front of their house and the top story is veiled by cloud, a black cloud that looks like it was made by smudging charcoal crayon with the meaty side of a human hand curled into a fist. A stroke of orange in the black.
One of the boys says, I think the house is on fire.
Just after these words, the trucks come bellowing. The engines dwarf everything on the street, cars, neighbors, the humble row houses of brick and vinyl. Gleaming and towering and brawny, awash in spinning light, they roll to a stop still screaming. The entire world—or at least the entire block—seems to rear back and hold its breath in awe.
Part 2
The Tiger
6/6/6/6
ABBY, JUNE 2, 2015
Everyone knows the bar. It turns the corner of East Seventh and Avenue B. This bar has been turning this corner since sometime before 1900. Tudor-esque arched doors and crusty many-paned windows that, when you’re inside them, make it feel like it’s always raining outside. The grimy air enfolds you, the music is always whatever is most downbeat that year, the walls are shingled with yellowed flyers from bands and clubs of years gone by, layered and rough as scales.
And here I am, it is early 1991 and I am seated on a stool where the long stretch of varnished wood just begins to coax itself into a curve, the horseshoe that allows the bar’s patrons to stare at each other across the ramparts of liquor b
ottles. I’m waiting for Michael Hutcherson, my boss at Grady Advertising, who is already an hour late. The bartender has set another slippery glass of vodka and tonic in front of me, and I’m sipping it through a mixer straw. Michael Hutcherson and I are over, I decide by the time I’ve sipped halfway to the bottom. But how will I break it off with him and not lose my job? Michael Hutcherson is my boss. My situation seems impossible, and I feel impossibly stupid for getting into it.
Then I notice: four stools down. A green bottle of beer and a soft pack of Marlboro Reds on the bar in front of him. A rangy white boy with hair the coppery-brown of whiskey in a glass. He’s talking to the bartender about Iraq. “One hundred and thirty kids incinerated in one push of a button,” he says. “The missile was made by Texas Instruments, by the way.” He gestures with his bottle toward the cash register behind the bar. “Oh shit,” the bartender says with a frown. That company’s logo is written in gold letters above the machine’s screen.
So I’m thinking about the tragically fucked-up nature of the world now, and then the guy realizes I’ve been listening, that his words have hit me. He rubs a hand over his sharp clean-shaven chin. His T-shirt reads UN CHIEN ANDALOU.
The bartender says, “Eli, this girl’s looking for a drinking partner, I think. Better step up before somebody else does.”
The guy gazes at me and says, “She seems like she’s waiting for someone.”
I take a sip from my straw. “I was,” I say.
So fast one can fluctuate from state to state. Horror to hope. Weird humans.
You Again Page 11
