Mrs. Gustafson now moved around before me and bent in very close and centered the knot of my one black tie. She, with her husband’s smiling approval, pressed right up against the front of me, and let her fingers stray over my ears to coil my hair back neat (did I not look my best?). When I stared, in broad daylight, at the same long platinum lashes that she had wisely never sullied with black paint, and when she, chins appearing as she nodded more, concentrated on getting the tie perfectly knotted, her exertion gave off a slight scent. —And it was mainly his—vanilla and geranium leaves and something extra that was right between being wrong and perfect and then came so down on the good side. And how to say it? when she touched me, in that state? and brushed past my ear and smoothed my long hair back, I got an erection, not just from recalling him but believing there might, just might, be left in my life a chance with her. I know, insane. But we all of us really were just then.
Bama’s plane finally lowered from nowhere, circled once while whining like some insect toy, and somehow landed. The ladder, lumbering and creaky, got maneuvered out by those two fine strong local lads. Business passengers came filing off first. On the tarmac, a great pyramid of army-green trunks and gear. Flight attendants stood at odd spots out there. Against stark farmed winter vistas, they all faced opposite directions, till, in my disorientation, it seemed a dance piece planned by some avant-gardist of New York. All in honor of today’s three strange New York arrivals.
Finally it was actual Alabama angled in the plane’s door. She looked dead white, she wore a short black suit, a tiny black pillbox hat, and not-undramatic Callas-like dark glasses. She had on black gloves to hide her “peasant claws,” as she called them. She already looked older. I thought how convenient black clothes are full-time since, when you’re summoned from Berlin to an only half-expected Iowa funeral, you come equipped. From the start, she had always been equipped.
But now Bama seemed to pull back from garish yellow healthy sunlight.
Once again she bobbed forward before retreating. I saw, floating over her head, one corner of a sort of Jackie veil. She hung there in the metal portal, acting dubious of Cedar Rapids’s even being real. She appeared disdainful, even somewhat harsh, disappointed. I knew her. I just knew that, in some griped jet-lagged part of her, she half expected to be met. And not by me. Not by his gentle, suffering folks.
“Why won’t she come out?” Robert’s mom asked no one who would answer.
Our Circle had always planned to travel to each other’s hometowns, a personal tour, spots where we’d squandered our short-lived virginities, train tracks where a car wreck nearly took us out at nineteen.
Now the uniformed attendants meant to keep people off the runway slowly noticed her. A young lady not quite on the plane, but not coming off. She blinked, hesitating there. She did look oddly chic. She looked like someone well known if lost here. My Alabama Byrnes was that now.
But the one who finally ventured down those metal stairs looked more like my plain ole Angie, the kid who’d bowed to us all at the clinic, bowed like a boy forced into some family ceremony, a boy making a joke of the dark rental clothes he secretly liked.
Her free hand held a prissy black leather purse that reminded me of a carryall for forty-five rpm records. She made it halfway down the ladder, clinging to its handrail like someone descending while on uppers. But I could tell she believed she resembled a thirties actress doing the spiral staircase while wearing chiffon to the tune of a wind machine.
“Is she … Bob?” Mrs. Gustafson asked. “I don’t think she’s well.”
“She’s well.” I sounded overinsistent. “She’s sad and she’s tired but well, understand?”
Then I slid past the guards. We’d been told to stand back because of propellers and insurance restrictions, but as I jogged, I thought: What can they do to me, what’s left to do to us now?
She, high heels having achieved asphalt, saw me. As I ran, dodging the pile of army equipment, she did too and grew bigger and, through her layers of widowhood, two white arms lifted. Angie barged so forward she ran past one of her own teetering high heels. She made a strange shrill laughing, “Hartley Airedale, son.” I caught and lifted her and she, if short, still hoisted me right back, the two of us bobbing, lifting coughing, shifting weight, taking turns.
“It’s true?” she shook me. She appeared far thinner; some white powder from her face was caking on the veil.
Then I saw her bend to peek under her own plane, scanning piles of luggage being carted here or there.
“What?” I asked, half stern in order to get through to her. And, beyond the dim gauze, Angie’s pretty dark mouth said, “Is … it … is he here yet?”
I breathed. “Yeah. Signed, sealed, delivered, in your cowboy top and his historic velvet with the star pin right in place. —Now, come be nice to the parents again. I think I love the mother. I also feel I’ve been sitting with them at this airport all my life. She considers you a film star, so do get a grip, this is not no West Village Halloween, girlfriend.”
“Honey?” she backed a foot away from me, as if afraid I would assault her. “I’m going down with it. It’s everything happening at once, the show, on top of the others, on top of Robert. You actually feel it in you, very Alien. My little ‘tote’ is for such pills as one cute German doctor found me on short notice. Extremely in the throat. I thought it would make me feel closer to him but he is dead. I am not yet dead, one hears. I lied that day. You had so much on you already. We all did. You’ve guessed. I just didn’t want to go into it. Remember your offer? Well, since you’re the last one standing, and seeing as how my mom considers sickness unladylike and won’t let me cross the Georgia line, looks like you might just be stuck with me. But I warn you, even when I’m healthy, many intelligent people consider me the most dreadful bitch.”
She stepped forward to hold me up a minute. She’d known she would probably have to. Her veil kept blowing in my mouth. I finally said to air above her shoulder, “You’re not making this up. You’re not playing around, are you?”
I felt her shake her head sideways just once. “Oh no.”
I stumbled over then and flopped onto a trunk. I sat, as on some toilet, knees against elbows, hands loose, gaping down. I studied tar. I saw her bare stocking foot. It looked comic, pitiful. This was Iowa in winter. “It’s just lucky for me,” I stood, “that you’re beautiful, a genius, and good. Here’s what we’re going to do together. You’ll move to North Carolina, room with me. You’ll rent a tobacco warehouse, northern exposure, then paint your absolute ass off. I can just see you and Mother, in her new white Miata convertible, you girls wearing white kerchiefs and your biggest sunglasses, youall slipping off to estate-jewelry auctions statewide. —It’ll mainly be all right. Know one reason? We got his bed.”
“Which helps,” she blinked. “Funny how some Robbie hospitality still helps. So you did ask them. And they coughed it right over. —Hartley? you know? you’ve gotten braver.”
“I’m happy to learn that. —So, Angie. How’d your paintings look, up?”
“Never better. Your Alabama is just three inches more immortal. Lot of fuckin’ good it does me. But you’ve got the burden now. I honestly pity you. You are a hell of a nurse, though. Remember the fat RN at St. Vincent’s coming in to ask you about the contact-lens fluid you used to clean his catheter? And now Cinderella finally gets the benefit of all your princely training-on-the-job. I’m afraid I’ll be quite a number, patient-wise. Do my best, though. —We played so hard so well together. What happened to us?”
“Not a clue.”
“Well, get one. Because, Hart?” She lifted my writing hand, then kissed, like a strand of lucky pearls, every single knuckle.
“Hart? You figure you can make something out of it? Our all ending up like this?”
“Yeah. Slow learner, but he learns. Yes ma’am. Believe I can.”
My saying that, it worked on her like the finest of all drugs. Across a beloved face that had only been con
fusion—I saw something slip—something like the warmth of a whole new career.
“Say ‘I do,’” I said.
“‘I do.’”
“Okay then. Because our bed is huge.”
I could see the crowd near the depot watching. I felt conspicuous. What matter? She was here. So, then, propping each other up, we hobbled toward the Gustafsons. Best behavior, the little hardened-sugar couple came down off the wedding cake. I soon noticed that, behind us, a stewardess was bringing Angie’s lost high heel; I saw how that pretty uniformed girl was lifting it aloft, as if it were some valuable slipper that meant something in a fairy tale. Which this was. Is. —The princess’s shoe that’ll fit only one gal in the kingdom and deserves, due to magic, respect. Then I spied, tucked beneath the hostess’s other arm, a glossy brochure. For its cover, an Angie painting reproduced big in living color, then inscribed to the stewardess. I decided, with a mixture of betrayal and delight, “They Know Who She Is. Thanks to HER, They Know. And Thanks, I Guess, to US.”
We approached Robert’s tall blond mother and his short white-collared father, both of them freely waving, crying some. Maybe from watching us out there. Worried, guessing. We’d been being fully who we were, I think, at least in part for them.
Angie neared them first, gloved hand out, poise itself. “Reverend and Mrs. Gustafson—Bob, Beka, I am so sorry. He gave us everything he had, didn’t he? Held nothing back, our love. —How are you all bearing up?”
Other passengers lingered, turning back this way. Angie’s widow’s weeds must’ve helped make plain at least her role in this. Strangers appeared a bit confused, but they surely acted interested. They seemed to understand at least a few things—somebody important had just arrived, someone who could use this whole town’s epic caretaking. I still felt embarrassed, but why?
Let them learn a little.
We were worth it.
Let them go ahead and stare.
Payday
urns out, there are at least four days in the history of Manhattan: the day you first see it, the day you get to move there, that day you—far smarter, far less intact—still find the strength to leave; and the morning you go back, as New York’s most loving, humbled, overqualified tourist.
Been here, done this, know which train.
My agent’s office is being painted, terrible fumes. We need a place to meet midtown. I’ve owned my house in North Carolina for, what? Going on five years. Amazing. My original accent is seeping back to sticky authenticity; my speed has changed from nursing’s gallop to recovery’s full stop; now it’s regained a smoother lope between. I have a few new friends; my first ones were the guys who helped me restore my house. Then acquaintance spread out through the village. Isolation was, for me, a hard state to achieve; I only got there by subtraction. Despite my resolution of solitude, it proved a toughie to maintain. You get pulled back into the world so soon. Especially if you’re nosy. Nosy is another word for hopeful. —You might laugh to hear I have been asked to join the volunteer fire department, just blocks from my house. I’m still debating. But you should see the talent-level in their busy shower room.
My agent, loyal through everything, suggested that we meet here at the Museum of Modern Art. She’s usually ten minutes late, for effect. That’s the birthright of physically beautiful people, a right I grew used to long ago. I settle on one of those backless benches to the lobby’s east, the wall nearest their bookshop.
It’s December and, through revolving doors, people maneuver huge giftwrapped packages. It has just begun to snow. Must be the season’s first storm, judging from how pleased-looking people appear lunging in here. Two women arrive smiling, shaking white powder from their hair, purging fat fur collars.
I sit reading the Times, waiting, though basically I have no talent for waiting. So I try to engage myself by studying tourists (pretending I am not one). These days, I am so out of all things art world; I subscribe to no glossy national magazines, just one local paper; instead I garden, putter, eat, bird-watch. And remember. I have learned to sit in each rocker for up to eleven minutes. Sit there, blank, safe, fatter, stiller.
I know I miss a lot up here in the city. If you lived in Manhattan for fifteen years and if you have the kind of memory I do, you still recognize certain faces from back then. Older, of course, they’re looking more prosperous or seedier. But over there, I see two people, both artists, long married, our age. We all attended openings together; they wouldn’t know a dropout like me but I recall them. They’re older but still seem flourishing, a pair.
Sometimes when you’re feeling agitated, your eyes will choose some arbitrary resting spot. Behind the dark coats of scruffy gorgeous Swedish students, beyond the usual Park Avenue matrons using art as their respectable starting place for luncheon-shopping expeditions, I come to idly focus on a new painting. It is the only picture in this lobby.
I’ve never before seen it. A huge oil, done in blacks and whites, and subtlest pinkish-grays. At once, of course, I know the artist. My sinuses burn. For a moment, part of me wants to bolt from here; another longs to turn toward those audibly revolving doors, expecting a two-part appointment made years ago.
Schoolgirls in gray pleated skirts and blue blazers cluster before the huge canvas. They bunch around their lady teacher, who is pointing out one portion of it—careful not to make actual contact with the valuable surface.
I fold my newspaper and, feeling a strange kind of hunter’s excitement, almost a nausea of attention, rise. I approach the painting, but slow, as if stalking the rarest of game. It might move. It might leap away, achieve the street, run straight for woods.
I feel atypically tall, somewhat wobbly, older than seems possible, thicker at my palpitating center. And yet I somehow make my Airedale way across this crowded public civic space. I keep my head down, fearful that, if I confront my goal too directly, someone, something, might push me back from it.
A fear comes: I will die before I get to it.
But no, you don’t even need a ticket to see this one. It’s the “teaser” that they stick in front of sideshows. Surefire bait to draw you in. I slide through conversations in three languages I can identify but not speak.
Its underpainting has a snapping and splashed energy. Raw X’s form the basic grid. These marks have been set down with an enviable sense of brushy freedom. Paint was trusted to do what it must at this impossible speed.
Hidden among the darks, stenciled digits, letters resting on their sides, paint scraped very thick, runes arranged—it seems—with a sort of archaic grandeur. Since the picture stretches six by nine feet, you feel that any artist who could manage so long a reach must be someone of immense physical scale.
Set overtop this whorl and slap, a frame of draperies, rendered as if around some puppet stage, valance swags around the picture’s entire top. Within curtains, susceptible to blackness underneath—a faint pink over-sketch shows a cottage, grayish rose. It has shutters, an opened half door, thatched roof, hollyhocks and azaleas standing sentinel, drifts of sea foam. This home seems the witch’s, as overly inviting as one in some fairy tale that is all violent twists. The kitschy sketch, though done with much ironic haste, still seems full of longing. There’s something childlike in its false cheer, the pathos of promised shelter.
Up and down either six-foot end, words show through the paint. First these look like accidental squiggles, until, closer, you see they’re sentences; each has been speckled with paint so as to at first seem hidden.
But I just saw two schoolgirls cock their heads, deciphering the flanking statements. One, to the right, offers the promise of fond slavery, a hope for free meals ahead; the left one threatens the artist’s very hands, promises the artist will soon suffer terribly and never paint again.
Finally, in the picture’s lower center, two human hands are outlined, then painted to appear dimensional. They exist side by side, small puppets downstage within too large a proscenium. A His, a Hers. Her hand wears a ring.
From its stone, a compass radiates. Elaborate directional arrows reach the picture’s farthest edges. The arrows are rendered in many fine lines as from some antique engraved map. At the center of this compass, in the picture’s bottom center, on the ring finger of the smaller hand, hers, a collage element.
The third finger seems dwarfed by so huge a gemstone, a big pale chunk, three-dimensional. I bend nearer to see it better:
It is a block of wood, maybe eight inches square. It has been enameled white—the outer edges outlined in sloppy double stripes of black. And, as on some child’s nursery building block, in the center of each, freely hand-painted, rests the number 282.
I try ignoring the teacher’s standardized lecture on this artist. Gender role questioning, “masculine” approach to paint application but a psychological … etc. I wait. A pretty droopy girl finally scuffs off, revealing the wall-mounted label. Not wanting to whip out my reading glasses (they date me so), instead I ease back two full feet. Back, more back, till these official modernist block letters playing before my eyes finally swim into a clarity that holds.
Artist: Alabama Byrnes
American. Female, b. 1952. d. 1990.
Oil and collage. 9 by 6 feet.
Plays Well With Others Page 41