My Beautiful Failure

by Janet Ruth Young

  40.

  and I found myself thinking about her

  We were swimming in cold water and shivering and patting each other with towels. I was shivering, she was stealing my towel, and I was chasing her until I felt warm again. We were riding bikes over the bridge between Hawthorne and Beauport, the sails on the water like white slanting As for our excellence. We were feeding each other shoestring potatoes from a tiny bag.

  41.

  L is for laughter

  I carried my bike into the bedroom and walked into the kitchen to find a soda. I felt good about my shift. Not only was I perfect, or nearly perfect, on that one call with Jenney, but in four hours I took thirty-one calls, although Pep says I should be in the forty range, including breaks and paperwork. Richie reminded me that the key to terming was emphasizing the quality of your listening, not the quantity.

  Dad was at the kitchen sink, wiping his hands with a rag. While his back was turned, Linda came in holding her fingers to form the letter L, snapping her head side to side and mouthing “Listerine.”

  “Cut it out!” I yelled. I spiked my empty soda can into the recycling bin to make it clatter. “I was perfect tonight! Nearly perfect!”

  “What’s up with you two?” Dad asked.

  “She’s calling me Listerine again!”

  “I didn’t call him that. I didn’t call him anything! I only implied it!”

  “Well, stop implying it,” Dad said, accusing both of us in one glance. “This conflict is so unnecessary.”

  “She’s driving me crazy, Dad.”

  “Linda, stop driving your brother crazy. Billy, don’t be such a hothead. You can’t let people push your buttons like that.”

  Dad went back to the studio, and the smell of paint thinner rode Handel’s Air, a stately tune like a wedding march, into the living room. Was he blasting his music to get inspired, or to drown us out? Push your buttons. If I were a father, I would have explored, not dismissed, my son’s experience.

  Andy texted me to see if I wanted to go to a movie. His treat. He had gotten a gift card for his birthday.

  “Busy,” I texted back. Yeah, right. Like I wanted to spend a minute more with that idiot than I had to.

  I opened my computer to start my music paper and other homework but found myself on the Hawthorne High Facebook page. Should I look? I wondered. Should I look up the class of 2010 and swimmers? Nobody would find out, and it would be nice to feel closer to a girl who thought I was good at something. But no, I decided. Who Jenney was outside of that six-inch beige plastic box was none of my business.

  42.

  think small

  When I got up the next morning I found Dad in his studio, already working on the show. He said he had been up since five mulling over more ideas and that he planned to finish another painting before he went to work.

  “This level of intensity will help keep Forty/Forty from being run of the mill,” he told me.

  “Have you eaten breakfast?” I asked. I had a bowl of oat squares with me and was careful not to drip milk on anything.

  “What people are looking for in art is not a particular subject or style, but excitement,” he said. “That’s part of my one day, one painting plan. The viewer can tell whether you maintained a level of engagement while painting or whether you finished the piece while deciding what you would have for lunch.”

  “Okay, Dad. I realize that it’s mundane of me to need to feed myself.” I pointed to the three finished sunset paintings resting on the pink table from Grandma Pearl.

  “Were these exciting?” I asked him. They were gray, after all.

  “I was in a state of constant tension: Will I be able to fulfill my vision? Am I going to disappoint myself? In a way it’s almost like a sport—skiing or luge—because your success can be due to timing. If you make the wrong decision at a key moment, the whole painting can be thrown off. But if you hit it right, the excitement keeps building right up to the finish.”

  Dad’s told me his next project was a group of very small works. He showed me the canvases. “The small scale is a challenge to people like me who prefer to work large. What can I possibly say in a space like eight by ten inches?”

  Linda had heard me getting my breakfast. She came in wearing her Justin Bieber nightshirt. “I love the small idea,” she said. “A small painting is the perfect Christmas gift. It doesn’t cost a lot, and the person you give it to can always find a place to hang it.”

  “That’s my girl,” Dad said. “You’ll be working on Wall Street someday.”

  While he talked, Dad sketched the outlines of a scene he must have come across while walking on the wharf, of a boat being repaired. I guessed it was what you would call Impressionism, because he was trusting the viewer to fill in all the missing parts. He painted the water, the people in the boat, and the name on the transom of the boat. Everything but the boat itself. The people were floating on the water.

  “Neat,” Linda said. “It’s a transparent boat, like the emperor’s new clothes.”

  “What is the name of this one?” I asked.

  “The American Health Care System,” he said.

  43.

  shift 4, november 15. call 24

  Listeners. Can I help you?”

  It’s Jenney.

  “Hi, Jenney. It’s Billy. Glad you called.”

  This is really difficult.

  “Take a deep breath. No rush. I’ll wait till you’re ready to talk. What’s going on?”

  I heard from my parents again.

  “Breathe.”

  It was awful. And I feel bad but I don’t, because I don’t think it was my fault. Wait. That didn’t make sense.

  “What happened?”

  They’re going after Melinda.

  “Okay.”

  We had a huge argument.

  “About Melinda?”

  Right. They said she ruined their relationship with me and she should have her license taken away.

  “They said that?”

  I feel like they’re blaming me and it makes me feel bad.

  “Did they say that?”

  Sorry. I can’t talk. The soft clicking noise is back again.

  “That’s okay. Breathe.”

  When my parents come at me with this stuff they make me feel guilty, like I’m the one causing the problems. And if I tell Melinda that, she says, “Don’t let them make you feel guilty. You don’t have to protect them anymore, Jenney.” And do you know what is one of the worst things about all that’s happened? I lost my mother. I lost both parents, but I especially miss my mother. Even though I’m nineteen, I still need her, you know?

  For the second time I almost regretted being at Listeners. Because if I had met Jenney some other way, we’d have a lot to talk about right now. We’d sit in a park somewhere and she’d tell me about losing her mother over the lawsuit, and I’d tell her about having lost my dad even though he was right there in the house with me.

  “What do you miss about her?” I asked.

  It didn’t used to be like this. She was more my friend than my mom. When my acceptance to St. Angus’s came we had this day together. We went to Boston and saw the Aquarium, and she joked that once I finished school these people had to fear for their jobs. And we stood at the top of the Giant Ocean Tank and she linked her arm in my arm—we hooked our elbows together, like two old ladies—and we had this feeling of satisfaction. We both did, the exact same feeling, and . . .

  She was crying again. My throat tightened, and my nose even started to tingle, as if I might cry myself.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “You can cry if you want to.”

  Jenney’s sadness tumbled out, years’ and years’ worth it seemed, in her tears.

  I don’t understand how my life got to be such a mess.

  I looked over my shoulder. Margaret and Richie had been called away by one of the college guys. He was saying he was worried about CIA Debra and that if they heard from her, they should tell him right away. My
mind was made up before I even knew what I was considering.

  I’m sorry, I—

  “Jenney, I remember you.”

  What? Are you whispering?

  “I said I remember you.”

  I knew that. I knew you did.

  “Good.”

  Give me a minute.

  “No rush.”

  My timing was perfect. Margaret and Richie were back at our table. They had written a note to me about CIA Debra that they intended to show me when I got off the phone. I felt both wrong and right. I was closer to someone than I had been in a long time. I knew my breaking the rules had comforted Jenney. It seemed like the rules had been made for someone else, not two people in our situation. Who had so much in common. Maybe the rules were wrong.

  Just a minute.

  I heard snuffling on the other end. She blew her nose and, I think, walked across the room to throw away the tissue. It seemed intimate to hear, like I was hearing her in the bathroom.

  “You’re a strong person, Jenney,” I said.

  I know. On my good days, few can defeat me.

  Margaret glanced over. She probably remembered my last, near-perfect call with Jenney. I was coasting on my reputation now.

  “Are you feeling suicidal?”

  No.

  “I’m sorry things are rough.”

  I’ll get through it somehow.

  “I know you will. I have to go soon.”

  Me too. I have to let Melinda know what’s happening.

  “If you think that’s best.”

  Thanks, Billy.

  “Good luck.”

  ’Night.

  44.

  outside

  Dad set up an easel in the backyard, under an almost-bare maple tree. When the wind blew, one remaining clump of leaves fluttered to the left, then to the right, like a pom-pom. A transistor radio on the wooden chair beside him played Handel’s Largo, drowning out the sound of highway traffic. Painting outside is called painting en plein air, French for “in the open air.” Yet eating outside is called dining al fresco, which is Italian for “in the fresh air.” Can you paint al fresco or dine en plein air? Possibly, but no one ever says that.

  I walked up beside Dad and touched his arm, wanting a closer look. He had drawn a scene with pencil, and now he was starting to fill in the colors. When he was sick, I had touched him as much as I wanted. He moved a lot slower then, and he even held my arm sometimes, for support.

  “A spy!” he yelled. “Tell me who sent you!”

  He wore a paint-splattered hockey jersey. His straw hat was like Monet’s, but his red hair was getting long in back, and with his red goatee and bony face, more than any other artist he resembled Van Gogh. He wiped his brush with a rag and pretended to stab me with it, forcing me to back off. But not before I got a glimpse of his painting, which was . . . odd. Dad’s tree had a rubbery face like the trees that come to life in the movie version of The Wizard of Oz and try to snatch Dorothy and her friends. But at the base of the tree were carloads of tourists with cameras and binoculars.

  “What, exactly, does that represent?” I asked him.

  “The attempted rape of New England by the tourist industry.”

  “It doesn’t look like the rape has been very successful,” I said. “Are you happy with the work you’re doing?”

  “Ecstatic,” he said. “Sometimes you have a vision and in between the vision and the execution a shadow falls. But not this time. It’s turning out exactly the way I imagined it.”

  “The tree grabbing the cars like King Kong and dumping the tourists into the oncoming traffic? Are the tourists at the bottom of the ravine dead?”

  “All the tourists are going to be dead,” Dad explained. “What I’m happiest with is this kind of cartoony look that makes you go, ‘Oh, what a cute painting of a tree,’ and then you look closer and say, ‘Uh-oh, not so cute.’”

  “I like the fall colors, anyway.”

  “Luscious colors,” Dad corrected. “In art school we called that ‘color porn.’ It’s easy to like color.”

  He and Linda should just make a dunce cap that says ART IGNORAMUS and have me sit under it. It would be an artistic dunce cap, I’m sure.

  I raised my eyebrows at Dad. He might call me shallow, but I would still push my point. “If you like what you’ve done so far,” I said, “think how much happier you’ll be with what you can accomplish a year from now. You’ll have a neat collection of work that you’ve created at a comfortable pace, and you can put more thought into what you want to include. You said you’d do forty paintings in forty days, but you’re not locked into that by anyone but yourself.” What I really wanted to tell him was that he would still be a great dad even if he finished zero paintings. That if he decided not to finish this marathon, I would love him just the same.

  Dad mixed a bronzy color on his palette. It might have contained some actual metal flakes. “How is your project going?” he asked. “I’ll bet you’re good at it.”

  This surprised me. In a way I thought Dad had forgotten. “People say I’m good. A couple of the callers say I’m the best Listener they’ve spoken to.” Oops. That was actually a breach of confidentiality.

  “It’s not too depressing, is it? I worry about you getting depressed. Because”—he looked from the canvas to me—“you know, it could be in the genes. Something undesirable I’ve given you. At least Linda got my painting ability as a trade.”

  I wanted a positive souvenir gene too. People always said we looked alike, and both Dad and I bounced when we walked. I wished that for one day I could be not myself but an observer, so I could see it.

  “Listeners isn’t depressing,” I assured him. “The whole environment is very upbeat. We make jokes and eat snacks and stuff. I’ve made a couple of friends there.”

  “Do you feel like you’re developing your skills?” Dad asked, squinting at me from under his hat. I noticed that he applied the paint thickly, in pasty waves, where I would have obsessively painted every leaf.

  “It’s amazing,” I said, watching his hands move over the canvas. “I’ve learned so much about sympathy and about communication. And the secret lives people lead, that otherwise I would know nothing about. I learn something new every time I step through the door.”

  “Then how would you feel if I did to you what you’ve been doing to me?”

  “Meaning?”

  “If I suggested you wait a year before trying to save someone.”

  “Touché,” I said. “I did not see that coming.”

  Dad was smiling the semi-angry smile of someone with a lot more to say. I ambled back to the house with my head down, acting more wounded than I felt. And I slammed the screen door loudly. This had worked when I was little to convey sulking and hurt feelings. But now when I looked over my shoulder, Dad hadn’t seemed to notice.

  I continued to watch Dad through the tiny metal squares. Working below the tree, Dad bent his head back like he was drinking from a goblet, filling his eyes and mouth with the colors and textures of the tree bark and sky. He scrutinized the canvas on his easel and turned it upside down. This surprised me. He thought checking a composition by upending it was pretentious. That was one of the reasons he left art school.

  Dad turned the canvas upright. He waved and laughed. He had done that for my benefit. Caught me looking, I guess.

  45.

  director

  Paint in the bathroom, on the rugs, and everywhere.

  But Mom didn’t seem to mind.

  Last year she needed tons of time off. Now it seemed she was making up that time and determined, like Dad, never to be average again. In the evenings, while Dad worked in the studio, Mom fanned out her spreadsheets and binders. Her museum was devoted to the leather industry, but the way she acted you’d think she ran the Louvre. She told me not to interrupt her, and once, after I bothered her three times in a row, she came home wearing earbuds. Earbuds on my mother. She always told me to take mine off. Hers lasted one evenin
g and then disappeared, but they drove the point home. No interruptions: this means you, Billy.

  I decided to take my homework in there, sit beside her, and wait for a chance to catch her without the headphones.

  “The painting Dad’s working on looks mental,” I said, just to open up the topic.

  “I know you’re against the show,” she said.

  “I’m not against the show. I’m just against this format. Don’t you think it’s too much?”

  Mom raked the arm of her eyeglasses through her hair. Sometimes this meant she was thoughtful. Other times it meant she was mad. Which would it be?

  “All art is too much,” she said in the tone of someone who had a master’s degree in American studies.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  Mom touched her hair. She had been wearing it up lately, with a fancy clip, and she wore Mom jeans tucked into a pair of suede boots she was proud of. She looked nice, but I didn’t want to change the subject by saying so. She tilted her head and paused, as if she was giving a press conference.

  “Any artist who creates something takes a risk,” she said. “Of being laughed at or of making something no one else will value. So if that happens to your father, it will be the same as with any other artist. I’m sure that, having a formal art education, he’s well aware of the risk and has decided to proceed anyway. Maybe he’s even enjoying that aspect of it, because it’s like the good old days when he pursued his art against the odds.”

  Having stated her point, to her mind, perfectly, Mom started inspecting a set of slides. She wanted to expand the museum’s scope from the merely local. She hoped to display, in an unprecedented coup, a collection of traditional Plains Indian leather pipe bags from a museum in South Dakota. She held each slide toward the lamp, unconsciously drawing her mouth into an upside-down U.

  “So you don’t think that if his show bombs or doesn’t happen, he’ll be crushed?”