Fire & Water

by Betsy Graziani Fasbinder

  “And then Mary K bought me the best bagel ever, Mommy.” Ryan was nearly spilling over with excitement. “And then we saw these people doing this beautiful dance in the street with ribbons that swirled all around them. Then we saw a man going number one on a bridge and another man that wasn’t wearing any pants.”

  Mary K pulled a stick of gum from her backpack. “What can I say? I showed the kid all of the highlights. You’re certainly looking new and improved.”

  “So you’re willing to be seen with me now?”

  “You’ll do, Murphy.”

  While Mary K showered, Ryan came to the window of the suite where I stood looking out over the jewel-toned trees. “Where is Daddy’s show?”

  “Right there,” I said, pointing to the spot where I knew the Conservatory Garden to be. “We can walk there from here.”

  “Is Daddy there already?”

  “I don’t know, honey. But you know that he has to concentrate right before his pieces are shown.”

  Mary K entered the room. Wearing her blue jeans and Mets T-shirt, she seemed as incongruous to the palatial surroundings as I felt. Though clad in her usual attire, there was something new about her. She still wore the bygone summer in the sunny spray of freckles on her face and the sun-bleached shimmer in her hair. But there was something else.

  “You guys ready?” she asked.

  I scanned her, puzzling.

  “Take a picture, Murphy. It lasts longer.” Mary K clicked her tongue and shot a finger pistol at Ryan.

  “Yeah,” Ryan giggled. “Take a picture, Mommy.”

  Then it hit me. “You haven’t smoked a single cigarette since we picked you up yesterday morning.”

  “Nope,” Mary K said, her eyebrows rising nearly to her hairline. “Not for a month. And I owe it all to the munchkin.”

  The irony of the nickname was apparent as Mary K stood beside Ryan. Though Ryan was just six, the difference in their height was mere inches. Mary K lifted the sleeve of her T-shirt to reveal a shiny square of adhesive bandage. “I owe most of it to Ryan, and a little to the nicotine patch.”

  Ryan’s lips spread into a grin, revealing a smile that was more holes than teeth.

  “Did you know, Dr. Murphy,” Mary K explained with a playful singsong in her voice, “that smoking increases risk of lung cancer and stroke?”

  “Why yes, Dr. Kowalski, I did know that.”

  “Yes, but did you also know that for diabetics, cigarette smoking causes problems in the circulatory system that can increase the likelihood of infections in the extremities?”

  “Ex-trem-it-ies,” Ryan explained with a nod. “That’s hands and feet and fingers and toes. I told Mary K what I read in my health book about smoking. Now that she has Welby, she needs to stay healthy to take care of him and take him on walks. Plus, because we love her and want her to be alive for a really long time and to keep her one good foot. Right, Mommy?”

  “It’s debatable which is my good foot, Squirt. The good Dr. Littleton made me a pretty good one, and I don’t even have to clip the toenails.” It was the first time in a while I’d heard Mary K mention Andra.

  Ryan laughed and the two exchanged playful punches.

  Andra Littleton had created a series of new and improving prototypes of foot and ankle prosthetics over the years, with Mary K as her alpha tester. With interchangeable feet for different uses—walking, running, swimming, skiing, and even an arched foot that would have fit into a high heel, if Mary K had ever been so inclined—the prosthesis, with its hydro-mechanics and computerized responses, had become the subject of medical journals and had won Andra research grants for further development. More importantly, it had restored Mary K to the athlete she had once been.

  “And hey, check it out.” Mary K lifted her T-shirt, revealing a swath of skin above her waistband. “I’m the bionic woman, huh?”

  “Look, Mommy,” Ryan said. “Mary K’s turning into a robot.”

  A thin tube emerged from a small plastic port, and Mary K wore a miniature insulin pump in her front pocket.

  “Robot, funny,” she said, ruffling Ryan’s hair and lowering her shirt. “The pump reads when sugar gets low and automatically injects me with the right dose.” Mary K looked up at me. “Keeps my levels steady. Seemed kind of stupid to be doing all of this and then smoking on top of it. I guess I decided to stop being a pain-in-the-ass patient.”

  “No more syringes?” Ryan asked.

  My heart pounded, remembering the day months ago that she had found Jake’s shotters. It seemed that years had passed since then.

  “Nope, no more syringes,” Mary K said.

  Ryan grinned. “That’s so cool.”

  “Enough mush. Let’s hit it,” Mary K barked. “Burt called while you were in the shower. Says we’re to be the first ones let in at the exhibit and there are already a thousand people in line. We do not want New York pissed off at us.”

  His name had a new sound to it, and I felt myself flush at hearing it. I turned away from my friend for fear my color might tell her more than I wanted to reveal. Ryan scrambled to the door with Mary K right behind her. Unexpectedly, my legs had turned to stone. Was it stage fright, given that so much of what I was about to do was performance? I was Jake’s wife in name only. How could I pretend that I had not spent weeks planning to end the life of the very artist everyone had come to admire? And to top it all, I’d just spent the morning kissing my husband’s best friend in my father-in-law’s penthouse suite. The buoyancy of the pleasure of his kisses now felt weighted by the reality that lay outside the room. I wondered if the balloon was sinking for Burt.

  “I get to push the buttons!” Ryan shouted from the hall.

  Without realizing that she’d moved toward me, I felt the warm touch of Mary K’s hand on mine. “It’s okay, Murphy. We can do this.” We walked toward the door together.

  On the way to the ornate lobby in the glass elevator, Mary K sucked in her breath and exhaled with a whistle. “I’ve been looking at Aaron Bloom’s architectural hard-ons in this city since I was a kid. But I never thought I’d be riding the elevator in one of ’em.”

  “What’s a hard-on?” Ryan asked.

  I crossed my arms and looked at Mary K. “Thanks a lot.”

  Full Bloom

  Acres of silk partitions fluttered near Central Park’s Conservatory Garden. In hues of green, blue, and autumn gold, the billowing curtain blended near-invisibly into its surroundings. A simple copper sign read: WOUNDED MOTHER. Neither Jake nor his name were anywhere in sight. The area was crowded with people. Overhead, kites floated and the air was filled with the bitter fragrance of autumn mums.

  Mary K’s scanned the crowd “You’d think this was a fucking Springsteen concert.”

  Fresh-faced docents guided us toward the narrow opening of the silken path. Burt stood sentry. His face was pinched with worry I’d not seen there earlier. He gave me a smile, then focused on Ryan, who ran to him with her arms wide open. She all but disappeared into the mass of him. “How’s my favorite little ankle biter, ay?”

  “Uncle Burt, there must be a million people here,” Ryan exclaimed.

  He set Ryan gently down on the ground. I put my arms around him, trying to imitate how I might normally greet him. He returned with an equally studied hug.

  “Mary K,” he said, his voice full of warmth, extending his hand to meet hers.

  “So, what can we expect?” Mary K asked.

  Burt lifted his bulky shoulders to his ears. “Not a clue. No one besides Jake has stepped a hoof in there for over three weeks. It’s taken round-the-clock guards, all courtesy of Bloom Industries, to keep people at bay. His new exhibit manager, Jeremy Lyon, has taken care of most of the details. I’ve been out of the loop. Haven’t even photographed it.”

  Ryan began to jump. “So we’ll be the very first ones to see?”

  “Right-O,” he said.

  Mary K’s eyes began to reflect the trepidation I felt.

  “Is he here?” I as
ked.

  “Not hide nor hair.”

  I leveled my voice, not wanting to alarm Ryan, though Jake’s absence was setting off alarm bells in my brain. “Any clue where he is?”

  Before Burt could answer, a pale, studious-looking man stepped up beside him. They exchanged handshakes. “This unassuming genius here is Jeremy, Jake’s new right-hand man. Jeremy, meet Katie and Ryan Bloom and their dear friend, Mary K.”

  Jeremy delivered a warm but weak handshake and pushed oversized glasses up his nose. He looked like he could use some sleep. “So nice to meet you, Mrs. Bloom,” he said, his eyes darting through the crowd, presumably looking for Jake.

  I suddenly felt about ninety years old. “Please. Call me Kate,” I said. “I hear you’re doing a marvelous job.”

  “I try. But I must say, I’ve never worked with anyone like your husband. It’s quite an honor. And, well… an experience.” At the sound of the word husband my eyes met Burt’s. Was the twitch at the corner of his mouth a wince of regret?

  Conversation with the very fretful Jeremy gleaned that he had also not seen Jake all day, nor had he seen what was inside the silk curtain. Those alarm bells in my head were ringing louder.

  “Not to worry,” Burt said. “Jake’s one of those blokes that works himself silly and then goes off like an old bear and hibernates. You’ll learn that soon enough, Jeremy. The exhibit is already over for him once he’s got it done. Doesn’t care much about the hoopla.”

  Mary K took Ryan’s hand. “Ready?”

  Burt placed his hand on the small of my back and its warmth radiated through me. Was that a gesture he’d done before? “I think I’ll stay out here and help Jeremy with details. I’ll see you all later,” he said.

  My stomach roiled, but I remembered Jake’s past installations. Jake’s art had always been a thing of wonder—beauty he was able to find everywhere. The sweetness of his soul always emerged in his art.

  I parted the curtain. Once inside, the silken pathway served to guide us. Despite the thousands who waited to enter, it seemed no one existed but the three of us.

  We meandered separately, at first finding nothing out of the ordinary.

  Ryan made the first discovery. On the ground along the path’s edge lay a female form about four feet long. The grass had been clipped short, revealing the gentle topographical curve of hip and shoulder in the earth. “Look, Mommy,” Ryan squealed. She ran ahead pointing out one and then another human shape along the path—some male, some female, some childlike in shape. At first they were mere suggestions, but they became larger and more detailed as we proceeded. It was as if some distant call had pulled sleeping spirits—both magical and eerie—from the earth, and we were witness to their emergence.

  Then I spotted something new: a crevice, just millimeters wide, two feet long, in the ground. It was lined in crimson. Unmarked, this crack in the earth would go unnoticed. But draped with brilliant red, the gap took on the image of a wound, moist, ripe, and ready to bleed. The dewy flesh had been added, of course, though it was impossible to discern the ingredients. Perhaps it was a pulpy mash of the red mum petals and maple leaves. It emitted an earthy, decayed smell, at once plant and animal.

  Steps ahead, at eye level, another scar appeared on the side of a boulder. It, too, glowed blood-red, moist, and raw. Each gash lured us to the next until more unmistakable human forms rose. Anatomical curves of hips, shoulders, breasts, and thighs gave the appearance of bodies in repose strewn about the lawn, emerging from the roots and trunks of trees and rising from stones. These human forms had not been created, but discovered and exposed. Gnarled tree roots became elbows and knees, stones became shoulders, soft mounds of earth formed hips, jaw lines, and cheekbones in profile.

  Each body bore a shimmering crimson slash, a slice across the torso, throat, or limb. Whether supine, prostrate, or climbing the twisted trunks of trees, the bodies became larger in scale—their corresponding wounds more gruesome in proportion.

  We reached a clearing so vast that the curtains that surrounded us seemed to disappear in the distance. My eyes were assaulted with the destruction of wounded bodies and tangled limbs. It was a battlefield of bodies ravaged and torn by some force of otherworldly violence.

  The fiery heads of mums and falling maple leaves conspired with Jake’s work to complete the composition. Under the beauty, behind the glory, alongside the delight of blossoms, everywhere Jake had found the flaws—the cracks—the carnage—that lay just beneath everyone’s everyday awareness. He’d marked them so that everyone else could see what he knew existed all along.

  The scene of slaughter overwhelmed me. How could he move leaves, mash flower petals, and crush patterns in the soil and grass to create such a scene? The paralysis I’d felt in the penthouse had been my warning. This scene was the same that had met me in the bathtub of our home—the same beautiful destruction.

  Then I spotted it.

  Because of the sheer scale, I didn’t at first recognize what I saw. In the center of the clearing, tucked among the soft swells of lawn, with a torso a dozen feet long, lay the body of a woman. From the line of her chin to the curve of her thigh, she’d been revealed. Her breasts were inviting mounds of earth. Her hips a gentle swell. Her shoulder the exposed, gnarled root of a tree. The lines of her tortured body pulled my eye to her core, where her abdomen lay splayed and glistening red, her womb raw and torn. Her chin in profile screamed her anguish, her mouth agape. The redness of her exposed womb seemed to throb. She seemed not only to bleed from her wound, but from her soul.

  My vision blurred with my tears. I was unaware of Mary K’s presence next to me until she spoke. “Fuck me sideways,” she whispered. “I’ve seen autopsies less wrecked than this.”

  Ryan’s scream felt like a slice into my own skin.

  The sound of my daughter pulled me from my stupor and I ran toward her where she sat covering her face. Expecting Jake’s whimsy and finding this carnage was more than she—and I—could bear. She hid her eyes in her hands and I rocked her, unable to take my eyes from all that surrounded me.

  * * *

  “She’s sleeping,” Mary K said as she sat beside me in front of the fireplace in our suite. Only Mary K had been able to calm her, and only many hours after we’d returned to our suite. Burt and I sat on the couch. “I exercised medical privilege and gave her a dose of Benadryl. That’ll help her sleep through the night,” Mary K sighed as she fell into a chair by the fireplace.

  “Poor angel,” Burt whispered, shaking his head. “My God, Kate, if I’d known. I’d never have—”

  Ryan’s screams had instantly summoned Burt into the exhibit. He’d snatched Ryan into his arms.

  “Shut it down,” I said to Burt as we fled. “He can’t be exposed like this.” Jake’s art had always revealed his inner beauty. This exposed the depth of his disturbance.

  “I don’t even know if I have the authority. We don’t own this. It’s the property of the museum.”

  “Just look at her,” I said nodding toward the bundle in Burt’s arms.

  The curator would not close the show, but Burt convinced him to post signs that warned of the graphic nature of the exhibit and that it might not be what families expected for their kids to see.

  Police managed the crowd. Press swarmed, barking questions at us as we made our escape. Burt charged through the crowd carrying Ryan. Mary K and I followed in the wake he created. His presence and the fury on his face repelled attacks. In mere moments we were through the crowd and in the sequestered safety of our suite.

  With Ryan asleep we could finally speak with candor.

  “I should have prevented this,” Burt said.

  “If anyone should have known, it was me,” I said.

  The door of the secrets I’d held about Jake had been blown off its hinges. In the hours that followed, Burt and I revealed all of the small details I’d held back from Mary K about Jake’s decline over the past two years.

  “Jeez, Murphy. Why didn’t you say
something to me?”

  “I just kept thinking that it would pass. That he would get better if we just found the right medication. That I was smart enough to figure it out. I guess I felt ashamed, too. What must you all think of me, with my life so out of control?”

  “It’s fucked up logic, but I get it. Not so great at asking for help myself. But, Jesus Christ on a raft.” She looked at her watch. “I know you said to go ahead to my folks’ place tonight, but I should stay. It’s no big deal.”

  “Your family invited you. It’s been so long since they welcomed you home. Go. I can’t bear the thought of causing you to miss an opportunity to reunite with your family.”

  “I’m staying right here on this sofa,” Burt offered.

  “I’d rather be alone.” I squeezed Burt’s ropy forearm. “Can you try to find Jake? See if he’s okay? That’ll make me feel better.”

  “Anything,” he said.

  “You’re sure?” Mary K asked. “I should get back about midnight.”

  “I’m sure.” I refilled my glass from the scotch bottle on the coffee table. “I’d like to go home tomorrow, though. Ryan should be home.”

  “No problem.” Mary K stood but seemed reluctant to move toward the door. “If you need me, you know. You’ve got my cell number.”

  “And I’m here in two shakes. Just give a jingle,” Burt said, giving my forehead a kiss.

  They both moved toward the door. With a sudden burst Mary K leaned down and embraced me. With her cheek against mine, she whispered in my ear, “I love you, Kate.”

  I could not remember Mary K ever uttering my first name, and the tenderness of it stunned me. Just as suddenly as she had embraced me, she disappeared out the door.

  Though I knew she couldn’t hear me, I whispered my response: “I love you more, Mary Louise.”

  * * *

  With a bang and a burst of light I was jerked from sleep. I shielded my eyes from the glare and read the bedside clock. Twelve-thirty.