“It was,” said Kelsey. She released the hair she’d been examining, swept it back into the rest of her mane. “Your stuff from the two thousands was insane.” Almost twenty years ago; it felt like a minute. “Maybe you’re just in a slump. You know, like a baseball player with the yips.” On the heels of that surprising analogy, “You just need to snap out of it.”
“Sullivan said I need to be more of an asshole.”
“Sullivan can be an asshole sometimes.” Kelsey looked an Oops. “Um, are you guys—?”
Laura shook her head. “I actually thought that you two might be.”
“Eww. I mean, no offense, but dude is old,” said Kelsey.
“He’s younger than I am,” said Laura.
Kelsey had a faint silver scar under her chin. Wait. Why was Laura looking up at her chin?
“Fuck,” said Laura. She realized that she must have slid off the sofa at some point; she was lying on the floor. “You said this was mild.”
“It is,” said Kelsey, leaning over, her face floating above Laura, flanked by two curtains of hair. “Very mellow.”
Crown molding ran all around the office ceiling, of the exact type Edward had been seeking to restore a broken bit in the parlor of his house. Edward.
“I’m getting married,” Laura told the ceiling.
“Wow,” said Kelsey, not so much in congratulations as in wonder. She began to laugh. “That’s awesome.”
Laura wasn’t sure why it was funny, but she was laughing too.
And then she was telling Kelsey about Adam. How at first it had seemed to be that rare thing, a marriage of equals. Neither of them wanted children, and they were each tolerant of the other’s long working hours. Marriage didn’t change their lives much: Laura still stayed overnight at the Tudor pretty often, still made solo trips to New York to haul slides around to galleries, collecting rejections until one day a young gallery assistant with a freshly inked MFA said Oh, wow as he put one slide up against the light.
Her first piece in a group show was singled out by reviews, described by one critic as muscular with more than a whiff of insult, of How dare she. More group shows followed, in Long Island, then Brooklyn, then Manhattan, hand over hand across a gorge of striving years. Until the watershed: a one-woman show at Sullivan’s Upper East Side space. Laura attended the opening alone; Adam had had a last-minute work thing. It was like a dream: flutes of champagne, red Sold dots speckling the walls, collectors buttonholing her to discuss her work—all rather overwhelming after so long painting alone in a basement. After one particularly heady conversation with a critic, Laura had taken refuge in the gallery office and used the phone there to dial Adam on his flip phone, gabbling a giddy flood of detail into the receiver after he said hello. That’s great, babe, he said when she paused for breath. In the background, a muffled trill of female laughter.
Laura hung up the phone, went robotically through the rest of the evening, stayed at the Tudor for a sleepless night. When she confronted Adam the next day, he said What did you expect?
“It wasn’t the sex,” Laura told Kelsey. “Well, it was and it wasn’t.” After the 1980s, sex wasn’t just intimacy anymore, it was risk. Laura and Adam didn’t use condoms—she was on the pill—and she had known without asking that Adam wouldn’t have used condoms with those faceless women either. “He took my life in his hands,” said Laura.
“In his dick,” said Kelsey solemnly.
“In his dick,” agreed Laura.
Kelsey was prettier than Laura had remembered, lips plump with youth, eyes clear and bright in their spiky settings of eyelash.
“You’re really pretty,” said Laura.
“Thanks,” said Kelsey lightly.
“My sister has been buying my paintings,” Laura said. “Out of pity.”
“You told me.”
“And Sullivan lied to me.”
“I know,” said Kelsey, mom-patient.
“He wants me to be more of an asshole,” she said. “And Edward wants me to be a wife.”
“It’s not about the men,” said Kelsey. “It’s not about what they want.”
“Maybe I need to be free,” said Laura. “Maybe that’s the answer.”
“Maybe you should talk to someone, dude,” said Kelsey. “I mean, not me. Someone real.”
“You’re too young to know how it is,” Laura said. “We’re all bursting with sadness.”
“I will not be bursting with sadness when I am old,” declared Kelsey.
“Hashtag life goals,” said Laura. She closed her eyes. “I quit my family,” she murmured.
“Let me know how that works out for you,” said Kelsey.
* * *
When Laura got home, she climbed the three flights up into the studio and stood in the stagnant, sunbaked air. She’d been so proud of it. She’d been thirty-four when her marriage ended, and she didn’t want to paint in a basement anymore. She’d scoured the city listings looking for light and space, and finding nothing suitable, had bitten into the trust against her sister’s objections and added the light and space she needed to the top of a rundown town house on the crest of a hill.
She remembered the day the renovation was finished, how she had sat in the cupola of light inhaling the sawdust-clean smell of new construction, longing to share the moment with someone. One of her art school friends, or her mother, who was across the world, or even Bea, who had been so po-faced about the expenditure. The person she really wanted, she realized, was her father. As a child, she’d sometimes helped him with hobby construction projects, birdhouses and small repairs to the Tudor; she’d loved those hours with him, the grave, preoccupied man she knew replaced by someone warm and humorous, even silly. Stupidly, as though it were a discovery, she realized how final it was, death. She had looked around at the (all hers!) giant box of glass and air, and thought: I will start again from here.
And she had. She had created good work here. It wasn’t a whim of childhood. Her mother may have ignited the flame, but hadn’t had anything to do with the rest of it, the utter deep wild joy of it. With a sudden flush of conviction, Laura understood that whether or not she had real talent didn’t matter: whatever the truth was, if she had it all to do over, she’d still choose the paint.
Her eye fell on the half-scraped canvas still propped on the easel, and she felt brought up short. How could she explain that? Why the joyless, rote Ghost Pictures, why four years of paintings no one will buy? Just a slump, as Kelsey had said, something to snap out of? Laura had done some of her best work when she was angry and sad—after leaving New York, and after Adam—but she was no longer young. She was fifty-four and weary. Could she find her way through the paint all over again?
She went out onto the terrace, into the summer evening, and stood at the rail. To the south was a row of narrow town houses that had been rehabbed into condos with wide glass windows; in one of those, Laura could see a young family. It was toddler mealtime, the child bouncing in her seat, waving her spoon, the parents on either side all business: Eat up. The child threw her spoon at the window, making a green splat on the glass. She froze, her face purely astonished. Then her mouth shaped into a joyful caw and she pointed, turning her head to her parents, one and then the other: Look Look! The parents broke into smiles. Happiness ricocheted between the three faces before the mother bent to retrieve the spoon from the floor and the father rose to wipe the window. Laura felt herself smiling too. Then had a scorching thought: In fifteen years those parents might be separated, by death or betrayal or resentment; that child might be suffocating in adolescent sadness. This bright moment, this happy day, would have amounted to nothing.
All we have is now, she thought.
She recalled the damp, rain-puckered poster on the kiosk outside the zoo, the forlorn pink pig who was almost certainly lost forever. Another nidus of sorrow: the lost pig, the child who mourned him. She felt a swell of anger toward the well-meaning parents who had posted the sign. Who had taken the cowardly path, prete
nding there was a fix to the problem instead of doing the more difficult thing of teaching the child about loss, about its inevitability and how to live past it.
It was abruptly obvious to Laura, what she and everyone usually managed to forget: Life was a sucking cornucopia of loss, everyone teetering on its edge all the time, all the precious things at risk every moment. Childhoods and pink pigs and best friends, lovers and brothers and parents and children, whole lives and histories perpetually rushing into the ravenous funnel of oblivion. It wasn’t possible to cherish them enough before they were taken away.
1980
Chapter Forty-Six
ROBERT IS at work when his life ends.
He has a pencil in his hand; he’s tapping it against the desk in couplets, three of them in a row, then space, then repeat. It’s a habit that he indulges only when he’s in this office, alone. It cropped up last year after he quit smoking, cold-turkeying it without telling anyone, while Genevieve was out of town. Bea was at college and teenage Laura didn’t notice; she was always on the phone or in her room listening to music or babysitting or out with friends. Noi probably did notice that the ashtrays stopped needing to be emptied, but she said nothing. With the crutch of tobacco whisked away, Robert had at first leaned on drink; after several fuzzy evenings he eased back on that and entered a short period of volatility, mood swings perceived only by his secretary, before finally reaching an endpoint of brisk clarity—accompanied by the new pencil-tapping habit.
Quitting smoking wrought other changes, imperceptible to him. Without the constant pinching effect of carbon monoxide, his arteries relaxed, providing less resistance to each squeeze of his heart. Without the chemical irritation, the inflamed interior of his blood vessels began to heal, their deposits of yellow cholesterol to disintegrate.
This day, Robert’s last, he’s stayed late at work. After his secretary left for the day, he’d locked the door behind her and taken a large envelope from beneath the desk blotter, slid out the heavy stack of satellite surveillance photographs and begun to scrutinize them methodically. Top to bottom, left to right. They’re a new technology, grayscale and grainy, difficult to read, but by now Robert has accumulated a good bit of practice. On the fifth image he sees it: the boy who could be Philip.
He can’t let himself look more closely until he has cleared his desk surface completely, putting everything away into drawers and file cabinets. When that is done, he centers the photograph perfectly on the blotter and begins to examine it all over again, starting in the upper left corner. When he gets to the collection of gray and white shadows near the middle of the picture he is snagged again by the figure’s posture, the way the head is held. It could be Robert himself as a teenager. He checks the coordinates printed on the margins of the image, goes to retrieve an atlas from the bookshelf across the room. At that moment, a cholesterol plaque ruptures in the wall of his left main coronary artery.
The exposed interior of the plaque is fluffy, like stuffing burst from a plush animal. The fluff doesn’t itself impede blood flow, but it releases a host of attractant humors that call to platelets floating by in the passing blood, and like unreasoning, obedient infantry, the platelets respond. They have one power, to turn sticky, and they do that, clutching together on the soft exposed material of the ruptured plaque, building a precarious bramble of clot. Robert is reaching for the atlas when a pinpoint of clot breaks off and rushes down the open channel, entering the left anterior descending artery and passing into one of the diagonal branches. Down the narrowing diameter it hurtles until it sticks, corking up the flow of blood to the heart muscle beyond. Robert feels a twinge of pain, touches a fist to his chest, and coughs, as though to dislodge something.
That bit of clot dissolves; the pain goes away. Upstream, clot is still growing on the ruptured plaque. For some time, while Robert takes the atlas down and opens it on his desk, there’s a balancing act going on, enzymes in his blood working to break down the clot as fast as it accumulates. The artery is nearly the diameter of a pea, the clot fluttering frantically at its margin. While Robert is paging through the atlas, the dissolution begins to outpace the accumulation: the battle is being won.
But then a large portion of clot detaches from its fragile mooring and tumbles down the left main coronary artery, into the mouth of the left anterior descending artery. Robert, bent over at his desk with his finger on the tangled blue and green of a map, feels a suction of air from the room.
He thinks, Not yet. He thinks, I’m only forty-four years old.
There’s still some space around the obstructing clot at first, allowing a small amount of blood flow, but platelets attach themselves and patch up the opening, and then Robert is on the floor. No one hears him fall. No one would hear him if he were to cry out. The office was expressly built to make eavesdropping impossible; there are sound-deadening buffers within the thick walls. I haven’t fixed things yet. That’s his next thought, as he reaches a heavy hand upward, toward the telephone on the desk above him. He hasn’t known consciously that he was planning to fix things, but suddenly he does know it. He had meant to find a way to lead Genevieve back—not necessarily to happiness, or to his bed, but to some kind of peace. She’d stop inventing excuses to return to Asia, she’d find a focus at home on which to expend her restless energy. Maybe her two daughters. He’s meant to fix them too. He has things he wants to tell them: Bea needs to drop whatever burden she is carrying, or she’ll end up too hard to be happy; if Laura doesn’t grow up soon, she never will.
With a monumental effort, he grasps the hanging cord of the phone and pulls, and the whole thing falls down with a crash beside him, the receiver jumping away from the base and droning a dial tone into the air. He rests his hand on the quilt of push buttons: Whom to call? His elder daughter is at college. His younger daughter is spending the night with a friend. His wife is out of the country. Again.
He and Genevieve had argued before she left—or what passed for arguing between them at this point. He’d asked her Should we have a funeral? and when she’d raised her eyes to his he’d gone on, Some kind of goodbye? It’s been eight years. We have two children who might benefit from closure.
We have three children, she’d said.
And then he said it, the thing that he’d been afraid to say.
She had to know he’d been thinking it. Robert was an only son, of a sparsely fruited family tree. His sister could not carry the name, nor his daughters. Robert’s parents’ effusiveness after the arrival of Philip had made clear—by contrast to their restraint after firstborn Beatrice—how much this had mattered to them. In retrospect, it seemed almost destined that the boy would slip away: that wizened pale sultana of a baby had been far too small to bear the weight of a dynasty.
“We could have more children,” Robert had said softly.
At forty-two Genevieve is still beautiful, and few would suspect her age, but Robert knows that it’s possible his point is moot—there may be no plush womb there anymore to nurture an infant. He has no idea how all that is progressing. He doesn’t peek into the bathroom drawer where she keeps her female supplies, doesn’t know if the drawer holds pads or tampons or hormone supplements or anything at all.
When he said those words, more children, Genevieve’s expression changed.
Robert’s grandfather had been fond of safari, the walls of his den at home crowded with hairy heads. As a small boy visiting that house, Robert had been unable to turn in any direction without encountering the indictment of their glass-eyed stares. Not that Robert’s grandfather had dug out the eyeballs himself, or cut the heads off himself, or carried any of the pelts or heads himself. Those tasks were accomplished by the attendants who stared out from some of the framed black-and-white photos also on the wall, the whites of their eyes making glowing dots against their dark skin. Robert’s grandfather spoke of them with affection, pointing them out and using their names—Maba, he was little but so strong—but also in a way that made them seem like children or
beasts, excluded from having their own motivations, or preferences about what they might rather be doing in place of serving the whims of the muzungu hunter.
Looking into Genevieve’s eyes that evening after he’d said more children, Robert had been reminded of those taxidermied heads. It had been the same gaze: the trophy regarding its collector.
At one point, he had envisioned the two of them as something like the game the girls played in the backyard of the Tudor, punching a ball strung to the top of a metal pole back and forth at each other. Genevieve was the orb, flying around stick-in-the-mud Robert. If he stood immovable, she’d wrap around and around on her string until she was nestled close. He had had that analogy in mind six years ago, when he’d refused to help in any way with her first return to Asia. Instead of discouraging her, the solitary venture had taught her self-sufficiency, and when Robert did accompany her on a later trip he felt like an acolyte moving along in her shadow. She traveled through the slums with flabbergasting ease. Take your vitamins, Lolly, she’d call to a giggling Thai girl on the street, and Okay, Miss Gen, the girl would call back. They called her Miss Gen, not Madame, another shock. Robert hadn’t known about that nickname. He felt reduced by it, appendiceal—Madame had incorporated his own existence. Miss Gen stood alone.
After saying more children, he finally realized that his ball-and-stick analogy was fatally flawed. No matter how deeply he’d planted himself, her orbit had grown only wider, the fettering string stretching to its limit. Just a matter of time until the ball broke free and sailed away.
His compulsions had returned after Genevieve began traveling; they came back stronger than ever, as if he had been holding his breath for years and had to gasp. Not just the checking, but new behaviors, so insidious that at first he did not notice them. Tapping his fingers against his thumb, one-two-three-four and back again, four-three-two-one. Both hands, each finger touching separately, exactly the same. Others noticed, though, and one day he saw a subordinate across the office imitating him, hands held up beside his head like a man adjusting his mustachios, mincingly tap-tap-tapping the fingers while an appreciative audience snickered. From a good distance away, Robert recognized it instantly, felt a hot sweep of embarrassment. His impulse was to swerve into the men’s room before he was seen, but instead he continued walking, steadily approaching the group, the laughing faces spotting him over the shoulder of the joker, the laughter dying away.
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