The Love of My (Other) Life

by Traci L. Slatton

  “Cavemen did that,” I demurred, “which explains why men are all so fixated on sex. Even scientists.

  They’re all really cavemen.”

  “Oh no, you don’t understand, it was my generation that really explored kink,” Mrs. L insisted.

  “We were desperate to get away from the war. You wouldn’t believe the naughty things Bernie and I did.”

  I laughed helplessly, but I didn’t inquire. I didn’t want to know. “Why don’t I take you outside? It’s another nice day.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said, and melted into her pillows. “Could you push the bureau so it’s flush with the end of the bed? I like looking at the photos.”

  I got up and strained to push the heavy mahogany bureau. “Are you tired again today, Mrs. L? Are you taking your meds?”

  “Just a small shift to change the perspective,” she murmured. “I don’t feel like going out or seeing anyone. Just you, Tessa, you’re so bright and dear.

  Suddenly you’re very spirited, too. But I’m not. I’m winding down like an old watch. I want to do that in peace.”

  My heart clutched in on itself. “A full care facility—”

  “I’m staying here,” she said firmly. “Bernie and I lived here in this apartment for fifty years. It’s full of us, of our life together. Keeps me from being lonely.”

  I stood by her bed and picked up her hand and stroked it. “Mrs. L, you can’t take care of yourself.

  What would have happened to you yesterday if I hadn’t come along when I did? You could have been sitting out there all night.”

  “I get myself food when I’m hungry, and I have clean clothes.”

  “You need more care than that,” I said, but gently because she was dear to me and I didn’t want to upset her.

  “No, I don’t. I don’t want to have a lot of tubes running into my arms and medicines pumped into me. I don’t want to lie in some strange bed at the mercy of strangers. What an inhumane way to die!”

  “You could have a lot of time left, and the quality of that time—”

  “Is up to me,” she stated. She gave me a solemn look. “The quality of anyone’s life is always up to them. Everyone chooses how they feel in any set of circumstances. I always feel my love for Bernie and our children. Now I’m unraveling, and I don’t mind. After ninety years, that’s what happens. That’s what’s supposed to happen. Oh, there’s a gift for you.

  On the bureau.”

  I wanted to argue with her that she should let herself live, that half a life was still precious. One look at her set face told me it was pointless. Wonderful, she was; easy, not so much. I found a rectangular brown-paper package on the bureau. “What’s this?”

  “Wait to open it until this weekend,” Mrs. L said.

  “Saturday. Open it after Saturday.”

  “You didn’t have to do this, Mrs. Leibowitz.”

  “I know. I wanted to,” she said in a soft, slow voice. “Doing what you want is the prerogative of the dying. Should be the prerogative of the living, too, but it doesn’t always work out that way.”

  “I don’t want you to die!”

  * * *

  * * *

  22

  Where the past meets the future

  Brian stood outside my building. Next to him were a stack of my canvases and two suitcases. He was holding my laptop computer under one arm and my drawing pads under the other.

  I sprinted toward him, turquoise slippers slapping the sidewalk. “Brian, what’s going on?” I cried.

  “José changed your locks. Luckily, he let me in to get your stuff. He’s a good guy.”

  “The board locked me out?”

  “They want you to make a substantial payment toward what you owe. They’re actually trying to avoid court.” Brian shrugged.

  “This isn’t legal, it can’t be,” I said.

  “We’re here now, what do we do?”

  “Damn it! How much do they want?”

  “Twelve thousand dollars and a payment schedule.”

  “Okay, okay.” I ran my hands through my hair, thinking fast. “Give me the skull. I’ll call Guy right now. He probably already has a buyer in mind, that’s why he’s so intense about the skull. We can do it quick.”

  “That Guy, he is one strange dude. I don’t like him.”

  “Me neither,” I admitted, shuddering. “Let’s get him off my back.”

  Brian scratched his chin. “About that. I put the skull in your cupboard where the wine was.”

  I stared at Brian with growing, sinking comprehension. I plopped down, sitting on the suitcase.

  “It’s still in my apartment.”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t have the skull with you.”

  “No. And we have a bigger problem. Frances gave me one day to get you to give back the skull.

  Then he’s calling the police.” Brian seated himself next to me.

  “Better the police than Guy,” I said, and shivered.

  “You need a strategy so you don’t have to face either one,” Brian said quietly.

  “A strategy? I need another life!”

  “You have one. Billions even,” Brian said, in a voice that was both bitter and nostalgic.

  “I mean here and now in the real world, Professor.” I felt bitter myself. All my eggs were hatching, and buzzards with poison talons were emerging.

  “What about making a head? Say it’s yours and give it to Guy to sell. As your copy of Bucknell’s copy of Hirst’s thing. That would pass as clever in the art market.”

  That’s when I lost it. After everything. I dropped my head into my hands and wept.

  Brian exclaimed and stroked my hair.

  “It is my skull. I made it.” I sobbed so deeply the words barely made it out.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Cliff mentioned the shadow arts … .”

  “He meant forgery?” Brian asked with an indrawn breath.

  I nodded. Then, because I couldn’t help it, couldn’t keep the doors to my memory banged shut as firmly as I’d been able to until this very moment, I remembered three years ago.

  The scene was Cliff Bucknell’s studio in the Catskills. I was working on the skull, gluing on sequins. It was the last piece I was making for him, the final one, after other projects I’d finished for him or spoon fed to him. I talked to Cliff while I worked, hoping to rouse him.

  Cliff was lying in bed curled up in a fetal position. He’d succumbed to heroin, a steady spiral down into depression, inertia, and then paralysis after his romance with pot and cocaine. He’d stopped working and had failed to honor several contracts with galleries and private patrons; he was in danger of being sued and ignominiously cast out by the art world that had hitherto idolized him.

  Then came I, the good and empathic student, to the rescue.

  The memory faded with its usual sting. I picked up my head to look Brian in the eyes. It felt good to come clean. “Cliff was clinically depressed and hooked on drugs. I was his student and I wanted to help him—”

  “Yeah, and I know how you help in this world. At your own expense,” Brian said angrily.

  I shrugged and didn’t look away. “He had contractual obligations with dealers, galleries, and with Guy. So I started a cottage industry of making his pieces for him. I also suggested work for him and modeled for him. Remember the nudes at Frances’s gallery? That was me.”

  Brian stiffened. “You posed naked for him? Were you sleeping with him?”

  Another painful memory: I stood naked in front of Cliff, who stood at an easel in a silk robe. He was a wreck, barely functional, this once celebrated figure in the art world, and disintegrating in front of my eyes. He couldn’t even keep up his phony accent but sounded like the Bronx boy he’d been.

  Then David walked in—I still hadn’t figured out why my husband came to Cliff’s studio that day—and he made the obvious assumption. He didn’t say a word. He gave me a look of contempt, turned on his heel, a
nd swept out in disgust.

  Didn’t he owe me a few questions after our years together?

  Didn’t I owe it to us to point that out to him?

  Or was I just glad to get the demise of my marriage over with?

  I took a deep breath. “I didn’t sleep with Cliff, but everyone thought I did, especially David.”

  “Saint David, your first choice,” Brian spat.

  “Brian, my ex was no saint,” I said and then resumed the pitiful tale. “One of the dealers realized that Cliff’s work wasn’t actually Cliff’s work.

  He told galleries that Cliff was being taken advantage of because he was ill. It spread like lightening that Cliff’s assistant, me, was passing off her work as Cliff’s and pocketing the proceeds. I never got a penny, but I was instantly the Osama Bin Laden of the art world—a hated pariah. No one blamed Cliff because he’s, well, Cliff. They blamed me. David was disgusted and wouldn’t let me explain.” And maybe I didn’t want to, I realized.

  Brian sprang up and paced in circles around me and the suitcases. “I can’t believe this. Forgery, cheating. Who are you?”

  “Your wife in another life,” I said, bitterly. “I can tell you what I’m not: a thief. The skull belongs to me, Brian. It was never supposed to be sold. Cliff promised to give it to me. He even signed a letter authenticating it as mine and belonging to me.

  I don’t know how that skull ended up in Frances Gates’s gallery, but I have legal claim to it. It’s mine.

  Gates didn’t do his homework on the piece’s provenance. The letter’s in a drawer in my bedroom. I’m surprised you didn’t find it when you went through my stuff.”

  “I got waylaid by your thongs,” Brian quipped.

  His gaze on me softened. “I knew you weren’t a thief.” He knelt in front of me. “You know why I came here?”

  “God, I’ve asked myself that question,” I said. I gave him a tearful lopsided smile, which was all I had in me. “You escaped the institution and found me somehow on the Internet?”

  “You still don’t believe that I am who I say I am? Even after sleeping with me? Fine. I came here because you’re alive.”

  “So what?”

  “So in my world, you aren’t.” Brian said. He closed his eyes, and in the air floating around him like an aura, I could almost, almost, tangibly see Tessa, me, gaunt, lying in bed and hooked to an IV.

  Brian crawled into the hospital bed and wrapped his arms around me, her, the other me. Her eyes closed and the image of her face rolled away.

  “Melanoma. From that mole on your breast, so they treated you for breast cancer. When they discovered the mistake, it was too late. Your death almost killed me. I became obsessed with seeing you again.

  That’s why I built the decoherence device. I’d been noodling around with the many worlds theory for years. But when you were gone …

  “It was never about my career or scientific advancement or the Nobel Prize or any of that nonsense. It was about you. The woman I love. My everything.

  “So don’t complain about the mistakes you made in the past, because you still have a future.” He plopped down next to me on the suitcase. Anguished, he combed his fingers through his hair so it stood straight up.

  Cars and pedestrians passed. Golden light slanted down from the sun. I looked up at the ribbon of blue sky, the leafy green branches of trees, and the pale fingernail moon in the sky. To the west, over the Hudson River that I couldn’t see but could imagine so well, clouds made contrails over the indigo water. I had a flash of a landscape painting. It was a cityscape, and on the sidewalk were two small, distinct figures full of loss, somehow mysteriously connected.

  I rose. “I have the keys to Ofee’s place. We’ll go there while I figure out what to do.”

  Brian was staring at my feet. “Great slippers.”

  * * *

  * * *

  23

  Downward facing dog solves all the problems of life

  Ofee’s walls were covered with posters of Ganesh, lotus flowers, and seated meditators with colorful chakras. One of my landscapes—a rather nice rendering of the Shawangunk Ridge in New Paltz in the fall, when the leaves had burst into colors of flame—hung beside Alex Grey’s visionary anatomical bodies. Brian and I dragged in the suitcases and canvases.

  “We have a place to stay. But I’m so upset I can’t think of what to do. I have to make a plan,” I said, wringing my hands.

  Brian walked around, examining Ofee’s décor.

  “Clearly Ofee is a drug dealer in this world. As a rule, I don’t believe in illegal substances, but this is an emergency. We’ll find his stash and see what he has that will make you feel better.”

  I couldn’t help smiling reluctantly. “Ofee’s not a drug dealer. He’s a yoga teacher. Well known, with a cult following.”

  Brian cracked up. “Ofee teaches yoga!”

  “He claims that downward facing dog solves all the problems of life.” I kicked off the fluffy turquoise slippers and demonstrated the pose.

  Brian walked around behind me and stared appreciatively at my ass.

  I looked up at him from between my legs and saw some of his native ebullience return.

  Brian placed his hands lightly on my hips. “Ofee’s on to something, absotively, posilutely.”

  “Nope. I’m still broke, divorced, homeless, and a failed painter with a shady past. Now there’s a porno art video of me on the Internet.” I collapsed onto my back. “Could things get worse?”

  “Dead is worse,” Brian said, his voice unsteady.

  He waited a beat, then spoke normally. “Anyway, you look really hot in the video. More importantly, so do I. That’s not so easy for a physicist.” He sat down beside me on the floor.

  “So, I’m still alive and kicking. What’s Ofee do in your hypothetical world?”

  “He’s a tax lawyer.”

  Now it was my turn to gargle with disbelieving laughter. “No way, there’s no possible world where Ofee is a lawyer!”

  “You don’t believe in alternate worlds. You think I’m a kook.”

  “True. Sorry.”

  Brian flicked hair out of my eyes. He kissed the bridge of my nose. “I guess I’ll just have to prove it to you. You think Ofee has a hat, or a wig, or something in this place so I can disguise myself?”

  “We can probably find something,” I murmured.

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m taking you to a public lecture I saw advertised online today, when we were at the Apple store.”

  * * *

  * * *

  24

  Level IV universes

  Brian wore a blonde starlet wig we found in one of Ofee’s closets. I wondered why Ofee owned it because he’d never mentioned such a thing to me. Did he have a hidden life as a transvestite that I didn’t know about? Who even needed parallel worlds, when we could live out many lives in this one? There are so many secrets people keep from one another, even best friends.

  But I suppose those aren’t as precarious as the secrets we keep from ourselves.

  “This is a good look for me,” Brian said, stroking the long, shiny locks of hair. We emerged from the subway stop at 116th Street on the Upper West Side.

  I knew where we were, of course: Columbia University, where I’d spent four years as an art major.

  What were we doing here now? I had not a clue.

  Brian had been unusually circumspect, though chipper. I glanced at him. “It’s the mirror shades that make the look.”

  “I know, right?” he sang, and chortled.

  If he hugged me right now, I’d slug him. I still hadn’t forgiven him for the Apple store. Or for the Rothschild Modern, for that matter. At least, I didn’t want to forgive him, though how could I hold anything against him? I looked at him and sighed. Then I looked around anxiously, wondering who in the street had watched me get frisky with Brian on the Internet.

  What had possessed us to try all those positions?

  I really wi
shed I’d been back at the gym for the last few months instead of vegetating at home in front of Netflix. But everyone wore the blank, unscathed faces of innocence, and I calmed myself. I mean, the video of Brian and me wasn’t on YouTube or anything. It was on an art gallery website. How many people were really interested in art anymore when work and family and texting and tweeting and Facebook and TV and real Internet porn competed for their time and attention?

  Likely, Cliff was right, and my appearance in the video was neither original nor particularly memorable. It kind of perked me up to think of myself as bad in bed. When all else failed, at least I had that.

  “Right through here,” Brian said, waving me through the tall black gates to Columbia Campus.

  “We don’t want to be late.”

  Then he was race-walking me past the busts of Zeus, Apollo, and Athena in the entryway, and into the Rotunda at Low Memorial Library. We moved through groups of students who streamed into the elegant hall, which was not a library, and which arched high overhead, a gorgeous dome patterned after the Pantheon in Rome.

  I would have drifted off into images of Rome and classical art, but I glanced at the stage and what I saw froze me in my tracks. Not what—who.

  Brian.

  How was that possible when Brian stood next to me, clutching my arm, and chuckling? “Oh ye of little faith,” he said, dragging me toward a seat.

  “But, but, but,” I stuttered. “That’s you.”

  He pressed his mouth against my ear. “That’s me in this world. I’m me from mine. We’re the same, but we’re not.”

  I gawked and took in the crowds who had come to hear Dr. Brian Tennyson’s lecture. “His books must be something if he can pull in this big an audience!”

  Brian winced. “So he’s a little more successful than I am. But he didn’t get to love you, and I did.

  So I say that I came out ahead.”