The Fixer: New Wave Newsroom

by Jenny Holiday

  After a few minutes of companionable silence, she said, “Do I have to be quiet to, like, respect your artistic process or something?”

  I was tempted to say yes because I could tell just from looking at her that being quiet was torturing her, and I could extrapolate that if I let her speak, she would somehow have accumulated an hour’s worth of things to say in the five minutes of silence that had elapsed. But I went for the truth. I owed her that, didn’t I, for spending a gorgeous Saturday morning inside posing for me? “Nah. I can pretty much paint or draw through anything. Growing up, my house was very…” I trailed off, trying to think how to put it, how to explain that I used to hide in my room while my parents shrieked and threw things at each other. “Loud,” I finally said. “Once I painted through an auction.”

  “Like, with an auctioneer and everything? Going once, going twice?”

  I nodded. “It wasn’t like on TV, though. It was a lot more orderly than you’d expect.”

  “Did you buy anything?”

  I shook my head. “Nope. It was our stuff that was being auctioned—our house had been foreclosed.” I didn’t look at her as I said that, just fiddled with the pastels to try to get her skin tone right. I wanted to tell her something true, but I didn’t want to see the pity I knew would be in her eyes. “So I just set up an easel in the yard and tried to paint the house. I don’t know why. I never had any particular attachment to it.”

  “Kind of like you don’t have any attachment to the art building.”

  That did make me look up. I didn’t see any pity. She was just sitting there with her head cocked, teasing me.

  I shrugged. “Buildings, houses—they’re just bricks and mortar. Why get all fussed about them? They’re all ultimately going to be dust anyway.”

  “Well, so are people, if you want to get technical about it.”

  I shrugged again, letting her fill in the blanks. Even I could see that outright saying I didn’t care about people any more than I cared about buildings just made me sound like a jerk. “Why do you care so much?”

  “I guess I just want to leave my mark on this school.” She scowled. “Well, that’s not totally true. I mean, it is true, but also, I’m planning to—”

  “Not the art building,” I interrupted. “Why do you care so much about everything?”

  She inhaled. Not quite a gasp, but a sharp intake of breath I thought might signal that I’d hit on a truth she wasn’t completely comfortable with.

  “Isn’t it better to care too much than not to care at all?” Her voice was low, almost a whisper.

  “Probably.” She was certainly a better person than I was—no argument there. “But that doesn’t answer my question.”

  To my utter shock, her eyes filled with tears. I wasn’t quite sure what was happening, why what I’d thought was an innocent question had spawned tears. “Oh, hey, don’t cry, Rainbow Brite. I’m a jerk. Just ignore me.”

  She did what I asked, looking down at her hands and fiddling with her nails. Her coral nail polish from the other night was chipped and she started to peel it off one of her fingers. It made me realize that I didn’t actually want her to ignore me, God help me. “I think it’s cool that you care about things—and people. ”

  She was still playing with her nails, and she remained silent for a long time. When she finally spoke, she’d raised her voice from its previous whisper, and it startled me a little. So did what she said: “I can’t fix my father, so I try to fix everything else.” She still wasn’t looking at me, but I could see a single tear begin its journey down her cheek.

  I kept drawing.

  “I never thought about it like that until just now, but I’m pretty sure that’s the truth.” She moved from her nails to her skirt, fiddling with the ruffle. “I’m terrified my father is actually going to kill himself one day, and I’ll be alone. So I guess I have to care about everything else so that when that happens, I’ll have…something.”

  I had heard her reference her mother’s grave over the phone the other night. “No siblings?”

  She shook her head, wiping her eyes with her fingers.

  “Has your father always…had problems?”

  She cleared her throat. “I think so. When my mom was alive, I didn’t pay too much attention, to be honest. He definitely had down periods where he slept a lot, and my mom always told me not to bother him. But then my mom got sick—breast cancer—and I sort of…”

  “Took over.”

  I could see it. Functionally speaking, she was her dad’s parent. Just like she went around trying to look after everyone and everything at Allenhurst.

  “The worst part is that if anything does happen to him, it will be my fault.”

  Geez. Who knew that sunny Rainbow Brite had been carrying such a burden around all this time? “How do you figure that?”

  “I knew my dad was sick. So why did I decide to come to a school that was three thousand miles away? What kind of sense does that make?”

  “You deserve to have a life, Jenny. Your own life. You can’t be responsible for him. Maybe some subconscious part of you understood that and ran away.” It wasn’t that different from what I’d done, really, though my escape to Allenhurst College had been fully premeditated. It was what I’d been working toward every minute of every day from the time I was old enough to understand that college could be my ticket out of my town. My ticket out of my family. My ticket to becoming an artist, something I wanted so badly I could scarcely allow myself to think about it.

  She smiled through her tears. “It still sounds so weird when you call me Jenny.”

  Jenny

  Matthew worked on the drawing for a good three hours. It was a strange feeling to have someone looking at me so intensely. And of course it wasn’t just that he was looking at my body, but that he’d somehow, with a simple series of questions, unearthed an elemental truth about me that I had never confronted before—that I was always running around trying to fix things because I couldn’t fix my dad. That much scrutiny was strange, but I’d agreed to be his model, so all I could do was sit and try not to fidget under his appraisal.

  But he put me at ease, which was kind of incredible when you considered that a couple weeks ago, he was basically a snarling mute. After the heaviness of our initial conversation, we talked easily. He told me a little about the town he was from, but I noticed he avoided any details relating to his parents—though I had learned that he had a much older sister who left home when she was sixteen and he was eight. But mostly we just talked about mundane things. I had a million questions about his family, his plans after graduation, and all that, but it didn’t seem appropriate to ask them while he was working.

  I had just started to wonder how I could delicately ask him if we could pause for a bathroom break when he stood and stretched.

  “A break?” I asked, hopping up from my stool.

  “Nope. All done.”

  “Oh!” I had no idea how long these things were supposed to take. “Can I see?” I started toward him, but he froze and his eyes darted around like he was a caged animal. “It’s okay,” I said, taking a step back. “You don’t have to show me.” But damn, I wished he would.

  “No. It’s okay. Come take a look.” He pressed his lips together and beckoned me over. “It’s just that it’s always kind of weird to show your stuff to someone, and I’ve never actually done a portrait like this before.”

  “You’ve never done a portrait?” It was hard to believe.

  “Well, sure, we’ve had models in class and stuff. But this is the first time I’ve drawn someone I actually…”

  “Know?” I supplied.

  “Like,” he corrected, just as I stepped around to the front of the easel and caught my first glimpse.

  My jaw dropped. It literally dropped.

  He had drawn me not once, but twice. In each likeness, I was depicted from the waist up. On the left, I was crying a little—my eyes were all watery, and there was one tear on my cheek. I was s
taring into space wistfully, like I was thinking about something far away. Someone, rather, because I recognized the moment, even though I had experienced it from the inside and had not been able to observe myself in it as he had. It had been when he’d plucked out the truth about my fears about my father and my guilt over leaving him.

  The second image, even though it was me, in the same dress, was the polar opposite of the first. I was looking right at the “camera” and cracking up. My huge grin exposed my teeth, and my eyes looked…happy. It seemed an anemic word to describe what I was seeing, but it was the best I could come up with. I tried to think when this moment had been, but unlike with the other image, I couldn’t pinpoint this one. I realized that there had been several times something he’d said had made me laugh.

  And…whoa. Hang on a second.

  Matthew liked me?

  “You hungry?” he asked as he stood at a sink at the far end of the room, washing his hands. I had to struggle to make sense of what he was saying, because my brain was still busy exploding. “Because I’m starving. What do you say we hit the A-Hole?” he said, using the Allenhurst Tap Room’s more common nickname. “I can use my vast insider knowledge to steer you toward the least awful items on the menu.”

  “I should swing by my room and change first,” I said, amazed that my voice came out sounding calm.

  “Nah.” He wiped his hands on a towel and looked me up and down. It was hard not to squirm. “You look great.”

  * * *

  Ten minutes later we were ensconced at a table at the infamously grungy Allenhurst Tap Room, sipping pints of beer and eating mozzarella sticks. I had gotten some weird looks from the other patrons, what with my formal dress, but I’d taken my cue from Matthew, who seemed totally oblivious, and acted like everything was normal. “These are shockingly good,” I said, laughing as a gooey mozzarella string extended from my mouth to the uneaten half of the stick I’d bitten into.

  “Yeah, it’s hard to mess up fried cheese,” he said.

  It being a Saturday afternoon toward the end of the term, the pub was crowded, so we had to lean close to make ourselves heard. He smelled like turpentine, which wasn’t a surprise given that he was an artist. But the fact that I found it so irresistible kind of was.

  “You do what you can back there,” he said, nodding at the kitchen. “But given the quality of the ingredients, that’s only so much. But cheese, even cheap cheese, is pretty reliable.”

  “You’re quite the connoisseur,” I said. The Hefeweizen he’d steered me toward, suggesting its lightness as a good foil for the rich cheese, was a perfect match for the mozzarella. “Have you worked here your whole time at Allenhurst?”

  “Yup. And I am not going to miss it at all.”

  “What are you going to do after you graduate?” I almost didn’t ask the question I’d been wondering about for so long. Things had become so easy between us, and it seemed like the type of question that might scare him off.

  “What are you going to do?” he countered.

  “Move to New York and get a job in journalism,” I said. “Then after a year or two, I’m going to apply to Columbia for a master’s in journalism.” It had always been the plan. It was the one thing in life I could count on.

  When he didn’t say anything in response, I decided to push him further. (I’m a masochist, apparently.) “You ever think about New York? Isn’t that the center of the art world?”

  He was shredding a napkin. “Yeah. But I’m not sure you get to just be an artist.”

  “Well, you already are one.”

  He looked up, surprise written across his face.

  “You are,” I protested. “That might be quite apart from your ability to make money from it, but I have no doubt that you are an artist of the finest ilk.” It was the truth, and there was something about Matthew that kept making me want to tell him the truth.

  “It’s the money part that’s the problem. If I’m just going to end up flipping burgers, why do it in New York, where everything is so expensive? I’m going to Boston. It’s cheaper, and there will be no moving expenses—just me and my shit on the bus.”

  “Can’t you do something related to art to make money? Like work at a museum, or—oh! Oh!” I had the perfect idea. I didn’t know why I’d never thought of it before. “What about editorial cartooning?” He started to protest, so I just plowed on. “Seriously. Your graffiti is all about politics.”

  “Shh,” he cautioned sharply, looking around. I felt bad—I’d been getting excited, and my voice had risen. “That’s not art, though.”

  “Are you kidding me?” I wasn’t much of an art person, but I searched my mind for an example of a politically minded artist. “Diego Rivera!” I cried triumphantly. “Are you telling me his stuff wasn’t art?”

  Matthew rolled his eyes. “You did not just compare me to Diego Rivera.”

  “All I’m saying is, you clearly have something to say. So why not editorial cartooning as a way to make money?”

  “So I should just knock on the door of the New York Times and tell them I’m ready to go?”

  There was a hint of his old snarling tone. I didn’t like it. So I shot him a withering glance as I said, “No. I would think the first step would be to build a portfolio.” When he didn’t answer, I softened a bit and added, “It’s too bad you don’t have any ins with newspaper editors.”

  Matthew

  Apparently I’d drunk the rainbow-flavored Kool-Aid, because half an hour later, watching Jenny trot back to the table from a trip to the restroom, I was preparing to capitulate to her demand that I submit a cartoon for next week’s Allenhurst Examiner. I’d resisted as long as I could, but, as she had so vehemently pointed out, I owed her for sitting for that portrait. As she walked, bouncing along in her bright white Keds, the skirt of her electric-blue formal puffing up a little, I could feel the last shred of my willpower evaporating. I was pretty sure Curry was going to love my portraits of her. And though I would never admit it out loud, she kind of had a point about cartooning. It had never occurred to me as a possible job path, but what could it hurt to have a bit of practical art experience on my résumé? Even if I had to get some shit job to pay the bills, wasn’t it a good idea to actively be adding to my portfolio at the same time?

  Just as she arrived back at our table, a girl I didn’t recognize did too.

  “Nessa!” said Jenny, smiling. Ah, so this was the roommate. Warily, I looked around, only half paying attention to Jenny’s introduction. If the roommate was here, it was possible that Royce wasn’t far behind.

  I’d been looking out into the bar proper, but he approached from the hallway behind us, where the restrooms were. And he wasn’t alone. There were two other preppy types with him, complete with letter jackets and frosted blond hair.

  “Art Boy.”

  I shot him a look. It wasn’t like he was going to do anything in public, but I knew his type. I had punched him. Jenny had refused him. He would never let these slights go. Plus he was slurring a bit.

  “Cat got your tongue, fag?”

  “Don’t use that language around me, Royce,” Jenny said with a coolness I suspected was manufactured.

  “What? ‘Fag’? Would you prefer ‘cocksucker’?”

  The Neanderthals laughed, and Jenny’s roommate gasped. “Royce!” she whisper-admonished, taking his arm.

  He shrugged her off like she was an insect and let his gaze settle on Jenny. Silently, he took in the dress, which was, of course, wildly out of place in the casual pub, where acid-washed denim ruled the day. I wasn’t looking to start anything, but I knew without a doubt that if he insulted the dress that Jenny so loved, I was going to punch him again. And I wouldn’t stop at one this time.

  “I’m just calling it like I see it,” Royce said to Jenny’s roommate. “If you couldn’t tell from his pansy-assed long hair and artistic ways, we know it’s true because this frigid chick”—he turned back to Jenny, leering—“wouldn’t let a real man anywher
e near her. Ergo, Art Boy is a fag.”

  “Ergo,” I drawled. “Wow. Big word for you, Royce.” This couldn’t possibly end well. I didn’t know how to defuse the situation, but I wasn’t about to cower before Royce fucking Waldorf. “Bigots don’t usually come equipped with such impressive vocabulary skills.”

  He took a step closer, a vein on his temple bulging.

  “Is there a problem here?”

  Never had I been more grateful to hear that voice. It was the pub’s night manager, Brian. Though Brian was usually riding me about bussing tables faster or not letting the kegs sit empty, he was basically a stand-up guy.

  “I hope not,” I said. “My friend and I are just trying to enjoy a drink.”

  Brian turned to Royce, eyebrows raised. “Can I help you find a table?”

  The intervention worked. After a few beats of tension-laden silence, Royce snarled and stalked away. Jenny’s roommate, the last to follow, stood staring at Jenny for a few seconds. She looked like she wanted to say something, but Jenny wasn’t cutting her any slack. She just stared back, her eyes hard. Good for her. If this Nessa chick was going to choose Royce over Jenny, the correct response, if you asked me, was good riddance.

  But of course Jenny didn’t ask me; she just looked up at me once her friend was gone, those huge brown eyes filling with moisture. “How could she just stand there and listen to him talk to me like that? To both of us?”

  I shook my head, not sure what to say. For someone with a dead mom and a messed-up dad, she was amazingly innocent in some ways. How did you tell someone like Jenny that it’s better to expect the world to fuck you over because that way you’re not disappointed when it does?

  “How am I going to face her back at the room tonight?” Her voice was small, and I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it at all. Small didn’t suit her.

  “Will she stay with Royce?” I asked. Not that I wanted to subject anyone—even the thoughtless, self-absorbed Nessa—to Royce. But for Jenny’s sake, it would be better if her roommate just didn’t come home tonight.