by Tara Conklin
My fears, however, were unwarranted.
Every person is many people: wife, mother, artist, daughter, friend, lover, rich, poor, peaceful, tormented. Sparrow’s portraits—a series of 18, all of Grace, all multimedia—capture his wife’s complexity with an examination of both gorgeous minutiae and broad, step-back scope. One, a study of the parting of her hair, shines, each strand etched with silver leaf, woven through with brilliant crimson paint. It is heart-stoppingly lovely. Another, a triptych of three Graces (even if her name had been otherwise, the piece still earns the title), depicts her as a featureless housewife; a ravenous, screaming harpy; and, most chillingly, in the central panel, a woman trapped within the strict lines of the frame, her one visible eye stretching large and carrying within it a desperation and claustrophobia that lend deeper, more troubling significance to the flanking images.
We see in Grace a young woman at the height of her beauty, in the prime of her life—a young bride, a new mother, an up-and-coming artist—and yet the overarching sense is of turmoil and dismay, a thwarted energy, a wasted talent. Grace Janney Sparrow died before she was able to fully explore and develop her prodigious gifts. We know that she dedicated the last years of her life to her husband and young daughter; she showed no work during this time. During this period, she removed herself from the downtown artistic community of which she had been such a vibrant part, while her husband, Oscar, continued to show and to lay the foundations for his much-lauded breakthrough show of 2000.
In this way, Oscar Sparrow has achieved what may prove surprising to his legions of fans: he has created a feminist examination of a lost woman. He has, in effect, painted Grace with such love and truth that underlying his work is an attack on the domestic life that he, in fact, pushed upon her. Did he intend this self-critique? Are these paintings offered up to us, the viewers and critics and historians of art, as a sort of apology?
The riddles in these pictures are riddles of the heart, and, unlike Sparrow’s earlier work, they offer up no easy solutions, no a-ha moments of epiphany. Instead, from their examination of a single woman, we are left with a resounding sense of wonder and of loss. These images of Grace Janney Sparrow are tantalizing, evocative hints of our own deprivation. We are richer for these paintings but so much the poorer for the loss of their inspiration.
With great care, as though the newspaper were a fragile thing, Lina refolded the Arts section and placed it on her lap. A long knitted scarf. Patsy Cline. Isolation. Motherhood. A thwarted energy. A wasted talent.
I want to explain some things, Oscar had said. Tell the truth. Lina closed her eyes and placed her forehead flush against the cool glass of the plane’s window. Can’t work, can’t think, can’t breathe, Grace had written. She is the loveliest thing I have ever seen. And Lina felt a sudden penetrating sadness for the young woman who had been her mother, for the young child who had been herself. Had it all been too much, or not enough? Had Grace stopped painting? Only twenty-four years old, with a husband, a child, a house. Lina did not know what motherhood required, or being a wife, but Oscar was an artist, and Lina understood what that meant: obsession and uncertainty, dedication and toil and frustration, time and focus. Perhaps Porter was right, perhaps the paintings were an apology. But the apology was not to the historians of art, or to the viewers and collectors of art. The paintings were an apology to Grace. I always loved her, Oscar had said, and Lina knew without question that this was true.
LINA ENTERED A GLOOMY HOUSE, the curtains drawn; a single lit floor lamp cast dusty shadows around the living room. She had just under an hour to shower and change before heading to Jasper Battle’s show. Lina moved with care, certain that Oscar was sleeping. After an opening, Oscar became a bear in hibernation, a great hump under the blankets, appearing only for bagels and beer.
But Lina heard voices and the chime of silverware hitting a plate, and smelled cooking, something warm and rich, like a roast chicken or ham. Lina left her suitcase in the hall and wandered into the kitchen. Oscar and Natalie were seated at the table, the remains of an elaborate dinner spread before them, half-full wineglasses and yes, the small carcass of a chicken or—Lina stared first at her father, who was midsentence in conversation with Natalie, and then at the frayed, half-eaten bird.
“Guinea hen!” her father said, laughing. “It’s a guinea hen! How’s that for culinary skill?”
Natalie turned around in her chair and looked at Lina with a smile. “He’s a very good cook, you know. He’s been working hard at it.” Her cheeks were flushed from the heat of the kitchen and the wine—Lina saw one empty bottle and another open on the table. Two lit candles burned between plates strewn with small, sucked-on bones. Lina felt a moment of dislocation, as though she had wandered into a house strikingly similar to her own but different in its fundamentals. Her father, a gourmet chef? Natalie, relaxed and casual, at their kitchen table? The difference between how Lina saw the world and how it truly was seemed suddenly vast and breathtaking, and Lina felt again as if she were four years old, mystified by a loss she could not control and events she did not understand.
Oscar stood and gave Lina a wide, firm hug, and kissed her on the top of her head. “I didn’t think you’d be back for another day or so. How was Richmond?” He stepped away and glanced at Natalie, who rose stiffly from her chair and came to stand beside Oscar, her hair mussed and golden in the candlelight.
“You know Natalie, of course,” Oscar said to Lina, muscling through the awkwardness with a bemused grin and brisk scratch of his beard. “We’ve been … spending time together lately.”
Natalie conjured her own brilliant get-through-this smile and said, “Oscar, you’re making this harder than it has to be. Of course Lina knows me,” and she stepped forward and gave Lina a quick hug, which surprised Lina enough that she instinctively returned it.
“I’m sorry you left the show so quickly the other night,” Oscar said. “I tried to follow you but you walk so goddamn fast, Carolina.”
Her father’s cheeks were rosy, his eyes clear and happy, and Lina considered for the briefest moment leaving him here with Natalie to finish their dinner, drink their wine. But she felt still the echo of the plane’s forward thrust and she didn’t want to lose that sense of momentum, she didn’t want to waste it. She felt too a need to reclaim this space and her father. A possessiveness grabbed her, an impulse to stake herself here and say what she felt. “I read Porter’s review,” Lina said. “Is he right? Is the show an apology?”
Oscar’s smile vanished and he leaned back against the countertop. “Well. Yes. Maybe. I don’t know, Carolina. I think Porter’s review was … more on target than some of his others.”
“Did she want to be married to you? Did she want to be a mother? Why did she stop painting?” The questions came fast, and it was not a desire to hear the answers that propelled Lina; she was aware only of the fact that she had to ask.
“Oh, Carolina. Don’t do this. Not now.”
“You say you want the pictures to show me something but I don’t understand them, Dad. I don’t know what you’re trying to say.”
Oscar looked to the ceiling. He pulled at his sleeves, fidgeting like a little boy. “Grace and I had a bad marriage,” he said. “Toward the end. She was very angry at me. It was no one’s fault. It just happened. I wasn’t a good husband, I wasn’t. I had an affair with Marie—I didn’t want to tell you that day at the gallery. I didn’t want you to be angry with me, or to think you couldn’t ask Marie for help with your case. But your mother was unhappy well before Marie. And she fell in love with someone else, I think.”
“Porter Scales? Was it him?”
Oscar exhaled, his arms folded against his chest, and Lina knew she was right. “How do you know that?” Oscar’s voice was suddenly sharp, an old anger stirred. “Did he talk to you?”
“He did talk to me, but no, he didn’t tell me. He only told me that he’d been her friend and admired her art.” Lina remembered that night, Porter’s rueful gaze, h
er gratitude to him for those small, wonderful facts. And with the remembering, Lina’s disquiet returned. She was just gone.
“Dad, how did she die?” Lina’s voice was soft but purposeful. Steadily she watched her father.
Oscar paused. “A car crash,” he said. “You know that.” But she saw the strain on his face, the downward tic of his mouth.
“Oscar, you’ve got to tell her. She’s an adult.” It was Natalie, and the sound of her voice surprised Lina. She had almost forgotten Natalie was there. Lina turned to look at her, leaning against the counter, such a strange sight in their kitchen—a space intimate only to Oscar and Lina—and yet Natalie spoke with authority, as though she were the one who belonged here and knew them best.
Lina turned back to Oscar. “Tell me what, Dad?” Of course there was something to tell. Hadn’t Lina known this all along? And for the first time in her life she felt ready to hear it.
Oscar shook his head, tilted his neck, left, then right, and Lina heard the crack of his spine. He exhaled. “Nothing. There’s nothing to tell,” he said.
A fierce disappointment flooded Lina and she looked away from her father. In the silence that followed, Lina struggled, wanting not only to slap him but also to stop wanting it, to release her curiosity and anger into the warm air of the kitchen, where they would dissipate and fade. Because did it really matter what had happened? Did it matter if she knew?
Lina studied the brief stretch of old black-and-white linoleum that Oscar said every year he would replace, but never did. Maybe someday he would; maybe Natalie would help him. And Lina saw with prescient clarity the two of them, Natalie and Oscar, on hands and knees, ripping up the tiles, sanding down the old wood underneath, wiping dusty hands on old jeans, and Lina, a visitor, standing in the doorway, commending them on their work. “It looks amazing,” she would say. “I’m so glad you finally did it. Why did you wait so long?”
And in those moments, Lina arrived at a decision. It emerged as a giant air bubble, trapped so long beneath the surface and now rising finally into the open air where it emerged with a pop.
“There’s something I need to tell you,” Lina said. “I’ve decided to move out. I think it’s for the best. I think it’s time I lived on my own.”
How easily these words flew into the space between them, and wasn’t this what she should have said months ago, years ago? The house encircled her, comfortable, known and knowable, burdened with memories and wishes, but it was just plaster and bricks. Lina would carry her memories with her, they transcended these walls, this old kitchen; they transcended even Oscar’s pictures, his memories of Grace that Lina did not recognize and did not want to face. She would continue to believe in that curtain of dark hair, that pepper and sugar smell, that sense of contentment. Who could tell her those things were untrue? Truth was multilayered, shifting; it was different for everyone, each personal history carved unique from the same weighty block of time and flesh.
Oscar looked startled but he nodded once, a single downward beat, curt and unhesitant, as though he’d been expecting this moment and his surprise was due only to the fact that it had taken so long to come. “Carolina, if that’s what you want. Whatever you decide will be for the best.” He smiled, the corners of his mouth giving the smallest of lifts, a smile in name only. Lina saw something cloud his blue eyes, tears or fear or guilt.
Lina turned and passed through the arched kitchen doorway, along the dim hall, into the living room, where she stopped. The half-light, the messiness, Natalie’s coat thrown across the couch, Lina’s suitcase in the doorway, and she again experienced a sensation of strangeness amid the familiar. In that moment the room faded away to become the living room from her early childhood, a smaller couch, a study of a row of spoons hanging where Lina’s portrait hung now, a rocking chair in the corner, its yellow paint chipped and worn. And a woman who was her mother, perhaps, or perhaps not, sat on the floor and played with her. They had blocks, wooden blocks painted in bright primary colors, and a small train with black wheels that the woman (the mother?) rolled atop the blocks as though they were a track. Puff puff puff, up the hill, the woman sang. Was this woman’s hair black as jet, falling halfway down her back like a curtain, like a black screen? Or was this not a woman but a girl, a high school student, earning some extra money, counting down the minutes until she might leave? Or was it a man who sat with her? A father all the time, who scratched his beard with both hands and laughed as Lina soared her train up into the air?
IT WAS JUST PAST TEN o’clock when Lina arrived at Jasper’s show. A short line threaded out the club’s unmarked door and it was crowded inside, a hundred or so people, both younger and older than Lina, all races, men and women, fashionable and staid. Lina wore jeans and a top she’d bought last summer for a planned vacation that never happened, and she stood alone at the bar, holding a plastic cup of beer and waiting for the show, comfortably invisible amid the chatter and changing contours of the crowd.
She heard someone calling Jasper’s name and “Good luck, man” and then Jasper was standing beside her at the bar.
“Lina, you came,” he said, his voice full of surprise.
“Of course I did,” she said, matter-of-fact, and returned his smile.
“How was Virginia?” Jasper leaned down as he spoke and Lina angled her head toward him, struggling to hear over the noise from the bar.
“Very interesting. I’ll tell you about it.” She spoke into his ear, the studs a glittering row of silver and anthracite.
Jasper motioned toward the stage. “We’re up soon. Let’s talk after the show.” Then he took hold of her wrist, a gesture that might have been awkward or strange, but his fingers felt warm against her skin as he squeezed gently. “I’m glad you came,” he said, and she felt again that tension along her spine, and a pleasant falling away, a dimming of the crowd and noise from the bar.
As Lina finished her drink, the lights went dark and there was the scuffling sound of bodies taking the stage, guitars lifted, microphones adjusted, and then a spotlight illuminated the lead singer—not Jasper but another man, short, skinny, and pale, with a nerd-chic haircut and thick black glasses, a guitar slung across his chest. The first song was all strumming guitar, hushed soulful singing, and the crowd became restless, heads turned away from the stage, conversations resumed. Lina felt a pang of worry, as though her stake in this performance was greater than that of mere observer, as though it fell to her that these four young men should achieve some measure of success tonight.
The song ended to a spatter of applause, a few hoots, and then the band started up again. This time the drums began first, a loud knocking that Lina felt deep in the center of her chest like a mechanical heart, and then Jasper on bass, a steady electric strumming, and then the guitars, and the crowd surged into life with a collective rush. This was what they had been waiting for.
Lina kept her eyes on Jasper. Fascinated, she watched and realized that he no longer looked like the Jasper she had met that night at the Bell show, or even the one she had just spoken to at the bar. Onstage, he appeared cold, removed, with a complete sense of self-containment that she would have envied if it had not looked so lonely. She recognized the look—it was the same go-away posture her father took on in the studio. Right now Jasper was his own separate universe, oblivious to everything and everyone apart from the instrument strapped around his shoulders. He didn’t play to the crowd. He didn’t preen or pose. The lead singer chatted to the front row in between songs, scanned the audience, sang out, tried to connect. But Jasper, for the most part, kept his eyes closed. He hung back from the edge of the stage and let his head hang, swaying like a hyped-up pendulum in time to the low tones of his bass. He might as well have been alone in the room. In fact, Lina, watching him, got the distinct impression that this was what he would have preferred—to be playing these songs alone.
Song followed song and Lina did not think of her father or Natalie or Grace; she thought of nothing at all, only the music and
the people drifting sweaty and hot around her, the sensation of being buoyed by all these diverse bodies, hard and soft in their various joints and joinings. Jasper’s bass was a percussive, deep vibration, and a trembling began at the bottom of her stomach, and the beat there swelled beyond herself, into the floor and the walls and the exuberant movement of the crowd. Lina felt herself moving with the music, with everyone, and then suddenly Jasper looked down at her—was he looking at her?—and she closed her eyes and became just another joyful body there on the floor.
After the show, Jasper found her, his T-shirt and scalp dark with sweat.
“Come with me,” he said.
“Where?”
“This bar we go to after shows. It’s not fancy. It’s pretty grungy, to be honest, but we can talk and play cards, if you want.”
“Cards?”
“Gin rummy. I’m a little obsessed.”
“But what about the Bell pictures?”
“I can show you later. After a game or two.”
The lead singer suddenly appeared at Jasper’s elbow. He had a white towel around his neck and pulled from his back pocket a dog-eared pack of cards, which he waved slowly back and forth in front of Jasper like a matador with his red cloth.
Jasper turned to Lina. “See what I mean? Obsessed. So are you coming?”
