The Tell

by Hester Kaplan

  “Owen. My god, you scared me,” she said, and whipped off her glasses. She closed her eyes and took a calming breath. Her lips paled. “Wait. Aren’t you supposed to be tutoring now?”

  “I bagged it. The kid was too stoned to hold a pencil. He kept nodding off.” The wicker chair screeched when he sat down. “Actually, I got canned by the boy’s father. That was after I told him that his son was more interested in getting high than getting into college.”

  “And he fired you?”

  “I got the ‘I don’t think this is working’ line. Which is code for ‘This is too fucking humiliating for me to deal with.’” He felt strangely moved now by the father’s disappointment. “I didn’t think you’d be here.”

  “Why not? I told you I’d be here tonight,” she said. She put her glasses back on and gave him a determined look. “This morning, don’t you remember? You were at the door, just about to leave for school, and you had some jelly on your chin. I wiped it off and told you I had a late class. Life drawing?” She opened her hands to show there was nothing to hide. “Remember? Bare boobs? Paying students?”

  He remembered how she’d touched the spot of raspberry and sucked it off her finger, how he’d tried to read some kind of remorse in her gesture but felt nothing more than the November morning air biting his neck. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “No, it does matter,” she insisted. She tapped her mouth with two fingers. “It matters that I’m here when you assumed I was somewhere else—at the casino. I don’t lie to you, O. I always tell you where I am and exactly what I’m doing and where I’m going.”

  “Yes, well, that’s the problem, isn’t it,” he said. “What you’re doing and where you’re going.”

  “Get a grip, Owen. This is crazy.” Her glasses slid down and she pushed them up again for the clearest view of him. “Maybe you don’t want to listen, or hear me, but I do tell you everything.”

  He couldn’t point to all the untruths or small distortions on her part, but he sensed they were everywhere, like the sanguineous vapor of rust in the air at that minute. Like the battered state of Brindle. He took in the room with the shelves listing under piles of old art magazines, paints, brushes, bottles of glue, stacks of faded construction paper, abandoned pieces of pottery, jars of markers, too many of them missing tops. Mira had once bought twenty boxes of German colored pencils from a guy selling art supplies off the back of a truck. There were only two left. The first time she’d brought him to Brindle, Owen had been hit by a potent mix of nostalgia for his elementary school art room and his attraction to her. He’d told her he wanted to make love to her on the table amid the pipe cleaners and Popsicle sticks and gummy erasers. She was passionate about every smudgy handprint, lopsided pot, and still life. She believed in the power that came from creating something, and she had made him feel everything—the creation of a new life for him—was possible. And it had been. To fall back into his gloom was unthinkable. He wasn’t going to allow it. He’d die first.

  “You’re not always where you say you’ll be,” he told her. “Sometimes I call in the middle of the day and I can’t find you.”

  “But you know me, O. Half the time I don’t answer the phone. Half the time I can’t even find the damn thing. That’s nothing new.” She came around to him, straddled his knees and put her hands on his shoulders. Her face was at his neck. She was angry but trying to hide it. “What exactly are you so worried about? That I’m going to become some kind of addict?” Her laugh on his skin, in his ear, was almost mollifying.

  “It’s possible,” he said. “It happens all the time.”

  She pulled back. “Right. Look at me. I’m a real degenerate.” She shook her head and wagged her tongue. “Tell me honestly; do you really think that’s going to happen?”

  He didn’t answer but instead put his hands under her shirt and ran them up her back.

  “You know you’re being more than a little crazy about this, right?” she said.

  He felt the fight within her to appease him, to assure him, but to hold her own at the same time. He wanted her to feel the fight within him, too, and he gripped her tightly enough to make her gasp. Her breath battled him against her ribs. He knew he could hurt her—he was very close to it. His fingers pressed into her spine. She started to say his name; he wouldn’t loosen his hold. Marriage was not always about being in agreement, but sometimes it was about only that. O, she breathed. Above them, a chorus of chairs scraped across the concrete floor and he let go. Her reprieve—she jumped off. She straightened her shirt.

  “Wilton’s up in the class,” Mira said, and pointed to the ceiling. “You know how he’s always looking for something to do? Why don’t you go up and take a look and let me know how it’s going.”

  Her tone was squeezed and false. He was ashamed for having tried to hurt her, and for how easy it would be. They both knew what had just happened, how close he’d been to violence. The proximity was sickening. He took the stairs that ended in a small landing where he could stand unnoticed and calm his breath. His control was a battered flag. When he looked in, the studio was bright and glaring. He recognized the model from before. It wasn’t her expression of implacable boredom, but the rejection in her pose, half thrown, half discarded, that was unforgettable.

  “I don’t care what they say,” Wilton announced, “but this is a hell of a lot harder than acting.”

  The words hung in the air. A stool scraped, then another. Owen could see only a slice of Wilton from where he stood, and the shoes and ankles below the easels of the others. Someone dropped a piece of charcoal that pinged on the floor. Paulette, a long-time instructor with a gray braid that reached down to the small of her back, soundlessly wove her way between the students.

  “In acting, at least they give you the lines,” Wilton added.

  Paulette told the model to take a new pose. Pages of sketchpads flipped over, a flock of birds taking off.

  “Here I have to make those lines up myself. So much tougher,” Wilton continued. “My question is, how do you ever know what exactly it is you want to say?”

  “Would you be quiet? Please?” one woman said. “Do you hear anyone else talking?”

  “Excuse me.” Wilton teased out the words and waited for the appreciative murmur from the others. “I didn’t know there was a ban on talking.”

  “What are you, a ten-year-old who has to keep talking even when no one responds?” she said.

  “I wish I were ten years old,” Wilton said. “I’d have longer to get this right.”

  The sanctimonious silence cracked. Paulette tugged uncertainly on her braid. The woman was disabled by shyness. The faucet still dripped.

  “Is there a rule against talking, Paulette?” a woman asked.

  The model scratched her forearm. She looked like she was thinking about dinner or what she had to do tomorrow. She flicked at something that had landed on her folded belly.

  “How can there be a rule against talking?” Wilton said. “That’s un-American.”

  “How totally, completely, fucking irritating,” the scolder said, her feet balancing on the toes of her serious boots.

  “Oh, well,” Wilton sighed, the pleased, seductive pest. “I tried.”

  He tried and he succeeded; the others in the room were now enthralled.

  Owen went downstairs and found Mira in the gallery, stuffing garbage into a bag in a hurry as though she’d just realized what the place looked like—to him. She yanked the ties of the bag shut, and went out to the Dumpster. He followed her into the cold as she heaved the thing up. The arc was short and the bag hit the side of the Dumpster. It split and papers escaped in the wind. She didn’t try to catch them but looked at the river and the hill rising behind it. A single rat had found something to eat, its red eyes flashing. It started to snow and Owen opened his coat around his wife.

  “Are you in love with him, Mira?” he asked.

  “Shit,” she said, exasperated. “How can you even ask me that? You’re ridicul
ous.”

  “Really? Because I’m trying to understand what this is all about. It feels like love, Mira, something crazy enough to make you do this, to sneak around, to jeopardize what you have. To do this to me.”

  “Enough. I’m doing nothing, and I’m not sneaking anywhere, and I’m not doing anything to you. God, would you let me breathe?” She pushed him away.

  By now the drawing students were clomping down the stairs, and Mira went back inside to say good-bye to them. She was professionally bright-eyed. Wilton was in the thick of the bunch, saying good night and holding the door open for them like the place was his. When he spotted Owen, he clapped his hands together.

  “How wonderful. I didn’t know you were going to be here,” he said. “I thought you were out teaching.”

  “I was.” Owen gave him a cool look.

  “Listen,” Wilton said, “what that class needs is more men. You have to come next time. There’s a dangerous estrogen overload that can’t be good for anyone’s art.”

  “All the great male artists had too much estrogen, didn’t you know that?” Mira told him. “Estrogen dominance, it’s called. It’s why they screwed everything and drank too much. It’s why not one of them was bald or thin.”

  “That’s some theory,” Wilton said. “Maybe I don’t have enough estrogen. Maybe that’s my problem.”

  When Mira asked him to show what he’d drawn, he held his pad to his chest. “Not a chance.”

  The model, puffy in a red jacket, appeared in the foyer, gave Mira a quick wave, and left. Wilton trotted after her, and they talked out on the steps, the door open and letting in the cold. The woman had her car keys out already like a warning against Wilton’s flirtation, and she shifted with disinterest. She tolerated him for as long as it took for the traffic signal at the end of the block to cycle through green to yellow to red.

  Wilton came back in with doggish disappointment. “I struck out,” he said.

  “So are you going to show us your work now?” Mira asked. “You’re embarrassed. That’s kind of sweet, actually, kind of endearing.”

  “Oh, it’s not modesty,” Wilton said. “It’s shame.”

  Mira slid the pad away from Wilton, who didn’t protest. It was always a game with them. They bent over his drawings. In his rudimentary sketches, Wilton had managed to give movement to what was still, elasticity to what was brittle. He’d captured the deeply erotic appeal of the model, and her look of disdainful boredom, almost as if it had been aimed directly at him. He’d made her breasts rise off the page. Wilton wiped the charcoal dust off his hands and declared the work to be shit. Mira hadn’t spoken. Wilton’s talent was enviable, obvious, immense, not at all raw. Who knew what the man could have done with his life?

  “I saw your daughter the other night,” Owen said, softening toward him at that moment.

  Wilton’s face was lit with expectation. His body tilted in Owen’s direction. “Tell me everything,” he said.

  Owen huddled in his down jacket as he stood over the grill and used a long fork to poke the pulsing coals. Behind him, Mira and Wilton talked in the kitchen’s lemony light and waited once more for Anya. Wilton’s slicked-back hair made him look shiny and marsupial, and he wore a white apron from the steak company that said “I’m the Man with the Big Meat.” Mira’s face was flushed, and she’d pushed up the sleeves of her black sweater. A row of pearly buttons ran between her breasts. Despite the cold of early November, she had wanted to duplicate the summer dinner Anya hadn’t shown up for in July, because this time the girl was absolutely coming. She’d called her father the day after Owen had told him about the visit. Earlier, Mira had retrieved from the basement a round paper lantern her parents had used at their parties and hung it from a branch. The silhouettes of dead moths were imprinted on the inside. When Wilton had delivered his nervousness and his white box of meat in the afternoon, Mira had assured him that each part of the meal had its own particular flavor of reunion: seriousness in grilled meat (forget the carcinogens), affection in the sweet beads of couscous, optimism in the beds of lettuce, blood in the tomatoes and the tangy drops of vinegar. And possibly bitterness in this smoke roused by a sudden, strong wind Owen turned away from. The paper lantern swayed like a full moon gone crazy.

  A shadow shifted. Owen scanned the yard’s impenetrable corners. The pea gravel mumbled underfoot, the dried leaves eddied around his ankles. Mira and Wilton had moved away from the kitchen window, and the surrounding houses were turned inward. This disregarded outside, shelter to smash-and-grabbers, raccoons, and coyotes, was the wild territory of city life. Cold breath hesitated at Owen’s mouth and tensed. A branch snapped, the leafless lilac bushes screeched against the carriage house, where something inside was swinging behind the glass. Owen’s heart hammered. He held the tongs like a club. At the back of the carriage house, overgrown bushes and hissing thorns hooked his pants. One of the glass panes in the door was smashed, and the in-rushing air had set things swinging and shifting: there was no one inside doing it. Still, someone had tried to break into the carriage house. But who knew when? Yesterday? A month ago? At the same time the house had been broken into? He already knew he wasn’t going to tell Mira.

  When he heard footsteps on the gravel and came out from behind the bushes, he saw Anya stopped at the top of the driveway. She was wrapped in a long coat with a scarf over her head like some kind of doomed countess. Wilton rushed out the back door, throwing the apron behind him. His arms were a riot of motion. He slowed to smooth his wheezy breath, his shirt, touch his hair, lift his shoulders and let them drop again, shake his wrists out. The man was running through his entire repertoire of misgivings. A sob bubbled up out of him like the sound of a ball bouncing down an abandoned hallway. He could have been trudging through sand, begging for water, for how hungrily he moved, and his daughter just a mirage. Wilton put his hands on her shoulders, kissed one cheek and then the other, and pressed his face against hers. He bent at the knees, cried, and dropped even lower. Owen glimpsed Anya’s heartbreak at this man falling at her feet while her arms were limp. She looked stunned.

  Owen was sure he would never see another meeting like this, but it was too much, and he went inside where Mira was slicing cucumbers. She was pretending this was like any other night, when it must have taken everything for her not to watch the meeting of father and daughter. He didn’t know what to say or what to explain—about the break-in and how besieged it made him feel or how the reunion in the driveway filled him with envy. To regain what you thought you’d lost. She would understand what that meant, but she didn’t look up at him and he didn’t speak. He watched her knife make careful cuts.

  “May we come in?” Wilton asked, appearing in the doorway with Anya behind him.

  Mira put the knife down and grinned. Her ability to be so instantly bright and enthusiastic was striking. Had she learned the poses from Wilton? “We’ve been looking forward to meeting you for a very long time,” she said, and didn’t so much shake Anya’s hand as hold it. “And you’ve already met Owen.”

  “Nice to see you,” he said. Anya looked as though she’d been blindsided.

  Wilton’s grin was stiff and he couldn’t still his hands. “They’ve heard me tell a million stories about you.”

  “There can’t be that many stories,” Anya said.

  “Okay, so I repeat myself sometimes.” Wilton tapped his temple. “I’m almost an old man. You haven’t seen me in a long time.”

  “And you haven’t seen me in a long time either.” She smiled coolly.

  “That’s very true. But here we are now.”

  When Wilton moved to lift her coat off her shoulders, she stiffened. Wilton waited, poised with a pinch of wool in each hand. It was an instant of humiliation that Wilton, for all his great acting ability, could not pretend his way through. Anya finally let her coat slide off and then held it draped over one arm as if she wasn’t planning on staying long. A thick black turtleneck sweater and black pants made an anonymous and m
ournful outfit. Her hair was pulled back severely with a silver clip. It was too much, too harsh. She tried to ignore her father’s voracious gaze. For Wilton, the memory and the reality might take longer to merge, and in an awkward burst, he pointed out the apple pie on the counter that Owen had made that morning. His voice was clattery. It was like watching a blind animal bump around in a cage. When Owen picked up the platter of steaks to take outside, it tipped and spilled a long line of blood on the floor.

  “I’ll get that.” Wilton grabbed a towel and kneeled.

  “My family has a dog.” Anya looked down at her father on all fours not far from her pointy-toed boots. “He’s always around to lick up stuff like that, cereal, crumbs, blood.”

  “Arf, arf.” Wilton wagged his ass as if he had a tail.

  Owen had an urge to kick him.

  “My four little brothers can make a pretty good mess. The dog comes in handy.”

  “Ah, brothers,” Wilton said, as if this was something remarkable about her he’d just learned. He put one knee up and heaved his body on to it. He lacked his usual fluid grace, and it took him a moment to stand.

  At dinner, Anya’s cheeks quickly grew red from the wine, and she circled a finger around the neck of her sweater to loosen it. Wilton refilled her glass. Neither daughter nor father ate much, while Owen and Mira packed in their food as if they could devour all the awkwardness in the room. Mira tried to draw out Anya, and soon Anya was describing family vacations, brothers, dogs, noise, and a bounty of happy details.

  “Where I grew up, the driveways are lined up like this,” Anya said, and chopped the air into even plots of blacktop. She turned to Wilton. “My dad’s a lawn freak, works on the grass every weekend.”

  Owen suspected that she knew exactly what she was doing by throwing her sunny history at her father, calling that other man “Dad.” She was showing Wilton every way his absence hadn’t mattered. He looked like he was biting into glass.