by Alix Ohlin
“Do you remember me?” I said. “My brother, Wylie, and I used to live next door. With our parents. Arthur and Marie Fleming.”
The names, even my mother’s, provoked zero reaction from David’s wife. She flipped a slick page with her index finger and shook her head. “They told me not to get a permanent wave,” she said, “but where hair’s concerned I know what I’m doing. I’ve been a student of hair since I was eleven years old.”
Feeling hot breath on the back of my neck, I jumped. Donny was standing behind me, holding a glass of ice water, his cheeks flushed. He jerked his head sideways, to indicate that I should leave the room, and fast, then closed the door after me. Following him back through the house to the backyard, I tried to remember what his mother was like when we were young, but couldn’t come up with a single thing. For all I knew, she could’ve been in that room reading Vogue the entire time; she’d clearly had the subscription long enough, anyway.
Donny handed me my glass of water and we sat at the picnic table, feet scraping the dirt, while I drank in silence.
“So, Lynnie,” he said. “What are you doing tonight?”
“What?”
“Me and my friends are going to catch a movie, probably, if you wanted to come along.”
I stood up. “Oh, jeez. I promised my mom I’d have dinner with her. Thanks for the water, though.”
“Okay, maybe another time then. Hey, do you like miniature golf?”
“I really should get going, Donny.”
He accompanied me around front to the Caprice, opening and closing the door in a gentlemanly fashion, and waved as I pulled away.
I turned the radio up high and took the highway to my mother’s, driving extra-fast. I couldn’t stop thinking about Daphne Michaelson flipping through Vogue and checking out runway fashions from a world she, so far as I could tell, had never encountered. And what on earth did she do during the school year, with both sons away, one for months on end, and her husband at work all day and then—a thought that tasted bad in my mouth—at some other woman’s condo? Her plight seemed to me terrible. Then, from some distant part of my brain, I managed to retrieve a childhood memory: a backyard party at our house one summer night, a flock of people from the neighborhood, adults with cocktail glasses, kids with sparklers and hamburgers. The two Michaelson boys, toddlers, exhibiting athletic prowess even then, leaping over each other gymnastically, landing on their heads and bounding back up. My mother inside in the kitchen, talking with the other wives. My father at the grill, spatula in hand, frowning at the browning pieces of meat. And Daphne Michaelson by herself in the yard, quiet, exquisitely made up, swaying slightly in a flowered dress.
My mother and I got home at around the same time. Before she could say anything, I proposed that we have dinner together, “unless you have other plans,” and she smiled awkwardly and said that sounded fine. I offered to make something, with the caveat that my cuisine extended only to items unwrapped and placed in the microwave. She smiled and said she’d be happy to cook. There was a kind of elaborate diplomacy between us. Actually, I thought, we could have used some form of simultaneous translation to help us communicate, as if we were foreign dignitaries.
“Lynn, could you set the table?” Since you’ve accomplished nothing else useful this summer.
“Sure, Mom.” That’s not fair. I did bring Wylie home, and you made a mess of that.
“Do you like Italian dressing?” At this point I don’t even know what you like, or even, frankly, care.
“Anything’s fine with me.” The feeling’s mutual.
I asked how her day was, and the trials and tribulations of travel-agency life kept us going through most of dinner. A couple who wanted to vacation on cruise ships presented her with a budget of five hundred dollars; another family required a money-back guarantee they wouldn’t come down with food poisoning on a trip to Machu Picchu. Adventure without risk, luxury at economy cost, entertainment without the stress of activities, structure without schedules, and, always, free cocktails: these were the standard demands. Over coffee she asked how my research was going. When I said I’d hit upon an interesting topic for my dissertation, she frowned and said she thought that was already well under way. Probably I’d told her so myself. I explained that this impression was widespread but false.
“It’s those paintings from the old house,” I said. “The ones by Eva Kent? I’m going to incorporate them into my work.”
She looked blank.
“On modernist values in feminist painters of the later twentieth century.”
Now she looked blank but impressed.
“I have a strong feeling about those paintings,” I went on.
“Goodness, those things,” my mother said.
“I’ve been wondering where Dad found them,” I said.
“I told you, I thought probably his secretary. You remember her, don’t you, Mrs. Davidoff? She had terrible bunions. She always asked after you children.”
“I can’t really picture Mrs. Davidoff buying those paintings.”
“Well, maybe not. She was a little severe. Of course I think her feet were giving her an enormous amount of pain. She had surgery eventually, a bunionectomy.”
This gave me pause. “That can’t be a real operation.”
My mother looked offended. “Of course it is.”
“Never mind,” I said. “So do you think Dad could’ve bought them at a gallery? Or did he know any artists?”
“Your father didn’t know anybody except the people he worked with, and us,” she said. “You know that. He didn’t have what you’d call a wide social circle.”
“So where did he get them?”
“Well, sometimes they have those kiosks at the mall,” she suggested.
I tried to picture Eva peddling her strange nudes outside a food court, and my father interrupting his shopping to speak with her, holding the painting by its frame and nodding his head in appreciation of the couple in Desert I: The Wilderness Kiss. Neither part of this was imaginable. When I was in middle school he almost always came home late from work, and would heat up his dinner in the microwave as I sat at the table and told him about my day. He’d eat straight out of the container, apparently indifferent to what it was, and I often thought I could’ve covered cardboard or mud patties or Styrofoam packing peanuts with tomato sauce and he wouldn’t have noticed.
“I still think it’s possible Bev Davidoff got it somewhere,” my mother went on. “Secretaries used to do that kind of thing. There’s no big mystery about it, Lynn. It was just a gift.”
“But two paintings—a pair?”
“Maybe it was a sale,” she said drily. “Frankly, I’m surprised you’re even interested. You never seemed to care about New Mexican art before.”
“I know,” I said. “Listen, I saw Daphne Michaelson today.”
My mother wrinkled her nose in a gesture I took for distaste and wrapped her hands around her coffee cup. “Did you,” she said. “Where?”
I stared at her. Did she think that Daphne Michaelson was out grocery shopping or hiking in the foothills? Did she have any idea what condition the woman was in? “I went to their house. Well, I went to look at our old house, and while I was there I stopped by the Michaelsons’ to say hello. David wasn’t there but Donny was, and so was she.”
“I see. So what does it look like? The house.”
“It’s covered in giant butterflies.”
“Fake ones, I hope.”
“They look tacky.”
“The people who bought the house seemed very nice,” my mother said in a pious tone. “A young couple with children.”
“How long has she been crazy?” I said. “I don’t remember anything strange from when we lived there.”
“It’s not nice to call people crazy.” My mother stood up and began clearing the dishes. “Donny’s a nice boy, isn’t he? And Darren is, too. When he’s away at school he calls David every Sunday night at seven o’clock sharp.”
&
nbsp; “So you’ve told me,” I said. I followed her into the kitchen, carrying the sugar bowl and the rest of the plates.
“I always wondered why Wylie wasn’t better friends with those boys. I know they’re a bit younger, but it’s not that big an age gap.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“No, I’m not. They’re perfectly sweet.”
“They kill frogs for sport.”
“Toads, aren’t they? And he didn’t know that until the other night,” she said, dismissing it with a wave of her hand. Then she filled a sink with water and started doing dishes. I grabbed a towel and took over the drying. For a few minutes we worked together in a harmony I had a hard time puncturing. The condo’s air-conditioning pumped audibly for a moment, then subsided. Outside, crickets sang their shrill, unmelodic song.
“You never answered my question,” I finally said.
“What question was that?”
“About Mrs. Michaelson. How long she’s been like that.” I started putting plates and cups in the cupboard, lining them up in careful rows.
“I’m not sure,” she said after a while. “I do know that her condition doesn’t seem to be worsening. If she takes her medication and avoids stress, she’s fine. David briefly had her in some kind of, you know, residence, but he couldn’t stand seeing her in there. So he brought her home.”
“How much does she understand of what’s going on?”
“You know, Lynn, I’ve never asked her,” my mother said, glancing away and—I suspected—rolling her eyes. She turned off the faucet and drained the sink, then paused for a moment with a sponge in her hand. “Up until ten years or so ago she was really quite lucid. When you kids were young we had no idea. You could talk to her, and she was odd—but within reason, you know.”
“So to speak,” I said.
She ignored me and set to wiping the sink and the surface of the stove, which, I didn’t point out to her, was not dirty in the first place. “But then something happened, with the medication or something. I’m really not sure. Apparently your brain can adjust so the medication’s no longer effective. Anyway, she got worse.” She stood in the sparkling kitchen, looking for something else to clean. When she couldn’t find anything, she put her hands on her hips and nodded, once.
“David will never leave her,” I said. “Doesn’t that bother you?”
“Of course it bothers me,” she said, her voice rough. “It bothers me that you come home for the summer and do your best to ignore me from the minute you get here. It bothers me that my son lives in the same city I do and I’m lucky to see him every two months. A great many things bother me, Lynn, but I try to keep going as best I can.”
This silenced me. A film of tears trembled in her eyes. Then the phone rang, and she stepped away from me to answer it.
“It’s for you,” she said.
Although I’d left him without regret the night before, I found myself hoping that it was Angus, calling from out of town or, better still, from some motel down the street. If he’d come to the door right then, I would’ve run out to the van within ten seconds. But it wasn’t him on the phone; it was Harold Wallace.
“You told me to call if I thought of anything else,” he said. “Well, I just thought of something else.”
Twelve
I followed Harold Wallace into a back room. His blue eyes were crisscrossed violently with blood, but his hair was neatly gathered in a ponytail, he was again wearing expensive, loosefitting clothes, and overall he seemed more alert than the last time. On the phone he’d been annoyingly mysterious, refusing to explain what he’d remembered until I arrived on his doorstep, and this morning he’d offered me coffee, tea, and even a plate of bizcochitos before I suggested, politely, that we just get down to business.
“Well, here we are. My office. The nerve center of the entire operation,” he said. If this was true, then the operation was in a lot of trouble. The small bedroom—underneath a stack of books and loose papers, barely visible, was a single bed—had been buried beneath years’ worth of bureaucratic detritus. Several filing cabinets stood half-open, their drawers stuffed beyond capacity with manila folders. Framed paintings and prints were leaning against every available surface.
“It’s a system I devised myself,” he said. “I know it looks strange, but it works for me.”
“How long have you been retired?”
“Oh, I’m not really retired. I still sell work from home. Yes, I’ve still got the eye, if you know what I mean.” He eyed my chest. I caught his bloodshot gaze and shook my head, and he shrugged and turned away, his smile hinting that it was mostly done out of habit anyway.
“So you remembered something,” I said.
“After you left, I got to thinking about what you said about the child, and I remembered a girl who got pregnant and kind of disappeared. She was a wild one, that girl. Anyway, a few years later, she sent me a photograph of herself. A look-whatyou’re-missing-out-on sort of thing, if you—”
“I know what you mean,” I said.
“So I just have to go through these files and look for it. Maybe you’d like to sit down? This could take a while.”
I cleared a spot for myself on the bed and sat down to watch as he withdrew files, examined them, muttered to himself, then moved on to the next handful. Of course he could have done this before I came over, or left me alone to wade through the files myself. But he either meant for me to witness all his hard work or simply wanted company; watching him rifle through stacks of dog-eared manila folders, every once in a while glancing at me over his shoulder, I suspected it was the latter. Humming as he worked, Harold seemed perfectly happy to devote the entire morning to the search.
Actually, I felt more or less the same way. The night before, when I’d gotten off the phone, my mother was in her bedroom with the door closed, and I slunk off to my room feeling guilty and agitated. If she was going to run around with a married man whose wife was mentally ill, then she had to expect people to comment on it from time to time. That’s what I told myself, but still I’d stayed awake for hours, thinking that I’d made my mother cry.
I thought about my father too, wondering if Harold could possibly be right about him knowing Eva Kent. Maybe he was driving back from the labs in Los Alamos one day, stopped for lunch, and got lost—people always do in Santa Fe. Say he went into the Gallery Gecko to ask directions, and there she was, sitting beneath one of her paintings and luring potential buyers with her brittle talk and strange, striking looks. She was the kind of woman who talked people into things, and my stammering scientist father was an easy mark who found himself glued to the tile floor in the small gallery’s close, hot air. Eva told him her name and demanded to know his. “Arthur?” she said, smiling ferociously. “So do people call you Art?” At this point, my scenario ground to a halt. It was impossible to imagine my father falling into step with Eva, in whatever form it might’ve happened. Then again, I never would have imagined my mother with David, either, and this made anything seem possible. All parents, I thought, are mysteries to their children.
“How’s it going over there?” I asked Harold.
He was sunk in thought over an open file, its manila wings vibrating in his trembling hands. “Here,” he said, and handed it to me.
Inside, there was a photograph of Eva Kent standing on a beach somewhere, smiling, in a swimsuit and a sarong. The date on the white border read 1982. There was no child with her. Her body was heading toward middle age, spreading and sagging slightly. Her hair had been cut and layered, and its dark strands, waving in the breeze, were sticking up above her head like antennae. There was a kind of wild excess to her smile, as if she were uncomfortable, or drunk, or mentally unbalanced. Her arms and legs looked badly sunburned.
Also in the file were several pieces of paper. One was a yellowed strip of newsprint, a local paper’s review of a group show, with a ballpoint star next to: “One artist of particular promise is Eva Kent, a fiery oil painter with a sure sense
of composition and style. Her violent technique contrasts meaningfully with her cool-eyed appraisal of the relations between male and female.” Beneath this was a letter from a gallery in New York, written to Harold, expressing interest in Eva’s work, requesting slides and dangling the prospect of a solo exhibition. I flushed with satisfaction: I wasn’t alone in feeling that jolt of electricity when confronted with her work.
The last item was a letter written on a sheet torn from a notebook, the writing slanted and blocky, almost childlike:
Dear Harold,
Here I am in California. I am feeling a hundred times better. I know you will take care of things.
XOXOXOXOXO
Eva
“What kind of things did you take care of?” I said.
“Oh, Jesus, who knows what that crazy lady was talking about.” Harold took the folder back, shut it, and sat down next to me on the narrow bed, puffing a little. “I’ve been thinking back to those days,” he said. “Eva Kent. The memories come flooding back when you look at this stuff. She was one of the better girl painters, all right. And you know, it was a great time for men when women decided they needed sex if they really wanted to be free.”
“I’m not sure that’s exactly what they decided.”
“It was definitely what some people thought, believe you me,” he said, and smiled. “We’d go up to Madrid and take over some run-down houses up there and stay all night. Eva’d be right there in the mix, always with a different man. She was aggressive, liked to do the choosing and the talking, and it worked well for her, especially with shy, quiet types. You said your dad was a straight arrow, right? Well, maybe that’s how he got the paintings. What do you think?”
I chose not to answer, thinking of my father—who was nothing if not the quiet, shy type—partying with painters in an abandoned mining town on the Turquoise Trail. This made me smile. Harold smiled too, though I didn’t know at what.
“The paintings my father got are really very good,” I said. “So what was the rest of her work like?”
“Which ones are those? Oh, yes, the desert ones. Well, I’m not entirely sure what happened to the other ones.”
