All week after Edison left she worked on the drawing. Even at work, she drafted under the desk. With the side of her pencil she tried to scratch in that sadness, that longing. As she drew she touched the side of her head and arm, feeling where they had rubbed against the other girl.
The second week, she put it away. She bought a recipe book and made Lou something called a Spanish omelette. It combined the bland taste of potatoes with the bland taste of eggs, but at least he seemed to appreciate it. It brought him some small joy, which was more than could be said of her picture. She didn’t sign up for classes; the League was just another place she didn’t quite belong. Whatever vision she needed to see, she didn’t think she would find it there.
Only a day into the third week, Edison called. She’d just got back from work and was massaging her right foot now that it had escaped from the hard leather of her shoes.
“So how’s the art going?”
“I gave up.”
“Gave up?”
“It wasn’t working.”
“But you started something?”
“Yeah, but it didn’t work.”
“Let me come over and take a look.”
“Aren’t you in Canada?”
“I was.”
The Guys were coming over that night, but if she set everything up, Lou might not mind if she went out. Yuki was about to suggest a time to meet Edison for coffee. The drawing was large, but she could roll it up under her arm. But, no, it was her apartment too. She could have a friend.
“Lou hosts these things, his writer friends, they come over. Shoot the shit, order Chinese food. We’re having one tonight. You should come.”
Lou got in late. He didn’t look at her as he kicked off his shoes. She knew that she would be the one who would rub off the scuffs.
“I have a friend coming tonight.”
Lou, still standing by the door, lit a cigarette and the red eye glowed up at her. “Mhmm, what’s she called?”
“Edison.”
“Edison? So this person is a guy?” Yuki concentrated on the grain of the table. Lou was near her now. He smelled of beer and hot dogs. Only blind arrogance could have made her think this was a good idea.
“A friend from art class.”
“You never mentioned a friend.”
“You didn’t ask.”
She saw the pinprick of the cigarette in the corner of her eye. How would she paint a thing like that? Yellow ochre, carmine, jet black, maybe gilt. The cigarette hovering just above her ear. So close. Heat licked her earlobe, at this distance still gentle. Her neck wanted to jerk away, but she held still, as a fly playing dead after the first swat. She didn’t know yet how long a burn would take to heal. But then Lou stepped back; he pulled on the cigarette and blew out a chubby puff of smoke. His lips were the same kitten-tongue pink as they’d always been.
“Delightful,” he said. “Dandy. Darling. Have your little friend over. Just don’t let him get in the way of the meeting.”
Tentatively, Yuki cupped her unblemished ear.
Edison was the last to arrive. He was taller than Lou, and taller than any of Lou’s friends. The Guys looked up defensively from around the kitchen table. Yuki realized they didn’t have enough chairs.
Edison smiled and said, “Don’t worry, I’ll stand.”
“No, let me.” Yuki gestured to where she’d been sitting.
“Really it’s fine.”
The Guys grinned at the back and forth. Lou was getting irritated. She could see it in the large bite of pizza he took and how he let the strings of cheese loll over his lower lip. Lou said, “She can sit in my lap.” And grabbed her arm.
So she sat sideways in his lap, leaning backward into space so that he could get a view of his colleagues and reach his beer. When she was young, she’d never been allowed to sit in Santa’s lap, and now she had no regrets.
“I brought this, though I don’t know if you prefer red.” Edison positioned the bottle in the middle of the table. It was California wine. Lou’s friends were beer drinkers. Not one reached for the bottle.
“Fine,” said Lou.
Edison smiled again. Yuki wished that he wouldn’t smile so often. She wished she hadn’t invited him. She felt perversely angry that he should humiliate himself this way. Leaned against Lou’s chest, she felt his buttons bite her bare arms. She pressed, feeling his heart—the flick, flick, flick of the beat, hard and light like a ping-pong ball. The first time she heard it she wondered if he was sick. Was there something wrong with him? His blood felt so frantic. He made her listen to her own, and she felt the same violence coursing down her wrist.
“So, what did I interrupt?” Edison asked. Lou paused; Yuki felt his arm tighten around her. But then it loosened from seatbelt to drape.
“We’re going to focus on poems in the first issue. The work of honest poets.” Several of The Guys had contributed poems and they blushed. They had been meeting once a week and calling each other late at night on the telephone, giddy as teenage girls. “But we’re trying to decide on a cover.”
“Why not a picture of Emily herself,” Edison said.
“Boring,” said handlebar moustache. She knew their names now but their key differences still seemed only sartorial. In her head, they existed as a series of unfortunate fashion choices.
“Doesn’t anybody know an illustrator?” Lou said. “This is New York, and not one of you?” Edison was looking at her. His face crinkled. She shook her head, just slightly, letting the hair glance against her chin. If Lou wanted her as artist he could have had her.
“Fine then, so what have you lot been working on?” Lou was happy; she could feel it in the straightness of his back. Various members read aloud from small battered notebooks. So battered that Yuki wondered if they’d been throwing them down the stairs. Lou did not mention his own work. The pizza got cold and shiny, then eventually disappeared.
Edison stretched. His T-shirt rode up, revealing a strip of his cod-pale belly. He turned to Yuki and asked, “Do you have the thing you wanted to show me?” Somehow she hadn’t planned it like this. Not with all these people. She hadn’t told Lou Edison was there to see something.
“In the other room.” By the other room she meant the bedroom. But for once Lou seemed happy, still curled around her, his head hooked over her shoulder. He was talking, chin nuzzled against her neck. She was warm and good and happy. It would be easy to give that slight shake of the head again. They could talk about art another day. But she wanted to know what he thought. She didn’t want to wait another day. Gently, she turned her head. She kissed Lou’s cheek just under the high bone, and he smiled at her, pulling her in for a proper kiss. With her eyes shut, she could pretend the room was not full of people.
Standing, Yuki was unsure what to do. She didn’t want all these men to see her work, but she couldn’t lead Edison into the bedroom while Lou and his friends sat outside either.
“I’ll grab it, just a minute,” she said, and scuttled to the bedroom. She knew where the paper was without turning on the lights. Lou had told her she could have the small pine side table to work at. The paper lay there. In the shadowed room it was hard to see her work, but the graphite gleamed just a little. In the dimness, it was the picture she wanted it to be. Her eyes saw the girls, the curve of the hair, the way one form slipped into the other. The mind drew in the details of sky and shadow.
“Okay in there?” It was a voice, male, but just at that minute she wasn’t sure whose. “Yuki?” Oh it was Edison.
“Coming.”
In the main room, Yuki positioned the paper on the yellow dresser that had served as the television stand before the television broke. Under the exposed bulb, Odile’s mouth was too large; Yuki’s hands too angular; light to dark were off balance; even the lines themselves were stiff and graceless. Edison stepped up behind her. He held his hands behind his back, as if he were walking through a museum.
Then the one with bubbly-champagne hair shouted out, “Show us
, we want to see.” The other men joined in, beating the table with their fists so that even the wood chanted: show us, show us, show us. She didn’t think they wanted to see so much as they enjoyed having their demands met. Lou remained silent. He picked up a pizza crust and chewed it contemplatively. He had seen it before, had come home and found her pencil shavings covering the desk. He had said nothing, only run a hand through her hair. Would he comment now? She tried to read his face, and decided that she didn’t really care what Edison thought—whatever it was would be nice and encouraging and maybe a little constructive. But Lou had known Odile, known the scythe of her smile, and chosen Yuki. Lou had given her art, had known that she needed to go to the Whitney. Their flowerpot stood on the windowsill where she could see it. What did he think?
She pinched the paper by its corners, holding it in front of her chest like a clapboard. The men peered, pinched their noses, tilted their heads. Yuki focused on the hollow eyes of the empty beer bottles, black and non-judgmental. The men, none of them artists, suggested she move some things up and other things left. One of them said something about Warhol. What about Warhol? When would people stop talking about Warhol?
“Can I see the photograph you were working from?” Edison asked.
The shadows shone where the ink was thick, so as it bent under the ceiling light, she and Odile momentarily vanished, leaving a bright blank.
The men took the photograph from Edison’s hands. They passed it around, holding it close to their faces. Where was her co-model?
“She lives in Europe now.” Probably, at that moment, vomiting spaghetti carbonara near the Riviera. Lou still said nothing.
One of them, she didn’t see which, suggested that this was the cover. This was Emily. The men licked their lips and passed the photograph around, stroking it. Yes, this was Emily. Then Lou smiled. He nodded, proud as if he’d raised a prize chicken. His girlfriend, and his ex-girlfriend’s daughter, on the cover of his magazine. He ruffled Yuki’s hair.
“My star,” he said.
Edison stood by the dresser, still examining the drawing. It was such an insignificant gray oblong, and how could she explain there was more of her in it than any camera’s reproduction? There was her life in each touch of pencil. But the magazine didn’t want the her that lived in the pencil marks. The drawing needed to be put away, somewhere dark, where no one could see it.
“It’s good,” he said. “I like what you’ve done with the eyes.”
What had she done with the eyes? Oh yes, she shadowed them out. She thought it was better if you didn’t know what they were looking at, because they hadn’t known either.
In a low voice, she said, “It still just looks like a bad copy, I keep getting scrambled in perspective.”
“Have you tried smoking?” he asked. “Marijuana slows you down. Helps you really see.”
Many people smoked. The younger girls at her office, the blissed-out boys on leave from the army. But Lou’s friends didn’t. They were men of the used white paper coffee cup and the thirteen dead cigarette butts tossed inside. They were men of deadlines and jitters. Even drunk, they were animated. They didn’t relax.
Edison’s raincoat was hanging by the door. He told her to go look in the left pocket. In the pocket’s quilted hug, she found a brown envelope and a pipe as small as the palm of her hand. It was polished wood, dark as the leg of an old stool. It was the sort of thing she imagined men in the middle of the country still used to smoke tobacco.
She brought it to Edison, who filled it from an envelope in his pocket. He lit it and tilted the end between her lips. His hand cupped her chin. “Inhale. One, two, three, four. Exhale.”
He eased the wood out of her mouth and took a long drag, the pipe hanging from the corner of his mouth.
“Hey, aren’t you going to share?” Lou asked. The men stared as a single dog pack. Edison passed the pipe, but he didn’t cradle Lou’s chin. The Guys followed. Yuki gazed at the narrow room, at the men with their beery hope, at the window into the hot night, at Edison, at Lou. She tried and tried to really see.
1973, Payne’s Gray
Invented by William Payne, painter of ruins and hovels. A blue-gray designed specifically for shadows. It is the February of paints.
The day of her opening it rained, umbrella-smashing, bus-skidding rain. The show wasn’t really a show. It was in a diner that belonged to a friend of one of The Guys. He’d seen the copy of Emily in which she and Odile stood hand in hand and had apparently accepted that as a photographic résumé. After three years of crumpled paintings, sketches thrown into The Paper’s trashcan, and being too shy to say anything at all to the girls who worked the galleries on the Upper East Side, this was all she had. If just one person would walk in and understand—to see what she was doing, that would be enough. Just one person.
She opened the door with her back, her arms filled with her work. The rain hit the awning with a popping noise. At each booth, knives clinked as they snapped bacon and hit china. She’d tied the photographs into two bundles of five. Lou had offered to tie them to her chest, like the babies those women in National Geographic carried through the desert. She said she could manage. Wet and lopsided from the weight, she regretted that now.
Her hair stuck to her scalp. She licked her lips, and the rain tasted salty. Was that chemicals or just the sweat of a few million New Yorkers? She hoped the frames were watertight. They cost more than she spent on food in a month, and she’d chosen the cheapest. Pale unpainted pine, half an inch thick.
“Hey, how can I help you?” The waitress was young. The dark line crayoned in above her upper lid did not exactly follow the line of her socket. The impression was innocent, but also a little lazy-eyed.
“I’m here to hang some pictures.” Yuki wondered where she could hang them. She could imagine few spaces further from the clean walls of a museum. The diner stank of sausages and greasy regret. She wanted to walk back out into the rain and take her photographs away. But Lou would be angry if she disappointed his friend. And Edison had been so hopeful when she told him. “You never know, it’s near the new galleries, all these art types come in.” She couldn’t see a single art type. Guys wearing overalls shoved fried bread and ketchup into their mouths. None of them looked up at her.
Edison gave her the camera for her twenty-first birthday. He showed up at her work with it. A Canon F-1—Interchangeable viewfinders, FD lens mount, intervalometer, The Motor Drive MF, so said the booklet. It had been the camera favored by the reporters of the Sapporo Olympics, or so Edison told her.
“This is too much.” But she was clutching the box to her chest. This new tool was so much lighter than Lillian’s war-machine, and it was all hers. “Way too much.”
“You kept complaining your paintings weren’t better than photographs. So I thought you could try taking photographs.”
“But—”
“What are fancy jobs for if not to fund my best friend?” He’d recently been hired by a firm that specialized in glass spires. “I’ve always wanted to be a patron of the arts.” He touched her arm, where the bruise had faded to a grass-stain green. “Let me take care of you, at least a little.”
She almost asked him what he knew, but then they’d have to deal with the answer. She almost asked him if he’d told that Canadian girl that he was buying gifts for someone else.
“I don’t know anybody who stares at the world the way you do. Let me see what you see.”
Yuki touched her eyelids, and thought, I stare?
That night Lou threw a party with The Guys and at the end he even did the washing up. She stood by his side, photographing the suds clustering around his fingertips. Later, when she tried to pop out the canister, she exposed the whole roll.
Still she tried again. She snapped Lou sleeping, his leather jacket flung across the foot of the bed. She photographed contented Lou dipping folded slices of toast into black coffee and angry Lou, his hand blurring toward the lens.
On the third roll of
Lou at breakfast he said, “Nobody wants to see pictures of me. I don’t care how good the light is.” And the light was good, bright and clear as ice cubes in lemonade. “You have to have a statement. Say something about the world, otherwise people don’t give a rat’s.”
“Oh, and what exactly was Monet trying to say about water lilies?”
“That the Academy, the Man, are a bunch of bullshit artists. Also probably something about light. Didn’t they teach you that in school?”
“And your face can’t be what I’m trying to say about light?”
She stood and kissed him on the bright bristles of his cheek. He pulled her toward him and briefly they stopped talking about art. His lips were creamy with Land O’Lakes butter. It took a while to pull away. “Hey,” she said, “I’m going to be late for work.”
She sat at her desk trying to think of a statement. The Paper was full of people making statements. It should be easy, but even her greatest sorrows felt misty and out of focus. Finally, she remembered Lou’s fingernail running along her eyelid. “Little girls” like you. He wouldn’t say that now. He wouldn’t want to call her a little girl, not the way his friends teased him.
Her mother had been a little girl in World War II. It was a time she never talked about. But sometimes Yuki would wake to find her mother crouched in the corner of her room, staring out the window with hunted eyes.
Harmless little girls like you—as if being unable to strike back was a virtue.
On a Thursday afternoon, Yuki walked down to Chinatown. She pulled the camera around her neck as soon as she left the office. The strap hugged her. Someday, she might be able to hold these photographs up as a lasting record of herself. People would look at them and recognize not her flat face or limp hair, but her true self, the Yuki behind the pupils. The Yuki who was the see-er not the seen. Of course, to do that she’d have to take a worthwhile picture.
Harmless Like You Page 15