Belinda studied the painting closely, perhaps even scrutinizing it, her hand repeatedly finding its way to her chin.
“This is the student?” she said. Before Brett had time to respond, she added: “She looks a lot like Mom.”
Brett walked around the easel to view the painting at his sister’s side.
“I don’t think she looks like Mom, but she reminds me of Mom,” Brett said. Brett had strong memories of his mother up until she passed during his early adolescence, but his most vivid paintings of her came from the pictures that had survived.
“Have you talked to Dad?”
“He tried to call me maybe a year ago?”
“Same,” Belinda said, and sighed. “I wish Mom had been here to see you grow up,” Belinda said.
“I wish she could have, too. But I had you,” Brett said. He wrapped his arm around her. “You grew up fast for me,” Brett said, his voice sputtering.
“It was never even a decision, bud. You know that.”
“I know.”
“Washing your streaky-underwear, on the other hand, took a fair amount of empathy on my part.”
Brett reached down the back of his shorts and shoved his hand in Belinda’s face, only she had already taken off across the studio, well-acquainted with his brand of tomfoolery.
“Brett!” she squealed, ducking behind his table of interesting things, until he wheeled around the side, taking off past the table, only he was much quicker and overtook her on the couch, where the chase divulged into a tickle fight. They giggled until both surrendered to lung-pounding exhaustion. They sat side-by-side. Brett put his arm around Belinda, savoring the rare moment on the couch, holding each other, each the other’s only family in the world.
“So show me some more of your work. What else are you working on?”
Brett hopped off the couch, grabbed a sketchbook and dropped it in Belinda’s lap. She flipped through the pictures, stopping occasionally to comment. Finally, she stumbled across a sketch of herself, laying on the grass in the country, eating jelly from the jar with her bare hands.
“Why did you draw this one?” Belinda asked.
“I don’t know. It’s just a way I like to think of you I guess.”
“You realize fruit is a plant’s ovary,” Belinda said.
“I did not,” Brett replied. “No, I did not,” he said, and they laughed.
Chapter 15
Olivia was excited for her next date, well, technically art lesson, with Brett. Their last encounter had been so amazing. This was what had been missing from her life after all those years of school and grinding work weeks that breeched the levy of Friday evenings, flooding into weekends, leaving no time for personal enrichment. Brett was more than a good guy. He was a library of knowledge, as intriguing as a curiosity shop and passionate enough to inspire a philistine. He was a singularity, with all of his ends and efforts channeled into a single goal. Prepared for anything at her next lesson, she wore a miniskirt with a cute top and a bathing suit underneath. Her mind raced as she pulled into Scott’s Addition. Had she overdressed? She was relieved she had kicked off her heels at the last minute in favor of flip-flops. She hoped he’d give her free range to paint whatever she wanted. She wanted to paint an image of a country road surrounded by deep fall foliage that she’d practiced all week in her sketchbook. She was wanting to surprise him with her practice.
She parked on the street and walked through the scorching July air to the studio entrance, where the door stood wide open. She stopped at the threshold to call inside and ask if she might come in, but she saw Brett chasing an alluring, half-naked girl around the studio. All the happiness in the world evaporated like unattended champagne in the presence of drunks as she watched him tackle the beautiful stranger and disappear behind the couch.
Olivia turned and walked down the street to her car. She dropped into the driver’s seat and cried.
Chapter 16
Brett and Belinda caught up for a while longer until Belinda signed up for an evening barre class at a local studio. As Belinda hurriedly gathered her things to leave for her class, Brett became cognizant of how little of his day’s objectives he had actually accomplished.
“Hey, what time is it?” Brett called out, just before she disappeared through the door.
“It’s quarter till six,” Belinda said. “Mwah, meet you at your apartment tonight for dinner.”
“What time do you leave tomorrow?” Brett asked.
“My flight’s at 6 a.m.”
“Gotcha,” Brett said.
“Get a watch,” Belinda called out.
Almost six? Olivia was supposed to have been here at five. Had he gotten his days mixed up, or had she blown him off? No, it was definitely today. He had gotten all keyed up to paint, so he stretched fresh canvas across a wood frame and stapled it. Then he washed a couple of brushes and variously rearranged some paint cans and tubes. Finally, he laid some old newspapers around an empty easel. He mixed his colors. The process calmed him.
With no other obstacles before him, he stood staring at the blank canvas, trying to decide which subject to pursue. Rather than forming novel images in his mind, however, he couldn’t get his mind off of Olivia’s absence. Why had she been a no-show? Had he done something to scare her off? Had he let it go too far, taking her on what was tantamount to a series of dates when they were supposed to be studying painting? Had he abused their student-teacher relationship? He could only speculate as to why she hadn’t shown, and the more he searched for a reason, the more certain he was he had overstepped an unspoken boundary. She was done with him. A woman could not, after all, be with a man she could not trust.
He took deep breaths, cleared his mind and mixed an uninspired pallet of paint. Then he stood in front of the easel, weapons hot, target still uncertain. The only visual he could summon was a grey mountain, but the image was depressing and he had no will to construct more sadness in the world. He stood in front of his canvas with an impotent brush in hand and wondered how he had arrived at this impasse. He had promised himself never again, but despite his intentions, he stood with no inspiration to paint. He felt like a drunk that had misplaced some infinitely valuable thing. Hollow and worthless, a deadweight on the world.
Chapter 17
In the characterless guestroom at her parents’ house, Olivia lay in bed in the dark, deep beneath the covers. She was hungry but had only the will to go to the bathroom. Her phone was dead, there was no clock in the room, and except for the sunshine that burned behind the blackout curtains, she had no idea what time it was. She kept reliving that moment, seeing Brett topple over that girl on the studio couch, before she ran down the street, desperate, despondent, and panicked. What did she have? No job, no hobby, no boy. Her life had become a series of burns, and she wasn’t ready to weather the heat again. She’d rather stay in bed under the thick covers with the air conditioning cranked, where she could delude herself that she would never be hurt again.
“Olivia,” Kelly sang, the bedroom door pushed open, and in came Olivia’s mother carrying a tray. The smell of grilled cheese made with mayonnaise and tomato wafted in the air.
“Kelly, get out of here. I have strep throat.”
“I can’t catch what you have.”
“You think you know everything,” Olivia said. Her mother unfolded the legs to the bed tray, placing it on Olivia’s lap, before walking to the curtains.
“No,” Olivia gasped, but it was too late, her mother had already opened the sea blue and eggshell white striped drapery, one by one until the room was flooded with natural light. Olivia shielded her face from the intrusion, forearm over her eyes. Olivia examined the sandwich, crust removed and lightly toasted. The sight of her favorite childhood meal bringing back a missing spark.
“You’ve got to get out of this room. You need some exercise or something. You look terrible. We didn’t invite you back here to lay around depressed.”
“I’m not depressed! I have strep throat,” O
livia reiterated.
“You have double heart break. That’s what happens when you play hard for a rebound that’s not suited for you. Don’t think I haven’t fallen into that trap a time or two,” her mother said, and she took a seat on the edge of the bed and stroked Olivia’s leg through the covers. “Work can be tough, especially in your field. It can be as hard-hitting as an Appalachian football scrimmage. Boys can be tough until you find a good one. The funny thing is, the minute you quit caring, the minute you relinquish control, that’s when you get the perfect job, the promotion, the title you’ve always wanted, the guy who will treat you right for the rest of your life.”
“So if I just get abused a little longer I’ll get what I want?” Olivia asked, her voice laced with sarcasm.
“Yes,” Kelly exclaimed. “See, there you go. You get it. Now you need to get out and move. Get some exercise.”
“What, like aerobics?”
“My God. Aerobics hasn’t been a thing in twenty years. I don’t know how you manage to keep your figure. Listen, you should go to the club. Go and do something active. At least get some sun at the pool. It’ll be a hell of a lot better for you than huddling in this cave waiting to die.”
“I have strep.”
“You’re not going to snag a boy while you look like the stinky white skin underneath a band aid. Go to the club,” Kelly said in an authoritative tone, one Olivia hadn’t heard since high school.
“Yes ma’am,” Olivia said, as she rocked back and forth under the covers, trying to warm to the idea of leaving the bedroom.
An hour later Olivia signed in at the front desk of the Cardinal Club, dressed in a white polo and tennis shorts. She walked from tennis courts to swimming pool, from swimming pool to driving range, from driving range to volleyball courts. Were there no batting cages in the world? Who the hell wanted to play tennis on a day this hot? Her answers were standing in front of her, in singles and doubles, swinging away, draining all those precious electrolytes. She hoped they felt like shit afterwards. They’d earned it.
On her second pass of the pool, a waiter offered her a drink. It was pretty cool you could buy booze just by muttering your parents’ membership number, but she didn’t have any desire to lay in her underwear in this furnace, by a pool where gawking strangers were more numerous than pigeons. She wandered down to the golf course and walked along the cart path. The place where the fairway met the rough always intrigued her, the semi-rough, that some greenkeeper put such thought into such minutia, cutting grass with the care of a barber trimming a rich man’s head. No sooner than she passed the first tee box, she spotted a girl she’d known in college walking parallel to her on a residential street.
“Carol?” Olivia called out.
“Olivia?” Carol called in reply, surprised as Olivia.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Not drinking at two. Not yet, anyway,” Carol said.
Olivia skeptically waded through the tall grass, uncertain what hazards the savannah concealed, carefully leapt a muddy ditch, wrapped her leg over the guardrail and went in to give Carol a hug. They hadn’t been great friends in college, but a college acquaintance right now felt like running into a long-lost lover.
“What are you doing here?” Carol asked.
“It’s a long story, but I’m staying with my parents for a while. What about you?”
“I’m, um. You want the long answer, or you want to just leave it at chilling?” Carol asked.
“Let’s hear it.”
“I finished my electrical engineering degree, and I was working with a group for a little while. But the work was so tedious; I never got out of the shop. I quit to travel for a couple of months before starting an MBA program. I’d already been admitted to the program but realized people only get business degrees to help them make money, and I already have lots money, so getting an M.B.A. would have been totally irrational.”
“Yea, chilling is quite a bit different than electrical engineering.”
“We’re all always sorting things out.”
“So you’re supposed to start the program this fall?”
“No, last fall. Like I said, I’m sorting things out.”
A car motored down the road, and both the girls stood aside.
“Look, let’s not just stand here. My house is a couple of blocks up the way. What do you say we go back and blaze like the old days?” Carol asked.
Olivia swirled her vodka tonic, only the melted ice remaining. She looked around half expecting to see a waiter, but she had stepped just beyond the boundaries of hyper-civilization. She dumped the drink in the manicured lawn.
“What the hell else do I have to do? Sure,” Olivia said.
Carol’s place was actually a lot farther than a couple of blocks from the club, but the hike wasn’t so bad once the hills leveled out, giving her a chance to catch her breath. Deep in a wealthy suburb, the houses were expensive and well maintained, and it was a pleasant place to go for a walk. They passed through a charming little commercial neighborhood, then sauntered along a four-lane until they turned down a side street. Carol lived in an attached brick townhouse on a quaint street littered with oversized SUVs.
Olivia followed her friend through the house back to a screened porch, where Carol produced a small weed jar. Carol slit a cigarette open with what must have been the sharpest nail file Olivia had ever seen, dumped the tobacco on an album cover, and replaced it with several pinches of bud from her jar. They took turns taking hits. Olivia was suddenly somewhere else, far away from where she had woken up this morning. Time slowed and history receded, drained into a subterranean reservoir, a place where new anxieties of relief replaced the torments of the ordinary world.
“What’s in this?” Olivia asked, as she examined the backs of her hands as if they were the most unusual apparatuses.
“It’s just really rowdy weed,” Carol said. “You know what I think of sometimes?”
“What?”
“Like how it’s so weird how we’re all just atoms. I mean everything is atoms, everything is made out of exactly the same stuff, from the yard to this chair to my body, but all three are so different. I mean, if I pour water, which is made of atoms, onto the grass, it just seeps into the dirt. But if I stand on top of the dirt, and I’m made of atoms, I just stand there. Why do you think that it is?”
“I guess you’re made of different atoms.”
“No, they are the same atoms,” Carol said.
“I guess they’re programmed differently,” Olivia said.
“Yea, it’s the programming,” Carol said as she took another big drag off the joint. She tried to pass it back to Olivia, but Olivia waved her hands no thanks.
“Like what if I had a remote that changed the program of the atoms? I could like turn that tree into a water slide,” Carol asked.
“That would be pretty wild.” Olivia wondered what she would do with an omnipotent remote.
“Everyone would want it if you had it, though. I mean, imagine being chased like Justin Bieber because you’ve got this all-powerful remote. I mean, you’d have to lay low with that shit,” Carol said.
“Yeah, like maybe you would want it so you could do good in the world, but people would always be chasing after you trying to get it. You’d have to build a big fortress to protect yourself when you slept and stuff, only the remote would be so powerful people would still break in,” Olivia said.
“You’d get tough. You’d have to make them fear you,” Carol said, striking a lighter, the orange glow kissing her palm, as if she were harnessing the flame.
“I wouldn’t want to live my life with people fearing me.”
“What if you had a choice, though? You could have the remote or it could go to a complete stranger, who you don’t know anything about, who could either be a saint or a genocidal maniac.”
“I’d rather it go to the stranger, I think, so I wouldn’t have the burden,” Olivia said.
“But wouldn’t that be se
lfish? I mean what if it was Hitler? Or Pol Pot? Wouldn’t you rather be the one with the power?”
“Yea, of course, but statistically speaking it probably wouldn’t be some super evil person. If random chance dictated who got the remote, it would probably go to some random ordinary nice guy or someone who’d use it to make sure his fantasy football team won every week and to order free pizza.”
“But could you take that risk?” Carol asked.
“Given that it’s a hypothetical, and the device is science fiction, yeah, I think I could live with that guilt,” Olivia said.
Carol laughed.
Olivia laughed a little bit, too, but not as hard as Carol, who burst into a demonic, cathedral-organ cackle. Carol got off on weird conversations. It had taken a bit of a dark and serious turn but was effective in distracting Olivia from the other bad shit going on in her life. She was really glad she hadn’t signed up for golf.
Chapter 18
Brett couldn’t turn his thoughts away from Olivia. What had he done wrong? He replayed every moment they’d spent together, searching for clues. Had he crossed a line? No, she kissed him first, and she seemed to enjoy it. Maybe something in her past haunted her? The clouds parted in the sky and a ray of sunshine spilled down into his studio. Or maybe he was reading too much into the skipped class? Maybe she’d forgotten, maybe she’d been spending time with her parents or a friend, and the lesson had just slipped her mind. He couldn’t relax for needing to know. He was skeptical he would figure it out anytime soon.
He tried to punch her number into his phone, but with trembling hands he kept missing a digit and having to start over. His heart skipped when the phone rang.
The Medium of Desire Page 11