The Dissident

by Nell Freudenberger

“Did I make paintings that happen to be underneath those paintings, do you mean?”

  I nodded. “Why?”

  “Who knows?” June said. “Like I said, they weren’t great, but they were better than her other stuff.”

  “I know why she painted over them,” I said. “I want to know why you gave them to her in the first place. Was it for money?”

  For the first time June looked genuinely scornful. “Money?”

  I was glad to hear she hadn’t succumbed to financial pressure so early in her career, but I resolved to remain stern. “Plagiarism is a serious offense—no matter why you do it. Passing someone else’s work off as your own will corrupt the very part of you that makes your own art. It’s—” But I couldn’t continue. I coughed artificially, stealing a moment to catch my breath. June was looking at me with a funny expression.

  “I didn’t plagiarize,” she said.

  “But you allowed someone to do it to you. Why would you do that?”

  June went to the storage rack and picked out her own portfolio. She put it under her arm and retrieved her can of brushes from the shelf above the rack. Then she began to walk the perimeter of the room, scavenging small items—paper clips, adhesive gum, a pack of sewing needles—and dropping them in her bag.

  “June?” I prompted.

  “I wasn’t even in your class yet,” she exclaimed. Then she opened a drawer and took a handful of beads. “But I sometimes used to make things in this studio—and one day Emily was in here too.” June shrugged. “She saw those paintings, and she wanted them.”

  “So you were flattered.”

  “No,” June said. “Who cares what she thinks?”

  I couldn’t help smiling. “But you gave them to her?”

  June shrugged. “I didn’t need them. I wasn’t even going to take AP Art. I just got annoyed when I saw that you’d put them up there.” She indicated the shelf above the whiteboard, where I’d displayed the paintings after Emily first showed them to me.

  “That’s when you decided to join our class?”

  “Yeah.”

  June was examining a still life I had arranged on top of a broken potter’s wheel. I had covered the wheel with a purple velvet cloth to set off the objects I’d chosen: a wineglass, a wooden flute, a ceramic bowl filled with oranges sitting on a black-and-white-lacquered chessboard, inlaid with mother-of-pearl. I had drawn these items from an impressive stockpile expressly for this purpose, which was kept in a tall filing cabinet labeled “SAS Dept. of Art.”

  June looked up at me. “But then she painted over them. I guess she was embarrassed.”

  “But what if you hadn’t noticed she was using them? What if you hadn’t joined the class, and Emily had won a prize, or an art scholarship? They have those, you know.”

  June tried to keep from smiling. “They weren’t that good.”

  “But you were afraid to find out yourself.”

  June didn’t say anything. She lifted the bowl of oranges and removed the chessboard. Then she replaced the bowl casually on the potter’s wheel.

  “Someone might be painting that,” I said, but June ignored me. There were noises in the gallery; people were coming toward the art room.

  “I finally have an idea for Color and Design,” she told me. “But I might not see you.”

  I wondered how she knew.

  “Maybe I could send a slide?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “I wanted to ask you—”

  Someone was hurrying toward the art room.

  “—what you thought?”

  “Of what?”

  Mrs. Diller knocked and entered at the same time. She flipped on the overhead lights and examined June.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “You told me to get my things,” June said.

  The vice principal shook her head. “Your grandmother is here. She’s waiting for you in the parking lot—she’s very upset, as you can imagine.”

  June did not seem to hear her. She was looking at me, holding the chessboard against her body, waiting for my answer. I didn’t flatter myself that my opinion was so important to her. It was simply that I had seen her project from the outside. No one had taken a photograph, and of all the people in the courtyard, I might have been the only one to see the tree and immediately understand it as a piece of art.

  “Put that away, and let’s go,” Mrs. Diller said.

  June held her chessboard tighter. “It’s mine,” she said. “I brought it from home.” The vice principal looked to me for confirmation: we were still colleagues at that point, and she expected support.

  “It’s hers,” I said.

  “Willie will walk you down to the parking lot,” she told June.

  June was still waiting for my answer. I hadn’t allowed myself to think that I might not see her again. I had to say something—but what could I say in front of the vice principal? Not, When will I see you again? Not, certainly, I love you.

  June sighed. “Well, then, see you, Show Pongsy.”

  I had an inspiration: “Wo zhen ai ni de shu,” I blurted out.

  June smiled at me blankly.

  I repeated it more slowly, the way you might address a child. But had June even learned the word for tree?

  “Shu,” I said, desperately. “Shu de yue.” It occurred to me that the sentence—“I really loved your tree of fish”—wouldn’t make much sense, even to a native speaker.

  The vice principal was looking from me to June.

  “June is learning Chinese,” I explained.

  “June is going down to the parking lot,” Vice Principal Diller said. “Right now.” She put a hand on June’s shoulder, not gently.

  “I really liked your class, Yuan Laoshi,” June said. “Or whoever you are.” Then she turned and followed the security guard out of the studio, through the gallery, down the stairs, and out of my life. I noticed she was wearing her school shoes, painted gold.

  “Good-bye, June,” I called after her, and at that moment I thought it might not matter whether or not she had understood. Perhaps it was the kind of thing that loses its shape when you try to put it into words, like dreams, or like fireworks in a tree full of fish.

  Mrs. Diller had already shut the door behind her.

  “I think you know what I’m going to say,” the vice principal said.

  And in my distraction, my thoughts of June, I forgot all of my friend Fang’s advice.

  “I think I do,” I said.

  70.

  PHIL AND AUBREY STAYED IN THE IMMACULATE GUEST BEDROOM OF AUBREY’S friends, the Barnetts. Patrick Barnett was a partner in the L.A. office of her firm; he lived with his family in Pacific Palisades, in a house perched on a cliff two hundred and fifty feet above the sea. Their street was a cul-de-sac lined with verdant magnolias. A thick marine layer burned off each morning by ten o’clock, and then descended again each evening at about six, when the house keepers were out walking the dogs. The guest bedroom was beige and white, decorated with photographs of the Barnetts in exotic locales: the Taj Mahal, Angkor Wat, Machu Picchu.

  Aubrey waited until their third evening in the Palisades to get to the point.

  “I think about the future,” she said. She was sitting up against the headboard, her legs curled underneath her, wearing a very fetching black nightgown. “I can’t help it.”

  “Me too,” said Phil. What did he do besides think of the future? He thought about it constantly, minute by minute. It was terrifying.

  “I’m afraid.”

  “I know,” said Phil. It was the rare conversation in which he felt they were on the same page. Aubrey’s breasts looked lovely, lolling in cups of black silk.

  “I try to picture things. Like, I don’t know—like getting breakfast.”

  “Getting breakfast?”

  “Like that old couple we see at Murray’s Bagels? Who read the Travel section?”

  “We could read the Travel section,” Phil offered, but he was starting to feel
nervous.

  “Or—can I say this?”

  Why did people ask if they could say something before they’d said it? How could you give your permission, Phil wondered, before you knew what they had in mind?

  “OK,” he said.

  “I try to picture getting married.” Aubrey didn’t look at him. She traced the pattern on the beige-on-beige duvet cover with one finger. She had very small hands with very bitten fingernails. Her hands looked like they belonged to a ten-year-old kid.

  “Even having a baby.” She looked up suddenly, with the kind of manic attention she ordinarily reserved for case briefs. He almost expected her to put on her glasses:

  “I try to picture you holding the baby.”

  Phil attempted to picture holding a baby, but he was distracted by Aubrey, who was smiling in an unsettling way. She was smiling as if she’d finally understood some hidden truth about life, perhaps religious in nature.

  “Dr. Harris asked if I could picture you holding the baby, and I can’t. It’s like trying to superimpose something where it doesn’t go.”

  Exactly, Phil thought. He felt grateful to Aubrey’s therapist, Dr. Caroline Harris, for the first time.

  Aubrey had sat up, and was speaking excitedly, gesturing with her hands: “You just sort of float away, into the ether. And I’ve tried, but I finally realized—I think it was when you left to come out here that I realized—it isn’t going to happen.”

  “Really?” Phil said.

  Aubrey nodded. She looked calm and gorgeous. “I can’t picture it.”

  “I agree!” said Phil. “That’s exactly—”

  “And that’s why I think we have to end it now.”

  “A lot of people don’t get married and are very happy,” Phil said. “Like Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins. They support all of those good causes.”

  “When I picture doing those things—I always picture Bruce.”

  Phil had been looking at the Barnetts on Machu Picchu, feeling vindicated. He had been thinking that he would never have to go to Machu Picchu, which was probably full of fat, sweaty tourists, moving out of the way for each other so that everyone could get their picture with the stone and the vegetation and no one else in the frame. If he and Aubrey went somewhere, it wouldn’t have to be a place like that, a once-in-a-lifetime kind of place. It wouldn’t have to be so far. They could go to Long Island, for example, and have a wonderful time.

  He had been feeling vindicated, and he had missed something Aubrey had said. She had said something important, and now she was picking at her cuticles, which were starting to bleed.

  “Don’t do that,” Phil said. “What did you say?”

  “I said—” She was almost whispering: “I picture doing them with Bruce.”

  “Doing what with Bruce?” Phil said. “Who is Bruce?”

  Aubrey’s eyes were wet, but she seemed to be yelling at him: “Bruce is the partner on the AT&T case! If you don’t know that—”

  “Isn’t he married?”

  “Divorced,” Aubrey said.

  “You’re having an affair with Bruce?”

  “You don’t even know him,” Aubrey said fiercely. A tear made its way attractively down one cheek. “And I don’t see how it’s an affair. You’re not even here.”

  “I am here!” Phil said. “I’m right here!”

  “But you’re not there.”

  “How can I be here and there at the same time?” Phil asked, but Aubrey got up and went into the bathroom. She shut the door, but he could hear her in there, sobbing and blowing her nose. He didn’t understand how sadness came so easily to people. For him it was like a pile of rocks that had to be moved one at a time. Just thinking about it made him tired.

  He waited a moment, until it was silent in the bathroom.

  “Aubrey?” he said, but there was no answer. He was getting up to knock on the bathroom door when his cell phone rang. He could feel Aubrey in the bathroom, tensing, waiting to hear whether he would answer. He wouldn’t answer, but he would look. He took the phone out of his pocket and looked: it was Steve.

  “I’m not going to get it,” Phil said.

  A muffled voice came from the bathroom: “You should get it.”

  “I’m not going to,” Phil said. The phone was quiet. Wasn’t Steve going to leave a message?

  “Did you get it?” Aubrey asked.

  A moment later, a text message flashed across the screen: “Lunch tomorrow, commissary @ 1?”

  “No,” Phil said. Y-E-S, he keyed into his phone. He was proud that he could use the text message function. It had taken him a while to get the hang of it.

  Phil put the phone back in his pocket just as Aubrey opened the door, pale but no longer crying. She had put a robe (presumably Samantha Barnett’s) over the black nightgown. Phil wondered how much the Barnetts knew about his and Aubrey’s situation.

  “You can stay here,” Aubrey said. “I’m going to go downstairs and sleep in the den.”

  “I’ll sleep in the den,” Phil said.

  “No,” said Aubrey. “I already told Samantha.”

  “You told Samantha before you told me?”

  “I should tell you that I’m leaving tomorrow,” Aubrey said, a non sequitur that suggested to Phil that she was following a script: The Break-up, original screenplay by Aubrey Harmanci, based on a concept by Dr. Caroline Harris, Ph.D., in cooperation with Barnett & Barnett, Ltd.

  “I’m taking a really early flight, so I can go into the office tomorrow night.”

  Phil couldn’t believe how much seemed to be happening without him. From somewhere in the house he heard the Barnetts’ toddler, Gabriel, shout, and then the sound of heavy footsteps hurrying to give him comfort.

  “I can’t go tomorrow,” Phil said. “I have a meeting with the production company.”

  Aubrey looked at him as if he were crazy. “Well, I don’t think we should go back together.”

  For the first time, a kind of panic gripped Phil. His head and his extremities felt light, and at the same time there was something heavy in his abdomen, as if a magnet were sucking all of his organs into one solid mass. Once Aubrey was gone, he wouldn’t be able to stay with the Barnetts, and he certainly couldn’t go back to Cece’s.

  The child cried out again.

  “But where will I go?” Phil said, but Aubrey was already halfway down the stairs and she did not turn around.

  71.

  PHIL ARRIVED AT THE STUDIO EARLY. BOTH BARNETTS HAD BEEN AT work when he left, and he’d been able to slip out easily, throwing his few things in the back of the car. (Aubrey had agreed to leave him the rental, although the firm would of course no longer be paying for it.) The guard spent a long time looking for his name on a list, and then waved him through reluctantly, toward the visitors’ lot. He passed the eyeless, dun-colored soundstages, a “New York Street” with a yellow cab and a garbage truck parked at one end, and a fleet of billboards for spring 2001 releases, including Darcy Feyth’s new romantic comedy: Live a Little, about a small-town beauty pageant queen who dreams of becoming Miss America, and her improbable friendship with the town dwarf.

  Phil found the commissary, and sat down to wait at a table by the window. He assumed the revision was finished, and that now was the time he would be called upon to “take it all in one blow.” Of course, he wouldn’t have a sense of what he was going to have to take until he got home and read the script. Got somewhere and read the script, he corrected himself.

  At one-twenty, Steve appeared in the commissary. He lifted a hand and waved to Phil. Phil was surprised to see that he was alone.

  “Where’s Keith?” he asked. A bevy of young women immediately occupied the other end of the table, casting covert glances at Steve. They looked to Phil like production assistants, some of them only a few years out of college. Of course the executives and the stars did not eat in the commissary.

  “Couldn’t make it,” Steve said tightly. They got their sandwiches and Diet Cokes (Phil was not a diet soda
drinker, but there didn’t seem to be any other kind) and found a table in the corner, by the window.

  “I have some bad news,” Steve said, pushing his sandwich to the side like a prop. “We broke up.”

  “You and Leona?” Phil tried to look concerned, but he couldn’t help feeling more cheerful. Steve was going through the same thing he was! And Leona was single!

  Steve frowned. “No—of course not. Leona and I are a done deal.”

  “Oh, well, that’s good.”

  “Me and Keith.” Steve leaned close to Phil, as if communicating a secret: “Keith’s brilliant, but he’s so fucking immature. This fucking computer shit is all he talks about now. He wants to design video games.” Steve shook his head. “He thinks gaming is going to be a big deal.”

  “I’m sorry,” Phil said. He thought of Leona, and could not feel too terrible for Steve.

  “So I’m sorry,” Steve said. He took the screenplay out of the pocket of his orange messenger bag, and handed it across the table. Phil glanced reflexively at the first page, and it was not until then that it was clear to him. The title—The Hypnotist—was exactly the same.

  “Maybe you want your copy?” Steve asked.

  “You mean—they’re not going to do it.”

  “Of course they could’ve hired new writers,” Steve said dismissively. “But my theory is, they were looking for an out. It was only, you know, Darcy who wanted to do it in the first place. My money says that’s why Keith and I got it. You know”—he glanced around and lowered his voice to a whisper—“we’re not really as big-time as we seem.”

  Phil stared out the window, to keep from looking at Steve. Of course it was bound to happen. The Hypnotist was a long shot to begin with. He ought to have been relieved that there would be no movie, no matter how small, about a psychiatrist whose brother has an affair with his wife.

  He looked out the window at the streaming secretaries, the gaffers, best boys, script girls, sound men and wardrobe mistresses, hurrying by in the relentless Los Angeles sun. He did not feel that they were real. They were an illusion, a projection designed to make him feel a part of something he was not.