Still Life With Bread Crumbs: A Novel

by Anna Quindlen

  She slipped out of the gallery, went outside for air, and stood on the street looking in through the big glass window at all the people inside, their faces raised to one another with looks of attention and engagement, a look she knew so well because she had so many times modeled it herself while she thought of something else, or nothing at all. Their faces seemed to float like balloons above all their bodies because nearly everyone inside was wearing black except for one big man, his head bent slightly, his face only a foot away from one of the photographs, the one of the cross with the snapshot of the woman and the girl at its foot. He wore an old gold corduroy jacket and was almost immobile, and when he ran his hand over his pale hair, bleached almost to invisibility by the gallery lighting, Rebecca suddenly recognized him and moved quickly, back inside. But it was difficult, almost impossible, to pass through the press of people, people who wanted to meet her, to congratulate her, to ask about the photographs, to tell her what they meant, or seemed to mean, and by the time she arrived at the spot where she had seen Jim Bates standing he was no longer there, and as she swiveled around she thought she saw a gold corduroy shoulder pass by the window outside and disappear.

  THE FLAG

  “Jim, I swear, you have got to go to this,” Sarah had said.

  “To what?” he said, standing at the counter, waiting for his coffee and his cinnamon pecan scone.

  “I swear I’m dying to go myself, I mean, I can’t believe she even sent me an invitation, but it’s the night Tad promised to take his mom to Bingo and he can’t get out of it, she gave him such a hard time about even asking you wouldn’t believe. And I can’t drive to New York City myself, I just can’t, and I asked Kevin, and he was like, we’re not going to Brooklyn. I’ve been to Brooklyn. It’s not a place I’m going at that time of night.”

  Jim Bates had looked at the gallery opening invitation, at the photograph on its front of the white cross and the trophy on the tattered bed of leaves. He read the paragraph inside, then looked at the photograph again.

  “Can I have this?” he had asked Sarah.

  “Okay, but can I get it back? I want to show it to my mom, just so she’ll know I was invited. She’s not going to believe it otherwise. I’m sick that I can’t go, just sick about it. So can you give it back to me? And will you go? To show the flag?”

  But Jim hadn’t said anything. He just shoved the invitation in his jacket pocket and left with his coffee. He even forgot his scone.

  “That’s peculiar,” Sarah said.

  STRUCK BY LIGHTNING

  Rebecca Winter lay in bed and listened to the sound from the attic above her. It was not as loud as it had been the last time, or maybe it was just that it didn’t seem as strange as it had then, the idea that some animal was running around overhead, disturbing her sleep. She looked at the digital clock on the table next to her bed. If she squinted she could see that it was 5:40, which was early to rise but not unthinkable.

  The dog sighed. Everything about him was so exquisitely sensitive that he could tell the difference between a sleeping human and a half-asleep one, between lids closed and lids opened. He rolled onto his side.

  A squirrel, Rebecca thought. Maybe this time it was a squirrel. The day before, after getting back from the city, she had taken a walk around the house and seen an odd trapezoidal piece of wood outside the back door. She’d turned it in her hands and looked around absently. One of the things she didn’t like about the idea of owning a house was that she didn’t understand how it worked. In an apartment you didn’t need to know. The super knew.

  She had been so relieved when the car had turned in to the bumpy gravel drive, when she saw the dog emerge from the back shed, when she opened the door to what had become a familiar smell of old woodsmoke, mildew, and vegetable soup. One day she had been out walking and she had wondered whether she’d become a different person in the last year, maybe because of what Paige Whittington had said about the dog pictures. Then when she really thought about it she realized she’d been becoming different people for as long as she could remember but had never really noticed, or had put it down to moods, or marriage, or motherhood. The problem was that she’d thought that at a certain point she would be a finished product. Now she wasn’t sure what that might be, especially when she considered how sure she had been about it at various times in the past, and how wrong she’d been. She considered the weight at the foot of the bed. For how many years had she said confidently that she was not a dog person? It just goes to show, whatever that meant. Her father had used that expression all the time. It just goes to show, sweetheart!

  “Let’s go out,” she finally said to the dog, who sighed again and tumbled to the floor.

  Small curly shoots of fern were beginning to find their way through the carpet of old leaves on the forest floor, and there was a give to the soil that it hadn’t had even a month before. The tree canopy made a doily of the pale blue early morning sky beyond. Maybe the squirrel in the attic, if it was a squirrel in the attic, would leave of its own accord once the chilly spring nights got warmer. Her woodpile was running low and the logs she was using made a kind of singing sound, like happy bees, which she remembered Jim Bates telling her meant they were not dry enough. But she knew she wouldn’t need a fire much longer.

  “Where is this marvelous place?” another photographer at the opening had asked her, gesturing to the photographs, and she’d been vague.

  The dog ran ahead and threw himself to the ground, seesawing his hindquarters through the glossy pellets of deer dung. His fine antennae for human behavior, which had made him capable of anticipating a kick even when it was only a vague drunken notion, did not extend to his current owner’s state of mind, and her dilemma about what she would do with him if she returned to her life in the city. For a time she had thought of turning him over to Sarah, to accompany the dog prints on the wall of Tea for Two, now in their fourth consecutive iteration, which had made for a material improvement in Rebecca’s bank account. But when she remembered the way Jim’s pale face darkened whenever the name of Sarah’s husband came up, and the way the man had smirked when he sold her firewood, she thought best not. And she somehow knew that Tad was not a dog person.

  (In fact he loved cats and had always wanted a Siamese, perhaps a pair of them.)

  The dog disappeared, and she heard him bark once, twice, then saw him circle back and head out again. She followed a deer trail across a creek and then into a clearing, and saw that there was a rough wooden ladder against the trunk leading up into the tree stand. There Jim Bates sat, looking down at the dog and then at Rebecca. She could have told herself that their meeting was accidental, but there was really no point to the delusion. For months she had been avoiding him, but since the gallery opening she had been determined to see him, even if she had not consciously known it.

  Neither was anxious to fill the silence with words, and so for a minute or two they just looked at each other. During that minute or two both of them realized, one unexpectedly, one not, that they were furious.

  “There’s a ladder?” Rebecca said.

  “There was always a ladder. Sometimes I use it, sometimes I don’t.”

  “So instead of making a fool of myself climbing that tree, I could have used a ladder?”

  “I didn’t hear you complaining.”

  “Have I been pink-slipped?” said Rebecca.

  “I’m not working,” said Jim.

  “And you haven’t answered my question. And you owe me lasagna.” As the sentence was leaving her mouth she wished she could snatch it back, because she remembered what had happened after the lasagna promise, and what had come before the lasagna promise. But even that was not enough to explain why he had shunned her all those weeks afterward, why he had come to her opening and shunned her there.

  “Did you admire the photographs?” she asked suddenly, her temerity amazing and somehow pleasing herself.

  He looked at his hands for a long time before he answered, as though he was tracin
g his old scars. “No,” he finally said.

  The dog pawed at the base of the tree as though he would climb it, and there was a faint growl of thunder from far away.

  “You’d better get down before you’re struck by lightning,” she said.

  “You’re a weather expert now?”

  “That’s harsh. I thought we were supposed to be friends.”

  “Friends? You thought we were friends?”

  “Obviously I was mistaken. Come, Dog.”

  “His name is Jack.”

  “Who?”

  “That dog. His name is Jack. He belonged to my sister.”

  Suddenly, horribly, Rebecca felt herself fill up with sadness. It was as though all the sad and bad and hard things, her exile, her poverty, her father, her gallery show, her sorrow about Jim Bates and what had happened between them and what had not happened between them, all gathered together like a weather map that showed red spot here, red spot there, red spots moving slowly together and then—kaboom!—a monster storm. She had to stand still for a moment to gather herself, and even then she was not sure she would be able to speak. It was a lucky thing she was too shaken to look up, because if she had seen the way Jim Bates was looking at her soft and trembling face she would have been utterly undone. And she was undone enough for someone of her character.

  Finally she managed to say, still looking down, “I’m so sorry. I had no idea.”

  “I could have told you it was her dog. I could have told her you had him. I didn’t. It’s not your fault.”

  “I meant I had no idea that she had died until long afterwards. I wrote you a note.”

  “I didn’t get it.”

  “I didn’t send it. I didn’t have your address. I’m so sorry.”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  The sadness in his voice, like a musical note, made her fill up again, so she turned and left. She pushed through the sharp shrubs and the undergrowth, caught one hiking boot in a hole and turned her ankle, scratched her face on a broken branch. When she saw the house through the trees she turned and called “Jack?” and the dog came running down the deer trail she would have taken if she’d been in her right mind.

  NOT MYSTERIOUS

  Jim Bates knocked at the door an hour later. He walked in without looking Rebecca in the face, and when he reached into his jacket she thought for just an instant that he would pull out a bottle of Tullamore Dew. She still had the other bottle, pushed far to the back of the cabinet, glimmering at her sometimes, meanly, if the light hit it just right.

  What he held out instead was the invitation to her gallery opening.

  “There’s nothing mysterious about those photographs,” he said.

  “I didn’t write the copy.”

  “But you don’t know anything about them, do you? You don’t know who put those things there and what they mean, do you? You just took your pictures and you blew them up and they hung them up and somebody will pay a whole lot of money for them and that’s that. It doesn’t matter, what they mean, whose they were.”

  From inside the invitation he took a piece of paper, folded into quarters, and when he unfolded it Rebecca saw that it was the list of the photographs in the White Cross series.

  “Trophy, Two Views,” he said savagely, and then he looked up at Rebecca, and his face was flushed. “That was a volleyball trophy she got in eighth grade. She had a mean spike of a serve. They won every game that year except one against some school that had these giant girls, everybody said they were ringers, high school girls pretending to be in middle school. I was away then but she sent me a letter, with a picture of the team. She won most valuable player. Then she played one year in high school, and then one of the guys called her a dyke for playing, and then she stopped. At least that’s what she said after, when I asked.”

  He looked at the list again. “Yearbook. I heard someone at that opening say you never move anything when you take pictures, that all those things on that poster Sarah’s so proud of are just the way you found them. If you’d opened the yearbook you would have seen her picture on the front page. They did this collage, and she’s the one wearing a crown and a bathing suit at the lake for senior days. Her friend Traci wrote next to it, ‘The best years of our life!’ She was kind of right. I don’t know what happened to her. To Traci. She might be the one who became a flight attendant. Or maybe that was Brittany. She lost track of all of them once she got bad.

  “The blue ribbon was track. There were a lot of ribbons. I don’t know why she kept that one. Maybe it was the only one she had left. She did hurdles. She tore something in her knee, and that was done, too. Maybe it would have been done anyhow. The birthday card—”

  “I’m sorry,” Rebecca said.

  “The birthday card,” he cried, flailing at the air with the paper. “The birthday card from her mother. Our mother. June twelfth. ‘I’m a Gemini, Jimmy, no wonder I’m schizy,’ she said. And the picture of her with her mother. Our mother. I must have looked at that picture a million times after, and thought, what would have happened if there had been a whole lot of pictures like that, Polly in her prom dress with Mom, Polly in her cap and gown with Mom. But there weren’t. I don’t even know if it would have made any difference. The doctors always said it was chemical. I don’t know, I don’t know if they even knew what they were talking about.”

  He held the invitation and the list toward her. “You get the idea. Just look at them for what they really are. A really really sick girl walked around here, in her nightgown probably, tearing up her bare feet on the ground, and set them all up, and when she was done she went up onto the roof of her house and she laid down in the snow and died. These are suicide notes. They’re not some kind of artistic statement or, what did one guy I heard call them, a struggle between nature and man? I mean, who are those people? They are so full of shit. These are suicide notes. These are a way of saying, I don’t need these things anymore, I want to die.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “No, you didn’t. You just took the pictures and let everybody look at them.”

  “I won’t sell them,” Rebecca said.

  “What?”

  “I can tell the gallery they’re not for sale. If anyone has written a check I can tell them I’ve changed my mind.”

  “Why?”

  “You find it so painful, that I made these photographs.”

  “I thought I’d found all of this stuff and picked it all up. You didn’t get them all, either, you know that? There was one with a hat with flowers on it, and another one with a little plaque with that ‘Now I lay me down to sleep’ prayer on it. That would have made a good picture, right, Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep? They would have loved that one.”

  “I’ll call the gallery this afternoon.”

  “No, no, that’s not what I’m saying. I just want you to understand what you were taking pictures of. I want you to know what they really were. They’re not just pictures. They’re real. All that stuff was real. The point isn’t selling them or not selling them. It’s what they mean. Not what the pictures mean, what the things mean. What they meant. What they meant to her. To me, too.”

  “I’m so sorry,” she said again.

  “I’m so tired,” he said.

  “I wish I had met her,” Rebecca said.

  “What was I going to say, would you like to meet my sister, the schizophrenic? Or bipolar, depending on which doctor it was. They could never make up their minds.”

  “It must have been so hard.”

  “It was like having a kid who never grew up and never learned the rules. And every damn night I would check on her to make sure she was all right, and every damn night she would say, ‘I love you, Jimmy,’ unless she was too stoned from the meds. And I almost never missed a night and then—”

  “I know,” said Rebecca. He’d missed the night that he’d stayed at the cabin. She reached across the dining table, lifted the round stone, and handed him the small blue envelope with his name on the front.
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br />   “Thank you,” he said after he read it.

  “I should have gotten your address.”

  “I’m just glad you thought of it.” He turned the cheap note-paper over in his hands. “I’m really tired,” he added. “I’m not sleeping too well.”

  “Lie down on the couch,” Rebecca said. She covered him with the blanket from the bedroom, and then she went into the back room and took down all the images she had tacked to the wall from the White Cross series. He was right; she looked at each one differently now.

  Other people used photographs as a way to keep close to the events of their lives; she had used them as a way to stand apart. She had never looked at the Kitchen Counter series and remembered the days before and after, the grocery shopping or the leftovers in the refrigerator, didn’t look at the photographs of Ben’s action figures or even the plateau of his baby back and think of which toys he’d preferred (the Ninja Turtles) or when those faint dimples at the base of his spine had given way to the firmer flesh of childhood. She’d denatured parts of her own existence by printing and framing and freezing them. And they’d become denatured even further by being written about, analyzed, lionized by other people, by strangers. Sometimes even she had believed that Still Life with Bread Crumbs was about women’s work.

  She looked at the White Cross photographs again with her new knowledge about what had come before and after them, and instead of static images they seemed an infinite prolonging, as though even now Polly Bates wandered, barefoot, shucking her past in preparation for a foreshortened future, pushing the crosses into the earth, laying down the beloved detritus of her life, saying goodbye: goodbye, card; goodbye, ribbon; goodbye, mother; goodbye, brother. She wondered if the great artists had ever considered this, da Vinci with the woman who would become the Mona Lisa, Sargent with Madame X, whether they had ever considered the terrible eternity of immortality. She could not even claim that Polly Bates lived forever through her work. Only her loss, her despair did.