by Wendy Lee
In the end, Naomi made the decision very easy for him. You leave me for that woman, she said, and my family will hire the best lawyer in town to make sure you don’t get a cent. Furthermore, your work will never be shown in New York City again.
Except at the Lowry Gallery, he wanted to point out, but one gallery wouldn’t be enough to sustain his career. Naomi was right. If he left her, doors would be closed and he’d end up like so many of his friends: unappreciated, uncompensated, and unremembered.
When he told Hazel his decision, something in her eyes shut down and shut him out forever. He didn’t ask her what she planned to do about the pregnancy, and forced himself not to think about it until one night at the dinner table Naomi casually informed him that her private investigator had spotted Hazel at a certain doctor’s office in New Jersey, a doctor known for performing illegal operations. That was almost enough to make him walk out on her, but he swallowed his anger along with his meal.
Later, he left the apartment and went around the corner to his studio, where he began to paint Elegy. The gray background reminiscent of the sky just before the rain started falling, back home in Iowa. The white blur in the center the sun shining through. On the back, in the bottom right hand corner, almost hidden where the canvas overlapped, he wrote a dedication: “For H.L.” By this time Hazel was refusing to talk to him, so he showed the dedication to a young female reporter from a downtown magazine called Artsbeat. Predictably, the reporter, who seemed more interested in his relationship with Hazel than the painting itself, gushed about the dedication in her article. He knew Hazel read everything that was written about him.
Of course, Hazel wasn’t the only person who knew about the dedication. Naomi found out, as well, and arranged for the sale of the painting. When she found out he had refused the offer, as if relenting, Hazel invited him to exhibit Elegy at her gallery. The night of the opening, no one could tell their relationship was over. Eventually, they stopped going around together, their names were no longer coupled in the tabloids, and after a few years no one in the art world or outside of it seemed to care. It didn’t help that he was unable to come up with any new work, and that the more desperate he was to produce something, the less able he was to paint. He felt cursed by Hazel, by Naomi, by every choice that had led him to this salt-stained place.
* * *
When he enters the barn that is his studio, Hazel is already there.
How did you get in? he demands. He usually keeps his studio locked, less out of fear that anything would get stolen, but that someone would be able to see he hasn’t produced a work of value since he’s been there. Even Naomi isn’t allowed to enter; she just places the tray with his lunch outside the door every day, and he waits until her footsteps fade away before opening the door.
Locked doors are easy to open if you know how, Hazel replies with a lazy smile that he’s never seen before. Indeed, he keeps a spare key underneath a loose flagstone by the studio’s front door, so she’s either been lucky at guessing the hiding place or she knows how to pick locks—he wouldn’t put the second past her.
What do you want? he asks, more curtly than he intends. What’s so important that you couldn’t tell me in the city but had to come way out here?
Where’s Naomi? She neatly sidesteps the question.
She’s at a charity dinner for the City Opera. She won’t be back home tonight.
Good. Hazel says it in a way that some would take as suggestive, but he knows better. He isn’t sure she’s thought that way about him in years. Ever since . . .
Maybe Naomi’s private investigator was wrong. Maybe it wasn’t Hazel who was spotted at the doctor’s office in New Jersey. Or Hazel went there, but she changed her mind. Their son would be five years old now (of course, he thought it was a boy). He almost expects her to be hiding the child somewhere in the studio, behind the blank canvases that she’s walking toward now.
An unaccustomed hope surges in him, only to subside when Hazel stops in front of Elegy, which he should have put in storage for safekeeping but instead keeps in his studio.
That was your last great work, she observes.
How do you know?
She gestures at the space around her, evidence of paintings he’s started and failed to finish, or failed to start at all.
You’re right, he admits, thinking to elicit a confession from her in return. I haven’t been able to work since we came out here.
Don’t expect me to feel sorry for you.
Hazel puts a hand out to Elegy, traces the surface of the painting as if she’s trying to remember the way something felt.
I want you to give me this painting. You dedicated it to me. I deserve it, after what you took from me, she says, and the last glimmer that there is still a child after all is extinguished.
Are you going to try to sell it? he asks. Do you need the money? Is the gallery in trouble? Because I can get you the money.
You mean, you can get it from Naomi, she sneers. It isn’t about the money. I just want what’s due me.
True, she was part of the inspiration for the painting, but he bristles at the idea that she has any ownership over it, as if it’s akin to ownership of him.
You can’t have it, he says. As you said yourself, this is my last great work. He tries to lighten his words, for his sake as well as her own. I can will it to you after my death, if that makes any difference.
She fixes him with an exasperated look. That’s the best you can do?
He figures he should do his old friend a favor. If you want to invest in something, invest in Mark Finnegan’s work. He’ll be worth something someday.
Hazel nods, in acceptance of his advice or his decision not to give her the painting, he doesn’t know. Just as she did when she visited him in his East Village studio nearly six years before, she doesn’t beg. But this time her tone has more rancor.
Keep it. You’ll need the money yourself when Naomi leaves you, after she realizes what a fraud you are. An artist who can’t paint anymore. That is, if you find someone who’ll buy it.
Hazel, he says gently. I think you should go now.
After she leaves, the sound of her car’s motor disappearing down the driveway, he tries to forget her final words to him. He wants to chalk them up to the bitterness of an aging woman who has lost so much in choosing to be with him—a husband, a child—but he knows that’s a cliché. Hazel is more complicated than that. And there is some truth to what she said. What good is an artist who lacks the ability to create something original? Hell, at this point he’d settle for creating a reproduction.
Maybe he should go back to the basics and copy one of the Old Masters, like Rembrandt, who painted by candlelight. He assembles the necessary materials, pours himself a strong drink, and extinguishes the overhead lamps. He looks at the blank canvas in front of him. The light from the single candle makes a perfect oblong in its center, flickering with possibilities. But it isn’t long before his head starts to droop from fatigue and alcohol, and he begins to dream.
In his dream, he’s meeting Hazel for the first time at her gallery. He’s walking up behind her, this vision in a white-and-gold dress. He can’t resist reaching out to touch the curve of her back, even with the knowledge that he’s only been married for a month, and that an affair might very well destroy him. Still he reaches out, and there’s a brief moment when she turns around, and he basks in the glow of her smile, before it bursts into flames.
Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank the following people:
Esi Sogah, Karen Auerbach, and the entire team at Kensington, for their hard work.
Deborah Schneider, for her support.
Kay Kim, Zoraya Nambi, and Harpreet Kaur Sandhu, for their friendship.
James Lee, Claire Lee, and Lydia Lee, for being part of my family.
Neil Gladstone, for making me laugh every day.
And Spencer Lee Gladstone, for making me a better person.
A READING GROUP GUIDE
> THE ART OF CONFIDENCE
Wendy Lee
ABOUT THIS GUIDE
The suggested questions are included to enhance your group’s reading of Wendy Lee’s The Art of Confidence.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. What are the reasons Liu decides to forge Elegy, even if he suspects he’s committing a crime? How has his life in America not turned out the way he expected it to be?
2. In what ways does Caroline take on aspects of her aunt Hazel’s life? What has been lacking in her own life that makes her want to emulate Hazel?
3. Why does Molly help her roommate, Kimi, in breaching school policy? How much is she responsible for Kimi’s actions?
4. How has Harold’s life been determined for him by his family upbringing and the culture in which he lives? Has he been able to make any decisions for himself?
5. Molly turns down a group art show because she doesn’t feel like she’s ready. Do you think she made the right decision? What would you have done in her place?
6. Why does Harold decide to keep the painting, even though he knows it’s a fake? What meaning does it have for him?
7. Do you find Caroline a sympathetic character? Do you feel she deserves to lose her aunt’s gallery, or for her forgery scheme to be exposed? Why or why not?
8. Why is Liu obsessed with painting a certain mountain from his memory? What does he learn about life from his wife’s fate?
9. Hazel asks Andrew to give her Elegy because she feels he owes it to her. Does a work of art ever belong in part to the person who inspired it? Or does it solely belong to the creator?
10. What and who determines the worth of art? Why do you think people are willing to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for one painting? If you could afford it, is there a painting you would be willing to pay millions of dollars for? Which one, and why?
Photo by Hillery Stone
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
WENDY LEE is the author of the novels Across a Green Ocean and Happy Family, which was named one of the top-ten debuts of 2008 by Booklist and received an honorable mention from the Association of Asian American Studies. A graduate of New York University’s Creative Writing Program, she has worked as a book editor, as well as an English teacher in China. She lives in Queens, New York.
ACROSS A GREEN OCEAN
Michael Tang and his sister, Emily, have both struggled to forge a sense of identity in their parents’ adopted homeland. Emily, an immigration lawyer in New York City, baffles their mother, Ling, by refusing to have children. At twenty-six, Michael is unable to commit to a relationship or a career—or come out to his family. And now their father, after a lifetime of sacrifice, has passed away.
When Michael finds a letter to his father from a long-ago friend, he impulsively travels to China in the hopes of learning more about a man he never really knew. In this rapidly modernizing country he begins to understand his father’s decisions, including one that reverberates into the present day. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, Ling and Emily question their own choices, trying to forge a path that bends toward new loves and fresh beginnings.
Wendy Lee’s powerfully honest novel captures the complexity of the immigrant experience, exploring one family’s hidden history, unspoken hurts, and search for a place to call home.