“Evidently hiding it,” Celia said. She opened an e-mail from a collector in Raleigh who was looking to buy an Edmund Yaghjian painting, preferably an oil, and had heard Trio might have one. She began a reply, telling the woman they had had a Yaghjian show the year before but had returned all the unsold works to the family. Trio had an address where the collector could write, and Celia stopped for a minute to look it up.
Ollie picked up the photo from beside the ivy and brought it up close to his face, then returned it to the stack. “‘Severely tacky tastes,’ my friend said. The aunt was an art collector but didn’t have an eye. The whole house was pure kitsch top to bottom, but then she had this phenomenal piece of real art sitting up in her attic all wrapped up in a towel.” Ollie picked up another photo and held it above his head, then looked up at it, turning it around and around as he did so. “So you never know, Cecilia. You never know what might turn up in your so-called stuff.”
Ollie was the only person Celia knew who ever called her by her full name. He had told her once that as a boy he had dreamed of marrying somebody named Cecilia because he had so admired St. Cecilia, the martyred patroness of music. In high school he had even painted a picture of St. Cecilia in her legendary pose of playing the organ. He had entered it in the Virginia Young Artists Expo and won first place. But then Connie had come along shortly after high school, and he had given up on his dream of marrying a Cecilia, though he still loved the name. Celia was quite sure that her name had gained her favor in Ollie’s eyes when she was first interviewed for her job at Trio.
“Well, I knew my grandmother,” Celia said now, “and I can safely say there’s no Jasper Johns in her attic.” She laughed. “No attic even.”
After he had looked at all the photos, Ollie told Celia that he voted yes for booking the artist for a show. He already knew that Craig agreed, because Craig was the one who had first seen the artist’s work in Winston-Salem and suggested they contact him. Celia had predicted when she first saw the photos herself that all three owners would vote yes. She almost always guessed right, and more than once Craig had suggested in his terse way that they just let Celia make the final decision since she knew their minds so well by now. He really disliked anything extra that took up his time, especially looking through slides or photos of other artists’ work.
“If Tara bucks us on this one, she needs to have her head examined,” Ollie told Celia on his way out. Tara had been the lone holdout against another artist recently, a woman from Savannah whose specialty was moonscape collagraphs in browns, grays, and blacks. Though Celia never said so, she was glad Tara had voted no on that one. The thought of looking at all those dark colors and pocked surfaces for six solid weeks hadn’t appealed to her in the least.
She was finishing her e-mail business a few minutes later when the phone rang.
“Craig here,” the voice said brusquely. She would have recognized his voice anyway. “Need you to do something,” he continued. Craig never wasted time chitchatting. “I’m coming by today to pick up my Madonna. Is it still out?”
“Uh, I don’t . . . no, I don’t think so,” Celia said. She pretended to be having trouble remembering, though she knew very well it was in a storage bin, not out on display.
“Well, find it if you can. It’ll save me some time. I’m in a hurry.” As if that were anything new, Celia thought. Craig sometimes stopped by the gallery for a minute, literally, and then was gone. But before she could say anything, she realized Craig had already hung up. Nothing new about that, either. Phone etiquette wasn’t one of Craig’s strong points, nor any other kind of etiquette for that matter.
With a sense of dread, she went back to the workroom and climbed up on a ladder over by the topmost bin. She might as well get it over with now. Underneath the dread, though, was another feeling—happy anticipation that the painting was going to leave the gallery. She would find it and set it by the back door, and that way she probably wouldn’t even have to speak to Craig, which would suit them both. While Ollie sometimes dropped by the gallery just to talk, Craig never did. Craig was one of those men who seem to be engaged in a lifelong contest to see if they can use fewer words today than they did yesterday. Before long he would be down to grunts and hand gestures. It was remarkable to Celia that he was a teacher. She knew he couldn’t be a very good one, since teaching required communicating. Of course, maybe he took on a different personality in the classroom, though she seriously doubted it.
Celia did try to rotate these things on the top shelf regularly, although because of their larger size, the inconvenience of getting to them, and the extra trouble and space required to hang them, it was very tempting to skip over them. She dutifully kept track, though, and kept careful records in a file named “Circulation.” Only a few times had she deliberately skipped a turn for a certain painting. Celia felt a pang of guilt now as she scanned the frames in the top bin, for the Madonna was one of the pieces she knew she hadn’t been fair with. It had been hidden away up here for a long time.
* * *
When Craig had first completed it four years ago and brought it to the gallery, she had instantly hated it, though she generally liked Craig’s work more than either Tara’s or Ollie’s. She had hung the Madonna but had left it on display a shorter time than she usually did with single new works by the gallery’s small stable of artists. She generally gave the three owners an even longer exhibit time if a work didn’t sell, but she had made an exception with this one. She remembered the great relief of taking it down and storing it away on the highest shelf in the back.
She couldn’t have gotten away with it had it been one of Tara’s or Ollie’s own works, but she had taken advantage of the fact that Craig so rarely came by the gallery and appeared to be in another world when he did come. He seemed so detached from everybody and everything, even his own art. As soon as he finished a painting, he either gave it away or dropped it off at the gallery, thereby divorcing himself from that one so he could immediately take up with a new piece.
He had told Celia once, in one of the few real conversations they had ever had, that he lived to paint and that what happened to the painting after he finished it wasn’t of much consequence to him. It was the immediate pleasure of the creative process that “keeps the blood coursing through my veins.” Those were the exact words he had said to Celia before standing up and walking out the door to get in his old green wood-paneled Chevy station wagon.
He lived with his mother and never mentioned a girlfriend. Not once had he seemed to notice that Celia was unmarried and available, for which she was glad, since she wasn’t at all interested in dating him. He had a wispy mustache and an annoying habit of sucking on his teeth as if food were trapped between them. She had often wondered how he related to students and if they made fun of him behind his back. He taught at Harwood, a private college over near Spartanburg.
For a teacher he was quite prolific in his output, but Celia doubted that he had any idea how many unsold pieces he had in storage or loaned out to friends. For him to ask specifically about one of his paintings, therefore, was very unusual.
Some of these bigger pieces were heavy, but she knew the Madonna wasn’t. It was actually quite light for its size. She spotted it now among the others, its slender gold frame looking out of place, even though it was just right for the piece. As she lifted it down, she felt her pulse quickening. It might have been out of her sight for a long time, but she had never gotten it out of her mind. She would see it most often at night in her dreams. She had put it up in the top bin partly for its size, of course, but also to get it as far away from her as possible.
She thought of a plan for right now. She wouldn’t look at the painting directly. She would lightly brush it off with the feather duster, but she would not actually look at the picture itself, only at the frame and the very edges of the canvas. This was also how she had coped with it when it had been on display four years ago. She couldn’t always avoid passing by it, but she could avert her eye
s.
She turned the piece around backward and set it on the floor against a cupboard, then climbed back up the ladder. While she was at it, she might as well look through the other paintings up here. There was a large gouache and pastel of a mountain stream she remembered—one of Ollie’s works, in fact, done during his early years before he had entered what he called his architectural phase. Little Tweed Creek, it was named. She would get that one down and put it back out.
Several minutes later she had moved things around in one of the small side galleries to accommodate two of the large works she had selected from the top bin. It would be a little crowded, but that was okay. She would be taking some other things down soon anyway, and she had a buyer for the carousel painting, so that one would be leaving in a few days.
Besides the Madonna and the mountain stream, she had also taken from the top bin a large enamel on canvas that reminded her of several magnified black Rorschach blots on a very pretty patterned field of blues, greens, and yellows. She had never understood why no one had bought the piece, cryptically titled The Deep Twenty. It was one of the few she had expected to be adopted quickly but had instead been stranded at the orphanage.
Tara had flatly declared The Deep Twenty too symmetrical, and Ollie was sure the artist had inadvertently hung it upside down. It would be a much stronger piece, he had argued, if the large blue background square were at the bottom instead of the top. When it was first displayed, he would stand in front of it, then lean over and contort himself sideways so he could study it upside down. “Yep, that’s better,” he would say. He even mentioned it to the artist one time, a cadaverous, scary-looking woman whose blond hair was about an inch long all over, but she made it very clear that she had not mistaken the top of the painting for the bottom.
Celia hung Little Tweed Creek above a collection of ceramic pots on a low shelf, and The Deep Twenty right above it, between the carousel painting and a crazily stitched fabric piece in three panels titled sun moon stars, a work which Tara scorned as “crafty,” meaning it wasn’t her idea of true art. This particular room was what Celia called her eclectic room—no unifying theme or common medium, just some miscellaneous things she liked most.
As she headed back to the workroom to get the Madonna ready for Craig to pick up, she kept concentrating on breathing deeply and steadily. She imagined her fingertips glowing red where she had touched the frame while getting it down. She gave herself a speech consisting of several short points, which she numbered as they came to her: (1) It’s just a picture in a frame. (2) Treat it like merchandise. (3) Think about other things. And her final point was emphatic: (4) Don’t look at it!
The Madonna piece—titled simply Mother and Child—was a batik, a laborious procedure of printing fabric using wax and dyes, adding one color at a time. The colors on this one were gorgeous muted maroons, purples, golds, jeweled greens, and blues. It had a mottled, somewhat fractured look, like stained glass. In fact, the Madonna herself appeared to be sitting in front of a stained-glass window of sorts, large blocks of dark, rich colors through which a mellow light diffused. The whole scene looked soft around the edges, slightly out of focus.
The Madonna, a more modern-looking version than the ones in Baroque and Renaissance paintings, was looking down so that her face was shadowed. Her long hair fell loose about her face and shoulders, and the neckline of her blue dress draped down in soft modest folds. She looked far more natural and unfettered than most Madonnas Celia had seen in other paintings, whose strained expressions often suggested they might be wearing uncomfortable undergarments. One hand of this Madonna was poised an inch above her baby’s face, and her lips were slightly parted, as if she had just breathed, “Oh!” It was remarkable to Celia how a face could emanate pure joy without even the hint of a smile. Unlike other stiff, primly posed Madonnas in all the other paintings down through the ages, this one was not at all aware of herself. She was past smiling.
And the baby—the utter sweetness of the baby! He was wrapped in something dark crimson, and his small face was illuminated. His lips were open also in a tiny O of wonder as he gazed up at his mother. It didn’t seem like a smart thing for the artist to do, drawing both mouths in puckered little circles that way, but it worked. You looked at those two mouths and couldn’t imagine either one being otherwise.
Not that Celia actually saw any of this now. She was seeing it all in her memory. With the feather duster, she dusted off the frame first, then kept her eyes fixed on the top left corner as she lightly dusted the picture itself. When she picked it up by the wire to move it over by the door, she realized she was gritting her teeth. Relax, she told herself, it’s just a picture.
She had meant to set it with its face against the wall next to the door, but at the last minute she turned it around. And then, as when passing a car accident, the perverse impulse to look where she knew she shouldn’t forced itself upon her, and she stepped back and saw the whole thing. She didn’t mean to and certainly didn’t want to, but she did. For a moment she stopped breathing. There it was, exactly as she had remembered it, except even more beautiful. She wondered if anyone else had ever looked at a single piece of artwork and both loved and loathed it the way she did this one.
This is my punishment, she thought, but then quickly revised it. This is part of my punishment. Her punishment was far greater than this one Madonna picture. She was certain, though, that this piece would never sell, that though it might be leaving the gallery for now, it was destined to return, then remain there to haunt her forever. It was God’s way of penalizing her for her sin. Whether it was stored away on the top shelf or hanging in plain view or even temporarily away from the premises, it would always be there, whispering to her. Remember, remember, remember. As if she needed a piece of art to help her remember.
So, okay, take a good hard look at it, she told herself now. Maybe if you look at it long enough, the effect will wear off. But she suddenly thought of all the warnings she had heard about not looking at the sun during an eclipse. It might seem harmless, but it could burn a hole in your retina. Nevertheless she stepped closer to the Madonna, knelt down, and looked right at it. She could see all the separate dots of color that made up the different parts. She had never noticed that the light around the baby’s head was actually a collection of small, irregular flame shapes. She wondered if Craig knew about the flaming tongues in the Bible, signifying the coming of the Holy Spirit.
“Teach me some melodious sonnet, sung by flaming tongues above”—the words and tune leapt into her mind for no good reason but were quickly obliterated by the distant sound of a baby, one she had heard only days ago, in another woman’s cart at the grocery store. Only one baby this time, not dozens of them, thankfully, and not crying, as they so often were in her dreams, but a single baby making waking-up noises—sleepy murmurs and small sucking sounds.
She stood up, turned the painting around, and slowly moved to the table to sit down. Sometimes she sat here in this same chair to eat when she came to the gallery early or stayed through supper, but food was the last thing on her mind right now. She saw the letter she had left there earlier, the one from the lawyers, and she stared at the envelope as she tried to breathe. She thought of the phrase “sole inheritor” and how it had made her laugh only an hour or so ago. And wasn’t that also the way life went? One minute you felt like laughing, and the next thing you knew you were crying.
They had told her all those years ago that she was doing the wise thing, that bringing an unwanted baby into the world was wrong, that someday when the timing was right, everything would be fine. They hadn’t told her about the dreams, about the sounds she would hear and the feeling of hands tightening around her neck and fists being punched into the pit of her stomach.
And then she heard the chime of someone entering the front door of the gallery. She could have predicted that if she’d been quick enough. As usual, just when you most needed to be alone, someone showed up.
8
Each Earth
ly Joy
“You here, Celia? It’s just me.” Celia recognized the voice, and her heart sank. She felt like hiding under the table. Boo Newman ran the gift shop two doors down from the Trio Gallery, and she never seemed to have enough to do since she had hired a girl to work afternoons. Now she visited up and down the strip mall, taking up everybody else’s time. Jack Upton down at the State Farm Insurance office had told Celia that Boo had spent an entire hour at his place one day the week before telling him all about her pets—a menagerie of assorted cats and dogs and even a myna bird named Agrippa—and their many talents and physical maladies. She had finished the first hour of her visit and started on her second when a client had come into the State Farm office. Jack had told Celia he wanted to jump up and kiss the ground the man walked on.
Boo was really a harmless woman and good-hearted, but she could wear you out with her words and her simpleminded way of looking at everything. Her real name was Iona, but her father had nicknamed her Boo when she was a baby because she was born on Halloween. She told this to everyone she met, usually more than once.
Celia quickly went to the sink and splashed some water on her eyes, then dabbed them dry with a paper towel and went out into the gallery. Boo was standing in front of Tara Larson’s Tumult piece, which had sold two days earlier, as Celia had known it would. The buyer lived up on Glassy Mountain in a new house with twelve-foot ceilings, and he had told Celia he needed something “huge and wild and earthy to fill a wall in the den.” He hadn’t batted an eye at the price, had even jokingly offered her more if she’d let him take it home with him right then instead of having to wait till the show came down.
Boo Newman was standing with her hands on her very large hips as she looked at Tumult, and when she saw Celia come into the room, she shook her head and said, “I know exactly what you’re going to tell me, but I’m going to speak my mind anyway. That is the strangest thing I’ve ever laid eyes on! I think Tara’s art is getting downright evil-looking.” She lifted one pudgy hand and waved it around. “So there, I guess I’ve proven all over again how out of step with the times I am, but I can’t help it. I simply can’t feature living with something like that hanging on your wall. I don’t know why she can’t paint real pictures of things people can recognize!” She pointed to the red dot on the wall beside the painting. “But somebody evidently doesn’t agree with me. I see you sold it. Just think of what you could do with that much money!”
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