The View from Here

by Hannah McKinnon

  Olivia was not familiar with either riding or horses, but she could see the truth in his sculpture. She stood beside the mare, noting the ripple of muscle through her bowed neck. The flare of her nostrils. There was life captured in that clay. It made something inside Olivia ache with an urge to create. She glanced across the room to the table in the corner by the window. It had been a gift from Jake. Sweet, soulful Jake who did not know a thing about sculpture or cooking or children. The three things that had thus far defined and shaped her world. Olivia still smiled when she recalled the afternoon when Ben had beckoned her out here suddenly to assist him with something important. As soon as she stepped into the barn and her eyes adjusted to the dim light, she saw Jake. Standing in the corner, beside the oak table, with that shy smile. With Ben’s permission, he’d set up an entire work space just for her, “by the window, so you have both light and shadow.” Beside the table there was a metal stool, for when she wasn’t standing, an assortment of sculpting tools, and a bucket. A bronze desk lamp arched its neck over the rough-hewn surface. But she had been unable to take her eyes off of Jake. “Happy birthday,” he’d said, softly.

  Now, on that very table, beneath a white canvas tarp, her most current project waited. But there was no time for that today.

  Upstairs in the loft, Olivia seated herself at the desk and opened the laptop. There were sixteen new emails. Most were inquiries about the upcoming September show. Two were from galleries updating Ben about sales. The last one was a message from the manager of a world-class resort on Cape Cod. Ben had sold a seal sculpture from his previous year’s maritime collection, titled Salt Works, to the seaside hotel. They’d sent a picture of the new installation in their main lobby. Ben would be pleased. Included with the manager’s letter was an invitation to stay at the resort for an evening of his choice, free of charge. Olivia sighed. She would have jumped at such a chance, but she knew Ben would never accept. He’d ask her to thank the gentleman, and leave it at that. Ben was too private, too humble. It was something she loved dearly about the man.

  Olivia could still not believe her good fortune in landing this job and living in this place. It was a far cry from the day she’d learned she was pregnant, in her final semester of graduate school at NYU just six years ago. Her then boyfriend, who wanted everything to do with acting and nothing to do with a baby (this was his life! his chance at making it!), made it painfully clear to Olivia that she would be on her own. She’d walked graduation with her belly burgeoning through her gown, wondering if she were the only art student to have spent her final semester alternately covered in clay and bent over the toilet bowl with morning sickness. Her father, Pierre, stood in the audience, clapping and shouting alongside Celeste, his restaurant partner who’d also largely helped to raise Olivia since her mother’s death. Afterward, they’d had a small luncheon and cake back at the restaurant.

  Olivia had been frightened, but she’d had a plan: she would have the baby in the fall, and the two of them would move back to Brooklyn and live with her father, just like old times. But two years after making that plan, Olivia felt stifled. It was hard having a toddler in the city, alone. Gone was her access to the luxury of the NYU art studio and all its conveniences and inspiration. She could not afford to share an artist co-op space in any of the available buildings in and around the city, unlike some of her former classmates. For a while, she worked as an office assistant for the NYU art department, but it was mostly clerical work. Each time she put together announcements for student art shows, she felt a pang. With every grant or internship that came across her desk, Olivia grew more restless. A bitterness crept into her voice when she made small talk with the art students waiting outside the professors’ office doors, their brimming portfolios in hand. Yesterday she had been that aspiring pupil. Today she was an exhausted single mother awash in fresh resentment.

  Worst of all was the guilt of being away from Luci. Juggling single parenthood with a creative life was nearly impossible, and eventually she gave up and returned to work at the restaurant. There her days were free to be with her daughter, and come nighttime Luci could be put to sleep in the back office. But it was draining, burning the candle at both ends and always having Luci in tow. And despite having secured some sense of routine and a small income, Olivia felt the calendar days peeling off the wall without really getting anywhere. Indeed, she had gone backward. She was single and back working at her father’s restaurant, only now with a child to support. Any aspirations of her own seemed laughable.

  It was during that second winter since graduation that Olivia received an email from a former professor. A well-known sculptor from Washington, Connecticut, was seeking an apprentice. He worked out of a restored barn on his property. The pay was not much, but Olivia would have a small carriage house in which to live and access to studio work space. It was a ticket out of the city. And perhaps a ticket to a new life.

  Olivia replied immediately, keeping the news and the new hope that flushed in her chest to herself. There was no need to involve her father. At least not yet. He would not support the notion, of that she was sure.

  Pierre’s temper was legendary; at the restaurant he terrified as many sous-chefs as he inspired. And fired twice that number in any given month. But still there was an ever-present line out the door of green young chefs wanting to work with him. For those in the industry and in the know were aware that clientele had been flocking to Bon Coin for years. Reservations were not accepted. You obtained a seat only if the chef knew you; or if you were the honored guest of someone who knew him. His crème fraîche was a full-cream cloud. Between courses you cleansed your palate with tiny ramekins of pomegranate sorbet or flat water with a lemon twist; a shot of apple brandy served as a digestif. On the rare occasion he was in a whimsical mood, Pierre sent out an amuse-bouche: a single seared scallop, a frosty shot of cucumber soup. There was no menu. Patrons ate what he felt like cooking, all of it artfully plated, its minimalist presentation designed to surrender to one and only one sense: the intoxicating pleasure of taste.

  Olivia was often asked, “Did you ever work with your father?”

  “No,” she was quick to reply. “I worked for him.” Though he loved his only child with a singular focus otherwise reserved only for his cooking, in his kitchen even she was not spared his temperament.

  “Zut, Livi!” he’d bellow, whisking a cutting board of diced onion out from under the blade of her knife and tossing it into the well of the sink. “Émincer l’oignon!” Pierre expected perfection at every turn, from the uniformity of minced carrots to the gleaming reflection of a freshly scrubbed sauté pan. Precision, attention, and the sourcing of raw ingredients—those were the hallmarks of a successful restaurant. That his employees simultaneously loved and loathed the man was not his concern; food critics were the only ones who had Pierre’s ear, and even they not all of the time. In her father’s kitchen Olivia learned to keep her head down, her knife sharp, and to persevere. Indeed, they were the skills of life.

  * * *

  In a way, working for her father had probably been what most helped her to secure her new job. Pierre was an artist, as well. Olivia understood temperaments and idiosyncrasies. Working for an artist was intimate. Olivia knew how Ben took his coffee, not that he’d ever asked her to get him one. She knew that when starting a new project he required complete solitude. Marge had explained these things during the interview. Olivia had borrowed her aunt’s car and driven out to the Connecticut countryside for the occasion, intent on meeting Ben Rothschild, the famous sculptor, and impressing him with her portfolio. But she’d been surprised to not even lay eyes on the man that first meeting. Instead, it was Marge who swung the front door ajar in her bare feet and a sweeping white tunic and invited her inside. She led her through rooms of antique rugs and Stickley furniture, which were otherwise stark white. She poured tea and pulled out a Windsor chair, motioning for Olivia to sit. What followed was a conversation more than an interview. What kind of training had sh
e had at NYU? What was her medium? How did she feel about working closely with another person, who might just as soon request she leave him alone when he “caught the scent,” as Ben described his muse, as he might ask her to dig through dusty attic boxes in search of a long-lost photograph so he could study the lines of the family dog, who, by the way, was buried under the red maple in the backyard—should she want to visit him.

  What was clear was that there were boundaries, but the lines were not of the usual pedestrian nature. The hours varied, as did the work. Which was why the two of them liked to keep their assistant in residence. “We all have our gifts and quirks,” Marge had said that day. That was just fine with Olivia. She had her own, foremost being Luci.

  Luci should be treated as any other child. Olivia needed her to live in a space where people let her be herself. “She speaks to four people in her life,” Olivia had confided in Marge that day. “Me. My father, her gran-père. Her speech pathologist. And our Brooklyn neighbor, Celeste.”

  Marge had listened deeply, nodding over her cup of tea. “Well, that must be a challenge for both of you,” she said, finally. “We know all about those, here.”

  As Olivia would learn, after she accepted the job, Ben was a gentle man with soft watery eyes. He was as practical about his artistic success as he was about sleep: he needed nine hours exactly, many of which took place during the afternoons, and none of which were consecutive. And he had a complicated relationship with alcohol.

  “Art consumes a person, if they’re good at it. When he’s working, Ben doesn’t touch a bottle. But when he finds himself between projects or feeling down, there are times he climbs into it,” Marge said.

  Olivia didn’t know what to say. She was not used to such honest disrobing from someone she’d just met.

  “He’s a quiet drunk, sticks to the property like an old sheepdog and sleeps it off.” She took a sip of her tea and looked at Olivia over the rim of her cup. “At worst, you’ll find him snoring in the barn. And that’s when you come find me. Will that be a problem?”

  Olivia shook her head. She knew too well the lure of alcohol, and the ways people flirted with it, from years in the restaurant. It was common, on both sides of the table. There were business clients who were day drunks. Kitchen workers who got hammered after their shift. Waitresses who did shots, and much more, in the dingy staff bathroom, before heading downtown to clubs. She did not judge. But she was also not foolish enough to harbor anything but a healthy respect for the reality of it.

  “I’ve dealt with it in the restaurant,” Olivia confided. “As long as it doesn’t impact me or my daughter.”

  Marge regarded her appraisingly. “Good answer. It won’t, I can assure you. Mostly Ben manages it. Sometimes it manages him. You’ll come to understand the difference.”

  What Marge was asking of her, Olivia realized, she was desperate for herself. Respect and space.

  Growing up in the city, Olivia had never realized what effect space would have on her. She was used to storing pots and pans (and toilet paper!) in her galley kitchen oven. She and Luci had shared one cramped bedroom, her child-sized cot squeezed in against the foot of Olivia’s bed. They walked up three flights of stairs with groceries, which they crammed into the two tiny cabinets above the stove. There was no space to work, to stretch one’s legs, to spread out. Certainly not to sculpt.

  Until then, Olivia had used a rear corner of her father’s restaurant kitchen for her work. He allowed her to keep a small table by a slop sink in what had been a prep area. She’d arrive early in the mornings, when Luci went to school, only hours after the last of the kitchen staff and servers had gone home for the night. The kitchen was quiet and empty; she would work until the afternoon shift arrived to set up the dining room and stock the bar. It was not ideal, but it was what she had.

  Here now, with the vaulted barn ceilings and plated glass windows and the overhead loft, Olivia had a new concept of space. Not just in which to work, but in which to envision. To flex her ideas as surely as she stretched her limbs on her morning walks with Luci through the wooded trails that ran behind the house. To sleep beneath the velvety sky, an uninterrupted stretch of dark ribbon and bright star that simply did not exist in the city. To steal an hour here or there at her worktable when Ben took his daily nap. This was what it meant to take up space.

  But space was not enough. What Olivia struggled with now was time. As a single mother and studio assistant, there wasn’t much left. Something that frustrated her deeply given that the ideal artist’s space and boundless inspiration were mere steps away from her cottage. Now she hurried through emails. She gathered the outgoing mailings for the September show to drop off at the post office, and jotted down a list of messages to leave for Marge on the desk. Marge would only involve Ben in communications with the outside world if she felt it necessary. He did not occupy any office space in the loft; his domain was strictly the barn floor, where such distractions would not interfere with his work.

  Sometimes Olivia wondered at the devotion Marge gave Ben. At her selfless contentment to manage his world, so that he could manage his art. It reminded her of her father, of how he threw himself into his culinary creations. Of the years it took for Olivia to understand that her father loved her as much as, indeed more than, his restaurant. And how she’d struggled to understand it as a child, when other fathers rose early in the morning to take their daughters to soccer games, and were home at night to read to them and tuck them into bed. Love is love, her aunt used to tell her when she brought Olivia home from the restaurant at night to tuck her into bed. Don’t question its form.

  * * *

  Back inside the cottage, Olivia lined up the bounty from the farmer’s market on the butcher block counter. Yellow summer squash and zucchini. Fresh corn. Four fragrant heirloom tomatoes. The sight of them pleased her more than she could explain, and she smiled to herself as she ticked through the possibilities: sausage-stuffed squash with Gruyère, roasted tomatoes on hunks of crusty sourdough, tomatoes caprese. No additions, beyond a sprinkle of sea salt and zest of lemon. Summer made cooking so easy.

  Luci, who’d been hovering nearby surveying the goods, tucked something quickly behind her back and bolted for the stairs, Buster on her heels.

  “Just where are you two going?” Olivia called after her.

  Luci halted. “Nowheres.”

  “You wouldn’t happen to be going nowhere with that lovely chunk of cheddar, now would you?”

  Luci slumped. “But it’s sooo good, Mama.”

  “Indeed. Come help me set up a cheese board.” Olivia sliced the cheddar into fat ribbons, which she set atop grainy crackers and handed to Luci. She selected a Cantal she knew Jake liked for its familiarity to farmhouse cheddar and a bleu. Jake claimed he only liked cow’s milk varieties, but she was secretly determined to turn him on to the ripe goat’s milk of Montchevre.

  “You need to be more adventurous. When my five-year-old has a more sophisticated palate than a grown man, there is work to be done,” she teased him. She ran a knife through a ripe pear, licked the juice from her fingers, and fanned the slices artfully on the board.

  “Is Jake coming?”

  It was still strange to hear Luci say his name, given that she’d never once spoken to him. Olivia often wondered how that made Jake feel.

  “Would you like that?”

  Luci nodded. “I want him to stay for dinner.”

  This was unexpected. Olivia was sure Luci enjoyed Jake; it was clear by the way she trailed after him around the house. By how close she scooted next to him on the couch when the three of them watched a movie, or the way she tipped her head back and covered her giggle with her hand when he joked around at the dinner table. But Olivia was in love with him, and it was hard to love two people who did not yet speak to each other.

  “It must be your lucky day, because I already invited him.” Outside there was the sudden crunch of gravel in the driveway as his Wrangler pulled in. She wiped her hands quick
ly with the dish towel. “And look—here he is!”

  Luci thundered to the door, hopping up and down until Jake appeared on the other side of the screen. “Salutations.” Something was hidden behind his back.

  Olivia pulled him inside. Jake’s face was ruddy with sun and vigor, his two-day-old stubble rough against her cheek. “You smell good. Like the beach.”

  “I was out earlier on my bike.” He pecked her on the lips, something he’d only started to do recently in front of Luci, and produced a small bouquet of wildflowers from behind his back. “For you,” he said, holding them out to Luci. “I picked them this morning on my ride.”

  Luci hesitated before gingerly accepting them, and Olivia feared her heart might burst.

  Jake kneeled down, naming the flowers in the scraggly bunch. “This one is called red clover, and the fancy purple one is chicory. But best of all is this one.” He pointed to a frilly yellow flower. “Can you guess its name?”

  Luci said nothing, but at least this time she shook her head.

  “Cat’s ear!”

  This elicited a shy smile.

  Olivia gasped. “Cat’s ear. Does it meow?” She bent and tickled her daughter’s ear. “What do we say to Jake?” she prompted.

  Luci ducked her chin and stared at her bare feet.

  “Lu Lu?”

  “It’s okay,” Jake said, but Olivia ignored this.

  “Just like Miss Griffin taught you in speech. What do we say when someone does something nice for us?”

  After a long silence Luci looked up at Jake and made a small noise in her throat, like a squeak. “Good girl.” Olivia kissed her head, trying to conceal how much this meant to her.

  “You’re welcome, Lu,” Jake said.

  * * *

  Later, after a quiet dinner and when Luci had been tucked in for the night, they sat in the weathered Adirondack chairs overlooking the backyard. Jake leaned back and exhaled, contentedly. “So, it went okay with the speech pathologist today?”