by Ashley Ream
He didn’t mention that infernal song, which was good. I would have had to stomp on his bare foot.
“Have you spoken with my father since he left the accounting firm?”
Martin scratched his beard growth. “Not that I remember, but that was a long time ago. You were knee-high to a grasshopper when he left Parker and Combs. It wasn’t even Parker, Combs, and Jimenez yet when he left.”
“I’m trying to find him.”
“I gathered.” Martin put his hands in his robe pockets and looked down at his welcome mat. “We were all real surprised when he left like that. I don’t think he even gave notice. Rumors went around that he’d packed up and left you and your mom, too.”
“And my sister,” I said. “I had a sister.”
Martin didn’t comment, and I couldn’t tell if he hadn’t known or maybe just didn’t remember because she hadn’t lived long enough to be a famous anything.
“Maybe he kept in touch with someone or you heard something about where he might have gone?”
“I sure wish I had something to tell you. I’m surprised he stayed gone. I would’ve thought he’d send word or come to his senses.”
“I’m not sure he had senses to come to,” I said.
“I understand how you must feel that way, but I really can’t help you. Jerry and I just worked in the same department, you know? We didn’t have beers after work or anything. Our wives didn’t know each other. Kept to himself mostly.” A baby fussed, and Martin looked in through the screen door. “All I can really tell you is that he was good at his job, if that means anything.”
I didn’t know if it did or not.
“If you think of anything—,” I said.
The fussing got louder.
He nodded, murmured a good-bye, and went inside.
I missed the ceremony on purpose, showing up late in a bright yellow dress that went down to my toes and gathered under my boobs. When the wind blew, I looked six months pregnant, which was something I hadn’t realized when I bought it.
The botanical gardens took up more acreage than all of LAX with the runways and international terminal thrown in. There were more than a dozen subgardens, including a Japanese garden, a rose garden, and a jungle with a waterfall inside its own glass house. A sign near the entrance told me there were more than fourteen thousand varieties of plants on the premises. I’d have to take its word for it.
Discreet signs pointed me through the main building, where they showed introductory films to visiting schoolchildren during the day. I followed the arrows out the other side and down a winding but still wheelchair-compliant path, where I didn’t see another person until I followed another sign around a dense grove of live oaks. Through the twisting branches, I made out fairy lights twinkling in the distance.
In a grassy clearing, near a path that broke off toward the lily pond, round tables with white cloths were set up. Guests held small plates and wineglasses and talked in small groups. The seated dinner hadn’t started. I was still fashionably late, just this side of rude.
I stood and watched for a moment. I knew nearly everyone by reputation and some well enough to speak to. I pulled my wrap around my arms—deserts are cold at night—and watched, looking for my landing spot. The people organized themselves by category. Old college friends moved together. Faculty joined and split and rejoined. Artists who were not the groom’s former students formed a subset, as did gallery owners and a group that stayed to the sides, wearing flat shoes and conservative garden party dresses. Family, I decided, and gave them a wide berth, pointing myself instead toward old college friends.
A reflecting pool, wide and rectangular, was full of floating candles. I took the path that wrapped around it. The closer I got, the more the hum of the party dissolved into high-pitched laughter and snippets of words. A uniformed waiter intercepted me with a silver tray half-empty but still also half-full of little toasts topped with shaved salmon and something white and creamy. I took one, and he handed me a napkin. I ate the toast in one bite. Dinner couldn’t come soon enough.
There were two more waiters. One carried tall flutes of gold champagne, a thin layer of bubbles still clinging to the surface. I took one of those and a bacon-wrapped shrimp from the other guy. The shrimp was still in my mouth when Jeremy spotted me through the throng of guests. He hurried over and threw his arms around me. I hadn’t yet wiped my fingers, but I hugged him anyway. Bacon grease wouldn’t show on the back of his black tux.
“S-s-s-s-so glad you came, Clem-m-m-mentine.”
“I wouldn’t have missed it for all the world and the one after that,” I said, which was true.
I hadn’t seen him in two years, which is one of those things you let happen and doesn’t feel like anyone’s fault but is.
“Have you m-m-met Mark?” He put a hand on the bicep of the identically dressed man to his left, who put out a cool, smooth hand to shake.
I took it. “It hasn’t yet been my pleasure,” I said. “Clementine Pritchard.”
“Of course, I know who you are. You’re Jeremy’s most prized former student.”
I smiled, and Jeremy blushed. “I n-n-never played favorites.”
Jeremy had short, spiked silver hair and wore small round glasses with black plastic frames. He had been my professor in the painting department at the Art Institute. We both liked to work late and eat meatball banh mi sandwiches from the Vietnamese fast-food place down the street, which wasn’t a restaurant so much as a building with a hole cut into the side that dispensed food. Everything came wrapped in wax paper and without enough napkins. We would spread out our dinners on the worktables in the studio and drink sodas from the machine chained to a pipe outside the side entrance. No one was waiting for me to come home, and I guessed no one was waiting for him, either. It was nice not to have to eat alone, and he was a good teacher. He was a better teacher than he was a painter. I sensed he knew that and didn’t mind it much.
“I did,” I said. “Jeremy was my favorite professor.”
The tips of the grass tickled the sides of my feet in my open sandals, and another waiter approached with more salmon. I took one and so did Mark. Jeremy waved him off.
“I haven’t said hello to everyone y-y-yet, and we’re about to have dinner.”
“Go on then,” said Mark, leaning over to kiss him. “I’ll talk to Clementine.”
Jeremy waved as he went and then threw his arms open to new arrivals. Mark watched him go. He looked young enough to be Jeremy’s son and handsome enough to get paid for it.
“What do you do?” I asked.
“Nothing to do with art.”
“Then keep talking to me,” I said.
“You don’t want to talk about art?” he asked. “You don’t want to pontificate on how the viewer’s experience completes your work? I could tell you how your latest piece was positively ovulating.”
He smiled. His teeth were as white as the tablecloths and glowed in the dim light of the candles and strings of fairy bulbs. It was distracting, and it felt like he was flirting with me. It might have been the sort of flirting that all very attractive people do as their way of moving through life. He could have been flirting to garner praise the way waiters work for tips. Or he could be a smarmy little shit.
“So what do you do really?” I asked.
“I’m a lawyer.”
Two strikes.
“Will you hold that against me?” he asked.
“Yes, but I will pretend I don’t because it’s your wedding night.”
I looked over his shoulder like I’d spotted someone, which I hadn’t.
“Please excuse me for a moment. It was wonderful to meet you and congratulations.”
“Jeremy is a wonderful man,” he said, slipping both hands into his pants pockets and crinkling the hem of his jacket in the process.
“Yes, he is.” Somehow my words came out sounding more like a threat, which I suppose they were.
I stepped away, picked up another glass of champag
ne from a tray and deposited the empty, and began wandering the tables, looking for my name card. People swirled around me in flowing dresses and gray and khaki slacks. Above the tree line, the spiral that topped the glass conservatory stood watch.
I found my card in the back third of tables. In the center was a small urn of white and cream flowers with long, spiky bits of greenery like uncut grass coming out the top.
“Oh, God, Clementine, did you hear? Oh, this is me.” Susan Kimball, a ceramic artist, held up her name card, which placed her two chairs over. “I think we’re having dinner soon,” she said. “All the nibbles have disappeared.”
Susan showed at the Contemporary, several blocks over from the Taylor. She made extremely large-scale pots with very narrow openings that looked to be melting the way chocolate does in bright sunlight. For a while, she’d been favoring greens and blues but had recently entered a warm period.
“Did I hear what?” I asked.
I looked around. The uniformed waiters had indeed evaporated, probably into the white tent tucked a discreet distance from the guests. I hoped there was more food in there—and champagne. I downed my second glass and set it next to my name.
“What happened at the Taylor. Surely they called you.”
Susan sank into her chair. I’d been seated not with the Art Institute group I had hoped for, many of whom had gone on to practical jobs involving cubicles and office baby showers, but at what looked to be the artists’ table, with a collector or two thrown in for our potential economic benefit. I recognized the name card to my left. He had bought something from me but not recently. I had the vague notion he worked in real estate. I would no doubt hear all about it tonight.
“No one called,” I said.
Some sort of staff member walked to the heat lamp behind us and relit it. Instantly the air was twenty degrees warmer, and the goose bumps on my arms relaxed. I let my wrap droop off my shoulders.
“Oh my God, it’s all anyone is talking about,” Susan said.
She leaned in toward me as though we weren’t entirely alone at the table. She’d pulled her brown hair into a messy knot at the nape of her neck, and there were small, shiny barrettes holding her bangs out of her eyes.
“They were vandalized. It was horrible.” Her eyes sparkled as if it were anything but. “They were showing Elaine’s work. You know Elaine. The vandals broke the front window late last night, threw paint on one of her pieces, and smashed it to bits. Can you believe it?”
I opened my mouth, but she went right on.
“I mean, is that art criticism or what—secretly we all just love it because, well, it’s a spectacle, and isn’t that what we’re all about, but also Elaine is such a you-know-what, and the work she was showing, I mean really, it’s so obvious, just hit the viewer over the head, why don’t you, it’s too bad for the Taylor, but on the other hand, you know what they say about all publicity being good publicity.” The whole spiel came out in one long sentence. “I even heard the guy who bought the piece was ecstatic. Thinks it’s worth more now.”
“Really?”
She nodded and took a simultaneous breath and a sip of her champagne.
Some sort of silent signal must have been given, because everyone was taking the seats around us.
“Personally,” Susan went on as people pulled out chairs and bumped into us and jostled the table, making the candles wobble and flicker, “I’m experimenting with luster right now. How about you?”
“I’m thinking about death.”
“Aren’t we all?” she said and laughed.
The arm of a waiter reached around and set a chilled white plate in front of me with a small pile of greens and one curl of Parmesan cheese.
23 Days
When I woke up, all my limbs felt a hundred times heavier than they did on other days, which was how I knew. Chuckles jumped up on the edge of the bed and picked his way on light paws up to my head. He bent down and sniffed my eyelashes. If I killed myself, I thought, before finding him a home, he’d probably start eating my body within a couple of days. That would be pretty gross.
My mind floated, or maybe it was sinking. I didn’t want to get up. Not then and possibly not ever. I did have to pee. I considered this from a distance, like it was someone else who had to pee and not me. How important was it to try to make it to the toilet when your limbs weighed five hundred pounds each? Wouldn’t it be better just to stay where you were?
Then someone knocked on my door.
I screwed up my eyebrows because that often made thinking easier, except today was one of those days, and nothing would be easy no matter what I did to my eyebrows. I really did need to make some sort of plan for my remains. That wasn’t something you wanted to trust Aunt Trudy with. Lord knew what could happen.
The knock came again, which meant it wasn’t some delivery person leaving a box. It also meant the main door downstairs had been left open for every tweaker and Jehovah’s Witness from here to Oxnard.
I opened my eyes, which took a supreme effort, and wished I’d remembered to train Chuckles to open the front door. He really wasn’t pulling his weight. I thought about that for a minute, while the addict-intruder-religious nut banged some more, and I decided not to pee on the mattress.
I went to the bathroom and avoided looking in the mirror the way a Hasid avoids Hustler before pouring out some cat chow for Chuckles. When I’d finished all that, the knocking was still there. I looked through the peephole and opened the door, wearing underpants and a tank top through which you could almost certainly see my nipples.
“So you’re alive.”
Carla’s hair was as short as hair could be and still be said to exist. It was nothing but a shadow over her chocolate-colored scalp. If you had a head as perfectly shaped and perched on as long a neck as she did, you might shave your head, too.
I didn’t respond.
“So are you having one of your artist’s moods or are you just rude?”
I wanted to go back to bed, and so I did. I just walked away from the door and left Carla standing there. I heard her come in a few moments after I collapsed in a heap. I heard the soft tap-tap-tap of her ballet-slippered feet across the floor. Even her footsteps were elegant.
She stopped before she got anywhere near the bed.
Chuckles meowed.
In the garage, someone activated the gate.
The air conditioner kicked on.
My arms and legs got heavier.
I started to forget Carla was there until I heard the shuffle of canvases. The pieces, my pieces, which were so much better than Elaine’s, were still lined up against the wall. I ignored her.
A while went by. Quite a while maybe. On days like today it was impossible to judge the passage of time. Minutes got stuck in tar and stopped moving. Eventually, I felt the mattress sink with Carla’s weight.
“I’m not going to press charges,” she said.
“Pin a rose on you.”
“How did it happen?”
I didn’t open my eyes. “With a lug wrench.”
“How did the art happen?”
I opened my eyes some but not all the way, so her form was a fuzzy black and brown shape in the near distance.
“Are you asking if I copied her or if she copied me?”
“Yes.”
“Fuck you.”
“Okay.”
“You knew and you didn’t tell me.” The programs for my show had been printed more than a week before.
She let a breath out. “It could have been a coincidence.”
“Bullshit.”
“It wasn’t our place.”
“How many crimes happen with that as the excuse?”
“Don’t blow this out of proportion.”
I considered punching her. Six months’ worth of work and my reputation were on the line. I was exactly in proportion. In fact, I wasn’t sure I’d done quite enough.
“Fuck you again, and you need to vet your assistants better.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It means you don’t send anyone from the gallery to my studio again.”
“I never have.”
“You did.”
“I didn’t.”
“She brought my check.”
“I send your checks certified mail. I keep the receipts.”
“Not this one.”
“When?”
“Six months ago.”
“I’ll look into it.”
“You do that.”
I heard the clatter of Chuckles’s tag as he scratched his neck with a back paw. The weight on the edge of the bed lifted, and Carla tap-tap-tapped to the other side of the room. I didn’t hear the door open. I wished it would. I wanted to be alone.
I heard the suction release as the refrigerator opened. That wasn’t the door I’d been thinking of.
“Do you know you have a blue chicken in here?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t think you should eat it.”
There were food noises. Cabinets were opened. Cutlery clattered on plates. There was the whish and purr of a gas burner sparking. Chuckles meowed. The air conditioner turned off. Whish purr clatter tap-tap-tap whish tap-tap-tap clatter. A car siren went off in the distance, and I started to fall asleep.
“Clementine.”
I woke up. Carla was still there, leaning over me and shaking my shoulder. I didn’t know what time it was.
“Clementine, you have to eat.”
Eating involved sitting up, and I didn’t want to sit up. Sitting up sounded like a lot of work.
Carla set a plate down on the nightstand, hooked a hand under each of my underarms, and hoisted. My butt dragged along the bed as she pulled me into a seated position. My underwear scooted down under my cheeks. She was frighteningly strong, and this seemed too personal. I didn’t have enough energy to struggle, so I scowled.
“Are you taking your medication?”
“No.”
“I figured. Eat this.”
My nose started to work. I smelled breakfast smells like in a diner. Pork fat. The unmistakable smell of pork fat. She set the plate on my lap. On it was a sandwich on toast with fried egg and strips of bacon and cheese melted on both slices like glue holding the whole thing together. I wasn’t hungry.
