The Muralist: A Novel

by B. A. Shapiro

  “I think one of us should stay here in case she comes back,” Mark said.

  “I’ll stay,” Jack offered.

  “No you won’t,” Bill snapped. “If she comes home and finds you here, she’ll turn around and leave again.”

  “It should be Lee,” Mark said. “We don’t need two girls wandering around alone in the middle of the night.”

  Although Lee walked through the Village at all hours, tonight she’d been unnerved moving through the deserted streets, looking into alleys where bedsheets swayed like hovering ghosts from their overhead clotheslines, afraid of what she might find. “Okay. I’ll stay. You boys go out for another hour, and I’m sure she’ll be here when you get back.”

  “Right,” Mark said, although he didn’t sound convinced. “Where else has she got to go?”

  No one answered this question either.

  Lee walked in circles around Alizée’s apartment, taking in the bareness of it, even filled with the towering canvases. Although far from finished, there was no doubt Montage was revolutionary. They were right to help her with it. For Alizée and for themselves; Alizée’s ideas were opening up new avenues for their own work. They all felt it.

  When Mark and Bill returned, there was still no sign of Alizée. And now Jack was missing, too.

  “Calling Jack a horse’s ass turns out to be a compliment,” Lee grumbled to take their minds off Alizée, although the truth was she was a little worried about him, too. “A horse is a noble creature.”

  “I’m going back out,” Mark said. “You’ll stay here?” he asked Lee.

  When Lee nodded, Bill said, “I’ll go with you.”

  Lee lay down on Alizée’s mattress, hoping to sleep. But her eyes flew open with every sound, and there were many coming through the open windows as the city began to wake. She sat up and was once again caught by the command of the mural. Even though she’d watched Alizée work it out, she wasn’t sure how it had become so large, far bigger and weightier than its sheer size.

  It had something to do with its physical massiveness, yet it was more than that. The experience of the colors was almost tactile. And there was the unexpected punch the juxtaposition of so many disparate elements created. The newspapers. The mixed textures. The transformations. It generated a raw emotion, a visual message that slammed you. And it wasn’t complete yet.

  For the first time, it occurred to Lee that maybe, just maybe, the idea that this painting could have an effect beyond artistic merit wasn’t such an ill-fated notion after all. Maybe Mrs. Roosevelt had it right. And maybe the plan Alizée had devised was a potentially credible scenario to get it out to as many people as possible.

  She stood and stared at the low roof of the building next door, which was littered with broken furniture and piles of old tires. Alizée would be home any minute. She had to be. Lee leaned her body far out the window but saw only the city’s early risers: the bakers, the newsboys, the bus drivers, a chambermaid. Abruptly, she left the apartment and went outside. She needed air.

  To the east, the sun was still low behind the buildings, but light oozed at their tops and sides, cutting into the shadows at street level. She sat on the front stoop. Apprehension caught between her lungs, pressed toward her throat.

  And then, there was Alizée, walking slowly toward her, fatigue written in every slope of her body. Lee raced to her, gathered her up in her arms. “Are you all right?”

  Alizée nodded into Lee’s shoulder.

  Lee held her at arm’s length. She did appear to be all right, although she was sweaty and dirty, and there was a scary deadness in her eyes. She was breathing hard, as if she’d been running. “You look like something the cat dragged in,” Lee said as cheerfully as she could muster, turning Alizée toward the front stairs. “Let’s go up to your apartment.”

  Alizée followed without saying a word.

  “She was really scared,” Lee said to Mark, her voice low. They were walking away from Alizée’s; Mark on his way to punch in at the WPA office, and Lee headed to the warehouse. Alizée was taking a bath and had promised to meet Lee at work within the hour. “Which, as you know, isn’t like her.”

  “And you said she’d been running?” Mark asked. “Do you think someone was chasing her? Trying to hurt her?”

  “I said she might have been running. There are lots of scary things in the city in the middle of the night.”

  “Jesus!” he cried, slamming one fist into the other. “How can she be so irresponsible? She could have gotten herself killed!” Then he caught himself. “Sorry. That was unfair. It’s just that, ah, that I love her.”

  “Yeah, I kind of figured.” Lee had to smile. “There probably wasn’t anyone there. She probably just imagined it. Easy enough to do.”

  Mark frowned. “Extra easy for Alizée.”

  “What does that mean?”

  He hesitated, looked like he wanted to say something, stopped. Then began, “You know she’s different . . . And I worry. She . . . she told me that sometimes she feels like she’s floating in the sky, watching herself painting or shopping in the five-and-dime. That she looks in the mirror and doesn’t always recognize her face.”

  Lee stopped to collect herself. Lit a cigarette. “Are you telling me she’s seeing things? Or not seeing things?”

  Mark took her cigarette and lit one of his own; his hands trembled slightly. “You said when she first got back, her eyes were all funny. Dead, you said.” He took a deep drag. “I’ve seen that look. Like she’s not with me. Like she’s on the other side of a window, and I can’t reach her. Even when I’m touching her.”

  “She’s just working too hard,” Lee said as much to assure herself as to assure him; she’d seen that look, too. And not just last night. “And think about what she’s producing—it’s tough to pull that kind of passion out of your soul.”

  “Montage is great, I’ll give you that, but this idea of switching it just adds to the whole, well, you know . . . She’s sick over her family, I get that, but taking on the weight of all the refugees? Of the whole goddamn war in Europe? It’s unhinging her. She wants to do something so badly that she can’t see what’s possible and what isn’t.”

  “I’m starting to think that maybe it isn’t so impossible,” Lee said. “If she could pull it off, if Montage were seen by lots of people, discussed, maybe that would create more interest in the refugees. It wouldn’t be an overnight thing, but it’s possible something could change.”

  Mark was shaking his head. “Don’t let the fact that Montage is shaping up to be a possible masterwork blind you. The mural’s brilliant, but the rest of it’s pure delusion. She can’t change US policy with a painting—no matter how good—and she can’t hang a sixteen-foot mural without someone finding out.” He threw his cigarette to the sidewalk, crushed it with his shoe.

  “Mark—”

  “And when she fails, she’s going to be devastated. Broken. And then what’s going to happen to her? How’s she going to be able to withstand that?”

  40

  ALIZÉE

  Alizée managed to leave the warehouse a little early, but it was on the other side of dusk by the time she reached her street. She hated the waning sunlight of autumn even more than the chill in the air. She hurried up the stairs of her building, but inside there was little relief. It, too, was gloomy and dark, the foyer full of cobwebs and grime. The smell of onions was overwhelming.

  She peered into her mailbox and saw envelopes. Her heart jumped, and she quickly drew them out. A five-page supplement to the Sears-Roebuck catalogue. An electric bill. A letter from Ruth, a girl she’d shared a room with at a woman’s hotel when she first came to New York. Another from Sheri Rhodes, who’d also won a scholarship from Hans Hofmann but had dropped out and returned to Michigan to get married after the first semester. Alizée couldn’t remember what either of them looked like. She trudged up to the flat.

  Hitler was running riot over the continent. The Warsaw ghetto had been cordoned off from
the rest of the city. And then last week the ERC director officially rejected her money-for-visas scheme. Mr. Fleishman had returned the cash, which was now hidden in an empty paint can, waiting to be used if another opportunity to get her family out of Europe arose. When another opportunity arose.

  This was looking bleaker by the day. The Vichy government in France had repealed the law barring anti-Semitism and reversed one protecting Jews from deportation to Nazi camps. The ERC had sent an emissary named Varian Fry to France to bring as many refugees back to the United States as was possible, but the lack of visas was severely hobbling his efforts. And Long was cutting the number of available visas by the thousands, last week to European immigrants coming through Cuba and Mexico.

  To make matters even worse, her powers of concentration were slipping. Ever since the night she’d been followed, instead of narrowing in on a problem, her mind jumped from one thought to another. She’d try to find the solution for a particular challenge, get stumped, leap to the next, go back to the first to reconsider, resolve nothing. This bouncing created an almost constant sense of déjà vu: she felt as if she was where she’d once been, but in a slightly different way. It was interfering with Light in America, with Montage, and with her decision about what they should do about Long.

  The committee continued to debate, secretly of course, not even Gideon knew about it. Aarone insisted saving the refugees superseded all other concerns. Nathan bragged about his sharpshooting abilities and the five guns he owned, how he could “knock off” Long with a single bullet. Bertha was the most reasoned by far, balanced in her thoughts and statements, focused on what was best for the refugees, but her pragmatism seemed to be leading her to support Aarone and Nathan. Astonishingly, even William was starting to shift a little, pointing out Jesus’s overwhelming concern with the downtrodden and with man helping his fellow man, but he appeared quite troubled by the words coming out of his own mouth.

  She let herself into the flat and put the mail on the table, then picked it up again. Something struck her as odd. She turned over the letter from Sheri. It looked as if it had been reopened after being sealed and then pasted shut again. She dropped it back on the table without reading it. Sheri must have decided to add something she believed was too important to miss. It could wait until later.

  She walked over to Montage, pleased and panicked at the sight of the panels, her emotions as willy-nilly as her judgments. The flow of the flowers and soldiers between #1 and #2 was good. But the cows reaching from #2 to #3 didn’t mesh at all. Number 1 and #4 were in better shape than #2 and #3, as they were more straightforward than the other two, requiring fewer details as well as fewer layers of color and texture. Still, even #1 and #4 needed a huge amount of work.

  She checked the Betty Crocker calendar nailed to the wall, counted up the remaining days: sixty-eight. That was a long time. She could do it. She counted up the weeks: less than ten. That wasn’t nearly long enough.

  She eyed the mail, wondered what Sheri’s news might be, picked up the letter. But then she saw that Ruth’s letter had a similar lumpiness under the back flap. As did the electric bill. She laid the three envelopes side by side on the table. The same small tears, same lumps of glue, same unevenness where the flap met the body. The flat expanded around her, the ceiling flying up into the dark night, the walls stretching across the street. Then with a whoosh, like an accordion, it collapsed back into its usual dimensions. Putain. Her mail was being opened.

  She paced, fists pushed hard under her arms, mind jumping. She’d known someone was following her the other night. Had had the same feeling just last week walking to work. And the boy on the train who tried to steal her bags . . . Had he just been a pickpocket or something more ominous?

  The committee might have been overheard talking about Long, or one of the members might have spoken outside the group. Either the America First Committee or Long himself might be aware she was the one who brought Mrs. Roosevelt the memo. That trusted colleague of Hiram Bingham’s might have had second thoughts. And then there was Montage. She recognized her little paintings and schemes were too unimportant for this kind of treatment. But Breckinridge Long’s life was not.

  There was a pounding, then a scratch at the door. She raced to the far wall and squatted behind one of her larger canvases. They were here. Already. What did they want from her? What would they do to her? She made herself as small as she could.

  “Alizée?” Mark’s voice boomed across the flat. “Are you here?”

  She thrust the canvas aside and ran to him, so relieved she threw herself into his large, reassuring body.

  “What? What?” he demanded, holding her away so he could see her face. When he did, he led her to the mattress. “Sit.”

  She sat. It was nothing. She’d overreacted. “I’m fine,” she assured him. “Fine.”

  He pushed a curl off her forehead, which was noticeably damp. “You don’t seem fine.”

  She took a deep breath and blew it out slowly. “Just gave myself a little scare. Silly.”

  “What kind of scare?”

  “It’s nothing.” She scrambled for an explanation. “I . . . I fell asleep is all. And when you came through the door I must have still been dreaming, thought you were in it, or you were someone else who was in it . . . You know how dreams can do that sometimes.”

  “Zée . . .”

  “No, no, I mean it,” she said. “I was so tired. I thought I’d just lie down on the floor for a minute. But then . . . then I guess I must have actually fallen asleep, and then you just startled me. That’s all.”

  Mark held her tightly, and she burrowed into him, hoping he’d just hold her and say nothing more. But he kissed her forehead and whispered, “You weren’t asleep, you were hiding behind a canvas, alone in your own apartment. You’ve got to talk to me, trust me. Please let me help you.”

  She needed to sort through this on her own, needed to figure out what was real and what wasn’t. Then she would talk to him. Part of her wanted to confide in him now, tell him her fears and her secrets, unburden herself. But he’d been so upset when he couldn’t find her that night. How would he feel about someone chasing her, stalking her, reading her mail? And there were his bouts. He didn’t need any more to worry about. “I do trust you,” she finally said. “But there’s nothing to talk about. I just need a good night’s sleep.”

  She found the idea of someone tampering with her mail even more unnerving than being followed. At least if she was being followed, it was outside, in public; her mail was inside, her private self. She watched herself more closely now, hovering higher to view a wider swatch, to see who was behind her, who was coming toward. She was spooked, jittery, and her nerves felt as if they were on the outside of her skin. This made it more difficult to sleep, and the weight of accumulating tiredness was crushing.

  The physical incongruity of restlessness and exhaustion was particularly acute late one night as she and Bill worked in silence. She was like a whirling dervish, ready to fall over but unable to do so because of her own cyclonic motion. She checked to make sure she wasn’t messing up the mural, and was surprised to find she wasn’t.

  Bill was immersed in painting an abstracted image of a pride of lions scanning the horizon, impervious to the dead lions at their feet. He didn’t look like he was going anywhere soon, which was fine with her. Not only did the lions need to be completed, but she wasn’t looking forward to being alone.

  “Working on this mural has changed my mind about a lot of things,” Bill said into the stillness.

  Alizée was caught unawares by the sound of his voice and jumped as if she’d heard a gunshot. “What? What?”

  He grinned at her startle, leaned back on his haunches and looked hard at his panel. “For one, I never liked merging styles in a single piece. I always thought it muddied up the works, but now I see that it can be additive. Like how when you let paint dry between layers the colors become more vibrant. Not less like you’d think.”

  She
nodded.

  “But it’s the political stuff I really get now.” Bill turned and looked at her, his ice blue eyes filled with what appeared to be gratitude. “Like we always say, art’s about evoking emotion, about exploring the human condition.” He waved his brush at all the panels. “And this is the human condition. The details might be specific to 1940, but the emotions, the underlying themes, are about who we are. Unfortunately, probably who we’ll always be.”

  To her great surprise, she burst into tears.

  “What? What did I say?”

  “Nothing,” she managed through her tears.

  Bill threw his hands up in the air. “I thought I was giving you a compliment.”

  The expression on his face was one of such complete bafflement that she started to laugh. And once she started, she couldn’t stop.

  As he watched her, Bill’s face changed from perplexity to concern. “Are you okay? Should I go get Mark?”

  She rocked on the floor, holding her knees to her chest, howling up at the ceiling. Bill filled a glass of water from the tap and tried to hand it to her, but she waved it away, sure she’d spill it. It occurred to her that Bill, Mark, Jack, and Lee had been laughing the same way the night she’d stormed out of the flat. But this concurrence only made her laugh harder.

  “Alizée,” he said, pleading. “Please stop. You’re scaring me.”

  Somehow, the idea of frightening this big, self-confident man did it. That and the realization that he was sure to tell Mark about the laughing fit. She sobered, mirth draining from her as rapidly as it had come. She hiccupped and wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her shirt, not caring that she was smearing wet paint on her face. Merde. This was the second episode in less than a week that Mark was sure to worry himself to death about. He was having enough problems. Maybe it was time to come clean.

  Bill handed her the water again, and this time she drank it gratefully.

  He knelt and tentatively touched her shoulder as if afraid the slightest touch might topple her.