Claire stared her into silence. Samantha stood with the rag and bandage, waiting. The stupid woman. “Can’t you see it’s me?” Claire said desperately.
“What do you mean?” Samantha’s eyes moved up and down the painting. “No. Stand next to it.” Claire obeyed, rising and walking slowly from the couch, but both women knew it was unnecessary. Samantha’s lips parted, moving her gaze from Claire to the painting and back again. “It is you. Where has the corner gone?”
Claire moved to the window. She stared out at the seagulls, now at eye level, still dancing, or mating, or fighting. “It’s mine,” she whispered to the window, the seagulls. Seagulls, ocean-tugged. And the ocean was calling her, too. She thought, for just a moment, that one bird paused to look in her direction, an acknowledgment.
Below. Claire looked below to see that the world was still throbbing. It hadn’t stopped at her departure. Like the sea, she’d drown in it if she let it in. She barely knew. She barely knew anything about the sea, as she barely knew anything about what she’d been protesting. She felt faint, uncertain how she’d gotten here. The marchers on the street flooding the pavement and rising high, the sweaty glass playing tricks on her eyes, the strata of shadows. All the people fighting. Fighting with police in riot gear who had appeared on the sidewalks. From here they were like rows of toy soldiers aligned by a boy’s small hand. Fighting for room to walk. Fighting with the day, the cold sun. All these people fighting. All these people dreamed at night.
She turned back to Samantha and said, “It’s mine.”
Samantha tensed. She made herself tall and spoke slowly. “Freddie must have paid good money.”
Claire peered at Samantha as if for the first time that day. She was stunning with her bouffant hairdo and Grace Kelly pout. Brilliant, too, though she rarely let that on. No wonder she had everything. And she never seemed afraid of losing it all, though the possibility perhaps had never crossed her mind. Claire hated her for that.
She smiled sweetly at her ex-sister-in-law. Nothing Claire could do would truly hurt Samantha, so she didn’t feel bad saying, “You’ve filled out since I last saw you, dear.”
Samantha smiled back. “Only where it counts.”
Claire made for the painting, two long strides. She ripped it down.
But she failed. It hardly budged, trapped in by nails. It hung crooked and heavy.
Samantha was still speaking. About laws and theft and morality. Unclear, like she or Claire were underwater.
Claire took the canvas on either side with both hands, lifting it calmly now, releasing it from the wall. The pain in her leg was gone. The painting was heavier than she remembered.
“You can’t do that. You can’t just take a painting from someone’s wall. It’s stealing. A thief. You’re a thief,” Samantha said, as if pleased with the conclusion she’d reached. But she didn’t move to stop the thief. Still standing in her place in the middle of the room, her hands full of bandages.
“But it’s mine.” Claire walked the painting to the couch and grabbed her bags. She headed for the door. In a way, the interaction was all very civil.
“I’ll call the police,” Samantha said behind her. “I will.”
Claire didn’t respond, she was outside the door, down the first flight of stairs. The radiator whistled a catcall. The clatter of her thin-soled shoes. Her Macy’s bag and purse cut off the circulation at her elbow and thumped against her hip. Holding the painting in front of her with both sore hands, like a wall always in close proximity.
Samantha was above her, leaning over the railing. “You’re mad, you know that?”
Claire broke out into the street, barely noting the doorman, a blur in a cap. The chanting hit her; it seemed violent now that she was no longer a part of it. But it was a gift to not hear her own thoughts. She walked south in the small space between the buildings and the backs of policemen, the canvas nearly scraping their backs, but none turned her way.
Nicolette would be proud of Claire for taking what was hers. For taking what she wanted. Perhaps the artist was here, somewhere in the protest. What if Claire ran into her? Carrying the painting like this? The thought of it made her tired. Over six years now since she’d seen Nicolette, and still Claire thought of her from time to time, thought of looking for her.
Left onto Seventieth. Ungainly with the painting, stumbling over nothing down the street, she almost fell in front of a group of schoolchildren. They stared at her and sniggered, she must look drunk to them. She tripped off the curb, not looking where she was going. She could die this instant. She could get run over by a taxi.
The fact of her body became an afterthought. If she was forced to think about it, she might forget how to walk. Old shoes, green like moss. When you cannot feel your own feet on the ground. And you feel you’ve dropped something, but know for certain you had nothing to drop.
Down Madison, mirrors and shop windows clicking by. She was walking alongside her reflection. Do not look at yourself or you will disappear. Each storefront marked a passing moment, as if the day’s clock were a straight line, slipping through another minute and another. Time passing as slow or as fast as she walked down the block.
Claire froze. To her right, a shop with display cases of blown-glass clowns and dolphins and children with balloons. Then she saw what had caught her attention: a woman was staring at her from inside the shop. Darting eyes that found and pinned her. She registered nothing but those eyes. Still familiar, still knowable after all these years. Nicolette.
A man nearly ran into Claire from behind, his briefcase scraping her buttocks then knocking the corner of the painting. She wasn’t feeling quite herself. Claire snapped her head south and walked briskly, the frame jolting against her shins. The man was tall and she followed him down the block as fast as she could. It couldn’t have been the painter. Though Claire had heard Nicolette had been involved with the Freedom Riders. Claire tried to reconstruct the face around those eyes. The woman she’d seen was older, who might have been Nicolette if Nicolette had aged twice as fast as she should. Who might be Nicolette in the future. Those lips, those perfect imperfections.
The man turned right on Sixty-Seventh, so Claire turned right as well. She was almost back at the protest on Fifth Avenue. And then the man was gone. She lost the man and her stomach sank. You lose a stranger on the street and you feel your heart break. On the corner, a group of young men were yelling at the cops, and a moment later they were gone, shoved in the back of a police van. There, the street, just two footfalls from her. There was the van, she could throw herself under it.
“Excuse me, miss.”
Claire stopped and turned to the officer who had pulled up beside her, lifting himself sluggishly from the police car.
“Where’d you get that there, miss?”
She nodded. He walked up to her, took the painting from her hands like she was a child or a mad woman, and leaned it against the dirty passenger door of the car. Claire stared down at the back of the frame. She did not feel any sense of surprise. What should she feel?
He was looking at her. “That artwork belongs to someone else, doesn’t it, miss?”
He turned her around, clipped the handcuffs on her loosely. The cold metal on her wrists was heavier than she’d expected. The swipe of his fingers, skin on skin. Her red, beaten palms. An old woman stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and stared.
A flash of wings. Birds going insane in the gutter. What was down there? So strong they rattled the metal grate. The sound of birds fighting, the sound of someone getting arrested. Replace eyeglasses, buy a present for Mary. The times you stare and think of birds. It’s all the time. It’s happening now. Again she heard the man yelling, Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas. Nearer now. She was not unstrung. She was not mad. It’s only the circumstance of the city smothering what’s important and there are too many people making too much noise and you can’t even hear the list of errands in your head replace the glasses or the list doesn’t make sense. She h
ad taken what was rightfully hers.
He opened the back door and lowered her in. She watched him through the spotted window as he set the painting in the front seat, treating it with more respect than her. The painting faced the road; it could see what was coming. He walked around and got in beside it.
The first time she’d heard her own voice in so long:
“Aren’t you going to read me my rights?”
2.
“No room in the precinct. Going to the Tombs.”
Claire didn’t know if he was talking to her or his radio. She hadn’t a clue where that was, the Tombs, and she was afraid to ask. Her tomb? They were driving now through Chinatown.
“We’re putting men in the women’s cell,” the cop said, catching her eye in the rearview mirror. “You might like that.” But his smirk disappeared and he said, “They’re not too scary. You’ll be safe.”
It was her own painting, that’s what she’d tell them. Why shouldn’t she have taken it back? All she would have to say is that it belonged to her, it was simply a misunderstanding.
Central Booking, stuffy and hot. She kept her eyes on her painting dangling from the cop’s hand. He didn’t even look at it. And if he did, he wouldn’t see its beauty.
They asked if she had any drugs on her and seemed not to believe her when she said no. They spread her bags and their contents across a desk. Her painting was being taken somewhere.
“What are you going to do with it?” Claire tried to sweeten her voice, but it came out shrill and childish.
“We’re calling Inspector Picasso,” the cop said. “He’s on it, don’t worry.”
She was taken down a cement hall and three flights of stairs. A frightening version of her basement and storage unit. An officer was walking behind, one hand on her shoulder, another on her back. She couldn’t see the face of the man who touched her, but she could feel the heat of his hand through her blouse. They’d taken her coat. She hoped it was draped over her canvas.
“Please. What about my painting?” she asked again.
“Ma’am. He’s lost his beret, he’ll be here soon.” On her back, she felt his hand shiver as he laughed at his own joke.
In the cell, gym mats were scattered on the floor, covered in half-eaten sandwiches. She saw the sandwiches before she saw the faces. Nine other people. But she didn’t register much more than a number, her mind jittery, bouncing to the next thing before landing completely on the first. There was an old pair of pants in the corner. Beside them, liquid that might have been urine or juice. The overwhelming smell of bleach made everything indistinguishable. There was one bed with a metal frame and a blue-and-white-striped mattress not an inch thicker than the gym mats.
A bench ran along the three walls. Claire sat down immediately, but the bench was so skinny she barely fit. She had to sit very straight, hands folded in her lap, legs closed, a well-to-do lady in a jail cell. She touched her scraped leg, her ripped stockings.
The nine faces hardly glanced at her. There was a pale, skeletal woman, wearing surprisingly few clothes for winter, sitting cross-legged on a mat, staring at her hands like something was wrong with them. A young boy rested his head on a girl’s lap. The boy was white and his girlfriend was black. This would have surprised Claire, and she would have hidden that surprise, had it been any other day. The boy’s eyes bulged and he melted as she stroked his hair. There was a love between them, neither over sixteen years old. A middle-aged woman cried softly in the corner. An old man, Russian maybe, slept on the bench. And four young men—three white and one black, all with dirty, disappointed faces—conversed quietly in the center of the cell. One had a broken nose, dried blood caked to the lower half of his face.
Claire desperately wanted to be invisible. If she didn’t hear them or see them, perhaps they wouldn’t see her. She breathed shallow through her mouth to block the stench. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw something scurry past, but when she looked, there was nothing. Her arms itched, and she imagined spiders and rats under the bench and in the walls. She felt she was going mad, and for a moment—oh she was so tired—for a moment she thought that was why she’d been locked away.
A sign on the wall read, water available upon request. Below that, another: sanitary napkins available upon request. Claire went to the bars and reached her arm through. She couldn’t be sure how long she stood there like that, waiting to be noticed. Her arm began to ache. The light was constant, the cruel desperation of ceaselessly buzzing fluorescent tubes.
Her favorite role that Avery had given her was for one of his silent films. She was a scantily clad bar wench who’d lost her lover in an unnamed war and who grieved by bombing City Hall. She ended up in jail, fell in love with another woman who had also lost everything to war, and together they broke free into a night without consequences.
This cell was not made of cardboard.
An officer finally approached.
“The sign said to ask for water,” she said.
“No cups,” he said, about to walk away. She pouted her lips, and could tell her lipstick had worn off long ago. After studying her face a moment, he said, “I’ll see what I can do.”
The officer never returned with water. When another guard walked by she reached out again and said, “I didn’t get to make a phone call.”
He laughed. She didn’t know what he found funny. “Sure, you can have a phone call. If you ask nice.”
“I can be nice,” she said. “But where’s the fun in that?”
He grinned then coughed to hide it. He called down the hall to someone. They yelled back and he said, “You’ll have to wait, sweetheart.”
When it was her turn, the same man—or was it the first?—unlocked the cell and she slid out, but it didn’t feel like she was out. Her cellmates stared after her.
“The rich lady wants to make a phone call,” the officer said to another.
Was it the Macy’s bag that had given them the impression she was wealthy? She didn’t bother correcting them. She dialed Mary’s number. The phone rang with an accusatory tone. It rang and rang. Where was Mary when she needed her? If only she could call Tomasz. It was entirely his fault this had happened. He hadn’t destroyed the painting. He had lied to her. She would call him and tell him he had to clean up his mess with his stupid, dirty rag.
“Hello?” Mary said.
Claire was silent in the warmth of her friend’s sudden voice. Then she hung up. She couldn’t explain it all to Mary now, not like this.
“Husband not home, huh?” said one of the officers, softer than before.
“No,” she said. “No one’s home.” She asked for a glass of water and they let her use her hands at a sink. She splashed her face and stared at her fun-house reflection in the chipped stainless-steel mirror.
Back in the cell. The fluorescent light that never ceased. The payphone ringing. She sat on the bench and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, three more people had been put in the cell and had found a place on the floor or the bench. The one who had been crying earlier was missing. She’d been crying but never made a sound. How much time had passed?
She watched the old man on the floor, sleeping with his head tilted back on the bench, his chin in the air. She tried to breathe steadily like he was, matching his chest’s rise and fall. But he stirred as if he felt her gaze and met her eyes. “I was only drinking a beer on the street,” he said.
Claire said, “You should hold it in a paper bag.”
Two of the boys shuffled oddly in the middle of the room. Were they dancing? No one could possibly dance in here. And then one boy was on the shoulders of the other, stretching his arms above his head, holding a cigarette to the light fixture, trying to catch a spark.
“Unscrew the covering,” Claire offered.
“We know, lady,” said the boy on the bottom. He was older than the others and had been talking excitedly earlier, the other boys listening intently. Claire looked away. Why she was concerning herself with these people
, she didn’t know.
The smaller one on top said to her, still straining up, “They took our lighters.”
The plastic covering fell to the ground. Someone yelled, “Watch out,” after it had already smashed into several large pieces.
Of course it wouldn’t light, they were only killing time. The boy on the ground lowered the other down safely.
Then he looked at Claire, a little sheepishly, and walked over to where she sat. A cigarette was trapped in his mouth, sticking to his dry lips as he talked. “Police did that to him,” he said, pointing to the boy with the bloody nose. Claire nodded and tried to look sympathetic. “Sorry for being testy. I need a drag and a cheeseburger.” He handed the cigarette to Claire, who wished he hadn’t mentioned a cheeseburger. “You gotta pretend,” he said.
Claire took it and smiled. “Thank you,” she said, but she didn’t bring it to her mouth.
In the center of the room, the other boys were growing excited and their voices carried.
“I heard fifty thousand,” the bloody one said.
“No way. A hundred thousand. It’s possible.”
“The radio said seven,” said the third.
“They’re liars.”
“They get the numbers wrong on purpose. And we can’t do anything about it.”
“Fucking yuppies is what they are.”
From beside Claire, the older boy flicked another cigarette at them. “Hey, watch your mouth.” He turned back to Claire. “Were you there? At the protest?”
“Yes,” she said.
He nodded solemnly, studying the bars. “That’s good. That’s very good.”
His eyes were tired and absent, two-dimensional like cigarette burns. She liked that he assumed she’d been thrown in here with the other protesters, something wild. He seemed to be their leader, confident but not arrogant, in his early or mid-twenties. His hair was shaggy and unwashed, and he wore a plaid shirt with a frayed collar and wide-legged slacks. Not a hippie, or a beatnik, nor upright. Claire liked that he didn’t appear to belong to any group. Obviously, he hadn’t had a mother picking out his clothes for some time. Even in here he smelled nice.
The Suicide of Claire Bishop Page 10