The Falconer

by Dana Czapnik

  Violet says that Max’s art has no story, it’s all statement. It’s all political. That there’s something simple about it—she’s taking a shortcut to the root of heartbreak, like writing a fifty-page manifesto instead of War and Peace. That it will sell well because of that—the pop sensibility, the clean, angry slogans. But she prefers a good nude of a lumpy, real woman’s body any day of the week. That nothing compares to the story told by a face, an expression, the way a body folds.

  But there is a story here. It’s just not a poetic story. It’s blunt prose. And it’s a much more uncomfortable one to face than a nude woman sitting on a bed, looking off camera. Or a stunning black-and-white photo of Christy Turlington, with perfect contrast, luminous skin, and a deep, glistening world. The beauty micrometer still exists, it’s just subliminal now. And no matter if you’re the most beautiful woman in the room or the least, the oldest or the youngest, we all walk around with an invisible one of those things on our faces. It’s a story about what it is to be a woman in America and a very justified, very real way of reacting to it. Choosing not to internalize it. Choosing not to be sad. Choosing not to be victimized. Choosing not to cut yourself or starve yourself or have a nose job or a boob job or submit yourself to the daily tyranny of the high-heeled pump and just quietly take it. Choosing to rage instead.

  “Have you ever been called a cunt?” Max sneaks up next to me.

  I raise my eyebrows. “Nnnno.”

  “Well, you will. Prepare yourself. Men love to use that word. Writers use it all the time in their books, thinking it makes them seem edgy and angry, and they think if they use it ironically it puts them on our side. Stand-up comedians say it when women don’t find them funny. Every woman with an opinion gets called a cunt at least once in her life, and when it happens it will both shock and relieve you because when you hear it, you will know the thing you’ve always suspected about the guy who just said it is true and at least you’re not crazy. Did you see that asshole with the blue hair and the spacers?” She motions to the reporter, who’s now standing outside by the gallery window, furiously taking notes on his pad. “Thinking he’s cool, playing devil’s advocate with me? He’d never have done that with a male artist. That’s an example of a guy who thinks he’s liberated because he works for the New York Press and pretends to appreciate Bikini Kill, but I see through it. That’s a guy who hates women, especially ones who are more interesting than him. I’m sure I’m gonna get a lousy review. But screw it. That’s what this whole show is about, giving the finger to shitbags like him.”

  “So you’re calling the show Laugh, Cunt?”

  “Yeah. Like, ‘Laugh, cunt. It’s a joke.’ That’s why I got those sushi rolls to have as passed hors d’oeuvres. I’m making a joke out of their terrible joke.”

  I nod. “Cool.”

  “I sense some reservation. Tell me your thoughts. I promise I won’t bite. Though, you never know—you might like it if I did.”

  I side-eye her. What to make of Max? “I guess the experience is very, um . . . shocking.”

  “Ah. And you’re wondering: But is it art?”

  “No.” I shake my head. “No, not at all. I guess what I’m wrestling with is whether there is space in one’s body or brain or heart or whatever to feel all this”—I motion around me at all the pieces in the gallery—“to feel all this, right? And to still also . . . I guess . . . how do I put this without sounding dumb? . . . And to also still really, really, really like boys.”

  “Ha!” She laughs and hugs my arm and puts her head on my shoulder almost in a mothering way, which is kind of funny because she’s so much smaller than me and she’s not usually a particularly warm or demonstrative person. She pats me on the back three times and turns to walk away.

  “So you don’t have an answer for me.”

  “I’m just glad the show’s got you thinkin’. That’s the whole point,” she yells over her shoulder.

  “I thought the whole point was to give shitbags the finger,” I yell after her.

  “That too, that too. Always that. Always.”

  Violet carefully peels away the stencil. The words are large and stark. She descends the ladder and places the stencil on a paint-splattered canvas sheet on the floor. She takes her hair out of her ponytail, but it retains the impression of the elastic that had been holding it back.

  “I love your pear,” I tell her.

  “What?”

  “Your pear.” I nod in the direction of the painting on the far wall.

  “Oh, that? I didn’t paint that.”

  “Then who did?”

  She shakes her head, confused. “Max did. This is her show.” She puts her hair back up and walks to the corner of the gallery and fills a small, white cardboard cup with coffee from a pot that’s been sitting on a hot plate all day.

  * * *

  When I get home, I find my mom sitting at the kitchen table, grading papers. Before she had me, she was a full-time sociology professor at Columbia, on track for tenure. In the living room, there are framed clippings from the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the New Yorker citing one of her studies. They’re all dated 1974. She hasn’t had a single mention since. She decided she wanted to go back to work about five years ago, but by then, all her contacts had moved on and all her research was outdated. She’s spent the last four years adjuncting at Sarah Lawrence, teaching all the intro classes to freshmen—what she considers academic grunt work—earning what my dad says is an hourly wage less than a fry cook at McDonald’s. I think she secretly hopes that if she keeps chugging along, eventually she’ll get back into a tenure-track position.

  She’s got her hand in her hair, which has gotten grayer in the past few years, and she’s leaning on her elbow. In her right hand is a red marker that she presses hard into the paper, and she crosses out a line and writes in the margin, “No!” She shakes her head and mumbles “These kids” under her breath. She always refers to her students as ‘these kids’ because the phrase implies that they’re stupid or uninformed or entitled. I don’t think she sees me in the doorway.

  “Mom?”

  “Oh!” She jumps out of her chair and puts her hand to her heart. She’s as easily startled as a cat sometimes. “I didn’t hear you come in. There’s a veggie burger in the fridge if you want to heat it up.” She looks back down at her papers. “How’s Violet?”

  “She’s fine.” I take out the burger and stick it in the toaster oven.

  “What did you guys do?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What did you guys talk about?”

  “Nothing.”

  “So you just sat in an empty room in silence?”

  “No, we talked about some stuff.”

  “Anything you want to share?”

  I shake my head and frown. “Not that I can think of.” I take the burger out of the toaster oven and take a seat across from her at the table.

  “Oh, Lucy, be careful with that ketchup by these papers. You’re always getting your dinner on these kids’ work.”

  “I’ll be careful,” I say with a stuffed mouth. Little crumbs of veggie burger shoot out and land on the papers. I swallow. “Whoops. Sorry.”

  My mom wipes the crumbs off onto the floor and sighs. “Maybe I should have considered sending you to finishing school.”

  “Hey, Ma, can I tell you a secret and you promise you won’t tell Dad?”

  “Sure,” she says nervously. I can tell she’s bracing for some kind of major revelation out of some made-for-TV movie, like I’m about to confide in her about losing my virginity and telling her how awful it was, and she’ll get to say something momlike and wise to me that makes all the pain go away, and then we’ll cuddle up on the couch with a blanket and some ice cream and watch Anne of Green Gables and cry.

  “I have Dad’s book. I’ve had it for months.”

  “Oh?”

  “Percy found it at a used bookstore. I haven’t read it yet.”

  “Oh.”

&nb
sp; “Why is Dad so weird about it?”

  “He isn’t weird about it. He just didn’t want you to read it until you were old enough because it has some violent passages.” She pauses. “And it’s an angry book, written during an angry time. He figured you’d ask about it at some point, and then he’d give it to you. But you haven’t asked about it since you found that copy of it years ago. I had no idea you even remembered it, let alone wanted to read it.”

  “But we have no copies in the house. I thought he threw them all out.”

  She laughs. “What made you think that? We’ve got about thirty copies in a box in storage downstairs in the basement.”

  “Huh.” I pause, confused. “Why didn’t he write any more books?”

  “There was just no time, between work and our family. I suspect when he’s retired he’ll get back to writing.”

  “Oh—so I’m the reason Dad isn’t a writer and I’m the reason you’re not a professor. Basically I’m the reason you both gave up your dreams.”

  “What? Did I imply that? Where is all this coming from?” She laughs at me, which is pretty rude.

  “Violet says you fit into a certain category of woman, a woman who gives up her own life for her children. She calls them mommy martyrs.”

  “Hmm.” My mom laughs a little bit again, though I have no idea what’s so funny about any of this, and she pulls her hair back from her face and leans back in her chair. “I think Violet fits into a category of woman herself: the very young and opinionated.” Then my mom sits for a while and doesn’t look at me and doesn’t say anything and kind of frowns a little bit, and I get nervous I’ve actually hurt her. I was just trying to get a little bit of a rise out of her, let her know that I will not be making the same choices. But I don’t want to hurt her.

  “Lucy, your dad went to law school to avoid the draft. He wrote a book, and it didn’t sell that well. I was getting my PhD, and we were living off that money, which was nothing. Somebody had to do something for us to be able to live. I was sick of heating up canned soup every night and living in roach-infested apartments. He got a job with the city. We saved up just enough money to buy this place and we fixed it up on our own, which is why nothing works. Then we had you. And he didn’t care that his evenings were spent with you instead of writing the Great American Novel.”

  “But what about you? If you hadn’t left your job at Columbia, you wouldn’t have to be adjuncting right now. You wouldn’t be working so hard to climb your way back up the ladder. Don’t you regret that a little?”

  “Regret? I regret not buying two more apartments in this building in 1974. We’d be able to afford to send you to any college you want without having to fill out a FAFSA. No, I don’t regret leaving work to stay home with you when you were young.”

  “C’mon, Ma. That’s a canned answer. That’s what you’re supposed to say to your kid. Tell me the truth.”

  She pauses. “You know, I’ve always loved the idea of reincarnation—that a person can have the chance to live more than one life and that as long as they lead a good life, their next life will be better than the last. But the thing is, I don’t actually believe in reincarnation. The fact of the matter is, this is it. You only get one shot. There are a lot of things in life I’ve always wanted to do. I’ve always wanted to live in Paris. Did you know I had the opportunity to do some of my graduate work at the Sorbonne?”

  “No. Why didn’t you go?”

  “Well, I had just met your father and I felt like I was falling in love with him.”

  “So why didn’t you bring him with you?”

  “He was in law school and couldn’t very well just pack up and move to France for a girl. He told me to take it, and I almost did, but I decided to stay instead and see where my relationship with him would lead. My girlfriends at the time thought I was crazy. This was at the height of the women’s movement and I was in academia. They were all bra burners and thought I was letting down the sisterhood. Opportunities like the one I was offered didn’t come around to women all that often. But I was young and foolish and in love and I reasoned there was no country, no experience, no job more important than that. And you know what? I was right. Had your father and I broken up and I ended up alone, maybe I would feel differently. But that’s not what happened. Do I wonder what my life would be like now if I had moved to France? Every once in a while, I think about it. But decisions in life are either-or. Perhaps if there is a parallel universe, that version of me made the other choice and she’s sitting in her flat on the Champs-Élysées eating wonderful cheese instead of reheated frozen veggie burgers, with her pouty French daughter with a little dog at her feet.”

  “But Columbia wasn’t an either-or decision. You could have kept working and had me.”

  “It was more complicated than that. I loved teaching there, but I hated our department head. He was an old, vicious man who made it very clear to me that I would work forever at that school and would never make tenure. He would pick on me in department meetings.”

  “Why?”

  “Who knows why assholes are assholes, Lucy, but there are a lot of them in the world, and when you’re a young, ambitious woman, you tend to meet them all. On top of that, I was working long hours and running myself ragged dropping you off at day care and picking you up after work and taking care of you and trying to do my job well at the same time. And I missed you. I never saw you. I was miserable. And when your dad and I crunched the numbers, we realized that with the cost of day care and babysitters, it basically cost us more money for me to work. Sometimes you have to do some cost-benefit analysis. So I left. It wasn’t an easy decision, and it was very tough adjusting to being a full-time mom. I always knew I’d go back to work when you were old enough, but you’re right in that I didn’t realize how difficult it would be. It used to be that there were only a handful of us. Now, everyone has a PhD.”

  “Couldn’t you have worked part-time?”

  “That didn’t exist back then. Either you worked or you didn’t, and most women didn’t. Your father made more money than I did, so it made more sense for me to stay home. I made the best decision I could for my family.” She pauses. “Anyone who says that if you do things a certain way you’ll be guaranteed happiness is selling you something. No one knows their destiny in advance.”

  “I don’t believe in destiny. It’s scientifically proven that most of life is chance. If you throw a quarter in the air twenty times, the theoretical probability is that it will land on heads ten times and land on tails ten times. But every time anyone has ever practiced that experiment, the numbers are always totally different. The only explanation for that is chance.”

  “It’s mostly chance, yes. But you do have some control over the decisions you make. You made the choice to flip the coin, for instance. The experimental probability would have been the same regardless of your participation, but you could have opted not to bother. To stay blissfully ignorant and assume that the world is always fifty percent heads and fifty percent tails.” She smiles at me. “It’s funny when you discover your kid knows something you didn’t know they knew. The first time that happened was when you were two. Dad and I were coloring with you, and we both drew a house, and Dad asked you, ‘Whose house do you like better, Mommy’s or Daddy’s?’ and you looked at us and you said, ‘I like both.’ Oh, we were near tears. How did you learn to be a diplomat at two? Who taught you that? No one did. Even at that age, you were your own person.”

  “Mmm-hmm. Okay. I was just curious.”

  My mom scratches the back of her head and scrunches her face, something she does when she’s upset or overthinking something. “Okay,” she says as she looks back down at her student’s paper. But I can tell she isn’t really concentrating on it. I understand that I had a really wholesome childhood because my mom was home for me, and we had a very stereotypically traditional nuclear family setup, which I am thankful for. But my mom could’ve been immortal in her field. She could have been important with a capital I. I
nstead she’s this nobody who will have nothing significant to do with herself after I leave for college.

  “Ma, if I came to you in ten years and asked, ‘Should I keep my job or have kids?’ what would you tell me to do?”

  “Oh, geez, Lucy, you won’t have to make a choice like that. Women have worked hard to make sure your generation of girls won’t have to choose. But don’t be fooled: You can have kids and a career but you have to give up something in both categories to make it work. But if, for some reason, you’re faced with some sort of binary choice, I’d tell you to have kids.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “Because despite the fact that you’re a sullen ghost I haven’t recognized in three years, and this is the first conversation we’ve had in months, my heart swells with the deepest love I’ve ever felt whenever I see your face. And that feeling is worth more than any accolades I would have gotten in my career had I chosen not to have you. There are some experiences that every person should have. One is romantic love—every person should know what it feels like to love and be loved. And the other is love for your child. These are essential parts of the human experience. And ultimately you have to respect what your own heart wants. But, my child, I’m a romantic soul. You might get a different answer from a different woman.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay.”

  * * *

  After I eat dinner and shower, I get into bed and get under the covers and fluff up my pillows and pull out Simone de Beauvoir from the plastic bag and say a little prayer that she has some answers for me because from everything I’ve observed, there’s just no way that a woman doesn’t get the short end of it. You either end up like my mom, a person put on hold or entirely extinguished, or Janie Gruener, a woman constantly frazzled and run down, or Max, passionate and devoted to her work but cold to everything else. And that’s if you’re lucky enough to get to choose at all, which is something that most women don’t, like Alexis’s mother, who has to work and raise her kids on her own, all while cleaning up messes made by wealthy people. It’s like those Choose Your Own Adventure books where every last adventure ends up with some part of yourself that you once thought was vital snuffed out and deadened.