Still Life With Bread Crumbs: A Novel

by Anna Quindlen

  “We have a lovely turnout,” said the woman at the door of the hotel ballroom, which is what they say when the room is half full.

  The room was half full. There was a slide on an enormous screen above the two chairs where she and the art history professor who was interviewing her would sit. The photograph on the slide was, of course, Still Life with Bread Crumbs. Since the lights were on, the photograph was a shadow of itself, like those old photographs in her mother’s albums that had faded with time.

  “I can’t tell you what an honor this is,” said the art history professor.

  In the car afterward, passing through Central Park, she thought about how odd it had all seemed. Her old answers about the Kitchen Counter series and its haphazard origins. Her old answers about the cameras she used and the size she chose for her photographs. A combative question from a man in the audience on the difference between using film and taking digital photographs. “The differences are so clear,” he said. “I’m shocked that someone such as yourself does not see it.” A combative question from a woman who said she thought too much had been made of the “iconography” of Still Life, which she called “Still Life with Dish Towel,” which Rebecca thought was actually a good name, perhaps better than the one she had chosen so long ago. Language had always failed her when it came to describing her photographs. When she was asked about what she was working on, she was vague. There was nothing she could say about the cross photographs that could come close to actually seeing them.

  Only one moment surprised her, when a young woman in a clutch of young people—an art class assigned to the event, after all these years she could spot them without trying—asked earnestly, “Could you tell us the secret to your success?” It had the feel of a rehearsed question, as though the young woman had said it over and over to herself on the subway train on the way to the hotel. Rebecca’s answer was completely unrehearsed.

  “The secret is that there is no secret,” she replied. “That’s true of almost everything, in my opinion. Everything is accidental.”

  There was a long silence, and then she added, “I’m terribly sorry, that sounded a bit like a fortune cookie.” Afterward she regretted saying that. She hoped the members of the class would remember the first part and not the disclaimer.

  When the event was over she signed some posters, a few books, and an art magazine article, and slipped out a side door and into the waiting car. As she settled herself in the backseat she realized that during the length of the onstage interview she had not thought, not once, about Jim Bates or overdraft fees or the future. She watched the city streaking by. That was what work was for sometimes, she supposed, for forgetting.

  She asked the driver to turn west past her apartment building, and she saw an unfamiliar doorman helping someone out of a cab. The cupcake store on the corner had closed; a sign in the window said a Mexican restaurant was coming. She asked the driver to go to her father’s apartment, and she saw her father and Sonya sitting on a bench at one end of the building’s circular driveway. Oscar Winter had his face turned to the pale late winter sun, and Sonya was reading a magazine. Rebecca felt like an interloper. “Don’t bother turning in,” she said.

  A tourist in her own life, she sank back in the seat.

  By the time she got out in the frigid winter air outside the cottage, night had fallen and the entire day seemed like an illusion. What in the world was that, she thought to herself. When she opened the door the dog’s eyes shone in the faint light from the kitchen overhead. “I’m back,” she said, and his tail thumped once.

  LYING LOW

  One afternoon Sarah arrived unannounced wearing a red wool jacket and a plaid tam, carrying a big wicker basket filled with a thermos of flavored coffee, a dozen scones, and a lemon pound cake as big as a brick. “I’ve been so worried about you,” she said, putting down the basket and throwing her arms around Rebecca. The coffee was strong, the pound cake delicious, but after nearly ninety minutes of listening to Sarah talk—about the rising price of coffee, the Starbucks rumored to be coming in the Walmart shopping center, the difficulty of getting poppy seeds, the stroke Tad’s aunt had suffered—Rebecca realized something obvious: that when she saw Sarah in the shop she could reasonably, at a certain point, pay her check and leave, but that in her own home, or what for a time was passing for her own home, she was required to wait for Sarah to run out of steam. And she had so much steam.

  “I need to tell you something that I haven’t told anyone else, because I know you don’t judge, I could tell that the first day I met you, even my mother said, that woman doesn’t judge, you can tell by her pictures. But Kevin has been having some issues, and he got a DWI last month. A Driving While Intoxicated. I don’t want anyone else to know.”

  (Everyone knew. They just wondered what had taken so long. A trooper almost always sat in the parking lot of the body shop a block down from Ralph’s, picking off the guys leaving the bar and driving so far onto the shoulder they were practically window-shopping. Kevin’s drunk-driving technique was a little different; he liked to stand on the brake at the traffic light outside Ralph’s, then hit the gas hard so that the car made a squealing sound. “NASCAR Kev!” he invariably shouted when he did this, an effect muted somewhat by the fact that his car was a Subaru Forester. “The guy is such a douche, he had the window open, yelling ‘NASCAR Kev,’ when he blew past the trooper,” said the bartender at Ralph’s.

  “In this weather he had the window down?” said one of the guys at the bar.

  “Total douche,” said the bartender.)

  “Thank you for listening,” Sarah said as she stood to leave. “I’m sorry I stayed so long. Oh, and we never got to talk about Jim, that’s another thing I’ve been meaning to talk to you about but you haven’t been in in ages, but I kept saying to myself, oh my goodness, I have to talk to Rebecca about poor Jim Bates and—” Almost as an automatic reflex Rebecca’s hand came up, palm out, like a traffic cop: No. Stop. Stop right now. Her gesture was so abrupt that Sarah stopped in midsentence, her mouth still open. There was a faint clicking sound as she closed it, and then she reached out a hand.

  “I totally understand,” she said. “Totally. It’s so hard, isn’t it. I know that. He doesn’t come in much anymore, either, but when he does I try to talk to him but he’s like—” Rebecca’s hand rose again.

  “All right, enough said for now. Anyhow, don’t be a stranger. That’s what my mother always says, don’t be a stranger. Tad said that artists go through cycles and I know what he meant, there are some times when I’m making jelly rolls and I look up and it’s like, bam, three hours have gone by. Which I know is completely different than what you do, but you know what I mean. He says he needs to talk to you, Tad, but he doesn’t want to interrupt your process, he says. Plus he has to drive his mom to the rehab place where his aunt is, it’s like the entire left side of her body is dead, just dead.” A cold gust came in the door, and Rebecca shivered. The space heater helped, but not as much as she had hoped. “Oh, Lord, I have to let you get out of the wind,” Sarah said. “But don’t be a stranger. I love your hair like that, too. It’s really different.”

  When Sarah was gone Rebecca looked in the mirror. She realized she hadn’t looked in the mirror for several days. Her hair reached to below her shoulders, and she’d taken to wearing it in a stubby braid down her back. She sighed. “I look like one of those women,” she said to the dog, who looked as though he understood what she meant, although she wasn’t sure what she meant herself. One of those women who let themselves go, who paid no attention to how they looked? One of those women who had given up, like the ones she saw in the market in the city sometimes with their canvas shopping bags, buying one grapefruit and a box of eight tea bags?

  A week later she went to Tea for Two for breakfast to head off another home visit, although she looked carefully for Jim Bates’s truck before she pulled into one of the spots in front of the place. “Yippee!” Sarah shouted, startling two strangers who had obvious
ly wandered in from the highway. They were the only customers in the place, since it was nearly ten and all the usuals were long gone. Rebecca opened her computer and began to work, looking through some of the images she’d saved over the last several weeks. And what happened next happened unexpectedly, and quickly, and, as it turned out, fortuitously.

  DOG PICTURES

  Two important, albeit terse, messages in a single day:

  “Call me,” said the message from TG she opened in Tea for Two. Rebecca wondered if there had ever been a period of TG’s life when she had used, or been told to use, or considered using, the word please. It was as though TG was stuck in the old days of telegram communication, when each word cost you, and good manners were expensive. I will call her when I have a minute, thought Rebecca. I will call her when I’m next in town. I will call her when I’m good and ready.

  She called her a half hour later, from a turnaround on the county road where, for reasons best known to her phone company, her cell service sounded as though she was sitting across the desk from someone instead of speaking underwater. She called her because she thought there might be some money in it.

  “Dog pictures,” TG said, her voice as clear as a digital recording, complete with disbelief, contempt, and hostility.

  “Dog pictures?” Rebecca said.

  “Dog pictures.”

  “Dog pictures,” Rebecca replied, with an edge to her voice.

  “I’m at a gallery opening in Chelsea and Jackson Meehan from Aperture magazine comes up to me and says, don’t you rep Rebecca Winter? And I think he’s going to talk about an assignment, and instead he says he has a friend who went into some little podunk town off the freeway last month and stopped for coffee and saw six photographs on the wall. Six Rebecca Winter photographs. Six Rebecca Winter photographs of which Rebecca Winter’s agent was completely ignorant. If you could have seen the look on Jackson Meehan’s face. Six Rebecca Winter photographs which his friend bought, in their entirety, all six, for twelve hundred dollars. Dog pictures.”

  Sarah had been breathless and pink with excitement and joy. A barter system, it had been, when Rebecca once again began to run low on firewood, this time with no log splitter in sight. Sarah had seen the photographs of the dog on her computer—“I wasn’t snooping, but I was clearing and I saw that one, and, wow, it’s so great!”—and Rebecca had printed and framed a set to fill the long white empty wall. And then, according to Sarah, a man had come in one morning and carried his mug over to squint at the signature at the bottom and said, “How much?”

  “For which one?” Sarah had said.

  (“I swore it was that one where the dog is looking at the camera and yawning. Because I love that one. Sometimes I say, ‘Kevin, I’m going to bring that picture home and hang it in the living room.’ Because I know he would love it, too. He’s not so into art, or dogs, but he would love that picture. I know it.”)

  “All of them,” the visitor had replied.

  What had Rebecca felt, when she saw the wall blank except for the hardware? Astonishment? Distress? And then Sarah had handed her twelve hundred dollars in hundreds, and she was both humiliated and elated. This is what it has come to, she thought, as she persuaded Sarah to take a commission of one hundred dollars, and Sarah promised her free scones forever. Dog pictures.

  “Dog pictures,” TG said again.

  What did it exactly? Was it the fact that the car was so cold that she could see her breath in the air, that her worn parka ripped at a seam as she shifted in the seat to turn up the heat and a squall of goose feathers rose around her, that her head hurt from what she suspected was a smoking furnace and she had had a chimney fire two days before because she had used Kevin’s cheap wood by mistake? Was it the fact that she now kept the snow shovel inside the front door in case there was another blizzard and that it fell with a loud clatter whenever she walked past it? Was it that she had spent two days toting wood into the house and from time to time a log roll would suddenly take hold and she would have to stack it all again, knowing there was a right way to do this and she didn’t know it, knowing who knew it for sure?

  Was it everything, all together, that made her say in a tough cold voice not unlike TG’s own, “And your point is?”

  “My point? My point? You are devaluing the franchise. A Rebecca Winter photograph has a certain price point. A Rebecca Winter photograph comes with a certain cachet. A Rebecca Winter photograph is handled by this office.”

  “When is the last time you sold something of mine other than that photograph the Greifers took that you didn’t especially care for?”

  “That’s a problem with the product, not the salesperson.”

  Rebecca’s hair was filled with feathers, and as she tried to speak she realized that one was stuck to her tongue. She picked it off, coughed, and said loudly, “You’re fired.”

  PAPA GONE

  The other email showed up on her computer after she had gotten home, trailing feathers into the house while the dog followed with his nose to the floor, sneezing. She took off the jacket in the kitchen, crammed it into a garbage bag, wandered around cleaning up after herself. No money, no work, no agent, but at least the parka had made it through most of the winter, hadn’t failed her in December. Her standards had shifted. She looked down at the dog. “Dog pictures,” she said, and he looked attentive. He loved having his picture taken. There was always something to eat afterward.

  Rebecca turned on her computer and looked through the photographs she had taken of the dog. She would print a new set, and perhaps some other New Yorker would come through, stop for coffee, and buy them. “I think they would make the cutest greeting cards,” Sarah had said, as though this would be the zenith of Rebecca’s achievement, the way her novelist acquaintances always complained that the public did not take them seriously unless a movie had been made of one of their books.

  She had only one email, from an address that looked for a moment both familiar and strange, and then she realized it was from Sonya. When she opened it, it said, “Papa gone.”

  PAPA GONE

  From the obituary column of The New York Times:

  Winter, Oscar: Beloved husband, father and grandfather. Former president of Freeman Foundations of New York City. Survived by his wife, Beatrice; daughter, Rebecca; and grandson, Benjamin Symington. Friends may call Thursday at ten A.M. at the Riverside Memorial Chapel, West Seventy-Sixth Street. Burial to follow in Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn.

  PAPA GONE

  “No shivah?” said the man in the gray suit.

  “My father left very explicit instructions,” Rebecca said.

  “Understood,” he said. “His preplanning was a model of the form. For your mother, too. He chose Green-Wood Cemetery because Leonard Bernstein is buried there, which he assumed would please her. But sometimes the family is not in agreement on the decedent’s plans and decides to modify somewhat.”

  He leaned in close and touched Rebecca’s arm. “By the by, I love your work.”

  “No shivah,” said Ben.

  Sonya looked away. She had no stake in the discussion, being, it turned out, Lutheran. All these years Rebecca had assumed Sonya, too, was Jewish, in the unspoken way in which the Winter family had been, and it turned out that, like her employers’ affinity for strawberry jam (not jelly) and shirts with light starch, she had simply absorbed it and used it where appropriate without adopting it at all.

  “Family Feud,” she’d said to Rebecca the night before at the apartment, pointing to the television, a solitary standing lamp giving an air of dolor to the place and casting the Mary Cassatt in the foyer in deep shadow. “He say, ‘Sonya, how come no cherry pie these days?’ I say, ‘Bakery on the boulevard on vacation, two weeks.’ He say, ‘No way to run a business, that.’ Then he cough, then he fall, then I call nine-one-one.”

  “I’m sure you did everything necessary,” Rebecca had said.

  Rebecca looked around the room at the funeral chapel, a living room for the dead or,
more accurately, for the friends of the dead. She couldn’t count how many times she had been here, although they did redecorate with some regularity. It was currently blue and cream. It had been gold and tan when her grandmother’s funeral had been handled by the people here. Shivah had been at their apartment, just a few blocks away.

  “Shivah, now there’s a racket!” her father liked to say. “Some of them bring food, but what is it? Some little casserole, feeds maybe four people who eat like birds, and meanwhile you’ve got a houseful. You know what shivah means? Hungry! Shivah means more lox than you can shake a stick at!”

  As if he could read her thoughts Ben leaned toward her and said, “You know how many bagels you need for shivah?”

  “Hundreds,” Rebecca murmured as her son put his arm around her shoulder.

  Or perhaps not. Her father had been ninety-one years old. Except for his daughter and his grandson, his family was gone, unless you counted Sonya and, of course, his wife. So were nearly all of his friends, and all of the people he’d overseen at Freeman Foundations until they’d closed the showroom and the factory. Cheap white utilitarian bras, or brassieres as they had always called them at the company. Girdles so snug “you can go down a dress size,” according to the slogan her grandfather had coined. For decades it had been a dependable living, a fortune even. And then women had stopped wearing girdles, and started wearing bras that were lacy, flimsy, turquoise and black. The women who wore Freeman Foundations got old, and died, and the sewing machines went still and were sold. “I don’t know what else I expected,” her mother had said dismissively.

  The chairs in the funeral parlor were empty except for a frail couple who had lived in their old apartment building, the administrator of the nursing home where her mother lived, an aide from the home, and Rebecca’s mother herself, who seemed to be asleep in the wheelchair, her chin on her sunken chest, her fingers only faintly twitching. The black dress she wore had been supplied the night before by Sonya and was several sizes too large, the darts jutting aggressively because there was nothing inside them. At eighty-six Bebe Winter had the body of a ten-year-old girl. She had had a lifetime stockpile of Freeman Foundations herself, the higher-end Belle line, but none of it fit her anymore.