“Did I ever tell you about my father?” Nicolette said more to the canvas than to Claire. “You remind me of him. But then, everyone does.”
Claire said nothing, glared without glaring. How dare she finally give Claire something in return. She should tell her to leave now, that she never wanted to see her again. But even now, perhaps that wasn’t true. Claire held her tongue, wishing very much she didn’t care what Nicolette had to say.
“I lost him in the war,” Nicolette said. “They brought his body home, but they wouldn’t let me see it. They wouldn’t tell me exactly how he died. We only saw him in uniform, in the open casket. But it was a private viewing area. So when it was my turn, I unbuttoned his shirt and peeked. I’d never been so afraid. I thought he would wake up right there and grab for me. But I had to see.” She said this unapologetically, rather obstinately, like she was still that little girl at the casket. “There was a giant red slit down from his right shoulder across his torso, nearly splitting him in two. I don’t know what weapon would have sliced him so precisely. I never asked.
“I shared that story at an opening once, and now every critic reads that into my paintings, especially my last show. Did you see it? Every time someone has something wrong with an arm or there’s a body in the landscape, they say it represents my grief.” Nicolette wiped her black hair from her forehead with the back of her hand. “I hate their explanations.”
“They’re wrong?” Claire asked.
“Like all neurotic artists, it’s my own death I’m obsessed with, not his. There are so many ways to die, and even more ways to imagine it. For that reason alone I’ve never understood boredom.”
Nicolette smiled slightly and moved her brush over the lower portion of the canvas. Claire could almost feel the paintbrush on her own neck—no doubt that was the part Nicolette was detailing at that moment, where Claire came to lay dead on the street below the bridge, her neck exposed. Claire ran her fingers over the small imperfections on her throat, the nearly imperceptible bumps rising from her skin like Braille.
“Do you ever imagine dying?” Nicolette asked without raising her eyes or her brush.
Claire chose a carrot slice from the tray, held it aloft like a wand. “We’ll see it today, won’t we? Freddie nearly peeked last night.”
Nicolette shrugged and mumbled an answer.
“What?” Claire said, a little too loud.
“It’s not quite ready,” Nicolette said. “It’s always more difficult than I remember. It is difficult to finish anything. And to start. The middle doesn’t exist.”
“Oh? I thought you were on the last touches.”
“I can see now how it might never be finished. Even the last touches could take weeks. I could take it—”
“What?” Claire said. “I can’t hear you.”
“I said I could take it with me to my studio to finish. I don’t need you to pose after today. It’s all detail work now, which could take a very long time. It will be worth the wait.”
“No,” Claire said. “We don’t want that. No, we must see it today.” Her voice caught.
Nicolette closed her eyes. Barely above a whisper: “You’ve seen it.”
Claire bit quickly into the carrot. She chewed and chewed and chewed and chewed and chewed and chewed and chewed and all the while felt the girl’s eyes burrowing into her cheeks, X-ray vision spying the pulp in the cavities of her teeth. It took her forever to chew that carrot.
“You were supposed to wait,” Nicolette said.
Now the painter was telling her what she should and shouldn’t do? Claire stood quickly, swallowing with difficulty. “Excuse me?”
Nicolette pushed back her stool and stood as well. “I wanted to give it to you.”
Claire pinned back her shoulders. It hurt to stand so straight. “I’ve never been so insulted,” she said. “You cannot come into a person’s home—you cannot come into their home—”
“It’s not an insult,” Nicolette said.
“Then what is it?”
“It’s a gift.”
“A gift?” This, more than anything, made Claire so hot in her anger she could have peeled off her skin and hurled it at the girl. “You are mad. You have to leave now. Or I’ll—yes, I’ll call the police.”
“Try to understand.” Nicolette’s voice contracted. She seemed on the verge of tears. “I only painted what I saw. I took this notion of your death—your suicide—and I gave it to the work. So it can’t happen. Do you see?”
“Suicide!” Claire tried very hard to laugh, but it came out like twigs breaking underfoot. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Maybe to you, but since I believe it deeply, it’s true. It’s very true.”
Claire closed her eyes. Light happened in there. But when she opened them again, both Nicolette and the painting hadn’t disappeared. “You need to go,” she said again. “Take it with you.”
Nicolette stepped around the canvas. Claire glanced about for an escape route—she could duck behind the couch—but she remained still. Nicolette walked to her slowly, one hand out as if Claire were a stray dog caught in headlights that might easily scare off with sudden movement.
“I understand you’re angry,” Nicolette said. “I wish I could stop painting forever. I would stop for you.”
And then they were so close and Nicolette grabbed Claire’s fingers with one hand and brought her other hand to Claire’s face, ran her thumb under her eyes, as if measuring her features again. Then down, her fingers creeping over her cheeks, her ears. Again Claire shut her eyes, but this time she did not wish her gone.
“You’re so beautiful, Claire,” Nicolette said. “You act like you know, but you don’t.” She slipped her fingers along Claire’s lips, her chin and neck, her lips again. The heat of Nicolette’s face, closer now, Nicolette’s hand on her hair.
She felt incapable of stopping this. Did she want to stop this? Nicolette was in charge, as she was of the painting, as she was of how Claire was seen.
Claire opened her eyes. “Freddie will not pay you,” Claire said. She felt a century older than the painter. She turned and walked away from Nicolette, locked herself in the bedroom until she heard the girl leave.
They waited until after midnight to hide the painting in their basement storage unit, avoiding their neighbors—Freddie had told everyone about the commission, even crazy Wilma Meyer upstairs who made her own straw hats. They would keep it for legal reasons, perhaps take Nicolette to court. They took what used to be the old servants’ stairwell, and at every floor for three floors, Freddie yelled, “Hey,” at Claire above him. But she didn’t have the energy to ask why he was yelling, or to change whatever it was she was doing wrong. In the storage gate, she insisted they position the painting on top of two large boxes—the contents of which she no longer knew—upright and eye level to allow one last look.
The Brooklyn Bridge, from which the woman in the painting had jumped—rather, the bridge from which she had jumped, for she was the woman in the painting—glistened like barbed wire. Each moment or fragment was a bit of a mosaic spliced together from the same broken material, a Roman torso that had been smashed and glued back together wrong. In one fragment, she was a teenager; in another, gray-haired and gray-eyed. Falling, every moment of her life. Each was undoubtedly her as she had never seen herself, or had never been. She was beautiful. She was dead.
But the sky behind her broken body was bright—a perfect, sunny day. Everyone outside of the frame was laughing, jeering at her, she just knew. The street below the bridge—so strange, a street, not a river—rang with children’s summer laughter and all the lives that crossed it. But then there was something dark that she couldn’t grasp. Some wildness in the brushstrokes. Heavy strokes. An image of an ocean appeared to her—a vast, violent, deep-night ocean. She’d never seen an ocean like that. No land anywhere, known only to itself.
4.
Claire had promised to meet her friend Mary for an event at the
Reuben Gallery and she couldn’t come up with a decent excuse to cancel. Already running late, she hailed a taxi going south instead of north. Her dress, cowl-draped black satin, caught in the car door as she slammed it shut behind her on East Tenth, and she had to beat on the passenger window to get the driver’s attention. He almost pulled away with her—she could have been dragged for blocks through city traffic with her dress around her head and it would have hurt and would it have killed her?
Mary was waiting in front of her building. She pouted at Claire’s tardiness and pretended that kissing both her cheeks was a very big chore. Claire was so nervous she barely said hello. What could she talk about when all that ran through her mind was an open ocean, the painting afloat like a life raft? What if Mary asked about it?
Mary had obviously been drinking before she arrived. This didn’t stop her from looking sternly at Claire and asking, before anything else, “What is it? Who died?”
Since Claire could not say, “Me,” she said, “What? Why?” and attempted a laugh.
“You’re all right, then? We don’t have to go,” Mary said.
“I’m perfectly normal. I would tell you if I wasn’t. Stop asking please,” Claire said as lightly as she could.
She couldn’t fool her friend, but at least Mary knew her well enough not to press. Mary, willingly, did most of the talking. She was a ghostwriter for little-known politicians’ autobiographies and she profiled larger personalities for the Village Voice. Mary always wanted an ear for whatever new person or project she was working on.
“Buckminster Fuller,” she said, linking arms with Claire as they walked east. “He’s staying in the Village. I’ll be in your neighborhood for the next week following him around. We should get lunch and you could meet him. He always wants to meet new people. I thought he was only interested in meeting my women friends, but men, too. He wants to know everyone. It’s part of his work, knowing people. He’s trying to save the world, and how could he save the world if he doesn’t know the people in it?”
“I’ve never heard of him,” Claire said.
“Of course you haven’t. You live under a rock.”
“That’s why I have you. Without you, I wouldn’t know Elvis.”
“You know I love feeling important. I asked him to come tonight. Bucky, I mean, not Elvis. But I doubt he will. He doesn’t like this kind of art.” Mary smiled at her, shimmering under the street lamp like her black jacket was covered in dew. Only Mary could pull off toreador pants and that ruffled blouse.
“Are women allowed to wear pants here?” Claire asked.
“They wouldn’t care if you came nude.” Mary laughed with her mouth wide open. She looked fantastic.
“You look fantastic,” Claire said out loud.
Mary hummed, so easy to please. “So do you.” But then she stopped smiling, stopped walking, and twisted her mouth. “Well, no, Claire, you don’t. Really, what’s wrong? Is it Freddie again? You look like you haven’t slept in days.”
“I can always count on you—”
“To be honest? Yes. And happy birthday,” Mary said, kissing Claire’s cheek before they started walking again. “Your thirtieth.”
“Thirty-fifth,” Claire said.
“Shh.”
The wind ripped through their coats and they laughed at it. Claire hadn’t laughed in so long; she almost forgot she was upset. Mary was a giddy drunk. She said she felt like taking off her shoes and skipping, but she didn’t. She put her arm around Claire and squeezed her shoulder and Claire felt like crying.
The gallery was on the ground floor of a loft on Tenth Street. The people spilled out onto the sidewalk, swimming in a pool of yellow light. Claire was overdressed, she could see that immediately. Most of the men were in jeans or trousers—the women too. Claire was surprised, though she tried very hard not to be, by how many American Negroes were present at an art gallery. “This is quite the eclectic crowd,” she said to Mary.
“Oh, Claire! I can’t take you anywhere.” Mary guided Claire inside by her forearm, then immediately recognized someone and flagged him down, leaving Claire alone.
The gallery was crowded and everyone looked horrible in the bright light. Sheets of stiff, semitransparent plastic hung from the rafters like laundry, sectioned so they formed smaller rooms. Red, yellow, and green paint was scratched across the mock walls. The word Fluxus rotated around her, painted or scribbled along every surface. Plastic fruit littered the ground. She stepped over fake bananas and kiwis to get to the drinks in the back. Just a glass or two of the sweet brandy punch. She poured generously.
Rows of folding cane chairs faced a screen in the front of the room. Projected on the screen were the words Escape Velocity. Big, black block letters. The words sounded like a magic incantation to Claire. A code to nothing, yet Claire wanted it. She wanted to own those words and use them, do something terrible to them.
She downed her punch.
At the corner of the table, tacky cocktail forks were spread beside a plate of cheese loaf and celery stalks. Claire looked around. Then she slipped a fork into her purse. At that moment, the music rose. She started, felt she’d been caught.
“You look lost.”
Claire turned to find a man a decade younger than she and a full head taller staring down at her eagerly. Acne scarred his upper lip, which he tried to hide with a thin moustache, but he had a confident air.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Claire said. “How could I be lost?”
“May I?” He gestured toward her empty cup, and she handed it to him. “Are you an artist?” he asked. “It seems like everyone here is.”
“Yes,” Claire said quickly. “Or, I used to work in film. But I gave it up.” It was not hard to lie to this man she’d never see again. And she had, years ago, appeared in one film.
“Why’s that?” He filled her glass and handed it back.
“Oh, a number of reasons. This painter I know thinks I want to jump off a bridge.” She sipped her punch quickly.
“Thrilling. Don’t you? Most people I know do,” said the man.
“That’s awfully flippant,” Claire said.
“You’re right,” he said. “It’s no laughing matter.”
“Do you? Want to jump off a bridge?” she asked, cup half empty.
“Sometimes.” The music rose and he had to lean in close to her ear to speak. “Perhaps this is an odd question, but did I see you put a fork in your bag? I’m just curious.”
“That.” Claire felt herself blushing furiously. “That is for an art project.”
He had a kind smile. “I thought you’d given up on all that.”
Something was about to begin, it was brewing in the air. She quickly poured herself a third glass of punch before the man walked her to Mary, who’d saved her seat, but there was no free chair nearby for him. It was a relief to see him go. What a stupid thing, her forks. What a lie. And not only what she’d said to the man. She felt embarrassed of herself in front of herself.
Mary had called this night a Happening. “Visual poetry,” she’d said. Over a hundred expectant faces surrounded them, and more people were milling in, late and chairless. The crowd was still rustling and mumbling when a woman in the front started reading in a loud monotone. “A Hart Crane poem,” Mary said. A woman dressed all in black and wrapped messily head to toe in white gauze bandages stood up from the middle of the audience. She also started yelling the poem loudly, competing with the other woman. A third player yelled at the spectators to take the programs from beneath their seats: they were to do as their card said when a bell was rung. Claire’s card had a different number than Mary’s but Claire did not tell her so. She followed her friend like a child. She was too old for this. And overdressed. She stumbled over a chair leg. The chattering of the crowd, shouts of the performers, music clawing its way out from a radio—each noise continued to cover itself with another, layer after layer.
She scurried to refill her cup—the punch was very easy to drink—be
fore men in butcher jackets covered in fake blood ushered them around the gallery. Others wore football helmets and tried to sell them bottles of water owned by the US government. Astronauts danced the hokey pokey. Someone yelled, “Duck and cover, the bombs are falling, duck and cover!” It became a song, a chorus lilting over the mock walls. And they ducked, people were actually ducking and covering all over the place. Something pulled at the hem of Claire’s skirt, it was Mary on the floor, grinning, and Claire knelt, too, but not all the way, and tried to smile, bent her arms around her head.
Above the noise, above all that current, Claire heard a name. Whipping around, searching the crowd, the confusion of faces, desperate. Nicolette. Why hadn’t she thought of it before? Of course Nicolette would come to an event like this. She was everywhere.
And then there were chicken feathers falling through the air—hundreds and hundreds of chicken feathers. They fell on her hair, her dress, on her wool coat that she’d draped over a chair somewhere. She tried to brush them off. But they wouldn’t unstick themselves, each feather coated in a drop of glue. A foot away, a woman popped, popped, popped open umbrellas. One flew open right beside Claire, swiping her cheek. Someone laughed.
Claire pushed her way to her coat, her cheek burning. She could hardly see the exit through the crowd spinning around. Her chest rubbed against strangers’ backs, her back against their chests.
Outside, in the streetlight, she tried to pluck away the fluff, but it only stuck to her fingers. And that’s how she walked home—covered in chicken feathers.
She trudged nearly twenty blocks in the new cold, the smell of damp wrought iron and Sunday garbage cooling. She’d have to explain her abrupt departure to Mary, but she’d worry about what to say tomorrow. Claire could hear herself clicking down the pavement. Then, a heel caught between cobblestones. She stumbled forward. People might think she was drunk. She was. It made her feel vulnerable. The streetlights hummed, accompanying her home, except for the dark corner of Eighth Street and Fifth Avenue—had it burned out or was there never any light? She looked around, expecting every shadow to morph into a predator. She held her bag tightly. There were footsteps behind her, but when she turned, there was no one.
The Suicide of Claire Bishop Page 3