I looked down thoughtfully at the patterns of circles the bottom of my glass had left on the cardboard Strongbow Cider coaster. “In five years . . . I want to be somewhere with my art. Really make a commitment to it, you know? Kind of like Josh with his writing . . . it’s silly, I guess, but it seems to be the one thing I’m kind of good at. And I want to get it out there in the world. Have these little pieces of me floating around out there, I don’t know, in people’s houses, and galleries, and coffee shops.”
“It’s not silly,” Josh said vehemently. “You know that. We’ve talked so much about this.”
He pulled me closer to him, really tight so that my lungs were squeezed. “Anyhow, in five years we’ll be married, huh,” he grinned. “With a couple little rugrats running around . . .”
I kissed him lightly. “You bet, big boy.” Everyone was laughing, good humor restored.
“Maybe,” I ventured, “In five years . . . or ten years . . . we’ll all meet again. Wouldn’t it be neat, to see each other again sometime. In some fabulous international location, of course.”
“Paris,” Trevor suggested, and Dov agreed.
“We’ll all meet at the Jardin des Tuileries,” Dov decided. “You two can bring the rugrats. Trevor will have a hot bank teller on his arm. I’ll still be a drunk pot-smoking loser, but I’ll fly there for free with all the frequent-flyer miles I’ll have from slaving away at international travel agencies for ten years, and I’ll get us all discounted hotel rooms.”
We clinked glasses. It would be time to leave soon. I miled sentimentally at all of them, grown-up boys on the verge of their real lives.
Chapter 10
Wednesday morning, I was waiting impatiently outside Blick Art Materials on Beverly Boulevard in Los Angeles ten minutes before it opened. The minute the doors were unlocked, I whirled through the aisles, restocking—stretched canvas, tubes of lovely creamy acrylic paint, palette paper, new bristle brushes. Acrylics instead of oils, because I was in too much of a hurry to wait for oil paint to dry. Acrylics instead of watercolor because the pastel, blurred hues of watercolor were not at all what I needed. I could hardly remember when I’d last felt such an intense need to put brush to canvas. Long before Lucy was born.
But today, I was burning, restless, awareness zigzagging through me in jagged arcs. I was so alert I could almost see colors that didn’t exist; everything around me pulsed with a bright energy that I could suddenly tune into. It was amazing, to feel so sharp, considering I’d slept just a few restless hours each night since Sunday.
Now that Josh was near, I had miraculously unfrozen. Thawed. I was becoming myself again. Finally, I knew the theme for the series I was going to paint, the one that would compose my artist’s portfolio. It would be called Incineration. Large canvases; thick, deep, dripping colors. Bodies rising phoenix-like from ashes. Forms writhing, twisting together, afire with passion or destruction. Great gouts of indian red, purple madder, venetian red, flung against the canvas with force, fading to rose madder on the edges, on a ground of dioxazine violet. Death. Conflagration. Rebirth. In which order, I wasn’t certain.
I set up my old travel easel in the kitchen so as not to stain the living room carpet. Unfolding the French easel was like a meditation—each wooden part pulling out, interlocking, tightening screws, shifting angles, until what was the small shape of a wooden backpack was suddenly a full-sized easel. Like those Transformer toys Alex played with when he was small—presto, from boring wooden box to instrument of inspiration. Opening the easel I inhaled whiffs of past painting sessions, each smell a memory—the lingering, acrid scent of turpentine; faint undertones of the easel’s wood; the musty, plastic-y smell of dried acrylic paint. Then, meditation over, not even bothering to take the time to coat the canvas with another layer of gesso, I began painting frantically, not wanting this feeling to end.
I’d never painted abstracts before, but I did now, till I had to pick up Lucy. I was ablaze, determined, filled with passion transmuted to brushstrokes on canvas. Thick, wild strokes that swirled, taunted, and danced. Each brushstroke was a release, yet it was like painting with my own blood. Parts of me splattering on the canvas, no longer the whole, self-contained person I was before—but fragmented, in pain, joyous but panicked at the same time. I couldn’t live the same life I had been, knowing he was out there. Josh was coming, and after Saturday, I could no longer be the same.
~ ~ ~
I was so distracted that afternoon when I picked up Lucy at Happy Hands preschool, I walked straight into Astrid as I shepherded Lucy out toward the car. I’d signed up to bring marshmallow Peeps to the class party on Friday. I even scrawled PEEPS on my hand with a leaky pen I found in my purse, so I wouldn’t forget. I couldn’t wait to get home and put Lucy down for a nap so I could finish that painting. It was like a jigsaw puzzle, or a crossword, where you’re almost at the end and just have a few pieces left, only a couple trivial words, and you’ve solved the puzzle. I was this close to being done, and nothing else mattered . . . ooof.
“Viv, look out! You’re a million miles away,” choked Astrid as I barreled into her.
“Sorry sweetie, you’re totally right. I didn’t see you at all. Listen . . . I’m painting again!” I exclaimed, glad to be able to blurt a tiny part of the truth to someone.
“Oh, good for you!” Astrid enveloped me in a warm hug. Lucy and Astrid’s son Mario had already run off to play together in the grassy enclosed area near the parking lot. “I’ve been waiting for this to happen. I knew you had it in you!” She pulled back and looked at me appraisingly, hands on my shoulders. “Look at you—you are on fire. Your aura’s totally pulsing, there’s orange everywhere!”
Astrid was the only real friend I’d made since Lucy was born. She lived a couple blocks away from me, and we’d run into each other so often at the preschool and at the tiny park at Curson and 8th Street, it was almost inevitable we’d become friends. With her wild nimbus of super-curly wheat-colored hair and her bird-like bone structure, paired with her almost six-foot height, she looked like a stretched-out pixie. Her plumber husband Fernando—large, solid, and very much of this world—grounded her, but not by much. She sometimes did psychic readings in her home and during the preschool’s annual carnival. Due to her utter sincerity, she was extremely successful selling products for Herbalife. She genuinely believed in her spiritual powers, and although I couldn’t say whether any of her predictions had actually come to pass, I couldn’t think of any that hadn’t, either. Cautiously, I reserved judgment.
All these traits hampered her desirability as a friend, even in loosey-goosey Los Angeles, which was a relief for me. The more people avoided her, the more I could keep her for myself. As I’d discovered in my eight years living here, it was very hard to find a niche here, and a group to belong to. The poverty-stricken, artsy types I’d hung with on occasion during my Kingsley apartment-dwelling days didn’t mesh with the life I led now, spouse of a reserved statistics professor, mother of a young child. We lived in different worlds—creativity, versus parenthood. Thank goodness for Astrid; she grounded me in both of them.
Plus, I had no idea how to deal with other mothers—I couldn’t figure out how my experience could mesh with theirs. The parents at Happy Hands preschool always seemed to be so busy and sure of themselves, the kind of people who would actually converse about how their kids were “growing up too fast.” The kind of people who could spend a perfectly nice afternoon at the park dissecting potty-training strategies with each other. I spent so many hours a day with Lucy—the last thing I wanted to talk about with other grown-ups was my child. That probably made me seem like I was some sort of half-assed parent, which wasn’t true. Most of the time.
With Astrid, I didn’t have to worry about all of that. She was some fusion of Julia Cameron and Sylvia Browne. She was self-actualization in action.
“Listen, I can tell you’ve got stuff on your mind. But you wanna meet at the park later?” Astrid offered.
I
jumped at the chance. “Sure, how about three o’clock? Lucy should be up and around by then.”
“Deal.”
I strapped Lucy into her car seat. She was singing tunelessly, over and over:
This little light of mine
I’m gonna let it shine
This little light of mine
I’m gonna let it shine
Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.
It was one of those catchy little preschool songs that lodges in your head and refuses to let go. By the time we got home, I was singing it to myself, hummed it all the way to Lucy’s room with her. “Mommy, are leprechauns real?” she asked. They’d learned about St. Patrick’s Day the week before.
“Well,” I answered carefully. “I’ve never seen one, but I’d like to think they’re real.”
“Like Santa Claus?”
“Sure, like Santa Claus, or the tooth fairy.”
“What if they aren’t? What if we hope they’re real, but they’re not?” Lucy’s face was woeful.
Never underestimate a kid. “We just have to believe in them, honey. And maybe if we believe hard enough, they stay real.” She let her breath out in a big relieved whoosh. “I’m gonna believe, all the time!”
“Me too.”
Once Lucy had maneuvered herself into her ill-fitting nightie, I lay down on the floor next to her, curling my body around her warm one for a moment, feeling her relax almost immediately into sleep.
Because she had once been a part of my body, I felt a strange connection to her, which was never more apparent than at the moment she fell asleep. It was as if my whole body was always on alert for her when she was awake, making sure she hadn’t hung herself accidentally from her doorknob with a jump rope, or closed herself up inside a dresser drawer, or any number of ridiculous fates only a parent could envision. But the moment she fell asleep, my body knew it. Asleep, no harm could come to her of her own making. My body would relax too, in tune with the soft, slow vibes emanating from her little body.
In a state of half awakeness, cuddling her close, I thought about money. Since the weekend news of Bear Stearns’ collapse, George kept obsessively checking his retirement funds in his Fidelity account, although, never a daredevil, he had everything invested in low-risk treasury bonds and CDs. I had no retirement funds and no personal savings to worry about. George was my retirement security; our joint checking account was my only means of spending power. Love kept me with George, but money bound me to him.
Still: that week, there was no status quo, anymore. I was hovering on the brink of some precipice. One little push, and it would be so easy to tumble over the edge. The force involved in pulling back from that brink seemed tremendous.
~ ~ ~
At three o’clock, after a snack of string cheese and goldfish crackers, Lucy and I traipsed across the street to the park. The developer of the adjoining business tower had likely been mandated to build that park; still, it had the basics any kid would want, in miniature. It featured, just a few feet of space, a seesaw, a slide, and three swings—all that a child with imagination really needed. Even better, a few yards away, there was a little pond, prettily landscaped, with a waterfall, rocks, and real fish and turtles.
Lucy and Mario immediately kicked off their shoes and began chasing each other around the park. They ran so freely, completely lacking inhibition or self-consciousness. Astrid was carrying 6-month-old Isabelle in a complicated-looked cloth sling. Various straps and latches kept the thing fastened, and only the soft sienna tufts of Isabelle’s furry head peeked out. I reflexively rubbed her hair as I would a pet’s.
“So, wow!” Astrid exclaimed heartily, pulling off her own shoes—she always wore footwear that was completely wrong for the occasion. Today’s strappy 4-inch gold lamé heels would have been better suited to a formal evening event. “You’re painting—I still can’t believe it.” She punched my arm affectionately, which hurt, rather. “Good for you.”
“Thanks,” I said modestly. “It feels good—like a dam opening, or something. I didn’t know I had so much bottled up inside.”
“Don’t we all,” Astrid murmured reflectively. I laughed at her. “Astrid, you’re the one person I know who has nothing to hide.”
“That’s because I work it all out, baby,” she grinned. “Between yoga, meditation, and this cranial-sacral therapy work I’ve been having done lately—I’ve got all the bases covered.”
“Your chakras must be totally aligned. Or something.” I agreed. Astrid had been trying, for years, to get me to read a book called The Psychic Pathway so I could open myself to the sixth dimension, but so far I’d resisted, out of pure fear that I’d discover uncomfortable truths about my own future. Or past, for that matter. I’d once been fascinated by tarot cards, and I still had some hiding in a drawer somewhere, but it had been years since I’d been tempted to do a reading.
Astrid was always completely open and honest with me. I wished I could be the same with her, but something was always holding me back. If only I could break free of those invisible tethers, just this once. I felt like I was lying to her, by not telling her what was really going on. My mouth opened; no sound came out, my lips burbling silently like a fish. Lucy raised an eyebrow. “Are you choking?” she asked politely.
“Stop it,” I protested. “Okay . . . It’s kind of weird. I just found out that this guy I used to know in London when I was in college—he’s this famous writer now. And it’s just, kind of, been on my mind . . . Lucy! Stop that right now!” Lucy was pouring a bucket of sand over Mario’s head. Contrite, she began swiping the sand out of his hair.
“Did you used to be in love with this guy?” Astrid guessed.
“Yeah . . .”
“It was one of those junior year abroad things, wasn’t it?”
“One of what things?”
“Oh—you know. You go to a different country and you expect to, like, have all these life-changing experiences. So you show up and if they don’t happen, you make them happen somehow—everyone’s there looking for some massive transformation, aren’t they? That’s why they all went so far away in the first place.”
I was beginning to squirm.
“So you have all these schools in all these European countries, just totally filled with horny exchange students who have taken enough philosophy classes to be able to declaim, like, existential theory to each other while fucking each other’s brains out,” Astrid continued. “And, you know, the kids are all in awe of those friggin’ old buildings they have there, and the fancy accents people have. All that history all around makes everything seem so important, right? So they go see Shakespeare plays or whatever, and then they fuck each other, and they’re convinced they’re in looooove.”
“You’re right,” I drooped. “One of those things. Yeah, I guess that’s what it was, then.”
“Great that he’s famous and stuff though!” Astrid chirped. Isabelle had started to wail midway through her speech, and Astrid performed some magic involving turning the baby sling in a perpendicular direction while simultaneously lifting her shirt and thrusting Isabelle onto her right breast. The baby, still snug in the sling, began slurping audibly.
“It makes it seem so stupid when you talk about it like that,” I muttered.
“Now—really! Don’t tell me you’ve still got a crush on him, after all this time!”
I should never have told her.
“Of course not. It’s just weird, that’s all. To see his name again. So what’s up with you? How’s the Herbalife stuff going?”
“I’m thinking about bailing, honestly. You want to know where the money really is? Pleasure parties. They’re like purse parties, but with vibrators. If you can get the hostess to serve some booze, the ladies will start laying out some serious cash. I’m going to get started organizing them on the west side. Here, I’ve got a sample. Wanna take a look in my purse?”
She jerked her head over to her voluminous shoulder bag, which was liberally encrusted
with faux rhinestones. I gingerly rooted around still-damp pacifiers, used Band-aids, and lost Cheerios till I found something large, thick, and rubbery. “It’s the Super Bunny!” Astrid enthused. “Just switch it on and feel that puppy go!” Indeed, turning the pastel monstrosity on practically electrified my arm. “If you want to buy one,” she lowered her voice confidentially, “I can get you a discount.”
“I’ll keep it in mind,” I returned tartly, as we followed Lucy and Mario to the pond. Lucy lay on the rocks and trailed her fingers in the water. Every time we came, she was determined to pet a fish, but the fish were too quick and too smart for her. She was convinced, though—one day she’d touch one of those elusive silvery beauties.
Eventually Astrid said, touching my shoulder, “You know, you’re so lucky to have George. You two are, like, the least dysfunctional couple I know.”
I squatted next to Lucy and spread my fingers in the water. They appeared to fracture in the eddying current. “What are you saying, Astrid?”
“Don’t screw it up,” she said gently. “It isn’t worth it.”
“It’s not that simple,” I said.
She knelt next to me and rubbed my shoulder. “Honestly, it’s simpler than you think.”
Fortuitously, Mario slipped in the water and cut his knee on a rock. So Astrid rushed home with a wailing Mario and Isabelle as I watched my fingers trailing helplessly through the water, making wider and wider circles, crazed patterns that didn’t make sense. The play date was over, but Lucy wouldn’t leave the park. She threw herself on the ground, kicking her feet, yelling “I won’t go! I wanna stay!” Eventually I resorted to picking her up, limbs flailing in all directions, fingernails scratching my face. It was like carrying a deranged octopus across the street, appendages smacking me in tender locations. I staggered a bit under her weight, going up the stairs, and wondered fleetingly what would happen if I dropped her.
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