“Wow,” Isabelle said. “That’s a big change, Impressionism to modern and contemporary.”
“I love it: the color, all that thick brushwork and strong subject matter – kind of like my new life. I’m no longer an impression of myself.”
Was there any comprehension in their smiles?
“The fact is,” I said, “I don’t really know who I am. But I’m going to find out. And I hope to have some fun doing it.”
*
I put the house on the market and began looking for a new home for Rose and me. The house had too many bad memories outweighing the good ones, but also it had never really been to my taste. It was too perfect, too pristine: like one of Claude’s lifted faces. I had had the bedroom cleaned, the window repaired, the bed taken away. I shut the door and never went into it again until the house was shown. I slept in one of the guest rooms.
The life that I had once lived now left me cold. I wanted to winnow down, to shed: I donated much of my designer clothes and jewelry to a thrift shop whose proceeds went to a women’s shelter. I wore what I wanted, ignored labels, and got my hair done to suit myself.
I had looked at several places, all appealing, but as Rose and I walked into the kitchen of a house on Newbury Street, Rose said, “Mommy, I like this one! It feels good!” Her piping voice sent bright echoes up in the big room. I had to agree; something about the place clicked, and that clever word “gallery” once again popped into my head as I walked through. I checked out the ground floor, visualizing a commercial space where currently there were too many walls and way too many doors, and then Rose and I ran up three flights of stairs to the top.
“Come look!” Rose said, popping out of a bedroom down the hall. “Mom! A skylight!”
We stood in the light beneath the recessed glass rectangle and looked up.
“Can this be my room? I can see the stars at night!”
That settled it. This was where we’d live. Not in California, not in the past, and not in fear.
We moved in and lived on the top three floors. I hired a contractor to renovate the ground floor into a gallery space. He and his crew produced a big room out of several small ones and put in a bathroom. Wide, beautiful, abused floorboards showed their faces, long load-bearing walls marched down open spaces, new track lighting had Rose singing Christmas tunes (I wasn’t really sure why). I had my piano moved into our living room, and Rose promptly jumped up on the bench. “Listen, Mommy!” she said, and banged horribly on the keys.
Time. Patience. Lessons…
Beth and Isabelle pitched in, using their contacts, getting me together with artists. On an impulse, and realizing a single head (mine) couldn’t do this, I called Anne Marshall and asked her if she’d like to come in as my silent partner. Since the day of her girls’ luncheon on Nantucket, we’d gotten closer. Her company always invigorated me.
“What a fabulous idea – I’d love to! I’ve been looking for something to keep me busy. I can work part-time while the twins are at nursery school.”
“It’s risky, Anne. I have no idea how it will do.”
“Nonsense. With your eye, it’s a home run.” Her voice sparkled with excitement. “So what should we call it? Do you have a name? All I can think of are names of flowers.”
“Rose came up with Skylight Gallery and I think it works.”
“Yes!”
The gallery opening was a modest affair, to put it kindly. Anne and I had managed to get a bit of notice in the papers, and I was still attached by the finest of threads to Barrett Browning, who graciously noted the opening in her column. And on the night, a whole dozen people came out.
But they were a really nice dozen people.
My parents also showed up, and I had to hand it to Mom: she dressed for the occasion, and you could have lit firecracker fuses with her enthusiasm. Dad was a harder sell, but I saw some real interest – along with a little bewilderment – in his eyes as he looked around. He’d taken Claude’s downfall, and our divorce, pretty hard, and an art gallery wasn’t the only place he seemed a bit out of his depth these days.
I handed him a glass of wine and kissed him and thanked him for coming, and he said, “Quite nice – good work, Katie. It’s quite impressive. No reason a gallery can’t be a going concern, as long as you keep at it – you’ve got Anne to help you, though.” He glanced at a display of abstracts we’d just hung. “These remind me of my own work,” he said.
When most of the guests had gone, Anne came up to me with a big smile on her cute face. “We’ve got a latecomer,” she said, and nodded toward the door.
Nate.
He was looking up at the paintings, and then he turned and was looking at me.
*
I had kept the house in Nantucket. Its casual fresh breeziness felt familiar, but in a good way, and there were good memories of the island from my childhood that I always loved to return to, and I wanted to share them with Rose. I’d dropped the island social life for the most part. When Rose and I were there, we gardened, played on the beach, walked around town. I felt I was metamorphosing into a local. At night I took my coffee out on the deck and let the ocean – that most soothing, stern, lively of voices – tell me over and over that things were going to be okay.
And I started to listen.
*
One day two years after the trial, Gillian called. She’d just returned from a medical conference in Paris and had happened to hear through the medical grapevine that Claude had moved back to France.
“I thought you’d want to know the latest on Claude – he’s moved on.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, apparently he has a successful cosmetic practice in Paris and has married the daughter of some high-up French politician.”
A door silently opened in my mind, but I didn’t approach it. I felt no animosity, not really, and no fear; just curiosity. “I wonder if he’s changed. Or maybe he didn’t have to.”
Maybe he never would.
“Well, he’s now completely out of your life,” Gillian said. “Hey, let me know when you’re having your next show. The last one was, well, it was so well mounted.”
“You’re a riot.”
The show in question was the work of a young postmodernist, a painter and a rising star.
“No, really, it was great! I can’t wait for the next one.”
Now I was rushing to close the gallery so Rose and I wouldn’t be late for dinner at Victoria’s. Victoria and I had maintained a tradition of dinner at her house once a week, often with Rose when I couldn’t find a babysitter, which was more often than not. This time, for some reason, Victoria had said, “Please bring Rose.”
I was excited because I’d just sold a Helen Frankenthaler painting. Not a major one, but a solid mid-career piece that put the Skylight in the black for the rest of the year. “Hurry up, Mommy!” Rose chided me. “It’s time to go to Victoria’s!” You don’t want to be late, do you?” I looked at my beautiful, poised four-year-old daughter and marveled at how she was so much her own person.
I vowed to catch up.
Charles opened Victoria’s door, and said that Mrs. Langley was expecting us and to please head directly to the screening room. I was puzzled by this, but Rose grabbed my hand and led me down the hall where I was surprised to find Gillian, who was eight months pregnant, as well as Anne Marshall and her girls, and Beth and Isabelle. They were all standing, all smiles, kids giggling. After hugs and kisses, I said, “I had no idea any of you were coming tonight. What’s going on?”
“It’s a party,” said Gillian.
“Great! But why?”
“Victoria and I got to talking, and we realized we’d never had a proper movie night, and why not show a movie starring our hostess… and celebrating her biggest fan?”
“Oh, yes! What a wonderful surprise. Thank you all.”
I recalled Claude’s “surprises”, how I had loved them, then come to dread them, and how now I was just loving this moment. Gillia
n was right that after my marriage had ended, I hadn’t wanted any of that. It was enough to feel safe and not so anxious; it was enough to be alone with Rose and involved in my new business. But apparently my friends had decided that now I needed to be taken out into the sunlight.
Charles passed around plates of fried chicken and salad, and there was white wine for the women and Shirley Temples for the girls. “I met Shirley Temple only once,” Victoria told me as she handed a glass to Rose. “She was a charming person, even when she was no longer adorable.”
When everyone was settled in with their food and drinks, the lights were lowered a little more, gently gilding the walls with a pale gold that was like the very beginning of a sunrise. Gillian, who’d said that in her hugely pregnant state she had to go to the bathroom all the time, took a seat in the back by the door. But I sat up front, with Victoria to my left, and Rose to my right. The lights came down all the way, and the credits to White Glove Escapade began to roll, with Victoria’s name splashed across the screen in enormous, looping white letters. Then the credits faded, and the story began: there was Victoria Langley as a chorus girl in a nightclub, nervously preparing to go onstage. I glanced at the elderly woman beside me watching her younger self on screen. I couldn’t take my eyes off either of them. I was fascinated by the innocent-looking young woman on the screen – in many ways still a child, just as I had been, in my make-believe world – and the older woman, the real one, who’d lived and seen so many things and knew so much about the world in all its cruelties and its pleasures and its mercies, and about herself.
I sat back in my seat and watched the show.
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