The Curiosities

by Susan Gloss

  “Would you like something to drink?” Nell asked. “There should be coffee and tea in the cupboards, and a six-pack in the fridge. Well, a four-pack now.” She held up her own bottle and nodded toward Paige’s.

  “A beer sounds great,” Odin said.

  Nell moved to get up, but he stopped her. “I can get it.” He walked over to the built-in refrigerator, took out a bottle, and examined the label. “Pale ale,” he said. “This is a treat. Up where I’m from, it’s nothing but PBR on tap.”

  Nell smiled. “My husband’s a bit of a beer nerd. I brought these from his stash.”

  Odin grabbed a bottle opener that was lying on the counter. He popped the cap from the bottle and said, “Well, cheers to your husband, then. Tell him I said thanks.”

  Annie patted the stool next to her. “Tell us what you’re working on.”

  “Do you want the truth or do you want to know what I should be working on?” he asked, glancing at Nell.

  Nell held up her hands. “Pretend I’m not here. You’ve already been accepted, so it’s not like I’m going to send you home.”

  Odin exhaled. “Back in Minneapolis, I’d been doing a lot of small-scale metal sculpture. You know, stuff that fit in the gallery and people could take home easily in the back of their Subarus.”

  “So you’re a practical sort.” Annie gave him a little push with the tips of her fingers. “That’s no fun.”

  “Well, that’s what I was doing. In the last few months, I’ve been working out of a barn, and every sculpture I start seems to wind up much larger than I intended.” What Odin didn’t mention was that he hadn’t actually finished any of the pieces he’d started, or even come close.

  Paige looked up now, for the first time since her initial, abbreviated greeting. “Maybe your work is like a goldfish,” she said. “It grows as big as its surroundings will allow.”

  Odin laughed and said, “Maybe.”

  He knew, though, that it hadn’t just been a lack of studio space that had kept his work small in scale when he lived in the city. Sloane, too, had advised him to stick to “more manageable” pieces.

  “Save the big stuff for when you get commissioned to do a sculpture to stand in a park or outside a fifty-story office building,” she’d said. “For the gallery, we want stuff people can buy on impulse and take away the same day. We want people to fall in love, swipe their credit cards, and take the artwork home without a second thought. Anything that requires setting up a delivery, borrowing a friend’s van, that sort of thing . . . there’s too much planning that goes into it. Too many opportunities for second-guessing. Art is impulse based. It’s about feelings. Joy, passion, awe. We have to capitalize on that.”

  Now Nell spoke up. “Well, it looks like Betsy, who owned this place, wasn’t afraid to buy large pieces of artwork. I’m sure you saw the sculpture garden when you drove in.”

  Odin nodded. “It was the first thing I noticed, besides how big the house is.”

  “It is big,” Nell said. “But none of the rooms are barn-sized, I’m afraid. So I hope you won’t be too constrained. There’s a pretty large boathouse down by the shore that you could probably use if you really need a bigger space. But it’s not heated and pretty run-down. I’m not sure it would be much of a step up from your barn.”

  “I was actually thinking the garage looked pretty nice,” Odin said.

  “Sure.” Nell laughed.

  “What’s so funny?” he asked.

  “It’s just that we’ve got this whole house to work with and, so far, you guys all seem to want to spread out as far from each other as possible, using the least-finished spaces. We’ve got Annie working out of the basement, Paige up in the third-floor cupola, and now you’ll be out in the garage . . .”

  Paige looked up from her phone, which she’d been typing on throughout the conversation. “I always work alone,” she said.

  “Oh, I’m not saying you have to work together,” Nell said. “There are other ways you can collaborate. Betsy, the benefactor, envisioned the artists doing a joint show at least once during each residency. Maybe as you all get to know one another, you’ll be able to see some common themes in your work that we could highlight.”

  Paige looked doubtful. She turned her attention back to the screen.

  “I haven’t done a joint show in a long time,” Annie said. “I’m not sure my work will be compatible with what everyone else is doing.”

  Odin glanced at Nell, to see how she was taking the other artists’ comments. He thought they were being kind of a pain in the ass, and he raised an eyebrow to show it.

  Nell gave a good-natured shrug. “Well, it’s a long way off, however we decide to do it. Just something to keep in mind,” she said. “But there is one requirement I wanted to mention right away. There aren’t many rules around here, but one thing Betsy wrote in her trust was that she wanted the Colony to have a standing communal dinner on the calendar. I was wondering if Sunday nights are a good night for everyone?”

  “Every Sunday?” Paige asked, not looking thrilled about the idea.

  “I was thinking once a month, maybe,” Nell said.

  “Works for me,” Odin said.

  Nell looked at Annie, who gave a quick nod.

  “Do you need us to, like, cook?” Paige asked.

  “I’ll take care of the food,” Nell said. “I don’t want to take you guys away from your work.”

  Odin realized that between the drive and the conversation in the kitchen, he’d been sitting for hours. He finished his beer, then excused himself to take a closer look at the sculpture garden he’d seen when he pulled in. Outside in the clear night air, it felt good to stretch his legs.

  Among the pieces in the garden were a pair of stone figures, a metal sculpture of a flame, and a six-foot-tall rooster made from recycled parts of machinery and musical instruments. Odin bent down to read the plaques at the bottom of each sculpture, squinting in the moonlight to read the names of the artists. He wondered, by reflex, if Sloane had ever heard of any of them. She was so much more tapped into the up-and-comers than he was. He swore he could hear the low whistle of appreciation she always gave when she saw something that swept her off her feet. But then he realized that it was only the sound of the wind, wandering up from the icy lake. And he remembered he was alone.

  Chapter Nine

  Nell

  PIECE: Oval-shaped Talavera platter with hand-painted blue-and-white floral design.

  It had been a while since Nell planned a meal. Like actually sat down with cookbooks and picked out recipes ahead of time. When she and Josh first got married, meals used to be a source of entertainment in and of themselves, sometimes filling the better part of a day. Josh was a great cook. Nell, not so much, but she was good at coming up with concepts for meals. They would spend lazy weekend mornings in bed, paging through cookbooks and poring over internet recipes, letting their whims dictate the day’s menu. One winter Sunday, a memory of Nell’s junior year in France led them to make a mountain of crepes so large they had to invite neighbors over to help finish them. Another weekend, Josh had become obsessed with the idea of making sushi. They’d driven around to multiple Asian markets to collect the right tools and ingredients. In the end, they’d spent more money and had a worse meal than they would have if they’d just gone out to their favorite Japanese restaurant. But it had been fun.

  When Nell was pregnant, her cravings made it tricky for her and Josh to keep up their cooking experiments. She always seemed to crave something specific, like fresh watermelon in the middle of February. But then she’d be repulsed by it when Josh procured it and brought it home. He’d done his best to oblige, though, often calling her multiple times from the grocery store to make sure that the exact brand of potato chips or bagels or sparkling water he had in the cart was consistent with whatever she and the baby needed right that moment.

  Now, they found it hard to find enough things to talk about to fill an entire meal’s worth of time. She and Josh s
eemed to stonewall one another in the evenings, playing a dinnertime game of chicken until whoever was hungriest relented and started boiling water for pasta or pulling together sandwich fixings. Or, more often than not, one of them called the number on one of the many take-out menus they kept in a kitchen drawer. Given their credit card debt, Nell knew their recent take-out habit was not a great idea, but Josh never said anything. Because he didn’t know.

  Somewhere over the last year, food had morphed from something they both enjoyed to nothing more than a necessary inconvenience. With this mind-set, Nell found it hard to get motivated to plan the Colony’s first communal dinner—especially when she sensed resistance to the idea from the artists. With so much on her mind, between the debt and the divide between her and Josh, not to mention her still-potent sense of grief over their daughter, Nell could barely muster up the energy and desire to eat more than a granola bar, followed by spoonfuls of ice cream straight from the carton, let alone plan an entire meal.

  Nell perused the towering bookcases in the office at the mansion, hoping she’d find a few cookbooks in the mix. She pulled out a glossy, oversized book about Provence and the Côte d’Azur and flipped through it for recipes. Seeing none, she replaced the book. As she pushed it to the back of the shelf, she felt it hit something and heard a metallic rattle. She took the book down again and peered into the space where it had been. Something silver winked at her from the back of the shelf. She pulled down more books to reveal a small safe built into the wall.

  During her first few days on the job, Nell had peeked inside closets and cabinets, looking for the safe that Betsy had mentioned on her deathbed. She didn’t find it, and wasn’t even sure it was still in existence. Then, when the artists started arriving, Nell turned her attention to the more immediate task of getting them settled in, and suspended her search.

  Now, though, she went to the desk to retrieve the combination that Don had given her. With the numbers in hand, she spun the lock and opened the door. Nell wasn’t sure what she had been expecting to find inside—glittering jewelry, maybe, or a priceless Kandinsky drawing. Instead, she found a shoebox.

  She placed it on the desk and sifted through its jumbled contents. There were handwritten notes scrawled on letterhead from the hospice facility where Betsy had spent her final days, envelopes postmarked from New York, and catalogs from art galleries across the country. Nothing seemed to fit together in any way that made sense, until she came across a couple of articles torn from magazines. The first one, a piece torn from the pages of Harper’s, was a feature recalling the literary and art salon that Gertrude Stein ran out of her Paris home in the twenties. The photo that accompanied the text showed Stein, a formidable figure adorned in black, seated on a chaise covered in fussy ruffled fabric. Above Stein’s head hung Picasso’s decidedly unfussy portrait of her, as well as a couple of the painter’s Cubist works. Handwritten in the margin of the article, in slanted script, were the words “Something to strive for.”

  No problem, Betsy, Nell thought. I’m sure I’ll have no trouble at all re-creating one of the most famous art salons of all time.

  Nell picked up another article clipping, this one cut from a Spanish newspaper. Her Spanish was limited, but she had minored in French in college, and acquired some reading proficiency in Italian in grad school. She deduced that the article was about the famous, long since closed Café Pombo in Madrid. The only reason Nell recognized the name of the café was that it was in the title of a painting by the Spanish artist José Solana.

  Solana had immortalized the café by depicting, in his dark expressionist style, one of the weekly tertulias, or social gatherings, held there, bringing together writers and intellectuals late into the night. Nell had never seen the painting in person—it was housed at the Reina Sofía art museum in Madrid. But she could picture it, as she’d seen it on slides and in books. She could see, in her mind’s eye, the young men gathered around the table, wearing black suit jackets and ties, a testament that they took their time together seriously. She could picture, too, the table cluttered with glasses of all shapes and sizes, bottles of wine and sherry—a sign that the men didn’t take themselves too seriously.

  Though not much else was immediately apparent from the muddled contents of the shoebox, it was clear that Betsy had seen Stein’s Paris gatherings and Solana’s tertulia as a sort of inspiration for the Colony’s communal dinners. But Nell didn’t feel inspired. Instead, she felt paralyzed. Gertrude Stein had entertained Matisse, Hemingway, and Ezra Pound. Betsy herself had rubbed elbows with Warhol, for God’s sake. How could Nell possibly follow in those sorts of footsteps? She had a hard enough time getting the Colony’s artists, with their disparate personalities and artistic approaches, in the same room with one another.

  Don had emphasized that Betsy’s notes—anything outside the typed trust document itself—were not legally binding, but just meant to be used as a guide. But Nell had the sense she’d be letting the dead woman down if she didn’t try to follow her vision as best she could. Nell lacked much vision of her own, now that the goal that had driven her for the last year—getting pregnant again—had been taken off the table. Adopting Betsy’s vision at least gave her a concrete goal to work toward.

  Nell felt pretty certain that Betsy’s vision for the communal artists’ dinners didn’t involve boxed pasta, frozen garlic bread, and salad from a bag. Which was about as far as Nell’s cooking skills went when she didn’t have Josh around. Of course, she could order in, and maybe in the future, she would. But she felt strongly that this first meal should be something homemade, to make the artists feel like the Colony was, indeed, their home. She’d have to enlist her husband’s help.

  Lately, she and Josh saw and spoke to one another mostly only in passing. And, in some ways, that made Nell feel relieved. It made it easier to keep the debt a secret. With the semester now in full swing, Josh had been spending a lot of late evenings at his office up on Bascom Hill. And with the all-consuming work of getting the Colony off the ground, Nell often lost track of the amount of hours she spent at the mansion. She hoped that getting Josh involved with planning the dinner would give them something fun to focus on together, after all the stress and seriousness of the last year or so.

  “What do you know about Spanish food?” she asked him when he picked up his office line.

  “Tapas?” he said. “Cured ham? Why do you ask?”

  She held her phone in one hand and, with the other, put the papers she’d scattered on the desk back into the box. “I’m trying to put together a communal dinner for the residents, and I’m going with a Spanish theme. I thought maybe you’d have some ideas. That is, if you’re willing to help. Please say yes. You know my cooking only goes as far as coming up with the concept.”

  “Sure,” Josh said. “If you want, I can put in a request at College Library and have them set aside some Spanish cookbooks.”

  “The perks of being married to a professor,” she said.

  “We should probably do a little research on what wines we want to serve,” he said. “I can pick up a couple of bottles on the way home.”

  “My favorite kind of research.” Nell looked at her watch. It was almost six o’clock. “Do you think you’ll be home soon? What are you working on?”

  “A law review article,” he said. “And it will be here tomorrow morning. Probably with the cursor still blinking in the middle of the same paragraph I’ve already rewritten six times. So a glass of wine sounds pretty good right now. Meet you at home?”

  Nell got home before he did. After a quick run and a shower, she put on some comfy clothes and searched online for Spanish recipes to try out. Many of the classic ones she came across required culinary skills beyond her level and/or called for ingredients she didn’t have in her kitchen, like saffron for paella or smoked paprika for lentil stew. One recipe she found, for tortilla española, looked easy enough, though. It required only eggs, onions, and potatoes, and looked similar to an omelet, which was one of
the few dishes Nell had down pat. She set out the ingredients and got to work. By the time Josh came home, she had the egg dish halfway cooked through and was just about to flip it over to cook the other side.

  Josh set two bottles of wine on the counter, one a red Rioja and the other a white wine she didn’t recognize. He kissed her and nodded at the egg carton on the counter. “Breakfast for dinner?”

  Nell shook her head. “Tortilla. I was just about to flip it.”

  Josh eyed the skillet with suspicion. “Need help?”

  Nell shook her head and pointed at the screen of her open laptop. “I’ve watched this video a bunch of times, and I think I’ve figured out the trick.” She put a plate over the top of the skillet and, with a quick motion, turned the whole apparatus over. But, unlike in the video, the tortilla didn’t slide out onto the plate in a single piece. Instead, half-cooked eggs ran out from under the pan and onto the stovetop, where they pooled before dripping onto the floor.

  “Shit,” she said. She put down the pan and grabbed a kitchen towel.

  Josh ripped off a wad of paper towels and bent down to wipe the floor. “You know, you could cater the artists’ dinner,” he said. “You didn’t get hired as a cook.”

  “I don’t know exactly what I was hired for, to be honest.” Nell turned off the stove and scraped what was left of the tortilla—more like a pile of scrambled eggs now—onto the plate with a spatula. “Anyway, I don’t know of any Spanish restaurants in Madison.”

  “You could pick a different theme.”

  “I feel like that would be giving up.” Nell tossed the contents of the plate into the trash and turned back to the counter, where she started cracking more eggs into a bowl.

  By the time the day of the first group dinner rolled around, Nell had made three trips to the grocery store and gone through six dozen eggs, but she’d finally perfected the recipe, producing consistently round, golden-brown, and fully cooked tortillas españolas instead of just heaps of scrambled eggs with burned potatoes and onions.