Losing Clementine

by Ashley Ream

  I stayed there for a long time, even after the water cooled off and everything around me was the same ambient temperature. I thought about things in the vague way you can think about things when you’re at the bottom of the ocean and the pressure is deflating your lungs like a beach ball. I thought about Jenny. I thought about Richard. I thought about Jerry and Ramona and how much trouble it was to breathe all the time.

  3 Days

  I had taken five baths in two days. It was all I could manage to do. I sat in the tub watching the level of the water where it hit my boobs rise and fall a tiny bit with each breath. I stayed in there until my fingers shriveled and the water began to get bits of fuzz and other things floating in it. Then I got up and went back to bed. I no longer had a television, so I couldn’t even watch that. Sometimes I could hear the drone of the neighbor’s television. No actual words, but that was okay. I listened to it anyway, the rise and fall of conversation, the laugh track. I mostly slept. Sleep and soak. Sleep and soak. That morning I called the food delivery boy. I thought about making a joke—“No green bananas”—but I wasn’t up to it.

  I thought more about Jenny. I thought about Ramona. I thought about my mother. I thought about Jerry, but only in relation to the other three women, who were the ones who mattered to me. I had achieved nothing of what I wanted when I had gone to see him, and yet he felt like finished business.

  I worried about Jenny. I had fantasies of what it would’ve been like if I had known about her. I had nightmares about the things she might have said to Jerry and Charlene. I wondered why I had hired her in particular. Did I recognize something about her? Probably I did. She was talented, but so were a lot of the people I interviewed. What she was was organized, and I knew that I wasn’t. She yinged to my yang.

  She was also apparently a wily, sneaky, snakelike secret-keeper to my slobbering, open-book, black hole of emotional need, which is not a particularly fun thing to realize, not on either end.

  I wondered what I should do. I didn’t know. I felt as if my limbs had been sucked into the bed. I slept some more. When I woke up, it was dark. I thought maybe the black monster was distracted, his hand a little looser around my throat. The thought gave me enough courage to make myself a sandwich.

  The food got to my stomach and awakened it from the starvation coma I’d put it in for the past two days. It was angry, and it would not be assuaged by one mere sandwich. I emptied the bag the grocery boy had brought, which had been left sitting on the counter minus a small carton of orange juice I’d managed to shove in the fridge before returning to bed.

  Because I like to think of myself as generous, I’d ordered a couple of cans of wet food for Chuckles and a bag of catnip treats. I popped the top on the food, which brought Chuckles running out of the bathroom as if his fur were full of flaming ants. He catapulted his body up onto the counter and shoved his head into the can before I’d managed to remove the lid the whole way. We had a dispute about this. I argued that he would cut his face cramming it in there with that sharp edge still exposed. He argued that I was a miserable excuse for a human being and an owner and perhaps I might like to kiss his fluffy white ass. I won but only by virtue of height. I held the can up above my head to peel the lid free while Chuckles stood on his hind feet and tried to scale my chest. He got as far as one foot on my chin before I got it open and set it down for him. He gave a meow to complain about the tardy service and then shoved his face into it. As his face was wide and flat and the can small, there were a few minor physics problems to be worked out, but he overcame them with sheer determination and a lack of dignity.

  I reacted similarly to a bag of Fritos and a banana Whoopie Pie, which I didn’t know still existed. Aunt Trudy used to bring them back with her by the case when she traveled with Bob on his business trips. I would sneak them, which would lead to loud screeches of “Who stole my Whoopie?!” which is just as funny as it sounds. It was one of the few bright spots of my years with them. Maybe there had been more. I wished I could remember.

  “Who stole my Whoopie?” I asked Chuckles.

  He didn’t get it, but then again he had ground-up tuna meal not suitable for human consumption in his fur. So, you know.

  I took the bag of chips and another pie with me to my worktable along with Chuckles’s catnip treats. He didn’t show much interest in them until I opened the bag. He wasn’t used to getting treats but seemed to have some sort of ingrained desire for them lodged in his lizard brain. No doubt it lived next to the neurons that demanded he chase and consume any bug that got into the studio, no matter how poisonous the insect or how painful the subsequent vomiting. I wasn’t judging. My lizard brain did that with tequila.

  I gave him a nip treat and went back to work on what I was calling American Centaur. The sketching was already done. It had the body of a cow—a castrated bull, really—and the torso and head of the Marlboro Man. I started mixing paint.

  2 Days

  By dawn, I’d finished the human bits. I filled in the shirt checks with small bits of red and blue I’d cut from my magazine collection. I’d redrawn the hands and face, so Marlboro Man was reaching up to tip his hat, and had painted in the skin. I didn’t have what I wanted for the body of the bull, so I left it and concentrated on the background. I filled in a dilapidated barn that included a side covered in advertising I’d pulled from my vintage magazines. I liked it so much I looked for other places to put bits of discarded consumerism, then doubted myself and peeled them back off. I cut and pasted until my eyes blurred.

  Chuckles, full of half the bag of treats, had long since passed the point at which he could be bribed for company and had found a corner to sleep it off. I put down my brushes and did the same.

  There was a Barcalounger with the footrest flipped up in the courtyard. It looked like it had been rained on, which was only one of the indignities it had suffered. The building was two stories tall with a center island of grass onto which all the front doors faced.

  “I didn’t pay you better than this?” I asked when Jenny opened the door.

  “It’s rent-controlled.”

  She was wearing blue-and-white-striped pajama bottoms and a light blue tank top, the same blue as UCLA’s colors. UCLA was just a few blocks away. I was wearing a blue tank top, too, but mine was navy and covered with cat hair. I’d forced Chuckles into an undesired fifteen-second cuddle session before I’d left the house. I’d also given him another can of wet food that smelled as if something had died under the baseboards. He’d bitten me on the hand. I appreciated the irony. He did not.

  Jenny’s arms were crossed over her chest. She wasn’t wearing a bra and didn’t need one. I didn’t like to think I did, either, but now that I was comparing, maybe I did. Maybe time and gravity had taken their toll. Her feet were bare. The toenails had been painted black, but it was chipping. She curled them under when she caught me looking at them.

  We stood there having ourselves what you call an awkward pause.

  “How angry are you?” she finally asked when I’d outwaited her.

  “Angry is just one of the many things I am,” I said.

  “You look like hell.”

  “Sweet of you to notice.”

  “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. I’m worried you don’t look good. Did you have a bad night?”

  “I worked all night. I didn’t sleep much. Are you going to ask me to come in or should we continue this inquisition on the chair out here?”

  “Homeless people sleep on that,” she said and stepped aside.

  I’d never been to Jenny’s apartment before. She had been my assistant. She had become my caretaker, and if you had asked me, I would’ve said she was my friend. I wasn’t sure now that that was ever really true. It had been, in retrospect, an upstairs/downstairs relationship. I hadn’t meant for that to be the case, and I felt some twinge of guilt that it was so. She knew almost everything there was to know about me, and I knew very little—and as it turned out even less than I thought—about
her.

  “Do you want something to drink?” she asked.

  “I think I better,” I said. “It’s gonna be a long day.”

  “I’m supposed to meet some friends for lunch,” she said.

  “Cancel it.”

  There it went. Upstairs/downstairs. Or maybe now big sister/little sister. Bully/victim.

  In any case, she didn’t object. “I have soda. Mexican Coke.”

  “The best kind.”

  Mexican Coke comes in a glass bottle so thick and solid it’s fifty-fifty whether or not it will break if you drop it on the sidewalk, which is only part of what makes it great. The rest is the real sugar that flavors it. No corn syrup. It’s sweeter than American Coke with no aftertaste. It goes great with the kind of salsa that leaves a capsaicin burn down the back of your throat.

  The front door of Jenny’s apartment opened directly into the living room, which was less than ten feet long. I sat on the sofa squeezed in there and looked around. There was no dining area, which was fine as she didn’t seem to own a table. The kitchen was to the right and just big enough for a refrigerator, sink, and stove. There was hardly any counter space, and the stove wasn’t full-size. I doubted she could’ve fit a cookie sheet inside it. Her microwave was equally miniature and balanced on a small bar that formed the room’s boundary. No wonder she cooked at my place.

  There was one door that led into the single bedroom, and somewhere in there must’ve been a bathroom. I imagined it was no bigger than the airplane toilet I’d used a few days before. There was art on the walls that I would’ve bet was hers, but from art school days, not recent. She could do better.

  All in all, it was a few steps above Irish William’s rented room but not many, and it made me wonder about what life was like for young people in this city. Maybe it was too hard and wasn’t good for them. Then I felt old for thinking the words young people. My first apartment in New York hadn’t had a single closet, and the water sometimes ran brown out of the taps.

  Jenny took the only other seat, a small rocking chair. It was next to a television the size of her microwave, which was sitting atop a folding TV tray meant for eating frozen dinners. She pulled her feet up into the seat with her and was waiting for me to take the lead.

  I watched her face. Jerry had looked like Ramona, but Jenny did not. She favored her mother’s side, which was both a relief and a little sad. “So tell me,” I said.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Everything I don’t.”

  She looked overwhelmed by the question. I could understand that. The amount of things about my own family—or at least a small part of it—that she knew and I didn’t went back twenty years. Then again, the things I knew about her family—or at least a small part of it—went back twice that long.

  “Mom told me when I went to art school.”

  “So I hear.”

  “I wanted to just call you up, but she told me about your mom and your sister. She said I couldn’t, that you wouldn’t want anything to do with me. I understood.” She said that last part as though apologizing to me for bringing up my moral failing, my inability to forgive something I’d never had the opportunity to decide if I wanted to forgive or not. “But I was still, you know, curious. After graduation, I decided to come out to L.A. I went to the Taylor just to see your stuff in person. Carla was there. She was the one who told me you needed an assistant.”

  Of course she did.

  “It was like fate,” Jenny said.

  “It was fate mixed with intention and manipulation.”

  Jenny found a loose string on the hem of her pants and twirled it around her finger. “Dad stopped speaking to me for six months.”

  Perhaps she was suggesting I punish her similarly, as though I were a parent saying to her child, “What do you think I should do about this?” And the child knows that whatever the punishment is, it will end, and she will be loved again as before. Clean slate.

  It was my day for feeling old. That was for sure. I’d gone years without really thinking about our age difference, not really. Instead I’d thought about the difference in our experience. I had more connections, more shows, longer to hone my skills, to work through the parrot phase where every artist tries to paint like someone more famous. But what all of that really meant was that I was just a lot older.

  So I told her about Ramona.

  I told her because I knew more than she did.

  I told her about the time I got sent to the principal’s office for punching Kyle Streeter, who made fun of my sister for crying on the playground after our dad left.

  I told her about the pet rabbit we had—God, did it smell bad—and the time Ramona tried to make it sleep in her bed with her, which only lasted as long as it took for our mother to come investigate the squealing.

  I told her that Ramona’s grades were always better than mine, that she was nicer than I was, so nice she shared her Halloween candy with me even though I almost never shared mine, unless you counted the kinds I didn’t like, like Smarties, which taste like stomach medicine.

  I told her all the little things I could remember, which weren’t nearly enough. Thirty years was a long time for memories to fade, until what you had were the memories of memories. They weren’t always reliable. It was like a game of telephone you played with yourself. But I told her what I could, because Ramona was Jenny’s sister, too.

  “And then she died,” I said, which was enough.

  “Would she have been an artist, too?”

  “No. She would’ve been something much more important. She would’ve saved the world.”

  “Maybe she would’ve cured your cancer.”

  “She absolutely would have,” I agreed.

  I thought we might end there on that note. If I had written the script, we would have.

  “What about your mom?” Jenny asked. “What was she like?”

  “Overwhelmed,” I said.

  “Is it true that—”

  “Yes.”

  I got up from the couch and set my empty Coke bottle on the floor next to a pile of DVDs.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Church,” I said.

  “Why?” It came blurting out of her, and she looked as if she wished the words were on a string she could pull back into her mouth. I often felt that way, and I needed a very long string.

  “I heard they keep God there.”

  “It’s a rumor.”

  “Smart mouth,” I said, sounding like my mother. “You need to start painting again.” I nodded at an orange abstract landscape above her head. “That’s old.”

  She looked up at it as if its presence offended her.

  “The Essex Gallery will still do that show,” I said.

  “They won’t. I don’t have anything for it. I already told them.”

  “Call them back. Use my name. They’ll wait for a little while. Not too long. Get something for it.”

  “It’s not that easy.”

  “It’s not supposed to be easy.”

  I went toward the door. Hugging her would be the thing to do, make a nice memory for her, for me as long as it lasted. I could put a nice punctuation mark on it except that I couldn’t. She’d still hidden from me, lied to me, all but lived in my space under a false identity. It was what it was, and it couldn’t be undone.

  There is a big cathedral downtown, newly built. It seats thousands, hosts dignitaries, features the finest of everything: modern art chandeliers; a sleek, minimalist baptismal font; even a tapestry all the teenagers think looks like Jesus giving John a blow job. There are landmark street signs pointing the way to the cathedral just like the Hollywood Bowl. There is valet parking on holidays because when God takes a rest he most certainly doesn’t worry about parking. They hid all the stained glass in the crypts, and the whole damn place is fourteen shades of beige as though it were decorated by the people in charge of making office cubicles. It is a place not of personal prayer but of collective showing off, and that i
s not where I went.

  The church I went to was surrounded by eight-foot chain-link fencing and stood on a corner lot next to a bodega. Across the street one way was a Mexican seafood restaurant specializing in whole fried fish. Across the street the other way were a hair salon and a lingerie shop specializing in crotchless underpants and nurses’ uniforms.

  The inside smelled like church. That smell hasn’t changed and will never change as long as people pick up and go somewhere to pray. It was hospital disinfectant, old books, and incense. There was a community bulletin board at the entrance with reminders about drives for the food bank and Sunday school hours, which I didn’t stop to read. There was even a carafe of coffee with a stack of Styrofoam cups sitting on a small, rickety table. I did not have any, but I did touch it just to see if it was hot. It wasn’t.

  I went through the interior doors to the nave, crossed myself, and sat. They had not hidden the stained glass in the basement here. Afternoon light filtered through the primary colors. The infant Jesus’s face was painted onto a beige circle of glass, giving him a flat, cave-painting look. He lay naked in Mary’s arms with a halo hovering above both their heads. His sex was hidden by a falling piece of fabric, and she had robes of red and blue. He grew up from window to window, gathering apostles, performing miracles, and hanging in permanent crucifixion, agony etched on his flattened face. There was a window for every season, every age, birth to death in pictures.

  I wasn’t alone. This small church next to the fishnet stocking emporium was one of the few perpetual adoration congregations left. It wouldn’t last. The women who came to pray in shifts over the Blessed Sacrament would not live forever or even much longer. They seemed to get older with each passing moment. There was no one to replace them. Even a priest could not be had for the asking. The confessionals were closed.