I listen to the conversations around me—students and teachers speaking in hushed, reverent tones, like they might disturb the art if they’re too loud. Some of them use terminology that I don’t understand, and others are so pretentious I can’t take it, but there’s one conversation between an older woman and a younger man who’s taking notes that I like listening to. She obviously knows what she’s talking about but she doesn’t sound obnoxious.
Jamie has been silent since we walked in, his hazel-gold eyes unblinking as he absorbs everything. I wonder if he’s ever set foot in a gallery or a museum before. I can’t picture his father taking him to, say, a sculpture garden, though I know his mother was a singer. Maybe he gets his artistic talent from her.
“Have you ever thought about art school?” I ask him.
He looks at me the way he did when I told Rachel he was an artist. He finishes his wine in one swallow before he says, “What the fuck would someone like me do in art school?”
I don’t know what he means by “someone like me,” and I don’t know how to interpret the anger in his voice. A waiter comes by with wine and offers me a glass with a wink. I look around to see if anyone’s watching and realize that nobody here cares what I do. I take the glass, though I’m already feeling the effects of the first one. Jamie also takes more. His eyes are trained on a photo of what I think is the small of a woman’s back when he says, “You can’t go to art school if you’re a dropout.”
“You’re getting your GED,” I remind him.
He shakes his head.
“You are.”
He says nothing.
“Jamie, you are. You studied your ass off and you’re…”
I trail off. He doesn’t look at me.
He already got his results.
I can tell he feels worse about disappointing me than failing the exam—we worked really hard on those practice tests.
I don’t know what to say. I never thought for one second that he would fail.
He moves a few steps away to look at a photograph of something completely unidentifiable and vaguely sexual. He finishes his glass. Neither of us speaks again until Rachel’s gallery.
By the time we get there, the wine has definitely had its way with me. The top of my head floats toward the ceiling; the paintings and the noise and the people flow inside my veins. I’ve been tipsy before, but this is not that—I drank more than I realized. It’s not entirely bad. In fact, it’s not bad at all.
Maybe I’m beginning to understand why someone would carry a flask around with them after all.
I see Rachel across the room, surrounded by men with gray hair and strange, anxious grins. Maybe they’re professors, or parents. Maybe they buy or review art—how would I know? I do know that they are downright enraptured as she explains her work, using those delicate hands to indicate a brush stroke, a color.
I gaze at the painting she’s explaining, and the violence of it pulls me in. Bright reds, oranges and yellows pulse in a messy, spiky ball with objects—figurines, religious artifacts, broken pieces of pottery—in the middle of the tumult. I get lost in trying to interpret it, and then I notice the flat-screen in the corner, playing footage of explosions over and over and over again.
My eyes drift up from the monitor, above the paintings, to the stark white wall with shiny black letters that spell out the title of Rachel’s show—“Oil at the Expense of Civilization’s Cradle: The Rape of Iraq.”
Jamie’s hand is on my arm, attempting to turn me around and pull me backward to the rooms with the black and white photographs and the panels of Mexican wrestlers, or maybe to lead me out of the building entirely.
“So? What do you think?”
Despite being drunk, I’m hyperaware of many things at once. Rachel is addressing her question to me with a self-congratulatory smile, though all three of us know that it’s not really my opinion she cares about; the gaggle of men she was talking to are now grinning vacantly at her back, their eyes taking her in as if she were the art; the title of her show is vibrating like neon in my brain; the fluorescent cheese and crackers are churning in the sour pit of my stomach; and Jamie is trying to figure out what to do in what the rational part of my brain knows is an impossible situation for him.
“Cool paintings, Rachel,” Jamie says as genuinely as he can while trying to wrangle me. His hand is hot on my arm, like it could burn through my skin. I open my mouth, and his grip tightens in warning. I know what he wants—he wants to take me outside so we can deal with this privately. But that is most definitely not what I want.
“Iraq?” My voice sounds foreign even to me.
Rachel’s smile falters as she’s confronted with someone who is not gushing all over her. “I’m sorry?” she says.
“What do you know about Iraq?”
Her response is terse. “I’ve studied Iraq extensively.”
The older woman circulating through the show with the note-taking student approaches. I look at her over Rachel’s shoulder and Rachel turns, that self-congratulatory smile instantly plastered on her face again. “Professor Astrid. Thank you for coming.”
The woman nods, eyeing me curiously. Can everyone in the room tell I’m drunk? Or do I just look as dangerous as I feel? “This is a very exciting show, Rachel,” she says. “Very exciting indeed.”
Rachel looks relieved to hear her praise—this professor must be someone important. Something ugly inside me lifts its head, nose to the wind, catching the scent of vulnerability.
“Rose, let’s go get some water.” Jamie’s now behind me, hands on my upper arms, still trying to turn me around as if he thinks I’m going to haul off and hit Rachel.
I dig in, sending roots deep into the gallery floor. “This isn’t art.”
Several people nearby turn with raised eyebrows to behold she who dared to call out the pretty Ivy League artist who is so clearly going places.
“Do you follow the news?” Rachel asks skeptically, as if she’s addressing an elementary school child. “Do you understand the situation in Iraq?”
Jamie drops his head to look at the floor—there’s nothing he can do now and he knows it. He lets go of me and takes a step back, folding his arms.
“The situation in Iraq isn’t art. And what you’re playing on those monitors over there—those explosions—that isn’t entertainment.”
“It’s called source material—” Rachel starts.
I can’t bear listening to her academic jargon. “People died in those explosions!” More heads turn. “Who do you think you—”
“Young lady,” the professor interrupts, reaching out and clasping my shoulder as if she truly wants to make me understand, as if it’s desperately important that I do. “Nothing is off limits in art. Art exists to examine everything—absolutely everything. That is its function in civilization. Without it, we’d all be lost.”
I look around the gallery at Rachel’s paintings. There are five of them, huge and abstract. They give the impression of irreparable harm to artifacts, structures, flesh. Yet to me, they are shallow and self-important. These paintings are not about Iraq at all, not about people who died, not about sorrow over the loss of culture and irreplaceable relics from the “cradle of civilization.”
These paintings are about her, designed to make her seem deep and knowledgeable and compassionate, sophisticated and able to take in a world beyond the one that she admires in the mirror every damn day of her life.
In short, they’re bullshit.
I was right about her—I was right about her the first time we met. She is a fraud.
Fluorescent cheese, crackers and wine arc out of my mouth and splat on the floor at Rachel’s feet.
*
I’m lying on the couch in the living room with my eyes closed so that I don’t have to see the Christmas lights blinking on our tree—they’re painfully bright, and it seems like there are hundreds of them because they’re reflecting off our old-fashioned glass ornaments. I feel like I’m on a boat in the mid
dle of the ocean during a terrible storm, though I’m probably more to blame for that than the Christmas tree. My head throbs. Or maybe it’s my ears—I can’t tell.
Though my eyes are still closed, I know Jamie is standing over me, refusing to take his jacket off or sit down. He’s fuming silently, Jamie-style.
He got me out of the gallery, made me lie down in the backseat of his car, put two seatbelts around me and then drove like a wild man—so much for never putting me in danger. As I lay there trying not to throw up all over his pristine car, I realized he shouldn’t have been driving. We were going too fast, and a few nearby horns blared. But I didn’t wrestle with those seatbelts and sit up to tell him to slow down.
Maybe it was the shame that kept me mute in Jamie’s backseat. I hadn’t meant to throw up at Rachel’s show. I truly hadn’t. While a small part of me thinks it’s funny, most of me knows that I behaved really badly. Like, abominably badly. How was Rachel supposed to know about what everyone’s been calling my “extenuating circumstances” for more than two years now?
But in my defense, my extenuating circumstances are extreme, especially if I’m standing in front of videos of explosions in Iraq that she calls “source material.”
She wants source material? I’ll give her source material.
My mother’s not home—she’s at Tracy’s parents’ Christmas party with Peter and Tracy. But if she had been home, I think Jamie would have handed me off at the front door and left without an explanation. We have plans to hang out with Peter and Tracy after the party, but I can already tell that’s not going to happen—Jamie is halfway out the door even though he’s standing right here.
I open my eyes and slowly sit up, wondering if I’m about to get sick again. “Do you think there was something wrong with that cheese?” I clutch my stomach, not quite ready to be upright. “It was such a weird color.” I flop back down, grabbing the embroidered Santa Claus pillow from behind my head and holding it to my chest. I have to get out of the living room before my mother comes home, but I can’t move. Not yet.
Jamie continues to say nothing.
Instead of apologizing for embarrassing him in public and making an ugly scene—which I know would be the right thing to do here—I let my embarrassment turn to anger. “Look, if you can work in a bar and carry a flask, I can have two glasses of wine at an ‘art’ opening.” I air-quote to communicate exactly what I think of Rachel’s work, in case he didn’t get it during my gallery tantrum. While my brain is telling my mouth to shut the hell up, out comes, “When did you get those GED results, anyway?”
The front door opens, interrupting our scintillating one-sided conversation and letting in cold December air that feels good on my sweaty face. Peter comes in with Tracy, who I haven’t seen outside of school in weeks and weeks, except for our ritual trip to the train station. Somehow, the day my brother comes home for Christmas break, she doesn’t have to go into the city, and she’s totally free to help out at her parents’ party, as long as he can go too. It’s all very convenient.
There’s a whole chapter on the way girls treat each other when there’s a boy in the picture in Killing Cinderella. Unfortunately, I can’t remember a single thing it says.
“Hey, man,” Peter says, shaking Jamie’s hand. Tracy takes one look at me and narrows her eyes.
“Are you drunk?”
“They serve bad cheese at Yale, the land of the gazillion-dollar endowment—can you believe that?”
Tracy laughs. “You need water and aspirin.” She turns to Jamie, implying that he should take care of that for me, but with one last black look in my direction, Jamie heads for the door.
“You’re not hanging out?” Peter asks, confused.
“Some other time.” There’s another blast of icy air and then Jamie slams the door shut behind him.
“Bye,” I call out as pointedly as I can manage.
Peter and Tracy exchange a look. “I’ll get some water,” she says, going to the kitchen.
“What that was all about?” my brother asks.
“Well, Mom, we went to an art opening. Some girl at Yale that Jamie knows.”
“And so you’re drunk…why?”
“I’m not drunk,” I say. “You know how they pass out those little cups of pukey wine? I had a few of those. And some rancid cheese.”
I can hear the sanctimonious tone before he even opens his mouth. “Rose, you have to be careful. You have a brother who’s an addict, remember?”
“I have a brother who was an addict.”
“I’m glad you have so much confidence in me but I’m always going to be—”
“—an addict, blah blah blah, AA, NA, yadda yadda yadda.” I throw the Santa Claus pillow at him, thinking I’m being funny.
The shock on his face nearly sobers me up.
Peter has worked really hard to turn his life around, and I’m making fun of the fact that he goes to meetings? What the hell is wrong with me?
He takes a deep breath. “You’re mean when you drink. Like me. That means you shouldn’t drink at all.”
“But if you’d been there, Pete…” I’m whining now. Actually whining. I see all of this as if I’m watching someone else do it, as if I have no control over it.
Tracy comes back in with water and aspirin. She raises her eyebrows at Peter, then looks at me. “What happened at the show?” she asks as she tries to help me take the aspirin without having to sit all the way up.
“The girl I told you about—Rachel, who likes Jamie? You know what the title of her ‘art’ show is?” I turn to Peter, knowing this is how I’m going to get him back on my side. “‘Oil at the Expense of Civilization’s Cradle: The Rape of Iraq.’”
For a second, Tracy is puzzled—she can’t understand how this could have sent me into a vomiting tailspin, which tells me so much about my place in her consciousness these days. But then she looks at Peter, who gets it right away, and the light of understanding dawns in her eyes.
Maybe now Peter will realize he shouldn’t be so hard on me tonight.
“Please tell me it wasn’t a video installation,” he says.
“Paintings, with videos of explosions to show her ‘source material.’ So I told her off.”
“You told her off?” he asks. “What do you mean?”
“I told her it wasn’t art. That the war in Iraq isn’t entertainment.”
“Wait, this was her final? Were there other people there?”
“Tons. Even Rachel’s very important professor. She was right there when I threw up on Rachel’s feet.” I feel my face get red, even though I’m trying to present this as some sort of victory.
Tracy gasps. Peter looks like he might throw up himself. “You realize that was a super shitty, drunk-ass thing to do, right?”
I hate when my brother talks to me like he’s better than me, like he’s staked a claim on moral high ground. “She deserved it,” I announce, digging into the anger I felt when I read those black letters on that white wall.
So what if I’m a mean drunk?
“Rose,” Peter says. “You don’t own the Iraq war because Dad died over there. It’s not yours.”
“Well, it’s way more mine than it is hers. Whose death did she have to watch on a fucking smartphone video?”
Then the tears and the snot start.
“You watched it?” Tracy says, sitting next to me, trying to put her arm around my shoulders.
“Of course I did!” I shrug her off. No way am I going to let her make this about the fact that, once again, I didn’t tell her something important. Even though that’s true.
I wipe my nose on my sleeve.
“Do you regret watching it?” Peter asks.
“No,” I lie without hesitation.
Peter sits down in a chair across from me, still holding the Santa Claus pillow. He leans forward and rests his elbows on his knees. “I almost didn’t watch it. I wasn’t sure I could handle it at this point in my sobriety.”
An ugly voice
in my head is telling me to mock Peter’s 12-step speak. “Jamie didn’t get his GED,” I announce instead, making it clear that I don’t want to hear about Peter’s feelings right now. I am in rare form.
“So that’s why he’s even more charming than usual.” Tracy wipes some mascara off my cheek.
“That, and the fact that I threw up at an art show that a college girl who’s totally in love with him invited him to.”
Tracy laughs a little. Then she laughs a lot. I start, too, although I can’t quite tell what’s laughing and what’s crying in my case. I feel like I might throw up again, but I can’t stop.
Peter—disappointed in both of us, I think—gets up, tosses Santa on the chair and leaves the room.
To my surprise, Tracy stays with me, flopping down on the couch, shoving me over to make room. I feel like I won a battle in a war I didn’t know I was fighting.
“Are you okay?” she asks when I finally stop laugh-crying and my stomach has decided to stay put.
I reach up and hit the switch on the wall so the overhead lights go off and we’re left with just the blinking Christmas tree. I used to love Christmas when I was a kid—I believed in the magic of the day with my entire soul. It’s strange how, as you grow up and that drops away for one reason or another, Christmas becomes this intangible thing that slips through your hands like sand no matter how hard you try to hold onto it. Since my dad died, Christmas feels empty underneath all the pretty trappings. I wonder if it’s this way for everyone who has lost someone.
I don’t know anything about Jamie’s Christmas memories—he’s never offered and I’ve never asked. I wonder if Christmas is empty for him too.
Maybe that’s what the flask is about.
I throw my arm over my eyes. “Jamie likes that girl,” I tell Tracy.
“Maybe,” she says. “But he loves you.”
No More Confessions Page 7
