Still Life with Bread Crumbs

by Anna Quindlen

  “Oh, heck no!” Sarah said when she asked for the check. “Not your first time in! It’s my policy—first visit is free. Well, not so much for people who just stop by for a pit stop, you know, the ones who come off the highway for something to eat and to use the bathroom, I can spot them a mile away, which I guess is what it is, right, a mile from the highway to here. But a new person here in town always gets the first meal free no matter what, no matter how much they eat, not that I think you ate a lot because you look like you could stand to put on some weight, honestly. Kevin says I say that to everybody because I could stand to lose some, but he’s just being mean.” She stopped to take a breath, and Rebecca did, too. She’d been trying for some time to compliment the scones, which were wonderful, but she couldn’t find an opening. “But I will tell you this,” Sarah added, leaning toward her. “Someday you can autograph your poster for me. Or for my mom. Oh my God, she will freak out. It’s her absolute favorite piece of art of all time, I swear. I’m going to do it. I’m going to get a copy and have you sign it!”

  HOW SHE WOUND UP THERE—THE MONEY VERSION

  Rebecca didn’t have a copy of the poster herself. She hadn’t even seen one for years, unless you counted a glimpse of it on a wall in a movie about a bunch of women sharing a house and discovering their own self-worth through yoga and sex. (In her defense, she had seen the movie on a plane, and hadn’t been paying much attention.) But for years she had lived off it and its satellites, the reprints and licensing, as well as its free-floating reputation. It had paid for Ben’s boarding school tuition, paid for the roomy apartment she’d moved them into after the divorce and had just sublet, paid for trips to Paris (for the Musée d’Orsay) and London (for the Tate Modern). It had paid her restaurant bills and her hairdresser tips and she hadn’t even really noticed how much money it brought in until it started to dry up and then disappeared.

  Her second show of photographs had been called the Kitchen Counter series, and it was seen as an iconic moment in women’s art. But in fact at the time she took those photographs Rebecca had just been tired, tired in that way a woman with a child and a husband and a house and a job and a life gets tired, so that it feels like a mild chronic illness. She had been thirty-six years old and had a toddler and a husband who was contemptuous of husbands who helped around the house. “Peter is so European,” women would say, and later Rebecca wondered if that was their way of telling her that he slept around. But that was later.

  One evening Benjamin had had an ear infection, and by the time she had gotten him dosed with bubble-gum-flavored antibiotic and settled down in his crib Peter had shown up with two assistant professors and their spouses. That had been one of his favorite tricks, to show up with dinner guests unannounced, the guests apologetic, Peter not a bit, as though it was a test for her, to see what she could manage. “I’m surely not expected to ask if I can bring guests to my own home?” he had said one night when she had complained.

  After everyone had staggered away tipsy into the night, calling compliments on the osso buco (in the freezer for exactly this purpose) and the flourless chocolate cake (ditto) over their tweedy shoulders, Peter had gone right to bed, once again confident that a kitchen magically cleaned itself sometime in the witching hours between brandy and breakfast. Rebecca had needed a moment before she started on the dishes and had lain down on their new modern couch, with its tubular frame and clean square lines, so uncomfortable that only a person as weary as she was could fall asleep there. At dawn a thin needle of sunlight through the living room window woke her even before Benjamin was screaming to be set free, and she had picked up her new Hasselblad, a gift from her father, and started to take pictures.

  She never really knew why, why that, why then. The truth was she never had known, before or after. Talking about art requires artists to sound purposeful and sure of themselves, but she’d never felt that way. Over the years she’d made up a lot of reasons because people didn’t seem to like the arbitrariness of the reality. They also didn’t believe that she’d simply photographed what was already there—a bottle lying on its side with a puddle of olive oil shimmering along its curved lip, a handful of greasy forks glistening in the overhead lights, and, of course, what was later called Still Life with Bread Crumbs, a vaguely Flemish composition of dirty wineglasses, stacked plates, the torn ends of two baguettes, and a dish towel singed at one corner by the gas stove.

  Her agent then had been an older man named Stephen, quiet and thoughtful, TG merely his abrasive and inappropriately dressed assistant, always on the verge of being fired almost up until the day that she pushed her boss aside and took over while he was in the hospital recovering from a heart attack. He had not been particularly interested in the photographs, or the show, but when he read the reviews and heard the reactions he’d said, quietly, “I think you may be onto something here.” She’d had a lucky break when the dean of the arts program at a university described the photographs as “housewife imagery,” and the head of the women’s studies program responded by calling him a misogynist, and a student kerfuffle that followed got a good deal of publicity, with the female students wearing T-shirts with the photograph on the front. Within six months Rebecca Winter had become a female icon, her Kitchen Counter series described by art critics and essayists as both an elevation and an indictment of women’s lives and women’s work. Imitators produced photographs of chicken bones, colanders, even pacifiers and diapers, but it was Rebecca’s photographs that held pride of place for years, turning up on magazine covers, postcards, T-shirts, even an ironic Mother’s Day advertisement. The poster had been Stephen’s idea, a simple thing: the image, her name, the title.

  Once Rebecca had read an essay in which a feminist theorist posited that the word still was obviously a way of suggesting how empty the existence of the average American woman was, that the bread crumbs were an allusion to Hansel and Gretel, leaving a trail so someone could find you, rescue you, keep you from being eaten alive. Rebecca had been amazed at how much could be divined from a photograph she had snapped unthinkingly in a haze of fatigue overlaid with unacknowledged anger, and a title she had come up with haphazardly when the gallery had decided that simply numbering the photographs wouldn’t do. She wondered what the theorist would think if she knew that Rebecca had finished working that morning when Ben started yelling “Juice!” from his bedroom, that she had parked him in front of the television to watch Sesame Street while she cleaned the kitchen and started a load of towels.

  And all while her husband slept before waking for his seminar Images of Attraction in Renaissance Art. “Coffee?” he’d said as he knotted his tie carefully and pushed up against her while she stood at the sink, not in a romantic or even a seductive fashion but as though they were in a subway car and other passengers had gotten on behind, jamming them accidentally together. It was his very carelessness that she had initially found so attractive, as though to snag his attention for even a moment was a sign of worth.

  Funny, that no one had ever asked what had happened to the dishes, the scraps, the crumbs in the photographs, on the poster. For a while afterward she had continued to use that same dish towel with its blackened edge, until one of the wives at dinner had lifted it as though it were the Shroud of Turin and said, “Oh my God.”

  For a time the poster was everywhere. You could see it in the windows of framing shops, on the walls in coffeehouses, in the offices of nonprofit groups for women, above the beds in college dorm rooms slept in by girls who had never made a meal or washed a dish.

  Rebecca had followed the Kitchen Counter series with a series of photographs of Ben, but so close in that they were geographic, the valley of a chubby bent arm, the hill of a rounded shoulder, all captured while he was sleeping, naked. (She had also incidentally potty-trained him in the process; with his diaper off he clearly felt disinclined to relieve himself.) It was said that those photographs, the Baby Boy series, did for motherhood what the Kitchen Counter series had done for housework, although
what that was depended on who you read. One mothers’ group called for a boycott of her work because Rebecca Winter objectified children. The boycott was unsuccessful. The Baby Boy series sold. Reproductions of the Baby Boy photos sold. Reproductions of the Kitchen Counter series sold and sold and sold and sold.

  “Please, leave the dishes. My wife will be immortalizing them once you’ve left,” her husband used to say to great hilarity during dinner parties, considerably less pleased with her success than Rebecca had hoped. It had taken her a few years to realize that Peter was an angry man, in the fashion of men who had dreamed a big future for themselves and then had not seen it materialize. That it had somehow materialized for his wife did their marriage no favors. “Well, what did you expect?” her mother said when she complained about that after the divorce.

  Ironically, great success made Rebecca less and less sure of herself, until everything she produced, even the successful things she produced, seemed like something she’d done before. Over the years it became commonplace for her to orient an image in the frame and have it feel like plagiarism. “Back to the future,” TG rasped, speaking in aphorisms as though her words were for sale and a client like Rebecca would get only so many. But she couldn’t go back and do what she’d done before. Her son outgrew his quiescent babyhood, her marriage came to a sudden, almost inevitable end in a blizzard of adultery, abandonment, and unacknowledged anger and envy on the part of her husband. There was no longer any dinner party detritus, no baby boy.

  It has its own momentum, success. It far outstrips its particular moment. A writer who has written one great novel can go to parties twenty years later and still be treated like a literary celebrity of sorts. But Rebecca understood that novelist’s secret in a way the party guests did not: the coin of notoriety pays with less and less interest as time goes by. She knew this because several years before, she had realized that she was bringing in very little money although her expenses had not shrunk but grown. Until finally the best plan she could come up with was renting out one place dear, renting another place cheap, and trying to do some work that would let her ditch the second and go back to the first.

  She should have been used to the reversal of fortune; she’d been born into a family that had had plenty of money, until one day it turned out they didn’t.

  It is terrible, being poor in New York, or at least that was what she’d heard, although the sum total of her exposure was a requirement in high school that resulted in the collection of canned goods at holiday time, which is how Christmas is referred to in a city with so many Jews, Muslims, atheists, and liberals.

  Rebecca knew very well that she did not know about being poor in the city or anywhere else, but she had certainly learned about not having enough money, which is different from being poor. Passing on restaurant lunches because the check would be split and there were certain of her acquaintances who thought nothing of a hundred-dollar meal. Agreeing only to dinners at which she knew somebody’s husband would prove his manhood by slamming his palm and his platinum Amex on the discreet little silver tray. Arriving at dinner parties not with wine or flowers but with a small photograph in a plain frame—but signed! Signed! A genuine Rebecca Winter!

  And in return she might receive a warm email from her wealthy hostess: they are taking a place in Italy for September, the sunflowers will be astonishing, the vines drooping and dusty beneath the weight of the black pearl grapes, all crying out to be photographed, as though they hadn’t been photographed so often that they are postcards, plaques, staples of the narrow gaudy tourist shops of Siena and Montalcino. Oh, she always says, I would love to but I can’t get away, when what she means is, oh, I would love to, but the airfare. How will I pay the airfare?

  She had taken to riding the subway again, telling herself how much quicker it was than sitting in a taxi stalled in traffic. She was lucky, she guessed. When she had been young, going to art school, cadging salmon canapés and grilled shrimp at openings, the subway was dirty and dangerous, men masturbating and muttering to themselves behind pillars in stations garishly lit and tiled like big filthy Turkish baths. Now the subway was cleaner and less frightening and more people seemed to use it, at least if you judged by those who rhapsodized about how practical it was at parties that belied the rhapsodies because the street outside was choked with black cars, their hired drivers standing at the curb, drumming their fingers on the hoods.

  The city is unkind to those with overdrafts, although it has long been their ancestral home. It is most comfortable for people who never have to think of what to spend because there is always more where that came from. Rebecca was now no longer one of those people. She had become someone who sees a plate of free scones as a windfall, someone worrying about what the charge would be for shooting a critter in her crawl space.

  She had made a deal with herself: she would live here, in exile, until she could afford to return to that old New York. How this was to be effected, she had absolutely no idea. At the doctor’s she had read an article about the fact that women over fifty began to obsess about mortality, and she knew this to be true. There was a certain tone of voice she had heard often in the city, at lunch or at a party, a lowered tone for the friend of a friend who had had a terrible diagnosis, who had so little time left to live, or who had just died. Rebecca actually thought very little about dying, but she thought about money constantly. She was afraid she was going to live forever, impoverished, her career a footnote in a dissertation that no one even read.

  KNEW IT WHEN SHE SAW IT

  Rebecca liked knowing what would happen next, and even in this strange place she began to impose order. She’d done it when she’d done stints abroad, studying art in Florence, living with Peter for a visiting semester in Rome. It had been almost like a printed itinerary, her routine: the campo for coffee at ten, the museum between eleven and two, the late lunch, the hour of exploration.

  She began to do it here, too. The disarray in the rented cottage dismayed her. Old paperbacks that had lost their midsections, Ball jars without lids, random keys pushed to the backs of drawers. In New York, when Rebecca found an orphaned key, she used it in every lock in the apartment. If it fit none of them, she tossed it in the trash, although sometimes she photographed it first. In a rented house she did not feel free to do the same, but she did put all the keys in one of the Ball jars, and put the most mangled books into a box beneath the bed. She regretted the possessions she had left behind her, the big down comforter, the firm pillows, the collected Shakespeare she had always promised herself she would read someday, the cast-iron frying pan that had seen her through graduate school, marriage, and countless breakfasts for Ben. That frying pan signified home, comfortable, dependable, substantial, well-seasoned. There were two frying pans here, one tiny, one enormous, both flimsy.

  At least she had begun to develop a routine for her day. The tearoom opened at six in the morning and had a wireless connection, so she started there. Sarah’s Scone of the Week and a double espresso. As soon as she opened the computer Sarah would mime zipping her lips and disappear into the back, the timpani of paddle mixers and oven doors breaking the silence. On her computer screen dispatches appeared as though from another world: she was invited to an opening for new work by Iris Cohen, who had early on been described as the new Rebecca Winter but who had now come out and moved on, currently to photographs of tattoos. Dorothea wanted to come and visit before she left for her teaching fellowship, insensible of the conditions in the cottage. Ben was working as a grip on a film shooting in Queens and on Long Island. “Hooray!” she replied. She always wrote “hooray” when Ben got a job, and meant it.

  The tenant of her New York apartment had discovered the air-conditioning did not work, had called the super, had discovered the circuit-breaker box, had discovered the air-conditioning did work, had apologized for all the messages. He was a retired executive of some sort, a man used to having things done for him instead of doing them himself. His angry messages were peremptory, his apologet
ic messages grudging. She hated the idea of him and his wife sleeping in her bed. She had realized as she was leaving the apartment, her car packed full of suitcases and boxes, that it was the second time she had had to move out of a place she did not want to vacate. The first was incandescent in memory, the day she had been subjected to the indignity of yelling at her husband to get out after a sleepless night of swelling outrage and then having him coolly remind her that the apartment was part of his university compensation and that she would have to throw him out by leaving herself.

  Rebecca had bought new sheets for the duration of the sublet. Tenant sheets, she thought of them, nice, but not as nice as her own. But it turned out the tenant wife had shipped her own linens (as well as pillows, blankets, and assorted artwork) from their home in Palo Alto. “It’s important to claim the space,” the wife had said solemnly. She was a Reiki practitioner and had placed a small statue of the Buddha on the windowsill overlooking Central Park.

  Rebecca couldn’t claim to have truly claimed the space in the cottage, with its balky toilet, its rattling refrigerator, its splintery wooden walls. In front of the cottage was a stretch of lawn that degenerated into a scruff of grasses and shrubs and a steep slope down a wooded hill. If she stood at the edge she could see the flat roof of a small house at the bottom. Sometimes she saw something glittering below, as though the sun was striking fire off a metal fence or a patch of mica.

  But the woods started almost at her back door, and because of the miserly little windows and the way the cottage was placed, it was dark inside a good part of the day, her bedroom and the small guest room on the other side of the bathroom plunged into gloom, the living room and kitchen lit briefly at midday and then in shadow the rest of the afternoon. It was a shame she no longer needed a darkroom; the spare bedroom qualified as one with almost no modification. She had set up her printer on a small table there. The room had one electrical outlet, and Rebecca had purchased several extension cords. She had also put her beautiful gold watch in a top bureau drawer (that stuck, even after she rubbed its bottom with a bar of soap) and replaced it with a black rubber digital watch that glowed in the dark. It worked much better and didn’t need to be wound. It was waterproof, too.