“You don’t put your faith in scripture, then?”
“I put my faith in intuition,” Lisa says. “I put my faith in the fact that a book written millennia ago, then assembled by hundreds of men over hundreds of years, is bound to suffer from some flaws. Some cruelties. Some inconsistencies. Men have agendas. Churches retract things all the time. We change our minds. So does God.”
“God can’t change His mind,” Marcy says.
“Can’t or won’t?”
“Doesn’t,” Marcy says, but her face says she isn’t sure.
“If God doesn’t change God’s mind, what’s the point of prayer? Why did Jacob wrestle the angel? Why petition a deity whose decisions are already made?”
Marcy leaves the church step with a gravel crunch. She looks up to meet Lisa’s eyes.
“We pray,” Marcy says, “because God likes us thinking about Him. It brings Him pleasure to hear from us.”
“Maybe,” Lisa says. “Or maybe God’s not that needy.”
Marcy’s quiet after that. This girl a third her age, what does she know about loss? About the strength it takes to love God when the person you love most in this world is taken from you?
“Do you have children?” Lisa asks.
Marcy’s head tips to one side like a dog angling its ears to hear, and there’s a smile on her face that she can’t hide. “Second trimester. The doctor said I should start showing any week.”
“Congratulations,” Lisa says.
“You were going to say that having a child will change my mind about God. About hell.”
“I was,” Lisa says. “You’re about to learn what real love is. That sounds condescending, but I don’t mean it to be. It’s just, you’re young. You think you know what love is, and you don’t. But you will.”
A bird alights on the stair railing at Marcy’s back, a flycatcher, judging by the bill, but Lisa doesn’t have time to ID the species before it takes off.
“I know what love is,” Marcy says. So far her tone has been measured, calm, but now it’s turned defensive, hurt.
“In six months, chambers are going to open in your heart, rooms you never knew were there. When they do, you’ll know there’s no hell. There can’t be. Because God would never send a child there.”
Marcy’s voice, when she speaks, has regained its footing. “For God to love us with a perfect love, He has to let us choose. Humans want everyone to go to heaven, but that’s because we’re fallen. God knows better. His love is just. Our love is imperfect.”
“Imperfect love?” Lisa says. “There’s no such thing.”
Politely, Marcy shakes her head. “Our job is not to question God. God made us. God can do with us as He sees fit.”
It’s no use. Lisa’s too late. This girl, her mind’s made up, chiseled by a thousand Sunday mornings, a thousand rounds of Sunday school. Marcy has her Bible, her church, her verses quivered, ready for the bow. All Lisa has is life.
The bird is back. It lands on the top step. It’s an Acadian flycatcher, common, olive and yellow and white, with a song like it’s screaming for pizza. The Acadian can hover, fly backward, even. Great bird. It hops once, twice beside the church door, then it’s gone.
Next week, June would have been thirty-five. Lisa can almost feel June with her, watching her.
What are you doing? June asks. Her hair is long. Her eyes are alabaster. She gestures at Marcy, then moves to stand at Marcy’s side. All this unpleasantness. Is this for me?
She’s right.
“Boy or girl?” Lisa says.
Marcy hesitates.
It’s okay, Lisa wants to say. It’s not a trap.
“We’re waiting to find out,” Marcy says. “But if I’m being honest, I hope it’s a girl. I know that’s terrible to say, and I’ll be happy with whatever God gives us. I just can’t help wanting a girl.”
A song escapes the church, the sound of the piano being played.
“I’d like you to do something for me,” Lisa says. “When the service is over, I want you to find Wendy, and I want you to tell her that her son is not in hell.”
The piano plays. The sun beats down. A truck rattles down the main road between towns.
“I can’t do that,” Marcy says. “I don’t know if it’s true.”
“It’s true. That’s a mother in there. Two days ago, she lost her son. Imagine, God forbid, but imagine what you’d need to hear if that were you.”
“Me?” Marcy says. She pulls at her pearls as though the strand has tightened around her neck.
“If your child died,” Lisa says, but sees too late she’s gone too far. This isn’t helping Wendy. It won’t bring back June. She’s taunting a pregnant woman in front of a church, trying to change a mind that won’t be changed.
“I think you should leave,” Marcy says. Lisa wants to believe that she’s heard wrong, but she has not. “You contradict the teachings of the Bible, you challenge my husband’s message, you haven’t been particularly nice to me, and now you talk about my child dying?”
When June died, Lisa received visits from friends and neighbors, mothers who wanted to share their same, sad stories. They used up Lisa’s Kleenex, crushed her hand, then left, more at peace with their own losses, happy for the difference they were sure they’d made in Lisa’s life.
Today, Lisa meant to tell Robbie’s mother about June, to promise her that she is not alone. If nothing else, Marcy has saved Wendy from this, for when is shared loss ever a comfort? When, in one’s darkest, soul-fucked moments, is it helpful knowing others suffer too? Better to leave Wendy to her family, her grief.
Lisa watches Marcy, but she’s done arguing. She turns to go, but there’s one last thing she wants to say, and she turns back.
“I hope you get your wish,” Lisa says.
“What wish?” Marcy says.
“I hope that it’s a girl.”
24.
Jake’s never seen a gallery outside of New York.
There must have been galleries in Tennessee, though his father never would have taken him to one. As a child, Jake rarely saw art outside of books, and he didn’t set foot in a museum until the school trip to the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. The other sixth graders jostled and postured, bored with what hung on the walls. Jake tried to ignore the walls, but every room lit him up until he could no longer pretend and stood, instead, searching painting after painting, for what made each so beautiful. He wanted to weep. He was twelve years old, and he was home.
“Which painting flipped the switch?” Artforum would ask, years later.
That was easy: Margaret Keane, Waiting, 1962, a gorgeous painting full of indigos and blues. A woman, framed by violet shutters and white curtains, leans out an open window. Behind her, the house is dark, but beyond the house is day. Her hair is brown, up in a bun but loose at the sides, framing her face. So many frames: the hair, the curtains, the shutters, the window frame. She’s trapped. She’s tired. Why, though, does she stand at the window looking sad? What is it that this woman’s waiting for?
The painting made Jake think of his mother. She was often sad, often tired, beautiful in a way that perhaps Jake’s father couldn’t see.
Jake learned that day that every painting tells two stories: the story the painter gives you, and the story you bring to what the painter paints. And both are valid. In their brushstrokes, composition, balance, both are true.
Of course, that’s only true of art. What hangs before Jake in the sprawling Asheville gallery is not art. The gallery is not even a proper gallery, and, in his velvet coat, he feels silly, overdressed.
What gets him first is the floor. It is not marble or tile or refinished wood. It is wall-to-wall Berber, the dark-flecked, soulless kind that carpets elementary school classrooms. This is a floor installed for Wine Night Wednesdays, a color picked for hiding spills. The second thing that gets him is the glare. Too much track lighting. Too much glass. Shadows take odd shapes and interrupt the paintings on the walls. Then there are the w
alls themselves, paintings saturating every inch of real estate, walls so crowded Jake doesn’t know where to look first.
The first room is a floral tantrum, tulips in planters and roses in jugs. The flowers aren’t even interesting. No Dalis or O’Keeffe close-ups here, merely arrangements, still lifes from America’s most ordinary homes. The paintings have the look of bad photographs transferred to canvas with pastels, which perhaps they are.
The second room is landscapes. One catches his eye, a log vaulting a river at an angle that almost lowers Jake into the painting. He likes the composition, except for the chipmunk the painter’s dropped into the foreground, cheeks stuffed for winter, cartoonish with its buckteeth and tucked arms. The rest is dreck: meadows, rivers, a forest glen, light filtered through the trees. Why must light always fight its way, in paintings, through tree branches and clouds? Boring, boring, boring. He surveys the room once more, but nothing here is lovely. Nothing is sincere. They are paintings of paintings, the Kinkades and Bob Rosses of the amateur painter set.
He checks the prices. The largest—a seascape, 36 by 48—is two thousand. A painting that size, in Frank’s gallery, might fetch fifty times as much. But a painting that size would take Jake weeks. This seascape was painted in a day.
Jake went to some trouble to be here: rented a car when Thad said he’d need their rental for the day, drove the hour back to Asheville, then tracked down what he thought would be a gallery but turns out to be the art equivalent of an antiques mall, painters renting rooms and stocking them with their wares. At the entrance, he ran into a woman changing out her own show, another thing he’s never seen before. He asked where he might find Marco, and she pointed to the back, past the flower madness, through the landscapes, and beyond a series of interconnected rooms.
The next room turns out to be photography. The prints are sepia, mostly, and the person behind the camera feels very strongly about the rule of thirds. There are the obligatory beaches at sunset. There are children with balloons. There is a mouse perched on the forehead of a cat. Motivational posters, most of them, minus the accompanying captions underneath.
Jake walks on. The gallery is long, a nineteenth-century shotgun house reinvented for commerce, and the final showroom, when Jake reaches the very back, is Marco’s. The paintings, here, are coming down, others going up. But it isn’t Marco he finds at the center of the room. It’s Amelia surrounded by brown boxes and packing materials. She holds a small framed painting, a falcon with its talons around a snake. Seeing Jake, she sets the painting on the floor with the exaggerated care of someone who’s been scolded for being careless in the past. From the wall at her back, a grumpy-looking seagull watches Jake, its bill crimson-spotted, wings spread for flight.
“I never got my chance with you,” she says.
Jake takes a step back. “I’m gay, Amelia.”
“Marco said the same thing when we met.”
She’s so young. Sexually, Marco will teach her everything he knows, then, once she’s good and in love with him, he’ll leave. Jake knows because he’s been there. She’s the new Jake.
Around the room, birds eye him: cardinals, jays, a pair of ducks navigating a stretch of pond. They’re Audubons, all of them. They’re Audubons without quite being Audubons.
A box of paper rests on the floor, and Amelia sits and wraps the falcon painting in it. A corner pokes through, and she gives the frame a second wrap. The paper is thin, newsprint-gray, and looks nothing like the paper Frank’s assistants use.
“Is that paper acid-free?” Jake asks.
Amelia eyes him from the floor. “Is Marco expecting you?”
“No.”
She slides the wrapped painting into a cardboard box. The box overflows with balled up paper, and she pushes the paper down. Then, with packing tape, she seals the box shut. Wrong. All wrong. Bad for the canvas. Bad for the frame.
“He’s out back,” Amelia says. “He’s stressed. Mel wants everything up by noon, even though it’s Sunday and no one comes in on Sundays until two at the earliest.”
“Mel?”
“Mel Gleason. The owner. You have to meet him. He’s the best.”
Jake doesn’t have the patience to explain the gulf between this world and his own. What’s more, explaining it would make him an asshole. Let Amelia believe her boyfriend’s a star. Let her think Marco and Mel are names people should know.
“How long has Marco done the birds?” he asks.
“As long as I’ve known him.” She’s removed a robin from the wall. She’s on the floor, more paper, more cardboard flaps and tape. “They sell better than anything he’s ever done, so that’s what all of his shows are these days: birds.”
Jake imagines Thad’s imaginary book of poetry and wonders which bird would be right for the cover.
“Tourists love the birds,” Amelia says. “Locals, too. One guy, he’s got seventeen. He keeps inviting us to dinner to see how he’s displayed them, but Marco never wants to go. He says there’s a bridge between a painter and a customer that must never be crossed.”
Today is a mistake. Jake came to see Marco’s art, to see if it’s evolved, and now he’s seen it hasn’t. He should go.
“You’re not impressed,” Amelia says. “You’re thinking Audubon, right? You’re thinking Marco ripped him off.”
Jake surveys the walls.
Amelia stands. “See, Audubon didn’t work from live birds either. He worked from taxidermies. Audubon’s paintings were paintings of sculptures of birds. Marco’s birds are paintings of paintings of sculptures of birds. Three removes from the animal itself. What does Marco call it? A meta-commentary. By mimicking Audubon, he comments on Audubon’s style.”
Jake has to look away from Amelia to keep from laughing. He can’t decide whether this line of reasoning sounds more like a bad undergrad art theory paper or something Frank might say to move some paint. Then, of course, there’s the fact that the meta element isn’t what’s making these things sell. People buy them for the pretty birds.
“You should see his latest,” Amelia says. “Marco’s branched out. The new ones are all pairs. Some have chicks. My favorite is the blue jays. They’re here somewhere. They’ve got this worm. I think they’d be perfect for Thad’s book.”
“There’s no book.”
Amelia crosses her arms. She looks confused. The floor, where she stands, is a minefield of mats and frames, paper bunched into balls.
“Thad and I were fighting,” he says.
“I gathered.”
“And you and Marco got caught in the cross fire. The made-up book was part of that. I mean, Thad writes poems, but he’s only published a few. Plus, birds are his mother’s thing. If he had a book, I don’t think it would be about birds.”
“If he had a book, what would it be about?”
“I don’t even know.” It hurts, saying this, because it’s true.
“Well, what are the poems about?”
He should be able to say. But he can’t seem to remember the subject of a single poem. He can’t conjure an image or a title, a catchy line.
“They must be bad,” Amelia says.
“What makes you say that?”
“Good poems aren’t easy to forget.”
That can’t be true. Thad’s poems are good. Jake’s been told they’re good. They’ve been in magazines. Not magazine-magazines, but journals, quarterlies. Something out of Montana. The Something Something Review. Thad was proud of that one. But if the poems are so good, why can’t Jake remember even one?
Oh, God. Is Jake Amelia, oblivious, his boyfriend a hack? Or is Jake’s head so far up his own ass he can’t see Thad’s poetry for what it is? Is Thad a shitty poet, or is Jake a shitty boyfriend?
He can’t decide, and now is not the time, because now Marco’s in the room.
“Jacob,” Marco says. His eyes shine, but his hair is uncombed. His clothes are clothes for tearing down and setting up a space, paint-stained shorts and an old T-shirt, collar stretched
to Marco’s chest. He asks Amelia to give them a minute, and, on tiptoes, she kisses Marco’s cheek. Then she hugs Jake.
“It was fun meeting someone famous,” she says.
Jake wants to protest, but before he can get a word out, Amelia’s raised a hand to his coat. She rubs the crushed velvet, elbow to cuff, then cuff to elbow, the material darkening, then brightening, under the harsh gallery lights.
“You think we don’t know the difference between what we have here and what you have in New York,” she says. “But we do. You made your point. You rubbed his face in it.”
“Amelia,” Marco says.
Jake has no words. He underestimated her. He’s underestimated them both.
“I just have to ask,” Amelia says. “Your boyfriend, does he come to your openings?”
He does. Dresses nicely, and always knows the perfect thing to say to Frank, or to a buyer, or to a painter Jake’s enamored with. Thad’s always there, always gently teasing him about his coat.
“All of them,” Jake says.
“I thought so,” Amelia says. “He seems really, really nice.”
Then she’s gone.
“Sorry about that,” Marco says. “She’s not herself today.”
He moves around the room. With far less care than Amelia, he pulls five paintings from the wall. The clatter of frames makes Jake wince. Marco piles the paintings on the floor, and, kneeling, opens an unlabeled cardboard box. He wraps the paintings quickly, without fanfare.
“You could have called,” Marco says.
“I thought if I called, you’d tell me not to come.”
The bird in Marco’s hands, Jake thinks it’s called a spoonbill, feathers pink, beak ladle-shaped. Five minutes ago, he wanted nothing more than to be rid of these people, be gone from this place. But seeing Marco on his knees, boxing birds, he feels a rush of sympathy, urgent and intense.
“I can help you,” Jake says. “I saw your old work, the slaughterhouse, the pigs. You have talent, but that talent’s wasted here. If you moved back—”
“Fuck you.”
Lake Life Page 17