You Again

by Debra Jo Immergut

  For the better part of a year, she’d stared into the void, this interstitial space tucked beneath Abigail Willard’s cerebellum, the black triangle in the red sulcus. She’d long diagnosed these hallucinations—these apparitions—as symptoms of whatever irregularity was hidden inside that triangle. But doubt had begun to creep in. The incidents—the library, the bistro, the night at the beach. She looked again at the photos of the broken phone. The scan of a torn page bearing the psychologist’s scrawled name and number. The uncanny pen-and-ink likeness of Abigail Willard, unearthed via Leverett’s policework, hidden deep in the files of the renowned art school.

  She would fly to New York in a month and a day.

  She needed to write the report. But increasingly she felt unsure about what it should say.

  11/11/11/11

  ABBY, NOVEMBER 2, 2015

  A color has many faces, Josef Albers says. Our eyes and our brains work in tandem to create a color, and this hue changes depending on the colors that surround it. Without these interactions, the professor teaches, a color is as lifeless as a single musical note. The art is in the in-between.

  Dennis’s eyes, for example. A conversation between green, blue, and gold. Green sea, cerulean sky, and ochre sand.

  Color is personal. A point also made by Albers, a notion that, I now believe, has been a kind of controlling principle for my life. I return to this thought again and again, the idea that the infinitesimal body parts we use to see the world, our rods and cones, are as individual as our fingerprints. And these utterly singular seers send their impressions to our brains, which are even more singular, and there our universe is made. Therefore, it follows. No two people live in the same universe. My green is not your green.

  There in Dennis’s arms, on a long-gone afternoon by the bay outside of Providence, I perceived his eyes as the green of unknown waters, countless fathoms deep, yet infinitely infused with light.

  I swam in them toward my future.

  NEW YORK CITY IS, apparently, home to many minor royals, though some flew in from afar: Geneva, Turin, Garmisch-Partenkirchen. The extended family turned out in numbers, stolid and toothy. The men homely but impeccably groomed; the women, imposing in height despite stumpy low-heeled pumps, and done up in well-cut dresses and jackets pinned with fat jewels in whimsical settings: clusters of cabochon-emerald grapes, a daisy with a canary-diamond center big enough to choke a cat. There was a set of young princesses, mostly stuffed into short strapless frocks, and in them, I could see the boldness of Mariah, in their curves and silky curls and the knowing way they posed for the cameras, the cheeks prominent and pillowy, the odalisque smile. And yes, there were many cameras. Not surprisingly, given the violent and sensational nature of the death, it was a news event, MoMA opening its retrospective, assembled in the course of a hectic month, and accompanied by a luminary-packed memorial service, in tribute to the late and very lamented Mariah Glücksburg.

  I wore black. A sleeveless sheath I’d had for so many years—bought when I was her, in fact, with money from that first job, working under the execrable Michael Hutcherson, and having learned from Glamour magazine that a city girl needed a classic black dress. I hadn’t worn it since long before the new millennium—it had become too tight, reminded me of what I didn’t love about my changing body, and it had been pushed farther and farther back along the pole that ran the length of my jammed closet until it was lost to me. But, searching for something to cover me in this unimaginable moment, I dug. And found it again. And it seemed fitting, the black. An echo of Mariah, in her final party garb, and appropriate of course for mourning her. I slipped it on and discovered that it hung with a degree of looseness. But wasn’t it true that I couldn’t quite recall the last time I’d really eaten a meal? Over the past year, my appetite had dwindled. Lately, it had vanished. Looking in the mirror, I wondered if I looked haggard or chic.

  Dennis dressed in silence beside me. A sober charcoal suit, the bolo tie, and a pair of Vans, surfer shoes. Yes, absolutely. Let him show his personal flair. I no longer felt I had a right to an opinion about such things.

  Our marriage seemed to have entered a different phase. Call it an afterlife. We had explored the outlines of our devotion to each other and our desire to be free. Neither of us cared to define the full extent of the other’s adventures. We would let the edges remain indistinct, softened by a layer of cool quiet, like snow. In the end, here we still were. And so we dressed without talking, the unthinking dance as we moved around the unmade bed, maneuvered together and apart in a space that had always been a little too small.

  IT WAS THE ROYALS, I guess, that drew the crush outside of the museum, the sensational nature of her death, and yes, Mariah did count a few neon-bright names, hitmakers of music and movies, among her friends and collectors. Dennis and I were absorbed into the slow-moving crowd pressing toward the security checkpoint. Bomb threats had been called in. For weeks, speculation had been careening between two theories: that she’d been targeted by a terror group, perhaps with a grudge over Greek nationalism; or that it was simply an art heist, carried out with indifference or carelessness re human life.

  The detective hadn’t been in touch. Neither had Pizziali. I wondered about it, whether they were locked in some kind of battle over the case, or stalemate. Whether my name was attached, or Pete’s, or whether the focus had shifted completely to the Petimezas clan.

  Dennis must have had the same subject in mind. As we waited in the pack outside the doors, he scanned the street. “They wouldn’t risk turning up here, would they?”

  “No, they must be laying low,” I said. The crowd pressed us forward, toward the revolving glass doors. We were launched into the bright interior, and it took my breath away, to see all of her work there, many of the pieces I had so recently touched, propping them on her chairs and sofas. Now they were suspended in these great stark halls, where the most blessed fragments of manipulated matter are allowed to linger after the hands that worked them cease to exist.

  Dennis and I roamed together, for a while. Then we lost each other. I’m sure he felt as I did, faced at every turn with her creations, the blinding whites, the soul-scouring spirals. Overcome. Dazed. Grief stricken.

  Toward the end of the exhibition, I found myself in a smaller room. Dedicated to her personal art collection.

  A Matisse cutout. A collage by Josef Albers.

  And next to those, a small still life. Two grapefruit, one tenderly rendered yellow orb, one halved to show raw glistening pink.

  Painted in Professor Bremer’s holy classroom. Hung that frosty, flurried night at Broder and Wilcox. Sold to an anonymous collector. Never seen again.

  Till now.

  And next to that: The green of the trees, the gold light on the bay. A flash of orange in the green.

  The museum and the massed mourners vanished.

  The whisper of the brush on the canvas. The outrushing tide of water. The feel of the grass and the sun and his skin on my skin.

  I gaze at the painting, and the painting seems to gaze back.

  Did that gaze hold some foreknowledge?

  Crowds milling and murmuring behind me. And then Dennis, next to me.

  I turn from the painting. To his eyes, green and blue and gold. Grass and ocean, sun and sky. Paint and flesh. The envisioned and the real. The past and the present.

  I reached for him. Our arms knew where to fall, my cheek knew where to rest on his shoulder, our bodies like the plates of the continents, shaped by time to fit just where they needed to be.

  Through the crowded rooms, up the escalator, I guided him to One.

  I searched for the spot, to show him. The missing place. The void.

  But it was gone—patched at some point over the last two decades by the museum’s skillful restorers. Of course it had been. The act erased. The outcome changed.

  Though not entirely. The silver box was in my evening bag. I carried it everywhere now. I opened it to show him.

  He poked the
flake of pigment with his finger. He turned to the painting, to the spot, then back to peer into my face, scrutinizing.

  I inhaled, filled my lungs full of air, then said, “I have seen myself do so many things. I mean, I have this girl in my life, and she is me.”

  “A girl?”

  “Me.”

  He put his hand to my forehead. “You’re sweaty. You look very pale.”

  “Me, I mean, me.” Behind him, I saw the Pollock dissolving, its tendrils of paint unraveling and drifting away into the air.

  “I’ve got to get you out of here,” he said.

  I closed my fist around that little box.

  ABBY, NOVEMBER 20, 2015

  My three men rotated through my bedroom, to frown at me with befuddlement and offer a glass of water or a peanut butter sandwich. I passed hours in the room, somehow unable to rise. I wrestled the covers on and off and called in sick to work. “Bethanne can fill in, she will kick ass,” Esther Muncie said, a bit cruelly, I thought. “I’ll be in Monday,” I said. Dennis held down the fort. I alternately slept and sketched the view out the window with a graphite stick, drawing over and over the trees with a few last brown leaves, the fire escapes and balconies on the five-story apartment buildings that lined the block behind our house.

  Change the outcome. The phrase wouldn’t leave me.

  The final MRI results came in a call from Dr. Alvarado. “Clean,” she said. “I showed it to four excellent pairs of eyes, and only one of them could see anything, just a blip, but I see nothing, so I say this is not something.”

  “Clean,” said Dennis, sitting by me on the bed. “A good Thanksgiving gift. And no explanation for what’s going on with you. But still, this is good news.”

  Thanksgiving, less than a week away. The holiday of Eli’s end. The day after the feast day in 1991, the day after the first and only time I was able to show Eli where I’d begun my life, and to meet my parents. That was when we’d gone over the edge.

  I could recall maples forming a bare brown net across on the cement sky. But that’s just what anyone’s memory would fill in, if they had ever spent a November afternoon in Hartsfield, Massachusetts. Winter seemed to arrive that very day, as we walked from the train station with our overnight bags, past the white wooden triple deckers and squat cape cottages, the steepled church and the brick municipal hall. At the foot of Prospect Street, we passed my parents’ yarn-and-fabric shop, where they taught me to sort and shelve the skeins and bolts by complementary and analogous colors, and next to it, the little granite library where I’d paged through the first art books I’d ever seen, black-and-white reproductions mostly. So many afternoons, my parents busy trying to make ends meet with the sluggish business at their store, I came there to puzzle over the naked gods and goddesses, the confounding moderns. What I saw in those library books seemed to flow through my eyes directly into my hands, animating them in an almost disembodied way, moving me to push the books aside and spill out, on small squares of scratch paper I swiped from atop the card catalog, my own clumsy imitations.

  The Thanksgiving dinner was modest, a mostly brown meal in the kitchen of the old Colonial on the outskirts of downtown. My parents were taken aback by Eli. “Is that safe?” my mother kept asking, as he talked about the photo work he’d been doing and all he hoped to do in Europe and Africa and the Middle East. She kept casting worried glances at me, while my father just set his lips tight, nodding grimly in an effort not to be rude, and appearing angrier and angrier as the meal dragged on.

  As we settled into the seat on a city-bound train the next morning, Eli stared out the window for a while, then turned to me and said, Do you think they liked me? I planted a kiss on his lips and told him I didn’t care. He opened the newspaper he’d bought in the station. Shit, the Balkans are really on the boil, he said. He spent the rest of the ride begging and cajoling me to go there with him, to leave right away.

  I didn’t know what to say or do. I did know that lately I’d found it very difficult to find the focus to finish my portfolio for the RISD application. The deadline was nearing. November 29.

  ABBY, NOVEMBER 23, 2015

  The evening of Dr. Alvarado’s call, I decided to rise from bed. I stood on wobbly legs, made a halting descent of the stairs. The boys had already eaten dinner, but Dennis presented me with a bowl of what was left: the macaroni and cheese from the box, speckled with frozen peas. I ate thinking about the memories awakened in the tube, degraded images restored by the imaging machine.

  I called Dr. Merle. “My brain seems healthy but my mind still does not,” I said.

  “I have been quite indisposed,” she croaked. “But I will see you, Abigail. Because your case is singular.”

  “Should I be flattered?” I laughed.

  “Yes, you are a once in a lifetime case. Or perhaps not.” She emitted a sharp, long, dry cackle. “So, I will see you day after tomorrow. Three p.m. sharp.”

  But today when I arrived, the building was eerily quiet. Through the glass door of the hair salon, I saw an abandoned mop angled across the trash-strewn floor, a few hanging wires, crooked hooks where mirrors had been removed from the wall.

  The hallway outside of Dr. Merle’s office was even darker. I tried the knob but the door was locked. I peered through the little window alongside the door. Papers had been scattered, covering most of the rug. File drawers tilted open, spilling folders.

  I stepped back, bewildered. Then: a bit of paper taped over the mailbox hung by the door frame. The scrawled notation. Postal carrier: return mail to sender. Dr. Merle Unzicker deceased 11.22.15.

  ABBY, NOVEMBER 26, 2015

  Pete set a lovely table. The old things we once used, those history-encrusted tidbits—crumbly paste-china plates passed down from my grandmother, the little handprint turkey place cards Ben had made in kindergarten—they’d disappeared in the fire. But we had a set of new white dishes and shiny new glasses and cutlery, paid for with insurance cash. For a centerpiece, Pete constructed a cornucopia out of aluminum foil, and filled it with weedy bits from the backyard, leaves and grass and a couple of apples from the fridge. This touched me deeply. My boys had never been crafty. Benjamin and Gianna proudly paraded back and forth to the table, bearing the turkey, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, and a gigantic salad dressed in sunflower oil and coconut vinegar.

  Our children had reached sufficient age to understand that Mom and Dad were barely functioning. They stepped up. A most heartening turn, a true consolation, for a parent.

  Wowza observed us from atop the chipped marble mantel, tail undulating slowly, a twist of smoke.

  “I would like to propose a toast,” said Pete. We all fell silent. It was very, very rare for him to call for an audience. “Here’s to Mariah.” He raised his glass toward Dennis and me.

  Then he reached into his front pocket and tossed a fat roll of cash, size of a baseball, bundled in a rubber band, onto the table. It rolled around and settled right in front of me.

  “That’s yours, Ma,” he said.

  It was Dmitri who suggested that Pete might try to sneak a painting out of the chaos of our home’s reconstruction. He’d heard that one of my pieces had sold for over two grand at a school auction. Dmitri had planted the seed of this idea, and said his brother could probably find a buyer, and Pete had acted on the suggestion the day the detective dropped by the house. But Pete, rattled by the bouquet-bearing police officer, guilt-ridden at having pinched his own mother’s artwork, bumped into Mariah when he arrived back at the carriage house, the painting under his arm. She was stirring milk into her coffee in the kitchen. “What’ve you got there?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “It’s my mom’s. She said sell it and give the money to a good cause.”

  “Isn’t that just like your mom,” she said. She licked her spoon thoughtfully. “So how much do you want for it?”

  He asked for two grand. She gently admonished him for underselling his mother’s work, and gave him twenty grand instead. Since it was fo
r a good cause.

  If not for Mariah, the green field by the bay would be hanging in some mobster’s house in Athens. If not for her, the grapefruits would’ve burned up in the fire, like all my other work.

  I contemplated the roll of cash resting by my plate. The outermost bill was a thousand-dollar note. My gaze seemed to penetrate the layers, to see them all at once and the deeper truth this layered bundle contained at its heart. All of life is like this. Love too. Comprised of layers. The layers are mutable, and the layers can be seen all at once, if regarded with open-enough eyes and mind.

  Dennis raised his glass. His eyes were brimming and bleared. “To Mariah,” he said. We all raised our glasses. “To Mariah,” we said.

  ABBY, NOVEMBER 29, 2015

  Please let me record this last before I leave this earth. I’m fairly sure I’m already half gone.

  They said the scans were clean, but for several days the headaches worsened again, the tightening and the throbbing, the wooziness. To Muncie’s dismay, I called to extend my sick leave, but what could I do? I was definitely unwell. Through the afternoons and into early evenings I was lost in dreams, sometimes nightmares, sleeping away the hours. Dark was falling, inside and out.

  This evening, after hours of half sleep, I saw a figure at the door to my bedroom, framed there as if projected on a screen, flickering in black and gray and white like a figure in a grainy old movie.

  It was Eli. The restless attenuated silhouette, haloed in light from the hallway, one hand tracing the edge of the door’s molded trim.

  “I thought maybe you could fund your painting for a while,” he said. “With that money.”

  Of course. This was my Pete, lingering there. None other. Of course. “Why didn’t you give that cash to Dmitri?”

  “I didn’t trust him,” he shrugged. He sat down on the edge of the bed. “But really. I want you to do what you were meant to do,” he said. “Plus, you can use whatever savings you’ve been banking for my college tuition. No more school. I want to be out in the world.”