by Rose, M. J.
So why hadn’t she told me about the photo in the museum? I’d never told her how deep the rift was between Cole and me. It was easy enough to avoid since the family didn’t get together en masse anymore now that everyone was living so far away from each other.
“Marlowe, just because you’ve opened yourself up once to someone – despite what happened – you can’t stay shut down. It’s damaging. To your soul as an artist.”
“I’m not shut down–”
He interrupted. “You are. Your face is closed. You stand with your arms crossed over your breasts. You lean back when I lean forward to say something to you. You look away if–”
“I don’t. I don’t.”
He nodded to me, indicating that I should look down at my own body language. And I did. My arms were exactly as he’d described. I concentrated on my posture; I was leaning away. Any closer and I would have been uncomfortable.
His gaze was too intense and I looked back at the photograph. Its message was even more profoundly disturbing. I was trapped. By one truth about Cole, by another about me, and by a challenge from Gideon to face my demons.
“You look as if you are awaiting a terrible verdict,” Gideon said.
I turned from the photo. “Not anymore.”
“I’m glad,” but his voice was still concerned and so comforting I felt it around my shoulders as if he had put his arms around me. I hadn’t heard a man talk to me with that kind of caring in a long time. It made me grateful and calm I looked into his face and our eyes caught. The connection went from being kind to kinetic. From being solicitous to being penetrating.
The sexual clench deep inside me was unexpected. And unwanted. But it was real. And while I stood there, with people streaming around us, not noticing us but the artwork on the walls, Gideon stood in front of me – not a client anymore. Not a stranger anymore either.
He’d looked at my face and read the expression in my eyes and had understood it.
And I didn’t know how to respond.
20.
There was a message on my machine when I got home, from Vivienne Chancey, telling me that the letters I had written for her had done wonders for her blossoming relationship but she’d hit a wall and needed me to do her a favor. “I’m going to email you a photograph I took in the desert, where I’m on location. If I send it today, could you write something that has some connection to the desert and how I feel and do it really quickly? How I feel about missing him, I mean. I know it’s not fair that I’m asking you to do it so fast. But I really need it ASAP.”
The message ended. The next began. At first no one spoke. There was a beat of silence. Then another. And then a third. And just when I was about to hit erase, I heard Cole’s voice.
“Marlowe did you get my last message? I think we should work this out before your mother and my father get here and–”
Pressing the stop button, I cut him off. It didn’t matter what he was going to say. We were long past arguing or blaming each other or trying to find a middle ground where we could come to an agreement.
I was angry at Jeff all over again for telling my stepbrother that I’d been in the office and seen the invitation. Furious with Jeff. I wanted to call him and let him know how I felt. To get in a cab and go over to his office and stand in front of him and ask him how he dared to interfere when he hadn’t been asked.
But that wouldn’t solve anything.
Jeff wasn’t the problem. Cole was.
He hadn’t even identified himself on the machine, assuming that I would know his voice. That was so indicative of him and the way he saw himself at the center of the universe. Even more insidious was that Cole managed to manipulate people into focusing on him without them realizing it.
Almost exactly the opposite of Gideon’s way had of not drawing attention to himself but of shifting the attention to you.
To me.
It was hard to even admit that.
Gideon had been attentive to me, I’d felt important. That what I had to say and offer mattered, and that in turn had encouraged me to open up to him.
Shivering, I walked away from the phone, sat down on the bed, picked up a cobalt blue silk pillow and hugged it to my chest. I shut my eyes.
The dark curls and marble green eyes were the first thing I saw. The olive skin, the strong cheekbones. The full bottom lip. The long fingers. The scars.
My insides ached.
After spending time with him that morning I wasn’t sure I knew him any better than I had before, but I did know more about him.
He was a sculptor. He’d taught sculpture at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York and had been tenured. Their iconoclastic artist in residence, he’d said. The youngest professor there. But he’d quit.
I didn’t know why, though.
I knew he liked coffee, black. And cookies. He favored blue jeans and always wore an old, beat-up Rolex watch that I bet had been his father’s for all the scratches on the stainless steel band and on the glass covering the face.
It was meager knowledge.
No. There was one other thing I knew.
Gideon was able to read my face. This man could tell what I thinking by looking into my eyes and watching how I moved. And no one before him had ever been able to do that. Not even Cole. Not even with my face engraved on his pupils. Not even with the two of us living in the same house and eating at the same table night after night and morning after morning.
It kept coming back to Cole, didn’t it? But that wasn’t going to last. It was only because his show was opening in a couple of weeks. Only because the enfant terrible of the current photography scene, the man who was destined to inherit Helmut Newton’s mantle, was about to jump to the next strata of his career.
And it kept coming back to Cole because for some reason he wanted my blessing to take that jump.
But I’m not religious. I’m not a saint. I’m not qualified to give my blessing to anyone. I cannot absolve my stepbrother. I don’t even know if I can forgive him.
If Cole needed redemption, he would have to find it somewhere else. He’d made his choices. All centered around what was best for him. He’d never cared what I thought before. Why start now?
Certainly not for my sake.
It had to be something else.
My mother and stepfather?
No, that wasn’t it. He simply didn’t care about anyone else that much.
It was the photographs, wasn’t it? Despite what he’d promised, he had to be using some of the photographs. I knew that there was one on the invitation. Of course there were more in the show. And he knew – somewhere deep inside of him – that what he was doing was wrong. Except Cole never felt guilt. Guilt was too selfless for him. It had to be a selfish reason.
What could that be? Was he worried that I would do something to hurt him? After all these years, what could I do?
Gideon had looked into my eyes and told me that it seemed as if I was waiting to hear a terrible verdict. And I was. I had been waiting for it for the last two years. Ever since my last conversation with Cole. The one that Joshua had overheard.
21.
The next night, I sat at my computer and reread the museum story I’d written for Gideon. It was finally finished and, reading it, I was embarrassed all over again.
This was a new emotion for me. This deep blushing inside of me that no one could see. I’d been writing letters and stories for the store for six months, but this had never happened before.
How could I send him this story?
I knew he was waiting for it.
He didn’t have his computer set up yet and so had no access to email; instead he’d asked me to print out the story and mail it to him. He’d told me he planned on writing it out in his own handwriting and sending it as soon as he got it. But I couldn’t imagine facing him again after he’d read these words and phrases.
These were not my fantasies. Nor were they his. And yet, more than anything I’d ever created, they were personal. I was cer
tain that if I’d been on my own, without him there in the museum with me, I never would have thought up the scene that took place in the Venetian bedroom.
Procrastinating, I clicked the computer keys and called up the quick letter I’d written for Vivienne Chancy earlier that morning and reread that one instead.
Using her photograph of an arid desert, I’d made up a scenario about a woman longing for her lover, imaging him coming to her, waiting for him. It surprised me how the two pieces I’d written for Gideon had influenced me. There was a deeper passion to this letter for Vivienne than the other’s I’d written for her. There were even some similar themes in the letter for Vivienne and the stories for Gideon.
At least she’d benefit from my current state of mind.
I typed out her address and sent her email, with the letter as an attachment.
Then I went back to the story I’d written for Gideon, reading it once more. After making a few corrections, I hit the print button on my computer.
When the phone rang, I looked at the caller ID before picking it up. It was my mother. I answered.
After a few minutes of conversation that was clearly not what she’d called about, she told me that she’d talked to Cole and that he was worried about me.
“That’s nice of him. He shouldn’t bother.”
I took the phone to the oversize armchair in the living room area, moved a pile of fine origami paper I was using in a collage onto the floor, and sat down.
“Marlowe, I haven’t wanted to interfere. But Troy and I are concerned. Did something happen between you two that we should know about?”
Mother’s intuition. She knew even if she didn’t know it. But it was so long in the past there was no reason to hurt her now. She’d feel responsible. Guilty for not having seen what was going on in front of her eyes. No. Her camera had been in front of her eyes. That’s why she’d feel guilty.
“Nothing happened. We never see each other because you and Troy moved away we never have big family get-togethers anymore. So how is Troy? How are you?”
“Why don’t I believe you?” she asked, not answering my question.
“I don’t know,” I lied, “by the way, why didn’t you tell me that Cole’s photograph was in the Metropolitan Museum of Art? For God’s sake. I was there the other day and walked by it. You know how weird that is?”
“I didn’t tell you because Cole asked me not to. Back in January when he was out here and he told us about it he said he wanted to tell you himself. But tonight he told me you haven’t returned any of his phone calls for weeks.”
“Actually it’s longer than weeks. I’m surprised he told you though?”
“Why?”
The printer had stopped and the silence presented itself as a new sound. I got up and turned on the CD player, not caring what disc was on, but needing the sound to fill in the spaces that held all kinds of words and thoughts I didn’t want to hear.
“What is the problem between you and Cole, Marlowe? I should have realized how long it’s been since I’ve seen you two together. Remember when you used to be joined at the hip?”
“It’s nothing. Grew together, grew apart.”
“Nothing is nothing with you Marlowe. You don’t drop people. You’re too sensitive for that. You get inside people’s heads and understand them. You care about them. You’re intensely loyal. You still have friends from grade school. Cole’s your stepbrother. You don’t grow apart from people you love. If anything, you hold on too long, are more forgiving than is good for you.”
“Thanks for the psychoanalysis. When did you give up photography?”
“Sarcastic now? That means I hit a little too close for comfort. What is going on sweetie? None of this makes sense. If anything, you hold onto difficult people too long. You like their complications, their layers. You’re so good at getting beneath their surfaces. And once you do, you understand and forgive.”
“You’re making too much of something that is probably just a bad case of sibling rivalry.”
“Sibling rivalry is for toddlers.”
“Okay then, professional jealousy. Mine. For him. I didn’t like constantly being compared to the more successful artist in the family.”
My mother didn’t say anything. I knew her well enough to picture her. She probably was playing with the catch on her watch. The same one she’d worn since I was a little girl. It had been my father’s watch before he died. And when she was thinking, or upset, she opened and closed the catch on the battered stainless band. I listened hard and heard the familiar metallic snap. I didn’t remember much about my father, who had been a journalist and died when I was four years old. Killed in Israel while covering a story.
“You know, I almost believe you.” My mother said.
“Why don’t you go all the way and fully believe me?”
“Because I’m not sure you could be that jealous. A little resentful. Slightly annoyed. Angry at yourself that you haven’t gotten further with your own work. But for it to all add up so that you stopped talking to Cole or taking his calls? Nope. I’m not buying it.”
I sighed. Not on purpose. If I’d been thinking, I would have held it in.
“Now you are getting me angry,” my mother said.
“Because?”
“Because you’re keeping it inside.”
“My prerogative.”
It was an old expression. My mother was a private person. An artist who became a mother of my sister and I and then two additional step-children. She believed in all of us having a right to our own privacy, and respecting hers and my stepfather’s. The catch phrase in our house was “my prerogative” if we felt someone was intruding when we needed alone time.
Now my mother laughed. It was the sound that had orchestrated the best times when I was growing up. She loved to tell jokes. To listen to us tell them. She teased us and tickled us and encouraged us to be just plain silly. Hearing the peals of her laughter, I thought about how much I missed her.
Since my mother and stepfather had moved to Santa Fe, I didn’t see them enough. When they were only a three-hour drive away, I went up often for weekends and always for holidays. Now it was planning and a plane trip.
“Troy and I are coming to New York in July.”
It was almost as if she’d heard my thoughts. “That’s great. I can’t wait to see you.” I knew why they were coming, but I wanted to hear her say it. “Vacation?”
“Part of it will be, yes.”
I waited. She waited. Finally I said: “The other part?”
“I thought you knew. Cole is having a one-man show at a Chelsea gallery. There’s going to be a big party. We’re invited. You’re invited. He said he sent you–”
“That’s very exciting.” I knew my voice was anything but excited as I interrupted.
“He’s so young to have such an honor. I was forty and Troy was forty-five before we had solo shows.”
I nodded, realized she couldn’t see me, and said: “How long are you staying?”
“What the hell is going on Marlowe? Didn’t you know about the show? Why aren’t you saying anything about it? No matter how annoyed you are at Cole about whatever it is, surely it’s not that serious that you can’t be happy for him about this. It’s an incredible achievement.”
I got up and walked over to the table in the hall where I’d thrown my bag when I walked in. Holding on to the phone with one hand, I fished around until I found my cell phone. Then, using my forefinger, I punched in my own number, waited for it to ring and for the call waiting click to interrupt my conversation with my mother. I let the first one go.
“Mom, listen, I don’t want you to worry about this and–”
The beep of an incoming call sounded over my words.
“That’s my call waiting. Email me the dates and leave some time for me. I can’t wait to see you. Really.”
After we got off the phone, I retrieved the four pages of white typewriter paper from the printer. Double-spaced. Helvetica, tw
elve- point type.
Hold it far away from your face, so far that you can’t read the words, and all you see is a pattern of straight lines, curves, circles, and angles. Meaningless black marks in a seeming random order. I couldn’t read the searing words from that far away. It was simply an arbitrary design. But for some reason it calmed me down. My writing was not important. It was simply an escape. In the stories, men and women did things to each other that might disturb them, ignite them, illuminate them, arouse them while I remained safe and secure. Untouched and unattached. Not close to anyone who could reach into me and turn me inside out.
22.
Four days later, Gideon met me in Bergdorf Goodman, one of New York City’s most exclusive department stores. He was waiting for me at eleven a.m. downstairs in the cosmetics department, at the Guerlain counter.
The carpet was thick under my feet and walking toward him I was conscious of how little effort it was taking to get me to his side. Seeing him again, I felt a catch in my breath and I only knew I was smiling because of the way he was smiling back.
“Good morning,” he said. “I got here a few minutes early. I think I’m on the verge of olfactory overdose. I never realized how serious women are when they shop. This should be more fun than most of these women make it look.”
I laughed. “What you’re seeing is single-minded devotion to a goal.”
We stood facing the large circular counter in the center of the room. Gleaming bottles caught the lights from the chandeliers. With their soft curves and gentle angles, they cried to be held.
The liquid golds and ambers, the sea-inspired blue-greens and gray-blues, the pastels stolen from the petals of the flowers that had inspired the scents, all enticed you to open the jewel-toned or precious-metal caps and touch the perfume to your pulse points.
