Orchid & the Wasp

by Caoilinn Hughes

  ‘For being so unprofessional and ungrateful?’ Sweat is beading on M’s bald head and his linen granddad shirt clings to his shoulders.

  ‘For Occupying Wall Street,’ Gael says, gazing at his thin lips inside his thick beard. The lips running through a list of things he’s not buying. It’s palpable now that something needs to happen in the room. She understands.

  ‘You make no sense,’ he says. Lowers his rutty forehead in a conditional truce. ‘Sixty seconds.’ He disappears in the direction of the bar. The whole room has to shift for him to get through, like a man swimming butterfly in a hot pool.

  Don’t you think she looks like Molly Crabapple? someone says in a group beside Gael, gawping unabashedly. No, the friend says. Gael searches for a painting to stare at so she can think. All she needs is a convincing opener. Something lofty, to live up to. She excuses her way towards the main back wall where six of the paintings hang in a row, distanced generously. As is the way of the paintings, her eye is drawn up to where a long metal pole spans the whole width of them like a huge curtain rod. They’re not hung from nails on the wall, but from the rod; from thick metal hangers that travel down the backs of the paintings, hovering an inch from the wall. Lit to cast stark shadows. If you touched them, they would swing. The set-up exaggerates their vicissitudes of fragility and brutalism.

  Five of the six paintings on this wall are the authentic ones. Four fakes are on the left wall, three on the right and one is hung traditionally on the other side of the moveable arch. But this wall is the gallery’s statement. The rest is decoration. Periphery. Maybe there is skill in their looking, after all, and M.F.N. were able to tell Guthrie’s hand from Xavier’s. Gael gets close to one. Squints through a patch of thinner paint for the etchings. For who loves whom.

  It makes her jump, the explosion of light and a black barrel pointing her way. She sniffs for smoke. F holds a vintage camera with a telephoto zoom lens and huge antenna flash – a remote clicker in her knotted hand. She lowers the lens so that the camera hangs from its strap and weighs her forwards like a pregnancy. Her hair, which is up, might well be wrapped around a femur like Wilma Flintstone, adding a foot to her height.

  ‘We usually do it by the window … but stay here. This is good.’

  The music has stopped and the chatter, quieted. M must have handed Gael the mic because she’s holding it. Are the spotlights, too, remote-controlled? A few gins haven’t been enough to calibrate her to this world from the paper-bagged-beer world of Zuccotti. With her back to the wall now, Gael is the point of convergence; not the paintings. The arch has been pivoted round so that Guthrie’s portrait is facing the crowd. Some look from Gael to the portrait to spot the resemblance. People on the stairwell are returning. She waits for them to settle, or so she makes it look. Crowds are not her thing. Small groups. One-on-one, best. She half expects heckling and imagines how casually Jarleth would shush it, commanding the room as his right. How he wouldn’t have to try. How Sive would command it more worthily, but with intention and exertion and effort. Not with words, either. She doesn’t make speeches. No, none of the women Gael knows presume to make speeches. And Guthrie?

  ‘When my brother was released from Our Lady’s Hospital for Sick Children in Dublin after his first fit … we went to the National Museum. It was Mum’s idea. A way to focus the mind outward and not in, she said. The mind was – I came to learn – an unsafe place for my brother. He was eight. He fractured his wrist when he collapsed, so he wore a cast. I begged him to let me write on it. He said he liked it plain. But if I really really wanted to, I could draw something. A panda, he suggested. Or a walrus. When go you back to school on Monday, I said, everyone will write on it whether you let them or not. So we settled on X’s and O’s. He was calmer than I’d ever seen him. It was because of the cast. It made sense of the doctor’s arrival at school, and how he hadn’t come back from the boys’ room, and how he’d been surrounded by a pack of spooked adults. He drew smiley faces. Despite what the CT scans said, he had something obviously broken.’

  People are leaning on one another, listening. They are all still. The gallery has a no-mobile-phones policy, which brings a certain nervous hunger to be in the moment, not normally fed.

  ‘In the museum, our father scolded my brother for resting his forehead against the glass. He was looking at Japanese ceramics. He did as he was told and came away from the glass, but not from the objects. He stood on his tiptoes to see the bowls and jugs spliced through with gold. I stood beside him and read aloud what it said on the panel. Kintsugi celebrates an object’s history and damage as part of its beauty. So they were broken? he asked me. And they didn’t get thrown out? They got glued back together with gold? Even at eight, he wasn’t just drawn to the aesthetic. The thought was equally beautiful. An idea like that could sustain him for weeks. Every day would relate in some way to the idea. Each and every bad experience.

  ‘Waste of gold, our father said, when he saw what we were admiring. It was time to go. He said. He spent most of his career as an investment wanker. Sorry, banker. No, wait, yeah, right the first time.’

  People laugh and now they are beginning to nod. She describes Guthrie’s condition and the auras, without using his first name. The paintings are signed G. Foess and Gael had made M.F.N. add a clause to the contract preventing the use of his first name. Gael had been the one to sign the new paintings, so they aren’t really forgeries, per se. And Guthrie will be protected from any media. The idea of him stumbling on a review describing some dozen paintings and his delusional disorder has been enough to keep Gael from entering REM now for weeks. But the rewards of pulling this off would provide enough gold to fill a very large crack in the breastbone.

  ‘I think our father had read the panel in the museum that day that said when Kintsugi first started, collectors would smash valuable pottery deliberately, so it could be repaired with gold seams. Everything our father heard from doctors said that his son’s damage had no cause other than a form of psychosis. There was no epilepsy. There was no danger around flashing lights or crowded environments; no reason not to get a driver’s licence, a degree; no reason to drop himself off the mantelpiece. Our father just Did Not Get how a person could hinder himself needlessly. Was it a kind of damage fetish?’ Gael accuses the audience with this question. Pauses. ‘That was how he thought. Drugs wouldn’t repair his son. Money wouldn’t repair him. None of the things my father was willing to provide would repair him. Over the years, out of some rage, our father persecuted him in a thousand ways until he seemed to decide that this ongoing self-harm had rendered my brother useless. The jug had been compromised. Why pour wine into it?’ She waits for the crack of silence. ‘My brother lacked any kind of function our father could understand. Except one. His function as a Christian.’ Gael pauses again, measures the confession. ‘So that’s how their relationship developed. Desperate for a comforting father amid all the bullying and trauma and physical pain of his disorder, my brother became the best Christian in the village.’ Gael smiles. There might have been laughter, but for the gleam in her eyes. She swallows so it sounds in the microphone. The patrons in view hold a tension in their mouths that’s not wine swilling.

  ‘What I could never come to terms with … The enlightenment he’d had as a child always seemed miraculous to me. I didn’t have it. I envied it. The true, rapt, awesome admiration of beauty. Not for anything’s sake. Not for a cause. Not to do anything with it. Just to observe it. Contemplate it. Believe it. After, to produce his own, borne of necessity.’ Gael can feel them observing her now, closer and closer, spiralling in on the luminous celestial body. ‘He’s never exhibited anything like this collection. He’s never painted anything like it. As many shows as he’s had for such a young artist, this is the first exposure. When I found the auras stashed in his attic, I saw the almost unbearable harm … and its illumination. … I’m grateful to M.F.N. … I’m honoured to bring this experience to you on my brother’s behalf … and I hope you’ll press your
foreheads against the glass.’

  An ecstatic cheer erupts and people clap their thighs one-handed, pressing their wineglasses to their foreheads with the other. Gael responds to this gesture with a wide smile and wet-eyed laughter and looks over the tops of their heads at the lights smouldering in the city beyond, like the just-missed fireworks of the New Year, after the kiss. Then a pair of hands shoots up on the right side of the room, near the portrait, and the fingers wiggle: Occupy’s hand signal for fervent support of a proposition. The hand signal that had been given just this morning in an equally ecstatic manner. Just before the hands duck out of sight, Gael catches a flash of turquoise and yellow on the wrist. Seconds later, a popping sound announces champagne and Enn, at the decks, has by some means found even weirder music to give volume to – an industrial genre called Japanoise, she’s told. Staying and somehow dancing to the nervy, stray drumbeat is an ultimatum tendered to the horde: We’ve done Truth; now Dare. M is moving through them, pouring champagne from bottles in each hand and F’s camera has been given to one of the caterers to do with what he can. When he asks her to stand there and turn this way, Gael warns him that any photograph with the paintings in frame counts as a reproduction, not publishable anywhere without her consent. People are trying to pull her away to talk to her; to have her talk to them, but she brushes them off. Unlikely buyers. ‘If you shoot any of the paintings, make it these five.’ She points. ‘But I still have to approve their publication. So go through the camera and delete any paintings that aren’t those five.’ The guy is a little shocked, given the jubilant mood, and how is this not a success? He says it’s not his camera and he can’t delete stuff anyway – it’s not digital. Gael extracts two bills from her purse and says she’ll take the blame if F notices the missing film. ‘Here.’ She rubs her hands all over the camera and pushes the notes up the guy’s sleeve. ‘My fingerprints.’

  ‘Jeez, Irish. Can’t you keep it in your pants for one second?’

  Gael turns. Still kitted out in triple denim, Harper is smiling particularly beautifully. Her eyes are heavy sponges. The bruise is caked in concealer. Gael frowns at her. ‘Did you put a GPS device in me or something? Back in London?’

  ‘Ha! I shoulda.’

  ‘Really, though. Harper.’ Gael’s holding Harper’s wrist now. The stomach trapezists are in full swing. ‘How are you here?’

  ‘Just cuz I’m a lit major doesn’t mean I can’t add two and two. I Googled Foess plus Manhattan. And you’re welcome that I got you outta prison.’

  ‘What?’ Gael leans in, but it’s too loud and headachy and they have to shout to be heard. Gael leads Harper by the hand out to the corridor. On the way, she catches someone taking out her phone and detours towards her to deliver a warning.

  ‘I said you’re welcome that I got you outta prison!’ Harper says, when they’ve found a spot by the lift. With one hand, she’d swooped two glasses of bubbles from the table as they passed and holds one out to Gael.

  ‘A lawyer got me out of prison,’ Gael says, taking the glass. ‘But if you want thanks, thank you for getting me arrested. Nice life experience.’ She takes a drink.

  ‘Just another box I ticked for you,’ Harper says. ‘You turned me into Pavlov’s bitch.’

  Gael squints. ‘What?’

  Harper sighs and gives her a defeated look.

  ‘Forgodssake don’t sigh at me,’ Gael says, then finds that her hand twitches by her side, wanting to trace Harper’s curves. Wanting to covet her features. Her frank ways. The odd, unrivalled combination of her. Her person as much as the dark finger of cleavage the dungarees force high between the lapels of her shirt. How unstudied she is. How studyable.

  ‘Your story was beautiful,’ Harper says. ‘The paintings are beautiful. Your family’s beautiful … You’re …’ She brushes her thumb across the part of Gael’s forehead with the bump. Lifts onto her tiptoes to do so. Lowers. ‘It’s not just cuz you’re so smokin hot … Well, it might be partly mostly to do with the hotness, I’m paying good money to figure that out, but I swear–’

  Back pressed against the lift doors, Gael draws Harper’s whole body against her and kisses her so deeply she can feel the slip of her mind within her like car tyres on black ice, suddenly tractionless. Lightheaded, as though she’s spilling blood for every second of it as if gravity is stronger on this section of the globe or at least this part of the room as if something is really badly wrong or just tipping over and it had been just to stop her talking, hadn’t it? To stop her saying I love you but now it’s not that; now it’s not even appetite; it’s as if she’s never kissed anyone and meant it. At the risk of sinking to the floor, Gael reaches a hand in the direction of the lift call button, but Harper pulls back. Says, ‘Wait.’

  It’s absurd, where they are, when she opens her eyes. ‘For what?’

  ‘Wait,’ Harper says. Her eyes are downcast and welling. ‘Gael, I love you, and I don’t wanna hate you. And I feel like if we’re together you’re gonna hurt me and I’ll hate you. My head will basically break.’ The line of her cleavage strengthens with her speech, like the volume line of an audio dialogue. ‘But if we stay just friends then I get to be your friend and that … for some stupid stupid reason … is way more appealing to me than being your … nothing. Because it feels like right now is the moment where we’re running full tilt at a cliff hand-in-hand – like a romantic frolicking suicide pact – and I’m laughing but you’re just smiling and I totally jump off thinking you’re with me, but I see halfway down that I’m holding the stump of a hand cut off at the wrist because you had an axe all along and how I didn’t pick up on it I don’t even know, but you decided that that was the amount you could lose to me so you wouldn’t fall with me but so that you wouldn’t ruin my fall completely, but it definitely would ruin my fall, Gael, seeing as I’m holding a dismembered hand. And I had that dream a few times and my shrink agrees that friendship might be possible without the cutting.’

  When Harper lifts her gaze from Gael’s shoulder, Gael turns her face to the room and sees how many people have just stopped watching. The back of her head and her shoulders rest against the lift. Harper’s hand is on Gael’s hip now, feeling for the twisting helix of her.

  ‘I don’t need a friend,’ Gael says, staring at the room.

  ‘That’s beyond stupid.’

  Energy depleted, Gael says, ‘I’ve got this far.’

  ‘Everyone needs a friend, Gael. Don’t be a doofus.’ Harper pauses, takes back her hand, seeing this logic won’t work. Seeing how much farther away Gael is from her than she’d thought. ‘Where would your brother be without you? Huh?’

  ‘Guthrie?’

  ‘Doing all this for him?’

  ‘I get something out of it,’ Gael says, without modulation.

  ‘Right. That’s normal. So you earned a commission.’

  ‘No,’ Gael says. ‘Not money.’ Her eyes go out of focus and in, as if someone is toying with her settings. ‘It’s something else.’

  ‘Even in the story you told, you were his friend. Reading out the info about the Japanese pots cuz he wasn’t tall enough? How adorable is that?’

  ‘I made it all up,’ Gael says.

  ‘About the pots?’

  ‘All of it.’

  ‘Bull. Shit.’

  Gael doesn’t say anything for a while, then, ‘Exactly.’ Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Harper shaking her head. The catering staff are beginning to put glasses away into an empty crate. Short party.

  ‘Vegas has a lotta bad acting,’ Harper says. ‘My parents once took me to The Adventures of Pinocchio, the musical. Worst day of my life.’

  Gael hiccups a single laugh.

  Harper says, ‘And, whatever you get out of it, whatever Guthrie gets, the patrons get more. Trust me.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ Gael looks for M. She wonders if she’ll fly home soon, or if she’ll make something happen that will decide things. If she can be cocky enough to make it work out.

  ‘I
bought one for Mom.’

  Gael snaps out of it to turn to Harper, who is very much in focus. ‘Bought what?’

  ‘Whattayathink, a boob job? A painting, Gael. We’re at a gallery.’

  Gael closes her eyes and fills her lungs such that the lace on her top stretches to capacity. She squeezes the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger.

  ‘What about it?’ Harper asks. ‘Are you thrilled or what?’

  When she opens her eyes again, Gael tips her own glass for dregs, then takes Harper’s glass and drains it too. ‘Which one did you buy?’

  ‘Uh …’ Harper puts her hand to the side of her mouth to shield what she’s saying from the public. ‘They’re all kinda spit and image, right?’

  ‘Was it on the main wall?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Was it the one on the far right?’

  ‘No. I dunno. They’re all goddamn beautiful. What’s wrong with you?’

  ‘This is why I can’t have friends,’ Gael says.

  ‘Because … ?’ Harper waits for a response, in a frozen show-me-your-cards gesture.

  Gael sees M settling up with the catering staff. Some people are getting their coats.

  ‘You’ve got a one-in-three shot at a Guthrie Foess original,’ Gael says. ‘There were only five and it wasn’t enough for a show. Guthrie wouldn’t do more because he stopped having fits and stopped having sense. Or started. I’m not sure. I hired a guy to make the others.’

  Harper’s blinking at a weirdly rhythmic frequency, like the blinking of a digital watch. She’s speechless.

  Gael looks at her. Says, ‘But they’re all goddamn beautiful, no?’

  Harper’s gaze floats rightward, to where M is now standing. Gael’s heart hurtles.

  ‘Since you were arrested today,’ M says, landing his hand on her lower back, ‘I guess you’re good without a helmet? I’ll go slow.’ He’s wearing a leather jacket and holds a set of keys to his motorbike. ‘She coming with?’ he asks Gael, who hasn’t stopped looking at Harper.