But I haven’t heard from you in a while. I wonder where you are now. I wonder about you a lot. For instance, are you omniscient? Do you have an all-encompassing calendar for a brain? Some people, I know, would call you a part of me, but it’s more complicated than all that.
I’m unsupervised most of the day, and that’s when I make things. I write lists and construct shrines. I drew a visual list of the organs in my body and called it “Ten things I hate about myself.” It made me think about what I actually hate about myself. And I make shrines for my brain. Two of them side by side, right and left. And a third shrine to be placed between the two hemispheres, for the disease inside.
Or I see how few clicks it takes to move from one site on data mining to one about Nicolette, only following hyperlinks. I start small, browsing sites that could be considered relevant to my job, the newest software, consumer reviews. Which lead me to technological design, graphic design, industrial design, industrial art, site-specific art and, finally, Nicolette.
Last week I graphed out my first meetings with Nicolette. She always seemed to appear out of nowhere, like she truly hadn’t existed before. There were so many first meetings—the hospital, the car lots, my apartment, another time in line for standing-room-only opera tickets. Normally, when you first meet and learn about a person, it’s like the way you learn to see a painting—all the information is available from the very first sighting, but the significance and interconnections only become apparent by registering the data over time. First meeting a person is an influx of this data (i.e. how she wrinkles her nose, her favorite band, childhood traumas). But the rate of new data acquisition about a person is a limit approaching infinity towards zero data-influx.
But in charting Nicolette, you’ll find that her line doesn’t decrease and level off at all. Every time we met I learned it all new! Starting and staying at maximum data influx.
But Mr. Fox found the chart and I had to convince him “Nicolette” was a scenario. None of that today.
But none of that today. Mr. Fox watches me through his office window. It is rare, and almost comforting, to not have to convince myself that no one is actually watching me.
The card the Hasidim gave me is tucked into the corner of my monitor. Google says the gallery is in Chelsea, a good walk from work. I compose an email:
Dear Nicolette, I am just checking in. I hope you are all right. Gimme a call.
Dear Nicolette, I’m sure you’re fine, of course you are, because there’s no reason you wouldn’t be, but just in case
Dear Nicolette, please know I’m here for you. You know where to reach me. But if not, here is my number and address.
Where is she? I used to be able to time-travel by conjuring her body. But now I no longer feel her. Maybe she’s in India. Or Israel or Home Depot or the moon. If I’m right, clap twice. I try to think straight into her mind. All I find is an ocean empty of her.
She never texted back or answered my calls. I tried her six times—five if one doesn’t count the number four, which I don’t sometimes. But whatever art is hanging in Chelsea has to be a clue as to what happened to her that day. A clue leading me (to me to me to me) to her.
There’s the breath from the AC coating the office; there’s the secret calendar of naked girls in the men’s bathroom; there’s the powder soap dispenser and fingers that smell like powder soap clacking away at keyboards; there are the keyboards clicking like hundreds of watches all going at different times.
Lunch by myself in the break room is as quick as I can slurp my cup-of-noodles. Food with more hyphens than nutritional value.
I spend the rest of my forty-five minutes, like any genuine loser, hiding in the bathroom. It’s quiet in here except for some people fighting somewhere about their marriage. I can hear them through the vents. I’ve spread my pills out on the little metal shelf attached to the mirror above the sink. One pill twice daily, by mouth, 5mg apiece. I’ll have to refill my prescription soon. Without even looking, I know there are sixteen pills left. I’ve been thinking about that number a lot, and I’ve been thinking even more about cutting back. I’ve been feeling good. Really good. Last month, the doctor said that eventually I could lower my dosage, that we’d talk about it, but I haven’t seen him since. I’m one of the lucky ones, he says. I’ve taken to the medication and have been doing well for eight months mostly symptom-free. Really well.
I might drop all my pills down the drain right now, because accidents happen. In the mirror, the pills are doubled. All lined up in salute, they spell ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ. I pluck one from the middle and pop it. Now they spell: ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.
The door opens behind me. With the side of my palm, I slide the pills back into the bottle, but one slips off and bounces on the tile floor.
It’s Orange-Socks Dave, looking at me in the mirror. I turn to him, the bottle in my fist behind my back. The pill landed just a few inches from my foot but I can’t pick it up with him here.
He smirks at me. “Making yourself pretty for date night?”
The other eight guys in their cubicles don’t bother about me too much, unless they’re trying to scare me about the Homeland Security Advisory. They keep a live color-coded Terrorist Threat Level on a few of their monitors. They think it’s funny. When they raised the Threat Level from Yellow to Orange the other week, Dave started wearing only orange socks. He either has a bunch of pairs or wears the same ones every day. I made my own Sesame Street version of the threat level system, Big Bird for yellow, Oscar, etcetera. The guys liked that.
“No.”
He stops smiling. “It was a joke,” he says. “Because you’re looking in the mirror?”
“Okay,” I say and leave the bathroom, the pill still resting on the floor. One obvious point in the category of lowering my dosage.
A decades-long plunge. The woman falls elegantly. Each frame, a segment of the woman’s fall, disconnected like a shattered mirror. She changes as she falls, but not in any pattern I can discern. She is old in one frame, young in the next, echoing, perhaps, a life flashing before one’s eyes—if a person’s whole life is one giant fall.
I can tell it’s Nicolette’s immediately. The hogs-hair brushstrokes. The untrimmed fan brush edging the faces. The faces. So many faces of the same woman, unknown to me but familiar.
In the gallery and the hall outside, there are no Hasidim in sight. Their absence makes me nervous. Are they trying to stay scarce?
The gallery-sitter—not a Hasid—stands behind me. I fiddle with my camera phone and put it back in my pocket and he glares at me.
The woman, dead in the street, stretches her head toward me; she is spilling out of the painting. Her chin and chest pushed out, her eyes closed, sensual even in death. She’s so close to me I can almost touch her, catch her. Her left arm is outside of the painting, unseen, reaching above her, maybe reaching for her true self—though if you’re dead, there ends truth.
A piece from the corner of the painting is missing. The line is careful, like it had been deliberately cut out. Only the N of her name remains.
The gallery-sitter sees me looking at the missing corner. “The integrity of the painting remains intact.” He sneers in a way that makes me want to flick his ears. As if I’m not good enough to be in his gallery. He’s trying to seem Yellow-level dangerous but he’s not an inch above Green. He’s afraid of me.
I want to ask him where the Hasidim are. “What’s it called?” I say.
He walks around the big glass desk in the center of the room and pushes a three-ringed binder across it. Then he sits down in his big ergonomic throne. In the binder, one laminated page is dedicated to each of the six paintings in the room, all by different artists, with little blurbs and photos of the painters next to thumbnails of their work.
Nicolette’s is aptly called The Suicide of _____. But there’s no photograph of her, no artist name. The blurb says the painting was donated anonymously, and that mystery shrouds the painter. It says the work had been wrongly attribute
d to a contemporary artist, but it has since been dated to the late fifties or early sixties.
“But Nicolette Bernhardt wasn’t born then,” I say.
The man raises his eyebrows, shrugs. “She came in herself and made a big event of denying it was hers. It’s an impressive work with or without her name attached.” And he nods like that’s the end of the discussion.
Truth encroaches like a shadow. What if I became the inverse of myself? What would I look like? What would become of Chinatown or the Bronx? Or my sister?
“There’s been a mistake.”
He grits his teeth. “Okay.”
It’s hers all right. Doesn’t matter what they say or what she said. She was always protective about what she put her name on. She’d say that her masterpieces weren’t hers all the time, that they were another Nicolette’s—the Nicolette she was six months or a year ago.
But this feels darker than that. Could she be in trouble? The painting is a link to her, and disavowing it severs that link. It is hers. I can tell by the way it looks at me. And speaks to me with this controlling voice just like Nicolette’s. By the softness you could mistake for cruelty. Someone could be after her, and she’s gone into hiding.
But the 1950s. It’s not possible. Tapping my finger on the desk, I ask, “Who was the anonymous donor?”
He grins. “I have no idea. It was anonymous.”
He knows.
I want to talk about the wilderness. Negative space would turn solid. Solid would become open. I would walk through buildings but not on the street. I would sit inside a brick. My insides would float around me in orbit. My muscles on the outside of my skin and my brain the center pulling like the sun.
“Who’s the lady in the painting?” I ask.
“An invention of the artist, most likely.” So quick to answer. Almost rehearsed.
“You know, it’s called The Suicide, but it could easily be called The Murder. Who’s to say someone didn’t push her off the bridge?” But the gallery man is shrugging over his cell phone, a little sad at some call that never came, probably his girlfriend ditching him for someone more attuned to an artist’s intentions.
Nicolette never painted from her imagination, and she certainly never invented a subject. When she painted, she painted what was there but lost to obscurity. That’s what she always said. Everything is what it is, not what it symbolizes. There are no symbols. “No ideas but in things.” I am me, but I am also a thousand things behind me. The falling woman existed, exists. But is she alive or dead?
I tell none of this to the gallery-sitter, who sits on in his cushy office chair, looking at me askance. I don’t tell him that they’ll come to me someday to help write her biography. And I don’t tell him this painting is the only thing I don’t know about her.
I get out my camera phone and pretend he’s not the only one waiting for a call, and I take three photos of the painting, and then I leave the room. I don’t say goodbye because I promise myself, and the painting, that I’ll visit at least once a week like it’s a sick old woman.
The stairs are at the end of the hall, but the elevator opens just as I’m walking past, it knew I was coming. It’s a service-type elevator and I step inside beside a man, in his sixties maybe, with a funny moustache and thick gray hair, and the ground-floor button is already lit. The doors close. A black garbage bag leans against his shins, blending into his black pants. And he has on a janitor-type blue button-up open at the neck so some silver chest hair shows. The old elevator eases down from the ninth floor.
That’s easy enough information to break down. I know this man in a split second, have him figured out. Still, my deductive skills have been off. I have always been a skilled detective, but I can’t draw connections like I once could. Ever since I started the pills. I don’t want to see all connections because sometimes I make them up and can’t tell the difference, I have learned that. But I’m always missing something now. Zyprexa blindness.
The man’s graying moustache wraps around his mouth. He has a soft, chubby face. Maybe he was okay-looking once but it’s hard to say. The veins in his forehead come together just above the bridge of his nose in a V. It seems to me like he must always be frowning, that his mouth can’t do any other thing, until he smiles at me, big and joking, and then it seems like he can’t do any other thing but smile. He shows me his yellowing teeth. He must smoke a lot. Then his face is softer, melting as if in recognition. Does he know me?
The elevator halts with a jerk.
I’m not scared. Elevators get stuck every day, somewhere. I look at the man.
He starts jamming the heel of his palm into a lever beside the buttons. The V of veins deepens. “Don’t worry about it,” he says. “Happens all the time.”
I try to say, “I’m not worried,” but the words get stuck in my throat like phlegm and I can’t spit it out. I’m chewing on it. He bangs on the lever again and a bright shiny brick of gold falls out of his back pocket. But it’s not a brick of gold, it’s a National Geographic that’s been rolled and bent and loved. There’s a huge macro photograph of a bee on the cover.
“Bee,” I say and point. There was a sentence that went around that word in my head.
He bends down to pick it up, forgetting the lever. “They’re disappearing. Did you know that?” He shakes the magazine and I shake my head. “A friend got me interested. She keeps a hive in the city. Totally illegal. They’re just vanishing. Poof.” I shake my head again. He hits the magazine against his palm a couple times. “Here, take it.” He shoves it in my hand. “I’m finished with it.”
There’s a groaning noise, the elevator is talking and jerking and I let my mouth hang. But he just smiles wider and we start moving down, slow and smooth. It takes forever, actually. And when it seems we’re almost at the bottom, I say, “Hey, thanks.”
And the guy keeps smiling and says, “No problem.”
But we’re not down yet like I thought. I look at the doors. “So, is this your building?”
He looks at me like he’s never been asked that before and shrugs. “Something like that. Custodian.” I can’t help staring at his thick head of hair while he talks. It’s wavy and gray, short but not too short. Exactly the kind of gray I want to have. It seems to light up when I look at it and is so full I almost touch it. Then, as if he can read my thoughts, he runs his own hand through his hair. “Yeah. It’s all right. Just started a few weeks ago. I can get into any gallery. I can look at art in the middle of the night if I want.”
“Do you?”
“No.”
“I went to see The Suicide. The painting called The Suicide.”
He stares at me for a moment, nervous-looking, his face shining with sweat, giving off light like his hair. He takes a breath like someone trying to not get angry. Then he reaches out his hand. “My name’s Jill.”
I give him my hand but I can’t give him my name. Not until I know it’s safe.
“Yeah, yeah. My folks wanted a girl, I guess.” Jill laughs at that, then says, “I guess you like her art?”
“Yeah.” My best nonchalant voice, juggling the magazine in my hands. “Don’t you?”
Jill shakes his head. “Can’t say. Can’t say I do.”
“I know her,” I say. And then we hit bottom and I want to pull my ears out for telling him that. Jill doesn’t even respond. Actually, and this can’t be right, he looks ready to cry.
I mumble thanks and hurry out into the street and the stupid day without her painting.
In the hospital last year, my psychiatrist asked what words were the most hurtful. He called it a wellness strategy—to pick the words that I found the most harmful concerning my disease, and to take them out of my vocabulary. He was a young guy fresh out of med school and had the weekend shift. Bursting with unconventional ideas. They’d just switched my diagnosis from schizophreniform to schizophrenia. And I felt kind of at a loss. They could just take away or replace.
We settled on the two words. “Let’s rip the
m out of the dictionary,” he said excitedly, “to make it official.” He brought over a big old Webster’s, its hard cloth cover frayed at the corners. “It’s okay. I got it used.” Scissors weren’t allowed, but the pages were thin enough I could use my fingers (though there may have been some extra, inadvertent victim words). He sat back with his hands clasped behind his head and watched me flip first to the S’s, then to the C’s. I extracted those two normal-seeming words. The ones that had disappeared until Nicolette texted them the other day. The ones she shouldn’t have. All it took was a thumbnail.
The Chelsea lofts are gray clouds against a gray twilight sky. Far away, black birds drift like a man’s stubble. If only I had the painting under my arm.
The 1950s. How can it be hers? Had I not held her just a year ago? But it is her painting. It doesn’t matter if it was painted in 1952 or 26 B.C. It is possible. No one will believe me, not the gallery sitter or the Hasidic owners or her fans on her guerilla art website. But it is hers.
A bee buzzes near my ear and I flick the National Geographic to shoo it, but when I look around I don’t see anything.
I have a talent for memorizing the weather. I get real cold and can feel the sleet in my hair when I think about the day my mom forgot to pick me up after a chess tournament in Tacoma. Or I sweat when I remember Jules’s wedding day three summers ago in a synagogue without air conditioning. I memorize weather like I’m cramming for a test, but maybe more like recalling the taste of grapefruit when you haven’t had one in months, tongue puckering. As for today, I’ll never shake the humidity.
It’s not dark yet, but the sun is down. Dusk is the truest time. All that ambiguity freshly unmasked from the seeming certainty of daylight. The certainty the sun imposes on lines. At dusk, lines meld together, you can’t tell the beginnings or ends of things, buildings melt into streets melt into telephone poles melt into my body. And the reality of the physical world, the day, it says, So long, Chelsea town, so long.
The Suicide of Claire Bishop Page 8