“Did you see anyone going in or out of the shack?”
The girl shook her head.
“See anyone outside it?”
The girl shifted in her chair and looked at her mother, who said, “Go ahead, honey.”
“Well, there was that guy who works for you, the stoner. And then there was a black guy sitting in his car. It looked like he was watching what was going on at the pond.” She gazed at a spot beyond Tom’s shoulder. “He was wearing a mask.”
“And what kind of mask was it?” Tom kept his voice as casual as he could, looking not at Harper but down at his notes.
“I already told them this.” She took another loud breath in impatience. “A ski mask.”
“But you didn’t actually see him come out of the shack, right?”
“Right. He was already in his car.”
“And he was wearing the ski mask in his car?”
“Yeah.”
“What was he doing? Just sitting there, wearing the mask?”
“Well, he made a phone call first, I guess. On his cell.”
“You guess?” Tom looked up, letting his pen rest on the page.
“No, not guess. That’s not what I meant.” The girl’s knees were trembling across from Tom’s own. “Yes, he made a phone call.”
“With the mask on? Was the mask over his ears?”
Harper just stared at him. Then she said, “You can still hear through a ski mask.”
“How cold was it that day?”
“How should I know?”
“Honey,” her mother said, “calm down. And be polite.”
“I know, Mom, but—”
“Never mind,” Tom interrupted. “It doesn’t matter. Look, I can see you’re upset. Just one more question, okay? Then I’ll leave you alone, I promise.” He’d said I promise multiple times since ringing the doorbell, he realized. He would have to tone it down.
Harper looked at him with eyes that might or might not have been about to brim over; he couldn’t quite tell. Why? Was it only the stress of being asked questions about the death of her best friend? It felt to him like something else, something more.
“Go ahead,” Harper said, though she sounded as if she wanted him to do anything but.
“Well, it’s just that I’m wondering: if he had the mask on, how could you tell who it was? When Chief Armstrong showed you the picture. If you didn’t see him come out of the shack, and he was already in the car with the mask on, how were you able to identify him?”
Her eyes slid fast into squinted slits. “That’s not what I said. Or if I said it that way, I said it wrong. I saw him come out of the shack, and then he got in the car and put the mask on.”
“Okay, got it. Sorry.” Tom gave an apologetic nod, as if acknowledging that he’d been the one to make a mistake.
“Were you working there that day?” she asked, appearing emboldened by his apology. “If you were there, you would have seen him.”
“I was there.” He’d swung by to check on the new guy, whom he’d only hired because he felt sorry for him being such a loser. “And yeah, I did see a black man.”
“Then what are you asking me for?”
Tom put a hand up to signal further his wish for peace. “It’s just about the mask,” he told her. “I didn’t see him with the mask.” He slapped the notebook shut, watching the girl slump with relief.
He was about to say he was sorry he’d had to intrude on them when the mother stood and held her shoulders in an exaggeratedly erect posture, as if to compensate for her daughter’s sudden slouch. “There’s a lot of suspicious things going on in this town,” she declared. “What happened to Joy, that goes without saying. But those ATM robberies, too. And right before Joy vanished, somebody walked right into our house and robbed us, in broad daylight.”
Her daughter winced. The mother didn’t seem to notice, but Tom did. “What did they take?” he asked.
“Well, that’s not important.”
“Did you report it?”
“Well, no. But it happened. I’m just saying, there are some suspicious things.”
He knew it was time to leave, before she could get any further into her rant. He’d already gotten what he’d come for. She escorted him to the door and he turned to thank the daughter, but she’d slipped out of the room while he wasn’t looking.
Before
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Today, the last order of business for the academic year: the competition for the Lewison Award. I wasn’t going to stick around after our last classes this week, because Grandee’s so sick and I should get back to Rochester, but Violet convinced me I’d be crazy not to put up my work; the winner of the award receives a waiver of second-year tuition and a meeting with the owners from the Mirage Gallery in New York. “There’s nothing for you to do here,” she told me, on the phone from the hospital. “She’ll still be here tomorrow. Go win your prize—that’s what she wants.”
Grandee is in no condition to want anything anymore, but I let it go and told Violet I’d see them both first thing in the morning. Then I won the prize, but that wasn’t the most important thing that happened. Don’t skip the details.
Twenty-six of us put up our entries in the sweltering Massey Hall (so hot the plastics people joked that their entries might melt). I entered the series I finished only last week, eight still lifes I call American Commonplace. My favorite is the one of Grandee’s sewing table, Pins and Needles, because when I look at it I can hear in my memory the metallic whir of the machine, see her hands guiding the fabric through the presser foot as she hums along with the radio. The other subjects include the blue creamer and sugar bowl, both chipped; her jewelry box with a tangle of necklaces spilling out; the hand-shaped ashtray my own father made in school as a child, and which Grandee used to hold safety pins; and her winter coat hanging in the front-hall closet, orange scarf draped over the neck. She never looked good in orange (it showed up ancient acne scars on her face), but she never cared. The fact that she didn’t care was what made me love the scarf, love her, and after finding an exact match to the orange, I laid the paint on thick, raising the scarf’s folds to three dimensions, allowing it to reflect light in a way a single dimension could not.
Susanne was recused from reviewing my work because I’m her teaching assistant. The other two jurors—a black ceramics sculptor named Jonatha Hurley, and Bart Richlieu, a white color fieldist we all call Baby Mark because he basically just rips off Rothko—leaned forward to get a better look at the individual canvases, then stepped back to take in the series as a whole.
“Beautiful,” Jonatha said, pausing to focus intently on Winter Wear. “The impasto on that scarf—ninety-nine out of a hundred people wouldn’t think to do that. Ninety-nine and a half. I love it.” It seemed that she might have uttered the last phrase to herself, not meaning for me to hear it. I tried not to show that I had.
“Ah, yes. Impressive,” Bart said, tapping his beard in the habit all the students liked to imitate. “You’re the hyperrealist. Interesting. Although—” He stopped himself, appeared to reconsider, then went ahead. “I don’t really see how this speaks to the black experience.”
I did my best to hide the sudden stiffness I felt in my forearms, my back, and my neck. Next to Bart, Jonatha took in a breath, and I waited for her to come to my rescue.
But she let the breath out and looked me in the eye. Though she remained silent, we communicated. You, the look told me.
She could have no way of knowing the paralysis I normally feel in a moment like this. Violet always scolds me for not standing up for myself—“for all of us,” as she says. Any time one of us gets disrespected, it means the rest of us do, too.
I understand her point but do not agree. Beyond that, it is not in my nature to “stand up”—I prefer to hang back and observe, to live my own life behind the scenes. “Militant is not who I am,” I told Violet once, and she said, “Oh, for God’s sake. You sound like a woman who doesn’t want to be c
alled feminist.
“Nobody’s asking you to be Malcolm X,” she added. “Or Gloria Steinem. Just speak up once in a while, when you don’t like what somebody says.”
She meant a moment like today, when I didn’t like Bart Richlieu questioning how the painting of my grandmother’s coat speaks to the black experience. Along with the encouragement I saw in Jonatha Hurley’s eyes, I could almost feel Violet kicking me in the seat.
“Well, I’m black.” I could have left it there, but being brave for a change felt good, so I did not. “And it speaks to my experience.”
I couldn’t tell if Jonatha approved of my answer or found it lacking. Probably somewhere in the middle, which is what I myself think of it, now that I’ve had time to reflect.
When the award was announced and I had won, Susanne gave me a hug as any mentor would, but there was more in it than that. At first I thought I was mistaken, wishful, but then she got wine-tipsy at the reception afterward and began flirting with me. Though I knew better, I offered her a ride home in her own car because we both knew she shouldn’t be driving. When I asked for directions to her house, she said, “Never mind. Show me your apartment,” and when I said, “Really?” she laughed and reached across the seat to touch my shoulder, then my thigh, and I sucked in my breath without wanting her to hear it.
An hour later in bed, after we made love (my fingers tremble, just writing those words), Susanne said, “I can’t believe we just did this. It’s so wrong, in so many ways.”
She was right and I knew it, but at that moment I did not want to admit the truth. “It doesn’t feel wrong to me,” I said, cupping my hand over the bone of her hip to hide the fact that I was lying. That I could touch her at all still struck me with a rush I didn’t recognize from anything before in my life. I am feeling it still.
“I’m married,” she reminded me. “I’m so much older than you. You’re a student,” and she gave the last word an emphasis suggesting it was the worst thing I could be.
I ignored that part, along with the part about her being married, and said there wasn’t all that much difference in our ages. “You’re what, thirty-seven? Thirty-eight?” I knew she was actually forty-two; I looked it up online after she did my admissions interview last year.
I didn’t expect her to correct me—Grandee always shaved ten years off what she told people, even doctors, who knew better—but Susanne did, seeming to think I might recoil when I heard her actual age. Instead I told her she didn’t look it, which is the truth, and said I was twenty-eight. This was adding four years, but I justified it by reminding myself it was to make her feel better about the gap.
She looked relieved. “You don’t mind sleeping with a woman with saggy boobs?” She tapped one with her fingertip.
I kissed it and said, “Not if you don’t mind sleeping with a chubby black man.”
She remained still for a moment, then pulled back to look at me. “Black has nothing to do with it.”
“Oh, but chubby does?” Teasing her was the only way I could think to change a subject I kicked myself for bringing up. I knew she probably believed herself, but black always has something to do with it.
She didn’t smile. “One of the things I noticed, when we met,” she said, snuggling closer, “was that I didn’t get the sense you didn’t trust me, or didn’t like me, because I’m white. Sometimes I do get that sense, when I meet a black person. Is that awful of me?”
All I could think was that the weight of her head, lying on my arm, felt perfect. But that wouldn’t be what she wanted to hear. I said I didn’t think it was awful, though this wasn’t precisely the truth. It also occurred to me to ask how often she met a black person in Chilton, but I didn’t do that, either. I knew she’d lived in New York before she came here.
“And if I do sense it,” she went on, “then I feel defensive. Even though I understand that I could be wrong. I mean, how would I know? I just met them. I could totally be projecting onto them something that isn’t there. But what if it is?” I knew she didn’t really expect an answer; as earnest as I knew she was, she was also somewhat drunk, and I was listening to a monologue in search of its own point. “Like I’ve always kind of felt that way with Jonatha. We’re perfectly friendly, but there’s this wall. I could be just as responsible for it as she is, but I only feel it from her.”
Even though I did not want to talk about it, I felt I had no choice but to murmur, “And she could be feeling it only from you.”
“I know!” The faint scent of chardonnay filled the air when she exhaled. “But I didn’t feel that way when we met.” She waved a hand in the space between us. “That’s what I’m trying to say. When you came for your interview. I think it was because you talked about Basquiat, so we kind of got it out of the way.”
I considered telling her about what happened in the sauna this morning after my swim. As I arranged my towel and sat down, the white man who’d been in there got up to go out. I closed my eyes to relax, but thirty seconds later he opened the door again, letting in a blast of cool air, and said, “I didn’t want you to think I got out because you came in.” He held his towel together in front of his chest with a fist the way women do, and it was obvious he wanted to be absolved.
“I didn’t think that,” I told him, feeling weary though it was not even eight in the morning. “I just assumed you were done.” The man apologized, waited a moment hoping I would say it was okay, then apologized again and retreated when I didn’t. On my way out of the building I stopped to talk to the security guard, Percy, who’s the only other black person I ever see on campus besides Jonatha Hurley and a metal sculpturist, Lizzy, whom I met when I went to some Students for Obama meetings.
I’m not sure if I feel a bond with Percy because we’re both black or because we’ve both worked security jobs, but it’s probably both. He calls me Pablo because, he says, Picasso is the only artist he ever knew anything about, before me. I repeated my conversation with the man in the sauna, and he shook his head and said White guys as if I’d know exactly what he meant, which, in a way, I did. Still, I felt a little bad about the encounter. The man in the sauna was awkward, but at least he thought about things. So did Susanne. So did I. But at the moment, I wasn’t in the mood for those things. I held her close and, my mouth moving in her hair, whispered that I hoped she wasn’t going to be sorry about what we’d just done.
“If I am, it won’t be your fault,” she said. “It’ll be out of my own guilt.”
“I don’t want you to feel guilty.”
“It won’t just be a feeling. I am guilty.”
There was nothing I could say to this. She is married, she broke her vows. With me. So I’m guilty, too.
“What’s your husband like?” Why did I ask this, and at that moment? To remind us both further that he existed, I guess.
“Gil?” She was only buying time, of course; what other husband could I mean? “Well, he has his own business, called Odd Men Out. He has a few guys who work for him; they go around and fix things in people’s houses. That and little contracting jobs.” The importance to her sentence of the word little was not lost on me.
Then she seemed to realize she hadn’t answered my question. She told me he was a good man, but that they were different in a lot of ways. “Just this morning,” she said, “he was reading to me from a magazine about some—I don’t know, some star, and I wanted to say to him, ‘For both our sakes, you should be telling this to somebody else.’”
I listened, afraid to recognize the hope I felt generated by her words. Was she saying that she wanted to be with somebody other than her husband?
Then she told me what he’d done with the inheritance she received from her parents, blowing it all on a scheme he thought would get them out from under. Of course, it didn’t. “It was a scheme, for God’s sake.” She kicked the covers away as if with that motion she could fling off the anger accompanying her words. “We had a nest egg, we had the money for Joy to go to Decker, if she gets in. And to pay
for a nursing home for Gil’s mother. Now who knows what will happen with that? And they might take our house.”
“They won’t take your house,” I said. I meant it as reassurance, but it only seemed to make her madder.
“How do you know? They’re taking people’s houses left and right.”
Not ready to let her go, I pulled her back to me. “Well, if they do, you can live here.”
She smiled, and stayed close, but the evening was over; we both understood that I’d ruined it by bringing up Gil. And the last thing she’d told me about him threatened to tarnish the pleasure I felt in the time we’d just spent together. Was it possible that she’d slept with me—an act I admit I had imagined, but would never have initiated myself—to get back at him for what he’d done?
To keep from wondering (and to prolong her presence in my bed), I told her I had a star story for her. I told her that on the door of my grandmother’s room at the hospital in Rochester, there’s a sign that looks as if some little kid drew it, yellow stars in a black sky. Falling stars, it says. At first Violet and I thought it was just a decoration, maybe from an art workshop on the children’s cancer ward. Then the nurse told us it was actually a signal to any medical person assigned to Grandee. It means she’s at risk of falling if she tries to get out of bed by herself.
“Oh,” Susanne said, putting a hand to her chest. “I love that. They could have just written FALL RISK on her door. But that’s so depressing and blunt. How much better is it that they put up a picture instead? Using art as a kind of code.”
I’d thought so, too, at the time. I didn’t tell Susanne what Violet had said when the sign was explained to us: What is this, a hospital or a nursery school?
“That’s a good star story,” Susanne murmured. “That’s one I wanted to hear.” Her voice came out drowsy, and she flung an arm over my waist as she nuzzled closer.
She warned me not to let her sleep, but I couldn’t help it. A few minutes later when she woke up, she scrambled to put her clothes back on, and I worried she would tell me it had been a mistake. But she didn’t, and even kissed me (the cheek, though) before hurrying out the door.
How Will I Know You? Page 7
