Odile fiddled with a tube of lipstick, rotating it up and down. She seemed to be about to add a parting shot, but she left and didn’t even bother slamming the door. Yuki slumped into the water.
Odile made her announcement at dinner. Lillian, usually a font of motherly superiority such as, “Never let a man buy you carnations. He’s either too poor or too cheap for roses,” or “When your lover is sleeping with other women, he should at least respect you enough to hide it from you,” seemed momentarily impressed into silence.
“He said I have a unique aura.”
Lou said, “That’s nice kid.” He grinned at Yuki, sliding his eyes to the side, as if they shared a joke. It was just a moment, there and then gone in the slip of light moving across his iris. By the time her face constructed a smile in reply, he had dipped a wedge of bread into his tomato soup and was talking to Lillian. “Lil, you know I like Campbell’s. This isn’t Campbell’s.”
Odile tensed her fist around the spoon. Yuki wondered what color Odile’s aura was turning. Lou wasn’t really so bad. Even the fights seemed all part of Lillian’s grand-writer pose. No one’s life was in danger. If anything the tragedy was in the pose. The magnanimous irresponsibility, attractive in Odile, was pitiful in Lillian’s older body. Lillian had lines around her mouth. How long until Odile too looked like that?
Yuki took a roll and dug her teeth into the crust. The bread cracked loudly between her teeth. She smiled. Odile averted her eyes.
At the end of the meal, Lou offered a brown paper bag of donuts. Lillian smiled and shook her head. Odile acted like she didn’t even see the bag. Yuki took one. As she squeezed it experimentally, Lou said, “Odile says you’re an artist.” Yuki looked at Odile, confused. They had been talking about her, behind her back? And this. She’d never said this, just that maybe she wanted to draw.
“Yeah. I guess. I mean. Not really. Maybe.”
Lou nodded and began on a second donut.
The day of Odile’s shoot, Lou was lounging in the apartment. The game he was reporting on wasn’t until that night. Lillian was clicking away at her typewriter. Odile paced around them both, making big figures of eight.
She held different dresses up to her torso. “This?”
“Darling, they’re paying you for your body, not your brain,” Lillian said. “They’ll dress you when you get there.”
Yuki flicked through one of Lillian’s romances. The girl was getting ravished. Yuki was amused to note the bodice received about equal descriptive attention as the skin.
“I’m taking the kid,” Lou said.
“I’m being picked up,” said Odile.
“Not you, the other one.” He must know her name by now?
“Why?” said Lillian. The typewriter paused.
“Girl’s going to be an artist. I’m taking her to the Whitney.”
“Where?” asked Yuki.
“Aspiring artist and doesn’t even know the Whitney? Young people these days.” He shook his head, grinning. “The guys in Layout won’t shut up about this show. Apparently it’s better seen high. But I’m not sure your parents would approve.” Yuki had long ago stopped trying to use her parents as a reference point for anything.
“She’s a kid,” Lillian said. Her voice was sharp.
“I know. I figured someone should educate her. I mean, we all know your approach to parenting.”
No one seemed about to ask Yuki if she had plans. She didn’t, but it was humiliating that they didn’t bother to ask.
“I’m going to wait downstairs.” Odile was wearing the first dress she’d put on and two more lipstick layers. “Later, freaks.”
On the subway, Lou read yet another newspaper.
“Why are you doing this?” He had never seemed interested in her before and didn’t seem so now. To annoy Lillian?
“I told you already. If you want to be an artist, you need to look at art. I’m a journalist. I read newspapers.” And with that he went back to ignoring her. Definitely to annoy Lillian, Yuki decided.
The building was a granite box wedged into the Upper East Side’s architectural finery. Inside, the walls were white, the rooms windowless. On the lobby wall was scrawled in thick black paint: “Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials.”
Yuki knew not all art was paintings of kings and cows. Not all art was even paintings. So what happened next could not be put down to unfamiliarity.
The feeling swelled up from Room One. No, it had always been there, her whole life. She’d been born with it. But in Room One it made itself known.
By the seventh room, her brain was pulsing. Her tongue felt slimy in her mouth. She bit down on it, feeling the pointed crescent of her teeth. A pile of dirt hulked in the center of the floor. Yuki stepped closer. Dried leaves specked the surface. Worms glistened under the white lights. There was no velvet rope to show where the pile ended. It simply disintegrated at the edges. The worms were not earthworms but maggots. They were the color of smokers’ eyeballs: yellow-white and glossy with a sick sort of life.
In previous spaces, slabs of ice melted; neon bulbs cast oblong canvases of light onto the floor; blood and paint were intermixed. It was in front of the dirt that her knees locked down. She wanted to bite her knuckles. She saw them splintering and cracking like so many after-dinner mints.
“You okay?” Lou asked.
She nodded.
Lou began to walk toward the next room, but she couldn’t follow. She shook. Warm tears raced down her cheeks and into her mouth. She swallowed them, imagined the salt absorbed by her gut and revolving up again toward her eyes. The clear white gallery lights pointed and blurred like stars. It was as if someone had peeled off the crisp outer layer of her skin so that the whole world felt achy and glowing. Finally, this sadness was no longer trapped in her cramped body. It was a living thing and bright as joy itself. Later, when she asked herself what had happened, this thought would make no sense. How could grief be alive, how could she have felt it gulp gallery air?
Nearby two women shook their heads at the pile of dirt.
“I can’t understand it? Can you?”
“I don’t think there is anything to understand.”
Yuki wanted to slap them. But more, she wanted to be the artist, to arrange the dirt, to feel the silk of maggot skin. She wanted her name in a white square on the wall. She wanted it so much she might double over and be sick. It was as if all former desires, for boys, for friendship, for peace, were pooling on the floor. She thought, is this what they mean when they say ambition?
There was no cordon around the dirt, nothing between her and it. She squatted, her sneakers squeaking against the floor. She bent down, fingers grazing the dry grains of soil. Lou grabbed her. It was different from being held by her father. Through her wet eyes his stubble glinted and sparked. Yuki slurped tears. She’d lost all her own words, but she salvaged that other woman’s phrase. “I can’t understand it. I can’t understand it. I can’t.”
Lou smelled like dry pasta. Nice. She wondered if he could feel her smelling him. If he could feel the intake of breath, if he could hear it; her nose was so close to his ear. She’d never noticed his ears before. Yuki blinked, trying to get a clearer image of their sworls. She’d read somewhere that earprints were as unique as fingerprints.
Through her drained eyes, she saw their audience. People had gathered in a circle. Women touched each other’s shoulders. A well-groomed man explained in a British accent that it was a statement about the war. He was addressing a younger girl in a polka-dotted skirt. As he talked, the girl rubbed her lips together and stared at Yuki.
Lou whispered, “Shh, shhh,” in Yuki’s ear.
Yuki strained to hear what the man was saying to the polka-dotted girl.
“It’s an alternate solution. The western world embraces the broken eastern.” He snorted. “As if that could make up for the acid and the bombs, the kids with their mouths torn open.”
Yuki’s eyes were sticky; her breath came just as fast, just as v
iolently. But the emotion had spun on the point of a pin. The joy was as violent as the pain. She’d gotten her wish. It hadn’t taken years, or even effort. She’d wanted to make art to be displayed in this space and now she was. It was easy. It was as easy as screaming. She had willed it and it had become. Her sadness had pulled these people toward her and for just a minute they were hers. They couldn’t pass her by.
As she began to laugh, Lou took her by the elbow and led her out of the museum.
Lou did not take Yuki to another gallery. But Odile was called back to shoot after shoot. She carefully purchased and numbered the magazines in which she appeared. She was always one girl among many: one afternoon a harem member and the next, background courtier. She cut different color ribbons to mark the pages based on her placement in the shot. Black satin for back row, blue for middle and red for front.
Yuki had her own files and folders. The bicycle drawings rubbed and smudged one another, getting ruined. Yuki’s father would never pay for it. It was a fantasy. Under a portrait of Odile, Yuki spelled out in children’s primer letters BICYCLE. She worked from the photograph they’d taken together, using a fine-tipped pen to etch in each lash and to scratch in the shadows around her eyes.
1969, Raw Umber
Umber from Umbria, as in the raw earth of Italian mountains. It is the color of a fur coat rarely worn, the oak bar in the Plaza, coffee dried to the bottom of a cup.
On the last Saturday before winter vacation, Yuki lay on the floor drawing Lou’s feet. He wore ridged black socks. The wool was starred with bleach stains, and his right big toe poked through a hole. The bones cut shadows and crannies into the wool.
“Stop,” he said.
“What?”
“Drawing me, I can’t concentrate.” He was reading a more prestigious newspaper than the one he worked for. Yuki had given up on newspapers. In her memory, the soldier boy’s face had become blurred as newsprint left out in the rain. For fun, she’d thumbed through an old copy of The Paper to see how Lou wrote, but she didn’t know what all those numbers meant. Was she supposed to be happy the Giants scored a 10? The New York Times was spread out on his knees, the ample sheets overflowing his lap. She had considered drawing the paper but the streaming letters intimidated her.
“Almost done.”
“Don’t you have anything better to do?”
“Not really.”
“At your age, you should have a job.”
“I’m in high school.” She’d gotten the foreshortening wrong on the left foot; she’d have to erase it and start again.
“Never stopped me.”
She’d never worked. Her parents had always said it was her job to get good grades. She was even failing at that. She went to school only because being ignored in the apartment was too lonely. Nevertheless, the Nothing chased her to class and covered her ears with its numbing palms. For the first time, she’d failed a class. Two actually: mathematics and biology. She hadn’t dared to tell her father.
Lou looked down at her. When he spoke, it was with the voice of a bigger man. “I could get you one. Make some pocket money for Christmas.” It was only November, but her school gave them a month for winter vacation. Something about it being a church school. That, and it was rumored the principal liked to spend his winters ice-fishing in Michigan.
“Sure.” She’d learned Odile’s laconic tone well—lately, it was the only tone Odile used with her. It was stupid to annoy the man. But since May, almost everything seemed stupid.
“If you’re going to be like that.”
Anything had to be better than waiting in the apartment for Odile to come home from whatever shoot or party. The Nothing had shoved its cold fingers deep into Yuki’s throat and even when Odile graced the apartment with her presence, Yuki didn’t know what to say to her.
“No, sorry, please tell me about the job.”
“All right then. Now leave my socks alone.”
A job, though, a job was something new. Vaguely, Yuki thought of the newspaper delivery boys who appeared in TV shows about the suburbs. In New York, the mailman delivered the paper. The televised bicycles were black and white, but in her mind they’d always been red. In each show the boy was the same: ass lifted in the air, hair flapping. Newspapers landed with identical thumps on identical doorsteps, telling identical families what to make of the world.
Yuki dabbed at her lower lip with Odile’s Tangy Tangerine lipstick. A smear onto each cheek was blush. She looped Lillian’s blue silk handkerchief around her bun. At least Yuki didn’t need to beg a skirt suit. Her mother had always dressed her up in an office worker uniform.
The Paper’s office was in the Village. The reception desk was large, with an oil-black telephone with ivory buttons. Maude, the editor’s secretary, explained, “Your job is to let the journalists know who’s waiting for them. There’s a directory in the desk with the desk numbers. Oh and answer the phone, press this and then this to put someone through. But, remember, always get the name of the caller first. Emileen shouldn’t be put through—she’ll be wanting to talk to the editor-in-chief.” Here Maude looked up to the ceiling. “Tell her—tell her he is in a meeting and cannot be disturbed. Also the ferns, the ferns need watering every other day. Don’t forget. If the ferns die the new ones come out of your pay check.”
Yuki nodded so hard that she felt her hair shake in its fastenings. She’d never had a pay check before. All around them men carrying legal pads, cheap briefcases, and coffee cups pushed past the double doors into the main office.
“You’ll get double pay for the holiday.” Yuki couldn’t even remember what single pay was. Maude pursed fuchsia-painted lips. “Your friend pulled strings to get you this job. Lots of girls wanted it. So he got you in. Don’t let us down.” She was surprised this man who owned two ties had strings to pull.
At noon, the girls from Copy went out and came back with tuna salad sandwiches that they ate while perched on top of the white radiator banks of the reception room.
“Hi.”
They ignored her. At the end of the day young men showed up in the waiting room to collect: Alice, Maybel, Claire, Wanda, and the rest. She called the copy pool to announce their dates had arrived at the office. Each girl flounced to the door without a wave. Was it because she was young? Japanese? Yuki thought about quitting.
All girls and women must have the same tender places that she did, under the shoulder blades, the sternum, just above the ears. Probably their eyes hurt when they were tired and when eating alone at a café full of couples. So why was it so hard to speak, to say anything meaningful? Yuki imagined their hearts playing the same song at different frequencies, joy and fear vibrating in their chests. Knowing this did not make speaking any easier.
She vowed she would try again the next day, but before she had a chance to say, “Cold weather we’re having,” or “Nice shoes,” or even just, “My name is Yuki,” Lou was leaning over her desk and asking if she’d eaten lunch. “You haven’t lived until you’ve had a pastrami and rye melt the way my guy does it.”
“I can’t leave,” she said. But she was already standing up, gratitude warming and softening her insides like a sandwich press.
“So what, you’re just going to starve to death? A nice photograph that’ll make for the front page. Receptionist DEAD Tired. No one ever comes in at lunch. I’ll show you my favorite bench.”
The bench was old and located inside a traffic triangle. It was cold and with each bite you could see Lou’s breath. He ate with his red wool gloves on. But Yuki took her pair off so that she could feel the hot sandwich through the paper. The pastrami was okay. The tomato slice was foamy and the cheese oozed like pus. She ate it anyway. She wanted to ask him why he was being so nice, but it wasn’t polite to ask such personal questions. So she said, “The other girls hate me.”
“Receptionist is a nice job. Light on the fingers. They probably think it should’ve been one of them. If they’re here it means they’re not flying back to Ohio to
see their moms.”
“Oh thanks,” she said. The girls were jealous of her. Maude hadn’t been exaggerating. No one wanted to be her, not even Yuki, herself. Lou had given her this gift—why?
“For what?”
“The job.” Grease ran down her chin, and she wiped it away with the back of her hand. “But what do I do?”
“About what?”
“To make them like me?”
“Why should they like you? Screw them kid. You’ll be out of there by January.”
The winter sun caught the bright coils of hair curling out from his rolled shirtsleeves. He’d cut the hair of his head cat-fur short. The younger men at The Paper grew mops down to their earlobes, Beatles-style. Yuki wanted to reach out and to pet Lou’s scalp.
Odile’s trench-coated photographer was dark and dashing. Lou was not. Yuki looked at Lou again. Flecks of pink pastrami stuck between his teeth. Was this a crush? Odile strewed empty contraceptive pill wrappers over their bathroom. Yuki couldn’t imagine even holding this man’s hand. He was too young to be her father and too old to be anything else. But, Lou treated her like a real person, he asked her how she was, how she was eating, she felt seen sitting on this bench with him eating pastrami, and she wished they could stay like that until the city was lit by its neon stars.
That night, she dreamed of Lou, but the dream dissolved as Odile stumbled into the room. Her dress was slick and red.
“Edison asked about you.”
“Who?”
“The boy from the bar, remember?”
Yuki pulled the sheets up to her face. “He’s alive?”
“No, not that bar idiot. The Plaza. The friend. He was at the party.” Oh yes, Trench Coat’s friend. The two boy-men had blurred in her sleep, and she could not remember either one. Both tall, both skinny, one freckled, the other? The other had soft-looking hands or had she imagined that.
“What did you tell him?”
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