All the Greys on Greene Street

by Laura Tucker

  After we’d eaten, Apollo sat back with the beer that Joyce had brought him.

  “Well, we will see. Are you okay, little bird? There has been so much.”

  I thought before answering, looking up at the official photograph of Buzz Aldrin that Joyce’s son had hung above his desk. The astronaut was wearing his puffy white space suit, his arm resting proudly on the enormous fishbowl of his helmet. I wondered how you went back to being a normal person after you’d walked on the moon. He looked like he couldn’t quite believe it himself.

  “Olympia?” Apollo nudged gently.

  The truth was, I was tired of sleeping. “I’m bored,” I said, and Apollo smiled, for the first time in what felt like a long, long while.

  He held up one finger. Saint Fall, excited by the change in the air, struggled to her feet and galloped out of the room after him, her back legs working in a slightly less coordinated rhythm than her front ones. When the two of them returned, Saint Fall almost underfoot, Apollo was holding a plastic bag with Pearl Paint’s red logo on it, and a thin strip of leather with a buckle, like a short belt.

  He moved the little tray table over from its spot by his chair, pulling it right up next to the bed and swinging the tray in front of me while Saint Fall clambered awkwardly up onto the bed next to me, huffing as she went.

  “Saint Fall’s old collar,” he said, holding up the length of leather. And then, pointedly, to the dog: “From before she was fat.”

  Delighted by the sound of her name, Saint Fall bounced on her hind legs like a sea lion and licked the air around my head. Dogs can smile.

  Apollo wrapped the strip of leather carefully around my bandaged hand, and buckled it before slotting a brush in there. It didn’t hurt. Then he filled two empty spaghetti sauce jars with water from the bathroom sink before producing an expensive watercolor pan set and a thickly textured pad of paper from the bag.

  He laid the white enameled pan on the table and placed little squares, no bigger than a thumbnail and wrapped in different colored papers, into the depressions. They looked like Joyce’s chocolates, but I knew they were cakes of color, the names printed in heavy black ink: Sap Green. Burnt Sienna. Winsor Lemon. Raw Umber.

  “I don’t want to,” I said.

  Ignoring me, Apollo opened the pad and unwrapped one of the little blocks of color. It was French Ultramarine, the first color we’d made together, the color in the color study he’d given me—kind of a low blow, if you ask me. He grabbed my bandaged hand and dunked the brush into the water in one of the jars before working it into the cake of paint.

  I watched as the tiny cube filled with a slurry of pigmented liquid. Then, still holding my hand with the loaded brush, Apollo drew a fat, wet, intense blue line right down the center of the white page.

  We looked at it in silence together. It was the first mark I’d made in more than a week.

  I contemplated the line for a while, then pulled my hand back. “I don’t want to.”

  Apollo’s jaw set stubbornly. “I think you should.”

  “I don’t use color, remember?” The tone of my voice was not nice.

  Apollo was undeterred. “You will not be able to use your Blackwings until your hands heal. Watercolor, you can do now.”

  More gently, he took my hand again, and together we dunked the brush into the jar. The water turned a bright, clear blue.

  Apollo unwrapped another small square—Alizarin Crimson, a red more orange than blue. Using the brush strapped to my passive hand, he made another slurry. I watched with detached interest as he moved it over to the pad and drew an orange-red circle next to the blue line. We watched together in silence as the creamy paper absorbed the liquid. The colors spread, creeping slowly toward each other before bleeding together, creating a narrow purple line where they met.

  Apollo ripped the paper off a yellow cube, a green, and a brown, and dropped them into the depressions in the tray. He pointed at the jars. “Clean water, for dilution. Dirty, to clean brushes.”

  Then he got up to go. At the door, he paused.

  “Please. Stop thinking and make something.”

  And then he was gone.

  BLUR

  I wasn’t going to. I didn’t want to.

  But I had been telling the truth, before: I was bored.

  And I discovered, once I’d started, that there was a lot to learn. We’d used watercolor in Mrs. Ejiofor’s class, but the colors in the plastic sets were pale and lifeless, and the cheap, thick brushes had scratched at the paper instead of leaving a clean line. The colors Apollo had brought me were beautiful, pure and deep, and I discovered that, even though many of the cubes sat unwrapped and inaccessible to my bandaged hands, I had lots of combinations right in front of me if I mixed the open ones together on the glazed white back of the open palette lid.

  I filled that first page, adding water to the shapes we’d begun. I liked the way the color flowed out of the brush, changing as I altered the position of it, how I could control the intensity of the paint with just water. Colors I didn’t think would work together—pinks and oranges, green and purple—mixed together in a soft haze.

  When that first page was completely saturated, I ripped it out and let it slide to the ground, starting another one right away. I heard my dad again: You learn by doing. Paper is cheap, Ollie. And so is time, when you’re young.

  In one corner of the new page, I drew a slash of plain water, then added a drop of yellow, using my brush to draw the pigment out to the dry spots. I created a moat in wet green paint and let it dry, protecting the white space it surrounded when I added a forest of colors to the periphery. I learned that if I held the brush at the very end, where an eraser would be on a pencil, and made a lazy stroke with my whole arm, I could lay down a luxurious swath of color.

  Once I got a little more confidence, I realized I could actually draw with the paints. I sketched the room using the brown Apollo had left me, blocking out the wall of astronaut and space shuttle pictures, the way the smaller squares echoed the huge panes of the windows reflecting the streetlamp opposite. But I didn’t fill them in, less interested in the details than in the shapes I could make with the color.

  I flicked the brush, first by accident and then on purpose, and delighted in the perfect round dots of different sizes that splattered the paper—messy, but effective. The bed sheets, dark navy with little white dots spaced randomly to look like stars in deep space, didn’t show much paint. Anyway, I had to believe Joyce wouldn’t care too much about sheets: There was still a bullet stuck in the bathroom door downstairs from the time she let an artist shoot a gun in the gallery during a show.

  I hobbled to the bathroom to change the water in the jars every once in a while, but mostly I let my mind rest while I lost myself in the physical pleasure of the brush moving over the textured paper, the colors blooming beneath it on the pad. An explosion of orange and red made me think of the fire, but I dropped a bomb of blue on top and let it turn into something completely different.

  It was a relief to let things be a little blurry. I liked how forgiving the watercolor was, how easy it was to pretend that you hadn’t made a mistake.

  By midnight, Saint Fall was snoring on top of my feet, and the better part of the pad, rainbow-colored and wavy with water, littered the floor around my bed. The pages didn’t look that different from the first ones I’d made, but I had more control.

  Sandwiching the jars between my bandaged hands, I carried them to the bathroom and emptied them, and let water run over the brush in the sink. I clumsily ran a damp washcloth around the back of my neck without looking at myself in the mirror, and found that Saint Fall’s old collar fit a toothbrush perfectly.

  I knew Joyce could hear me—I could practically hear her listening—but she left me alone.

  While I’d been painting, I’d made a decision—or maybe, I’d come to terms with something I’d
known I’d have to do all along.

  I was going to have to tell Apollo what I had done.

  THE MAKING OF A BRAVE MAN

  I had fallen asleep waiting for Apollo, but I woke up right away when he came in. The clock by the bed said it was two in the morning.

  He shrugged off his brown leather jacket, folding it and placing it over the back of his chair. I saw him note the drifts of watercolor paper around my bed.

  “Hey,” I said softly so I wouldn’t scare him.

  “You had fun?”

  I nodded. It was the truth. Painting with watercolor had been the first thing I’d thought of when I’d opened my eyes.

  “Yeah. But I don’t really know how to do it yet. And I think I got paint on the sheets.”

  He shrugged. “Like everything else, it will take a lifetime. Still, it looks like you have made a good start. Go back to sleep now. I have some tricks in my sleeve that I can show you in the morning.” He settled into his chair, picking up the magazine he’d left on the arm of it.

  The second thing I had thought about when I’d opened my eyes had been everything I had to tell him. I took a deep breath and looked at the wall for courage. The astronaut John Glenn had been on the cover of Life magazine in 1962, under the headline Making of a Brave Man. He was wearing his helmet in the photograph, and he wasn’t smiling.

  “I think I started the fire,” I said.

  Apollo put his magazine down again.

  The words rushed out of me before he could speak. “When Alex and I came in from the fire escape, you put a rag on the drafting table so you could close the window. I saw it roll down and land on the seat of the stool. I should have said something, but I was so mad at Alex and Richard. And then later, I was mad at you.”

  The light was behind him, making Apollo’s expression unreadable.

  I couldn’t stop talking. “I’m so sorry. I can’t stop thinking about it. I’ll go to the police if you think I should.”

  “Oh, Olympia,” Apollo’s voice was calm and strong. “There’s no need. They are not sure what caused the fire, but it was something in the apartment—a cigarette, maybe, or the wires in the walls. It did not start in the studio, the fire.”

  Suddenly, I couldn’t talk at all.

  Apollo kept going. “It was not caused by the rag you are talking about, definitely, because I disposed of that rag properly after the two of you were gone.”

  I sat back against my pillows, stunned. I had been so sure that it had all been my fault. But it hadn’t been my fault at all.

  Too late, I realized Apollo was still talking. “Olympia, are you listening to me?”

  I shook my head. “No. I really thought . . .”

  “I understand what you thought. But it was not true.”

  All I felt was exhausted. I leaned back against the pillows and looked back up at the portrait of John Glenn on the cover of Life. His eyes looked like he had seen some things he’d never be able to explain.

  “I ripped down the sign.”

  It took him a minute to figure out what I was talking about. In the pause, I saw the ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE sign again—crumpled into a loose ball on the tiled foyer floor, then the blue of my sneaker kicking it out to the curb with the rest of the trash.

  “You were angry.” He was only offering an explanation for this incredibly dangerous thing I did, not an excuse.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, but he shook his head. That apology wasn’t his to accept.

  A minute later, Apollo leaned forward to gather the color-stained papers from the floor at his feet. “Listen. Since we are exchanging confidences in the dark of the night.” He sat up and clasped his big, rough-looking hands in front of him, then clasped them again the other way. “There is some news. I talked to your dad tonight. We think the best thing is for you to go over there, to be with him for a month in the summer.”

  I noticed, with some surprise, that my first response wasn’t an automatic no.

  “But isn’t he in trouble? What if the photo isn’t enough?”

  Apollo gave a quick, sharp laugh. “He is not in trouble in France. Even if the photo of the young Monsieur Grandjean does not force the museum to return the Head to the church, your father is still the big hero there. He can’t come back here—although we will see what happens with that when the French government finds out about this photo. But in the meantime, you can visit, no problem.”

  A pang went through me. “What about my mom?”

  “She believes it is the right thing, too, for you to go.” Apollo’s voice got soft when he talked about her. I couldn’t believe I’d never noticed that before. “And it will give her the chance to get back on her feet.”

  “Will she be okay, without me?”

  “She will miss you very much. She already does. But I will be here, to look after her. And it will be good for you. They are staying in the country, your dad and Clothilde, on a farm that belongs to her family. It is beautiful there—you’ll eat fresh eggs for breakfast, from the chickens in the backyard—and close enough to Paris that you can go in for the weekend.”

  I wasn’t sure about the chickens, but Apollo knew how to sweeten the pot.

  “You can go see Manet’s Olympia. And thousands of other pictures you’ve seen in the books.”

  Everybody knew the museums in Paris were almost as good as the ones here. Still, I didn’t say yes or no.

  “You will like Clothilde, I think.” Apollo bent to retrieve the watercolor palette from the floor. He placed it on the tray table and moved it to the side. “I do.” He folded his magazine, then leaned over the arm of his chair to turn out the light behind him.

  “Also, she is a grown-up, and making a better job of it than the rest of us. It might be nice for you, for a change, to be a kid for a little while.”

  OURS

  Two mornings later, Apollo came in, holding a foil-wrapped egg-and-cheese sandwich in one hand and a folded newspaper in the other.

  Joyce had cleared her son’s desk and moved it in front of one of the big windows so I could paint. Apollo had brought me some watercolor books, along with a new pad. One of the books was all about Winslow Homer, whose work I didn’t like until I kept looking and then I did. I hadn’t been sure how I could make art out of the way the ocean made me feel that first day on the Island, but Winslow Homer helped.

  Apollo put the newspaper down to the left of the watercolor I’d been working on. He’d folded it so I could read the article on top without having to use my bandaged hands.

  There was a photograph of the big man with the Head, right next to a reprint of the old one he’d shown me in the stairwell, of him standing in front of her when he was a kid.

  Then Apollo opened the foil package and held out half of the sandwich for me to take a bite.

  Looted Carving Returned to Church in Rural France

  Associated Press, Écalles-Sainte-Catherine, FRANCE

  Home—at last.

  The cows grazing in this field of wildflowers seemed bemused by the crowd of eager onlookers who gathered today to witness the return of a piece of painted wooden statuary to the tiny church behind them.

  The exquisitely carved representation of a woman’s head surfaced earlier this year in the previously undocumented holdings of the late industrialist and philanthropist George C. Dortmunder.

  Concerns about the provenance of the piece came to light during a routine cleaning prior to display. With the help of Antonin Grandjean, a Belgium-based art expert who spent summers in the area as a child, French officials have now confirmed that the Renaissance-era piece disappeared from the church sometime during the German occupation of Écalles-Sainte-Catherine during the Second World War.

  A professional from New York–based firm Greene Restoration was hired to transport the piece, and will stay to supervise its reinstatement onto the badly damaged remains
of the original sculpture.

  Art historian Peter Blakely believes the work would not be out of place in one of Europe’s grand cathedrals. “The quality of the work—the artistry—is absolutely extraordinary.”

  Its reappearance gives weight to long speculation that famed sculptor Paulo Marconi travelled to the South of France early in the sixteenth century, possibly to recuperate after a mental health crisis. According to local lore, the visiting foreigner fell in love with a shepherdess—perhaps not surprising, in a village where sheep still outnumber people three to one. The shepherdess’s name is now lost to history, although her face is not: The carved head is believed to be her likeness.

  The Dortmunder Collection was, of course, eager to avoid any taint associated with artwork stolen during the Nazi regime. Alastair Tronk, a spokesman for the collection, issued this statement from New York: “We are grateful to be given this incredible opportunity to right the wrongs of the past.”

  Lucille Mayer was baptized in the church seventy-four years ago, and has come almost every morning since to attend Mass. When told that auction houses estimated the worth of the piece at over a million dollars, Madame Mayer seemed as bemused as the cows grazing outside.

  She responded simply. “But she is not for sale. She is ours.”

  THE MEANING OF MAYDAY

  We went back to the hospital to get my bandages off the next day.

  I was still moving slowly, because of my foot, and the sunlight seemed unfamiliar. The air outside still smelled a little bit burned, but that might have been my imagination. When we passed my block, I turned my head so I wouldn’t see.

  I didn’t like being in the hospital again. The doctor was pleased by how I was healing, even though my hands looked awful. She gave me a cream and some exercises to do so I could draw again. I started doing them even before she stopped talking.