by Alex Dolan
Paire arrived in the evening, when the neighborhood seemed abandoned. The scariest places in New York were areas without people or the constant hum of traffic. She checked over her shoulder every few seconds and pressed the doorbell to the Morse code rhythm for S.O.S. until Melinda jogged out to the front gate.
Mel gave her a warm hug and a tour of the compound. Building A was her living area, building B her work area. Apparently, multiple artists used the studio, but she was the only one who lived there. As they walked through the secluded lot, the moon and lights from adjacent buildings gave just enough light for Paire to make her way through the gravelly dirt without stumbling. Mel knew her way around by heart, even in the dark.
Paire wanted Melinda to be taller. She still hadn’t completely distinguished this woman from the figure in Qi’s portrait, and when she had envisioned the empress in the flesh, she imagined someone a foot taller than she, a long-limbed prima ballerina. Melinda was only two inches taller than Paire at most. Her tousled hair also unsettled Paire. A few tendrils escaped a loose bun and drifted about her face. Unlike the defined comb streaks in the empress’s hair, Melinda’s hair settled wherever the wind blew it.
Mel unlocked her studio door, and the steel moaned as she slid it open. Instead of the paint fumes Paire knew from Rosewood’s studio, Melinda’s smelled of clay and loose-lidded jars of glaze. “This is where I work,” she said. With the flip of a switch, a string of overhead lights flickered, illuminating a vault the size of a small barn. Paire gasped. She had entered an urban Eden. Mel’s studio was a literal sculpture garden, overgrown with gigantic ceramic flowers, each one taller than the ceilings in Brooklyn Heights. Hearty, succulent leaves fed into trunks that twisted like frayed rope. Robust blossoms at the tops exploded in tropical purples, oranges, and reds. The petals, fleshy lips. Stamens as long as stork beaks. Beneath the lights, all of them bore a glossy sheen from the ceramic glaze. Paire thought of Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors. All of them possessed a monstrous beauty.
The organic, earthy odors seemed out of place here, where the flowers didn’t need soil, and would never die.
“You made all these?”
“Made here and fired in the kill.”
“Kiln?”
“It’s pronounced kill.”
Paire didn’t believe her.
She said, “Trust me. This is what I do.”
“Can I touch them?”
“Just don’t hang off it.”
Paire stroked the cool, smooth surface of the nearest stalk.
At her request, Melinda explained how she created her giant flowers. “The first step is constructing a metal armature. The clay’s too heavy, and these things would collapse without it.” Melinda showed her one in the corner, a woven skeleton of thick wire. She used copper, which could withstand higher temperatures without melting. As she walked around the armature, she tended to it as if it were a real plant, preening the leaves, making slight twists to the wire to bend the petals this way and that. She used a stepladder to adjust the pistils and stamens at the top of the stalk.
“Once the armature is set, you pack on the clay.” Polymer clay, which fired at lower temperatures. She explained how she glommed clumps of clay onto the wire, fleshing out the form. Once it achieved the proper bulk, she massaged the clay with her thumbs until the grooves of leaves and rooty veins emerged. She carved out details with knives and other tools. Mel showed Paire a table of instruments that resembled antiquated dental tools.
“Once it looks the way it should, I bake it.” Melinda employed three men to help her roll the packed armature across the dirt on a wheeled pallet and load it into the kiln. “It’s the riskiest part of the process. We never do it in the rain, and we move like sloths.”
Paire lightly ran her fingers over a petal. “Then the glaze.”
“Then the glaze,” Mel repeated.
Paire was fingering the sublateral veins on the underside of a leaf, and Melinda’s face came into view beside hers, staring at the spot Paire had focused on, possibly trying to take in her own work the way a newcomer might see it.
Melinda stood closer, as close as Rosewood might stand when they were together.
Paire felt the need to talk. “Why didn’t you become a painter like your father?”
“Because he was too good at it, and I didn’t want to compete with him.”
Paire said, “Your father was in a different country. Did it really feel like you were competing with him?”
“It’s not a competition he started, but it feels like a competition because I’m working in the arts. It’s a strange feeling to be both inspired and intimidated by the same person. There are times when I don’t want to be an artist at all, just so I can separate myself from him.”
“Then why do you do it?”
“Because it makes me feel good. I was the kid everyone copied in art class. It made me feel good to be good at something, so I kept at it. Now, it’s the only thing I can imagine doing for fourteen hours a day. I assume you’re an artist.”
“I’m trying to be.” Paire thought about her sketchbooks, and how she had yet to develop an authentic voice, or a body of real work. She had so much work to do.
“Why do you do it?”
Paire had to think about how to put it into words. “It’s the only thing that makes me forget about everything else.”
Melinda led Paire back across the courtyard to the kiln. Like her studio, the entrance was marked by a steel door, but this one opened like a submarine hatch, with the spin of a steel wheel. Once it spun freely, the artist yanked a heavy lever, and the metal groaned as the door swung heavily on its hinges. There were no lights inside the kiln, but enough light from the courtyard shone inside for Paire to get a sense of it. Inside, the room was more than twice her height, stacked with silt-stained yellow bricks and a domed ceiling.
Paire commented, “It’s like a giant igloo.”
“It is, isn’t it?”
“Is it safe to go in?”
“Of course it is.” The inside was musty and smelled of ash. Two of Mel’s flowers loomed in the shadows, like giants ducking their heads.
“So they get fired here?”
“Fired here, and hauled back to the studio to get painted.”
“Can you show me how you paint them?”
Mel looked at her guest, perhaps gauging the sincerity of her interest. “We’ll see.”
After the tour, Melinda and Paire returned to building A, the living space. They sat at a garage sale walnut dining set, which felt out of place on a poured concrete floor. Their voices bounced around on all the hard surfaces.
Mel poured Cabernet. Paire didn’t drink much, but she thought it rude to abstain. With a body just north of a hundred pounds and a low tolerance, she felt tipsy after two glasses. When she was drunk, she became giggly. Her vision softened, and the physical distinctions between Melinda Qi and the Empress Xiao Zhe Yi further blurred. She was fascinated with everything the empress was saying from across the table.
Mel rubbed a finger around the rim of the glass, as if trying to make the goblet sing. “What do you know about my father?” Paire averted her eyes, and she apologized, “I’m sorry—that’s not a fair question, is it?”
Since they had met at the MAAC, Paire had found out more about Gabriel Kasson, Abel Kasson’s father. Gabriel had worked with the United States Ambassador to China during the Nixon administration. His official title was Special Assistant to the National Security Advisor. He accompanied the President and First Lady when they visited the PRC in 1972. Paire found a photo of Pat Nixon in a bright red coat, shaking hands with officials at a school in Beijing. In the background, looking deathly serious, was the face cast in bronze at the MAAC. Gaunt cheeks, glasses, and breezy hair. In the photo, he held his topcoat tight against his chest while the breeze played with his hair. A few articles that covered his career mentioned the trip to China, but most pieces summed up his life in a paragraph describing a businessman who coll
ected art and founded the MAAC. At some point, he was the president and CEO of Kasson and Kasson, the company that would declare bankruptcy in 2009.
Paire didn’t know how much she should say about Qi Jianyu. She felt too much like a stalker already. “I admire his work. At least, the one piece I’ve seen.” She intoned the word admire to convey a passing interest in his work.
Melinda playfully squinted through her maroon liquid at Paire. “If that’s the only one you’ve seen, you ain’t seen nothing,” she said. “I only wish I had more to show you.”
“Have you seen others?”
“Here and there,” she said. “The popular pieces all had a similar theme. Painting modern people in ancient costumes. It was a simple idea but the execution made it special. I liked to think he was trying to show us that the figures we hold up as icons are just as human as the rest of us. But the effect was the opposite. The way he rendered his people, he took ordinary people and made them iconic.” She sipped the wine with a gentle slurp. “Look at my mother. She wasn’t someone people would line up around the block to see. But up there on the birch board…”
Paire had barely touched her second glass of wine. Since Melinda had already emptied her third, she sipped more to catch up, feeling like she might soon be too buzzed to keep track of the pour. “Did his other paintings have the same effect on people?”
“That and worse. That old man who killed himself? He wasn’t the first.” She saw how Paire’s face shrank at the memory of Nicola Franconi’s body curling up on the sidewalk. “I’m sorry to bring that up. It was horrible you had to see it.” Melinda sighed. “I’ve seen what my father’s paintings do to people. I should feel guilty that I let something loose that can cause that kind of damage. But you know what? It makes me jealous. Because I would kill to create work so gorgeous that someone would stab themselves just to ensure they’ve captured that memory for the rest of their lives.”
Paire’s stomach twisted. That last comment would seem like an overstatement if she had not seen the man die herself.
Mel smirked at Paire. “I don’t hate my father for creating work that’s better than mine. It inspires me to be better myself. But having his work is a burden, and sometimes I feel like art shouldn’t be a burden. It should bring joy.”
“Why a burden?”
“Bad things happen around those paintings. There’s a curse around that thing. Something my father sealed in spite. More bad things are bound to happen as long as it’s out there.” Since Paire wasn’t touching her wine, Mel reached across and took a sip from her glass. “Abel Kasson? He’s a volatile man. You introduce that painting to that man, something wrong is going to come of it, it’s just a matter of when. Knowing that catastrophe is going to strike, that’s a burden.” Gauging Paire’s reaction, she added, “Sometimes I want to relieve myself of that burden.”
Paire wasn’t sure what to say. Now that they were talking about Qi Jianyu and not Melinda Qi, she felt like she was representing the Fern Gallery again. The conversation turned back to business, and she felt self-conscious about being a little drunk during a business conversation. She spoke with the ostentatious overenunciation a child would use to impress grown-ups. “So are you trying to sell it?”
Mel said, “You don’t want me to, do you? I can tell.”
Paire thought, No, not to Abel Kasson. Not to anyone. But what she said was, “Wouldn’t you want to keep it? It’s a part of your father.”
“It’s like having the ghost of my father in the room. The ghost of my mother too, because she’s in the painting.” She rolled the stem of her glass between her fingers. “You probably had a good relationship with your parents.”
“You’d be surprised,” Paire said.
This seemed to intrigue Melinda. “What was your father like?”
Paire felt like she needed to say something, rather than let the question hang in the air. “I only met him once.”
“What was he like?”
“Like talking to a mannequin.”
“Tell me about him.”
Either because of the wine or because she felt compelled to extend their time together, Paire told Melinda Qi things about her father that she’d never divulged to another New Yorker. Not even Derek Rosewood.
• • •
Lake Novis got out of prison when Katie turned thirteen. The prison told Gilda when it released him, and even provided an address. Katie found it in the mail.
Up until then, Gilda had titrated information about her father, determining what dose to give her depending on her age. Until she was six years old, Katie was told that her father was an explorer. Botswana. Papua New Guinea. Gilda might have kept lying to her, but once she got to school, Katie heard rumors about her father. They grew more barbed the older she got.
At six, she learned that her father lived in prison, but she didn’t fully grasp what a prison was at the time, or why someone would live there. She wanted to visit, but Gilda refused to bring her, either because she thought it would be unsafe or because she didn’t want to be seen in a correctional facility. Katie wanted to write, but her grandmother wouldn’t divulge the specific prison that incarcerated Lake Novis. When she turned eleven and was allowed internet access and her own library card, Katie learned that her father was at Maine State Prison, about halfway between Abenaki and Bar Harbor.
Thanks to Gilda’s efforts to suppress and destroy the media coverage of the trial, she wouldn’t read much about the crime itself for another year. The prison didn’t let unaccompanied children visit the inmates, so she sent letters. She never received one in return.
Gilda had purged the rest of the house of photographs, so she didn’t know what her mother or father looked like. Given the lack of evidence, from time to time Katie wondered if her parents had existed at all. When they talked about the Immaculate Conception at Christmas, Katie got to wondering about her own birth, whether she might have just bloomed into existence, or, since she was a Darwinist, dragged herself out of the sludge in a local cranberry bog.
Katie had rummaged through all the storage boxes in the attic for some traces of her parents. At the bottom of a crate of books, she finally found a letter tucked inside a copy of the Bible. It had been used as a bookmark. Trifolded and left in the envelope, the letter wrapped around a crisp photograph. From Cissy to Gilda, with a postal stamp from Caribou, Maine, farther north than Montreal. The letter read, Please be happy for us. Cissy scrawled her signature in a loopy cursive, with a pigtail in the C.
Katie kept the photograph under her winter sweaters. On some nights, she looked at it before she slept. Lake and Cissy Novis. Her parents had been a pretty couple with smooth skin. They mugged for the camera, cheeks pressed together, intentionally foolish. Her father’s front two teeth folded over each other slightly, but not enough to damage the impact of the smile. Her mother blew a kiss with the same swollen lips that Katie had inherited. The date had been written on the back. At the time the image was captured, they would have been in their early twenties. They glowed with joy.
On Katie’s thirteenth birthday, Gilda honored the day with a cupcake and a candle. The lackluster celebration and Katie’s simmering adolescent discontent gave her the excuse to be testy. While she forked the cupcake, she asked, “When am I going to see my father?”
“I don’t know,” Gilda replied as she had when Katie had asked a hundred other times. “I’ll get back to you.”
That response had staved off follow-up questions for years. But on this night, Katie launched a forkful of frosting-coated cake into the air, hitting Gilda square in the chest. Her grandmother gasped. For the first time ever, she truly looked at her granddaughter. Whether she admired her spunk or worried about her volatility, Katie couldn’t be sure. But she had the woman’s attention. Katie spoke in a bolder voice, one that she would use more as Paire Anjou. “I know he’s out.”
“So, the jig is up,” Gilda said.
“Were you ever going to tell me?”
“You don
’t want to meet him. He’s not…” Gilda chose her words carefully. “He’s not someone you would want as your father.”
“How do you know?”
“He’s not a good man.”
Katie said, “I don’t care. He’s my father.”
Gilda said, “He’s not right—mentally.” She added, “Never was.”
“He’s your son-in-law.”
“All the more reason you should listen to me.”
Katie had made up her mind. “I’d like to decide for myself.”
Grudgingly, Gilda finally consented and chaperoned the visit to Lake Novis’s single-room flat in Portland. Gilda didn’t seem surprised when Lake answered the door, but Katie was struck dumb. Her father was much thinner than in the photograph, as if he’d stopped eating the day they put him away. He looked as though he’d been embalmed. For the occasion, Lake wore a waxy suit that seemed dug out of storage, possibly the same suit he’d worn during the trial. It didn’t fit him.
“Hello, Katie.” He didn’t speak much, but when he did, he wouldn’t rasp anything louder than a whisper.
She shivered when he spoke her name. With his cornstalk body looming in the doorway and his sad, sagging expression, she felt like she was being called home by death.
Katie Novis didn’t rush to hug her father, nor did Lake thrust his arms out for an embrace. With Gilda as an arbiter of sorts, they sat on the couch and conducted a businesslike interview. Looking back, Paire considered something that Katie hadn’t noticed at the time, which was that Lake’s daughter looked remarkably like Cissy Novis. As such, Lake had a tough time keeping his eyes on her.