Losing Clementine

by Ashley Ream

  I worked fast and ate Twinkies. Twinkies are the sort of thing you can eat a lot of because they don’t taste like anything except eventually of chemically altered lard. Still, you can push right past that and keep going.

  After my shower, I’d gone online and ordered groceries to be delivered for the first time. I should’ve started doing that years before. It was a revelation. I almost couldn’t believe it when the kid with the shaved head actually showed up at the door carrying the bags of food. And by food, I mean junk. But still, there he was holding exactly what I had decided I’d wanted a mere two hours before. It was like magic. It must’ve been how Benjamin Franklin felt the first time his kite got hit by lightning.

  I ate the butt end of a snack cake and shoved the cellophane wrapper over into the pile of cellophane wrappers. Chuckles, too, had scarfed his breakfast before demanding and receiving a refill. The sun came through all the windows like God rays, and dust motes danced in the light like fairy sparkles. I tore into another magazine on the hunt for more flesh to strip. Everything seemed to be happening at time and a half, even the banging on my door.

  “It’s open,” I yelled, unwilling to stop cutting out the dark, thin thighs of a preschool-age child from the background of a shantytown.

  Carla came in. Her nearly shaved head shone in the reflected God rays, but that was the only shining she was doing. The invisible crown she usually wore had slipped, and the film of impassivity across her face had dissolved.

  “You could not be contacted for comment.”

  “If you’re going to come to my studio, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t speak in non sequiturs like the goddamn Cheshire Cat.”

  Carla’s long straight skirt whished around her thin ankles as she crossed the hardwood floor. She laid a newspaper next to my pile of wrappers and picked up one of the pieces of cellophane, the inside smeared with stuck bits of sponge cake.

  “How many of these have you eaten?”

  She pawed through the pile, which crinkled under her hand, and started counting.

  I shrugged and pushed the cellophane out of her reach.

  “What do you want?”

  She dragged her eyes away from the wrappers and pushed the newspaper closer to me. It was neatly folded the way businessmen on subways hold their papers and open to the front of the arts section. There was a photograph of me taken the year before at a museum event next to a photograph of Elaine Sacks, which, judging from the shrunken state of her crow’s-feet, had been taken much longer ago than that.

  Plagiarism at the Taylor?

  I picked it up, and my glue-coated fingers stuck to the thin newsprint. The article took most of the top half, leaving nothing but a narrow column on the right for a write-up of the philharmonic’s financial woes. I sat down on the blue stool pulled up to the worktable and read the entire thing, including the photo captions. My name was all over it and so was Jenny’s. She was quoted. I could not be reached for comment. Carla had talked in art-speak about aesthetic trends that could be seen across the work of many artists during a given period. Elaine denied all knowledge of me and my work, implying we’d hardly met. The vandalism got prominent mention but wasn’t attributed to me, nor did the reporter say that Elaine’s cheating, copycat ways had led the unknown perpetrator to his or her crimes.

  When I was done, I folded it up and handed it back to Carla—also without comment.

  “I’ve been asked to resign in two weeks. Mr. Taylor thinks two weeks is an appropriate time frame,” she said.

  I no more cared about what John Taylor thought than I cared when he took a shit.

  “Thanks for letting me know.”

  Carla’s skull looked even more perfectly formed than usual. It was smooth all around without any of the usual lumps and bumps, and it sat on a neck at least 25 percent longer than an average neck. It was longer today than before. I was almost certain of it. In fact, everything about her was elongated: her hands, her fingers, her legs, her feet. I couldn’t believe I’d never noticed how much like a Steven Spielberg alien she looked.

  “So I guess you win,” she said.

  I blinked.

  “I win what?”

  “You got what you wanted. I’ve been punished.”

  It’s strange when you discover someone is attributing to you feelings and motives and a whole level of involvement you don’t have. “That’s not what I wanted.”

  I got up from the stool, taking the cutout leg with me to the canvas. I spread glue over the paint, placed the paper, and brushed more glue on top of it, careful not to cause any wrinkles or bubbles. Carla watched. When I was done, I set the brush down and took a quick step back to make sure I was happy with it.

  “The gallery would appreciate it if you would say something publicly to make it clear this is a dispute between you and Elaine and not with us.”

  I wasn’t happy with the leg. I stepped forward and peeled the piece off the canvas with the sharp end of a sewing needle, rotated it three degrees and pressed it back down.

  “No,” I said.

  “No, what?”

  “No, I won’t make a statement.”

  Carla sat down on the blue stool and leaned both elbows on the worktable. She looked as if her head was wearing out her neck and she might like to lay it down someplace, maybe right there. She was in danger of getting paint, glue, and Twinkie crumbs on her shirt, but I figured she’d been around enough artists’ studios to know that on her own.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s not true, and I don’t want to. Besides I’m on a deadline.”

  “We’re not responsible for what our artists do.”

  I was not in the mood to argue the point. In fact, I was more in the mood to throw some teapots out the window, and I was fresh out of teapots. So I asked her to leave—just like that, and it was very satisfying.

  The advantage other major cities have and the reason L.A.’s museums will always be in a state of turmoil is that we are so damn unwilling to share. Every billionaire wants a building with his name on it in which to hang his pictures and only his pictures, and they all think they have a collection worthy of isolation. None of them do, of course, but it doesn’t matter. Rather than enriching the holdings of the public museums, whole edifices have risen following the death of each megalomaniac, each building holding a thousand mediocre paintings and two or three good ones. This has made art patronage inefficient for the masses. The only upside is for the artists. With those acres and acres of white walls multiplying exponentially with each funeral, museum directors have had to do something.

  I parked in a loading zone and stood in front of the two-story plate glass windows that fronted the lobby of the Walton Museum of Art. I sign all my pieces with my first name, and there it was across the window, just as if I had written it. The C alone—the only really legible part—was a story and a half, and the T’s crossbar stretched forty feet. Below, in red, it said:

  Clementine Pritchard

  1990–2005

  Only in art can that be the years not of birth and death but of the retrospective’s scope. They weren’t bad years as far as years go, but I didn’t spend much time thinking about them or looking at the work I’d done. Mostly because it was painful. I’d do it all differently now.

  This particular stretch of West Los Angeles is populated by silver, mirrored skyscrapers that buzz with lawyers during the day and empty of all but the Hispanic cleaning crews at night. Twenty-four-hour traffic on the 405 two blocks away hummed overhead while street-level gridlock inched and honked along. I walked around the other side of the building, which took up a whole city block, and entered through the gate.

  The courtyard with its bamboo garden is open to the public and at lunchtime is populated by paralegals with brown bags eating their ham and cheese while their bosses order the octopus salad from white-clad waiters in fancy restaurants. The courtyard is nicer, and I have a feeling the paralegals know it. The bamboo canes stretch almost to the roof of the three-story bui
lding, getting narrower and narrower the higher they climb. Any slight breeze sways them and bangs them together like wind chimes. It’s the only noise that really drowns out the freeway.

  I skipped the gift shop and took the outdoor staircase to the second-floor exhibition space. The signature and tagline from the front windows were repeated on the freestanding white wall that greeted visitors. I slipped in past the guard, despite not wearing an ENTRY FEE PAID sticker, and started the tour.

  The curator had arranged things more or less chronologically, so I was zoomed back in time twenty years. I’d used more paint then and fewer magazines or other modern media. I’d cut heavy black mat board into silhouettes and made years of work that looked like Indonesian shadow-puppet shows.

  I didn’t know as much then. My technique wasn’t as good, and that needled me. I was making just enough to keep the lights on and food in the pantry.

  This was the first time I’d seen the exhibit. You’d think someone from the museum would’ve called me for a consult or something, but they hadn’t. I was invited to the closing-night party. There was going to be a DJ and a cash bar. I’d get free drink tickets if I were going to be around then, which I wasn’t. The exhibit would be open another two months. I hoped someone else got to use my drink tickets.

  I wandered into the second room and watched other people look at my work. There was a young couple, maybe even still teenagers. Students, I guessed, from nearby UCLA. Maybe art majors. Or philosophy. Something that scared the shit out of their parents. She wore cutoff denim shorts with long threads dangling from the unfinished hems and shredded, opaque tights underneath. He wore a black scarf despite its being summer and had tied it just so. Very Parisian. Very gay. They held hands and looked at things slowly. A middle-aged woman with short, cropped gray hair sat on the bench in the middle of the room. I sat next to her. She wore glasses with large red frames that matched her clogs. I’d have bet anything she donated to PBS and NPR both. She didn’t move around at all, just stared at the one or two pieces in front of her with much less absorption than the kids. Maybe her feet hurt. Maybe she’d given up pretending to take art that seriously. I could respect either of those things.

  This room went up to the late nineties. I was using a lot more color and had obviously been spending way too much time thinking about Basquiat. I’d even experimented with words—cutout words—in the pieces. Not all of them made sense even to me. It was a little William Burroughs that way. I’d been doing a lot of coke back then, which meant three-quarters of the work had been done at four o’clock in the morning with blackout curtains pulled shut against the impending dawn. Coke did interesting things during my more manic periods.

  I scooted closer to the woman and followed her line of sight.

  Detroit No. 4

  I remembered that series. I’d done a dozen of them. All with lots of blazing reds and oranges, with black and brown paper and newsprint. The destruction of manual labor, of industry in the U.S. Everything looked like it was burning, which it was supposed to. I’d cut a story out of the Times on plant closures and stuck parts of it all over the place, layering a bit of thinned paint over it, so you could just, if you tried, make out some of the words. I’d gone in with permanent marker on some of the paper and drawn right on it, colored in sections with it. It didn’t look as good as I remembered.

  I stood up, crossed right in front of the woman, maybe even blocked her view, to squint at it a little closer. I hadn’t seen Detroit No. 4 or its siblings since I sold them ten years before. The black wasn’t as black as it used to be. I got closer to check.

  Nope, definitely not.

  It bugged me. It looked old, faded, dying. It made my palms and the bottoms of my feet itch. Had the damn thing been hanging in front of a window?

  I flipped open my bag and dug around. I kept all sorts of things in there for emergencies. Scissors and baggies and even one plastic glove for any crap I wanted to pull out of the gutter and take home to Jenny for storage. I also had a permanent marker. It was big and fat and smelled like it would get you high, which was always the sign of a good art supply.

  I took it out, yanked it open, took a good whiff, and leaned in close to make the touch-ups. I concentrated hard, my other hand holding the piece steady. It wasn’t as big as some of my later work, and I didn’t want it to wiggle.

  The thing about art—the thing you must understand if you ever buy a real piece of it—is that it never belongs to you. Not really. It’s always going to belong to the artist. I don’t care what your insurance company says, which is exactly what I said to the guard who bum-rushed me.

  Thank-fucking-God, I’d pulled my marker up from the canvas when he hit me. If the tip had left a wiggled line like a stock market crash down-down-down to the bottom corner, I would’ve kicked him to death, I swear it.

  “Don’t resist. Don’t resist.”

  The guard, who was young enough to be someone I’d babysat, was straddling my hips and had his forearm across my neck. I don’t know if they taught him that in museum guard school, but it was a shitty plan. I brought my elbow back to the floor and punched him square in the nose. He made a yelp like a coyote pup and put both hands to his face. I was struggling to sit up and looking for a nice fleshy spot for another blow when the whole museum goon squad came running in, their orthopedic shoes slapping on the marble floor.

  “Vandal!” the woman in the red glasses shrieked, pointing at me in case things weren’t clear enough. “Vandal! Vandal!”

  I was really starting not to like her, and if the goons hadn’t dragged me off the floor and out from under Officer Friendly by my armpits, I might have let her have it, too.

  Two guards had my wrists and were pinning them behind my back, up between my shoulder blades. Junior, one hand still on his nose, bent down to pick up my bag and paw through it.

  “Take out my ID,” I said to him. “Read it. I’m Clementine Pritchard. That’s my painting.”

  “That painting belongs to the museum,” said one of the guys behind me, this one closer to my age.

  “Actually,” I said, “it’s on loan.”

  I couldn’t help it. Authority makes me lippy. He squeezed my wrist tighter and pushed it up higher until my shoulder ached, and I wanted to bite someone.

  The kid fumbled with my wallet like zippers were new to him before getting it open and my driver’s license out. He squinted at it and then held it up for the others to see. There I was at the DMV two years before, looking a little haggard and pissed off, probably a lot like right then. My name and address were right next to the photo, clear as a California day.

  I thought I felt the field level out, but that could’ve been my imagination.

  “Is she really Clementine Pritchard?” the woman asked.

  The guard on my left scowled at her and didn’t answer. I tried to blow a piece of hair out of my face.

  “What do we do?” Junior asked.

  “We follow protocol. This doesn’t change anything.”

  “She is Clementine Pritchard!” the woman exclaimed. “Oh, I just love your paintings. I have been here three times this week.”

  Without closing it up, the kid shoved my wallet back in the bag. “We should call the director.”

  “Fine.” The two guys behind me shoved, and I skittered forward.

  I wanted the hair out of my face, so I could see. But the guards were too busy giving me Indian burns on both wrists to let me do any grooming. Through the veil of black tresses, I saw the kid in the gay scarf flash me a thumbs-up. I gave him a chin bob back.

  “I’m sorry I called you a vandal!” the woman shouted as they steered me out of the exhibit.

  “This is a very unusual situation.”

  The museum’s director was wearing a dark gray suit, a white shirt, and a light gray tie. When they say everyone looks better in black-and-white, they mean photos. He looked a little sallow, nothing a blue sweater couldn’t have fixed.

  I didn’t know what to say to that. T
hings had been pretty unusual around me for a while. It sort of depended on your perspective.

  “I called the Shipleys, who kindly loaned us the painting.”

  I had told the creep it was a loan.

  “And they’ve been very understanding. They’ve decided to accept your”—he paused and made a flittering hand gesture—“touch-ups as an improvement by the artist.”

  “They are. It was fading. You should tell them to stop hanging it by the window.”

  He gave me a closed-lip smile as if he were indulging a child. “I think I’ll let them make their own call on that one.”

  He leaned back in his chair behind the long, shallow blond wood desk. It was entirely free of ornament and clutter, an homage to modernism if I ever saw one. I leaned back, too, and laced my fingers across my stomach. Larry, Moe, and Curly had long since been dismissed. The whole thing had taken several hours, during which I’d been locked alone inside the employee break room. They’d taken my bag, so I didn’t have any change for the candy machine, which sucked.

  I hadn’t been invited up to the office on the third floor until my identity was verified and several phone calls had been made, one of which was to the Shipleys on their window-filled estate.

  No harm, no foul, I thought. I was starting to wonder why we were both still sitting there, eyeing each other with polite interest.

  He leaned forward. I didn’t. His hair was thick and full and the sort of dark brown they always show on do-it-yourself hair color commercials. It was so perfect, in fact, that it made me wonder if it wasn’t a very, very good wig.

  “I’d like to turn a negative into a positive here.”

  I bounced a knee. I feel about corporate-speak the way I feel about authority. Bitey.

  “I’d like,” he went on, “to add a nice footnote to tomorrow’s news story.”

  Ah. That’s why I hadn’t been turned out on my keester.