The House Girl

by Tara Conklin

  Lina looked nothing like Oscar. She had inherited her mother’s slight build, dark eyes tending to green, straight black hair. Elfin, that was how Oscar described her when she was a child, a clever little elf. Lina had quick hands and hair cut sensibly shortish, falling just below her chin, a style she’d worn since high school and one she had no inclination to change. Her body was compact and lean, wiry in the legs and arms, an efficient tool that matched her able, precise mind. Since childhood, Lina had burned with a restless energy, a busyness that required an object, a project, whether mastering the monkey bars at recess, running cross-country in college, or understanding the church-state divide in law school. The current project, as she had told Oscar, was to make partner at Clifton & Harp before she turned thirty, an ambitious but not impossible goal.

  “Ouch,” Lina said. Oscar’s glasses hung from his neck on a black cord, and Lina’s chest was mashed against the frames. “Careful. I almost broke your glasses.”

  “Now that would be a shame,” Oscar said.

  Lina kicked off her heels, the three-plus inches she wore regularly at the office, and lowered herself, blessedly, wonderfully, onto the cool floorboards. She made her way to the kitchen. Oscar followed, humming.

  “Carolina, can you help me with this?” he said, hand to the back of his head. “I’ve got something here.” He turned and pulled from his scalp a thick lock of paint-stiffened hair.

  “Not again,” Lina said.

  “Is it bad?”

  Lina surveyed the damage. “Not like the last one. I don’t think it’ll show up too much.”

  Taking scissors from the side drawer, she cut out the half-dried paint, still sticky, taking as little of the hair as she could.

  “Minimal damage,” she said and ran a hand across the back of his head. “So have you eaten? Please say you didn’t wait.”

  “Didn’t wait. Made some pasta. A little mushy. Not bad.”

  “Whole wheat?”

  “Yes.”

  “Greens?”

  “Yes. Spinach. I’m a very healthy man. Look at this stomach.” He patted his belly, which swelled with a small late-middle-age wiggle. “Fit as a fiddle.”

  Their three-legged cat, Duke (short for Duchamp), wove silently through the space between Lina’s legs. Duke’s right foreleg had been gone for years, amputated after nerve damage suffered during some furtive late-night cat activity rendered it useless and unfeeling, but he managed to glide just as gracefully on three, maintaining that essential liquidity of feline motion.

  Lina fell into an old easy chair upholstered in riotous color, one of the mismatched four that flanked the table. Their kitchen was spacious and worn and Lina’s favorite room in the house. A revolving assortment of Oscar’s sketches and studies were pinned to the wall beside the fridge, along with the detailed schedules and charts that Lina compiled each month for grocery shopping, bill paying, Oscar’s appointments, her work travel.

  “So how did it go today?” Lina asked. Duke’s purr revved, a little engine of happiness, as he pushed against Lina’s legs looking for a scratch, and she reached down to the place he liked best, the triangle of short, soft fur between his ears.

  “Really good, I’m happy to report.” Oscar was beaming. “I think I’m ready.”

  “Ready?” Lina straightened up and Duke skittered away. Oscar had been working steadily for almost two years on the new paintings, working large-scale, using new techniques. No one had seen the pieces yet; no one even knew exactly what he was painting. Natalie, Oscar’s dealer, had been a frequent visitor in recent weeks, anxious and lovely in her vintage dresses and tennis shoes, exiting the house with a small disappointed wave. The buzz, Natalie said, was growing.

  For nearly all of Lina’s life, Oscar had remained stubbornly unfashionable, with his busy cluttered paintings (unironic, apolitical, neither minimal nor maximal), his refusal to go to the right clubs or cultivate the right friends. But when Lina was in law school, a wind had shifted, the planets aligned, trend or luck or who knew what. Now hedge fund managers and aging rock stars scheduled private appointments with Natalie, viewing with heads cocked and index fingers to chins certain canvases that Lina knew had once been stacked in precarious towers in the basement laundry room. Oscar had fretted, briefly, over integrity and mass appeal and selling out. But not for long. He switched galleries, from the loyal but staid Richard uptown to the glamorous and sharp-eyed Natalie in Chelsea, who told him to quit teaching part-time at City College and concentrate on making more pictures she could sell. Oscar consulted a financial advisor. He renovated the second-floor studio. He bought a pair of green leather shoes for $600 that he did not wear but kept on the kitchen table as a receptacle for loose change.

  “So can I see the new pictures?” Lina asked, smiling too, caught by his excitement.

  But Oscar’s grin vanished. He hesitated, an anxious blink. “Carolina, I’ve been painting your mother.”

  Lina did not answer immediately. Oscar’s words altered the feel of the room. He hadn’t painted Grace since her death; he didn’t talk about her or, as far as Lina could tell, think about her. Lina now experienced his revelation at a remove, her surprise muffled, her senses dulled. All at once she felt the exhaustion of her day, the 13.7 hours billed, the useless brief. “That’s great,” she said finally, but only because Oscar was looking at her and she could think of nothing else.

  “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about it for months now. Truth is, I’ve been shitting my pants like a little boy. I don’t want to upset you.”

  “Why should I be upset?” Lina looked up at him, his dark eyebrows, more gray than brown now, drawing together, his jovial handsome face serious and concerned. “Dad, really. Upset?” Grace’s death had been so sudden—a car crash, Oscar had told her, ice on the road, darkness—and Lina so young. She remembered no suffering, no last good-byes at the hospital, no weeping or medicinal smells or shit-stained sheets. The event of her mother’s dying had not marked her, and Oscar, of all people, should know this.

  “It’s just that we’ve never really talked about her, and some of these pictures might … I don’t know, surprise you.”

  “We never talk about her because you don’t want to talk about her, not me. Remember?” When Lina was sixteen, they had fought for the last time over Grace. Lina had asked, again, about her mother’s family and Oscar had, again, refused to tell her. I can’t talk about Grace. I just can’t, he had said. Lina had screamed and raged; she threw a potted jade against the living room wall where it shattered with a bloom of ceramic shards and dirt, and then she ran to her room and cried, hating Oscar, hating how he had forced her to make up stories about her mother. Grace was from Florida, Mexico, Montana, Peru. Carolina was my grandmother’s name, my aunt’s, an old friend’s. I remember her smell, her laugh, a bedtime story. I remember nothing at all. After that night, Lina had decided with a mix of embittered defeat and secret relief that she would never again ask Oscar about Grace. She had the house, full of her own half-memories, some photographs, a few of her mother’s paintings; she didn’t need anything more from Oscar. She didn’t want to be angry at her father all the time. She didn’t want to believe that he was hiding something from her.

  “I know I haven’t wanted to, but it’s been twenty years,” Oscar said. “That’s a hell of a long time. Even I can change in twenty years.” Now he grinned at her, but the smile seemed forced, an attempt at levity that Lina met with her lips pressed closed, doubtful. Where Lina’s memories of Grace flickered indistinct as dreams, the weeks and months following Grace’s death were burned in Lina’s mind with vivid recall. A buzzy TV drone, the hot grease burn of pizza on her tongue, a parade of teenage babysitters—one faceless morph of ponytail and orthodontic glitter—and her father always there, always at home, hunched and shrunken, quiet, pale. Lina played, she watched TV, she had the run of every room; there were no rules, no schedules. As time passed, the sharpness of Lina’s sadness faded, she learned how to carefully skirt
the mental space occupied by her mother’s death, and the avoidance quickly became a habit, unthinking, automatic. But Oscar did not seem to possess this tool of self-preservation. Even as a child, Lina worried. She sensed a danger in Oscar’s inactivity, all the time indoors, the friends turned away at the door. What if Oscar’s sadness continued? What if he did not return to himself? What if she were left truly alone?

  “Are you sure this is a good idea? For you?” Lina asked.

  “Yes, painting your mother is a good idea. It’s the best idea I’ve had in years. Decades,” Oscar said, and Lina heard no strain in his voice. “I’m okay.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes. I’m sure. Jesus, don’t worry! You worry too much.” He grabbed hold of her hand and squeezed.

  “And you want to show me the pictures? Now?” She glanced at her watch.

  “I know it’s late but you’re so busy these days, Carolina Sparrow, attorney-at-law. Natalie’s been breathing down my neck. I told her you had to be the first to see them. If you like them, if you’re okay with them, I’m ready to show.”

  “Well, we wouldn’t want to disappoint Natalie,” Lina said with a weary edge of sarcasm that she knew sounded petulant, but she didn’t try to correct it. Lina didn’t really like Natalie, or rather she didn’t like the package in which Natalie delivered herself: carefully mussed hair, artful quirky clothes, always a hand on your arm, a too-low voice that made you lean in closer to listen. And she particularly did not like the role Natalie now played in Oscar’s life, of gatekeeper to the outside world, business partner and artistic confidante, even a bit of therapist and best friend, from what Lina had gathered from the snatches of conversation she’d overheard and the few extended periods she’d spent in Natalie’s company. Lina stood and straightened her skirt. She tried to hide her exhaustion with a bright smile.

  Lina followed her father upstairs to the second-floor studio. Oscar flipped a switch and the room was suddenly and brilliantly illuminated. Large canvases angled against the white walls, short stools sat around a trestle table like patient children. There was the murky, spicy smell of oil paint and dry plaster dust.

  “Okay, here’s the first one.” Oscar stood beside a piece that reached to his shoulders. A swath of brilliant blue unfurled corner-to-corner across the canvas, bisecting a chaotic, colorful background. Within the blue a woman’s body seemed to float, small, dark-haired, featureless, drowning. Lina listened as Oscar described the devices he had used, the screening technique and a collage of clippings from old New York tabloids. The piece was classic Oscar Sparrow—every inch of the canvas heavy with layered pigment and collage. Lina liked that Oscar’s work was never simple, that each piece demanded of the viewer careful consideration of its disparate parts before consideration of the whole. Oscar’s paintings were like arguments, in a way. Each painting had a point, but the end could be justified only by the careful accretion of facts, and those facts lay hidden within the canvas: a stroke of red, a small jagged shape of mirror, a paragraph cut from yesterday’s newspaper, a pencil sketch of a dog. Oscar never gave away his intent. Deconstruction did not interest him.

  Oscar turned away from the picture and Lina followed him farther into the studio. He stopped before three paintings propped against the wall. These were simpler, with stronger blocks of color, primarily abstract, though in one Lina thought she saw the image of a thumb, larger than her own head, and perhaps not a thumb at all. She didn’t ask. Then in another, a knee, did she see a kneecap? And a scalp, a forehead, the line where the hair lifted from the skin etched in crimson paint. It seemed the paintings were of bodies, or one body, examined.

  “Now this is where we start getting more figurative,” Oscar said and he turned and pulled a sheet off an outsize canvas. Lina looked straight into the eyes of her mother, at twenty-four or twenty-five, when Lina was a baby. It was a portrait, the head and torso occupying the entire frame, stretching six feet high, five feet across, her arms folded in front, the posture stiff and formal, the face pale and mournful, elongated to the point of distortion, but the woman still unmistakably Grace: her long dark hair parted on the left, her lips full and swollen as though bitten.

  Lina inhaled sharply. Twenty-four years old. Grace had been twenty-four when Lina was born, the same age Lina was now. It was ridiculous, the idea of Lina having a daughter, a husband, a house. Having them, and then losing them, or them losing her.

  Oscar waited a beat, his eyes on Lina. “Ready to see some more?”

  “Sure,” Lina said. “Show me more.” Her voice was casual, but her heart beat uncomfortably fast, the force of it pushing up into her throat as it did sometimes when she ran sprints.

  Oscar moved to another canvas draped with a sheet. Lina remained in front of the portrait.

  “Are they all of her?” Lina asked.

  “Yes.”

  “The forehead? The kneecap? Those are her?”

  “Yep. They’re all Grace. The show is called Pictures of Grace.”

  As Oscar fiddled with the sheet, Lina examined the portrait. The painted eyes loomed large, dark as Lina’s own. The hair was longer than Lina’s but seemed to have the same heavy weight, the same near-black color. Grace’s face appeared vast and complicated, the skin composed of multihued layers of pigment and collage. Strips of newspaper cut into intricate swirls seemed to flutter at her throat, giving the impression of lace. Lina leaned in, but the overlapping text was nearly illegible, one sheet layered upon another and another. Finally she made out a single word in a small, no-nonsense, common font: “Enough.”

  Lina stepped back as if bitten. What did she know about her mother? Grace had been an artist too, though unsuccessful, not like Oscar. Lina had never met her maternal grandparents; she did not know their names, where they lived, or where Grace was born. She knew that Oscar met Grace in a bar in the Village, that they lived together in Brooklyn in the late seventies, married at City Hall, bought the dilapidated brownstone with the money from Oscar’s first show. They made art and they struggled and they were in love and Lina was born. And then, the icy sweep of road, the crash. On a brilliant, cold sunny day, Oscar had scattered Grace’s ashes at the Cloisters, a place she had loved for both its art collection and its sweeping views of the Hudson. Lina had not accompanied him; he had thought the task too upsetting for a child. As an adult Lina often wished she’d been with him that day, that she carried a memory of some physical act to mark Grace’s death. Instead, Lina recalled only a vanishing, an absence, an ache.

  Lina’s gaze skated over the canvases—Enough, the crimson part, the kneecap, the small figure against the blue—and Oscar’s open, expectant face as he stood before the next painting. But Lina didn’t want to see any more. Duke lay at Oscar’s feet, an old cat now, brought home from the animal shelter when Lina was ten. He was cleaning his face with little rolls of his one remaining foreleg.

  “I didn’t realize you were … ready. I mean, emotionally ready to do this,” Lina said.

  A tension appeared in Oscar’s face, and he crossed his arms against his chest. “It’s not like I just woke up one day and—bam—everything’s okay. For so long I didn’t want to think about her at all. But then, I don’t know, the past couple years have been different. I wanted to go back, to when she was young, and remember her. I loved your mother very much. I wasn’t a perfect husband, I know that, but, Jesus, I loved her.”

  Lina watched Duke, and her own memories ticked by: a curtain of dark hair, the tuneless song, pepper and sugar.

  “And look at you—you’re an adult!” Oscar spoke nervously into the silence. “And I’m practically an old man.” Here he grinned. “I wanted to … explain some things. Tell the truth. I’m better at showing than talking, you know that. These are for you, Carolina. I want to show you some things about your mother. Stuff we’ve never talked about. It’s time you knew.”

  Lina looked again at the Enough portrait, her mother’s elongated face—like an El Greco, she thought, one of those ra
pturous, wraithlike ghosts. Wasn’t this what she had always asked of Oscar? Tell me, she would say. Tell me about my mother. But now she felt only an urgency to leave the room. Oscar had caught her unprepared. The reckless girl who had flung that pot across the room was long gone, replaced by a Lina who did not like surprises or this sinking sensation of weakness and instability, like standing on sand as the tide pulled away. She needed time to consider Oscar’s pictures, to analyze and think through her reaction. And sleep. She needed sleep.

  “Carolina, have I upset you?” Oscar asked, his voice tight. “Why don’t we talk more tomorrow. You look exhausted.”

  Oscar’s tone, and the way he was standing now, his shoulders slightly rounded, his stomach slack, provoked Lina’s old concern. And of course—Natalie needed a show. In recent weeks the publicity had been mounting, all tied to the mysterious subject matter of Oscar’s new work: Why all the secrecy? What had Oscar Sparrow done now? Interviews with journalists, a spread in Artforum, all of it clever and enigmatic, Oscar deflecting questions with a bemused grin. It had pained Natalie at first, or so she said, but even she had to admit that, as a PR strategy, it worked. But now Oscar was reaching a critical point. An opening date for the show hadn’t been confirmed yet and if they waited too long, Natalie had warned, people would lose interest.

  Lina steadied her breath. “I’m not upset,” she said, smiling as Oscar’s eyes played across her face. “The pictures are fantastic. I’m so glad you finally want to talk about Mom.” She did not want to lie to him, but she didn’t know how to explain the thudding in her chest. “It’s just … been a long day. I’ll take a closer look tomorrow, but I’m glad you’re painting her.”