by Dani Shapiro
Clara feels herself disappearing. Who is Kubovy seeing? The little girl who grew up on the walls of the Kubovy Weiss Gallery, the images of whom earned him fifty percent of a small fortune? Which photograph is he seeing? Clara with the Lizard? Clara in the Tree House? Clara, Napping? She is disintegrating, becoming nothing more than thousands upon thousands of pixilated dots: gray and black and white. Each one, floating in space, separate from the rest—meaningless. She feels herself coming apart.
Clara tries mightily to hold Kubovy’s gaze, but he is better at this awkward moment than she, and her eyes slide away. She’s sure Ruth is watching, with a kind of carnivorous pleasure. Kubovy and Clara, together in a room. Just like old times. The movie reel of her life playing backward, stopping only at key moments characterized by the warm, milky comfort of self-delusion.
“Oh, please, Kubovy,” Clara finally says, recovering. “That’s hardly the case.” Her voice is muted, as if coming from deep within the cave of herself. Even in the flattering light of Robin’s perfect bathroom this morning, she appeared exhausted. Dark rings under her eyes. Hollows in her cheekbones that she hadn’t remembered seeing before. Her hair cut into an efficient shoulder-length nonstyle. She has wanted for so many years not to resemble the girl in her mother’s photographs. Now, by sheer dint of age, she may have finally gotten there.
Peony swings into the room, carrying a wooden tray with a teapot and two cups.
“Clara, I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were here,” Peony says. Her smile is a bit wobbly. She’s scared, skittish.
“That’s okay, Peony. I’m fine, thanks.”
“Kubovy, tell Clara our plan,” says Ruth. She’s swaying slightly on the small tip of her cane.
“It’s not exactly a plan, Ruth,” says Kubovy. “As I’ve been trying to tell you, to move galleries, to come back to me at this point—believe me, as a businessman, I would like nothing better. But I’m saying this to you as your ally and your friend”—Kubovy’s tan deepens—“it would be suicide.”
“Suicide!” Ruth’s whispery voice raises into a muted shriek. “Suicide!” She begins to laugh. She laughs harder and harder, until the laughter turns into a fit of coughing. She doubles over, nearly losing her balance. She hobbles over to the sofa, her left foot dragging, and maneuvers herself into a sitting position.
The three of them—Kubovy, Peony, and Clara—stand helplessly and watch. It’s the Ruth Dunne show, and this morning’s episode is featuring hysterical Ruth. There are so many Ruths, Clara can hardly remember them all. Jealous Ruth, competitive Ruth, manic Ruth, exhausted Ruth, lost-in-the-wilderness Ruth. But the scariest Ruth of all, at least to Clara, is this one. Hysteria spreads its map across her mother’s face, a series of red blotches blooming on her cheeks, the tip of her small nose.
“I think I can afford to commit suicide if I want to, Kubovy,” Ruth says, catching her breath. “I think I’ve earned that right.”
“I apologize. It was a poor choice of words,” says Kubovy. “But Ruth, we have a legacy to think about. It would be most prudent to leave the current works with Matthew, whose name, let’s face it, is more bold-faced than mine at this point.”
“I can’t bear that place,” Ruth spits out. The red blotches have faded, along with the hysteria, and now she looks completely spent. Her skin is translucent, a tangle of blue veins throbbing visibly in her forehead.
“He’s done well by you,” says Kubovy.
“He’s a preening sycophant.”
“Be that as it may.”
Peony is watching the back-and-forth of this exchange as if it’s the finals at Wimbledon. She is leaning forward, eager not to miss a single point. She is receiving a valuable education in the business of photography, as she is receiving an education in the business of dying. When she got the internship with Ruth Dunne, most likely she had been hoping to work in the archives, answer correspondence, or, if she were really lucky, apprentice in the darkroom.
“As your friend and adviser, Ruth—and I’m sorry to be speaking in such a direct manner—”
“Oh, bugger off, Kubovy.”
Kubovy’s tan deepens once again. This exchange is costing him. He loves Ruth—he has always loved Ruth. Clara realizes that she hasn’t once—not once since she left New York—thought about what might have become of Kubovy Weiss. She has put him high up on the shelf in her mind where she keeps everything else related to her childhood. Now that he’s here, right in front of her, close enough to throttle, she feels herself shaking.
Of course, she supposes, any good gallery owner could have put Ruth Dunne on the map with the Clara series. But it hadn’t been just anyone. It had been Kubovy, and he had been brilliant at it: a master. All the more amazing that Kubovy had remained Ruth’s friend, even after she left him in the late eighties for Leo Castelli.
“What, Ruth?” He sounds weary. “I’m trying to help you. I assume you asked me for my advice because you trust me. And what I’m trying to say here is that I’m in a better position to deal with your estate if Kubovy Weiss is not your gallery. Believe me, when it comes to the IRS I’ve been through this before—”
“Estate! The fucking IRS!” Ruth explodes. “I can’t stand it. I won’t listen to another word of this.” She tries to lift herself off the sofa, struggling to her feet—an impossibility. She collapses back into her seat, her bony bottom barely making an impression in the cushions.
She turns to Peony. “Help me up.”
Peony moves to one side of Ruth and swings her easily upward with her strong young arms. She pivots Ruth, whose feet dangle uselessly, and deposits her into the wheelchair.
“You could have a career doing this, you know,” Ruth says to Peony. And then, as if she knows she may have just said something insulting, “Peony is a very talented young photographer, Kubovy. Interesting work in photo-collage. You should take a look at her slides.”
“I’d be delighted,” says Kubovy.
Peony doesn’t know where to look. She keeps her eyes on her toes, but seems like she might levitate at any second.
“Ruth, we have unfinished business,” says Kubovy.
“To be continued.” Ruth waves airily from her wheelchair as Peony begins to push her back to her bedroom. Clara stands next to Kubovy and watches her mother’s head, erect and bobbing on her narrow shoulders.
Kubovy puts an arm around Clara and steers her toward the windows. “She’s going to try to make a bloody mess of things,” he says. “That’s what she does. It makes her feel alive.”
“But she’s dying, Kubovy,” Clara blurts out. She is surprised by her own vehemence. Is she trying to convince Kubovy? Or herself? Despite all evidence to the contrary, despite the statistics on the Internet, part of her still believes that her mother is going to walk out of her bedroom, her long hair flowing down her back, her lungs pink as a baby’s. And then Clara can leave for another fourteen years. Her past can stay right here in this apartment, locked up inside the gates, guarded by the doorman. Safe behind these thick soundproofed walls.
Kubovy gives Clara a long hard look, and again she tries and fails to hold his gaze.
“Don’t judge me,” she says quietly, her eyes on a bare patch in the murky blue of the oriental. Forcing herself to stand her ground. She is strong—she knows she is strong. She’s done what she had to do to survive, hasn’t she? What does Kubovy know about that?
“My dear Clara,” Kubovy says, caressing her name. “Far be it from me. I was simply wondering…” He trails off, shaking his head as if to stop himself. “I know Robin is around, but you—Ruth is so delicate now, and after all these years—”
“What are you trying to say, Kubovy?” Goddammit, she’s getting pulled in.
“Are you planning to see this through?” he asks.
She stares at him.
“Of course,” she says. She is surprised by the force of her own vehemence. And then, as if to convince herself, “She’s my mother.”
Chapter Three
; IMPOSSIBLE to isolate a memory: to carve it out and separate it from what has come before or after, from what has been told and retold. Stories turn what we remember into a series of polished little gems. In Clara’s case, impossible to isolate her own memory from what has been written about, taught in art classes, discussed as case law, hung in museums. Her past doesn’t belong to her. She has long since stopped trying. Why make the effort when there is nothing new to be found?
But now, off the shelf it tumbles. Suddenly, glaringly accessible. All of it, her history, gleams—perfectly lit, silvery—in the darkened and cobwebbed corners of her mind. Each image is a looking glass into which she can disappear—like her favorite childhood heroine, Alice—until she finds herself on the other side.
She is four years old—the year before kindergarten—and she is sitting cross-legged on the floor of the Kubovy Weiss Gallery. She has never been down to this neighborhood before, a long taxi ride from their apartment on the Upper West Side. It might as well be a different city. It’s quieter than uptown, and the light is much brighter over the low rooftops. Even the smells are different: turpentine, Windex, the sour scent of spilled white wine.
Her Barbies are strewn around her, their platinum hair all tangled up; she had tried to shampoo them the night before. She has been allowed to bring three Barbies, along with their assorted paraphernalia (tiny combs and brushes, a few changes of clothing) because her mother has told her it’s going to be a long afternoon, and Clara needs to be patient.
The main rooms in the gallery are huge, cavernous—it is a converted warehouse in SoHo—with gigantic dark wood beams running across the high ceiling, from which small pinpoint track lighting hangs, creating oval-shaped pools of illumination on the spotless white walls. The front of the gallery is made entirely of glass, and from where Clara sits she can see people walking past on West Broadway. She’s just learned to count, so she counts the number of ladies. The number of men. There don’t seem to be any children. It’s a school day. But Clara isn’t in school, not yet. Robin is in first grade, but since Clara’s only four, her mother wanted to keep her home. They have so much work to do.
“I think we should pare it way down, Ruth. Keep it simple.” Kubovy is leaning against the front desk, smoking a brown hand-rolled cigarette. The surface of the desk is clear, except for a round glass vase containing a dozen pale peach roses, sent earlier that day by Clara’s father.
“How simple, Kubovy?” Ruth’s soft voice seems louder in this space, with nothing to muffle it. The heels of her cowboy boots click against the hardwood floors as she paces back and forth, looking at the various ovals of light. Her hair is pulled back with a large tortoiseshell clip, her face bare.
“I know we said we were going to hang the landscapes—but I’m having my doubts.”
“But we only have eight Clara pictures,” says Ruth. She folds her arms and stands in the middle of the room.
Clara is playing with two of her Barbies, trying to get one to comb the other one’s hair. She pulls the comb through gently, holding up one small hunk of knotted hair at a time, the way her mother does with her—but it isn’t working. Barbie’s hair is more and more of a rat’s nest. Serves Clara right, she’s only half paying attention to the job at hand. She’s listening to her own name, repeated over and over again, bouncing off the walls of the Kubovy Weiss Gallery. Clara pictures. Clara. Each time she hears her name, she looks up. But they are not talking to her.
“Eight. Exactly,” says Kubovy. “Large format. One hung on each wall. Think of it, Ruth. It will be stark. Fabulous. A tremendous statement.”
“But the landscapes,” Ruth says. “I’m quite attached to the landscapes.”
Kubovy takes a long drag on his cigarette and exhales through his nose and mouth. The white smoke swirls around his face. With his salt-and-pepper hair, long and curly around the collar of his shirt, he looks like a feline creature from one of Clara’s picture books.
“If you put the landscapes on the same wall as the Clara pictures, they’ll look like shit,” says Kubovy. “Excuse my language.”
Clara looks up. She’s pretty sure he just said a bad word. And Ruth, who has been in a kind of dreamy contemplative mood, as blank as the blank walls, snaps to attention.
“What did you say?”
Kubovy shrugs. “It’s my job to tell you the truth. The landscapes are derivative. Immature. I see nothing new or fresh in them.”
“But you took me on after you saw those slides—”
“That’s true,” says Kubovy. “I suppose I saw some glimmer of talent. But nothing compared to the Clara photographs, Ruth. Surely you know that.”
Kubovy walks over to a rolling cart, on which a series of large crates are stacked, each labeled with black Magic Marker on the light, splintery wood: Clara with the Lizard. Clara, Napping. Clara in the Fountain. He pries open the slats of wood on the Clara in the Fountain crate and carefully removes the photograph, bits of tissue paper floating to the floor. The photograph is five feet square—bigger than Clara’s whole body—and framed in simple black lacquer. Kubovy struggles to carry it over to the wall.
“Rico, Brian!” he calls into the back room, and two young men materialize. One of them is wearing a bandanna on his head, just like the bandanna Clara has brought for her Western Barbie outfit.
“Let’s give this a try,” says Kubovy.
Rico and Brian hold the photograph up to the wall. Clara gathers her three Barbies together on her lap and watches. She hasn’t seen these pictures before—not in their final form. She’s only seen the Polaroids Ruth has taken, sketches, ideas, the barest outline of the real thing.
Now, she sees herself. So gigantic! So much bigger than she actually is! She remembers the night—it was very late—Ruth woke her out of a deep sleep and bundled her into the elevator. Where are we going, Mommy? Clara had asked her. Just to the courtyard, sweetheart. Everything’s set up. It won’t take long, I promise. As the elevator made its slow descent, Clara looked at her mother in the dim old-fashioned yellowy light. Ruth always looked most beautiful when she was in this state. Clara didn’t have the words for what the state was, exactly. But it seemed to her to be something akin to bursting. Bursting with what, she wasn’t sure.
In the courtyard, the lighting was set up, two tall pole lamps and the silver reflector disk. Ruth had brought down a thick wool blanket, even though it wasn’t cold out. She wrapped it around Clara.
“Let’s get you undressed,” she said. The blanket was itchy. Clara remembered they had used it for a picnic in Central Park earlier in the summer.
As Clara stepped out of her pajama bottoms, Ruth glanced up at the sky.
“Look, sweetheart,” she whispered. “Look at the moon.”
“It’s a full moon!” Clara said, her clear voice piercing the silence of the night. “I see the man there—the man in the moon!”
“Ssshh,” said Ruth. “We don’t want to wake people up.”
Where was the doorman? Ruth must have asked him to stay inside his booth. Maybe she gave him a tip, the same way she sometimes did when he hailed them a taxi on Broadway.
“Okay, Clara. Let’s climb into the fountain,” said Ruth.
“But we’re not allowed,” said Clara.
“Just for tonight.”
Clara climbed up on the edge of the fountain and dipped her toe into the two inches of water inside the stone basin. It wasn’t too cold. The water was still, because the fountain part had been turned off for the night. Beneath the green-black glassy surface of the water, hundreds of copper pennies, nickels, dimes, even quarters gleamed like stars.
Ruth quickly approached her with the light meter, holding it up to Clara’s bare chest. She then adjusted the aperture on her camera. Clara knew better than to talk right now. She felt the heat of the lights on her body. Her mother was crouching, aiming the camera up at her, squinting through the lens.
“Hold your arms up in the air, Clara. Like you’re a part of the fountain. Like y
ou’re reaching for the moon.”
Click. Ruth checked the light meter again. Click, click, click.
Rico and Brian are holding Clara in the Fountain in the puddle of light cast on the gallery wall. The photograph slips a little, and they right it; their arms are getting tired.
“Perfection,” says Kubovy. “I’m seeing it—the whole gallery, with just these eight extraordinary images.”
“I don’t know,” says Ruth. She is standing in front of Clara, partly blocking Clara’s view of her own naked body, pale and shiny as marble, arms flung wide in the moonlight.
“Ruth, please—listen. Listen to me. This is your introduction. Your debut. No one knows you yet. Artists can spend their entire lifetimes recovering from the wrong first impression.”
“Mommy?”
Ruth doesn’t turn around. She folds her arms, cocks her head. She is lost in another world, the world she goes to when she’s inside her pictures. Sometimes Clara imagines that they are together in that black-and-white world, that the place inside the pictures is the real one and this—all this is just a rehearsal. A setup. Like the way she and her mother stage the pictures before they actually get made.
“Mommy?”
Clara has to pee really badly. She doesn’t know where the bathroom is. She looks around, but all the doors look the same. They don’t even have knobs.
“All right, Kubovy.” Ruth sighs. “I hope you’re right.”
“I know I’m right.”
Kubovy walks back over to the rolling cart of crates and begins to open the next one, cursing as he nicks his finger on a staple.
“Let’s start to sort out the placement,” he says. “I think—”
“Mommy!”
Clara crosses her legs hard. She feels a tiny bit of urine wet her panties. She never wets her panties. But now, out it comes. Down the side of her leg. Pooling around her bottom.
Ruth wheels around. Clara is sitting in a puddle on the floor.
“Oh, no!”
“I’m sorry, Mommy.” Clara begins to cry. She cries and cries, until she feels wet everywhere: her bottom, her cheeks, the front of her dress. “I tried to tell you—”