by Dani Shapiro
“Do you want me to do that for you?” Nathan asks. He’s afraid she’ll slice her finger open.
“No, I’m fine,” Ruth says. “So tell me, who is this fabulous client? I hope he likes strudel.”
Nathan’s client arrives an hour late for lunch. He is flustered, pacing back and forth on the front porch, his long hair—jet-black, not yet gray—windblown from the ride upstate in his convertible. He’s wearing jeans and a navy blue blazer. A bright-red cashmere muffler is wrapped around his neck, obscuring the bottom part of his face.
“These country roads,” he says by way of introducing himself, when Ruth opens the door. He hands her a bottle of wine. “My apologies.”
“Not at all,” Ruth says. She’s slightly mystified by this man on her porch. Nathan hasn’t told her much about him. “Please, come in.”
Robin and Clara are watching television in the family room when Ruth brings the stranger through.
“Girls, please say hello to Mr….” She trails off. “I’m sorry, I don’t know your name.”
“Weiss,” he says. “Kubovy Weiss.” He crouches down so he’s at eye level with the girls. “But you can call me Kubovy.”
“You made it!” Nathan comes bounding in from out back. He has bits of dried leaves and twigs on his fisherman’s sweater; he must have been hauling in firewood.
“Nathan.” Kubovy straightens up, offering his hand. “Thanks for having me.”
Clara keeps looking at the man with the long hair and the funny name. He’s different from the people her father usually brings home, and it isn’t just the hair either. He looks like a drawing in one of her picture books. A Maurice Sendak animal, all curls and angles and watchful eyes.
“So you are the photographer,” Kubovy says to Ruth.
“Yes,” Ruth answers faintly. Her forehead knots with anticipation as she waits for the usual questions. Where have I seen your pictures? Can you make a living at that?
“I’d love to see your work,” Kubovy says.
“Oh.” Ruth’s hands fly up, a reflex. “I don’t really—”
“Kubovy is an art dealer,” Nathan says.
Something comes over Ruth. Her pupils widen, her nerves bristle with attention. She is suddenly more alive than before.
“Really,” she says. Her voice gives nothing away. She is cool, oh so cool. “Do you have a gallery?”
“Yes, in SoHo,” says Kubovy. “On Prince Street, though we’re about to move into a larger space on West Broadway.”
Nathan hums a little tune under his breath as he uncorks a bottle of wine. He walks into the kitchen and emerges with a platter of cheese and a small bowl of olives.
“Please.” He gestures to the sofa. “Make yourself comfortable.”
Kubovy sinks into the deep food-stained pillows. He struggles to sit upright as Nathan hands him a glass of wine.
“My husband tells me you’re his client?” Ruth asks. She’s still trying to make sense of all this. The thoughts practically gallop across her face.
“Our firm is handling a dispute between Kubovy and one of his former partners,” Nathan says.
“Mommy?” Clara looks up from Sesame Street.
“Yes, sweetie?”
“I’m hungry.”
“We’ll have lunch soon, Clara.”
“Clara. What a beautiful name,” says Kubovy. Then he turns to Ruth. “So. I am serious, you know. I hope you will show me your work.”
“Maybe after lunch,” Ruth begins. “I don’t know what I have here. Most of my work is in the city.”
“Whatever you like.” Kubovy shrugs.
“Contemporary photography is Kubovy’s specialty,” says Nate.
Ruth nods, as if unsurprised. It must be a lot of work, acting as if none of this matters to her.
“Please, my dear,” Kubovy says. He sounds much older than he is—he is perhaps in his mid-thirties. “Don’t be nervous. I don’t bite.”
“I’m not nervous!” Ruth says.
Kubovy does a slow-motion blink. “Of course not,” he says. “My mistake.”
After lunch—after the charcuterie, the crumbling Asiago, the thick slices of saucisson and hunks of fresh baguettes, after the wine—Ruth slips upstairs and comes down a few minutes later carrying a large black portfolio.
“These aren’t my most recent—” she says. The color in her cheeks is high: two bright pink spots. “I mean—”
“That’s fine,” Kubovy murmurs. “Let’s have a look.”
He brushes away the bits of cheese and bread crumbs, then spreads the portfolio open on the dining-room table.
From the kitchen, the sound of running water, clanking dishes. The hum of domestic life. Nate has absented himself from this process, taking the girls with him. Here, Robin. Stack these dishes. Clara, honey, could you hand me that towel, the one over there, hanging by the stove?
Ruth stands behind Kubovy, looking over his shoulder as he slowly flips through the pages of her portolio. There are fifteen photographs in all, sheathed in plastic. His manner—relaxed until now—is focused, fastidious.
“Those are landscapes,” she says, and shakes her head. “Obviously.”
Kubovy doesn’t respond. He’s not making this easy for her. No comments as he takes in each photograph. No sign of what he’s thinking. He pauses over one image, a photograph of the local garbage dump: the rusted gates, the pickup trucks, the huge vat of empty bottles glistening in the silvery light.
He closes the portfolio, placing his thick square hands on top of it. Ruth sits down next to him at the table. She isn’t going to give him the satisfaction of asking, Well? What do you think? She stares at him, waiting for a verdict.
“Interesting.” He purses his lips, blowing out air. “Not quite there yet—but interesting. Quite beautiful.”
She waits for more, but no more is coming.
“What’s not there?” Ruth asks.
“My dear, that’s what you need to figure out.” Kubovy pauses, fishing for a cigarette. He lights up, then flicks his ash onto a salad plate. “I’ll tell you what: Figure that out and come see me in a year.”
“HI, HILARY.” Robin greets the saleswoman on the fifth floor of Barneys by name. “My sister here is looking for something simple and black.”
“Any designer in particular?” the saleswoman asks, turning to Clara. Sizing her up. She’s certainly happy to see Robin, who must be one of her better customers.
“I don’t know,” Clara says. She looks around the floor at the spare well-placed racks on which dozens of shapeless garments—mostly black—hang. She’s never heard of half these designers. Costume National. Rick Owen. Junya Watanabe. She feels she’s been living under a rock—or at least in the pages of the L. L. Bean catalog.
Sammy has already found a bag she likes in the Prada department. She carries it over to Clara.
“Look, Mom. Isn’t this cute?”
Clara takes it from Sammy and looks at the price tag. Thirteen hundred dollars for a few stitched-together pieces of leather.
“Robin, this is insane,” Clara says.
“Well, it’s Prada.”
“No, I mean being here. It’s too weird.”
“You need something to wear. You can’t go in blue jeans—which, as best as I can tell, is all you own.”
“I’ll just borrow—”
“I’m a size two,” interrupts Robin.
“No, I was going to say—” Clara starts, then stops. What was she going to say, that she’d wear something of Ruth’s?
“Is it for a special occasion?” The saleswoman—Hilary—returns with an armload of black. Skirts and sweaters, blouses, dresses.
“Our mother’s funeral,” Robin says.
“Oh!” Hilary looks from one to the other, as if wondering for a moment if Robin is joking. Then realizing.
“I’m so sorry,” she says, ushering Clara into a large windowed dressing room.
Couldn’t Robin have lied? Did Hilary with the crimson lips a
nd powdered face really need to know their family’s business? Clara strips down to her bra and panties. She averts her gaze from the three-way mirror. The last thing she wants to do is look at herself from any angle—much less every angle—well lit and naked.
She pulls a black sweater over her head, but she can tell before she even gets it all the way on that it doesn’t fit. Then she climbs into a pencil skirt, tugging it up over her hips, which have become curvier since giving birth to Sam. She gives herself a quick glance in the mirror: awful, like a sausage stuffed into its casing. She keeps going. Layers of black chiffon (inappropriate), a black wool thing that wraps around and around her body (bizarre), until finally she slips into a black short-sleeved dress and zips it up the back.
On the other side of the dressing room curtain, she can hear Robin and Sam discussing the finer points of shopping. My favorite color is pink, Sammy says. What’s yours? Clara strains to listen. Pathetic, that she doesn’t know her sister’s favorite color. Gray, Robin says.
Clara forces herself to meet her own eyes in the mirror, and when she does, her knees almost give way beneath her. How long has it been since she’s seen herself in anything other than jeans and a sweatshirt? The dress fits her perfectly. She looks—she has tried so hard not to, but she looks—elegant and beautiful. Her skin is pale, stark against the darkness of the dress, and for a moment she has the eerie sensation that her mother is in the mirror, gazing calmly back at her.
Suddenly dizzy, she sits down on the plush little ottoman and crosses her legs. Focus. Whose voice is she hearing? Ruth’s—or her own?
“Clara?” Robin’s voice sounds far away.
The dressing room might as well be a space capsule. She has been catapulted into orbit, snipped loose from earth’s gravitational pull.
“Clara?”
She’s dead. Clara’s mouth forms around the words. She reaches back, pulls her hair out of its usual ponytail, and shakes it loose. She keeps staring into the mirror. Dead. My mother is dead and gone. She imagines Ruth’s body, lying in its casket at Frank Campbell’s.
“Mom?”
There’s Sammy—real as can be—parting the curtains of the dressing room. Eyes like saucers.
“Oh my God, Mom—you look so pretty.”
And then Robin, just behind her.
“Well, well. Look who cleans up nicely.”
“I can’t do this.” Clara struggles not to cry.
Robin looks at Clara with a notable lack of sympathy. Suck it up, she seems to be saying.
“Of course you can.”
The three of them take in Clara’s reflection in the mirror. Everything will be different from now on. And nothing will ever, ever change. Clara’s relationship with Ruth—now frozen in amber. Tears roll down her cheeks, and she wipes them quickly away.
SHE KNOWS this will be the last time. When her robe falls from her shoulders and she stands in the hot white glare of the pole lights, when she shivers at the suddenness of it, she knows she will never, after this, have to pose for her mother again.
It is late at night when Ruth pulls her from a deep sleep.
“Come,” she says, her voice gentle. “Come with me.”
The studio is brightly lit. Ruth has hung a heavy cream-colored tarp along the length of the far wall. The tarp spills halfway onto the floor, pooling there like the train of a wedding dress. Ruth recently started to take commissioned portraits for Vanity Fair and uses the studio for the shoots: Sting has come through, and Meryl Streep, and even Madonna, who just starred in Who’s That Girl? Near the door a leather-bound guest book, a gift from Kubovy. Someday it will be full of famous signatures, from rappers to presidents.
“Stand over there, Clara.” That quiet voice. Does Ruth use the same tone when she shoots her celebrities? Clara steps onto the tarp, the canvas rough beneath her bare feet. Her mother has never taken her picture in the studio before. All the other pictures have been staged: the lizard, the wet bed, the Popsicle.
She waits, her senses alert, the thick terry-cloth robe still wrapped around her. She doesn’t allow herself to be detached—not like she has always been before. No. This time she needs to be fully present for what happens next. What happens when her robe drops to the floor.
Ruth fiddles with the lights, then moves a reflector so that it’s aiming up at Clara like a silvery moon. Ruth is muttering to herself as she works, concentrating on getting the exposure exactly right.
In the arched windows of the studio, Clara can see her own reflection against the darkness of the night. She imagines people down on Broadway—walking their dogs before bed or coming home late from a party—looking up at the bright glow coming from the top floor of the Apthorp and wondering what’s going on up there at this hour.
“Okay,” Ruth says. “Let’s get to work.”
Clara pauses for a moment. Nothing will be the same after this. Lately, she has managed to hide herself. She has worn black bulky leggings and sweaters beneath her school uniform. She has locked the bathroom door when she’s taken showers. She has changed quickly into her pajamas. The only noticeable change has been her hair, that short black choppy cut she gave herself a few months ago.
“Come on, Clara.”
Ruth is impatient. Everything is set up and ready to go. Clara sheds her robe the way a high diver might before walking out onto the board. Preparing to somersault, to flip backward, to slice clean through the water like a blade.
“Oh, my God.”
The first words Ruth utters. She doesn’t see Clara head-on, but, rather, through the lens of her camera. She lifts her head up and stares at her, her mouth ajar. “What the hell is that?”
At fourteen, Clara’s thighs have become fleshy, thanks to a steady diet of ice cream and doughnuts after school. The weight she’s gained hasn’t made her fat, exactly. She’s what could be described as solid. For the first time not a waif, not a frail thing. But it’s the tattoo Ruth can’t handle, the dark green garland of leaves and vines snaking around Clara’s upper arm like a misplaced Christmas wreath.
“What have you done to yourself?” Ruth’s voice has lost its gentle, coaxing tone. Her voice is stretched so thin it sounds like it could snap. And Clara—Clara just gazes at her mother calmly. As if watching a movie unfold from a comfortable seat in a darkened theater. Ruth has no way of knowing how hard Clara’s heart is pounding. How she feels her entire spine is made of ice.
Ruth puts aside her equipment, then approaches Clara slowly, almost nervously. She lifts Clara’s arm and examines the tattoo for a moment, then rubs her thumb over it to see if perhaps it’s just painted on.
She stands inches away from Clara, her chest heaving.
“Who did this to you?”
Clara can’t seem to talk.
“Do you realize it’s illegal to—my God, Clara. You could have gotten an infection. You could have died.”
Ruth is still staring at the tattoo, willing it to go away. And Clara is wondering. Is that what’s really bothering her mother?
“Say something!”
Clara is silent. Her body speaks for itself.
“Goddammit!” Ruth cries. Then she turns around and stalks back to her camera.
Clara bends down to collect her robe.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Ruth asks.
“Getting dressed,” Clara says.
“Oh, no. We’re still going to work.”
The ice in Clara’s spine turns to water. She feels herself melting—all that hardness, all that bravado falling away.
“What?” she asks.
“You did this to yourself, to your beautiful—” Ruth’s voice cracks. “Why?” The word comes out in a wail.
“So you’d stop,” whispers Clara.
Ruth doesn’t move a muscle. She stands behind her camera and looks at her daughter for what seems a very long time. Lost—somewhere way, way deep inside herself—in thought. Outside, on Broadway, a car alarm goes off, a long series of high-pitched beeps. The radiat
or hisses and rattles. A mouse scratches its tiny claws inside one of the thick walls.
“We’ll document this,” Ruth finally says.
“I don’t want to,” Clara says.
“It will be the last time, Clara.” Ruth closes her eyes. “I promise.”
Click. Clara is standing naked in all her tattooed, black-haired solidness, holding her bathrobe like it’s a teddy bear. Her breasts are hints of the woman she is becoming. A shadow between her legs. Click. Her left arm red from where Ruth had grabbed her so tightly. Click. Tears—is she angry or sad, relieved or mournful?—standing still in her eyes.
AFTER THE FUNERAL—town cars lining Madison Avenue despite the attempt to keep it private—after the eulogies and flowers, the casket lined in a purple velvet Ruth would have hated, after the guest book scrawled with signatures, the sea of famous faces, Kubovy ushers Clara and Robin into a café two blocks from the funeral home.
“Why now, Kubovy?” Robin fumes. “There will be people waiting at the apartment. People who want to pay their respects.”
“I’m leaving for Europe tonight.” Kubovy looks first at one sister, then the other. “I know this is difficult, but—”
“We should be doing this in her attorney’s office, not here”—Robin gestures at the marble and chrome, the gleaming espresso machine—“sitting in this fucking fishbowl.”
And it is a fishbowl. They’re seated by the floor-to-ceiling windows of E.A.T., where all of Madison Avenue can see them. The tables are crammed close to one another. An older woman in a tweed jacket is right next to them, eating her scrambled eggs and lox. Clara realizes, with a start, that this is precisely why Kubovy has chosen this place. Total visibility. He’s trying to avoid any possibility of a scene. But why would there be a scene? She doesn’t care how Ruth left things, and she can’t imagine that Robin does either. Robin certainly doesn’t need any more money. And Clara—Clara doesn’t want it or expect it. She hopes her mother left her entire estate to a museum—or to Kubovy, for that matter. She just wants to go back to her life in Maine. She wants all of this to close up around her like skin healing over a wound.