An Unexpected Grace

by Kristin von Kreisler

  With his eyes, Rich pinned her wings to cotton. “Is there anything you haven’t told us, Lila?”

  She didn’t like the familiar way he’d used her name—or the implication she was holding something back. But, then, maybe she was. Since Rich and Joe’s last visit, she’d been thinking about something she should have told them – not that it made any difference, but she needed to be open and honest.

  Lila sat up straighter, took a breath. “Yuri Makov called and asked me out once. I turned him down. We talked for two minutes, and that was the end of it. He never called again.”

  Rich cleared his throat. Joe widened his eyes as if Lila had just confirmed his suspicions. On the sofa he leaned toward her so he looked like he was about to lunge. She backed farther into her chair.

  “Did he call before or after the valentine?” Joe demanded.

  “After.”

  “So the relationship was getting to be a bigger deal to him,” he said. “Why didn’t you tell us this a week ago?”

  “The call meant nothing. It was as unimportant as the valentine.”

  “Makov obviously liked you.”

  “If he did, it was all one-sided. I hardly ever talked with him.”

  Joe’s caterpillar eyebrows arched. He thrummed his pudgy fingers on the sofa’s arm. “One of your colleagues claimed Makov hung around outside your office. She thought he was waiting for you.”

  Lila felt sullied that anyone would suggest that. “I didn’t see him hanging around.”

  “Never?” Joe demanded.

  “Well, maybe once in a while. I didn’t think anything of it. He was cleaning the hall,” Lila said. “What colleague told you that?”

  “She asked us not to use her name,” Rich said.

  “Because she’s wrong. Yuri Makov would only have been there to vacuum.” Surely that’s true. But what if it isn’t?

  Like Joe, Rich moved forward so he was barely sitting on the sofa cushion. The sun in his smile had set. “We’re gonna ask you straight out . . . Were you and Makov having an affair?”

  “No! Honestly!” Saliva gathered on Lila’s tongue. Her mouth tasted like tin. “How can you ask me that?”

  “It’s a logical question,” Rich said.

  “It makes my skin crawl.” She pressed her unhurt arm against her stomach.

  “An affair’s no crime. Admit it. We need to wrap up this case,” Joe said.

  “I’m sure there’s some other explanation for what he did. It can’t have anything to do with me. I’ve told you I hardly knew him.” How many times did she have to say that to make them believe her?

  “You’re sure you never went out with him?” Joe asked.

  “Positive.”

  “Ever meet him away from the office?” Joe asked.

  “Never.”

  “Ever flirt with him?” Rich asked.

  “Of course not.” The points of thumbtacks protruded from Lila’s words.

  The men’s questions made her writhe as if she were guilty of something, when she insisted to herself that she’d done nothing wrong. Yet she couldn’t shake the excruciating questions: What if she’d played an unintended role in Yuri’s shooting everybody? Could that be possible?

  As these questions lingered in Lila’s mind, she wished she’d never asked them. And she was angry at Joe and Rich for even suggesting she might be responsible for what Yuri Makov had done. As she told herself she wasn’t to blame, she squeezed the club chair’s arm. Her face flushed, and a bead of sweat trickled down her spine.

  Rich and Joe watched her with hard-set faces. For a long, silent moment, they let her hang in the wind.

  “Okay,” Rich finally said, looking as dark and mistrustful as Joe. “There’s no point wasting more time here, but we want you to do some serious thinking about what was going on between you and Makov.”

  “I told you, there was nothing. And if there was, it would have been in his head.” Lila wanted the men to leave. Desperate for a cool, clean breath of air, she gripped the chair’s arm tighter and said politely, “I’m sorry I can’t help you more.”

  “You could if you wanted.” Joe’s eyes were hooded with suspicion again.

  “I’m sure this case is hard for you.”

  “You could put it that way,” Rich said. He and Joe got up and headed toward the door. “We may be back.”

  I hope not. “Fine.”

  Lila locked the deadbolt behind them. Usually a healthy eater, she hurried to the kitchen for some reassuring chocolate chip cookies that Cristina had left in the freezer. As Lila took a bite, Grace lay under the table and turned her face toward the wall to avoid eye contact. Lila could have offered her one of Adam’s biscuits, but she was tired of trying so hard to be nice to everybody.

  As much as Lila wanted to learn about Yuri Makov, she’d had enough of him for one day. Instead of returning to the computer, she went to the deck and, exhausted, flopped down on the white canvas chaise lounge.

  Clouds had blown in and covered the sun. In a bay tree by the street, blue jays were squawking the way they do when the weather is about to change. Wind swayed the redwoods and unsettled them to their roots. Nothing seemed soothing.

  As Lila rested her head against the pillow and festered over Rich and Joe’s questions, she felt a stirring of the members of her mental family, the facets of herself who lived, like relatives, inside her head. Sometimes they presented themselves as characters in her imagination, and the first one to appear on that distressing afternoon was her Crazy Aunt, whom Lila rarely let out of her mental attic because she was angry and out of control, as most women were taught not to be.

  She roared into Lila’s thoughts in her bashed Ford Explorer and bared her tobacco-stained teeth. Her bleached hair was cut in a Mohawk, a safety pin pierced her earlobe, and the head of a fourpenny nail stuck out from the middle of her forehead.

  Those cops are fools. You don’t have to take their garbage, she bellowed. Your life is a screwed-up mess because of Yuri Makov, and they’re trying to make you take the rap. That’s ridiculous! It’s time for you to rip out their hearts! Lila’s Crazy Aunt snarled like a dog gone mad, and her safety pin quivered.

  Her brief, furious outburst in Lila’s mind was a clue to how tired she was of being civil when she didn’t feel civil. She wanted to fight back against the men who had caused her grief—Yuri, those policemen, Reed, and even Adam Spencer for saddling her with Grace.

  Admitting her anger forced Lila to take an unflinching look at another mental-family member, diametrically opposed to her Crazy Aunt and instilled in her by her mother, who had valued graciousness. That mental-family member was the Pleaser, the part of Lila who pranced around in a pink jumpsuit and lavender tennies, blowing bubbles and handing out roses on street corners. Eager for no one’s feathers to be ruffled and awkward situations to be smoothed, she controlled social interactions by lubricating others’ rusty feelings and ensuring that everyone was happy. She had taken Grace without protest and been polite to Rich and Joe. She soothed and cosseted people so they felt comfortable and liked her—a way to dodge conflict and keep relations on an even keel.

  Maybe she had soothed and cosseted Yuri Makov. Shrinking back, Lila told herself that couldn’t be. But maybe it could.

  Lila retreated to the bedroom, where Grace was hiding under the bed. If she decided to wriggle out and bite Lila, she could run into the bathroom and lock the door.

  Grace’s leg was sticking out from under the bed skirt like an errant drumstick that had fallen from the ceiling. Her foot was bent back at an odd angle, and her paws’ pads resembled a fedora hat’s gray felt. Her nails curled down like commas written with a black, felt-tip pen; wisps of gold fur stuck out between her toes. If Lila had found Grace’s leg on display in an art gallery, it would have interested, not threatened her.

  Lila stepped over Grace’s foot, and in the middle of the day she climbed into bed and pulled the covers over her ears. Now she and Grace were stacked on top of each other with a mattr
ess between them, double-decker refugees from the world.

  11

  “Come on, Grace.” Standing by the open back door, Lila pointed to the yard.

  Under the claw-footed kitchen table, where Grace had been keeping her distance all morning, she blinked at Lila as if she were addressing her in Coptic.

  “You need to go out.” Lila pointed again. But after ordering Grace to eat and getting no response, Lila didn’t expect the dog to carry out her wishes. “Look, I want to paint. I’m going to sit at that table. Nothing personal, but I refuse to get so close to your teeth.”

  Grace rested her chin on her paws, closed her eyes, and announced that she did not intend to interrupt her morning lounging.

  Refusing to let her Pleaser bow to a dog, Lila snapped her fingers. “Out.”

  Probably tired of being nagged, Grace limped through the kitchen, out the back door, and down the steps toward the tree ferns. Lila was ready to start a watercolor study of the first painting in Openings, her oil series of windows, gates, and doors. She pulled a chair to the table and told herself to focus, as she’d never have been able to do if Grace’s teeth had remained under the table.

  Today’s painting would be of clouds through Cristina’s kitchen window. But unlike René Magritte’s fluffy white clouds, the ones in the sky that morning were stormy and dark. Thor was up there, swinging his hammer and thirsting for a fight, as lightning and thunder gathered to express themselves. Maybe Lila was drawn to the clouds because they reflected her dark, hostile grudge against Yuri Makov.

  She fumbled with a roll of masking tape and anchored corners of paper to her pine watercolor board. Then she sketched the kitchen window’s rectangle with a soft-lead pencil that made a comforting scratching sound. She unscrewed the caps of crimson, black, and Prussian blue paint tubes and squeezed pea-size lumps of watercolor on her palette—and the kitchen filled with an earthy smell of hope. When she dipped her brush in a mason jar of water, the handle clinked against the glass, as cheerful as a ringing bell. She sloshed water on her palette, pushed in small amounts of paint, and mixed till she had swirls of interesting colors.

  As Lila slid her brush’s bristles across the rough watercolor paper and painted a delicate trail of purple wash, she slipped into the vast, exquisite world of creativity and listened for the urgings that would tell her where to put on color and what to leave alone. Her inner guide nudged her to layer on more purple and show the clouds’ dark mood, but leave contrasting patches of the paper white to define shapes. Finally, after more dabbing and swishing with her brush, she spritzed on water to haze the clouds’ edges, and a cool mist blew in her face.

  For a more blurred image, she spritzed again—but she misted too much and her clouds puddled. She put down the bottle, wishing she’d not lost control. Painting was a safe place to let loose, and nothing terrible happened; yet you had to rein in the freedom, or you could wreck your work—as the puddles showed.

  So many things could hijack a painting. As an artist, resistance had been Lila’s constant companion. She’d first been up against it when her father tried to stop her mother from registering her in an after-school art program in junior high. He’d bought Lila encyclopedia software and a lacrosse stick and insisted, “Look up the Krebs cycle and the Weimar Republic. You’re drawing in your room too much. Go outside more.”

  Lila looked up the Krebs cycle and the Weimar Republic, and she played lacrosse. But she painted and drew, and her father grumbled and stood in her way. When she was in high school, he explained why: Artists starved, and he wanted to protect her from crawling home, impoverished, with an empty rice bowl in her hands. Still determined to be a painter, though, she got an art degree in college—and he turned out to be right, because poverty became another obstacle.

  In Lila’s low-rent apartments, mice were her roommates, and she ate daily hot dogs—boiled, deep-fried, simmered with chili or cabbage, buried in a sweet-and-sour sauce, wrapped in crescent rolls and baked. Furnace heat in winter was Lila’s distant dream; health insurance, a mirage. She got used to deprivation because she loved what she was doing. Still, her father disapproved.

  When Lila started dating Reed, she painted a slightly surreal series, Odd Juxtapositions, which joined incongruities on canvas. She painted a 1968 Thunderbird parked on a lily pad, a watermelon slice zooming through the Milky Way, a diamond-scaled Chinese dragon curled up in a laundry basket. Next, she depicted flowers, and, true to odd juxtapositions, she painted cherry blossoms floating in a giant cup of tea.

  By then Lila’s paintings were selling in galleries but not earning enough to live on, so one hot summer afternoon she took her work to a Palo Alto fair. She spread a quilted blue bedspread on the dirt and set out her cherry blossom painting with others in the series. Gnats buzzed around her eyes as the sun beat down and filled her head with visions of lemonade, which she couldn’t afford. In her pocket was $18.29, all the money she had in the world.

  A woman in jeans and pointy-toed red sandals looked down at Lila’s work, darkened by her shadow. “Could you make those flowers orange?”

  “Orange?” Lila bent back her head to look into the woman’s pie-shaped face.

  “You know, like the fruit.”

  No one had ever asked Lila to compromise her work. “Why orange?”

  “I have orange chairs in my dining room.”

  “Those flowers are cherry blossoms. They’re pink.”

  “You could paint over them. If you don’t have to start the painting from scratch, that would keep the price down, wouldn’t it?”

  Lila could relate to how a flat tire felt. She heard her father whisper in her ear, “Orange? Pink? What difference does the color make when your rent is two weeks late?” But she’d intended for the petals to be a pink flash of beauty before the tea muddied them brown. She’d wanted to capture a vision of grace that was vulnerable and easily ruined. Only pink could convey that; orange would be too harsh. She couldn’t bring herself to change the color.

  Lila pictured the woman’s dining room, a meeting place of Sears and the Alhambra: Ornate, velvet-upholstered orange chairs would circle a matching ornate Moorish table. In its center, on dark walnut veneer, a wicker cornucopia would spill out shriveled squash left over from Thanksgiving—under a chandelier raining down plastic, sawtooth-edged teardrops.

  Lila stood to her nearly six feet, muzzled her Pleaser, and frowned down at the woman, a moral pygmy who was baiting her to lower her standards and who didn’t understand the importance of integrity in art. In her head, Lila heard her father urge his usual, “Don’t be stubborn! Yield!” Nevertheless, she said with a blink of determination, “Maybe you could match your chairs with a sunset painting. This one isn’t about orange flowers.”

  As the woman turned away, Lila shook hands with destitution. The woman’s footsteps made puffs of dust, but Lila refused to let them cloud her spirit. The woman called back, “Forget it.” But Lila would not forget it. She told herself that she would fight resistance harder to keep doing the work she loved, and she would wear the fight as a badge of courage. She would never go down in defeat.

  Now at Cristina’s table, Lila picked up a sponge and resolutely mopped the puddle to salvage her clouds.

  Absorbed in painting, Lila barely noticed the raindrops pinging on the skylight. She went to the window to check on Grace, sitting by the ferns. Apparently, rain had been falling on her for a while, because her fur had matted and darkened to a dingy, sodden ash. Her red bandana, now maroon, had drooped around her neck.

  Grace must have known that Lila was at the window, because she turned and looked at her. Though Grace was drenched, her eyes had the proud glimmer of spaniels in eighteenth-century portraits, sitting on velvet pillows beside ermine-dripping kings. Her eyes announced, You may think I look like an urchin, but I can take any cold and wet the world has to give. Far be it from me to beg to come inside.

  Lila could never leave Grace shivering in the yard. If she’d been chained to a tree, sh
e’d endured rain and cold. Though sharp-toothed and bipolar, she did not deserve to suffer more. Lila went to the door and called her. She climbed the stairs slowly, as if to let Lila know that bounding gratefully into the house was beneath her. When she came through the door, she brushed against Lila’s legs and got wet gold fur on her black twill jeans. Grace walked through the kitchen and left muddy paw prints, like calling cards, across the floor.

  “How does anybody live with a dog?” Lila moaned.

  Grace bristled her eyebrows, which consisted of a few coarse hairs. With what looked like indifference at the trouble she’d caused, she lapped water from her bowl and ignored Lila wiping up the paw prints with a paper towel. Uncouth was what Grace was. An unmannered beast, like Adam Spencer’s Irish wolfhounds.

  Grace padded to her living room outpost, which was an oriental rug beside the sofa. She closed her eyes. The stage curtain dropped, and she geared up for a production of her one-act, solo performance piece: The Napping Dog. She began to snore. In minutes she was really into it, fully committed to a loud, blockbuster rendition of “Adenoids in Trouble.” As she inhaled, she sounded like rusty machinery grinding in a Jean Tinguely sculpture. When she exhaled, her lips puffed out with a blast of air.

  Grace often changed sleeping positions, each of which showed that moping was her art form. First, she curled into a ball and pressed her nose against her tail, as if she were trying to disguise herself as a dejected pumpkin. Next, she lay on her side with her legs stretched out in front of her so her body made a large, despondent U, perhaps for melancholy “underdog.” Finally, she rolled onto her stomach and closed her eyes so she looked like she was contemplating life’s sorrows. No matter how she sprawled, her body always seemed to say, I am sad.

  Though she’d messed up the floor and Lila’s jeans, Lila wished Grace had had a better life. But when Lila went back to painting, Grace’s snores distracted her; then Lila realized she was breathing in sync with Grace, like they were connected, two parts of a whole. Unwilling to let Grace interfere not just with her art, but also with her breath, Lila stalled it to alter her rhythm and breathe to the beat of her own drum.