The Riverhouse

by G. Norman Lippert

  “I don’t think we were kids at quite the same time,” Shane replied, meeting her smile.

  “Pogs,” she said. “I’m older than you think. You remember pogs?”

  “Sure, I guess. I never caught that particular rage, myself. I was more into the world of baseball cards. That’s still a thriving industry, in fact.”

  Christiana nodded enthusiastically. “Sure. That’s the best example of all. I mean, why is any particular baseball card worth what it is? It’s not because of the two cents that went into its raw materials. It isn’t even because it has a picture of some special player on it. It’s because more than one person out there wants it, and is willing to pay a buck more than the other guy just to make sure he doesn’t get it. That’s what potential money is all about. It’s about wanting something more than the other guy. Without the other guy, the potential drops to nothing. Without the other guy, the baseball card is only worth the cardboard it’s printed on.”

  “So that’s how you knew how much to ask for my baseball card?” Shane asked, finally taking a sip of his own wine. “You just guessed at how many ‘other guys’ there were?”

  “No,” Christiana admitted, shaking her head. “I wish I was that good. When I priced your work, I just priced it to sell, like you said. Someday I’ll be good enough to know how people are going to respond to any given work. I hope so, at least. For now, I just go on my own instinct. Every now and then, fortunately, that instinct is right on. I had no idea that that weird painting of yours would be received the way it was.”

  “Eighteen hundred dollars,” Shane said for the third time since they’d arrived. “That’s some serious potential money.”

  “It’s not potential anymore,” Christiana said, patting her bag on the bar next to her. “Assuming the check clears. If it does, that’s the difference between potential money and the real thing. Now, its potential money for the new owner. For you, it’s the real deal.”

  Shane furrowed his brow. Nearly everything about tonight had surprised him. “Do you know her very well?”

  “Penn Oliver?” Christiana said, chewing another bite of the energy bar. “No, not really. She and Morrie used to date, although it doesn’t sound like it ever really got past the flirty-email phase. I’ve read her columns, of course. She’s usually pretty fair, I guess. There are other people who take a perverse delight in the power of their words to destroy. She’s usually not like that. Still, having her there scared the living bejeezus out of me.”

  “I have a feeling things are going to turn out all right,” Shane said. “She seemed happy enough.”

  “She obviously liked your work,” Christiana replied, smiling crookedly. “One star per show is about all anyone can hope for. Who’d have guessed it would be the newbie latecomer?”

  Shane shook his head, embarrassed. “I think that was a perfect example of the power of the one other person. Penn Oliver only wanted the painting because she saw how that other lady, Dolores Grand, responded to it. I’m not sure she’d even have noticed it, otherwise.”

  “There you go,” Christiana said, gesturing toward Shane with one hand. “That’s the way the market works. Hooray for capitalism. If we can get Dolores Grand to come to every show and announce her intentions to buy something, we’ll be golden. Too bad we can’t pay her off.”

  “I get the feeling she’s not the kind to be bought, at any rate.”

  Christiana blew out a breath. “At least not for any price we could afford.”

  There was a silence between them, and Shane allowed it to spin out. He was pleased to be here with her, surprised that things had turned out as they had. It was one thing to have sold his painting, and for what seemed to him to be a rather shocking price, but it was another thing entirely to have ended up here, sitting close to this young (not as young as she looked, perhaps?) woman at the dim little bar, watching her sip her wine and look around, studying the way her black hair captured the light and tossed it around as she moved. Part of him insisted it was foolishness to inspect her so unabashedly, but she didn’t seem to notice, or to mind if she did. He decided, for the moment, not to worry about it.

  “So,” he finally said, raising his wine again. “Whatever became of Morrie?”

  Christiana pressed her lips together slightly and then said, “Oh, don’t worry about him. He’s got bigger fish to fry than meeting us here. He’s got shoulders to rub, contacts to make, people to impress. Somebody’s got to do it, and he’s just so damn good at it.”

  “You don’t like Morrie?”

  She made a vague flapping gesture with her hand. “Morrie’s all right. He’s a bulldozer, that’s all. Like I said, some people have to be. I just don’t think they should enjoy it so much.”

  “I wouldn’t be here tonight if he hadn’t bulldozed me a little,” Shane said, frowning slightly. “I have to say, I’m glad he did.”

  “I am, too. If the showing gets as good a write up as I hope, it’ll be due mainly to your Riverhouse. I mean, she did buy the painting, after all. That’s got to be a good sign. But don’t think that Morrie asked you to show your piece because he was trying to help you or me out. At least, not for those reasons alone.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She sighed and stared at her wine again. “Nothing. I shouldn’t. Like I said, Morrie’s all right. Let’s just say he doesn’t miss a golden opportunity when it comes his way. He knows how to play all his cards. It’s a gift, really.”

  “So, you two aren’t…?”

  Christiana glanced at Shane, her brow furrowed, and then laughed. “What? Dating? No, not at all. Heavens, no.”

  Shane bobbed his head noncommittally, trying not to look too pleased.

  Christiana went on, “He’s been a great help, honestly, even if his reasons for helping are a little mixed. It’s a hard business to break into without someone on the inside. He’s happy to be that someone for me, and I’m happy to let him. He flirts, sure. Some guys just can’t help themselves. Guys like him are about as subtle as dogs yapping from behind a fence. It doesn’t really mean anything, though. Morrie’s a businessman at heart. By helping me, he gets to show off his own artists in a ‘legitimate art environment’, which is good for his business cred. And I get access to the venues and attendees that I could never hope to get on my own. It works for everybody, for the most part.”

  “So is that why he asked me to be in the show?” Shane asked. “To help his ‘business cred’?”

  “Are you surprised? At least yours was real art. It’ll get written up in the paper and he’ll clip it out and frame it. More importantly, he’ll use it as the basis for a press release and send it out to all of his clients, telling them about how this artist he represents is making a ‘big splash in the underground art scene’, or something like that. Like I said, he’s a businessman at heart. He knows how to play all of his cards.”

  Shane shrugged. “I suppose I should be offended, but I’m not.”

  She nodded. “I see that. I envy you. Seems to me, lately, that I’ve been offended more often than not. It’s getting harder and harder to be patient.”

  “Patient with Morrie?”

  She laughed and lowered her eyes. “No. Well, yes, I suppose. But with everything else, too. Work. Life…” She drew a quick sigh. “You know. Everything. This isn’t where I expected to be by my age. When I was growing up, age thirty was sort of the high-water mark. It was the deadline for getting serious about life, you know? I knew I’d have my life and career all arranged by then. I’d probably be married, I’d certainly be an attorney, just like Mother and Father, and I’d be living like the lawyers on TV, the ones who hustle and bustle through every day, tackling the big important legal cases, putting away the bad guys, and then spending their evenings in trendy nightclubs working out the kinks of their intensely interesting personal lives.”

  “Damn those lying people on TV,” Shane said, smiling crookedly. “Damn those lying courtroom drama shows.”

  Christiana smi
led back, sheepishly. “I so wanted to be Ally McBeal. Give me the coed bathroom and the dancing baby hallucination any day. I wanted her problems. I almost dyed my hair to be like her.”

  Shane shook his head. “You’re better off brunette. Leave the dirty blonde to Ally.”

  “I left the whole thing to Ally,” Christiana replied. “Life doesn’t look like it does on TV. I guess real life just can’t fit on a TV screen. So here I am, contrary to all my plans and expectations, thirty-two and still trying to figure out what life is going to look like.”

  “What are you hoping for now?”

  She glanced at Shane, and then looked back out over the bar. “A gallery of my own, I guess. That’s what I really want. But I won’t show just anyone. I want to promote artists who paint what’s really there. Not just the ugliness in their own heads or the made-up feel good stuff that most people seem to want to look at. Nothing pretentious and nothing plastic. I suppose that makes me pretentious in my own way. That’s all right with me—for now, at least. Life is just a lot more complicated and interesting than most art would have us believe. It isn’t just emo abstract ugliness and it isn’t just clown’s faces on black velvet. I mean, it is those things too, but those are just the boundaries… just the hard edges. Most of life happens in the middle, between those two extremes. That’s where most of us live and work and move every day. That’s what I want to see in art. That’s the kind of gallery I’ll open someday, if I can.”

  “It’s a gallery I’d go to,” Shane said seriously.

  Christiana looked at him again. “You keep painting and maybe you’ll have a good reason to.”

  “You’d display my work?”

  “Maybe. I may not love your stuff myself, but it fits the description. It’s not beautiful, but it’s not ugly either. There’s nothing forced about it. And what the hell, it apparently sells.”

  Shane laughed. “So Morrie’s not the only one with business in his soul.”

  “I’m the daughter of two lawyers,” she replied, straightening on her barstool and affecting a stern demeanor. “Some things are just bred in the grain.”

  “Well, at least one part of your teenage dream has come true,” Shane said, lifting his wine glass. “You’re sitting in a trendy nightclub discussing the weighty intricacies of life.”

  “Hmm,” she said, raising her own wineglass and clinking it to his. “But I’m not being fought over by the district attorney and a young, hot-shot lawyer under the guise of an argument about today’s grisly murder trial.”

  “Well, there’s Morrie and me,” Shane said, feeling a little bold. “Which one of us is the D.A. and which one is the young hotshot lawyer?”

  She shook her head, smiling a little and sipping her wine again. After a moment, she said, “So what about you, Mr. Shane Bellamy? What about the mysterious New York artist who suddenly relocated to the buggy backwoods of the Midwest. What’s your story?”

  Shane exhaled wearily. He raised his hands, palms up. “It’s a long, unhappy tale.”

  “Thus the painting,” Christiana said, nodding. “Who was it that said that art grows best in the fertilizer of life’s crap?”

  Shane grinned. “I never heard that one. Maybe it was you.”

  “Maybe it was. Go on.”

  Shane shrugged again and looked away, scanning the people gathered around the bar. “I’m like you in some ways. I grew up knowing exactly what I wanted out of life. The difference was, I got it. I had that life for several years. And then, suddenly, it all went away. I guess that’s what it all boils down to.”

  Christiana took another, smaller sip of her wine. “Morrie says you used to be married.”

  “Well, you know how it is,” Shane replied. “Nobody keeps secrets from their agent.”

  “So what happened?”

  Shane looked back at Christiana, saw her studying him carefully, her dark eyes serious. He sighed. “She just got bored with me, I guess. It’s the same story as everybody else. She says I got lost in my work, stopped paying attention to her.”

  Christiana didn’t blink. “So was it true?”

  Shane frowned and looked along the length of the bar. “I don’t know. Maybe…” He shook his head. “How can you argue with somebody else’s perception?”

  Cristiana laughed a little hollowly. “Some people do it all the time.”

  “Well, there was no point in arguing with Steph once she’d made up her mind. But no, I didn’t think it was true. I’ve thought about it a lot since the day she told me she wanted out. At the time, I was too stunned to think back on it, but since then… that’s about all I’ve done. I was no model husband, but I wasn’t a slouch. I did make efforts. I loved her. A lot.

  "And you know what’s weird? She loved me, too. You can just tell when someone says it and they mean it, can’t you? I mean, people are pretty insecure, generally. It’s natural to doubt someone when they say something really important and personal like ‘I love you’. But if they say that to you and you never have the slightest question in your mind about whether they mean it or not… if you never once doubt it… that’s got to mean something, right? I used to look at my friends, at their marriages, and think to myself, ‘I’m very lucky. Steph and I have it good.’ We weren’t perfect, but...”

  Shane stopped, sighed, and shook his head again, slowly. He looked back at Christiana. “She laughed at my jokes. I guess that sounds pretty stupid, but that was the first thing I thought the day she told me she wanted a divorce. I thought, ‘but you laugh at my jokes. You have any idea how rare that is, after eight years of marriage? How many couples still enjoy each other’s company enough to laugh at their jokes? And you’re willing to just throw that away?’”

  Christiana frowned. “But you didn’t say that to her.”

  “No, I didn’t. It seemed like a dumb thing to mention at the time. I just knew there was some magic bullet, some perfect thing that I’d be able to say to change everything back to normal, to remind her of what we had. I was just waiting for it to come into my mind. It never came, though. Soon enough, she was gone, and I just kept thinking that same stupid thing over and over, like a broken record: you laughed at my jokes. How can you just throw that away? You get me. You understand me better than anyone. And I understand you. Who will understand you if you leave me? Who will get you? And who will laugh at my jokes?”

  Christiana nodded and didn’t say anything for a moment. Finally, she said, “What do you think it really was?”

  “What what really was?”

  “Why she decided to leave you.”

  “I don’t know. We only talked about it a few times, but she never really said anything more than she did on that first day. Basically, I just wasn’t there for her. I was too busy. She felt alone.”

  “That’s baloney and you know it. You said you understood her.”

  “I did.”

  “So why did she really leave you?”

  Shane blinked at Christiana, but she didn’t look away. She stared at him expectantly. Finally, he drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Maybe… probably, it had something to do with having a baby.”

  Christiana nodded again, knowingly. “She wanted one, and you didn’t?”

  “At first, yeah, sort of. I was less excited about it than she was. She could tell, but I was willing to go along with it for her. I’d never been the kind of guy who loved kids, but I figured I would learn to love my own baby, once we had one. Problem was, we couldn’t. We tried for over a year before we went to see a doctor. Nothing worked. We never got to the point of finding out exactly why. Maybe we didn’t really want to know. But I think it affected her a lot more than it did me. I think… maybe she blamed me. Maybe she thought it was my fault.”

  “Because she knew you weren’t as excited about it as she was?”

  Shane nodded, barely listening. “But the thing was, I was excited about it. Not at first, like I said, but the more I thought about it… the longer we tried…”

  “You
caught the bug?”

  Shane thought for a moment, smiling to himself. “I was walking out of the grocery store one night, carrying my bag and shaking out my keys, and I was following this guy pushing a cart with a little kid in it, up front in the baby seat. I’d begun noticing kids everywhere I went. That’s how it is, isn’t it? You buy a red car, you start seeing them all over the place. So I was watching the kid. He was a boy, not even two years old. He pointed up toward the sky, his little chin raised. His dad saw him and followed his pointing finger, looking up over his own shoulder. Then he says to the kid, ‘that’s the moon’.”

  Shane stopped. He blinked and swallowed. “‘That’s the moon,’ the dad said, like it was the most normal thing in the world, having to explain something so obvious and mundane. The kid just sat in the cart, looking up at the sky, his face somber and amazed, awestruck. He was awestruck by the moon. I looked at that little boy and his dad and for the first time I thought, ‘I want that. I can do that. I want to explain to a little person what the moon is. I want Steph and me to have a baby so I can do that someday.’”

  Christiana was looking at Shane, her expression serious but otherwise unreadable. Shane shook himself. “Maybe that’s a silly reason to decide to have a baby, but that’s what pushed me over the edge. Problem was, we just couldn’t. At first, it was sort of a fun challenge. And then, after a few months, it became a steady, nagging worry. Finally, after a year, it was an out-and-out fear. I think it took its toll on Steph, and I think it contributed to the end of our marriage. But it took its toll on me, too. If I did withdraw, it was because of that. I was… I don’t know.”

  “Stressed?” Christiana suggested. “Worried?”

  “I was ashamed,” Shane said, looking her in the eye. “That’s all. I wanted to give her what she wanted. I didn’t know if it was my fault we couldn’t—not yet, at least—but deep down I suspected it was. I think she did, too. I hated not being able to give her what she most wanted. So I buried myself. I did what I could do for her instead. I worked, and I provided income. That, at least, I could control. If she was alone in the end, that was why.”