by Tish Cohen
If Elisabeth weren’t her mother, if she were anyone else, Lila would have sworn she was flirting. But it was impossible. Her mother was at least twenty years older than Adam, plus he was her daughter’s…something. Friend, at the very least.
“You’re a wonderful artist, Adam,” Elisabeth purred, letting her fingers trail along the bottom of a canvas.
He tripped over a pile of rags and righted himself, his cheeks beet red. Though, knowing Adam, he was blushing out of self-consciousness rather than flattery. “Thank you.”
There was a thump from the front of the house and a young voice called, “Mummy?”
“Back here, sweet pea,” called Elisabeth.
“Wait,” said Lila. “Kieran was in the car?”
“Napping. She was up until two last night so I didn’t want to wake her when we pulled up.” When Lila showed her surprise, Elisabeth explained, “I had Finn and a few of the other neighbors over. Kieran gets overexcited and can’t sleep.”
“Or it was noisy,” mumbled Lila.
“What’s that?”
“Nothing. Just I can’t sleep when it’s noisy.”
“Doesn’t bother me. Then again, I always keep those little earplugs in my bedside table.”
Before Lila could ask if she keeps those for Kieran, her sister raced into the sunporch and her eyes bulged. “Whoa!” She spun around in a slow circle, taking in her sister’s naked body.
“Mum,” Lila scolded. “This is a bit much.”
“Nonsense. Children should be surrounded by art without the constraints of censorship. Isn’t it wonderful, Kieran?”
“Come on. I’m her big sister. It’s different.”
Kieran blinked at a drawing of Lila’s bare hip and tried not to appear too shocked.
Adam sat on a stool, whacked a dry paintbrush against his thigh. “Did Lila tell you I sold a painting of her? To a fashion designer.”
“Well,” said Elisabeth. “Very impressive to be selling before you graduate. Delilah, did you hear that?”
“I was there.”
“You haven’t heard the best part,” said Adam, tapping Lila now with the brush. “I met with the designer again today. It involves you. She’s using Nude with Denim in her new ad campaign. Your portrait will be on billboards across the country. Times Square even.”
“Seriously?”
“Delilah Blue,” Elisabeth said, cupping her daughter’s cheeks in her hands. “You’ll be famous.”
Lila pulled away.
There had been a student exhibition earlier in the week. Thursday night at the Mommesin Gallery. Seeing as only L.A. Arts student pieces were shown, there’d been quite a few nudes of Lila. There were poses she was proud of, poses that made her shoulders or neck hurt just to think of them. Some of the students had beautifully interpreted what she offered—captured the ribs rippling beneath the latissimus dorsi in her scapula rotation pose as Lila had intended. Others missed the challenge presented in the bulging deltoid, the protruding trapezius, the angled scapula, and simply drew a coquettish girl with one hand at her head, the other at her hip, as if she were posturing for an incoming ship full of sailors.
Certainly there were nudes other than Lila, glittering under the halogen spotlights. At least six, maybe seven other models’ sternomastoids and mandibles looked down upon her. But their poses lacked something hers didn’t. A certain vulgarity. An ugliness that was fresh and dirty, almost animal. There was no point to being attractive as an art model. To make yourself sexy was to miss the point.
She looked up to see Adam staring at her, and quickly averted her eyes.
The thing was, no one in the crowd had noticed Lila the person. No one realized the breasts on the walls were living, breathing, and walking around the room in search of a glass of champagne.
It was the artist who was celebrated, never the subject. Even if Lila was hanging in the Louvre or lolling across the gutter of New York magazine, her identity would be unknown.
“Mum, we should go,” said Lila. “We’ve invaded Adam long enough.”
As they approached the door, the bell rang. Adam pulled it open to be greeted by none other than Lichty himself. He stood in the shadows of the porch, looking outlandish in a polo shirt and plaid golf shorts. “I’m in a bit of a hurry. Just need to pick up those Modern Art History papers if you have them ready.”
“Perfect timing,” Adam said. “Look who I’m just releasing into the wild.” He opened the door wider to reveal Lila and her family. If Lichty had wondered how close she’d become to Adam, he hadn’t let on before and he didn’t let on now. He nodded to Lila and stared at Elisabeth a bit too long, probably re-savoring the terrible moment she’d come by to pick up Lila after class.
Adam disappeared into the next room to dig up Lichty’s papers while Elisabeth wiggled her way closer to the door. She leaned against the wall and smiled at Lichty. He said, “Looks like something of a party.”
“Should be.” Elisabeth nodded toward Lila. “Every day is a celebration to me now. I haven’t seen Lila since she was eight years old.”
“Well,” said Lichty. “This is a special. Were you off somewhere working?”
“No. I was right there at home,” said Elisabeth. “My ex-husband kidnapped her and I only just found her a couple of months ago.”
His had been an innocent question, intended to do nothing more than help pass the itchy, crawly, post-scholarshipdenial minutes until Adam returned. Lichty’s eyes flicked over Lila, then darted away, embarrassed. Horrified. He hadn’t counted on seeing right through Lila’s clothes, not here at the door without any studio lights to make things official. He didn’t count on seeing through her Nice ‘n Easy roots to the dirty-blond stems sprouting beneath. It was too much at three-seventeen on a weekday, with traffic whizzing past and sparrows hopping beneath the bushes looking for crumbs. He rubbed his neck and glanced toward his Beetle, mumbled, “I should wait in the car. I have a few calls to make.”
The look of discomfort on the man’s face made Lila bristle. She wanted to pin him to the welcome mat and scrape off his eyebrows with a palette knife.
Elisabeth continued as if nothing happened. “I suppose my daughter has told you I’ve taught art up in Toronto.”
“She hasn’t actually.”
“I’m sure you’ve heard of it. Bromley Kerr. Great school.”
He nodded out of politeness. “Sounds like a fine place.”
“I really just substitute, but I find it’s the subs who are the ones who are able to offer the freshest viewpoints.” Her other spaghettini strap fell down. “Since we’re out there in the real—”
“Pardon me,” he said, suddenly fascinated with her wrist. “Your bracelet.”
“You like it?”
“Looks very familiar. Where did you get it?”
“My beautiful daughter gave it to me for my birthday.” Elisabeth reached out to touch Lila’s elbow.
Lichty turned to stare hard at Lila. “You gave it to her?”
No.
No.
No.
Lichty meeting Elisabeth should never have happened. “It’s not what you think. I checked at—”
“I don’t know what you’re playing at, Miss Mack.”
Elisabeth interrupted. “It’s Lovett now. Mack is just a name her father dreamed up. Not even legal.”
“It’s my bracelet.”
Lichty’s bracelet? In the model’s stall? Why hadn’t she considered that? What was wrong with her? She tried to answer but had no idea what to say.
Elisabeth laughed, haughty in her anger. “You, sir, are incorrect.”
“Am I? Let’s examine this, shall we? My partner gave me a bracelet. It had a loose clasp. It fell off my wrist. I’ve been looking for it for weeks, and now here it is on the wrist of my model’s mother.”
“Are you accusing my daughter?”
“Mum…”
A packet of papers floated over Lila’s shoulder and forced themselves into Lichty’s han
d. Adam’s face appeared as he wrapped his arms across Lila’s and Elisabeth’s shoulders and gave them both a squeeze. He looked from Lila to Lichty. “What’d I miss?”
ADAM’S STUDIO WAS strangely bright. There was a full moon and without curtains or shutters, the light fanned out across the drop cloth like shards of glass. She and Adam had been sitting on the floor for hours, leaned up against the wall, taking turns sucking red wine from a box.
Adam wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “You don’t know you’ll be fired. How could he after what he just heard about you.”
“Like I’d dare show my face.”
Adam fell silent. Just gazed at their shoes and tapped her foot with his.
“It’s not as if I even liked modeling. The guy never adjusts the air conditioning. Never brings in the heater. I swear, eventually my neck would have been permanently wrecked. It still hurts from the Three Pencil Class. Being an art model is way harder than it looks.”
“I know.”
“Plus the floor is never swept. There must be a decade’s worth of skin follicles and grit in that changing stall. And don’t get me started on the robe. Is it so freaking hard to bring it home for the weekend and drop it into the wash?”
“Sometimes I can smell it while I’m cleaning brushes at the sink.” Adam allowed his hand to reach over and squeeze her leg. “Modeling is a total grunt job. So why are you so upset? You’re worse than after getting turned down for the scholarship.”
Her first instinct was to pull her leg away. Instead, she lifted the wine box to her face and drank. Wine dribbled down onto her T-shirt and she made no move to do anything about it. “I don’t know.” She looked down at his hand. It wasn’t the typical elegant hand you’d imagine on an artist. Adam’s hand was wide and sturdy. Mapped with veins and power. Competence. Maybe it was the wine, maybe it was the day, but suddenly, that hand seemed the most fascinating object in her world and she didn’t know how she’d missed it. She wanted to touch it, kiss it, feel the fingertips against her skin.
She set the wine box on the floor. “Is your offer still open?”
“Which?”
“New York. I think I want to come.”
“Seriously?” He sat up taller and looked at her. “I’d love it. I’ve been thinking, you know, about your home life. You need to get away from it for a while. Just let the dust settle. But I’m planning to bump up my move date. My cousin’s leaving in December now, and I’ve applied for a transfer to NYU.”
“You won’t get that by December.”
“So I’ll take a few months off and finish my degree next year. In the meantime I’ll be working. We’ll be working.”
“We’ll get one of those booths, like you said. Set up on Prince Street.”
“We’ll hang out at the MoMA and the Frick.”
“I’ll get new cowboy boots. New York cowboy boots!”
“We’ll polish the cat.”
“She’ll be our model. Nude Sleeping on Counter. Nude Watching Birds. Nude with Dead Mouse.”
“It’s New York. Nude with Dead Rat.”
She hugged herself. “How many bedrooms?”
He hesitated, pushed his glasses up his nose, then wrapped his arms around his knees. “It’s more of a studio.”
She looked around the room, her eyes resting on his unmade bed over by the far wall. White sheets, blue duvet balled up and dangling off the end.
“I’ll sleep on the floor.” He grinned. “Like the gentleman you know me to be.”
She flipped her hair over one shoulder and moved closer, setting her hand on his shoulder and tracing the seam of his T-shirt. “About that…”
He waited, barely breathing.
“Your previous offer. I think it had something to do with removing your pants.”
He started to get up. “You want to draw me? Or paint me, maybe?”
She pulled him back down. Reached her arm around his neck, touched her lips to his earlobe, and took in his scent. After a moment, she heard herself whisper, “No.”
Thirty-Six
It was a mistake. She knew before waking up, before opening her eyes even. Before looking up through the skylight to see the faint purple brightness of a drizzly day sprinkled across the treetops out back.
There was too much of him. As if his flesh had fused, through heat and exertion and perspiration, to her own and threatened to hold her there, mashed into the dirty drop cloth forever. All she felt was the need to run. From the weight of his bare leg draped across her thighs. The hairy arm flung across her abdomen. The damp T-shirt bunched beneath her elbow. His hot breath stroked her neck like a fever, and the stubble on his chin stung her naked shoulder like hundreds of tiny insects.
Another someday come and gone. When she’d imagined losing her virginity, she’d filtered out her own aversion to human touch. There she was in her reveries, stroking and being stroked, caressing and being caressed, like some kind of slippery and practiced nymphomaniac. Sure, sex with Adam had been lovely while it lasted, momentous even, but how long was one meant to endure the touching? The aftersex was like a bad bout of the chicken pox, an itch you suffered to avoid pockmarks.
It was becoming a pattern. The somedays of her life would teach her not to look forward to anything. Because life is passive aggressive. Once it finally gets off its ass and allows you a wish fulfilled, that wish will come with a heavy price. You want your mother? She’ll come with a kidnapping on the side. Sorry, no substitutions to the order. Menu items are unchangeable. In other words, someday will cost you your future dreams.
Very slowly, careful not to wake him, she slipped out from under his sweaty limbs and hunted for her clothes. Jean shorts in the corner. Panties and sweater on the stool. Socks…Forget socks—she could do without them. She slid her feet into boots, then pictured him alone, sad, two days from now when he came across her cable knit knee-highs. But hunting through the mess of strewn artwork and clothing was too risky. He might wake up. Instead, she mouthed “good-bye” and stole out into the feeble daylight.
IT HAD RAINED hard during the night. She’d heard it once or twice as she lay pinned beneath Adam’s limbs. It made walking across the wet slope in the hills behind her house a challenge. More than once, she skidded down onto her hip and wound up covered in mud. The dampness, however, made it the perfect morning for a cigarette.
So stupid. Everyone knew better than to have sex with a c lose friend. Things would turn ugly now. She could never again look at him without imagining that terrible, claustrophobic moment of waking up covered in his never-ending parts.
She should have thought ahead. Lost her virginity with one of those arrogant, immature males from school. The kind your mother—should you have grown up with one—warned you about when you hit puberty.
Adam was different. Lila’s taking off would wound him, especially after Nikki. The thought of it, the guilt, propelled her frantic pace through what was becoming an annoying, prickly, on-again, off-again drizzle.
After rounding a corner, she stopped. There was a smallish coyote in the clearing up ahead.
With fur much blonder than Slash’s, this animal—though sodden—was delicate. A female. She just lay there, right out in the open, light rain pattering against her big ears. Panting, staring out at nothing in particular.
Lila dipped her cigarette butt in a puddle, squeezed the water out of it, and slid it into her pocket, then crawled up the slope and crouched behind a cluster of bushes. More movement. Sure enough, Slash, just upslope, walking through the scrub with a dead animal in his mouth. Something small and dark. A groundhog maybe.
The female jumped up to greet him, her body curled in submission, her tail tucked low as she reached up to kiss his face and fuss over him. He ignored her attentions, continuing across the incline to a crevice in the rocky hillside where he set his tiny prize on the ground.
Slash yipped and circled his offering. A smaller, darker coyote emerged from the den, pausing at the entry to sniff the air, loo
k around. This coyote’s blackish snout was even more refined, petite. Another female, Lila guessed. Maybe younger. She moved toward Slash, her tail low as well, shimmied into him, and nosed his chest. Slash was having none of this emotional nonsense and neither was the first female, who rushed at her and drove her to the sidelines. The jealous wife.
The alpha female nosed the den and backed right out to make way for pups—one, two, then three, four, five. Not squat and tubby, these youngsters. More leggy and pubescent and awkward. They leaped all over Slash, nipping at his bad ear, his tail. One pup was more businesslike and started poking at the dead rodent, dragging it closer to his mother as if to ask her to cut his meat.
Lila watched Slash sit back, satisfied. He made no move toward the food himself, but seemed content to watch his offspring dig in. As the mother helped them tear the kill apart, the patriarch began to groom himself.
She’d been wrong about Slash. He was not the bloodthirsty killer she’d thought. He was nothing but a father, doing what was necessary for his brood.
The darker female—a kindly aunt perhaps, or a youngster from a past litter—kept her distance from the other two adults, from the pups and their dinner, lurking as she was in the brush nearby. When the pups had eaten their fill and seemed to be looking around for more, Slash and his wife made eye contact with this female before trotting off into the fog. Now the female’s role became clear. She allowed the pups to tumble around in the grass, but when one of the youngsters started to follow his parents, she rounded him back up and ushered them all into the den.
Lila backed out of the bushes as silently as she could—not wishing to give the sitter cause for alarm—and pointed herself back toward the cabin.
Thirty-Seven
Later that morning, Victor hung up the kitchen phone and sunk into a chair. That was that. He had his answer and, in spite of having suspected it for some time, the finality of it knocked the bluster out of him. The nurse hadn’t come out and said as much—the patient never received such news over the phone. She’d called to ask him to come back to see Dr. Barrow. They’d made the appointment. Only what happened next absolved him of the need to show up. The woman dropped the telephone receiver as she tried to hang up, and said to someone nearby, “No, it was Victor Mack. Early-onset Alzheimer’s.”
