Brooklyn is a state of mind. Ask Walt Whitman or Marianne Moore. A genuine Brooklyn soul doesn’t last too long without forsythia in March, egg creams in July, and the minimum daily requirement of unidentified particulate matter blowing into your eyes in October.
Catherine, more a creature of the ether than of Brooklyn, met me at the door. Without makeup, her dark eyes and her springy brown curls made her look particularly vulnerable. We exchanged hugs and niceties in the entry foyer, its oatmeal-colored walls lined with Japanese artifacts. I purposely kept my back to her husband’s collection of Samurai swords. I would wait until we were comfortable-in the kitchen, where we told all our secrets-to ask about the slashed invitation.
Michael led the way down the hall. He had a sixteen-month-old’s round-faced, squat-legged chubbiness and looked somehow already bigger than Catherine, who was still exotically small. No one has ever accused me of being willowy, but I can still shop the outlets for size-ten samples. Still, Catherine is the one friend who makes me feel like a Valkyrie in full armor. That hadn’t changed in twelve years, nor had her questions.
“Do you ever sabotage yourself, Gina?” She spoke in a whisper, as though saying it aloud would make some negative reality more tangible.
Catherine always had questions. I used to think of it as a sign of some mild mental disorder, a dementia inquisitas manifesting itself in an inability to follow the rules of normal conversation. Then I discovered that I enjoyed looking for answers to give her. I even, quite consciously at some point, started to ask Catherine-questions myself.
“You didn’t tamper with that invitation just to get some free publicity for the gallery, did you?” I hadn’t slept much; that thought must have crept up when my mental censors were off duty. Maybe this was how Catherine lived all the time.
She made a face. “Your office can manage better publicity than that. Did you come out early because of that invitation? I mean, I’m glad you’re here and happy you’re working on the event, but I think you’re overreacting, Gina. I guess I was a little worried at first but now it seems, I don’t know, silly.” She held out a half sandwich, tiny moon shapes scalloping the crust edge, about at Michael’s mouth level, and he pulled her hand down to take a bite.
When he was a toddler, Rico had settled for nothing less than holding the sandwich in his own dimpled hands.
“Rico’s age is enough to get some good press. Featured in a major gallery at twenty-two. Patrick says they’ll call him a wunderkind.” She laughed, a small sound, and licked grape jelly from her fingers. “I asked him if he slipped that invitation under the gallery door, and he looked at me like I had finally lost my mind. I believe him. About not doing it, I mean.”
Did she mean Rico or Patrick? Before I could ask, she wrinkled her nose and said, “I don’t have enemies and I doubt that Rico does. It’s probably not a threat at all.”
“Maybe you’re right. But why was the invitation stained only along that slash?”
With a shrug and a noisy sigh, Catherine sat in the rocking chair and folded her hands in her lap, Madonna becalmed.
I drank my coffee and remembered that April day, seven months earlier, when Catherine and I sat on the steps in front of her brownstone, hands wrapped around mugs of hot coffee. We had pretended that the sun was warm, but it was our friendship that felt so good.
“Did you ever wish Rico would disappear,” Catherine had said, “just be unborn? I mean not ever have been born.”
A real Catherine-question.
“Not once. Not ever,” I said, unable to entertain the notion of no Rico. The stone steps felt cold, hard.
“I stopped painting when I got pregnant.” Her dark eyes had looked into my very heart as though she were asking me to change something. “Rico will never have to face that.”
Now, as I sat in her kitchen, I wondered whether she would blame Michael, later, secretly, for this transformation from painter to purveyor of paintings.
Michael plopped himself at her feet and she reached down and stroked his cheek. “The gallery has to work. The rest isn’t enough for me,” she said. The silver gleam of the sky framed by the window behind her hurt my eyes.
“Not enough how … intellectually? … emotionally?” I asked.
She was quiet; Catherine’s pauses took some getting used to. It was her timing, I had learned. Not my fault, just her way.
“I want to soar. I don’t soar at home.”
Catherine wanted a poet to play his words in accompaniment to her rapture, to join her in freedom from the law of gravity.
“Aren’t things good with you and Patrick?” I had meant to ask her if she soared in her marriage. It hadn’t come out that way.
“Staying home, I don’t get much, you know, stimulation during the day. At first, when I told him my idea-about the gallery-Patrick said he wanted me to stay home with Michael for a few more years.” Her face was lost behind those wild curls. “But then he changed his mind. Just like that. He’s even financing the first twelve months.”
“That sounds good.” Almost too good, I thought. Patrick indulged this whim too readily and helped Catherine give up on herself as a painter. “So when the gallery opens, you’ll be happy.”
Catherine stood, stretched on her toes, and reached both arms up, her fingers pointing. I expected her to lift off the ground and float to the ceiling, to beat her wings against the window until someone opened it and let her out to catch the smoky November wind moving among the city’s spires.
“Mostly,” she said. “I guess, mostly.”
I left Catherine’s and wheeled my suitcase down the street. Just a tear … nothing to get worked up over, David had said. I think you’re overreacting, Catherine had told me. Probably they were right and I had fixed on this for some mother-reason born of my struggle to let my son live his own life. Surely Rico would consider my worries proof of a relapse into the role of overprotective mother with an overactive imagination.
He was, after all, a grown-up, a man whose dark hair, long-lashed brown eyes, broad shoulders, and narrow hips are attractive to women. His natural reserve gives way easily to his genuine interest in people. He keeps himself in cadmium yellow by working at a record store called Riffs, shelters neighborhood strays, likes old movies, and returns library books on time.
He’s good but not perfect,
What he hasn’t yet acquired, even after two years in New York, is an everyday instinct for self-preservation. He lives mainly on salami and Mallomars and would never buy a new toothbrush unless his old one fell into the toilet. He rides the subway at all hours, falls in and out of love with The Most Terrific Woman several times a year, and is determined to be a painter and not acquire any credentialed, marketable skills.
We all have our blind spots, and I had to allow Rico his and keep mine from getting in his way. I resolved not to mention the slashed, stained picture.
I set my bag in front of the grillwork gate, pressed the buzzer, looked through the just-below-street-level window. Inside, a Tiffany table lamp glowed in the midday pallor. Ribbons of light fell to the floor through a jungle of foliage. In lieu of paying rent to David and me, Rico has been restoring the three-level brownstone to its original Victorian glory. He calls the jungle room “the conservatory.” Shades of Colonel Mustard. The room was empty.
The tips of my fingers curled toward my palms in an attempt to get warm. The cold bit at my toes through the thin leather of my pumps, which had been fine for the 71 degrees I’d left in California.
Then Rico’s face appeared in the window, his expression leaping from wariness to surprise and finally settling into a broad smile. I hoped he would still be smiling in fifteen minutes.
I hugged him; his face felt good against my chilled cheek. He smelled good. When he pulled back, I noticed a scrap of toilet paper stanching a shaving cut on his jaw.
I suppressed a shudder and began. “I tried to call last night but you weren’t home and Riffs was closed. I didn’t decide I was coming until
late. About nine. California time.” So much for urbane patter.
He set my suitcase beside the hall table, a spindly-legged affair sporting a drop cloth covered with plaster dust. “You could have had Dad call me or something. I know this is your house, but you said you’d give me some notice. I didn’t expect you until Thursday.”
It was a lame excuse. Clearly, I had lost some ground in the struggle to let go. “I’m sorry for the lack of warning.”
On cue, a rumpled little redhead wrapped in a wrinkled terry-cloth robe appeared at the top of the stairs.
“Mom, this is Laura. She plays keyboards for the Rompettes. Laura, this is my mom, Gina Capobella.”
Laura smiled and said hello and disappeared. Another of his women-we’d discussed safe sex since he was fifteen but maybe we needed a little brushup talk about safe relationships.
He hung my coat on a brass hook in the hall and we went into the kitchen. His mouth was tight, his shoulders up around his ears. He lit a burner on the stove and set a teakettle over the flame, In the tense silence, I heard my own breathing and the pounding water filling the upstairs bathtub.
“I hope Laura’s not in any hot water,” I said, emphasizing the key phrase as I pointed at the ceiling, in the general direction of the bathroom.
Rico’s face was blank, his silence stony. He was turning down the invitation to our old game.
“I hope she’s not in too deep,” I said, giving it one last try.
The corners of his mouth edged into a smile. “She’s prepared to sink or swim on her own,” he said. “She’ll talk about it when she’s ready to come clean.”
We both grinned, but I knew that punning our way to familiar ground was only a start. Rico had lived in this house on his own since his twentieth birthday, two years ago. It was peremptory to claim territorial prerogatives on such short notice; I really should have tried harder to call. “Maybe you could think of my being here as a double-reverse empty-nest syndrome,” I offered.
“You’ve been reading Good Housekeeping again. That’s dangerous.” He lifted a serrated knife out of its slot and cut a French bread in half.
“Very funny. Listen, I’m quiet in the mornings and I might even be persuaded to make you some bracciola,” I smiled sweetly.
“Home cooking and word games can’t make everything all right, Mom.”
It’s good when your kid keeps you honest. Reminds you that you’ve done a decent job of it. Knife in hand, he hugged me and then set to piling turkey, cheese, lettuce, mustard, and mayo on the bread. He sawed through the huge tower with a knife, then scooped the sandwiches onto plates and carried them to the table. “Does this visit have anything to do with Catherine? She’s seemed a little weird or something the past couple of days.”
“She desperately wants the gallery to be a success. I thought it would put her at ease if I was here.” Every word true, but sins of omission would surely be my undoing. They felt too much like getting away with something.
“She’s more anxious about the gallery than I thought.” Concern for my friend-his friend, too-creased his brow.
What a face. Not only a mother could love it.
“It’s been so hard on her, trying to make it as a painter. She’s giving up her dreams. Don’t you think”-What? That he should give up before he’s given it a try? What are you trying to tell your child?-“that she’s entitled to be a little weird?”
Rico didn’t answer.
“Enough water for me to have some tea?” Rico’s friend, her face scrubbed and sparkling but her hair still a wiry auburn tangle, stood in the doorway. The terry-cloth robe had been traded for jeans, a citrus-green turtleneck, and a tattered purple sweater that looked big enough for her to hold a party in.
Rico wiggled his eyebrows like Groucho Marx, then disappeared into the pantry and emerged with a teabag dangling between two fingers. “Almond Sunset for you, my lovely.”
“You two look just like each other.” The girl made a circle of her thumb and forefinger and held it up to her right eye, closing her left eye as though she were looking through a lens. “I’d recognize you anywhere. Not just from the pictures but because your mouth is so much like Rico’s and your eyes. It’s neat.” She put one hand in her lap, propped her head on the other fist, and watched Rico prepare the tea.
“What kind of music do the Rompers play?” I envisioned a band for the Sesame Street set. Somehow this pretty, sleepy woman didn’t seem the type, but maybe the small ruby stud in her left nostril gave the wrong impression.
“Rompettes. Ska.” Laura smiled benignly at my blank look. “You know, kind of like world beat or reggae. We’re not very good, but my boyfriend is making a documentary about us. He’s studying filmmaking. NYU, graduate level.”
Rico’s back was to me; this was a little confusing. Her boyfriend?
“Interesting,” I said. Rico looked over his shoulder and smiled. Interesting was a long-shared code for judgment temporarily deferred.
“He got very intense a couple of weeks ago. Watching me like he was framing every action for a scene-it made me nuts. So I came here and got my mother to promise not to tell him where I was. With the unlisted phone here, I don’t even have to talk to him unless I want to. The quiet feels … healing, I guess you’d say in California. Rico was terrific to offer me a place.” She got up and stood behind Rico, massaging his shoulders.
So she was another of his strays, not a romantic relationship at all.
“I never met her boyfriend,” Rico said as he set the teapot on the table, “but she swears he’s handsomer than me.”
“Well, he is. Anyway, you can’t compare dark and dashing with blond and brooding.” Laura stared at her crimson-tipped nails and then arranged her face in a smile. “Are you staying long?” she asked me.
I told her I would be in Brooklyn until the day after the gallery opening. The three of us sipped our tea and talked about friends and school, the art scene, and old neighbors. Rico showed me the five paintings he’d be exhibiting at Porterfield’s. They were abstract, with the suggestion of a face serving as the focal point for each. “This one’s a self-portrait,” he said pointing to the largest canvas.
I balanced my swelling pride with the desire to shield him from the frustrations of being a painter. Catherine and Patrick were doing things right with the gallery, Rico said, except that Patrick got stuck in traditional thinking sometimes-but what else could you expect from someone whose family had lived in the Hudson Valley since Rip Van Winkle went to sleep? She needed someone like that, I said, to gaze at her fondly while she explored her place in the arts.
By Thursday morning I had sublimated any leftover worries about Rico with vast and unnecessary expenditures of energy. Despite the presence of my willing and competent staff, I took care of everything personally: I hired the harpist, selected the champagne, calculated the number of hors d’oeuvres, tested the lighting, and called my media contacts. Only a few times during those hectic days did I catch myself staring at Rico, memorising the details of his face, the angle of his cheekbones, the ridge of his jaw, the clear, taut skin.
Only one last detail to settle-what to wear.
“Do you like this one better?” I swirled into the kitchen with what I hoped was the grace of a runway model. In the bulky gray suit with the leather trim, I felt more like a 747.
“No contest. The white jumpsuit. My boyfriend says white is the ultimate sophistication. He wants me to wear white all the time. He says it enhances inner purity.” Laura wrinkled her nose, tugged at the collar of her houndstooth jacket, pulled down the sleeve of her cinnamon-and-nutmeg striped jersey. “Maybe wear the green silk. I like what it does for your eyes.”
That sounded nice. “What about you, Rico? You’re the star. What are you wearing?” I asked.
Rico, who had become involved with a cleaver, garlic, celery, and bok choy, said through his gritted teeth, “I’ve done okay dressing myself for the past two years, Mom. I’ll figure out something.”
That told me.
“Mothers are supposed to care about these things, Rico.” Laura gave Rico’s cheek a pinch before she turned to me. “If you wear the silk, you need some outrageous earrings. I’m going to see my boyfriend before I go to the opening, so remind me before I leave and I’ll lend you mine.”
Did she mean the safety pins or the Christmas ornaments? I was saved from a reply by the insistent shrill of the doorbell.
I unlocked the inner door. A blast of arctic air swept into the vestibule as I opened the grill work gate. Shivering, I moved aside to let a grape-colored woolen bundle step in.
Catherine’s face was barely visible between the wool beret and the scarf pulled up around her nose. Her eyes warned that this was not a simple social call.
“Come into the kitchen and stand by the stove,” I said.
She didn’t budge. With her gloved hand she reached into her coat pocket and handed me an envelope. “Someone slipped this under the gallery door early this morning. I just found it.”
I opened the envelope and pulled out a folded page from the New York Post entertainment section. Great-they were doing a piece on the gallery. Not the Times, to be sure, but maybe after the opening … I unfolded the page. Rico’ face, centered in front of one of his paintings, stared up at me, A slash outlined in reddish brown sliced through the page. Dried blood or cranberry juice, it hardly mattered; the intent was clear enough.
“This doesn’t feel like a prank, Catherine. Someone is sending a message that they intend to hurt Rico.”
“Or me. Or the gallery.” Her eyes downcast, she jammed her hands into her pockets. “Rico’s not the only possible target. And no, I don’t know anyone who thinks Rico cheated them out of a place in the show. Patrick already asked me that.”
Exasperated with her self-indulgence and fearful for Rico, I sent her home and called Frankie Fretelli, an old friend with an NYPD desk job. If I brought along some Johnnie Walker Black instead of art gallery white wine, Frankie said, he’d come to the opening and keep an eye on things. David would be there too, if the weather didn’t delay his flight. We’d all keep our eyes open.
A Woman’s Eye Page 26