Alive in Shape and Color
Page 25
The USA.
There were terrorists here too, and apparently always had been.
Erika had spent half her work time investigating “weatherpeople,” discovering that they were initially called the Weathermen like the man in the office had said, and then, right around the time of the bombing, becoming the Weather Underground—because they had all decided to disappear, go “underground.”
They made no sense to her, these Weatherpeople. What was weird was that so few of them had gone to prison for what they had done. Some even taught at universities now—or had, before they retired. Hell, she could have had a Weatherperson for a professor and not even known it.
There was no proof that these Weatherpeople had been involved in the bombing of The Thinker, no real reason given for the destruction except four words, scrawled in some kind of marker. Off the Ruling Class. Which meant what, exactly? The Thinker hadn’t been a member of the ruling class. In Dante’s Inferno, he’d actually been a poet, at a time when poets weren’t considered much of anything at all.
Erika’s boss stopped at the bar, and asked for a bottle of water. Then she gave Erika a familiar look—one filled with disapproval.
“You should mingle,” her boss said, and nodded toward a woman, standing alone near the Antithinkers.
Erika fake-smiled, then trudged over. That woman near the Antithinkers was the last person Erika wanted to talk to. Erika had noticed her coming in.
The woman was rich-woman thin, wearing a white designer dress that Erika had seen on one of those Fashion Week red-carpet videos. The woman’s bony hands sparkled with a massive diamond-and-sapphire ring on her left hand, and a slightly less gaudy one on her right. The rest of her jewelry was tasteful though. She wore a flat gold necklace around the dress’s collar, and matching gold earrings.
The gold set off the remaining blond in her white hair, which she wore at chin length, in one of those angular cuts that also spoke of money.
It wasn’t the aura of money and comfort that made Erika want to talk to someone else, however. It was the woman’s face. She had clearly been beautiful decades ago, but she was too thin now, which accentuated her high cheekbones, and made her carefully made-up eyes sink into their sockets.
When Erika had first seen her, Erika had thought that the woman looked like a walking skeleton who was trying to pass as a living person.
Seeing the woman up close didn’t change Erika’s mind.
The woman turned, and for a brief moment, her gaze fell on Erika. Then it moved past her. Erika turned enough to see that volunteer, the one who had quoted Faulkner, standing behind her.
The volunteer wore a blue silk dress that make her look like a badly dressed mother of the bride. Those sharp blue eyes, though, didn’t look motherly. They were filled with something else, something vicious.
Erika stepped out of the way. Screw the boss. Erika wasn’t going to talk to either of those two women.
But Erika couldn’t bring herself to walk too far away. She stayed close enough that she could pretend she was just entering the conversation if the boss came by again.
The skeletal woman smiled at the volunteer.
“Well, look at us,” the skeletal woman said, and Erika shivered. She recognized the voice. It belonged to the woman who had been arguing about the language of the exhibit a month ago. “Who’d’ve thought we’d be the ruling class.”
The volunteer’s lips thinned. Her cheeks turned a bright red—not from embarrassment, but from fury.
“We always were,” the volunteer had that same tone she had used with Erika on that day.
They had known each other. No wonder the volunteer had quoted Faulkner. She might not have been talking to Erika at all, not really.
Erika took one tiny step back. Now she really didn’t want to be part of this conversation.
The skeletal woman looked at the still images from the Antithinkers.
“I would have thought Irv would be here,” she said. “But of course, he never did have the balls.”
Then she tilted the glass of white wine she held in her right hand at the volunteer, and walked toward the stairs.
The volunteer didn’t follow. Instead, she put the back of her hand to one of her cheeks, as if taking her own temperature.
“Who was that?” Erika asked before she could stop herself.
The volunteer blinked, as if she hadn’t even realized Erika was there. Then the volunteer looked after the skeletal woman.
“Why, Helen, of course,” the volunteer said softly. “She’s the Red Queen. Always and forever, the Red Queen.”
1970
The drive took forever. They arrived in Pittsburgh at four in the morning, and followed road signs that read HOSPITAL. The hospital the signs led them to looked as old as the art museum, and was in a scary part of the city.
Irv parked catty-corner from an entrance marked EMERGENCY. Then he got out and opened the side door. Lisa helped him slide Leo out, even though she knew it was pointless.
Leo was weirdly pale, and he hadn’t blinked, not once since she got in the van.
Irv didn’t say anything though, just carted Leo to those doors.
Lisa didn’t help. She couldn’t bring herself to. She knew there was no point in bringing him inside. She would never see him again, and if she let that thought in all the way, she might not ever recover.
So she slammed the van door shut, shoved her hands in her pockets, and started across the parking lot.
“Where’re you going?” Helen yelled from the passenger seat.
Lisa didn’t answer. She didn’t know where she was going. She just knew she had to get away, had to leave now.
Maybe she would find a pay phone. Maybe she would call her dad and ask him to get her.
Maybe she would go home.
Then she let out a snort. Home. She could no more go home than the wild-eyed vets coming back from ’Nam could.
Besides, what would she say to her dad? Hi, Daddy. I accidentally killed someone today, and I can’t cope with that. Can I come home and pretend everything is normal? Is that all right?
And what would her father say? Her conservative father, who always told her she should be grateful for what she had. Would he say, Sure, honey. I’ll be right there? Or would he disown her?
She shook her head. The air was cold here, but not as bad as it had been in Cleveland.
It wouldn’t be fair to call her father, to put everything on him. Besides, she had disowned him a year or more ago, when she thought being on the vanguard of a revolution would be fun.
Fun. With Leo staring at nothing, and Helen laughing like a demented doll, and Irv, as stone-faced as The Thinker himself.
Lisa marched away, realizing they had gotten what they wanted. They had brought the war home. But not in the way they expected.
Things never went the way anyone expected.
She had thought she might die tonight. She had thought they all might, if something went wrong. And she had expected the statue to be ruined.
But then what? A call to arms? A realization that the war was wrong? The end of the museum?
She hadn’t thought things through. They hadn’t thought things through. They had planned on adventure, on a statement, on sending a message.
Which they had.
She just wasn’t sure, exactly, what the message had been.
JONATHAN SANTLOFER is the author of the bestselling The Death Artist and the Nero Award–winning Anatomy of Fear. He is the coauthor, contributor, and illustrator of The Dark End of the Street, editor/contributor of La Noire: The Collected Stories, The Marijuana Chronicles, and the New York Times best-selling serial novel Inherit the Dead. His stories have been included in such publications as Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, The Strand, and numerous collections. He is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts grants, has been a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome and the Vermont Studio Center, and serves on the board of Yaddo, the oldest arts community in t
he United States. Also a well-known artist, Santlofer’s artwork is included in such collections as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Newark Museum. He is editor of the forthcoming collection of stories and art on the subject of democracy to benefit the ACLU, It Occurs To Me That I Am America, Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, January 2018. Currently, he is at work on a new crime novel and his memoir, The Widower’s Notebook, will be published by Penguin Books, spring 2018.
The Empire of Light by René Magritte
GASLIGHT
BY JONATHAN SANTLOFER
It was true, she hadn’t been feeling well, hadn’t been herself, the headaches, the nausea, the slight vertigo. But she was fine. She’d always been predisposed to colds and flu, periods of time when she didn’t feel quite right, sensitive, her mother used to say, and that was true. It was a virus, that’s all, at least she’d thought so for the first few weeks. But now, after three months she wasn’t so sure.
“Give it time, Paula, you know how these New York colds can linger, especially in winter,” Gregory, her husband of six months, always so sweet, always trying to reassure her.
But what sort of cold lasted three months?
She’d finally gone to the doctor, tired of Gregory telling her to give it time. Gregory, who insisted she use his doctor, “the best in the city,” an elderly man with cotton-candy white hair, who gave off a whiff of mothballs, his office somewhat down on its heels despite the lower Park Avenue address, the upholstery of the waiting room chairs worn, one actually splitting, the only other patient waiting, a woman who looked to be at least ninety and possibly blind, milky cataracts on her eyes that gave Paula a chill. No receptionist either, the doctor himself opening the door and escorting Paula into the examining room, reading aloud from the chart she had just filled out: “Thirty-seven, no history of serious past illness.”
He was nice enough, Paula thought, and appeared to know what he was doing, the usual tests, blood pressure, heart and lungs, drawing blood. And she had to admit he was charming and talkative, plus they shared an interest in crime fiction—movies as well as books, her favorite genre since she’d been a girl—the two of them comparing classic and contemporary favorites throughout her examination.
Still, she’d complained to Gregory when she got home. “His office is a mess and he’s so old.” Her husband gave her a look that said, Stop being a spoiled brat, she’d seen it slide across his handsome face, before he tried to hide it. She knew the look, had seen it too many times in her life, and he was right: She was spoiled. The only child of successful artists who had given her everything—the best private elementary school, then boarding school. After that, her parents’ money made it possible for her to attend prestigious art schools, undergrad and graduate, where she’d studied painting, though even she could see she was only adequate, that she would never be in the same league as her A-list artist parents. She’d rarely put brush to canvas since grad school, nowadays only puttered in her well-appointed studio, rearranging high-quality oils and pastels, the tubes of paint untouched, the pastel wrappers still intact.
Paula pulled herself out of bed, managed to brush her teeth, wash her face, run a comb through her hair, all of it an effort, then made her way down the lushly carpeted staircase of the Greenwich Village brownstone, her hand gliding along the mulled oak bannister. She’d always liked the feel of it, smooth and solid, something to hold on to, so few things in life felt like that. Except for Gregory, her rock, her protector.
The phrase disappointing daughter trickled into her mind like an inky stain, though surely her parents had never said such a thing—not to her face—always encouraging, doting on her the way all striving parents do, with expectations that she would be successful, must be successful, another thought they’d never expressed though she clearly felt, along with the feeling that she would never measure up.
Paula’s fingers tightened on the bannister.
Her mother, a successful artist, one of the few who used pastel in a serious way, “that rare artist who brilliantly defies the limitations of her medium,” so said the New York Times about her mother’s first exhibition at the tender age of twenty-three. Paula had read the review so many times she could recite it by heart, along with others that traced the arc of her mother’s remarkable career, one that had never taken a downturn, her work now valued in the high six figures, the best examples going for well over a million at auction.
It was the same for her father, whom just about every art magazine and periodical had dubbed “a genius,” his major paintings—large invented narratives—were currently selling for even more than her mother’s pastels. A fabulous pair, Paula the envy of her boarding school friends. “Your parents must be so cool,” though she’d often wished for a housewife mom and an accountant dad.
A decade of great reviews for both parents, before Paula had ever been born.
An “accident,” she’d overheard one day, her mother whispering to a friend after too many martinis, about the birth of her baby girl. Paula was five or six at the time and the word, accident, like a mole, burrowed deep into her psyche and made itself an uncomfortably permanent home.
Gregory, an aspiring artist himself, had been dumbstruck when she first told him who her parents were. Paula, equally dumbstruck by this incredibly handsome young man, an artist, flirting with her, at least it seemed so, his hand on her arm, her wrist, as he spoke, his blue eyes sparkling, that devastating smile she would come to love, along with the dimples on his perfectly stubbled cheeks.
Paula paused at the bottom of the staircase opposite the mirror, the one with painted reflections on its surface so that the viewer could not tell what was real and what was not, just one of a series of hand-painted mirrors her father had made. She caught her fractured reflection, large nose and square jaw, the resemblance to her father uncanny, his rugged good looks, which had never quite worked on a girl.
“Make your weakness your strength,” her mother always said, assessing Paula’s face as if it were a disjunctive Picasso portrait, tilting her head one way then the other, once suggesting a nose job, another time a chin reduction.
But Gregory found her attractive, always telling her she was “striking,” though secretly Paula would have preferred beautiful, even settled for pretty.
How she loved showing him off, could feel peoples’ eyes slide from Gregory to her and back. She must have something to get him, what they had to be thinking, though she didn’t mind. After all, he was hers. And not just handsome, but gorgeous, everyone said so, and eight years younger than she, though she looked young enough, or had, before this lingering illness produced dark rings under her eyes and turned her skin pallid.
There had been a few boyfriends before Gregory, none who mattered or who’d hung around very long, something always wrong with them, or more likely, she thought, with her. But she was married now, and happy, something she told herself every day.
A note on the sleek kitchen island: Darling, today is the day you are going to feel all better! I’ll be home early. Love you, Gregory.
Her husband, who had left their bed so quietly, careful not to wake her, so considerate, always taking care of her.
Paula read and reread the note, held it to her cheek. She pictured the studio she’d bought for her husband, a cavernous space in a converted industrial building. Though there’d been plenty of room in her brownstone—any room he wanted—but he said he couldn’t paint at home, had to be out, needed his own space, and she understood though she’d have preferred to keep him close. And he deserved a good studio for his sweetness and devotion, the kindness and care he always showed toward her. A talented painter too, all he needed was a break, and he’d never gotten any, not with his blue-collar background and the state college with its so-so art department, though he never complained, except to fight her on buying the studio for him.
“I don’t want you spending your money on me, Paula.”
“Who else would I spend it on?”
But Paula had prevailed.
The truth? She didn’t like the idea of him keeping his apartment, any apartment. A separate studio was okay, but not an apartment he could escape to when he grew tired of her, and of course she worried he would, no matter how many times he reassured her, no many how many times he professed his love.
She pictured the look of absorption on Gregory’s face while he painted, the sweat on his veined neck, the smell of him, the taste of him. For a moment all of her symptoms disappeared and she felt fine, the idea that Gregory was hers and that he loved her, was enough to cure her, at least for the moment.
She replayed the message from Dr. Silvershein, who confirmed she did not have Lyme disease, her self-diagnosis. After all, she’d spent the summer in her family’s Rhinebeck home, and ticks were rampant in the area.
If not Lyme then how to explain the nausea, the aches and pains—the visions. The only way she could describe them. Seeing something one moment. Then not. House keys placed on the small mahogany table by the front door, suddenly gone. A necklace she was sure she’d put on top of her dresser, missing. Was she losing her mind? Was this illness a sign of early dementia?
The doctor had found nothing, her blood tests, all negative. He suggested she had a low-grade virus that would eventually go away or perhaps she was just tired, which annoyed her. How could she be tired, she didn’t do anything. She was no longer painting, didn’t have a job and didn’t need one, thanks to her parents. All she did was lie around reading mysteries and thrillers. When she told Gregory the doctor’s report he’d been so happy: You see, darling, there’s nothing wrong with you. It’s just a bug.
Another note tucked beside the teapot: Drink this! XO Gregory.
Paula lifted the top off the pot, eyed the tea, the brownish color murky and cloudy. Burdock Root, whatever that was, according to the tea bag label. Gregory had been coming home with holistic remedies since she’d gotten sick, one foul-tasting tea after another, along with his daily smoothies laced with kale, tofu, vitamins, and minerals, which he swore by, but no way Paula was drinking this awful-looking tea, plus it was cold.