by Gail Bowen
Colin nodded. He was hearing the message of the crocuses, but Charlie was dubious. He was a resolute child, and he kept grinding the side of his head into the ground. If he didn’t hear the crocuses, at least he’d been given permission to burrow in the mud.
Madeleine held out her arms. “Demeter was so happy she began to dance, and she made a cape out of white crocuses to give to her daughter when she returned.”
It was an idyllic ending to an idyllic afternoon, but the afternoon wasn’t over. The twins discovered that flattening out on a hill was fun and rolling around until they found a mud puddle was even more fun. As we trooped home, the boys were very dirty, very happy and very weary. When we reached the porch, Maisie and I stripped the twins down and, despite their protests, led them to the showers.
I took Charlie into the boys’ bathroom and Maisie took Colin into hers. None of my children had curly hair, and I was impressed by the tenacity with which Charlie’s beautiful copper curls gripped mud. He was eel-slippery, and by the time his curls were squeaky clean, I was soaked to the skin. When Maisie and Colin arrived in the nursery, she held out a robe for me. “I’ll put your wet clothes in the dryer. I wish we were the same size, but since we’re not, dry and warm is the best we can manage.”
“Dry and warm is fine,” I said. We helped Charlie and Colin into pyjamas and then, as was their pre-nap ritual, we carried them around their pretty lemon-yellow bedroom looking at the paintings Taylor had made of the heritage birds Maisie’s late sister, Lee, had cherished and Peter was now breeding. The stately beauty of the birds and the poetry of their names evoked another time: pink-billed Aylesbury ducks, Blue Andalusians, Ridley Bronze turkeys, Swedish Flower hens and scarlet-combed Langhams. The litany of the names lulled the boys, and by the time we tucked Colin and Charlie into their big boy beds, they were both half asleep.
“Mission accomplished,” I said.
“It’s always easier when it’s one-on-one,” Maisie said. “Now with Vince Treadgold around, that ratio will be come up more often. I was at Falconer Shreve yesterday, but Pete said the twins had a great time tagging along with Dr. Vince, as they call him. Charlie, Colin and Dr. Vince will be able to learn about farming together.”
“So you think Vince is here to stay?”
A shadow passed over Maisie’s face. “Nobody is ever here to stay.” She walked towards the wall where a portrait of her twin sister hung. Maisie had asked Taylor to paint it from a photograph taken of Lee when she was seven. Lee was lying in a field, looking up at the sky. Her copper curls were tousled; there was a smudge of dirt on her nose, and her smile revealed two gaps where her baby teeth were missing. The photo was of a girl in love with life, and Taylor had been reluctant to undertake the task because she wasn’t certain she could give Maisie what she needed, but Maisie had been reassuring. Taylor worked for almost a month on the piece. We all agreed that the finished work captured Lee’s spirit, but it was over a year before Maisie was able to take the painting home.
That afternoon, Maisie gazed at the painting for several minutes before she turned to face me. She was teary, and she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “I’m sorry, Jo. Every so often I just lose it.” I put my arm around her and she lay her head on my shoulder; it was an action we had both become familiar with after Lee’s death. Finally, Maisie straightened and looked into my face. “The life I’m living is the life Lee wanted. The farm, the comfortable house, the loving husband, the beautiful kids. Not a day goes by when I’m not overwhelmed by the knowledge that I am living the life my sister longed for and never experienced. And what’s worse, I’m not grateful. I want more. What’s the matter with me?”
“There’s nothing the matter with you. You’re strong, you’re smart, you have a huge capacity for love, and in the two years since you and Peter were married, you’ve faced an onslaught of changes that would have flattened most of us: Lee’s death. The twins’ birth. Renovating this house. Moving here from the city. Becoming an equity partner at Falconer Shreve and handling at least a half-dozen complex criminal cases — two of them high profile. And look in the mirror — you’re still standing.”
Maisie’s laugh was sardonic. “Barely,” she said. “I’m starting to wobble.”
“You’re exhausted,” I said. “I can help with that. You and Peter never had a honeymoon. I’ll be finished with Sisters and Strangers by June 11. Zack and I can take the twins, and you and Pete can go north to Jan Lake and have the honeymoon you planned. But that’s almost two months away. Short term, why don’t we arrange for a four-day weekend. We can come out here and stay with the twins. Zack loves the farm, and with Bobby Stevens’s help, Vince, Zack and I can handle the chores while you and Pete do something crazy like go to New York.”
Maisie tried a smile. “And see The SpongeBob Musical?”
“I hear it’s transcendent.”
“Pete and I might not be ready for transcendent yet,” Maisie said. “But the prospect of being alone together for a weekend at Lawyers’ Bay is very tempting.”
“The keys to the cottage are in my purse,” I said. “I’ll give them to you before we leave. And Maisie, I’m not taking the keys back until you and Pete have used them at least once.”
Chapter Eleven
Our first stop when we got back to the city was dropping Taylor off at the apartment over the Sahara Club. She and Kyle Daly were meeting there to check the progress his crew had made. The apartment was off-limits to the rest of us until the renovations were complete and Taylor could show Vale their first home together. Taylor’s emotions had always been too close to the surface to hide, and when she and Kyle came back in the early evening, she was bubbling, and Kyle looked pleased. The barter of professional services was clearly a success.
“I take it from your faces that the apartment is shaping up,” Zack said.
“Kyle and his crew are working miracles,” Taylor said. “It’s a beautiful space, and it’s starting to look like home — a very spiffy home — but still a place where Vale and I will be able to kick back and just be together.”
“Our guys are doing a great job,” Kyle said. He held up a DVD of Frida, the biopic of the relationship between Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, the acclaimed husband-and-wife Mexican artists and activists. “This is Taylor’s and my homework for the set decoration part of the bargain. Ainsley thought the ways in which Julie Taymor, the director of Frida, used images to communicate characters’ mood and the narrative’s messages to an audience might generate some ideas for us. Given your involvement with Sisters and Strangers, we thought if you didn’t have other plans, you might be up for a movie night.”
I had seen Frida when it was released. The film covered a period in the history of Mexico that seethed with unrest, and it was engrossing and visually stunning. People lived large, and Taymor had focused on passions, political and sexual, that flamed hot and dangerous and often ended in violence. It was a terrific movie by any standard, but I understood why Ainsley believed the film would be of special interest to Kyle and Taylor.
When she was eighteen, Kahlo had been severely injured in a trolley crash that shattered her back and punctured her body with a steel rod. She lived in constant pain, and Taymor had shown how the extravagant colours of Kahlo’s imagination enabled her to create art that allowed her to rise above her suffering.
Zack and I had no plans for the evening, so after Taylor made popcorn, we settled back with our drinks of choice and watched Frida. When the end credits ran, and I flicked on the lights, Zack stretched his arms and inhaled.
“That certainly packed a punch,” he said. He turned his chair to face me. “How do you think we would have fared if we’d followed Frida and Diego’s lead and promised to be ‘not faithful but loyal’?”
“About as well as Frida and Diego did,” I said. “But despite all the affairs, the battles, the divorce and the remarriage, their relationship lasted nineteen years.
They were fated to be together.”
Zack held out his arms to me. “Just like us.”
“Right.” I leaned in for a hug. “Two colossal talents and two colossal egos — just like us.”
Taylor and Kyle had both been struck by the way in which Taymor blended Frida’s experiences with images that revealed how the experience changed her life. Two images of the trolley accident stood out for all of us. In the first, a bluebird Kahlo is holding flies from her hand at the moment of impact; in the second, a container of gold flakes another passenger is holding spills over Kahlo’s bleeding body. When Kyle said he’d read that both images were rooted in incidents that occurred at the time of Kahlo’s accident, Taylor’s excitement was palpable. “That’s why the images are so powerful,” she said. “They’re proof of the ways magic touches our lives.”
The film had quickened my pulse too. I had always been attracted to Frida Kahlo’s art with its blend of realism and magic. I had never connected Kahlo’s work with Sally’s, but Sally’s painting Flying Blue Horses provided an example worth exploring.
To me, the parallels between the lives of Frida Kahlo and Sally Love were striking. Both women had many lovers, male and female; both lived dramatic, tempestuous lives, scarred by pain: Kahlo’s was physical; Sally’s was emotional. Sally never recovered from losing Des and believed until she died that the father she adored had committed suicide and tried to kill Nina and her. Both Kahlo and Sally found a way to channel their pain into art that was heartbreakingly intimate but resonated because the emotions their work evoked were universal. The connection between the two artists was another layer in understanding how Sally’s art revealed her, and that night as I slid into bed, I thought of Emily Dickinson’s poem “I Dwell in Possibility” and smiled.
* * *
The next morning after Zack left for Falconer Shreve and Taylor went out to her studio, I took my laptop to the kitchen, poured myself a second cup of coffee and looked up Frida Kahlo’s Henry Ford Hospital, 1932. In the painting Kahlo lies naked on a bed, her body and face twisted in agony. She has suffered a miscarriage and the sheet beneath her is soaked in blood. Six images float in the space around her, one is the image of a male fetus, the son she and Diego longed for. The juxtaposition of reality and fantasy makes the work difficult to look at but impossible to forget, and my mind turned to a painting of Sally’s that, despite my best efforts, had also left an indelible mark.
When Ben Bendure asked what Taylor and I wanted from Izaak Levin’s collection of art using Sally as a subject, we made our choices, and I suggested that Ben select his favourites and that he send the rest to our mutual friend, the art dealer Darrell Bell with the request that the self-portrait Sally had given Izaak Levin as a birthday gift be kept from public scrutiny. Sally had painted the piece I wanted kept private when Izaak told her that artists admitted to the American Academy in New York were required to give the academy a self-portrait, and that, as his student in his “Academy of One,” Sally should follow the tradition.
She was fourteen years old and he was forty, but they were already lovers. As her teacher, her agent and, periodically, her sexual partner, Izaak was part of Sally’s life until they died within minutes of one another at a banquet in Sally’s honour. When we were both in early middle age, Sally gave me a pithy description of her first years with Izaak Levin. “I painted and we went to galleries and we fucked, and that was my school of the arts.”
Izaak himself had shown me the self-portrait, and what it revealed about Sally’s assessment of herself at fourteen enraged and sickened me. It would have been easy to dismiss the picture because, at first glance, it seemed so stereotypical: a ’50s magazine ad for a soft drink or suntan lotion. A pretty girl wearing a halter top and shorts hugged one knee and extended the other leg along the hood of a yellow convertible — a glamorous pose, sex with a ponytail. But Sally had used colour to create light in an odd and disturbing way. The car glowed magically surreal — it was a car to take you anywhere — and the hot pink stucco of the motel behind the girl panted with lurid life. Sally herself was a cut-out, a conventional calendar girl without life or dimension, an object in someone else’s world of highways and clandestine sex.
Like Frida Kahlo, Sally had used the extravagant colours of her imagination to create art that allowed her to rise above her suffering. I had hoped that Taylor would never see her mother’s self-portrait. Now I knew that in order to do their best work, both Taylor and Vale, who had been cast as the young Sally Love, needed to see the painting.
Ben Bendure picked up on the first ring, and thrillingly, his musical bass was once again strong and filled with life.
“You sound terrific,” I said.
“I surprised myself and my doctor by healing quickly,” he said. “My doctor is within hailing distance of my age herself, so she’s a cheerleader for all her octogenarian patients.”
“Good for her, good for you and good for me, because I need you, Ben.”
“Anything specific or just in general?”
“Both,” I said. “But let’s take care of the specific first.”
When I told Ben about the connection I’d made between Frida Kahlo’s work and Sally’s, he was intrigued, and we had a ten-minute conversation about art and life, two subjects of which we never tired. Ben agreed that the self-portrait belonged with us, and he volunteered to call Darrell Bell and have him deliver the work the next time he came to Regina.
“Now that’s settled,” Ben said. As always when it was time to move on, Ben was brisk. “Tell me about this arrangement Taylor and Kyle Daly made to trade services. That kind of barter was common among people working in the arts when we were young and broke. So much has changed. It’s cheering to realize that artists still believe in fair exchange.”
“Kyle and Taylor certainly do,” I said. “Kyle’s a talented art director who needs someone who can replicate brilliant original paintings, and Taylor’s a gifted artist who needs someone to create the perfect apartment for her and Vale.”
Ben chuckled. “I gather your daughter and Vale Frazier have already decided on a future together.”
“They have,” I said. “It’s the first real romantic relationship for both of them, and they’re making thoughtful decisions about what comes next. Taylor says she and Vale will have demanding careers, so they want to use the months when Vale will be working on Sisters and Strangers here in Saskatchewan to build a firm foundation.”
“You and Zack have raised a wise child,” Ben said. “Taylor and Vale have extraordinary gifts. I’ve been a fan of Taylor’s work since I met her, and it’s been a privilege watching her art deepen and grow more daring as she finds her way. Vale is going to be intriguing to follow too. While I was recuperating, I watched the movie Butterflies twice just to see her performance. That young woman is the real deal.”
“So you believe Vale is a good choice for the role of Sally.”
“Better than good — inspired. Vale has that aura Sally had of radiating light cut through with sudden flashes of darkness.” He paused. “Vale has not had an easy life, has she?”
“No,” I said. “She hasn’t, but she is absolutely without self-pity. A friend once told me that the priest who prepared her for confirmation said, ‘Take what you want from life. Take what you want, but pay for it.’ The first time Vale spent the evening with Zack and me, I thought of those words. Vale has paid in hard coin for her success.”
“Sally did too,” Ben said, and I could hear the ache in his voice.
“Ben, when you’re feeling ready to travel, why don’t you come to Regina?” I said. “I’ve always wished we lived closer to each other, but I’m grateful we’re within easy driving distance. Anyway, all of us miss you, and you and Georgie Shepherd still haven’t met. Georgie and I are working on the script together, and we could use your insights.”
“That’s a tempting offer. I promise I’ll give it serious
consideration.”
“Please do,” I said. “Because Sisters and Strangers needs you, and I need you.”
* * *
The last time Ainsley paid me an unannounced visit had ended badly. She and I had made some progress since the day a year and a half earlier when she attempted to convince me that Vale Frazier’s version of her relationship with Gabe was not to be trusted, but there was still a chill between us. That morning when I opened the door and saw Ainsley dressed for travel in a turtleneck, longline cardigan and leggings, her face pale and drawn, my heart went out to her. The pain of carrying Roy’s ashes to their final resting place in the columbarium near the summer home he and his late husband shared was incalculable, and nothing I could say or do would lessen it.
When I invited Ainsley to come inside, she gestured to the taxi waiting on the street. “I’m on my way to the airport, but I wanted to leave something with you.” She reached into a soft pink leather tote, took out a large mailing envelope and handed it to me. “A few people are coming from New York for a farewell gathering, and I put together a memoir of Roy. I wanted you, Taylor and Zack to have a copy, and there’s a rough cut of The Happiest Girl in the envelope too. The narrative flow between scenes is choppy, the score is incomplete and some of the visual and sound effects need tinkering, but there’s enough there to give you an idea of the final product.” Her voice broke. “It’s going to be brilliant, Joanne — everything Roy wanted for it and more.”
“I know it will be,” I said. “And Ainsley, everyone working on Sisters and Strangers is determined to make the series what Roy believed it could be. Kyle and Taylor brought your DVD of Frida over to watch with Zack and me last night and seeing how Kahlo used the elements of magic realism in her work opened a vein of possibilities for Georgie and me to explore.”