The Unfinished Life of Addison Stone

by Adele Griffin

  That fall, it was like Addy singlehandedly rebranded South Kingstown as an art school. It gave her a lot of pleasure to walk down the school halls and see her paintings up there. She was also working so hard to stay sane. She hated her meds, but they focused her. And of course, they kept Ida away.

  Our Town theater program, courtesy of South Kingstown High School.

  ADDISON STONE: (from a last recorded interview with ARTYOUNITE.com): I’ve had a complicated relationship with my meds ever since high school, when I started them. I know Z throws off the switch of the monster-go-round of my own thoughts, so that my life makes sense to me.

  But Z sucks. When I’m off it, I feel so free in my skin. Ropes loosen around my brain. I’m sprung. I’ve got clarity like a rock climber on the summit at daybreak. Everything’s in perfect focus. Then the focus becomes too perfect, too clear, sharp as icicles. (pause) I start to lose my toehold, but still I’m trying to hold on for as long as I can. I never want to ask for the ropes to be retied. So it pretty much has to be an act of capture.

  Peacedale Ladies by Addison Stone, courtesy of Nancy Hurley.

  IV.

  ART ROOM FABLE

  JONAH LENOX: I’d seen her, of course. Her art had hijacked South Kingstown. Addison Stone on all the walls. But I met Addison for real her junior year, which was my senior year. Thing is, I feel like I’d always known about her. Like, I knew she’d had these mental issues. Her reputation preceded her by a mile. I’d heard the stories, too. Mostly third- and fourth-hand information.

  “You hear she got electric shock for five weeks in the nuthouse?”

  “You see how her wrists are all scarred up?”

  “Does she look crazy to you?”

  That’s what a lot of kids would say to each other. Did she look crazy? Because she didn’t look crazy at all. She was the awesome, cute opposite of crazy.

  I’d also seen that clip, the Musketeer girl swinging in the Newport mansion. She never got credit for it back then. But everyone knew. I must have watched that clip a billion times. I was so goddamn ready to meet Addison Stone.

  LUCY LIM: True love was not Jonah, a.k.a. The Lenox. True love was Lincoln Reed. Infatuation was Zach Frat. But before Zach, before Lincoln, there was darling Jonah. He and Addy were like two pirates taking down the same ship, or two people stuck on the same broken elevator. They were together because of geography and timing. They both were desperate to be other places and live other lives. As soon as they could get out, they did—Addison to New York and The Lenox to Colorado. But for one year, they were misfits together.

  JONAH LENOX: How’d I meet her, as in, how’d it start? So I’ll tell you a secret: going after Addison Stone was one of the hardest things I ever did. Maybe because I was so shy about getting served her rejection. Anyway. All week, my friends had been bugging me. A senior who was shy about a junior—Jay-zus. Also I had to end things with this other girl, and I wanted to give that a couple of weeks. Deal with the fallout. It was the longest two weeks of my life.

  Finally, I picked my day. Friday, after school. Addison was alone in the art room as usual, with her music cranked, one of her bands that she loved, I think it was Tricky, and the song was “Overcome” on a loop. Addison could get drunk on music. She was stretching a canvas for one of her Fieldbender studies, the art that would make her famous. She said she liked to draw Fieldbender because he was always busy around the art room. “He’s live in the wild,” as she put it.

  I stood in the doorway and watched her for a while. Those ribbed leggings, the long sweatshirts, the chipped, dark nail polish. She was always layered and loose, as close to pajamas as she could get. And long sleeves hid the scars. Addison saw her scars as weakness, a shout-out reminder that her brain had steered her off the cliff. So she hid them.

  Addison in the South Kingstown High School lounge, courtesy of Jonah Lenox.

  Finally I asked if she needed any help. She waited. Letting me sweat. Then she asked, “Is your company help?”

  Ha. I hadn’t expected that. I said, “Yeah, maybe,” and then I ripped the canvas linen with her, stretched and nailed it to the frame, and of course we got talking. She knew my grandma Sugarfoot, who drove her school bus for a while and who once made Addison spit out her gum into her hand. And we talked about Macbeth, which she’d read when she was at Glencoe. It was her favorite play. She could quote a lot of it, like, “Whence is that knocking? How is’t with me, whence every noise appals me?” She said she related to Macbeth’s meltdown, the way he was spiraling into an abyss even as he kept pushing forward.

  She was also straight about Glencoe. She didn’t act sensitive. At some point, I went out to the vending machine and got us a Coke to split. We cracked it open and sat, backs against the wall, pouring it all out to each other—music, art, gaming, poetry, politics, comedy, graphic novels, God, goth. You name it. Fuck, I was so electrified by her. I couldn’t even think what I’d have done next if Addison hadn’t wanted to go out with me, after that first Friday afternoon.

  LUANNE DENGLER: You want proof Addison Stone hated me? She broke up me and my boyfriend, Jonah Lenox. He was mine, and she stole him. In fact, it’s a great example of the kind of girl she was. If she’d lived, she’d have been that stab-in-the-back bitch who’d try to screw your husband in the bathroom at your own birthday party.

  Jonah was the boy trophy of our school. Everyone wanted Jonah. His hotness wasn’t the same hot as Addison’s brother, Charlie, who’s a superjock. Jonah’s different. He’s got a past—his dad’s a drifter, and his mom died a long time ago, so he’s practically an orphan. Plus Jonah’s an outsider. He was raised on a farm in Cumberland by his grandma, who’s part Narragansett Indian and rough as a rhino, even though she’s always dressed like she’s going to Atlantic City in her triple-string fake pearls. She always wore heels and had a cig hanging out of her mouth while she drove the bus. But if you ratted her out for smoking, she’d make you sit right up behind her. So nobody told.

  Sometimes I thought Jonah was nuts for Addison because she was the same lawless as Sugarfoot. It was hard for me to compete with that.

  Jonah didn’t care about sports except for snowboarding. That’s partly why he’s out in Colorado now. Most girls keep tabs on their exes, right? I always will on Jonah. His eyes are the color of Jim Beam, and he’s got those broad shoulders, and at school you could hear him coming from a mile in those size thirteen shit-kicker boots. I know I’m rambling about Jonah … I wish I could have put the same spell on him that Addison did. Instead she used him like a winter coat. Useful till the day he wasn’t. All she cared about was herself. Addison Stone was in love with Addison Stone. I’m sure all these interviews are making that crystal clear.

  DREW MACSHERRY: Jonah’s been my pal since we were ten. His grandma’s farm is across from MacSherry Dairy, my family’s farm. Jonah’s dad took off when he was little. Then one day he returned out of nowhere, and Sugarfoot got out her rifle and ordered him off, and she shot the sky. Everyone talked about that for years. In eighth grade, me and Jonah formed a band, “Shoot the Sky,” with my kid brother, Mac, on drums, me on vocals, and Jonah playing lead guitar.

  We’d practice out in Jonah’s barn. We stank, but we were loud and free. Then one day who’s in the barn but this pantherish girl, sitting up on the seat of the broken tractor, sketching us.

  “Don’t mind me,” she said. “I’m here with The Lenox.”

  She was a gypsy. But Jonah said she was just someone from school. Like Mac, I’m homeschooled, so I didn’t know anything about her. But then she was there the next day, and the next, and by the next week Addison had put up an easel, and she’d taken over a corner of the barn. She told me she sold her paintings to the school. I thought she was taking the piss outta me. Who’d have the balls to do that? I always liked that idea, though, of a principal writing checks to a student.

  Me and Mac kinda fell in love with Addison—it got to be that on afternoons when she didn’t show, we didn’t even feel like p
racticing.

  Maggie Lenox Playing Dress-up by Addison Stone, courtesy of the estate of Addison Stone.

  JONAH LENOX: Sometimes Addison didn’t like to be around her mom, and she hardly ever liked to be around her dad. Roy was a wimp who liked to drink, and then he’d get a head full of steam, and he’d pick on Addison’s mom or switch off the music or the TV and shove open the window, even if it was blasting cold out.

  “Damn sauna in here,” he’d say while we all shivered. “Fresh air’s good for your health! TV rots your brain! You’ll thank me for it.”

  So yeah, sometimes Addison came over and slept in our barn. Right in the hayloft, unless Sugarfoot knew she was around, and then she’d coax Addison inside like a stray cat and get her to eat a home-cooked lasagna.

  Addison once gave me a painting she did of me, with Sugarfoot hovering in the back, and it was just exactly the right vibe. Me and my grandma didn’t talk much, but she was always there, and we were family, real and deep. Sugarfoot had my back. The picture’s at Waverly Heights Senior Home now, in her room, right over her bed.

  In the House of The Lenox by Addison Stone, courtesy of Ruth Lenox.

  ARLENE FIELDBENDER: As co-heads of the South Kingstown High School art department, my husband, Bill, and I had known of Addison Stone since she was Allison back in middle school. Even by that time, she had won a number of local art contests. So when the annual W.W. Sadtler contest was announced, we saw it as a key opportunity for her. William Wentworth Sadtler was a New England businessman who made his fortune in tin and lived most of his life in his wife’s hometown in East Warwick, Rhode Island. You see his name a lot on plaques around here, in hospitals and parks.

  Sadtler collected many beautiful paintings in his lifetime, mostly portraits, and his foundation had created an annual twenty-thousand-dollar grant for a high school junior or senior in pursuit of an education in art. It’s a windfall, and Bill and I have witnessed it as a truly life-changing experience for a student. Not just the money, which is incredible, but just as a way to affirm a young talent. RISD students, Providence College of Art students all submit. It’s the brass ring.

  So I said to Addison, “Create a portrait, and this money will be yours.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because, my dear, you are that good.”

  BILL FIELDBENDER: Addison picked me as her subject. She was making studies of me all that winter. Pencil, charcoal, pen-and-inks. I didn’t mind; why would I? I was her most available model. Chances were high that if Addison was in the art room, I’d be there, too. That winter, I was also using the school art room to work on some of my own projects. I’m a dabbler.

  “Okay, Bill,” she’d say—she never called me Mr. Fieldbender—“you’re gonna need to sit down for two or three minutes and let me create exactly the perfect shadow to capture how your neck bags like a baby elephant.”

  “You sure know how to make your teacher feel handsome,” I’d tease.

  But I always gave her the time she needed. She never stopped surprising me. Even her early studies were evidence of her extraordinary talent.

  Billfold/#1 by Addison Stone, courtesy of the estate of Addison Stone.

  ARLENE FIELDBENDER: As soon as Addison committed to a canvas and began to apply the oils for the work that would become Billfold/#1, the first of that series, we knew. We just knew. She’d hit another level. On a personal note, I was glad she’d chosen to paint Bill. He was as good to her as a father, certainly better than her own. Sure, there was maybe a touch of hero worship there, but it was harmless. Sweet, even. Addison also really knew Bill. She “got” him—his solitude and curiosity and intelligence. His soul, even. Addison’s portraits work psychologically because she wanted to understand the inside of personality every bit as much as she could.

  Addison gave the Sadtler submission her all, but she did make a slight joke out of the contest and its hype. In the end, she painted an ornamental gold frame around Billfold/#1. As if presenting her entry as a gift.

  Once she’d turned in the Sadtler submission, she began Don’t Even Think (About It). She planted two “trees” made out of bent wire and wash buckets, and then she strung a web of threads and thin cords and tiny blinking Christmas-tree lights between them. The branches of the Contest Tree were taped with hundreds of fluttering Monopoly money bills. The Addison Tree was knotted in a snarl of shoelaces and frayed purple ribbons, and she’d used a pocketknife to nick into the wire, creating them to look just like her wrist scars.

  When we asked her about the work, Addison said, “I don’t want to think about that money, but it’s consuming me. I keep imagining lines and cords and lights looping from me to the Sadtler grant and back again. So if I don’t win, I guess I’ll just turn off the lights.”

  While Addison is known for her portraits, she captured my heart with that installation. What an interesting, quirky way to capture a mood. That’s the moment I recognized that, win or lose, Bill and I needed to do something more by Addison.

  I contacted her mother. I said, “Your daughter should be auditing weekend classes at the Rhode Island College of the Arts. I’ve shown a professor friend of mine some of Addison’s work, and he’ll let her attend for free.”

  As you might have learned, Maureen Stone has a hard time with decisions. She gave me the whole song-and-dance: “Gracious, we’re only a one-car family, and I’m much too busy to drive Addison! Besides, I don’t want her getting that serious about art! And why would she attend college before she’s in college?”

  In the end, it was Jonah Lenox who drove Addison to Saturday morning art classes at RICA. It was over an hour away from his farm to her house to the campus. Then he had to hang out there so he could take her back home. But Jonah Lenox, luckily, was one of the few people taking Addison’s genius seriously.

  LUCY LIM: The Lenox had this dooky-green Chevy Impala, and baby, we loved it! He always let me third-wheel it with him and Addy. I’d been scared of him when he was going out with Luanne Dengler. But he was so sweet to me. Soon I forgot that he’d been anything but Addison’s guy. The three of us would jump in his car and have these adventures. “Let’s go to the beach! Let’s go to the Wakefield Mall for Friendly’s Fribbles! Let’s go to the Mystic Aquarium and watch the dolphins!” Didn’t matter what. We’d drive around and sing that old Beastie Boys’ song about how we holla in a Chevy Impala.

  I didn’t always come along. But I always felt invited. Those were some of my best afternoons, the three of us lurching down Route 114 in that car, looking for something to do.

  MAUREEN STONE: Jonah was a good boy. I’d never have prevented Addison from seeing him. He was a diamond in the rough. After that summer she’d had, goodness, I was happy to see her that way. She was quite secretive whenever Jonah called. She’d giggle and run up to her room with her cell phone. When she was with Jonah, she acted, well, normal, I suppose? Like any teenager.

  DUSTIN GERAHY: I was the only other junior taking Advanced Placement art at South Kingstown High School. Me and Addison Frickin’ Stone. She was incredible. An art-room fable, a story to tell my grandchildren.

  It’s not like I sucked—I’m at Carnegie Mellon now, majoring in graphic design. But art class with Addison was like being thrown into a baseball game with the pitcher for the Red Sox. I was cut down to size before I had a chance to prove a thing. Addison was a whole other league of talent. The other art students knew it, the Fieldbenders knew it. The art room was Addison’s fiefdom, and her projects, like those Billfold paintings, they were our kingdom’s treasures.

  My first love? I’ll never tell! But I remember my first kiss. It was in a barn, on a working farm way out near Cumberland. The kisser was Jonah Lenox, “The Lenox” I liked to call him, like he was a rare, wonderful species of something. He lived on that farm, and sometimes I lived there, too, when I couldn’t deal with the circus clown car of my home life.

  Kiss night was black as pitch. We were in rolling around in the hay. With tongue and a hand on
the boob—what bee-sting I’ve got. The Lenox had square, warm hands. I opened my eyes in the middle of the kiss. It’s the curse of an artist, right? To want to observe and record while experiencing?

  It was too dark to see, and I was grateful for that. It would have been an overly visual experience otherwise. In the dark, I could concentrate on tongues, mmm, synesthesia. Like being deep under the blue-green water at Point Judith beach. Or sleeping under the warm sun with my toes pedaled in the sand. The Lenox was delectable. Sweetest guy I ever met. He loved my art, too. An early true believer. That was a big deal for me.

  Billfold #2/Billfold #3 portraits of Bill Fieldbender by Addison Stone.

  Excerpt from issue # 79 of ArtRightNow interview with Addison Stone.

  ARLENE FIELDBENDER: We did feel like her parents. Perhaps we crossed some boundaries. If we knew she was coming into the art room to work before class, Bill and I’d bring in coffee and breakfast biscuits, and then over breakfast, we’d talk to her about balancing art and schooling. We didn’t want to pressure her about scholarships and art schools and competitions. At the same time, we knew she could win them all. It was so tantalizing for Bill and me, just to think of the bigger world recognizing and celebrating her talent.

  When Bill and I had lived in New York, a zillion years ago as students at Hunter College, we found such a supportive community. It was only once we’d launched her that we realized Addison had no network in New York, not the way Bill and I had. I will always wrestle with it. Could we have prevented it? Did we encourage bad decisions in her life, because we believed too hard in the good of her talent?

  That squid she ended up signing her life away to, Max Berger, could very likely buy a small country off all the money he’s made from the Addison Stone domain. The selling of a dead young supernova. Despicable. The other day, I saw someone wearing a T-shirt with Addison’s face on it. Max Berger must have licensed that. He’s a revolting opportunist. Bill and I never would have thought this would be lovely Addison’s legacy. When we knew her, we were blinded by her potential. In love with it, I suppose.