You Again

by Debra Jo Immergut

  Prussian blue, she says, with a little smile, chasing the rime of paint at the edges of my fingernails.

  I was up at it, almost all night.

  She nods happily. Good to hear. She drops my hand. I have been trying to get a portfolio together, but . . . I’ve let it slide a bit.

  She is thinner, I notice, her chin less soft, bones at the base of her throat more pronounced, her bright exhausted eyes.

  You’re getting lost in his trouble.

  His trouble is my trouble, she says.

  I remember now tagging along on his photo shoots deep in the city’s bowels, in the ragged colonies of desperadoes who live in the caverns of the trains. Helping him cajole his way into drug dens in abandoned buildings in Inwood and Mott Haven.

  She looks past me and her face suddenly blooms like a flower in time lapse. There he is, she says. I turn to see a figure coming toward us. Dressed in running shorts. He’s still quite far away, the path is dotted with other walkers and runners, and he hasn’t seen her, or us.

  But one thing is very clear: he is not running. He’s stumbling, one hand on the handrail.

  I turn to her. He doesn’t seem right.

  No, she frowns. He doesn’t. She starts to run. Moving quickly away from me, toward him, weaving in and out of the approaching pedestrians.

  As I watch her go, her ponytail bouncing, the bottoms of her sneakers flashing, there’s a sense of slipping again. Woozy. I turn to the railing. My gaze lands on the black water far, so far below. For an instant, I feel myself catapulting, plunging toward it. Then I steady myself and when I look for them again, I see no sign of them in either direction. Only the morning mist, which has thickened even further now, all around me, it’s all I can see, draping over the bridge and down to the river, a heavy gray blanket dragging its hem in the flow.

  ABBY, JULY 4, 2015

  Forest Versteeg was as good as his word. He’d asked Dennis and me up to the country cottage he owned with his gallerist husband, Matthew Legge-Lewis. But Dennis had departed, and so early on this holiday morning, I drove far upstate alone, on increasingly empty roads. The sky churned with storms, rumbling like God’s own upset stomach. Their bungalow sat in a half-abandoned hamlet straggling up a mountain, facing north. I’d imagined subdued charm and stunning art, but the place smelled of chimney ash and dog hair and was full of broken-down secondhand chairs. I felt at home.

  Forest spent the hour before dinner hitting a tennis ball against the concrete wall of a tractor shed across the driveway, while his husband and I watched from a warped side porch, drinking powerful watermelon daiquiris, whipped up batch after batch in a little blender plugged into an extension cord that trailed out a window. “I have vowed not to apologize for our shortcomings, here,” said Matthew, a small plump man with a dark carpet of hair encircling a perfect brown dome of baldness, and round spectacles perched on his nose. Rain threatened. Their two mutts lolled and slobbered across our feet. “We like to say that here we have a respite from all fabulousness. It’s just sloth and slovenliness here, and I love it.” He chortled loudly and happily, and the dogs thumped their tails in response.

  “Sloth is definitely in my wheelhouse,” I said, holding out my glass for another refill.

  The ball smacked against the cement, and Matthew asked me about my long-ago falling out with Jillian Broder.

  “Not a falling out, really,” I said. “My work didn’t sell, and she simply lost interest.”

  “Well, I’m interested,” said Matthew. “I’d love to see your work.”

  “I would have so happily shown you everything,” I said. “But it’s all gone. The fire.”

  Forest suddenly stopped, the ball winging past him and into the yard. He swiped at his face, pinkened with exertion and slick with sweat and the raindrops that were just starting to fall. “I didn’t realize that. I’m so sorry, Abby. I will always remember that work. It was absolutely unforgettable.”

  The downpour began. Forest ran for the porch, already soaked by the time he got there. The pups refused to budge, and we all stepped over them and retreated into the house.

  “Do you realize,” I said as we finished our drinks in the dim living room, listening to the rain ping on the flue in the cold fireplace, “if I’d sold all those paintings at that show, they’d be gone anyhow. So it kind of shakes out the same.”

  “You can mourn them, you know,” said Forest, swirling his glass to get the last lumps of rum-soaked melon.

  “But Dennis’s work came through it?” said Matthew.

  “He only had one small piece there in the house. According to him, it gained patina in the fire.” I laughed. “And he’s been able to get back into the studio. Since he lost his job. His new work is brilliant,” I said.

  “Yes, yes, so I heard, from Mariah Glücksburg. We bumped into her at some dive bar out on the island. She sang his praises, that husband of yours,” said Matthew with a chuckle. “Viennarte. Not too shabby.”

  I said nothing.

  “Then she said you were the real genius of the family,” Forest added, quietly.

  The rain let up as dusk fell. We headed for a fireworks display in a bigger town closer to the Hudson. I shuffled along behind Matthew and Forest in the dark, across a high school football field thronged with Americans in a holiday mood. Matthew spread a blanket for us. The fireworks began flinging out their shimmering tentacles. Once, during a silver moment, I glanced over and noticed that the two of them had snuggled close to each other and were holding hands. I felt a pang. After all, how many times had Dennis and I done the same on this same date? On sandy beaches in the years we’d taken our boys to the Jersey shore, two little orangutan tots clinging to us as they squealed at the noise and color. Or up in Massachusetts, early on, when I’d taken my new and clearly serious boyfriend back to Hartsfield to cuddle in the cool grass in City Park. I could still recall the kisses lit in flashes, under the lame yet heartfelt pyrotechnics of my hometown. Twenty years of Julys, next year. If we made it to next July.

  The blossoms opened and collapsed into smoke. Booms echoed off the dark mountains. When the last ember faded, I rubbed my eyes, to clear the tears before anyone could see.

  ABBY, JULY 8, 2015

  I made him a pot of tea in our ruined kitchen, using a propane camp stove from the basement. We fucked in the ruined master bedroom, on the scorched wooden bed, in sheets feathered with soot. Afterward his back was covered in flakes of char, and my body was speckled by his smudged charcoal fingerprints.

  Again I’d texted the detective. Against all good judgment and the many promises I’d made to myself. I waited for him at the house, where I also awaited a delivery of floor tiles. He appeared at the door, a bag from an Italian deli in his hand, dimpled smile on his face.

  He kissed me, long, dropped the bag on the floor. It was very hot in the house, and I could feel his shirt chilled by his car’s air-conditioning. His skin felt slightly rough like an almond’s skin. We climbed the stairs to the bedroom and when he undressed, everything about him looked brand-new and festive. It felt like that to me, when I was fucking him—it was like crashing a party, where all was new and strange, you were treated to delicious sights and tastes, and you didn’t know the people or the point, and you were very sure you didn’t belong there. But that was the lure of it.

  Afterward, he fetched the deli bag and unwrapped an eggplant parmesan sub, split into two halves, spreading the paper out on the bed. “DiFiori’s. Best in Brooklyn,” he said. “They grow their own herbs for the sauce.” He said herbs with a hard H. He wolfed his half, lay down again, stared up at the ceiling, and let out a long sigh. “Fucking crazy day,” he said. “When I get that promotion, I’ll be setting my own hours. Which will be a relief. I’m wiped.” He turned and smiled. “But in a good way, now.”

  “You really think you’ll get promoted?” I was eating slowly, savoring. The sauce, tangy and sweet and thick, truly, the best in Brooklyn, he might be right.

  “The chief gi
g?” He shrugged. “Yeah. Now I’ve decided I want it, I’ll do what it takes,” he said. “And let’s face it, Pizziali is a dipshit. I don’t mind the guy but he’s a sneaky little dipshit. I just need to nail this one big thing I’m after, and I’m in.” He turned on his side and watched me with a smile as I ate hungrily. “You like it,” he observed.

  “No. I hate it. I’m hating every minute of this.” I licked the last of the sauce off my fingers.

  “How’s Pete?” he said.

  “Pete’s at his grandma’s house.”

  “Great. No bad influences at Grandma’s house.”

  “No. Just bad Technicolor food.”

  He looked baffled. “What?”

  “You know, like pink coconut snowballs.”

  “Oh yeah, I love those,” he nodded. Then he grinned. “Now you’re making me hungry for dessert.” We fucked again.

  After the detective left, the construction crew arrived. I texted Dennis that I missed him and I pledged to myself that this would be my last transgression. I stood before my easel again. I raised my brush. But then, I lowered it, tapped it in my dish of water, walked to the window, where flakes of charred ash lingered in the corner of the panes. I ran the wet brush across them, to gather them, then walked back to the canvas and worked them into a field of whitened cobalt blue.

  The work wasn’t coming easily. Sometimes I stood there for hours, a dumb creature staring frozen, sniffing for a scent in an imperceptible breeze, trying to draw some meaning out of the air, only to find nothing. Sometimes I wished I could paint like someone else. Someone so much smarter and better than me. But the work was in front of me, just me, and only I could do it. So I persisted, a smallish creature, still standing there, open, hoping. Working in the ruins, with the trust that somehow meaning would drift in and settle around me.

  July 17, 2016

  * * *

  From: GarrettShuttlesworth@physics.humboldtstate.edu

  To: J.Leverett@deepxmail.com

  I’d like to run some calculations on the Cori supercomputer at Berkeley. I know your need for discretion on this case though, Jameson. Willing to risk it?

  ABBY, JULY 25, 2015

  My boys sounded entirely too happy in California. Dennis was teaching both of them to ride the waves, driving every day to Huntington Beach Pier from his parents’ parched acre in Tustin, the concrete backyard and the spiny plants that scraped you if you came too close.

  Benjamin loved it so much, he didn’t want to come back. Not even Gianna could compete. He asked if he could live with his grandparents and go to Tustin High. “California is bullshit,” said Pete, on the other hand. “It’s a failed system. The air is totally fucked up, the beach is full of plastic garbage. Also Granny and Gramps do not have Wi-Fi, I mean, they have a cable modem, Ma. With a cord that you have to plug in.”

  “But enjoy the weather at least, sweetheart,” I said. “It’s so muggy here.”

  I missed my boys terribly.

  Mariah called, inviting me to the dwindling end of Long Island to meet her man. “It’s well past the middle of the summer,” she said. “Have you even seen the goddamn ocean, with all the excitement in your life? I think every artist needs to see the ocean at least once a quarter.” I could not think of a reason to say no.

  I was asleep on the train when I heard my name being called. “Excuse me, hi, Abby.”

  Dmitri Petamezas threw himself into the seat across the aisle from me and kicked his feet up on the armrest one row up. Acid green sneakers, bright orange laces. I complimented him on this bold footwear choice.

  “I collect them, I have forty-seven releases, I think.” He told me he was headed to his dad’s house in Bridgehampton, which was boring beyond reason, he said, though lately there were some cooler bars opening up.

  “You’re not old enough for bars though, are you?”

  He shrugged. “According to the Kentucky Motor Vehicle Commission, I am.” He grinned at me, charming as a chipmunk with his dark eyes and plump cheeks. “I’ve been chatting with Pete,” he said. “So they left you here, huh? California sounds good.”

  “I have to work.”

  “Wage slavery,” he said, shaking his head.

  I recalled him slurping cereal in our kitchen the morning of the fire. The smell of chlorine in the house. I frowned at him. “So how do your parents pay the rent, Dmitri?”

  “They’re entrepreneurs,” he said with a smile. “I’ve tried to tell them that they’re also in the path of the tsunami. They laugh.” His irises shone like black oil. “But this movement is unstoppable, by any of us, parents, kids, it doesn’t matter who is for or against it. It’s the coming moment. The current conditions are not sustainable. We must do what must be done.”

  “You may very well be right,” I said. I didn’t want to agree, I didn’t want to condescend. “Do those shoes glow in the dark?” I asked. The conductor rolled by us, yodeling about the Bridgehampton stop. He stood up and slipped his backpack straps over his shoulders. “Abby, think about this.” He braced himself against the seatback and looked down on me, still smiling. Beneath our feet, jolts and vibrations, the island sliding past us as we hurtled east. “What do you truly want for your sons. Envision another way. They don’t have to end up as rats trapped in a rigged maze. Like you. Like your husband Dennis Willard. Like both of you.” He flipped his bangs away and fixed me with those eyes, ancient and newborn at once. “Be bold, Abby. I saw you out there on Flatbush. You have rage in you. You can fight.” The train slowed, pulling into Bridgehampton station.

  He gave me a searching look. “Have you thought any more about us?” he said. “The Brigade?”

  “I have,” I said.

  “And?”

  “I guess I’m more with you than against.”

  He nodded, then raised a fist. He kept it high all the way down the aisle and off the train. Then I saw him standing on the platform, tapping into his phone, as the train continued along the island’s forked tongue.

  ABBY, JULY 26, 2015

  Hyde is the name of Mariah’s man. “I am a student of human anatomy, and your patellas are misaligned,” he told me, as I walked into the room in my bathing suit, sun-blasted from the long beach day. He’d completed most of a kinesiology degree. His long bare feet were brown, his hair in a disorderly braid. He was chopping mint and cucumber for the smoothie he swore was about to change my life.

  Mariah lay on a hammock hung just outside the open sliding doors, watching us with a beatific smile. “Every physical being is a book of runes for this man,” she said.

  Hyde looked up from his cucumber, perplexed.

  “R-U-N-E-S,” said Mariah. “Not ruins.”

  “Runes,” he said, nodding.

  “It’s a system of symbols,” she said. She looked blissfully happy, Mariah did, in cut-off jeans shorts and a bikini top, arms pillowing her head, there in the shade of her covered porch. She was curvy and soft-bellied and commanding as an odalisque.

  I stretched out on a sofa beneath one of Mariah’s paintings. A faint soft-edged slash, in a madder-lake red blended into ivory. “So how about Dennis,” I said. “Dennis in Vienna. At this stage of the game. Remarkable, right?”

  “Utterly,” she said. She lay on her side, facing me, a silhouette from this angle, a set of curved shapes against the blue swimming pool.

  “Were you behind that?” I asked.

  She sighed loudly. “Abby, his work speaks for itself. Always has. It was only a matter of time.” She disappeared into the soft crevasse of the striped hammock, voice floating to me. “But as for Viennarte, I may have put in the first word.”

  Hyde glided across the room holding a small tray aloft, balancing two spindle-stemmed wineglasses, brimming with green slush. He delivered one to each of us, a courtier paying tribute to a pair of queens.

  “You gave up on yourselves too easily,” Mariah’s voice drifted over to me. “Giant talents like you two, taking office jobs.”

  “We were broke,” I
said. “We had children.”

  She laughed. “You needed more patience and maybe better advocacy.”

  “So now Dennis has you as his . . . advocate?”

  “Hell yes,” she says. “And you do too.”

  “Yes, but only one of us just got invited to Viennarte. The one who is fucking you.”

  She laughed even more. “Abby, come on.”

  “What did she just say?” Hyde piped up.

  “She’s joking, doll.” Mariah sat up again and blinked at me, her face serious now. “What would I need to go and do that for? Look at this gorgeous specimen I’ve got here.”

  He smiled. “Thanks, babe.”

  I was sweating, my pulse pounding in my ears. “Tell me the truth,” I said. “Maybe I’m just envious of him. Or you. Or both. Tell me what I’m feeling is artistic envy, or if there’s something else going on.”

  She blinked those luminous eyes at me again, for a long moment. “Abigail,” she said at last. “Your day will come, I know it will. You are just beginning to rise.”

  I lifted my smoothie to my lips, now feeling deeply ashamed and ravenously thirsty. My face was burning, from the day of sun, from my embarrassment and anger, my shins felt abraded by sand, my heart sore.

  Who was she to assure me that my day will come?

  Who was I to hurl accusations about out-of-bounds fucking?

  I chugged the rest of the admittedly delicious smoothie then lay flat on the sofa and stared at the ceiling. I was surely the most confused person on the planet. Mariah passed by and kissed me on the top of my head as she padded off to shower.

  Later that night, Hyde insisted we should all go out for a nightcap at the Marlin. “Shit, is that place still there?” I said. We were already drunk, and we rode bicycles the five blocks to the town center, me teetering on a too-tall model, gears a bit rusty. Mariah and Hyde rolled ahead on matching Italian trail bikes. She tootled a bulbed horn, waking half the sleeping town, I’m sure. She must have drunk half a fifth of vodka in the past few hours, and this was a petite woman. Still she held her own, Mariah. She had practice, drinking with the men of the arts for decades now.