She also bought a journal—something she hadn’t done in years. In college, Mary Ellen had bought and filled dozens of the little books, her mind spilling over with ideas and musings. But after graduation, when she started her job, keeping a journal began feeling like a chore, so she’d stopped. Now it felt strange, writing to herself. She barely recognized her own voice on the page. But as the reading assignments in her photography class became more challenging, Mary Ellen found it helpful to take her swirl of thoughts and press them between the pages of the little leather-bound book, where they became more manageable.
The teacher of the course was a fiftysomething woman named Justine who mesmerized Mary Ellen with her effortless aura of cool. She would come to class wearing crumpled suede boots and drapey greige sweaters and uncompromising black-framed glasses. She’d throw down her worn leather satchel, sit on the edge of a desk, and launch into wearily bemused stories of art-world squabbles, scandals, and multimillion-dollar deals. She knew everyone, read everything; she was constantly attending unadvertised art “happenings” in abandoned subway stations and electrical plants.
Mary Ellen would sit in the front row, puzzling over the frayed hem of Justine’s sweater, the almost invisible edge of gray in her part, the Chanel logo on her glasses. She wondered if Justine ate dinner before or after class, out or in, with wine or beer, or a cocktail first and then wine. She’d mentioned she was divorced, so did she go to all those gallery openings alone, with friends, on a date? Mary Ellen tried to imagine Justine running a mundane errand, like getting her driver’s license renewed. Would she leave the house in yoga pants? Did she own yoga pants?
Mary Ellen studied Justine as carefully as she studied the books and articles on the class syllabus. Justine, on the other hand, paid Mary Ellen scant attention, only occasionally offering individual critiques in which she encouraged Mary Ellen to crop, overexpose, and blur her pictures into abstraction. Mary Ellen took this advice, not always understanding it, but determined to ace the class—at least metaphorically, since there were no actual grades given out.
She noticed that Justine responded most to pictures that Mary Ellen could only describe as ugly or disturbing, so she would spend her weekends and lunch hours searching the city for the right sort of subject matter: broken glass, cigarette butts, a pigeon flattened in the middle of the street. She would import the pictures into Photoshop and make them even uglier, tinting them yellow-green, for example, or stripping out the color altogether. Sometimes she would zoom in on an arbitrary corner of the photo, reducing it to nothing more than a few abstract pixels, which she would name after the original picture: “Pigeon, Market Street.”
It wasn’t until the end-of-semester student show that Mary Ellen actually seemed to register on Justine’s radar. A woman who introduced herself as Birgit Paulson, owner of a small gallery, stood for a long time in front of Mary Ellen’s three photographs—colorless, heavily manipulated compositions—and began asking Mary Ellen questions about her process and her portfolio. Justine hurried over and volunteered that Mary Ellen’s portfolio was actually “very interesting,” and that Mary Ellen would be happy to show it to her any time.
“She’s major,” Justine breathed in Mary Ellen’s ear after Birgit walked away. “A very connected gallery in Fishtown. This could be really good for you.”
“But I don’t have a portfolio.”
“You will. We just need to buy some time.”
Justine’s way of buying time, it turned out, involved introducing Mary Ellen to everyone she knew—a blitzkrieg of buzz generation. Justine explained that while word was filtering back to Birgit that Mary Ellen was making the rounds, Justine would suddenly become too busy to arrange an actual meeting. “Trust me,” she told Mary Ellen, “by the time you have some work ready, she’ll be throwing herself at us.”
Mary Ellen considered the whole thing laughably far-fetched, but she was enjoying Justine’s attention, and she felt privileged to gain entry to her world—a place where people talked about things other than sports and real estate, and where important business was conducted at midweek parties in fringy neighborhoods.
The party where she found herself one unseasonably warm November evening was being thrown by Justine’s friend Peter, a filmmaker and naturalist, and was billed as the perfect opportunity for Mary Ellen to meet all the right people who knew people who probably knew Birgit. Peter lived in a trinity—one of those tiny Philadelphia row homes with one room on each floor, from basement kitchen to roof deck, strung together by a treacherously steep winding staircase. Perfectly fine for a single man, Mary Ellen thought as she squeezed through the front door behind Justine, but not great for a crowd; a firetrap, really. She craned her neck to see if there was a rear exit, but the lighting was dim and Justine was pulling her impatiently through the mass of bodies.
Justine stopped in front of a generously bearded man. “This is Mary Ellen,” she shouted to be heard over the other people in the room, who were also shouting. “My latest project. She’s a photographer. Mary Ellen, this is Peter.”
“Hey,” said Peter, taking Mary Ellen’s hand and holding it for a beat longer than was comfortable. “I love a good project, especially coming from Justine. You must be one to watch.”
“Oh, she’s just being nice,” Mary Ellen said with an embarrassed laugh that stopped when she caught Justine’s eye.
“Justine never does anything just to be nice,” Peter said, fondly bumping his shoulder against Justine’s forearm. “Help yourselves to drinks. They’re in the kitchen, down those stairs.”
No, of course, Mary Ellen thought, following Justine toward the stairway in the corner. Justine was anything but “nice.” Selectively generous with her time and opinions. Aggressively sociable under the right circumstances. But nice?
In fact, it was Justine’s not-just-being-nice intensity—her rigor—that had jolted Mary Ellen out of her post-college-visit malaise. Taking Justine’s class had made her feel challenged and stimulated in a way she’d only felt in college, or perhaps in the early days of her career, when she was still trying to prove herself. Her mind buzzed with movements, theory, vocabulary; she found herself questioning everything she’d always thought about art, architecture, literature, even music. It was thrilling, and a little scary, like riding in a car that someone else was driving much too fast.
When they got to the kitchen, Justine became absorbed in an urgent conversation about tenure politics, so Mary Ellen headed for the bar, where she was grateful to find a bottle of decent gin among the warm Pinot Grigios and Chardonnays. She took her time plucking softening ice cubes from the sweating bucket, squeezing a lemon wedge over them, pouring the gin, relishing the bottle’s familiar heft, wishing there was a real glass instead of the sharp-edged plastic cup.
She shook the cup, lapping the gin over and around the ice cubes for a moment, then drank. Sweet and bitter, the first sip always burned a little, alcohol rising like campfire smoke into her head while the liquid plunged into an icy pool at the bottom of her empty stomach. She stood facing the bar for a moment, pretending to examine a wine bottle. The whole idea of interacting with strangers at a party seemed like an unnecessary exertion for someone her age—like running, which she’d taken up a few years ago, when she turned forty-five, and which had resulted in severely strained Achilles tendons.
When she was in college, she’d been more supple, more motivated. She’d pushed her way boldly through crowded rooms, cheerfully accepting the keg-pumping services of whatever young man was ready to fill her red cup, smiling easily, sometimes even dancing. But parts of her had stiffened over the years, including her smile, which, when she posed for pictures, felt like a forced cracking open of her face.
She turned around; Justine was gone. The kitchen was crowded with clusters of laughing people. She studied some postcards stuck to the stainless-steel refrigerator door with tape.
“Sorry…” Peter
had materialized next to her, struggling to hold three six-packs of beer in his arms. “Can you open that for me?”
“Oh. Sure.” She held the door while Peter rearranged bottles in the fridge. “So how do you know Justine?” she asked, averting her eyes from the crusty assortment of condiments inside the fridge door.
“I met her at Starbucks, which is funny, because neither of us ever goes there, but we were both waiting for the bathroom.” Peter pulled out some Tupperware containers, peered through their sides, set them on the floor. “She started interrogating me about my life. I think we talked for thirty minutes before we realized there wasn’t anybody in the john.”
“Oh, I hate that,” Mary Ellen said. “When there’s a line for the bathroom, and everyone thinks there’s someone inside, but then someone walks up and pulls extra hard on the door, and you realize you’ve all been believing in something that isn’t there.”
“Organized religion!” Peter said. “Okay, these have to go.” He stood up with the Tupperwares in his hands, looking hassled. “I don’t have time to empty these.” He went to the trash and stomped on the pedal to open the lid.
“Wait!” Mary Ellen said. “Don’t throw away all your containers. Let me empty them for you.”
“Really?”
She swallowed the rest of her gin, set down her cup, and reached for the containers. Peter shrugged and handed them to her. “Thanks, dear.”
Mary Ellen found a spoon and began scraping the food into the trash. It felt strangely intimate, interacting with the graying remains of what she supposed had been dinners for one, perhaps eaten in the glow of the television, or on the counter with a magazine held open by the edge of the plate: half a chicken breast with a few limp spears of asparagus; a sticky, congealed bean salad; some lumps of meat in a rubbery sauce that smelled like death. She threw herself busily into the task.
“What are you doing?” hissed Justine, who had reappeared.
“Helping Peter clean out his fridge.”
“No. Stop. Come with me. You need to meet people.”
“Let me just wash these—”
“No.” Justine took the containers and threw them into the sink.
“I need another drink then.”
Once Mary Ellen had resupplied herself with gin, she and Justine carefully wound their way back up to the living room. The crowd had swelled, making it even more difficult to maneuver. “Richard!” Justine called, leading Mary Ellen toward a tall man who seemed to be draining a beer bottle in a single swallow. “Richard, I want you to meet someone. Mary Ellen is a photographer.”
Richard lowered the bottle and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Hi. What kind of work?” he asked.
“Um,” Mary Ellen said, looking at Justine.
“Representative abstraction,” Justine said. “Very Siskind-esque.”
“Ah,” Richard said, nodding. “Did you know there’s a really good Siskind in that group show at Strike Collective?”
“I’ve been meaning to go,” said Justine. “Doesn’t Alexandra have a piece there?”
“Yes, that big collage she was working on for so long. It’s good—a real takedown of all that faux Arte Povera stuff that’s been going around.”
“Oh, I know—did you see that Dominetti show—”
“In Barcelona? Shameless.”
Mary Ellen did her best to follow the conversation, making mental notes of names to Google later. She wondered what it was like, being an art person, understanding the references encoded into every piece of work, having well-informed opinions about what was good and what was bad. Since starting Justine’s class, she’d come to realize how shaky her own frame of reference was. Whether she “liked” something, whether she found it pretty or skillful or pleasing in some way, turned out to be completely beside the point.
Richard was poking Justine’s shoulder. “By the way, I heard something juicy about you,” he said.
“Oh God. What?”
“Lina Burns saw you at Blick. Buying paint.”
“Not true.”
“Come on,” Richard growled. “Oils, for Chrissake. What’s going on?”
“Lina Burns doesn’t know what the fuck she’s talking about,” Justine said, crossing her arms.
“Well, I hope it’s true. I asked what colors you bought, but she couldn’t tell.”
“That’s because Lina is color-blind.”
“Don’t be mean.”
“I’m not painting, and if I were, I wouldn’t tell you.”
“So you are painting.”
“Hey, is that Erica?” Justine waved at a woman across the room and rushed off, leaving Mary Ellen and Richard alone together.
“So.” Mary Ellen swirled the melting ice in her cup. “How do you know Justine?”
“I taught with her at Tyler,” Richard said, holding his bottle up to the light. “Before she was let go. I’m going to get another beer. Do you want one?”
“I’m okay, thanks.”
Having lost sight of Justine, and needing to look purposeful, Mary Ellen moved toward the stairs. As she picked her way up the spiral to the second floor, her mind coiled around the conversation she’d just heard. Was Justine a secret painter? What sort of art? Hadn’t she said that artists and teachers never intersect? Could someone like Justine—someone who knew so much—ever be satisfied with her own work? Did she really get fired from Tyler?
Mary Ellen found a table of drinks in Peter’s study on the second floor. The gin was making her thoughts loose and uncoordinated, but she was actually enjoying the exotic whirl of uncertainty, and she celebrated by pouring heavily this time. She turned around and found herself standing at the edge of a small clump of people. She shifted slightly to the left in order to position herself in front of an opening, and like magic, they parted, enlarging their circle, smiling and asking what she thought about GMOs.
It was starting to feel kind of good—being at a party, meeting new people, standing in a room with red walls and a handsome oak desk, with terrariums on the windowsill and books stacked both upright and sideways on the jumbled shelves. Justine was like her fairy godmother; she’d pulled her from the ashes of middle age and brought her to the ball.
Not that she and Matt never went to parties—of course they did. But usually they were out on the Main Line, where so many of their friends had decamped after having their kids and making their money. Outdoor sofas and crab canapés. Wine that sparkled and conversation that didn’t. They would drive home feeling groggy and satisfied, the way you do after Thanksgiving dinner. That was nice, they’d say. Harry seemed happy; has he lost weight? Amy sure is obsessed with mulch. I wonder where Caroline was; did someone say she’s in Sedona? Maybe we should go to Sedona.
Now Mary Ellen was chatting with someone she’d never met before about hydrofracking. A girl in braids was organizing a march on Harrisburg; the crowd was going to lie down and play dead on Commonwealth Avenue. Mary Ellen promised to join them, knowing full well it was happening on a day she had to go to Cleveland for focus groups. But tonight anything seemed possible—even being in two places, or being two people, at once.
She decided to see what was on the third floor. She excused herself and refilled her glass, then wound upward, her hand on the wall, uncomfortably aware of the way the steps were vanishing down the center of the spiral behind her. The stairs delivered her to Peter’s bedroom, where three people were lying on his bed smoking, and others were leaning against the floridly papered walls. Up here, everybody seemed limp, slumped, in need of support. A purple satin dressing gown hung from a black iron hook. The windows were slathered in velvet.
Mary Ellen sat for a moment on the end of the bed, careful not to touch the bare feet of the people lying behind her. She felt hungry, but the food was all the way down in the basement, underground, as far as possible from this lush aerie. The peop
le on the bed were murmuring and laughing softly. Did they want privacy? Mary Ellen began mustering the strength required to stand back up, but then a man sat next to her, causing the end of the bed to dip alarmingly.
“Hello.”
“Hello.”
He was handsome, and he was looking her square in the face. Mary Ellen felt heat gather in the top of her head. Had she invited this? What was happening? The man kept looking at her, his expression unchanging; he seemed to be waiting for her to take off her blouse. Smoke billowed around her face, stinging her eyes. She waved it away. “So how do you know Peter?” she asked.
“Who’s Peter?”
“The person whose bed we’re sitting on.”
The man put his hand on the mattress and leaned on his arm. The arm was remarkably hairy. “I think he’s friends with my wife.”
“Oh.” Mary Ellen looked around to see if there was an angry woman glaring at her. “Is she here?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Um…” Mary Ellen drained her cup. The man was wearing cologne, indicating that he was either foreign or from South Philadelphia. Mary Ellen was reminded that she liked men who wore cologne. Cologne was aggressive; it stuck to you, like a flag that had been planted in your soil.
The man pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “Would you like one?”
“No thank you.” Mary Ellen hadn’t seen this many people smoking since the eighties. And in bed, no less! Matt was going to be horrified by the smell. Not just of cigarettes, but of this man’s assertive aroma, which seemed to be extending its long fingers into her clothes and her hair. What was she doing?
She should have invited Matt, even though he would’ve hated this party. Matt didn’t wear cologne. He showered often, though—sometimes more than once a day—so he always smelled like Ivory soap. There had been a time, before the girls came along, when Mary Ellen and Matt had taken a lot of those showers together. Twin babies had put a stop to that a long time ago. Just the thought of all that slippery nakedness was laughable to Mary Ellen now, especially with all the sagging and wrinkling that had happened under her thick terry bathrobe. Mary Ellen’s modesty, she’d long decided, was her contribution to their marital equilibrium.
The Runaways Page 6