by Lucy Ives
“Can you?” asked Victor.
“May I?” Cate repeated. She was looking at me.
“Sure,” I said.
“Would you feel really bad if I told you that I was maybe concerned that you might not have a good time at the party? I feel like you kind of hate this kind of thing. I feel bad inviting you, but then I feel like I should. I don’t know. It’s my own dilemma, I suppose.”
I thought about this for a minute.
“She seems all right to me.” This was Reihan. He was currently eating a lot of cake. He sort of jostled Cate’s leg with his leg to indicate that she should desist with the descent into guilt.
“Well, Sylvia, I mean, Stella! God! Stella is about the most resilient person I know, but that doesn’t mean she has to like everyone. You know I don’t.” Cate leaned over and somehow gracefully kissed Reihan’s knee.
“Hmm,” said Reihan. Then, “Mmm. This cake is really excellent.”
“You made a good choice,” Victor confirmed.
“Do you want some more of it?” Cate was getting up. “I know I do.” Then she said, “Stella, come here for a second.”
I was a little tipsy so it took me longer than an actual second to find my way to my feet. I traipsed after Cate.
In the kitchen Cate said, “I’m serious, you know. That could totally have backfired and I don’t know what made me do it. If I told you it was like there was some kind of invisible force in the world this afternoon, would you believe me? It was guiding me, making me do what I did. I never doubted it until after we went through with it! Isn’t that weird? And for the record, it’s really more than OK with me if you don’t like people! It’s one of my favorite things.”
“About me or about anyone?”
“Yes.”
“Which ‘yes’? Are you sure you weren’t just drunk?”
“I’ve been drunk before.”
I considered this. I was fairly drunk myself. “You know what I think, C., is that that was you. That’s what I’ve come to believe. When it feels like there is that weird hand, I mean, I know that feeling. That’s actually you.”
“So that’s me?” Cate was serving both of us some more cake.
“Yes, that’s you. That’s you encountering yourself.”
“Haha,” said Cate. “Maybe I am a nicer person than I think!”
But then I had to be put in a cab and sent home because my level of intoxication had become not just excessive but incapacitating, and, no, Victor and I were not married the next day because, as we all know, at this point I was still married.
sunday
[ 28 ]
On Sunday, a heavily aftereffected version of myself made an appearance at Paul’s memorial. I wore sunglasses for as long as I could afford to and not seem obscenely rude, as well as a fair amount of blush. The occasion was copiously attended, mostly by people I did not know. We were served couscous and dips and slices of raw vegetables and fruit, and writers spoke. The event had been organized by writers, and it was only toward the end that the museum staff had a chance to make their farewells. Nicola di Carboncino spoke for a hot second and then Bonnie got up and asked everyone who had known Paul at the museum to raise their hands so that others in the room would know who we were. She said how glad we all were to have been invited to share in this appreciation of our colleague. She said that he had been a beloved, but in some ways not so very known, person at the museum. Not that we all hadn’t known him, and appreciated him, and felt his support. But that he kept aloof in an attractive way.
It wasn’t faint praise, exactly, but it struck a lead note. Perhaps others feared that they themselves would be subject to such a description after death, at which point they would have little opportunity to defend themselves, except via the agony of haunting. Possibly Bonnie was still smarting from the incident of the unfinished exhibition checklist. She was, after all, somewhat petty.
Fred lurked near the door and left early. Ella Voss was also in attendance. In the aftermath I approached her and handed off the flash drive containing Paul’s writing.
“It seems like maybe he had another book,” was what I said.
Voss examined me. “Thank you,” was all she seemed to feel like saying. She was in short order accosted by various literary acquaintances, and so I also made my exit, the better to get home.
Once there, I stripped down to my undergarments, fixed myself a jar of cold water, and climbed into bed. I sighed, feeling at once drained and cozy. I was sitting atop a proverbial heap of information, but at least at this point there did not seem to be anything I needed to react to with any kind of urgency. I was toying with my phone in the way that one does when one has little to do and is enjoying the fact that one is not obliged to reply with a panicked swiftness to incoming info. I slipped into various apps, slipped out again. I began swiping through the week’s photos.
I came to the images I had made of the map. This was not the map of Wilhelm Wunsch’s 1803 pamphlet but rather the map of American Objects, of the Gaypoole commonplace book, the original siren that had summoned me into this system of affiliation. I began pinching and stretching, as one may do with photos on phones of our era. And as I pinched and stretched and found myself standing before the now greatly enlarged arched doors of the attractive huts of Elysia, I felt, for the first time in a long while, satisfied. I didn’t want much, other than to be in this location, playing with forms of the mediation of the past. I ventured into Elysia’s wild surrounding garden, its park of incongruous beasts. I zoomed in on the vegetation, on the grimacing faces of big cats. Examining the uppermost canopy of one particularly complex copse, I found an unexpected pattern. I had to zoom out, relocate, zoom back in again. I stared at the phone.
WO IST AM TAG IHR ZEICHEN? WO SPRICHT DAS HERZ, read the words. I zoomed further. The words continued: SICH AUS? UND WANN IM LEBEN, WANN IST ES FREI,—WAS UNSER WORT NICHT NENNT, WANN WIRD, WAS—TRAUERT, GEBANNT IN DIE NACHT, SEIN WUNSCH IHM? For he was not just a huckster, nor your average artisan. Wilhelm Wunsch was a micrographer, or microcalligrapher, an artist who draws with tiny letters, and this map, though similar at first blush to the map contained in the pamphlet, was truly nothing like it. It was not just an image but a letter, a longer poem. Minuscule words were hidden within the vegetation of Elysia’s woods.
I have some German, so I was not entirely up Google Translate’s creek. I read, to the best of my abilities:
Where are signs to be seen in the day? Where does the heart—speak aloud? And when in life is it possible—that what a word cannot name, when will what—we mourn, what is banished to night, be granted?—
I noted a possible pun here with the writer’s name, Wunsch, meaning “wish” in English. I searched around among the foliage, roots, and branches and found additional language, here beginning with the phrase AN MEINE GELIEBTE TOCHTER.
To my dear daughter. Give me your eye if not your hand and believe. Elysia is real and these are the verses of your mother, encircled in the loving bands of my own art. There is no Elysia, but the stories I have told you are true.
I continued to scour the woods but could discover no further script. My eyes ached from the effort, were twin raisins stuck to the bottom of their sockets. So this was the paradise, here in the paradox of Wunsch’s vow, that Elysia was “real,” and that there was at the same time no Elysia. It reminded me a little of Paul Coral’s division of his writings into “FACTS” and “LIES.” Funny how categories like these had so little difficulty coexisting, particularly in the vicinity of a museum. Hennicott’s and/or Brunhilda’s fantastic tale had been pretty good for that, too, with its combination of two incompatible worlds.
I zoomed back out on the map. “Where is that blessed Elysia?” the large-scale poem still read. And now Brunhilda, if she had read her father’s minuscule words, had a fairy—or should I say star for a mother: Étoile, that uncertain but beautiful figure, with her gauzes and maritime backdrop, with whom Wunsch had once sampled the joys of early American scam
ming. She sang; he sold bad advice. Then came the separation of mother and child, the disappearance of the mother; though Dad carried on without her. And so Brunhilda’s mother had become a piece of magic lore, a spirit or idea. Just what every girl needs, as I myself knew, from not unpainful experience! Perhaps Caro, who might or might not have named me after a counterfeit etching (Étoile = star = Stella), would be willing someday to appear to me as a bobbing blue light and lead me away from whatever annoying picnic I was currently attending, into utopia.
As if on cue, my phone screen lit up and made some encouraging jingles, signaling that Caro herself was FaceTime-ing me.
“Speak of the devil,” I muttered, before accepting the call.
An image of Caro’s tetchy tortoiseshell, Poutine, appeared, along with Caro’s own speckled hand. The hand was stroking the cat’s tricolor head as it purred deafeningly into the iPad microphone.
“Hi, Mom!” I yelled.
Poutine screeched and departed.
“Goodness, dear, do you really have to do that to her? You know how she feels about trust!” The iPad was unceremoniously flipped to reveal Caro’s face. She held the device out at arm’s length, as if it were a mirror.
“I guess not,” I said. “Do you mind looking at my ceiling?”
“What’s that, dear?”
I put the phone well out of the way of my face. “I was saying, I hope you don’t mind looking at my ceiling.”
“Oh,” said Caro. “I suppose that’s a bit odd, but very well. Show me your ceiling!”
“You’re already looking at it.”
“Of course.” Caro paused. “So, dear, I hope you are enjoying the weekend?”
“Yes. I’ve had just about enough of it.”
“Oh, well, I’m sure you’re doing many things. I’m sorry I couldn’t make it to Paul’s. It must have been very well attended.”
“It was.” I didn’t feel I had the energy to go over the memorial with her, play by play.
“Yes. Well, I was calling because I wanted to discuss something with you. I know I mentioned your father’s and my impending trip? And I wanted to see how you might feel if, well, I were to possibly take a longer sabbatical.”
I wasn’t sure where this was heading. I squirmed in bed, displacing the phone, which fell to the floor with a little slap.
“Hello?” Caro called, as if she had been abandoned in a well.
“Hi,” I said, reaching over for the device. “I’m still here.”
“Oh good. Wonderful. So, to make a long story short, I’m sure you would never dream of even thinking about this sort of thing, much less consider it as an actual option, but I want to make you an offer. I want to go away for a little bit. Nowhere exotic really, but I want to travel, and I’m not such a fool that I think that I can, as they say, take my business with me, but understandably I don’t want to lose it.”
You could have knocked me over with a feather, or maybe a molecule.
“I think you perceive what I am saying. You are, after all, my only child. You’ll think it over and let me know what I should tell Charles.” This was her assistant of many years.
I believe I nodded. She was offering me her business.
“No need to say anything!” Caro blithely maintained, possibly to cover her own discomfort at my present torpor and/or our technologically awkward situation. Only now did she see fit to announce, somewhat shrilly, “Your father and I are headed to the country this weekend, but don’t forget that on Monday he will meet with you!”
“Yes,” I managed. “Bye, Mom,” I said, raising the phone again to face level, screwing my eyes shut, kissing the air.
monday
[ 29 ]
It was Monday again. It was chilly and dry and the heavens seemed to be hollowing themselves out in preparation for the coming of spring, making room.
Now I was back in the workweek and on my way uptown early. I was meeting my father for breakfast so that we could go over some legal matters. (He does not do lunch.) I got out of the train and walked over to the Bageltopia he had selected, where he was already present, perusing a paper version of the Times and drinking a pulpy glass of juice. He lowered his spectacles and accepted a kiss.
My father is a little shaky. He grew up in a tough neighborhood and so has a tendency to speak quickly and, at times, in coded phrases. He is, in addition, not particularly emotionally reliable. “So what’s up with you,” he said in a not entirely kindly way, though that was not how he meant it. He is, by the way, seventy-seven.
I told him that I was doing all right. I ordered some coffee. I was debating about whether I should let him know about Whit’s unwelcome appearances the week before. My father can become incredibly angry at mind-boggling speed, and I was sure that any emotional comfort I could hope to derive would be overwhelmed from the get-go by the solar death that would constitute my father’s affective response. I’m saying, my father is sensitive. The coffee came and I put cream in it.
“Is that something your mother taught you?” My father was referring to my administration of dairy. He meant was I being a sissy.
I am a sissy, and so I said, “It tastes better this way.”
“That’s disgusting,” my father said, though, again, not in a mean way. Or, he did say it in a mean way, but that was not how he meant it. At least, I prefer to believe that this is how he meant it.
“I like it,” I told him. For my own benefit, I smiled.
My father had ordered some toast, and this came, and he began scraping various things onto it. He took a few bites, and while he was still chewing, revealing the food in his mouth, he said, “I have some good news for you.”
“Really? That’s unusual.”
He was still dealing with partially chewed bread but went on anyway. “What, that I would have good news?”
“No,” I said, “that anyone would have anything nice to tell me.”
“Well, it’s a good day, then.” My father swallowed. He took a slug of juice. “Your soon-to-be former husband has signed.”
I was stunned. All I could say was, “He signed the papers?”
“Didn’t you hear what I said? Yes, he signed the papers.” My father paused a moment to suck his teeth. “He has signed. There you go. Les jeux sont faits.” My father tore into the next piece of toast, and now with more bread impeding him he continued, “Though who knows what it’s going to take in the courts. Be prepared to wait seven months.” He chewed some more. “They can’t do it any faster than that for some reason.”
My father, may I reiterate, is, like Whit, a lawyer. However, here the similarity between the two of them ends. Whit was born to blue blood, my father to the proverbial collar, etc. And, unlike me, pace Sylvia from Stanford, my father is very good at math.
I was still staring into space.
“Hello?” said my dad.
“Oh,” I said, “thank you. I just realized I’d been having a kind of a tough week last week.”
“So?”
“So, I don’t know.”
“So, then, so what?”
I nodded. “Exactly.”
—
OUT ON THE STREET LATER I wasn’t really sure what to do with myself. I had been champing at the bit, so eager to bypass this particular milestone that now that it was securely in my rearview I felt a little wobbly at the wheel, a little like I might just drive off the road, if that isn’t too mixed a metaphor. I mean, I was going to be free. But what did that mean to me? I imagined myself toiling away at the museum, at last learning to correctly appease and satisfy Fred, so that I would not be banished to the running of a satellite CeMArt in one of WANSEE’s smart cities; so that both of us could work on and behave as if nothing were wrong. Perhaps I would find another husband, and we would settle down and have children, and I could be confident in the security of my position, no matter how much time I needed to take off for the betterment of my spawn. Fred, who was soon to be anointed Emperor of Arts Administration on Planet Earth, would vou
ch for my value. I could still live the perfect life. Nothing was preventing me.
But thinking through this perfect life, during the course of which I would eventually switch from Barneys to Bergdorf’s, in search of formal heels of a more modest height, the better to accommodate my sometimes ailing knees and back, and during the course of which I would continue to go in quest of ever more illustrious forms of servile prestige, some of which would be slightly out of reach, that is, until they were finally obtained by me, and during the course of which I would feel the minor twinge that accompanies doing what others have already done but which is mollified by the knowledge that you do it well, I felt like perhaps I might prefer to just go ahead and walk into traffic, get it over with. I mean, it was not that I really wanted to die, but that I saw quite clearly that it would be wise to take this option, rather than live through the fate that awaited me, if I let the combined dynamics of the laws of physics, plus history, plus society at large, plus Fred’s genius for converting autonomous humans into chess pieces take their course.
I was on my way up the steps of the museum and there was a ding from my bag that I took for more flagpole noise until I realized, upon repetition, that it was coming from my phone. I dug it out, pausing in the shade of the façade. The text was from Caro, of all people, and all it said was, “Don’t forget my offer.” Because of my exhaustion and residual inebriation, it took me a minute to realize that she was referring to our conversation of the previous night. “Holy shit,” I mumbled to myself, feeling fully drunk again, and went indoors.
I greeted Marco, “Yodel!” I saluted him. I stopped by.
“So what’s new with you?” he wanted to know.
“Not much,” I said. “How are you holding up?”
“It was a pretty pleasant weekend, actually.” Marco was giving me the tiniest glance in, the tiniest sliver of view afforded by a door ever so slightly ajar. It looked nice in there.
“Wow,” I told him.
“You?”
“Oh,” I said, “you know, nothing. But actually I think I figured some things out.”
