by Carol Anshaw
“You know. Send a message.”
During the break, one of the few guys in the class came up to Carmen and Alice in the hall. “M&Ms?” He offered a pack with the corner torn off.
“Who’d say no?” Carmen said and he tapped a few into her palm. Then another few into Alice’s.
“Where’d you get these?” Alice asked. “Is there a machine?”
“I picked them up on the way from work.”
“That just seems like incredible forethought.”
Carmen was glad Alice was doing the talking. She had trouble making conversation with guys like this. “Like this” meaning anyone who might be flirting with her. Of course, he might well be, probably was, flirting with Alice. Carmen had noticed him in class. They all had name cards propped in front of them. His said Rob. He wore expensive sweaters, cashmere v-necks, but with nothing underneath. Also something gold on a thin chain around his neck. His hair was manicured. Every hair had its exact place. He wore some kind of manly cologne. From his remarks in class, he seemed to be clueless about what Proust was trying to get across. He thought Charles Swann should give up on Odette and get out of Paris. Get over being so French. Get his head on straight. Maybe move to New York. This bone-headedness made Carmen think he was only in the class to pick up women. And that once he saw he was barking up the wrong tree with Alice, he would turn to Carmen. She knew she signed up for the class mostly to meet someone, but that someone was not Rob. That someone was Ralph Fiennes.
The thing on the chain around his neck, she saw at closer range, was a little Egyptian ankh symbol. She could already imagine his apartment. The leather sofa, the dimmer switches. The Luther Vandross collection. Rob was art director for a chain of hair salons, whatever that meant. She was being a hideous snob, she realized, particularly for someone who got left by a guy she thought she was doing fine with, and further was now a person with only half her hearing and one ear that looked as though it had been drizzled onto the side of her head from a melting candle. This was a guy she’d probably be lucky to get, and before he had even put himself forward she was already rejecting him. The social road ahead looked like a bleak highway, post-apocalyptic, overblown with dust, gray and lifeless except for mutants popping up here and there.
portraits of girls at windows [alice in amsterdam]
Zombies lurched and hobbled across the screen on the wall in front of her, slow and hungry. Watching them, Alice was temporarily, but enormously, happy. Watching a zombie movie in business class, eating heated nuts on a flight from Chicago to Amsterdam. Things were quite different, she was finding, when you were famous, or even just loitering at the edge of fame. You didn’t hang your own paintings anymore. You didn’t crate them or uncrate them. Craters and uncraters and hangers took care of all that. When you traveled for exhibitions, you didn’t fly coach on Icelandair. You didn’t stay on the sagging sleeper sofa of a friend of somebody you met once at a group show in Milwaukee.
Days later, in Amsterdam, she was still feeling the buzz. She was being put up at a hotel on the Herengracht, with caviar on the room service menu, linen sheets on the bed, a spa on the top floor. All expenses taken care of by the museum that was putting on a solo show of her recent work. All that was required of her was her presence and, for the moment, her absence. The time had come when the curator and her assistants needed the meddlesome, overanxious artist out of their hair. Alice took the hint and headed off to blur out a few anxious hours with tourism. First to the Van Gogh museum, then to the Anne Frank House. She knew only the outline of Anne Frank’s story. The hiding. The diary. The death camp. The death. Before today, she had only considered Anne Frank as an emblem, the face put to the fate of the millions. On the Prinsengracht, she found her way to the end of the line of pilgrims that hugged the house. She shuffled forward with her silent companions up the steep back stairs hidden behind the revolving bookcase, into the small secret annex, the only sounds an ambient sanding of soles on wood, a creak of leather handbags, here and there coughs. As though they themselves were slipping into hiding.
Inside the bare rooms time stopped; they moved like sleepwalkers. Alice touched the faded ochre wallpaper, frayed at its seams and edges from the erosion of thousands of brushing fingertips, air-stirring whispers. She peered at Anne’s taped-up rotogravure pictures of movie stars, celebrities whose fame had been dissolved by time, the girl who taped up their pictures, in the end, more famous than any of them.
Standing in the back, where Anne and her sister Margot slept, looking out the windows onto a chestnut tree, its branches bending to a light breeze, Alice realized this must be the same tree Anne Frank saw, the sum of the natural world available to her for those two years in hiding. Suddenly Alice was sucked pneumatically through a tunnel that brought her to thoughts of children broken by instruments of fate—both by huge, deliberate killing machines and small, foolish accidents. A child stopped dead in her tracks, held back from moving into life, everything in front of her rendered perfectly smooth, free of footprints.
She realized she had been standing too long in the same spot, the traffic of visitors forced to eddy around her. She moved along, but only to circle the room again; she wasn’t ready to leave. Although she was always working on one or another painting of Casey, Alice had come to a dead end in thinking about the accident. By now the memory was filtered, reflected. In this moment Casey came to her along with Anne Frank, a quick flip of snapshots in an album—two girls, one looking out a window, the other flying into one.
And then Maude flipped into the album. Maude straightening out the broken girl on the grass just beyond the road’s gravel shoulder. Alice remembered the almost painterly composition of a patient in pale madras and denim, a nurse in silk, shimmering in the drifts of moonlight that fell through the gently rustling tree branches. Finding the girl’s vague pulse, trying to breathe her own life into the girl’s mouth. All her memories of Maude, beginning with this one, were so vivid, their focus so sharp, that Maude’s current absence was kind of irrelevant, just something trivial cloaking her continued presence.
Of course, added to this was the nuisance of Maude’s presence on television, as Ginger Slade, the tough but tenderhearted cop she now played on a terrible show called Blue Light. Any Wednesday night, Alice could watch Ginger jumping a high fence in a chase sequence, or interrogating some poor Colombian woman being used as a drug mule. Or standing with her booted foot on a chair, a serious automatic holstered at the small of her back as she leaned in to stare down an insolent coke dealer. What Alice hated most about the show was Ginger’s tough-talking love affair with a crime scene expert. It wasn’t that Alice was jealous of this stupid fictional romance, but it burned her that some dumb actor with cultivated stubble got to make out with Maude now, while Alice didn’t.
Worst, though—the particular torture devised for Alice—because of Gabe, Alice’s and Maude’s paths still occasionally crossed. In this small, maddening way Maude was still available to Alice. The chocolate left in the box, still in its crinkly wrap, beneath its tissue cover. These points of contact only added to the confusion. Gabe’s tenth birthday brought her back to Chicago last year. This was after her breakup with the guy who rented out period cars for movies, before her marriage to the cameraman.
The birthday party was at a bowling alley. Gabe was currently a bowling maniac; no one knew where he came by this interest; all his friends played soccer. Maude and Alice eventually drifted away from the lanes, out to the parking lot and stood leaning against the front of Alice’s van, looking down at their comically colored rented shoes until Maude turned suddenly, pressing the length of herself against Alice, kissing her then saying, “Do you think I don’t still want this?” And Alice, who had never been able to ask Maude the tough, follow-up questions, just stood in the middle of that moment emotionally naked. But this kiss was followed only by a little more bowling then a lot more absence and silence and, for Alice at least, more of the low, rumbling roll of finding and loss, retrieval and
flight that began the night of Carmen’s wedding and had not yet come to rest.
She had tried to outrun the past. She had tried to find a replacement for Maude. For a while, she was running through the muscular carpenters and electricians in a group called Tradeswomen. Most recently she had been seeing the most serious woman in the world. Ingrid. Carmen set them up. Ingrid sat on the board of Carmen’s shelter. She sat on a lot of boards, gave speeches and presentations on women empowering themselves. She was a vegetarian. She wore plastic shoes. She used Z-Tar soap and always smelled a little like fresh roofing. Spiritually she defined herself as Druid. Alice found all of this dead seriousness kind of hilarious in the abstract and in the retelling, but in Ingrid’s presence, it was somehow intensely erotic. Like bedding a saint—rough sheets, silent sex. Their days together were numbered. For sure Alice would slip and use the term “history.” Or, in some heated moment, ask to be fucked. Soon she and Ingrid would have a small, nasty breakup that would look as if it was about something, but would really only be about Alice not having enough passion to go on. This was Maude’s legacy; she had left Alice with her heart weakened, its chambers bruised. She was no longer up to the enthusiasm required by love.
She found herself sitting on a bench overlooking the Prinsengracht. When she idly checked her watch, she sprung to her feet. The light had fooled her. She was running very late.
At the hotel, she showered hot then cold, changed into skinny black pants and a silk camp shirt—a sort of uniform for opening nights. She walked over to the museum, along ochre canals, over bridges, under heavy awnings of leaves, past buildings of brick, their doors painted in high gloss colors—dark green, navy blue, vermillion. Instead of ending, the day had stretched out. Instead of being dusk, six o’clock had the look of mid-afternoon in these fabulously long days of early northern summer when it stayed light until eleven. Staying out as the day pushed toward midnight was like playing hooky from the regular rules of clocks. Café tables spilled out onto the narrow streets to accommodate swells of customers. The canals were filled with salon boats, cigarette boats, tiny fishing dinghies with outboard motors. Salvaged lifeboats were jam-packed with partiers, everyone standing, still dressed from work, holding glasses of wine, bottles of beer, ducking a little to clear the bridges, their chatter and laughter reverberating off the brick retaining walls.
The streets along the water slipstreamed with bicycle traffic. Men in suits, women in loose skirts, their purses dangling daintily from the handlebars. A musician with a cello strapped to his back. Parents with toddlers in rigged-up seats, front and rear. A woman with her dog in a box cantilevered out over the front wheel. There were no stop signs so the mix of traffic—the bikes, but also cars, motorcycles, delivery vans, pedestrian tourists five abreast—dismantled then reassembled itself at each intersection, in this or that nick of time.
She thought she might be able to be happy here in an interestingly sad way.
The curator of Alice’s show, Anneke Morren, waited at the museum’s entrance, smoking languidly. Anneke was thin in a way that reeked of control; you could almost smell her flint, her metal. Her favorite beverage seemed to be hot water with a slice of lemon. Alice had never seen her eat anything. She had dark eyebrows and white-blond hair, glasses with square frames. Tonight she wore a lightweight purple cape over something else, something black. In any lineup, she would be immediately recognizable as the museum curator. She exuded a heavy musk of calm. Openings were all in a day’s work for Anneke, no cause for fluttering. Besides, she had people whose job was to flutter on her behalf—two young guys in black trousers and white shirts who were laughing continuously, as if they were being tickled, when they were actually only setting up a white-linen-covered table in the museum’s lobby, arranging wineglasses, silver trays of canapés, and vases extravagantly crammed with extravagant flowers—purple lisianthus, golden calla lilies. This was Holland; they had flowers to burn.
“Your show, it will be a great success,” Anneke predicted as she draped one of her bird-wing arms across Alice’s shoulders, guiding her inside. “I always know a little ahead. It is something like a scent, it precedes the crowd. This is hard to describe. But I am always right.”
They walked through the gallery, taking a last-minute look at the twelve paintings that made up the show, which the museum was calling American Vacation—a series of big canvases, 48” x 72”—that imagined a low end of tourist postcards. Narrative scenes of gas station restrooms, grim motel rooms, mangy petting zoos, third-rate roadside attractions. Alice was proud of this work; if it had been made by someone else, she would have been envious. She suspected it had found favor in Europe for being exotically American. She would have preferred it was liked merely because it was good, but she’d take approval where she could find it.
“You are pleased?” Anneke waved a swath of cape around the large gallery. A few years ago, Alice would have burst out laughing, but by now she had been subdued. Now she could keep a straight face in front of the most pretentious statements or gestures.
“Oh yes.” In addition to the paintings, the room had been lightly cluttered with old hotel desks and writing tables with postcards of two of the paintings, pens and sheets of stamps set out. “But this is really your part. The terrific presentation. For me, the best part was when I was making the paintings.”
She hoped this sounded like the truth, which it was, although more and more of what she said about her work sounded canned to her as it passed her lips, pre-formatted for the interview, or the short chat with the collector or gallery owner. When she had been painting in obscurity, she could just paint. Now she had to paint and articulate her process, her themes, her palette; be flattered by approval; try not to appear defensive in the presence of criticism. These were luxurious burdens, of course.
“You know,” Alice said, trying to make it sound by the by. “I visited the Anne Frank House this afternoon.” She wanted to talk about this with someone. What was it like in Amsterdam during the war? Anneke’s parents would have been alive through the occupation. Immediately Alice saw that she had brought too serious a subject into this upbeat moment. The silence elongated. A pulse became visible at Anneke’s jawline. Alice suspected she was hardening against having this conversation with a foreigner. But she was polite as she closed the subject. “Anne Frank,” she said, “is complicated.”
Maybe a hundred people came and went during the next couple of hours. The language barrier Alice had been dreading turned out to be nonexistent. Everyone spoke excellent English, as opposed to her phrase book Dutch, which consisted of being able to say alstublieft and dank u wel to shopkeepers and the hotel maid. Everyone at the opening offered kindness and praise, of course. She took the chat at openings with a grain of salt. She wasn’t sure what she would hear if she had the room bugged. Once, after a group show early in her career, Alice was overflowing with self-congratulation until she got smacked with brutal reviews and a sudden chill from the gallery. Over time she learned to not take the bubbly atmosphere of these evenings too seriously. The bubbles had more to do with seeing and being seen around the art than with the art itself.
While Alice was talking with a couple who collected electronic sculpture, Anneke rushed up (which is to say her low-key, discreet version of rushing) and whispered at Alice’s ear. “Kees Verwey has arrived. This is a great honor for you. He comes to few openings. At this point, he hardly ever leaves his studio in Haarlem.”
Verwey, Verwey, Alice thought. Then her memory gained purchase. Kees Verwey. Still lifes. Gestural portraits. She couldn’t call up any specific paintings. And wouldn’t he be dead by now? Wasn’t he painting in the 1930s? Then she saw him across the gallery, thickened and slightly stooped with age. Comb-over hair, bristly mustache. She only knew it was him by the way the crowd deferred and dispersed, as though street-sweeping brushes spun in front of him while he moved slowly along the perimeter of paintings.
He examined several paintings quickly, then stopped at Wish You
Were Here. The painting’s setting was the pool of a down-and-out motel, its colors a constrained palette of worn pastels. Leaves floated in the corners, a plastic water slide dangled over the lip, broken off halfway down. Its subject, faded to a ghostly presence, was a family. Alice had tried to render these figures as shadows, to make a vacation in this place where any initial impulse of hope had long been abandoned. She spiraled down inside herself watching the old man stand in front of it, then move back across the gallery to look from a remove. Suddenly his opinion held weight. She anticipated his worst criticism. She shared the curse of many artists—that praise beaded up and rolled off her while criticism stuck like glue, glue embedded with ground glass.
When he finished looking at Alice’s work, he was accompanied by the middle-aged man who brought him, toward the buffet table where he made himself a substantial sandwich of dark bread and smoked salmon. Alice thought, well, at least she wouldn’t have to talk with him, then saw Anneke glide across the gallery, snag him, and guide him slowly over.
Alice told him she was honored he had come.
“I had an appointment here anyway. With my dentist.” He tapped his cheek with a thick index finger, tipped dark green with paint. His suit had the tight, boxy cut of an earlier era, its sleeves and pockets specked and dabbed with patches of paint. He went on insulting her. “It is nothing that I came here. The painting on the notice interested me a little. Now I have seen the others. I would say to you that these are good paintings. But they are part of your apprenticeship. Something is yet held back, I think. I would like to see what you do after these. You may contact me and bring me the paintings. I will look.”
Alice felt heat rushing across her face and turned away so he wouldn’t see this. When she turned back, he was still looking at her, waiting. She saw, finally, that he was offering something of value.
