Here’s what happens on the tape: a baby cries. The microphone crackles, attempting to accommodate the volume of infant sorrow. A female begins to hush. Her voice is German, lilting. (The article says the mother is describing a Dürer to her baby. It is an etching of two hands pressed together in prayer. Provided translation: “Don’t those hands look like Daddy’s hands?”) But the baby won’t stop crying. The pitch spirals up and up. The woman’s shushing turns to hissing. The baby gets louder, and the woman issues a guttural stream of German. A few words are recognisably curses. And then, in heavily accented German: “FUCK.” The baby is still crying, but now the woman begins to cry, too. You can tell it’s her because she’s still swearing, distorted now through both water and wire.
I didn’t think it was my mother’s voice. I don’t know why—maybe I couldn’t imagine her with a baby. I saw her as the one holding the microphone. The exhibition had been called Real Art Real People. The website went down my sophomore year of college, but I shuttled that file from hard drive to hard drive. This meant less than you might assume. I just thought that a person should try to keep track of his own mother.
It had been years since I listened to the file, but somehow the wail thundered through my dreams that night.
15.
New York, September 2016
The only other thing I knew about my mother came from the day a woman walked into my gallery and said, “I’ve come to offer my condolences.”
Dad had been dead two days and I was operating on coffee and muscle memory. I felt the automatic whirring of my money-making cogs. It was important to be able to tell a potential buyer and I’d honed the skill so that it operated without interference from melancholy. She’d looked like a client, or at least like a client’s wife. She was in her fifties or sixties with skin like kid gloves. The kind of gloves you see in historical museums, smooth but tinted with age. Her French bob had the gleam of a salon blow-out. I could evaluate the wealth of a woman from the health of her nail beds and the state of her split ends.
“You knew my father?”
“You don’t remember me?”
And then I did. Odile Graychild, ex-model. She’d started a fashion line a few years after I was born. The line specialized in silk shells in neutral colors. Many of my best clients wore her.
This is not how I first knew her. She’d shown up when I was very young. I still remembered it. She’d been wearing a red turban. I’d never seen a white lady in a turban before, not even on TV. The turban matched her lips. I hadn’t heard a doorbell, but I came in from the backyard and she was sitting at our kitchen table, wanting to know where my father was. My father never locked the house during the day; I was too apt to shut myself out.
It was one of those stories that got stranger with time. As a kid, most of the things adults did were perverse and unpredictable, so it didn’t bother me excessively. I don’t know if I’ve inserted the glass of Scotch retrospectively as a rationalization of what I came to realize was peculiar behavior. I shouted for my father, who sent me out of the room. They stayed talking together in the kitchen for I don’t know how long. When they came out, she was swaying, and he told me he had to go into the city for the day; would I be good and call Bernie, my best friend, and find out if I could stay with him that afternoon?
Dad said he’d drop me off on the way. Odile’s car was silver with a black racing stripe. Dad drove, and she sat in the front playing with the dial.
Later, Dad explained that she’d been a friend of my mother’s. He didn’t elaborate, but after that, I recognized Odile’s face in the style portion of the New York Times and kept track of her in a peripheral way. She must have been keeping track of me, too. A few years passed, and I received an expensive digital camera in the mail. A few years after that, a watch. They were the impersonal obligatory presents of a rich aunt, but I didn’t know what prompted them.
“You knew my mother.” I didn’t have the energy for multi-clausal sentences.
“Mm, your father too, though you’re right, I knew your mother better. But I saw the obituary.”
He’d been in the obits, not a long mention, but still there. As an architect, he’d been successful. He never built a skyscraper but designed an avant-garde school in Brooklyn and a botanical center in Long Island. He’d built his tombstones all over the state.
“Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For your condolences.”
“Yes, those. You know, you look like her. Around the eyes and forehead. You have her forehead—she was always frowning. Your mother was my best friend. Even lived with me, used all the hot water. Water wasn’t all she took.”
Odile Graychild laughed once, pleased with the cheap drama of her speech.
“She stole from you?”
“Not money. Mom’s boyfriend. Scummy son of a bitch. I wouldn’t’ve cared, but by the time I was done with Italy Mom had a boy toy who was even worse.” Odile broke off, as if leaning back for another lob of indignation. “Do you know I went to Italy, and my best friend never called? Your mother, she never called. I don’t think she even asked for my number. I’d get midnight calls from men who’d known me in New York. I was beautiful, sexy too, but that vanishes long-distance. I had nothing to say to them. Flirting got dull.”
“How old was she?”
“Sixteen, seventeen.” Odile laughed her sharp laugh. “Mom’s boyfriend was in his thirties, though you kids are more puritanical about that sort of thing. In those days, we didn’t care so much.”
Odile Graychild took out a cigarette and began to smoke. As she pursed her mouth around the filter, wrinkles rippled out across her cheeks. I told her she couldn’t smoke inside. Her BlackBerry tinkled. Lit cigarette in the corner of her mouth, she answered it.
“Just tell them they’ll have to start again. We’re bringing back leather-lined. It’s their job to figure out how to make the market take it.”
I could almost see the fumes gnawing the art. This bad fairy kept ranting into the phone, tapping her stilettoed foot, the red sole winking up at me. Sometimes I wished my mother had had the dignity to die in childbirth and be sanctified.
Under all that, the money cogs kept spinning. Part of my brain was always trying to figure out how much I could get someone to pay for a bronze tampon. Once you know how much someone will pay for an artist’s tampon you know everything about them: do they have a sense of humor? Do they have rage issues? Do they care if you think they’re smart? Do they want to be smarter than you? Did their mother throw plates?
Odile Graychild didn’t seem like a body fluids sort of person. This isn’t to say that I thought my artists made expensive trash. My artists were people who’d learned how to play games with space and light. They raced each other on a track so complex and loop-de-loop it was often really damn hard to tell which man, woman, or movement was in the lead. Most art buyers were like the guys who go to the track to bet. They had no idea what it feels like to be a horse, to be all sweat and oxygen.
So I started getting out the catalogues. Odile Graychild might really like Annika’s work. The minimalism would speak to her.
“Got to be going, but my condolences. Sorry, I won’t be able to make it to the funeral.”
She dabbed out her cigarette on the glass desk. She withdrew the pack of menthols, green foil glinting in the bright gallery lights, and slotted the half-smoked cigarette inside. My friends in college used to do that, rationing out a cigarette for days, but I’d never seen an adult do it. Especially not an adult who owned handbag stores in two out of three time zones worldwide. It was a little sad—the ashy head peeking up over the foil. She trapped it inside the carton and placed the carton in the inner pocket of her coat. Her hand was on the door ready to leave. I couldn’t help myself. “Why did you really come?”
“To offer my condolences.”
“So why all that stuff about my mother?”
“I suppose I wanted to know if you take after her. I’d almost forgotten
until I saw him in the paper. Edison Eaves, it’s not the sort of name you forget. And anyway, your dad’s buddy fucked me in his darkroom. Didn’t even kiss me first. I was a fucking child.” She paused. “Literally. A. Fucking. Child. So I probably wouldn’t have forgotten your dad’s name whatever he was called.”
“What?”
“Your mom met your dad because his friend was photographing me, because he wanted to shove his way between my legs.”
She glared, daring me to say anything. In my experience fights, like meats, gain flavor with age. But this wasn’t my dinner to eat.
“I don’t know what to tell you. I wasn’t born yet.” It was harsh, but it was the truth I had.
She swung dramatically toward the door, charcoal cape flapping behind. Before I had time to wipe away her ash, she’d yanked it open.
“Anyway, send your mother my love.” She paused, looked over her shoulder and added, “By the way, what I told you was in confidence, I don’t expect to see it in USA Today.” I hadn’t seen her face in the tabloids in a decade.
“My mom and I aren’t close,” I said to the empty gallery.
Yuki
1979, Gesso
Not a paint in its own right. Gesso is smeared over canvas to prepare it for painting. It is equally good for covering up your mistakes, for starting again.
They took out a notice in the New York Times and The Paper. For a while, she expected Lou to write. He did not. Odile sent a signed photograph of herself with no letter and no return address. Her ballpoint had pressed so hard into the paper that she’d puckered her own clavicle.
Edison didn’t bake her pies, but the house was in Connecticut. In the front yard were a magnolia tree and a child’s swing. The single plank was fastened by two rope cords. Yuki slipped between them, her hips just narrow enough. The slender branch of the tree curved under even her weight. A petal fell onto her lap, but the branch held. Edison had made them pancakes for dinner, and the empty plates sat out on the porch. The last of the light glinted on the silver-pronged forks.
Edison was sanding down the door to prepare it for a new coat of paint.
“Pick a color,” he said. He smacked a bug off his neck.
“I don’t know,” she said, “you decide.”
“You’re the artist.”
“You’re the architect.”
The building was set apart from the main town. On one side of the house was an old churchyard. The stones were evenly spaced, and the lawn was always groomed and green. Her bedroom looked out over the gravestones. From the swing, the view was blocked by a row of poplars. In between the dark fronds the sky was cut into blue lace. But, she thought, the churchyard was empty now. She almost loved the weekend visitors: the girls in jeans, the middle-aged men with gas station bouquets, the women with diaper bags.
Edison switched to a finer grade of sandpaper. His movements were expert, and the paper emitted a steady sigh. On his father’s farm, he’d staked fences and repainted barns.
Yuki asked, “You really never wanted to live in a house you built yourself? Not even when you were a kid?”
“I’m an architect because I like buildings. You’d think some of the guys at work went into the business so they could knock down houses.” A steel swallow knocker was screwed to the door, and Edison was ever so gently sanding around the tips of its wings.
“Maybe they just need something new,” she said.
They’d married in a church near his parents’ place in Canada. Mr. and Mrs. Eaves reminded her of Edison. They were kind and methodical. The flashiest thing they’d done was name their son after the genius of electricity. When they said that all they wished for their son was happiness, Yuki believed them. The wish seemed simple and vast as the wide empty lands around their farm. Her own wishes scalded her nerves, and she was trying to learn not to touch them.
“Are you happy here?” Edison asked.
The move had been easy. There had been no teary goodbyes. Lou’s friends had closed ranks. Only Maude at the office had given her a card.
“Maybe,” she said, “swallow blue?”
In her studio, a square room with a large window, Yuki began to gesso her canvas. She used a house painter’s brush to layer on the goo that would whiten and smooth the linen. It required her full concentration. If she rushed or daydreamed, the gesso would clot and leave scars that would show through her work. She started in the far top corner, moving rightward. Her strokes methodically lapped each other. The radio was playing, but she wasn’t listening.
Edison had hired a maid, a girl from a less prosperous town. She came on Wednesdays and cleaned the bathtub, and washed the floors. All Yuki had to do was paint.
She stepped back and stared at her perfect white box. When it was dry, she’d put it in the corner, stacked on top of all the other perfect white boxes she had made since they moved in. And when she was ready to paint, there would be no scut work, simply the fluid transference of image from brain to life. She had the best paints and her canvases were prepped.
Yuki touched the tower of boxes, running her fingers over the canvas skin, slightly rough like the bottom of a foot. She wasn’t sure what to paint. Sketchbooks of all sizes covered the table. Edison brought them back from the city in all weights of paper, but her sketches were empty and interchangeable; the faces were the faces of crash-test dummies.
Still, she was sure that once the house felt like a home, in this peaceful studio she would finally figure out how her art was supposed to look. Edison agreed. He was a kind man. She couldn’t think of him as a boy any more; you can’t marry a boy. He said thank you when she cooked dinner and ordered in when she forgot. When she shaved baby carrots into pancake mix and called it carrot cake, he asked for seconds. Cooking was okay. She could walk to the fridge and play with the palette she found there. She mixed canned tuna with yogurt and called it dip. She liked the fleshy color it turned. Not the color of healthy skin. The color of the inside of a belly button, soft and purpled. It was lucky that Edison didn’t complain, since he was her one-man audience.
Neither she nor Edison owned many things, and their house still felt like a showroom. She went out to the yard. When she looked at the house from the outside, the swallow blue door—Edison’s careful painting—it looked like a house in which people were happy.
Edison would be home at eight.
There were no flowerbeds in the front yard. It was filled with overlapping flint pebbles. After she told Edison that flowers might be too much for her to care for, a man with a truck had come and scattered flint over where the grass and flowers had been. She’d said the magnolia tree with its white wedding-dress blossoms had all the flowers she needed. Neolithic people had made arrowheads from flint. Cracked stones revealed deep blue veins. She had surrounded the house with ancient weaponry; it seemed like bad feng shui, but what did she know about that? And the magnolia blossoms were so soft, and whiter than canvas. She had made the right choice. She had.
Yuki returned to her swing. The branch still held. The rope was mossy and smelled of rain. Yuki had gone looking for the girl stuffed with Lou’s child. Champagne-hair had let slip the girl worked at the Silver Spoon Café. Yuki had ordered a coffee and the girl had brought it with a gap-toothed smile. A green scarf was settled in her long red hair. Their ancestors probably grew up on the same damp Irish rock.
When Edison came home four hours later, he found her on the swing and led her back into the house. She sat on the kitchen table while he cooked.
“I brought you back a present.” He reached in his pocket. It was a tiny woman, an inch high. She had black hair. “Do you remember that story you told me, about how you were going to keep shrinking? Well, we got in some new models, and I stole her.”
Yuki ran her finger along the thick plastic seam.
“I thought, maybe, you could use her, when you’re ready.” Yuki let the girl rest in the flat of her hand. The girl was so light that if Yuki closed her eyes she might have thought her hand was emp
ty.
“There’s nothing in my brain,” she said. “It’s static. I keep thinking, in a minute, just a minute, I’ll have my idea.” She made a fist around the model.
“One of my college painting professors made us draw ourselves every day. It was supposed to teach us invention, to force us to find new ways of seeing ourselves.”
“Did you?” she asked. Edison had stopped taking art classes.
“Maybe, but I guess I wasn’t that interested in myself. Now, if I’d had you to look at . . .” He winked and splashed some olive oil into the pan.
“Dork.” She wanted badly to get lost in this game of marriage.
She opened her hand. The girl was broken, arm snapped off.
“Self-portrait number one.” She laughed. There was a spot of blood in the center of her palm, but the pain felt bright and clean. Edison ran for a Band-Aid, and she watched the oil simmer. She had no idea how long it would take to burn.
1980, Zinc White
Once called Chinese White, the whites of your eyeballs, the white of weddings, the white of ghosts, the white of antiseptic creams. Lightning white.
“You have ideal arches,” the podiatrist said. “They’re neither high nor low.” He showed her a page of photographs. He pressed a finger against an image of a fat pink foot. Long brown hairs wormed around the anklebone.
“This is the way an arch should look.”
Yuki flexed her arches, curling and uncurling the toes.
“And see, yours match exactly.” Her feet were small, off-white and green-veined. They looked nothing like the ruddy appendage in the photograph.
“So what’s wrong with them?” she asked. On the wall, a framed poster showed women running along a beach, their buffed orange bodies glowing. The women laughed as they ran, mocking the limping fool in the doctor’s chair.
“Sometimes people just experience phantom pains. They should pass. Your feet are fine.”
Harmless Like You Page 21