by Karen Raney
Strange at first, doing it in the lake bedroom with the life preservers hanging on the wall and the shelves full of board games and stuffed animals I’d never bothered to get rid of. We left the curtains open. There was something thrilling about that, even though no one was out there to see us. Maybe it was being at the lake house. Maybe it was the conversation we’d had on the dock. But that time was the closest and the best. The way it’s supposed to be. So it was the saddest time too. The books don’t tell you about that.
I rolled onto my stomach and Jack ran his hand up and down my spine. His dampness was squashed against me, his legs giving off a lazy kind of heat. It’s true that men literally empty themselves out. I felt emptied out too. With my free eye I could see the line of silver through the trees, fringed by my lashes. Night took a long time to fall here. The water held on to the light. My eye slowly closed and slowly opened, giving me the silver line again. Where would that line go? Where would the lacy trees between me and the line go? Where would the moss go that was in so much shadow now you couldn’t see it, you just had to know it was there? What about every idea I’d ever had about the lake? Everything that had ever happened to me at the lake? Where would that go? I could feel the answer like some sorry thing circling around and around itself, unable ever to lie down and rest, and the answer was: Nowhere. The lake would still be there. But my lake wouldn’t be there. Whatever I felt, thought, saw, heard was sealed up and attached to me and only to me, and it would go wherever I went.
I pulled the sheet up and tried to keep the sadness from taking over. If I let it take me over, then sadness was all I would ever have. I unrolled my length beside him. It was a miracle, when you thought about it. If Miss Sedge hadn’t put us together for the campaign, I would not be here in the lake house bedroom with Jack. I would not know what it was like to lie next to a perfectly warm body that was naked just for me, and feel the ripples from his hand fanning out.
“Jack?”
“What?”
“I love this place.”
I made him keep stroking my back and listen to every last detail of every story I could think of about the lake. The year my cousins and I rescued dragonflies trapped in the spiderwebs under the dock. We picked the sticky stuff off with tweezers. If their wings weren’t too damaged, they flew away. The first time I swam across, with Mom and Grandma alongside in the canoe. Singing on the dock before a storm. Picking blueberries at the air force base. It was my job to remove the hard green ones and the leaves and twigs that got mixed in. My grandfather’s birdhouses, walks down the glen, the perfect silence in the woods when it snowed.
“There,” I said.
“There what?”
“Let’s get up.”
I let Jack go first. I liked watching him put on his clothes. He was still shy about me seeing him naked, but this time he didn’t seem to mind dangling around the place right in front of me. Puckered and saggy. Bruise-colored. So different from the rest of his body. So different from the one in bed with us, which had a mind of its own. I didn’t close the curtains, though I’d never liked them being open once it got dark. Jack did some shadowboxing and threw his underpants in the air and caught them with his foot. I lay on my side, laughing in the right way.
The thing was this. Once upon a time Jack might have thought of me as this girl he built planetariums with, or this girl he talked about the ice sheet with, or this girl he made an animation with. But now, whatever happened, he wouldn’t be able to pass over me too lightly. I would always be the first girl he did it with. That’s not something you forget.
Hi Maddy,
About time it warms up. London climate is not the best, especially compared to Spain or America, that’s for sure. You never can trust an English summer. You have to always take a jacket when you go out. I miss the heat of my country. But I guess I am used to it by now. I want to ask again about your mother. How is she? And her friend who is ill?
Antonio
Dear Antonio,
I would love to travel to Spain or London. Anywhere, really. I’ve been to California and twelve other states, plus Montreal. I guess that’s not too bad. I bet there are kids who have never been out of DC. Jack and I drove up to our lake house, just the two of us.
My mother is an atheist like you. Maybe that’s what attracted you to each other? My grandmother is a Christian but not the yucky kind. She is really smart and she has an open mind, as much as you can have an open mind and still believe in God, prayer, heaven, etc. My grandfather goes to church but he never talks about it. I don’t know if he really believes. Do you think it’s possible to believe in life after death without believing in God? Vicky is a Catholic and she goes to church but I don’t think it has much to do with God, it’s just what Catholics do, like eat fish on Fridays and speak Italian in the kitchen. I wish I could take it so lightly. Fiona’s not the religious type.
Mom is okay. Her friend is hanging in there.
Maddy
Maddy,
I come from a Catholic family, and church was part of my life growing up. I didn’t really question it until I got older—thirteen years maybe? My parents didn’t like it when I stopped going to church. My mother especially. They are simple people. I guess I wanted to make a point. Once you look at the concept of religion with a scientific frame of mind, it seems less and less plausible. Though I would NEVER rule anything completely out because part of keeping a scientific frame of mind is being open to being proved wrong. A lot of discoveries came from scientists entertaining ideas that seemed ridiculous at the time. Do you know what a paradigm is? A paradigm is a view of the world that organizes our way of thinking, and even our perception, what we see and don’t see. Scientific revolutions don’t just add new facts, they change our entire worldview.
I do find it very hard to conceive of an afterlife. We are animals. Smart animals, but even so, animals don’t go to heaven, do they? I suspect it is a story people tell themselves because it is so hard to accept the idea of not existing. You also have to look at the damage religion has done. So many wars fought in the name of it. People thinking they don’t have to make the most of their life because they have a spare one. In my way of thinking we must believe we are given one life. I know you have an inquiring mind, and that is such an important thing. But I wouldn’t worry too much about it for now!
Antonio
Eve
22
I had taken to arriving at work before everyone else, when Roland the security guard was eating donuts in his office on the mezzanine. He knew I liked the run of the place before the day began. I snapped the switches one by one as I made my way through the dark building. Light leapt ahead to create the space as I needed it: the lower gallery with its shrouded piano, the paneled staircase, the glass bridge that linked the original house with the airy modern half of the museum.
After Maddy died, I’d preferred going to work to staying at home. I let go of the young people’s programs, but retained my managerial responsibilities and still led sessions with adults. Lately I’d been spending a lot of time alone in the galleries. I felt thrown back to a time when art had seemed thrilling and necessary; but when I stood in front of the paintings I loved, they were like old friends I had fallen out with, trying to tell me something I couldn’t understand.
Today I headed for the wax room. This was an alcove the size of an elevator, located off the gallery that held Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party—the collection’s most famous painting. I felt for the switch. The little empty room sprang to life, its pitted coat of beeswax glowing like skin. Many a visitor stepped in and out again, complaining, “There’s nothing in there!”
When it was first installed, I had found the wax room oppressive; underneath the sweet smell of birthdays and Advent, something lay in wait that was feral and indifferent to the human world. Strange that I was drawn to it now. My sensory life had been reset in so many ways that I often found myself seeking out what used to repel me. I positioned my folding chair in th
e corner. Aside from anything else, the empty room was somewhere to think.
“Wasn’t it was up to Maddy to tell you?” My father had ventured the question cautiously, because he knew it was the crux of the matter. Maddy had chosen to find Antonio independent of me. There was no getting around that. I was starting to see that you can lose someone not just once, but over and over again. All these men who wooed her away from me! Jack, Antonio, and in a complicated way, my own father. Of course she needed the counsel and approval of men; of course she craved their love. I knew that. I accepted that. No doubt as adults she and I would have reclaimed our female solidarity and laughed together at the foibles of men. No doubt eventually I would have told her the full story of Antonio. I always planned to do that. We always planned to track him down once she turned eighteen. Plans!
When I emerged from the wax room, the main gallery lights were ablaze and Alison Ward, one of the attendants, was sitting on her hands, practicing her scowl for the day. Just before going on compassionate leave, I had put Alison on probation because of an incident in when she’d argued aggressively with an intern giving a public talk. Since my return she’d had the air of a child flaunting impeccable behavior while biding her time. Then last week a visitor had complained about Alison to one of the docents.
She saw me carrying the folding chair and raised her eyebrows. My watch said nearly ten. I had been in there longer than I’d intended.
“Good morning,” I said brusquely. “The cleaners told me something spilled in the wax room. They aren’t allowed to touch anything in there.”
I went straight over to her, glad that I was standing and she wasn’t. She knew I was making excuses. She knew what everyone knew about my life. Her face was round and pale in a boxy haircut, self-inflicted, by the look of it. She watched me from narrowed eyes, shrewd in the way a mistreated cat is shrewd. The contrast with the stylish merrymakers of the painting beside her was comical. Not to mention the contrast with Maddy.
“Was it?” asked Alison in her scratchy voice.
“Was what?”
“Was something spilled in there?”
“If so, they cleaned it up,” I said. “Alison, I have to tell you there’s been a complaint.”
“I thought you said the cleaners weren’t allowed in the wax room?”
I ignored that. “Not official, but a complaint nevertheless. From a member of the public.”
“A complaint about what?”
“A visitor told one of the docents that you spoke to him in an ‘extremely rude manner.’ Something about a Matisse.”
“People don’t like being told what to do, no matter how polite you are.”
“And how polite were you?”
Alison had a way of appearing to be looking at me without actually meeting my eye. “If it wasn’t an official complaint, what are you telling me for? They can say anything they want.”
I gave her what I hoped was the piercing look of a line manager. I no longer had any confidence in my own authority.
“He was this big loud guy. He went right up and put his finger on the Matisse. I said, ‘Please don’t touch the artwork.’ He said, ‘But it’s behind glass.’ I said, ‘If you touch the glass, the glass touches the painting.’ He gave me a dirty look, and when he thought I’d turned my back, he did it again. Where do people get off, damaging works of art?”
“How long have you been here, Alison?”
“Year and a half.”
“Weren’t you planning to start a master’s?”
“I was going to.” She made a face. “Want to know why he was provoking me?”
“We take visitor complaints very seriously, you know. It’s a disciplinary matter.”
“The guy was wearing a backpack. He must’ve sneaked up the fire stairs. So I said to him, ‘You can’t bring that in here. Can I ask you to go check it in the coatroom?’ He said in this nasty way, ‘You can ask me, but I’m not leaving this in any coatroom. Do you know what’s in here?’ He went like this . . .” Alison made the hand sign for a pistol. “Pointed his finger straight at my head like he was taking aim, and laughed. Asshole.”
“Did you call him that?”
“Of course not.”
“Phew.”
“I called him a redneck jerk.”
“You can’t call visitors names!” I sighed. “You know that.”
“Should I have called the police? It’s against the law here, carrying a gun.”
“Alison, in this kind of job you have to keep your cool. You could have looked for Roland, or any one of us, to back you up.”
“I told him I was going to get security and he swore at me and stomped downstairs. So I guess I scared him off. I bet you’re putting me on probation again. Great. Send me away for keeping some maniac from destroying a Matisse.”
“Well, he would have pushed my buttons too.” I tried not to smile. “People can be exasperating. How old are you, Alison?”
“Twenty-four.” For the first time she looked straight at me through the ragged edge of her bangs. “How old was your daughter?”
“Sixteen,” I answered automatically.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Thank you.” There was an awkward silence in which I blinked away the threat of tears. “Well,” I concluded, composing myself. “I won’t take this any further. But next time I suggest you breathe deeply and count to ten—no, one hundred—before you bring out your big guns.”
We grinned at the same time. I exited the gallery in the direction of the offices. Though I had never been partial to The Boating Party, the blurred, candy-colored brushstrokes actively annoyed me now, the men striking poses in their undershirts, the woman in the bonnet ostentatiously kissing her little French dog. Not a sharp angle in sight.
• • •
The office area was large enough to be divided into separate rooms, but that would have gone against the spirit of the place. We each had a long table to ourselves, with bookshelves and bulletin boards creating zones of partial privacy while retaining a sense of collegial openness. The interns shared a table by the window.
“Claire,” I said, coming to a stop by her desk. We had the place to ourselves. “I have an idea.” Claire Tivington was director of education. I was assistant director, which was the way I preferred it, second in command. Her eyes lingered on her screen; we had a financial audit coming up. “I could do with a new project.”
She gave me her businesslike face. Fifteen years my senior, she was a no-fuss lesbian who dressed in pantsuits a little too tight and short in the leg; to the relief of the staff, she had finally let her eggplant-colored hair go gray. The instant Maddy was diagnosed, Claire had given me as much compassionate leave as I wanted, persuading a retired colleague to provide cover. Though we had always kept a professional distance, I was immensely grateful for her kindness. Now Claire folded her plump hands on the desk.
“One year is coming up, isn’t it?”
“I’m thinking it might be a good time to revive the England trip.”
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s look at dates and figures.”
“I was thinking early December.”
“That soon?”
“End of November is, you know, the anniversary.”
She gave a sage nod.
“It’s an interesting moment over there. They’re serious about merging education with commissioning, curation, forms of display . . .”
“Yes, I know,” she said.
“I could do a series of interviews, like we discussed. Find out what’s happening on the ground. Write up a report. A book, even.” I paused. “I’ll need someone with me.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” She checked my eyes. “Well, it does sound good. We might be able to spare one of the interns. Melissa, maybe? Anyway, there’s a lot we’d need to figure out first.” She unclasped her hands and one of them inched toward her mouse. “Funds, for a start.”
Melissa was a confident, demure intern who dressed
in short skirts and over-the-knee boots. She gave bland visitor tours and was starting to write content for the website. She was liked by staff and public alike. She never put a foot wrong. I balked at the idea of spending two weeks in London with Melissa. But it was a good sign that we were already talking about details. With Claire being the bighearted person she was, I thought there was a chance my request would be granted.
“Dig up the proposal,” she said. “We’ll see what we can do.”
• • •
I ran across Alison frequently after that, as though our encounter had rendered her visible. She spent her lunch breaks in the galleries, or the ground-floor shop, flipping through books. One day I came across her, arms folded, in front of The Silence That Lives in Houses. She glanced at me suspiciously.
“Do you like that painting?” An inane question. I’d banned the word like from my teaching sessions.
“I think I know what he meant,” said Alison.
“Who?”
“Matisse!” she snapped. “Who else?”
I left a long pause. She had no idea how to talk to a line manager. “What did he mean?”
“Well,” she began, “it’s bright and noisy outside the window, but what you want is to be indoors, where you can look at your book and your globe and think about what’s out there. See, the trees are solid but the interior is all outlines. The people are outlines. They’re facing away from the window. They’re facing the vase of flowers. The book they’re looking at is blank . . .” She stopped. Her voice lost its animation. “I don’t know,” she said, sullen again.
“You really love this, don’t you?”
Alison pushed her glasses up with one finger. “When I started here, I thought, Oh, it’ll be great, I’ll be near the art. What a joke. It’s just a customer-service job. I might as well be working in a drugstore.”
“In my day you could work your way up. There were federal positions. My master’s was run out of a town house in Foggy Bottom. Now, to do anything interesting, you have to have at least an MA. And even then—”
