The Legacy

by Kirsten Tranter

  A large chaise longue sat at an angle at one end of the room, solid and wide as a single bed. It was covered in light green linen, with one short armrest and a back support at one end. A cushion of the same fabric rested against the back. More than anything else in the room this spoke of Ingrid’s body: she had sat and lain here. It was a perfect chair for reading, long enough to stretch out and put feet up and fall asleep. A soft mohair blanket was folded across the seat. I felt an urge to cover the whole thing with a sheet, to blanket it like a corpse.

  The only other things in the room were a desk and chair, set against the wall between two windows that reached almost to the ceiling. The room presented at first as a study, dominated by desk, books, chaise longue for reading, but the chaise looked as though it could equally be used for sleeping, and the dresser added another note, personalising the room. I wondered if the other drawers held clothes. It was a room that could be lived in, slept in, not just studied in, but didn’t want to proclaim itself openly that way.

  I sat down at the desk, my back to the picture of Ophelia and the chest of drawers. The desk was a simple construction, beech stained with a transparent white wash. No drawers. A miniature, hollowed-out classical column held some pens and pencils, and there was a glazed ceramic dish with paperclips in it, a spiral notebook open to a blank page, and a small amphora. The amphora looked old, its surface slightly pitted.

  I leaned over and raised the shade on one of the windows, fine white canvas that lifted easily on its ropes. Sunlight fell against the window now in a way that blanked out the glass in a golden slant and lit the desk brilliant white. Sounds of traffic rose faintly and I had a sudden sense of how far I was above the ground, how many storeys lay below, how much distance to the street beneath the window. Dust particles danced in the light, tiny galaxies shifting.

  On one side of the desk sat a stack of manila folders filled with papers, and on top of the stack a black pocket diary. I paused, then decided to look. A quick glance at the folders showed them to be filled with photocopied articles and book chapters for Ingrid’s research on Roman culture and writing. I put them to one side and picked up the diary, held closed by a brass clasp. I turned the clasp softly and opened it. It fell open to the page marked by a ribbon set into the cover of the book. The page was divided into days of the week and the words Paul, 9 were there in Ingrid’s hand. I skipped to the next piece of writing, what looked like a short list of book titles and author names, with Labyrinth written at the top, the name of a bookstore near the Columbia campus. I looked back at Paul, 9 and saw that the date was 11 September. I dropped the diary and felt my lungs constrict. The little book fell and landed on the carpet without a sound.

  There was the same self-consciousness and guilt as when I had opened the drawer, but I retrieved the diary anyway and studied the writing on the page, the familiar shape of it. Neat round letters, a large hand. I turned the pages back and saw the writing on other pages, other days. Names, events. Dinner. Lunch. Coffee. Parties. Book titles. Websites. Numbers. I turned the pages forward, through each week of the empty months that followed. Blank. Blank. Blank.

  On the note pages at the end of the diary there were more lists, more titles, shopping lists, random words I couldn’t make sense of. It wasn’t until I found my own name that I realised that I had been looking for it, looking at all these other words without retaining a single one of them, waiting for my own name to occur. It was there in a list with names and dates. Birthdays. Julia: 28 May. Ralph was there. Fleur. Gil. Victoria. I recognised one or two other names and not others. The list did not quite fill the page.

  It had been a couple of years since Ingrid had sent me a birthday greeting. I remembered Ingrid’s birthday, 3 October, and the last time we had celebrated it, in Sydney with a crate of champagne. Sadness came over me and I thought resentfully of Ralph. He would want a full report on this: Ingrid’s room, her books, the place in the house that was hers, the list that included his name. The sun shifted its angle and the window cleared, showing the walls and windows of the buildings across the street and a generous patch of sky.

  I closed the book and tried to rearrange the pile of papers as I had found it. It was time to leave. What time was it in Sydney? What time was it here? There was no clock in the room.

  I took the key back to the chest of drawers and tried it briefly in the lock of the second drawer. No movement. I put it back on the chest and snatched up one of the tiny elephants quickly, before I had time to think. Its shape was firm and sharp in my palm and then dull in my pocket. I looked at Ophelia before leaving the room and her face was whole again, dead and empty against the water up on the wall.

  Grey gave me a postcard before he showed me out. It advertised a show at Maeve’s gallery, with the artist’s name and the words New Work on one side, black capitals on white, and the address and details for the gallery on the other. ‘It’s opening on Thursday,’ he said. ‘Maeve would love to see you. Come and have a glass of wine.’

  I said I would see him there.

  18.

  When I thought about Ingrid, her actual dying was the part I tried not to picture, but it was the part that featured in my dreams every night for those first weeks in New York. The dream would always be both different and the same, with her smiling, or turning her head, or presenting simply her enigmatic, smooth-skinned back, with its shoulder bones rounding and lengthening into the shape of wings. But always, then, dying. Suffocating, her eyes wild and pleading like Desdemona on stage, hair matted against the sheet, face disappearing beneath the pillow. Or drugged, her body slumped in a chair. The overstuffed armchair in the off-white living room, the one I sat in across from Grey that morning there.

  In one version of this drugged death her hand drapes over the arm of the chair, fingers catching the light like a Vermeer maiden, nails the eerie colour of death. So white that I know, when I understand the colour, that she’s gone. The nails are telling me, the white of the poisonous powder that killed her, in the dream.

  The night after that one, the dead white nails, she sits up in another dream in the same chair with a glass of wine, regarding me with an amused look on her face. The windows are bright, opaque, impossible to see through to what’s outside, the view obscured like it was that day in her room with the sun hitting the glass at a blinding angle.

  Where do you think I am, she asks me, with a look – or in words, I can’t remember, though it must be words because her cadence is there in the word ‘think’, tongue soft on the ‘k’.

  Her glass is bubbling now. It’s champagne, or fizzing with bubbles from tablets dropped into it, white foam.

  The dream stayed in my mind like a photograph the next morning, and I held it like I held the photographs that were to come later, examining it from every angle I could remember. What was through those windows?

  There were versions where her dying was less elegant. Some nights I simply saw the towers burning and falling. They appeared from a distance, tiny structures made of matchsticks, and at other times huge monoliths of concrete and stone that collapsed before me, falling miles down into the earth.

  She fell. From a cliff; down a long flight of stairs; down a grassy hill. She floated downriver like the Ophelia she loved, flowers around her. She drowned in a lake, and presented a faceless, pale body recognisable only by the necklace around her neck, the empty cameo frame on a chain.

  I walked from the Village to Fleur’s studio in SoHo along the cobbled streets and past iron-clad storefronts. The shops were fewer to the block as the street went south towards Chinatown. I stopped in front of a place that sold either shoes or chairs, or both, and maybe lamps. All these things were artfully arranged on the floor space of the shop. It could have been an art gallery.

  Fleur’s place was on the top floor of the building. I pressed the button next to her name – a handwritten label reading simply Grey. The button didn’t seem to make contact with anything much. I wondered if it worked. After a little while the buzzer sound
ed and I pushed open the heavy iron door and climbed the painted iron stairs. Light came through skylights and windows into the stairwell and by the third floor the space was bright with sun. Fleur opened a wide iron door, painted red, and held it while I stepped through.

  The door opened onto an expansive loft, half the floor of the building at least. Large windows let the sun spill in onto the floor, making slanted shapes of light on the white floorboards. A small kitchen fitted into a corner around from the door, and four black corduroy beanbags slouched around under the windows.

  Fleur looked her seventeen years: her feet were bare and she wore black jeans with a T-shirt and a grey hooded sweatshirt over it. Her hair had the appearance of blonde dyed black, pulled back into a high ponytail. She wore a lot of eyeliner. She smiled a sweet smile, and I half-expected to see metal braces, then reminded myself that girls like Fleur probably wore the new invisible braces. Her face was older but vaguely recognisable from the picture I’d seen of her and Maeve that had been stuck to Maeve’s fridge on that night when Fleur hadn’t made it to dinner; the same elfin shape, pointed chin.

  I recognised a Nan Goldin photograph on the wall, an unhealthy-looking couple on a bed, and a few others, all portraits or photographs with people in the frame. There was one that looked like a picture of a slightly younger Fleur: she wore heavy lipstick and a dark velvet dress, pearls around her neck. Another figure stood in the frame, a woman with her back to the camera and one hand on Fleur’s neck. They glowed in the diffuse light. In the picture Fleur looked a little towards the woman, whose head was inclined slightly as though listening. Suddenly the shape of the woman’s back cohered in my mind and I recognised Ingrid, and knew the dark blonde hair tied back from the neck.

  Fleur watched me looking at the photograph with her observant eyes. She asked me if I’d found the place OK, all politeness, and I said yes.

  ‘Would you excuse me for a second?’ she asked. ‘I was in the middle of setting up a shot.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘I’ll just be a second.’

  One large corner of the space had been made into a kind of set, with a video camera on a tripod and two tall bright lights with cords that snaked across the floor. The lights shone on a small set where two dolls appeared to be undressing each other. Some photographs hung on the wall nearby that seemed to be Fleur’s own work: two black-and-white and two colour photographs of dolls posed as classical statues, painted white. All were missing parts of or entire limbs. Their remaining hands held little doll accessories as they would urns or spears or other classical props. They were photographed against a painted background of leafy landscape, familiar from eighteenth-century portraits.

  ‘Are these Barbies?’ I asked.

  ‘No, I use Sindy mostly. And other cheaper models.’ Fleur stayed focused on the dolls, her back to me. ‘Barbies look too generic. I try to use older dolls when I can. And I like them fatter than Barbie.’ She dragged on her cigarette.

  The dolls being filmed were posed against a curtain tacked onto the wall behind them, a garish fabric that looked like sparkly astroturf. They didn’t look too healthy. One appeared to be wearing extra black eyeliner and a miniskirt. The other was missing some of her blonde hair and had on only a bra top and fishnets painted on her plastic legs. The similarity to the Nan Goldin photograph on the other wall was striking.

  ‘What’s happening here?’ I enquired.

  Fleur regarded the dolls for a while and smoked with one hand crossed in front, resting on her hip.

  ‘Can’t give it away.’ She paused. ‘Haven’t worked out the story yet.’

  ‘How do you work it out?’

  ‘Well, I can’t work it out as I film,’ she said, turning to face me, ‘although that’s what I’d most like to do. It’s too slow with the stop-motion. So usually I sit with them for a while, and play through a scene, and film that, and then I reconstruct a sort of script from that. Although there’s no words so it’s not really a script. It’s a sort of storyboard.’ She kept on smoking. ‘There will be music though. Actually, I just got a request to make a music video. But I don’t know. I’m not sure if I want to do that. Of course, Dad would say that music video is about all this amounts to.’

  ‘He doesn’t like your new work, does he?’

  ‘No, it’s not really art, blah blah. Not like painting, the hand holding the brush, etcetera.’

  She was smiling, and didn’t sound too upset. I wondered if she was doing this stuff with dolls and video just as rebellion, but that didn’t seem right. It wasn’t clear how much this all had to do with him, or not, or whether it would be possible to break down this image of the dolls undressing to explain it all that way.

  ‘I didn’t grow up with dolls much,’ Fleur volunteered. ‘Apart from Cynthia here.’ She picked up a doll from a small alcove set into the wall near where the photographs hung, stroked her hair, and replaced her gently.

  The photographs and stories on video seemed like a deliberate kind of return to childhood, but one with any sense of innocence evacuated or transformed. Whatever play she was engaged in here was intently serious, troubling beyond the usual forms of mutilation that little girls sometimes visited upon their dolls. The humour in the work quickly slipped away into something more ironic and disturbing. Fleur couldn’t have had much of a normal childhood, whatever that meant, with her celebrity and the expectations that success brought with it. I hoped she was finding some kind of catharsis in the project.

  There was only one of her paintings in the place, and I was surprised to see that it was a print, laminated onto cheap board. It was the red triangle painting from the catalogue cover on Grey’s coffee table. Fleur noticed me looking at it.

  ‘The museum owns that one.’

  ‘Is this your favourite?’

  Fleur smiled, but her eyes stayed flat. She shook out another cigarette from the packet in her sweatshirt pocket, and lit it from the one she had finished smoking. She looked too young to be smoking so much.

  ‘It could be my favourite,’ she said when she had lit it. ‘Ingrid didn’t like it though.’

  Seconds passed.

  ‘Tell me about her,’ I said.

  ‘What do you want to know?’ Fleur asked tiredly.

  I waited again.

  ‘OK,’ Fleur said. She walked to the half-sized fridge over in the corner and squatted in front of it, pulling out two beers. She gestured to a beanbag. ‘Sit.’ She handed me a bottle, and sat on the the other and started drinking.

  In my dream that night Ingrid showed me a curse tablet, pulled out of a drawer. At first it seemed tiny, smaller than the palm of my hand, but when I started to prise apart the scroll of lead it grew so that it was suddenly very large, and Ingrid took it and held it out before me in two hands. When it was fully open I could see that it was not lead after all, but a canvas. I was looking at Fleur’s painting, the red triangle a gash on the surface.

  I look to Ingrid to ask her what it means, but she only smiles, then turns her back and appears like the portrait with her and Fleur on the wall in Fleur’s studio. I look again and Ingrid’s right hand is gone, and she stands like a disfigured classical statue, or one of Fleur’s white dolls.

  A large painting greeted me as I walked into Maeve’s gallery that Thursday night, hung so that it faced the open door. It looked like Sargent’s painting of a woman in a dress with shoe-string straps, Madame X. It was life-size like that, just to the proportion of a body. The woman stood straight and tall, one foot slightly in front of the other, in a strapless gown made of velvet or thick satin. One pale hand rested on her thigh, while the other held lightly to the corner of a small table. A plant on the table trailed its fronds down towards the floor. She wore a silver chain around one wrist. Her neck was bare, and stones gleamed in her one visible ear, itself shining and perfect as a shell. The entire painting was dark and heavily glazed, as though the Sargent was there underneath a layer of brackish, distorting water. It wasn’t quite the same woman, nor
quite the same dress or body. She gazed off in another direction. Her feet were strangely bare, like small white fish under the weight of her long gown.

  I continued in. The walls were hung with paintings in a similar style, all portraits. Some showed the whole body and others only the head and shoulders. Mostly women, except for one portrait of a child and one of two men, both wearing tuxedos, heads leaning in as if sharing a private joke.

  Grey and Fleur were standing together in a smaller room just beyond the main space of the gallery, through an archway that was half closed off by a heavy black curtain. It was my only glimpse of the two of them together, a short, silent tableau. Grey stood with his hands on his hips, pushing his jacket to the sides, and Fleur was half-turned away from him, arms folded, her shoulders a little hunched over. She was wearing black pants and sneakers and a long-sleeved shirt with some kind of colourful design on it, letters and pictures, and a heavy red cardigan. Grey’s stance was tense and exasperated. Fleur tossed her hair back over her shoulder with one hand in a petulant gesture.

  Someone walked by carrying a tray arranged with plastic cups of wine. The room was filled with men and women dressed expensively in dark clothes. One woman trailed peacock feathers from her gathered black hair. The woman from the Sargent-like painting materialised in front of me, dressed in a gown almost identical to the one in the painting, pointed shoes on her white feet. She stood there with a drink in one hand listening to a grey-haired man in black. He gestured to the painting closest to them. I wanted to hear her voice. The man kept talking. The woman laughed at something he said, a giggle, high-pitched and tinkling. She started talking and her voice wasn’t how I’d expected it at all, but high and breathy, a girl’s voice. It felt disappointing. I took a cup of white wine from a tray that paused at my side.