9
MARK & ALIZÉE
“This is ridiculous.” Alizée pulled the belt of her terry-cloth robe more tightly around her. “Lee had no right to bother you.” Two red circles of fury flushed her cheeks. “No right.”
Mark held up his hands, although what he wanted to do was put his arms around her, crush her to him, devour her. “Sorry,” he said. “She thought something might be wrong. That you might be depressed. Which I unfortunately know something about.”
“Well, I’m not depressed,” Alizée snapped. “I’m just tired. Have a headache. Maybe the flu. Can’t a girl get sick around here without someone sending in the posse?”
He was relieved to hear the strength in her voice, irritation instead of the lassitude he knew so intimately, the downhill slope he’d suffered for years. “No gun,” he assured her. “No posse.”
When Alizée hadn’t shown up at the warehouse that morning, Lee went to her apartment to check on her. It had been well past noon, and Alizée was still in bed, mounded beneath a couple of blankets. She said she was sick and wanted to sleep, but based on her lethargy, dull affect, and lack of fever, Lee, who’d just seen her crying in Hans’s class, guessed Alizée might not be suffering from a physical illness. So she’d called Mark and asked him to drop by that afternoon.
It was the first time he’d been to Alizée’s apartment. His own living situation was pretty grim, but not as spare as this. After he and Edith had separated—for the third time now—he’d moved in with Phil Guston and Grant McNeil. They at least had a can inside their apartment, hot running water, and a kitchen with an actual stove instead of a hot plate. But Alizée had more light and space, and he figured she didn’t like roommates any better than he did, which was one of the problems with his marriage and was growing to be a problem with Phil and Grant.
“I guess Lee overreacted,” he backpedaled. “She’s been known to do that. Just worried about you, I guess.”
“I should’ve told her I wasn’t coming in.” Alizée sat down at the beat-up table and pointed to the other chair. “I felt so crummy when I woke up, I didn’t have the energy to go to the drugstore to use the phone. Should have.”
“Happens,” he said. There was something about her that touched him, more than her beauty, more than her talent, more than the fact that he desperately wanted to be inside her. It had something to do with her toughness, or maybe the vulnerability he suspected she used the toughness to hide. “Trouble getting out of bed is something I know something about, too.”
“So I hear.”
“But not you?” he asked.
“More the opposite. My problem is I get too up.”
“Lord Byron once said, ‘We of the craft are all crazy.’ ” He paused. “But would you want it any other way?”
“Sometimes.”
“Sure. I get that. But I don’t know if it’s possible.” His eyes swept the canvas-strewn room. Colors and quasi-geometrical shapes and arresting juxtapositions. There was no doubt Alizée was good, very good, and the canvases bore this out. Although she’d only recently started working abstractly, her instincts were deep.
His eye caught on a painting propped on the north windowsill. What was she doing with that one? He studied it, trying to ferret out what made it so arresting. Thick swatches of pure blue and yellow, edges dripping into a mellow brown, titillating slashes of black. An abstraction, yes, but somehow instead of growing from a depiction of reality, which was how most of them were working these days, it felt as if it was rising from the abstraction into something else. This created a formidable combination of fascination and disquiet.
“Your work is damn good.”
“Hans doesn’t seem to agree.”
He wanted badly to kiss her but held back. Lee had told him Alizée would never get involved with a married man, not even a separated one. And Mark wasn’t ready to make a definitive break from Edith. Not yet, anyway. But he found it difficult to believe that a girl like Alizée, a girl who would leave everything she knew and come to New York on her own, would be such a stickler for propriety. Maybe with enough time she’d change her mind.
“Coffee?” Alizée stood and filled a soup pot with water.
She looked better already, and Mark was pleased to see it probably was just a touch of flu. His “bouts,” as he’d come to refer to them, went on for days, sometimes weeks, spurred by nothing he could make out. He lolled mindlessly, miserably, in the dark place, not wanting to be there, but unable to go anywhere else. He was pressed down by anxiety, weighted in place by an all-encompassing self-loathing, his mind turned into crystalized molasses: sharp, impenetrable, and unbearably painful. But when the darkness began to loosen its hold, as it invariably did, the suicidal demands became more insistent. And that was where the real danger lay.
He thought back to the last time he’d decided he didn’t want to live, a few years after he’d come to New York. He was living in an apartment without furniture or hot water and going to the Russian Bear almost every day to fill his empty stomach with rye bread and listen to the balalaika orchestra instead of painting.
He’d been struggling with his work, more than struggling, it was going nowhere, and he was desperately lonely. Despite his classmates and roommate, he existed alone in a dark, cold cave, huddled in the far recesses with only the damp rocks for company. He simply didn’t want to be there anymore. If his roommate hadn’t been let off early from his job as a busboy, Mark would have bled to death.
He stood to free himself from his thoughts and was again drawn to the painting against the window. “What are you figuring with this?” he asked.
“Just playing around. Trying something new. Not really sure, actually.”
“It’s the most compelling painting here.”
She turned from the hot plate, clearly surprised.
“Whatever you’re doing, you should keep at it. This grabs me and pulls me to it.” He mimed punching himself in the stomach and staggered closer to the painting.
“You think so?”
“There’s something unsettling about it, but in a good way. Like it’s growing or maybe becoming something it isn’t. Or maybe becoming something it already was, but that I didn’t know it was until you showed me.”
Alizée came to where he was standing. “That’s what this makes you feel? That it’s becoming a thing it already was?”
“I think that’s the crux of it. Yes.”
She stared at the painting. “That’s exactly what I was trying to find. What was already there. To free it. Let it emerge.”
“Looks like it’s breaking out to me.”
She was completely still. “Thanks for saying that. That helps. A lot.”
“I’m not just saying it. I mean it. I mean it so much I’m going to talk to Aaron Seliger. Tell him to come down here and take a look.” Aaron Seliger was the owner of the Contemporary Arts Gallery, one of the few galleries in New York willing to show modern art. Aaron had stuck his neck out and produced a one-man show for Mark last year. Everyone, including Mark and Aaron, had been surprised by how well it had gone over.
Alizée threw her arms around him. “You’re a real doll.” Then she just as quickly pulled away.
All Mark could see was the two of them naked, sweating and wrestling and groping, giving each other what they needed to give, getting what they needed to get. This was all he wanted. What he needed. Every other thought vanished from his mind. He reached for her.
At first she came toward him, but then she stopped. “I’ve got to think.”
He leaned in and kissed her lightly on the lips. “Don’t take too long.” Then he left.
She stood in front of the canvas Mark had admired, stunned. This was the best work in the room? The lost-and-found dancers, risen from the depths? The flat was suddenly warm, and she dropped her bathrobe to the floor, trying to see what he had seen, to feel what he had felt, in what she’d never thought of as a painting, just as an experiment, a failed homework assignment.
A few months earlier, Hans told the class to go into the “urban environment” and draw scenes of people going about a daily task, oblivious to their surroundings. The students were then to turn the drawings into an abstract painting that evoked the feeling of detachment. So she went out with her sketchbook and penciled people reading newspapers on park benches, people riding on buses, people in the grocers and people eating lunch at a delicatessen. She came up with a dozen semidecent sketches and transferred two to canvas. One quickly became hopeless, and the other, the basis of this one, never succeeded in producing a feeling of detachment. It never succeeded in producing any emotion other than her disdain, and it joined her stack of failed canvases to be reused.
A few weeks after that, she was wrestling with yet another representational-to-abstract project, muttering under her breath, damning Hans and his repetitive, narrow-minded assignments. It was tedious and boring and, worse, futile. Stupid. What was so grand about going from representation to abstraction? Why not go the other way?
She’d snatched the unfinished urban canvas from the top of her pile and plopped it sideways on an easel, making what had been its right side, its bottom. She stared at what was now a complete abstraction, searching for recognizable images, mentally changing the focal point, the depth of field, the center. She marched to the far wall and studied it from there, then slowly drew closer. She turned away from it, then turned quickly back again. Nothing. She snapped the paintbrush in her hands in two. Putain. Could she do nothing right?
She dropped the broken brush on the floor and stomped back to the canvas, enraged by it, by herself. She grabbed another paintbrush and swirled gobs of blue paint over the original browns. She threw the paint on more vigorously than she usually did, applying it thickly, thinly, however she wanted. No thought. No assignment. She painted yellow over blue, let the two colors streak each other without allowing them to merge into green. She used navy, almost black, slashing lines where the new blue met the old brown, leaving whatever yellow edges there were to themselves. Why the hell not?
The animal ferocity of her movements was emboldening; she kept going, reveling in the pure pleasure of defying Hans. And suddenly, felt as much as seen, they appeared: dancers. Two dancers doing the jitterbug. She grabbed a fine brush, roughed out the figures, then stood back. They were there and not there, emerging into consciousness from a place that hadn’t existed before. She’d turned back to her homework painting and saw the problem: it was too there. Ultimately, she did a good enough job on the assignment that Hans only criticized her privately rather than during class. She hadn’t looked at the dancers again.
Now she looked.
Mark said it was becoming something it already was, that he hadn’t been aware of it until she showed him. Which was exactly right. But she hadn’t been aware of it either, not until the figures showed themselves. And maybe that was the point. She hadn’t been trying to find them. She allowed them find her.
A lightning flash of heat surged through her. She snatched a half-dozen old canvases from her failed pile, threw the paintings in progress off her easels and windowsills, replaced them with upside-down and sideways paintings. She grabbed up her palette, brushes and tubes of paint, then stood completely still, slowly inhaling, conjuring.
She moved from one painting to another. Splashing yellows here. Swirling greens there. Purple. Red. She flung one that wasn’t working to the floor, picked it up, sliced it with a deep rose, threw it down again. She was still wearing the T-shirt she’d slept in the previous night, and it clung to her, damp against her skin. Sweat soaked her hair, ran down her face. She mopped her forehead with used paint rags to keep it out of her eyes, kept drinking water and kept painting. Time slipped. There was nothing but the canvases.
By midnight, nine hours after she’d begun, two paintings were complete. On one, lily pads emerged on a pond. On the other, the Empire State Building grew from a jumble of jagged rectangular shapes. She gulped down two more glasses of water and went downstairs to the johnny. When she returned, she placed the new paintings next to the one Mark had liked: dancers, lily pads, Empire State. Ghosts, perhaps, evolving, hovering, not fully formed, never meant to be. But there they were.
She tossed on the mattress, unable to sleep. She could see the three paintings in the thin, city-night light, muted, in shadow, but very much present. She closed her eyes. They flew open, gobbling up the canvases, hungry to know. Were they good? Were they good good? One moment, yes. Then no.
When dawn began to seep into the corners, she finally gave up and made herself a cup of coffee. Lee had brought over a cake her boyfriend, Igor, refused to eat because he claimed it was too sweet, which Lee didn’t want around because she was “watching her figure.” Alizée forced herself to eat a piece. Even dunked in the black coffee, it was too sweet.
She went to the canvases, chewed at her paint-covered fingernails. She had a stack of failed canvases ready to be reversed. She had the vision and the driving desire. Yet she knew she couldn’t count on the wonderful craziness that had fired her last night. These bursts of élan came and went, sometimes induced by fretfulness other times by nothing she could discern, impossible to summon at will. But she didn’t need them. It was her passion, her ideas, her brushstrokes. She could do it either way. The series would be called Reversal. It would be the breakthrough she needed.
Mark had opened this window. Shown her what was hidden within her experiment. Revived the boldness she needed to see the idea through. As Lee had said, he was a wonderful, sweet bear of a man. Alizée was touched by his kindness, thrilled by the way he lived in the moment, rejoicing in its heat and complexities, drawing on it to feed his passion. And he’d been able to look at her work and articulate what she hadn’t known herself.
She visualized the way he’d reached out for her. Once again felt how much she’d wanted to reach back, the body-filling ache when she stopped just short of his arms. The soft touch of those lips. She wanted Mark, but she couldn’t have him. She couldn’t go looking for loss.
Every day she lived with the fear that she might have to again endure the piercing aloneness that had followed her parents’ deaths, the rending of herself into so many pieces that she no longer felt fully human. She remembered pressing her fingernails so deeply into her arm that she drew blood, hoping to prove to herself that she did exist. And then wondering why she cared if she did or didn’t.
She couldn’t go looking for loss. Of any kind. Because it would awaken those old feelings, the ones she kept tightly coiled inside, the ones she knew she couldn’t survive a second time. And they were already stirring. She could feel them as if they were living creatures, hibernating snakes sensing spring, sensing the dread that grew within her at every news report out of Europe, at every letter. Waiting to rip her apart.
10
DANIELLE, 2015
“You must remember something else,” I said to my mother over the phone. I’d resisted talking to her about Alizée because I knew she’d give me a hard time, but my desire for information finally overcame my desire to avoid an argument.
“I don’t know why we have to have this same conversation over and over again.” Her sigh was highly theatrical, as was she. “Ad nauseam,” she added. “To no end.”
“Maybe because every once in a while you let something else slip. Something that makes me think you know a lot more than you’re telling. Like how you casually mentioned that Grand-père got Turned and Lily Pads from Eleanor Roosevelt years after Grand-mère gave them to me. Or how you just recently told me Alizée went missing from a mental institution. Before that you only said she’d gone missing.”
“Why would I keep anything from you?”
“Because that’s what we do in this family.”
“Not discussing painful things isn’t withholding information, it’s just good sense.”
Now it was my turn to sigh. Like mother like daughter, the curse of the only child. “What would you say if I told you a few of her p
aintings showed up at work?”
“I’d say someone’s pulling your leg.”
“There’s no one else. I think they might be hers.”
“You’ve got to let this obsession with Alizée go.”
I paused for effect. “What if it’s not just an obsession?”
“Oh, Danielle, don’t be so dramatic,” she said. “I’m meeting Dad for dinner and have to walk the dog before I leave. Let’s talk later in the week.”
“I thought I’d ask Grand-mère.”
“Even if she remembers anything, she’s not going to talk about it.”
“You can’t be sure, ” I said, although my grandmother was a long shot at best.
“I’ve known her a lot longer than you have, Danielle. And if there’s one thing I’m certain of, it’s that she’s not discussing anything that happened before or during the war. With you or anyone else.”
“I’m asking her about after the war.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Does that mean I can’t borrow your car?”
“Of course you can borrow my car.” Deep sigh. “God knows your grand-mère can use all the stimulation she can get.”
On Saturday, amid a biting early March rain, I took the train out to Greenwich, where my parents live on the seedier side of town, a place that would be the good side just about anywhere else. My mother owns a small accounting firm and my father’s the most dedicated high-school English teacher in the world. Although they both work their butts off, their household income has always fallen well below—well, well below—the Greenwich median.
I grew up feeling inadequate because I wore knockoffs while every other girl in my class wore Gucci and Versace. When I took up with the artsy crowd in high school, this fact became irrelevant, but I’ve never been able to completely get over that haughty disdain from the mean girls in middle school or the not-quite-good-enough feeling that came from all those perfectly plucked arching eyebrows.
The Muralist: A Novel Page 6