The Empress of Tempera

by Alex Dolan

  “This is going to make it better?” she asked.

  “It’s training. Trust me,” he said. “Remember, jugs are your best friend.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The big holds on the wall, the ones that are easy to grab. Those are jugs.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Chalk your hands.” He handed her a white ball, the size of a baseball, and she rolled it around her palms and fingers until she was fairly certain they were dry.

  “I feel ridiculous,” she remarked. This was true, but more because she’d overdressed for the occasion. Despite the shorts and loose T-shirt, her vibrant hair and beet-red lipstick were too dazzling for athletic gear. This gym was not the place for fashion statements. Some of the other climbers to their left and right smirked at her.

  He leaned into her ear and urged, “Climb.”

  She started up the wall, reaching for a green hold, then digging a toe into a pink mound of plastic. Her shoes were different from anything she’d ever worn, and resembled ballet shoes with hard soles. The moment her other foot rose off the ground, the first slipped off, and she stumbled on the blue mat and tumbled into Rosewood. Agitated, she said, “What is this supposed to help with?”

  “Concentration. Don’t use your toe unless you have to. Use the inside of the foot. Your foot should be turned out like a frog.”

  Rosewood had tried having a conversation with Paire about the Empress Xiao Zhe Yi, but she didn’t like to talk about the painting, because she didn’t want to admit her fascination with it. So last night, when her rabbit kicks woke him up, he forced the conversation without ever mentioning the Qi by name. “You know how much a painting is worth?” he asked.

  “As much or as little as someone’s willing to pay for it?” she responded.

  “There is no inherent value to art. I know I’m not supposed to say that, because it’s how I make my living, but it’s the truth. Nothing that I sell is going to cure cancer, or feed people. Nothing that I make will create a solution for real-life problems.”

  To Paire’s regret, her first thought was: maybe that’s just your work. But she wouldn’t say this. She wouldn’t hurt him. She knew what he was doing. The same way Rosewood had recognized a change in Paire, Paire too saw a change in how Rosewood looked at her, with a measured pity for how she fawned over the empress. Not even the painting itself, for he was never at the gallery when she was actually aweing over it, but the secondary images of it, the photos on her cell phone and the sketches in her pad. When he diminished the value of his own work, he was trying to wean her off her reliance. She had to tread carefully to spare his feelings. “What’s the value, then?”

  “Art stimulates thought and emotion. If you’re lucky, it can stir up a cultural dialogue. Once people start talking, start bickering with each other, there’s a chance that they can figure out real solutions that make progress.”

  This might have been the role of Rosewood’s work, but she questioned whether this was the function of all art. Nevertheless, she played along. “If that’s the case, isn’t there a value for whatever sparks that dialogue? Building momentum from inertia, and all that?”

  “As much value as anything else that can change the way people think. But no more, and no less.”

  “So, as much or as little as someone is willing to pay,” she said.

  Since their conversation hadn’t convinced Rosewood that she was any closer to abandoning her obsession with the Qi, he ended up suggesting an activity where they wouldn’t have to talk, where she would have to focus on something right in front of her, instead of daydreaming about the painted birchwood on the Fern’s rear wall.

  She reached for the green hold again. He placed his hands on her back and whispered in her ear. “Try two hands,” he suggested. His arms didn’t envelop her but his touch felt like its own kind of embrace, the whisper in her ear intimate as a mattress confessional. She liked it. She wondered if all this effort from Rosewood came from a desire to keep Paire all to himself. If so, she welcomed the attention.

  She grabbed the plastic nub with both hands, and hoisted her foot onto the pink hold.

  “Roll your foot into the wall,” he said.

  She lifted her other leg and found a blue knob. Her shoe kept slipping. “Don’t go for the round ones—they’re the slopers. They’re harder to stay on, because there’s no edge. Find the ridges. Those are the incuts—good for hand-holds.”

  She wasn’t following everything, and her eyes kept darting up and down the wall, unsure where she should focus. Someone to her left knew what she was doing, and spidered up the wall.

  Her left foot found a blue ridge, and she felt a moment of balance, with both hands fastened securely onto jugs, her feet sufficiently froggy.

  Rosewood coached from the floor, “Remember, if you can climb a ladder, you can climb a wall.”

  For this moment, she felt good, her mind blissfully free of anything to do with the Fern Gallery. She moved upward slowly but steadily, ambling from hold to hold, maintaining her balance. The clarity lasted only a few seconds. A vision of the empress flickered into her thoughts. Her focus now disrupted, her hand found a sloper, and she tilted off-balance. Her left foot slipped, and after a few flaps of her arms, she fell off the wall. Paire had climbed about twenty feet off the floor, twice the height of a basketball rim. She panicked when she realized she was going to plummet to the floor. Her body tensed, preparing for the impact, which assuredly wouldn’t be as pain-free as Rosewood had promised. But she stopped in midair. After her moment of lurching panic, the rope caught her, and Paire dangled in the air by her harness.

  She rotated on the rope like a Christmas ornament until she faced Rosewood, whose gloved hands secured the rope. He smiled up at her. “Not so bad, right?” She smiled down at him. She liked trusting him like this, and for a briefest moment, her brain stopped flooding with thoughts of the empress.

  That morning, on the taxi over to the climbing gym, Rosewood had tried to address her attraction to the Qi again, this time more directly. He approached the subject gently, so he wouldn’t embarrass her. “What do you like about it?”

  Paire had wondered the same thing herself ever since she’d first seen the portrait. She wondered if the allure was simply a consequence of having watched a man die in front of it. Rosewood might have questioned the inherent value of art, but that painting was at least worth someone’s life, because that was the price that someone was willing to pay for it. But the more she learned about it, the stronger her attraction became. She admired the strength she saw in the woman. She wasn’t an empress, but had been a real person that the artist had dressed in costume. “I like that this woman gets to be someone else.”

  Paire had hinted that she wanted to separate herself from her past, but she’d never told him why. While the taxi jostled them on the way to the climbing gym, he took a guess. “I know you don’t like to talk about your family. I get it. How many times do you hear me talk about mine? And that’s fair enough. It’s healthy to know who you don’t want to be. Look at me. I don’t want to be a soldier.”

  Paire knew more about Rosewood than she heard him share with others because she was nosy enough to ask about his family and he never evaded her questions. When he was fourteen his parents had enrolled him at West Point Academy. His father had wanted him to pursue the family trade, but Derek Rosewood had inherited his mom’s slight build and pretty face, and didn’t fit in. Perhaps he was born with the predisposition to rebel against authority, or perhaps he’d learned it through living with Grant Rosewood, a domineering man, who, in the photos Paire had seen, towered above the rest of the family, with heavy arms and shoulders like shot puts. Derek Rosewood got himself expelled from West Point by repeatedly showing up to class naked, the way it was rumored Edgar Allan Poe got himself tossed out. As she remembered this story, Rosewood had said, “It’s trickier to know who you want to be. And you’re only going to find out if you get out and experience as much as you can. As an artist,
that’s also how you’re going to find your voice. At least, that’s what I did.”

  The taxi rounded a corner, and she saw the sign for the gym. Dover Cliffs. “So if I hate this?”

  He said, “Then at least you tried it. But it would pay to be good at this.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you can apply it to other things.”

  Paire didn’t think he was being fair. Most of her life in Abenaki seemed to be a long string of things she knew she didn’t like. Just two years out of Maine, she was just starting to get to know what she liked. She liked Rosewood. She liked cozying into his warmth at night. She liked getting support and mentoring from an established artist. She even enjoyed the occasional leer from strangers, giving her more attention than she ever got in Maine. She liked creating, even if it was only on her sketchpad. She hadn’t had the time to learn much more than that.

  Having thought about her family again, her anger propelled her. Paire started back up the rock wall, and scrambled up the sides more confidently, trying to do the scary thing, even if she fell. She found the jugs and insets, avoiding the slopers. When she thought about her feet, she concentrated more on how she placed them, and less about silly things like whether her toenails could match the glow of the empress’s.

  After the crime, the one she didn’t like think about, which put Lake Novis in prison and left Cissy Novis dead, Katie Novis was taken in by her grandmother, Gilda Abington. Of the Abenaki Abingtons, she’d joke to herself. She always remembered Gilda as a spinster, a creaky woman with a perpetual frown who had shriveled in her decades of Maine salt-winds. At one point Gilda had been married to John Abington, twenty-two years older than she. John Abington had founded Abington Press, a publishing house that specialized in children’s books. The press brought the beloved Claymore character, an illustrated cartoon armadillo, to the childhoods of a generation. Claymore the Courageous Armadillo. Claymore Wonders Who’s in the Dark. Claymore Goes to City Hall. Just a sampling of titles. Abington Press had built a small empire around these titles and other kids’ books. Even Rosewood had once referenced Claymore in passing, but Paire didn’t dare explain her family’s connection to the Claymore books. She never mentioned the name Abington.

  John Abington passed away several years before Katie Novis was born, so she never knew him. When he was alive, he apparently split his time between New York and Maine—the house in Abenaki was considered the summer house when it was built. Gilda didn’t like New York, and as Katie later found through research, was reluctant to spend time in the city where she knew her husband kept mistresses. After they’d been married twenty years, Gilda started staying up in Abenaki, and the two lived in separate cities. When John died, Gilda took over the estate, and held a position on the board of directors for Abington Press, although Katie suspected that she served more of a figurehead role. She never spoke of the publishing business around the house.

  John and Gilda had one child, Cecily Abington, Cissy to most. Once her parents had separated, Cissy spent most of her time with her mother in Maine—at least until Cissy’s late teens, when she was transferred out of the house and into the hospital.

  When Katie was taken in by her grandmother, Gilda was a widow, alone in a gigantic Queen Anne mansion on the Atlantic coastline. Buffered by pines on one side and a rocky cliff on the other, it overlooked a tempestuous set of breakers that churned white foam on the calmest days. Gilda’s master bedroom was a round room in the second story of the bulky turret that faced the ocean. On the first floor of the turret, Gilda kept a round library and office, where she spent days leafing through books. Katie had considered Gilda largely asexual, a nun without the habit. If her grandmother had been lonely, she’d never let on. True to her New Englander roots, she didn’t talk about her emotions.

  From a young age, Katie wandered around the grounds, logging a good hunk of time in a pear orchard cloistered by a wall of pines. John had had it planted, so Gilda almost never visited. The fruit grew small and tasted almost sugarless until the moment each piece dropped from its tree and turned soft on the ground. They grew Bartlett, Seckel, and yes, Anjou varieties, and sometimes Katie treated herself to the occasional edible plucking. In the orchard, Katie didn’t have to look at that pale yellow house and see the silhouette of her disinterested grandmother in the windows. She didn’t have to think about Abington Press, Claymore the armadillo, or her parents. This was the safest place she knew, and so long as the weather stayed north of twenty degrees, she braved the winter to sneak out to her private place.

  Gilda had made attempts to wipe her daughter out of public record. She couldn’t control every reporter, but when Lake Novis was on trial, she kept the story from hitting the press. It only leaked out to a few outlets outside of Maine, and never spread as wide, or as sensationally, as it could have, especially when it was attached to the Abington family. Gilda had gone so far as to purchase and burn copies of the newspapers that ran coverage. She burned them right in the pear orchard, and when she told Katie about it years later, Gilda’s story inspired her granddaughter to make her own purge fires when she turned klepto in high school. Her efforts didn’t stop local rumors and whispers, but Gilda did what she could to wipe Cissy’s name out of memory. When Katie Novis changed her name, she felt like she was extending these efforts, effectively ending the Abington family line.

  Rosewood occasionally asked why Paire didn’t visit her Aunt Gilda, but the truth was Gilda didn’t want her to visit. Last year, when Paire first started school, she tried to call Gilda every week. At first Gilda merely offered a few terse sentences before making an excuse to end the call. After a while, she didn’t pick up.

  Paire wrapped her arm around the top of the rock wall. She’d scrambled up all fifty feet, and felt a little dizzy when she looked down at Rosewood, still anchoring her with both hands choking the rope. The height shouldn’t have bothered her. The cliffs at Aunt Gilda’s were more than one hundred feet above the churning ocean.

  “Now fall,” Rosewood called to her.

  “Excuse me?”

  “We’ll teach you how to rappel later. Just drop. It’s easier than you think.”

  Paire’s heart pounded.

  “Let go.”

  Funny, Paire thought, the whole purpose of this trip was to keep her from dwelling on the painting. More important, it was to keep her from stewing about all the things that made her susceptible to the draw of that painting. The things she hated about her past. This had failed. As she hung from the top of the wall, she distinctly remembered the cliffs outside the Queen Anne in Abenaki. How, when she had wandered close and looked over the drop, she’d hoped Gilda would show some concern, even a tap of the window from inside the house.

  Arms outstretched and eyes closed, Paire dropped backward from the rock wall, first feeling a knotting in her stomach when she fell, then feeling liberated as her body breezed through the air. For an instant, she abandoned her fear. She was doing the scary thing, the ultimate scary thing, and though terrified for her life, her other worries vaporized. It was bliss.

  The sensation didn’t last long. When Rosewood successfully belayed her, the rope tightened and Paire dangled in the air. She felt a slight melancholy.

  Rosewood lowered her gradually to the floor, and Paire kicked at the wall whenever it felt like she might collide with it. All the way down, she thought of her mother, who had died at the end of a rope.

  Cissy Novis had hanged herself. The police would later determine that she’d first tried in the bathroom with the bedsheets, throwing them over the shower curtain rod and twisting the fabric as tight as she could. The knot was never tight enough to choke her, and although Cissy was petite like her daughter, when she let her weight drop, it broke the rod. In the garage, Cissy found rope and threw it over a crossbeam. She stood on two plastic milk crates and kicked them away, and according to accounts, twisted about like a worm on a hook for fifteen minutes until she finally expired. The police found her in a floral dress she almos
t never wore, something that flared out at the knees like a Doris Day housewife’s dress.

  Katie had once asked Gilda, “Why’d she do it?”

  Gilda’s minimal response had a sense of duty to it, as if she were trying to imprint a message onto Katie. “Some cookies come out of the oven wrong. When that happens, the only thing to do is throw them away.”

  Paire felt her shoes touch the floor, and a moment later Rosewood’s hand on her back. She felt less inhibited than she had moments before, and kissed him. “My parents were both criminals. They did bad things. That’s why I don’t talk about them. That’s why it’s easier for me to think about what I don’t want than what I want. Because I don’t want to be like them.” She felt her shoulders relax as she said this.

  Rosewood mulled this over as he unscrewed his carabiners. He made no show that this was the first time she’d told him one of her big secrets, but he smiled sheepishly to himself. “You know, the best way to cure a phobia is to expose yourself to the thing you’re afraid of.”

  “Do the scary thing?”

  “They call it exposure therapy.”

  Her mind flashed back to dinner a few weeks ago. “You want me to eat a lobster?”

  “That’s not what you’re afraid of,” he said. “I want you to break the law.”

  Chapter 7

  Roughly forty feet underground, Paire and Rosewood stood on the platform of Wall Street station.

  The subway wasn’t always reliable, but they timed it so the train dumped them on the platform just before three thirty in the morning. At that hour, the only other person in sight was a homeless man bundled into a sleeping bag under one of the benches. No cops.

  As with most New York subway stops, faint, harsh light glinted off the tiles. Despite the fact that the station was in the heart of the financial district, it was grimier than most. Two trenches flanked the central platform. Across the rails, too far to touch, the white tiles were flourished with a strip of red-and-white checkerboard. Wall Street had been spelled out in microtiles that reminded Paire of ancient Greco-Roman mosaics.