Love Love

by Sung J. Woo

  “Little sis,” he said, and she turned around. There was a glow to her skin, her hair shiny like a long, wet stone. She wore a simple black dress that made her look older and assured.

  “Big bro,” she said, and there was that same kid smile on her face, just a bit wider with the passing of a few decades. It felt so good to hold her. Their mother was gone, and when their father left, then it would be just the two of them.

  “What is this?” she said when she caught his eyes welling up. “That’s usually my job.”

  “Maybe we’ve switched places,” Kevin said.

  She scanned the room and slowly shook her head. “I have to stop saying that I can’t believe this is happening. Holy shit, is that like a giant matchbook? I wonder if it works. I wonder if it’s made by one of those artists who’ll set it on fire at the end of the night.”

  A media crew arrived through the entrance, lugging their cameras and AV equipment, a stream of burly stagehands grunting through the door while a pair of well-coiffed media folks, a thin man in a Euro-cut suit and a woman in a skin-tight red dress, stepped gingerly over the threshold. Judy and Kevin stepped off to the other end of the counter to stay out of their way.

  “I took him to see Dr. Elias,” she said. Still she avoided using the words father or dad. Maybe he was expecting too much—the fact that she’d followed through was an accomplishment.

  “You did?”

  “Don’t sound so surprised.”

  “Well, you didn’t call when I rang you. How’s he doing?”

  “About the same. Maybe a little worse.”

  “You don’t get better from renal failure.”

  A caterer paused with a silver tray in his hand, holding flutes of champagne and glasses of wine, and Kevin was glad to see Judy decline.

  “So,” she said, changing the subject. “I brought Roger with me.”

  “And I’m looking forward to meeting your man.” It had been a while since he’d seen her so happy, which was good but also imbued him with trepidation. Judy had a way of falling hard for people, and though after Brian she’d become more guarded, Kevin didn’t notice her holding anything back as Roger Nakamura walked through the door. He was about Kevin’s height and build, and looking at his face was like staring at one of those traditional Japanese flat paintings where the eyes were thin and wide and the faces were horsey-long, almost like caricatures.

  “You must be Kevin,” Roger said. He spoke with equanimity, each word its own island.

  “And you must be Roger. Thank you for taking care of my sister.”

  “It was just a few weeks. She healed up quickly.”

  “Still, I wasn’t there. I’m grateful.”

  The three of them made small talk. Judy regaled Kevin about the first-class flight from Newark to San Francisco where they sat in a recliner-like seat and were given bibs for their lobster dinner. Kevin looked around as he listened, trying to find Denise, until one of Claudia’s assistants interrupted them.

  “We need you, Ms. Lee,” she said, “you and your artwork. Our installation people are ready.”

  “I can use Roger’s help, too, so we’ll let you catch up with your former star student,” Judy said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Look behind you,” she said, before being whisked away with Roger.

  He’d never seen Alexa like this, decked out and dolled up. Her normally straight blond hair, which was always tied back in a ponytail, was waved out to a luxurious fullness, and her black satin dress was a tube of elegance. As she approached him, he saw that the dress wasn’t all black but varying shades of darkness, the gradations shifting with each step.

  “Surprised to see me?” she asked.

  “I guess I shouldn’t have been.”

  “But surprised nonetheless.”

  He leaned over and gave her a quick, innocuous hug.

  “So,” she said. “Mom told me you guys had sex.”

  Kevin’s mouth and his brain were not cooperating, and he was certain he looked like a guppy out of water.

  “Yes,” he finally said.

  “I’m not judging you,” she said, sounding exactly the opposite.

  “Well, thank you. Claudia felt the need to tell you this, I see.”

  “She feels the need to say a lot of things she shouldn’t,” Alexa said. “So do you feel complete now? Are you satisfied with your life, your longing? Are you in love?”

  She was trying to sound funny and sarcastic, but mostly what came across was her hurt, of exactly what, Kevin didn’t know. He had a feeling Alexa didn’t, either. There was a complicated dynamic of emotions at work here, and as the grownup, he thought the best way to diffuse the situation would be to play it straight.

  He kept his voice as neutral as possible as he asked, “What do you think?”

  It did the trick. Alexa’s shoulders fell, then they rose up to a nonplussed shrug. “I think . . . I think maybe we should talk about something else.”

  “Small talk.”

  “Tiny talk.”

  “You’re out here visiting your mom.”

  “It was her idea. I haven’t seen her in a couple of months.”

  “How’s your tennis going?”

  She picked up a flyer on the counter, rolled it into a baton, and mimed a perfect drop shot.

  “That’s totally Bill.”

  She nodded. “I’m working with him now. It’s different. He’s a very different player than you. A very different person. It’s fine, but it’s . . . different.”

  “The way we play is who we are,” Kevin said.

  “Oh, and I just got accepted to the Bollettieri summer camp,” she said. “Some advanced techniques thing.”

  “That’s fantastic!” Kevin said. It was the premier tennis academy in the country, where top players like Maria Sharapova, Pete Sampras, and Andre Agassi developed their skills.

  “I suppose. I don’t think I’ll learn that much more, considering how much you and Bill have already taught me.”

  “Spoken like a true teenaged know-it-all.”

  Behind and beyond Alexa, there was something going on, something that sounded like more than the chatter of pre-opening excitement. Claudia was vehemently shaking her head, and Judy was holding on to one of her mounted sketches.

  “It’s my mother.” Alexa grabbed his hand and pulled him toward the now full-blown commotion, a crowd forming, the savvy media folks already rolling the camera. “Before things get out of hand, which I guarantee they will, let me just apologize ahead of time for her being who she is.”

  “You don’t have to tell me about her eccentricities,” he said. “I’ve been staying with her for almost a month now.”

  They’d reached the eye of this widening gyre. “I’m sorry,” Claudia said to Judy, “but I just can’t.”

  “What’s going on?” Kevin asked.

  “She says she won’t display my drawings,” Judy said, her voice disembodied, a ventriloquist’s dummy. “She says they’re no good.”

  “No, please, that’s not what I said. What I did say is that they’re not going to work here. I made a mistake. It’s me who fucked up. And I am deeply, deeply sorry for that, but I just can’t let these go on.”

  “But she’s here,” Kevin said. “You brought her here.”

  Claudia, looking exasperated, closed her eyes as if to blot out the mess she’d created. “You’re not helping.”

  Judy looked to Roger, who had his hands in the pockets of his pants and met her eyes with the same, utterly composed face. Kevin remembered Judy telling him that Roger was medically unflappable, whatever that meant, but if there was ever a time to flap, this was it. Judy dropped her gaze, dropped her head, and dropped her framed piece from her hands, and as it made its inevitable, awful descent, Kevin saw that it was one he hadn’t seen before, a tennis ball–shaped planet in outer space, her largest work yet. The glass shattered as the corner struck the floor, the noise amplified with the unnatural hush that had fallen
over the gallery.

  It seemed as if everyone was frozen under a spell until Judy ran out. Roger followed, their footsteps hammering echoes in the silence.

  “What happened?” Kevin asked Claudia. “What the fuck?”

  Claudia sighed, tightened the bandanna around her head. Kevin knew he was pissing her off, but he didn’t care. “Right now, Judy’s work is one of desperation. The first one she sent you, that was real. I can see it in her strokes, the confidence, the attitude. With each subsequent sketch, it ebbs away until this last one has none of it, not a whit.” She held up another one Kevin hadn’t seen, two women in tennis skirts sitting on a bench, topless as they breastfed the tennis ball they each cradled in their arms. “They’ve been neutered, as if they were started by her but completed by someone else. Displaying her works as is would be like showcasing the decline of an artist, and that’s not what this show is about.”

  Kevin peered at the drawing to see the certain mistakes that Claudia saw, but what was the point? This was her domain, and he knew how immutable her mind was once she made it up. All he saw in his sister’s work was wonder, how she took a blank canvas and drew something that had existed only in her brain. It was magic, this act of creation, and Claudia had sullied it.

  “Bullshit,” Alexa said. “All of it, all utter bullshit, Mom.”

  Claudia crossed her arms and addressed her daughter. “Now you know better than that.”

  “Contrary to popular belief, this is what she does better than anything else,” Alexa continued, ignoring her. “It’s positively Olympic, her ability to screw with your mind.”

  “I meant every word I’ve said. That’s called integrity.”

  “She hasn’t told you, has she,” Alexa said to Kevin. “She hasn’t told you what happened when she suffered her nervous breakdown, excuse me, vision, when she stopped being a reasonable person and became the monster that she is.”

  Claudia clapped twice, and the circle around her began dispersing. “We still have a gallery to open in less than half an hour, folks.” She turned to Alexa. “You can keep talking, but no one’s listening, my dear.”

  “You and your stupid fucking Tiny Claudia,” Alexa said, and she headed for the exit herself.

  Already Claudia’s assistants were at work in the background, removing the panels that were supposed to showcase Judy’s works. Hammers unhinged nails; pieces of the beige matte boards passed from one assistant to another like a fire brigade.

  Kevin clutched Claudia by the arm with enough force for her to emit a small yelp of complaint. He wanted to keep his voice steady, but he could feel himself losing his cool.

  “Everything was ready to go here,” Kevin said. “All you had to do was just let it go. If you’d just let your people do their fucking jobs . . .”

  “I can’t go against myself.” She yanked her arm free of his grip. “That’s what it would’ve been, me doing something that no longer felt true.” She picked up Judy’s painting off the floor, the shattered glass an intricate spider web that obscured the sketch underneath. “This might feel like the end to your sister’s career, but have faith that it’s just the beginning.”

  “No,” he said. “There has to be a limit.”

  “A limit?”

  “You’re a child, Claudia. You’re worse than a child, because you’re an adult but you don’t act like one.”

  Claudia shook the broken shards into a garbage can, the pieces sounding like white noise as they hit the metal. “That’s how you really feel?”

  “I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life.”

  She placed the framed sketch on a rolling cart and stood in front of him, close enough that he smelled her familiar scent of paint and sweat. “Then we’re done, you and I.”

  “Fine,” Kevin said.

  “It is. You’re not the first one to no longer understand who I am, and you won’t be the last.” Her voice was about to break, but then she fought it off. “I know this is my lot in life.”

  With that she walked away, toward the gap where his sister’s works were supposed to be tonight, a white space that was now being populated with long-backed white chairs and round white side tables, an area where people could gather and debate the finer points of art and all its elusive definitions.

  He felt a hand on his shoulder.

  “It seemed best if I stayed out of the way,” Denise said. “With what was going on.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “You didn’t even get to meet Judy.”

  “That’s all right. I’ve gotten my fill of art and artists for the evening. Possibly for my lifetime. What should we do now?”

  “What I want,” he said, “is to go home.” Except home was across the country, and getting a ticket tonight would basically bankrupt him. Still, he tried, calling the airline as Denise held the door open for him. The please-hold Muzak annoyed his ear.

  Outside, the air was cold, and sitting on the stoop was Alexa, her legs pulled in close.

  “Hey.” He crouched down next to her. He handed his phone to Denise, who nodded and took it.

  “My mother’s crazy,” she said. Her eyes were red, her voice gravelly. “I’m sorry I ever mentioned her to you. She wasn’t like this, always. She used to be a normal person.”

  “‘Tiny Claudia,’ you said. What did you mean by that?”

  “A hallucination. She’s always been a manic depressive, but one night she had a huge fight with my dad and she was gonna kill herself. Emptied her bottle of sleeping pills and had shoved them in her mouth when she saw a tiny version of herself at the bottom of the bottle.”

  “A tiny version . . . ?”

  “She swears it was her.”

  “She hadn’t actually taken the pills yet. So this hallucination was not drug-induced.”

  “That’s why she insists it was real. She spit the pills out, rinsed out her mouth, told my father to go fuck himself, and became who she is. Somebody who does what she feels, regardless of the consequences, because to her, going against herself is taking those pills.”

  “Claudia’s theory on life is like communism,” he said. “On paper, it’s great, but its actual execution leaves much to be desired. Do you want to go somewhere or something?”

  She shook her head. “Eventually I’ll have to come back here. She’s still my mother. I have no other place I can go, except home.”

  “I got somebody,” Denise said, and she handed Kevin’s cell phone back to him.

  He introduced the two ladies to each other then took the call. The best the rep could do was to book a flight three days from now, one that had a pair of connections, from San Francisco to Dallas to Denver and finally Newark. He still had to pay another three hundred dollars, but he took it.

  “Back in Jersey on Tuesday,” he said.

  “You’re not coming back to Mom’s tonight, are you,” Alexa said.

  “We’re gonna stop there now so I can pick up my stuff,” Kevin said, “but no, I won’t be sticking around.”

  “And you’re not coming back to the tennis club, either.”

  “Maybe as a member, like you.”

  “I have a match next Saturday in a local junior tournament. The girl I’m playing is six foot one with the wingspan of an airliner. Ridiculous serve. Would you consider being my coach?”

  “I don’t know how much help I’d be,” he said, and he meant it, because in the end, tennis was a long-distance boxing match, you against your opponent. “But I’d be honored.”

  “Good,” she said. She dusted herself off, looking once again like a prom queen in her strapless dress. “Then this is still not good-bye. Because I hate good-byes. In fact, I’m just going to walk back in there now so I don’t have to say it.”

  They watched her do exactly that, disappear into the squinty brightness of the Hive.

  “I like her,” Denise said. “One of your students?”

  “Was,” Kevin said. “I quit my job at the club.”

  As they were about to leave, the
thin man who came with the media crew hurried through the door and hailed Kevin.

  “Someone told me you’re the brother of the artist Judy Yoon Lee?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’d like to talk to you, but I have to go back to the opening. Can I get your number?”

  Kevin gave him his number, the man typed it into his smartphone, and then he was gone as fast as he’d come.

  “The saga continues,” Denise said.

  They walked down the Embarcadero to get to Denise’s car, past the giant gray Pier 35 building until the bay came into view. At night the city was a living jewel, lights from the distant Treasure Island twinkling gold. Sailboats glided through the darkness while inland, a pair of skyscrapers was outlined like neon lights. The beacon atop the Transamerica Pyramid was a cold white orb.

  “You can stay at the Sanctuary, if you like,” Denise said. “I know we have beds open and you’re only gonna be around for a couple days.”

  “That’s really kind of you,” he said. “My wallet thanks you as well.”

  “I have a shoot tomorrow, but the next day I’m free, so I can come by to see you off.”

  Denise clicked on her key fob, and her car blinked its headlight eyes in response. They both got in, but before she pressed the starter button, she turned and looked at him. Under the street light, her Barbie doll made-up face looked wrong, because she was frowning.

  “What’s the matter?” Kevin asked.