by Anna Shapiro
You could never make more prints like the ones before those bad decisions, but you could still see the picture when it was full of possibilities that hadn’t yet been chosen. They vibrated in the bare spaces, in the whiteness, as new snow cries out for your footprints.
Her own gesso paintings in her eyes were representations of pure fluid possibility. The white had more in it, through the eyes of her imagination, than any picture she was able to realize. She had almost never been satisfied with anything she’d made. And it now struck her that, in making her way to Bay Farm—and she had made that; it was entirely her own—she had made her way into that open white field. It felt like infinite possibility. Every day she went there or expected to go, something extraordinary might happen, and did. Anthropology class. The lecturing raccoon by the compost heap. Weesie. The snowy apple blossoms. Danny beneath them. Being alone in the wind with the Long Island Sound.
Bay Farm connected to a wider world than she could reach from the little black Levitt house. It was, in itself, a world. She had said something about this once to Weesie, walking along a path between classes; that it was like a snowglobe. “The micro-cosm in the macrocosm!” Weesie had shouted in her excitable combination of enthusiasm and irony, throwing her arms wide to the landscape dotted with figures moving along the paths.
There has to be some narrowing as you go along, she thought, staring into the rectangles of beautiful white. Even in a white painting, making the stroke that way instead of that way—it determined what possibilities were left. Not just in paintings. It was like playing tic-tac-toe, all of life. If you put an X on Rad-cliffe, you couldn’t X the box for Cooper, and if you got D’s in algebra, those boxes were going to have big O’s in them and you couldn’t X either one. If you were sucked out of your path, out of what you thought was your life, into a different, unintended one, the expected choices possible were blocked or dropped away forever or were unrecognizable from that vantage point.
But if that happened and you stood in that strangeness and operated from it, were you the same person? Could you get back on the path at some point? Would you get to the same destina tion? Or would your way be blackened with cross-hatching, grimed like the snow, ungapotchkeh, too trampled to be found? Or just different?
12.
MAUDE SMILED AS she made the tiny, brightly colored pictures. The suitable-for-framing Bay Farm diplomas were designed on the model of illuminated manuscripts. They were hand-lettered, by seniors selected for their abilities with the flat-ended nibs of calligraphy pens. After the lettering was stroked onto sheets of buff parchment and proofread by other members of the diploma committee, they were passed to the illustrators, also on the committee. With the lettered parchments the illustrators got lists, communally compiled, of each graduate’s propensities and preferences. These were supposed to be iconic qualities. No faculty member invaded this committee, so a particular coolie, for instance, was shown reading The Doors of Perception and with an ashtray among his books, as if smoking and drugs were officially acceptable. And this might be executed by a sweet-natured senior who favored smock dresses, had smiles for everyone, never did drugs or smoked, and generally had a disengaged air, beneath her frizzy hair, that suggested beatitude.
The committee members, chosen for their talents, had dispensation from other non-course school activities from April onward, until the fifty or so diplomas were complete. Like the girl who had to spin thread out of nettles, they accepted an implicit vow of silence for the duration. You were not allowed to reveal what iconic qualities had been named for illustration. You were not allowed to reveal who was illustrating whose diploma.
Maude would have been on this committee. She would have had Weesie’s diploma to do, and Weesie would have had hers: it was regarded as a plus if you had inside information, a possibly deeper sense of what mattered to the recipient. In March, Maude wrote to the school, asking if she could be an illustrator. She expected to be turned down. What a privilege, to be part of something Bay Farm. Instead, a parchment arrived in a big envelope, lettered Louise Agatha Herrick.
Weesie wouldn’t know Maude had done it until it was handed to her by the headmaster on the dais in the refectory in June. She would have been sent from the meeting while this decision was made.
Maude drew, colored, and dreamed wishfully. When she was done, she put the leathery sheet back in the big cardboard envelope, pasted on a label, addressed it to the committee, sent it off, and waited.
It is a misfortune to place your love in an institution. With what, what organ, is an institution going to love you back? Here she was, big sophisticated artworld person—who consorted with famous artists, who slept with one; who was in her second year of college!—wanting nothing more than to be handed a parchment lettered by her friends, with less than professional little pictures on it, and hear her name called, in alphabetical sequence with the others in her former class. It was for this she found herself still waiting, as if she’d had the other years ’68–69, ’69–70. As if it were possible. She didn’t get over things, but she would if she heard Maude Pugh between Francie Perkins and Ellie Raines in the roll call of graduates. She imagined she would. She imagined her love requited. Her divided lifeline would come together.
13.
WHEN MAUDE COMPLAINED about life class to Bruno, he laughed, as he did at most things, including her reluctance to sleep with him. “Charcoal! Why do we have to use charcoal?” she complained, just as the Levittown housewives had in Milt’s class. “It’s impossible to get a clean line or clarity. It’s muddy. It isn’t even black. You can’t even make it opaque. And newsprint—it makes my skin crawl to touch it. It’s like raw wood.” She grimaced, closed her eyes, and shuddered.
Bruno, in the swivel chair at his desk, showed the gap between his teeth. “Why not just take a photograph?” he said with his hard grin.
“Very funny. What do you know about visual art?” Bruno had arrived at conceptual art, as it was lately being called, by way of beatnik bongo poetry and then happenings. She unrolled an abomination she’d committed, of the nude model, sub-Immerman. “Look at this. I could always draw, and look at this. Penelope”—the drawing teacher—“says she has no idea what I’m doing. As if I were from the moon.”
“You are from the moon.” He enjoyed her glare at him and the dangerous jungle look she had lately adopted, braiding her hair at night to bush it out into a wild cloud that jiggled and floated when she jerked her head. But he saw that she might really be upset. “Come on, moon maiden.” He pulled her onto his knee. He patted her back—pat, pat, as if someone asked you to pat their dog and you didn’t believe anyone could like doing that. “I know you can draw.”
“You’ve never seen my drawings.”
Life class, Maude thought, was deathy. It was silent except for the scratching of charcoal on newsprint, and the pacing footsteps of Penelope, prowling from easel to easel. The twenty of them straggled in, set up their pads of newsprint, got out their little boxes of fragile, brittle charcoal sticks and grimy gum erasers, eased onto stools, and sat stolidly while the model—they were professionals who seemed dulled to everything except their own desire for physical comfort—shed his or her robe and began posing.
The one-minute poses were the worst. You could get down only the ugliest, most approximate scrawls, nothing you’d ever want to see again. Then five-minute poses, not much better. Then twenty minutes. Even these ended too soon for Maude. She was always just discovering some complicated mismatch of profile and ear at that point, finding that the left side didn’t connect with the right.
It was a good thing she had the titillations, worldly connectedness, and acknowledged superiority of Concepts class and Bruno—supports thin as an eggshell but with a reassuring suggestion that all potential in the universe had not been sucked away. Because, otherwise, not being able to draw was like the final loss of potency. She had sustained herself for years by enacting her fantasies on paper. They had even, her dr
awings, seemed too alive sometimes, like the “monsters of the id” that made a certain sci-fi movie from some lonely afternoon’s television viewing indelibly scary. That was one reason it had begun to look attractive to do something else, anthropology, something.
But that would be making a choice. Simply being unable felt as if her father’s unconscious evil wishes for her were magic far stronger than what she could muster, as if Milton’s jealous desire to drive out everything from her life, so that only he remained, controlled the universe; as if she couldn’t move so much as a literal finger without drawing his cosmic fury and punishment. At this remove, it was even as if he had driven Danny and Weesie away and claimed Bay Farm—where he had been lauded! as a lecturer!—for himself. She was scared of him. He had killed her cat, poor Ghostly, her greatest love, then, in the world. White fur with black blood congealing.
But that was ridiculous. Magic didn’t exist. That was stupid.
“Class,” said Penelope, her lank ponytail twitching down to her ass, “from next Monday, you can use whatever materials you like—black conté crayon, pencil, charcoal, any kind of paper, so long as it’s at least eighteen-by-twenty-four. We’ll be doing long poses—one-hour, two-hour, and at the end, when we work with color, the same pose for several classes. Okay. See you next week.” She swung one skinny arm up, in an olive-green sweater, by way of waving to them, while looking down at her shoulder in the aversive way she had, as if they were too much for her.
Maude fell in with a serious girl she had talked to a few times, Myra. “I’m going down to New York Central. Want to come?” Myra offered. New York Central Art Supply, where Cooper students bought their supplies.
They walked downtown together through the just-beginning New York spring, the trees still bare but an occasional daffodil showing on a playground border or in front of the big, white apartment buildings at the edges of the Village. The girls’ hair blew in their faces. There were still a few weeks of germination time for the envelopes from colleges applied to in January, thin if bad news, thick if fruitful.
In the narrow, stock-crowded store, with its rainbows of Windsor & Newton tubes and square pastels sold by the stick, Myra introduced Maude to compressed charcoal, “nothing like what we’ve been using—you have no idea.” The compressed charcoal was cylindrical and solid; the hardest grades had a sheen; the softest were velvety and left promising smudges on her fingers. There was special paper, striped by watermarks and with a furred nap to catch and hold the charcoal powder.
With these tools, at the next meeting of their life class, it was as if Maude regained use of her tongue, and more than regained it. “God, that’s photographic,” said a classmate, not altogether approving such retrograde naturalism.
It felt uncanny that she could do this suddenly. It felt as if she’d unwittingly learned French in her sleep. Penelope stood a long time behind Maude’s easel. “It’s interesting to see,” she announced to the class. “Some of you just needed to find your own medium.”
Maude didn’t mention to anyone in Concepts, oh, by the way, she could now capture reality, nor did she show her drawings. If it felt like evil magic possibly emanating from Milt that she couldn’t draw as she’d always been able to, it felt equally magic that she suddenly could draw better than she ever had. It might not happen again. Not that the Concepts people would care. In Concepts class, they had been working on an exquisite corpse. The Dadaists had made exquisite corpses on paper, one person starting a drawing, folding the page over so only part of the scribble showed for the next person to continue, and then that person would do the same. The one the class was creating began with a sound tape, which the rest of them would hear for the first time in that day’s class. The clue Maude had gotten was a nonsense word written on a strip of paper. You were at the mercy of the level of talent or intelligence of the person before you. That day, the rest of the corpse was to be revealed. The exercise turned out to work more like a game of telephone than like the Dadaists’ experiments, each clue worse than the last, the continuations uninspired, including Maude’s, degenerating from zingy juxtaposition to vapidity, corpsily devoid of spark.
Several days onward, when Maude had “spoken French” in life class again, and more than once again, she brought her drawings to Bruno’s office. She knew he was a bad audience for anything in this line, but she was bursting. She unrolled one on his desk. “Hey!” he said, his circle-of-sky eyes lighting, as if the magic of representation were, finally, irresistible. “Shitass. That’s Pink Pearl,” he said, using the nickname the students gave to a certain slack old model. “It actually looks like her. Shitass. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen one of these drawings of models with a face.”
Actually, there was a girl in life class whose drawings were always accurate, recognizable, and poetic in the way they captured light. They had faces; they had everything. But Maude was pleased to accept the compliment.
Maude sat on Bruno’s desk, elbow on knee, chin on hand. “You’re just supposed to care about light, mass, shadow, and the composition of the page. You know, for it to come out, you do kind of have to kind of forget what it is and just draw the shapes of the shadows.”
“You drew the shapes of the shadows, all right.”
“I did, didn’t I?”
“Hey, if you’re going to draw so graphically, do one of someone sexy. Do me one of you!”
“I suppose you’d want full beaver.” She just didn’t like him enough. She didn’t believe she could like anyone enough. She missed Danny as if they had parted that minute.
Bruno showed his gap, but he looked differently at her, as if nervous in the presence of a spell that worked, even though it was no more than a competent life drawing. “What? What is it?” he asked.
Her festive air was gone. He saw a thoughtful absence. She spoke into her lap. “I promised someone else a picture. Ages ago. It just occurred to me he might really want it.” She had never really believed Danny’s request until this minute, until Bruno asked for a sexy one, of her. Danny really wanted her. Suddenly, she felt sick with the need to undo the wrong. She had punished him above and beyond what he deserved. She had been cruel. He hadn’t asked for much. It was just that what she’d wanted was to give him everything.
“You’d better not be doing him a full beaver.”
“How do you know it’s a him?”
Bruno sat back heavily in his chair. She was not going to sleep with him again. He was sure of it. He wished he couldn’t tell. He would rather not have noticed. He picked up the drawing of Pink Pearl. “Let me have this one. Just sign it.”
14.
SHE READ THE letter three times, in case her eye had skipped over something, some crucial “not” or “no,” in case she’d misunderstood, still standing by the pink front door where the mail had slopped through the slot, fanning onto the black seafoam linoleum. Milton was filling the percolator for a pot of coffee, careful not to let water touch the electrical prongs.
“Daddy?”
“Mmm.”
“I got into Sarah Lawrence.”
“Good.”
He continued his task rather than turn toward her. His back appeared to sizzle, though the tension might all be hers. “It’s four thousand dollars.”
“You could commute,” he said to the cabinet above the sink.
Then it would just be tuition. “I really couldn’t.” A rescue came from a phrase remembered from the college handbook. “You have to live on campus the first year.”
He sighed, skinny and tall in the doll-like kitchen, in jeans that bagged around his storky legs. His white hair came down over the collar of his corduroy shirt. She could see how soft it was, like feathers. She could see, from his back, his struggle.
“I’ll get a college loan.” She was old enough to sign for one.
“No.” He turned around. “You’ll do no such thing. Don’t be ridiculous.”
She looked at him. Her face ached with not showing fear.
“I’m payi
ng.”
You are? she wanted to say—Why now, when all this time . . . But she knew better than to set off such a process of fission in the mystery uranium. His face was deeply disappointed, some-how. Was he going to say he’d be glad to be rid of her? But he just walked into the next room, lighting a cigarette, leaving the white ceramic percolator to begin its long, sucking gurgle and pop. He’d done everything he could to hold on to her, if only as a captive and slave.
She too retreated, to the white cell of her room, to fill in the forms and send them off before he changed his mind. Not that he would be able to stop her now. Maybe that was why he’d given in. She’d never believed he’d pulled her out of Bay Farm because of the money. It was to keep her from getting away. It was to keep her.
Maybe she’d become a person for whom it was too easy to leave, to leave people behind, to leave men. Maybe she’d lost her own meaning, become an abstraction of herself, become her own exquisite corpse, something someone else started and finished. Maybe she couldn’t love, or believe in it, or it just seemed too damaging. Milt’s love took the form of enslaving—who wanted that? And she was like him. She was not unlike him. Danny had loved her but she had proposed for him Didi Bates and Weesie, of the tribe of better people: people who knew how to love, who would stay with it. Anyone would be better at loving than a Pugh.
As she was getting ready for bed, she caught sight of herself in the big round mirror that was a hand-me-down from Nana Resnikov. There was something Oz-like about its shape and the blond, decoish crescents that held it top and bottom. It made a picture, that flattened circle, with her in semi-dimness, her naked torso, her hair. That was the picture she would give Danny. Looking at herself, she felt herself to be him, seeing her. Danny looking at someone he cared about. Someone he forgave. She would capture her own reality, for someone else.
