Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories
Page 20
What in God’s name have you done, Leanda! You know I hate tattoos on women.
She was feeling panic, for Jayson would learn about the tattoo eventually. Even if she kept it hidden, as Carroll did her tattoos, in the presence of relatives. She felt a thrill of horror—what if Carroll had recorded some of the tattoo session on her cell phone, and sent it out? A multiple mailing?
That night, she hadn’t wanted to go out with Carroll, or with anyone. She’d had enough of going out—of being “festive”—several days on the Vineyard helping to prepare for the lavish party—at a time when she needed to prepare her portfolio for the Camden (Maine) Arts Colony. The deadline was August 15 for a place in the fall/winter.
Her friend Nicholas had sent his application already. It was certain that Nick would get a place there since he’d been a Camden arts fellow several times in the past, and the director was enthusiastic about his work. It had been their plan to go together—Leanda had promised to tell Jayson that she couldn’t be his assistant any longer.
That evening, Nick was going to call her—but she’d gone out with Carroll, and hadn’t answered her cell phone when the call came. It was essentially a life that wasn’t adult—she knew this. To be an adult you had a serious job, you supported yourself, you were married or living with a loyal companion; you might even have a child, or children. (It was like a gull’s shriek in her head: she was twenty-seven.) You didn’t live much of the time with your family, you didn’t sacrifice your (still reasonably young) life working (for no pay) for your demanding father.
Like one of the voracious shorebirds, Jayson Johnston was—flapping its feathered wings, stabbing its beak into what was edible, mad glaring eyes, shrieking cries of insatiable hunger.
A sudden swirl of nausea. This had to be—what?
She hadn’t gotten around to listening to her voice mail since she knew that Nick would have called, and she felt guilty about not seeing him. She’d invited him to the wedding and then—unconscionably, in a text message—she’d dis-invited him.
It had to be the tattoo. A dirty needle!
Maybe—she was infected with AIDS?
(But not from a tattooist’s needle, was that possible?)
(Of course it was possible. Very likely, Foxy Joe Hall was HIV-positive.)
(But why had Carroll taken her to that terrible place? Didn’t Carroll like her?)
(Of course, Carroll liked her! Of her girl-cousins, Carroll and Maggie had always liked her best, better than her sisters. They’d told her so, many times.)
She’d begun to shiver. She listened to Nick’s message:
Hey Leanda, where are you? Did you forget to call when
you got back from the Vineyard? Can I come over—
tonight? Or—tomorrow?
The second message:
Leanda? Where are you? Are you back from the wedding?
D’you want me to vet your portfolio? Are you working on
it now? When will it be finished? Maybe—supper tonight?
Hey—I miss you. It’s OK about the wedding.
To her dismay, there were a half-dozen calls from Nick, plus text messages, which she hadn’t somehow discovered until now. She couldn’t bring herself to contact him.
The male gaze: she knew all about this, intellectually. In her Contemporary Culture seminar at Yale she’d written a paper on the subject. She’d quoted many impressive sources, included many terrific examples of the male gaze from Renaissance madonnas through odalisques by Manet, Renoir, Picasso and “exploited female figures” in Andy Warhol’s lithographs. It wasn’t just in pornography that the male gaze was evident but in serious classical art—virtually everywhere. Yet, Leanda understood that she had no way of defining herself outside the male gaze. If it were not the male gaze of men of her own approximate age like Nick, or her male cousins, it was the (nurturing, if judgmental) male gaze of older men: her professors at Yale, her instructors at the Parsons School, her male relatives, her father Jayson Johnston.
This gaze was like oxygen. Women who weren’t aware of it were deceived into thinking that they could exist, they could breathe, on their own.
Girls were rarely so deceived. Girls understood, what women tried to forget.
Even in her fever-state, trying to work at her computer doggedly experimenting with Photoshop variants on her best photographs from the past year, Leanda couldn’t escape the truth of this insight: that the male gaze so defined her, she could not imagine surviving, still less living, without it.
So, there was Nick. Before Nick there’d been other Nicks.
These hadn’t been boys (like Mitchie) who’d teased and tormented her and laughed at her. These had been boys who’d been kind to her, drawn to her shy stammering manner, her beautiful but often downcast eyes, the bruised-looking mouth that could be induced to smile. Of course, many of these boys, and now men, weren’t tall—they were drawn to Leanda by her diminutive size. Here was a young woman who wasn’t, well—womanly.
At least, at the start Nick had adored her. They’d met at the Parsons School where Nick was teaching a workshop in Photoshop which Leanda had taken. Nick wasn’t much older than Leanda but his photography was so clearly superior to hers, she’d felt a kind of relieved gratitude, she wouldn’t have to pretend otherwise as usually she did when she dated artists.
Two years they’d been together. But not living together. Nick complained that Leanda didn’t answer her phone, didn’t text back when he texted her. Gently he complained that she worried too much about her family, for a woman of her age.
“It isn’t as if they worry about you.”
She’d invited Nick to her sister’s wedding, and to stay with her at the family “farm” on Menemsha Cross Road. She’d intended to introduce Nick to Jayson Johnston—at last. And if they slept together in the same room in the guesthouse, that would define Nick as Leanda’s lover, unmistakably.
Her sisters thought Leanda was so sexless, so backward, she’d never had an actual boyfriend. Beautiful face and perfect straight-black glossy hair to her shoulders but disfigured by ineptitude as by acne. She’d never brought anyone home to introduce to the family, and certainly not to Daddy.
Two days before they were to leave for the Vineyard, after Nick had booked tickets for them on Jet Blue/Cape Air, Leanda had told him it wasn’t possible, she had to go alone. Unforgivably she’d disinvited him by way of a text message—she hadn’t had the courage to call him, or even to write an explanatory e-mail.
Of course, Nick had been disappointed. But not angry, as another man might have been.
He’d been, Leanda thought, not so surprised.
Now, she was feeling so sick—with guilt? regret? poison in her bloodstream?—she couldn’t call him.
He’d believed that Leanda was a beautiful woman. He’d loved it that she was mixed-race and that she was vague about her probable background—all she really knew with certainty was that she’d been adopted as an infant by Jayson and Gabriele Johnston, who’d been forty-eight and twenty-nine at the time.
Now, she was looking so frankly sick—sallow-skin, lank hair, dry scabby lips—there was no disguising the fact that she was of Filipina extraction. She dreaded anyone seeing her in such a diminished state not as the delicate-boned Asian-American beauty the male gaze registered but as a totally ordinary-looking slant-eyed girl of the kind Nick had been seeing all his life in school, the kind who’d probably cleaned house for his mother, and registered in the male gaze as invisible.
So she hadn’t called Nick whose father was a doctor associated with Columbia Presbyterian. She hadn’t called any of her college friends who lived in the city and who might have come immediately to her. Instead she’d called Carroll and left a message she hoped didn’t sound whiny:
Hi Carroll? This is Leanda. I guess I don’t feel so good—
I think I’m sick—maybe the needle was infected?—the tattoo
looks red—feels sore—I don’t think it’s healing right—could
This was 9:25 P.M., August 4. At 9:40 P.M. she called Carroll again.
Carroll? It’s Leanda. I’m feeling kind of—a little panicky,
I’m kind of sick—I’m afraid to call 911. I’m afraid of the ER.
I’ve been vomiting but I don’t feel any better. I have a fever—
101.1 degrees. Could you come over, if you’re in the city?
I don’t want to call my mother, you know what she’s like she’d
be hysterical . . . Please can you call me back, Carroll? Maybe
you could come over . . .
In the space of several hours Leanda would call several other persons—her sisters Jody and Quinn, who had apartments in the city but who weren’t in the city at this time; and her cousin Harriet. There were older female relatives (including her mother) she considered and dismissed.
No one answered her calls, and no one called back. By this time it was nearing midnight. She’d taken two capsules of Tylenol—that was good for a fever, wasn’t it? She’d been vomiting—that meant she was in danger of dehydration. But when she tried to drink a glass of water, she choked, and vomited it up at once.
Her heart was beating strangely. Her skin itched, burnt. There were welts, terribly itchy welts, on her thighs, and inside her clothes on her belly and chest. She had sensitive skin: allergic to certain kinds of seafood, tomatoes, even onions. She wondered if she’d eaten something spoiled or contaminated.
In desperation finally she called her mother.
The phone number wasn’t familiar to her, she’d forgotten it out of neglect. Had to look it up. Oh but she was so sick!—vomit leaking up into her mouth.
And the cool smug voice answered:
You have reached the residence of Gabriele Heideman-Johnston. Ms. Heideman-Johnston is unavailable. If this is an emergency you may want to contact Ms. Heideman-Johnston’s secretary whose phone is—.
It was her mother’s revenge, Leanda thought. For her mother had been jealous of her and her father, the special bond between them.
As Gabriele, at a young age, had supplanted the middle-aged Mrs. Charlotte Johnston, whom Leanda had never met, who’d supplanted a woman named Marilynne Meyer, whom Leanda had also never met, who’d been the mother of her sisters and brother, so Leanda as a girl had supplanted her mother in her father’s affections.
At the time, growing up, Leanda hadn’t been conscious of this, or only barely conscious. It had become more evident, painfully so, when she’d graduated from college, and had been prevailed upon by her father to spend time on the Vineyard with him.
At Brearley, as at Yale, Leanda’s father seemed to be “known”—she hadn’t had to speak of Jayson Johnston, and had rarely spoken of him, out of shyness.
In such schools there are known families. Amid most of those others, who are not-known.
Leanda Johnston’s family situation had not been especially complicated, as such situations went. The majority of her Brearley classmates had been from families in which separation, divorce, remarriage, custody disputes, half-siblings/step-siblings, and adoptions were commonplace; not a few were, like Leanda, the children of an older father who’d married down a generation or two from his own generation, thus his youngest daughter had “older” siblings, practically of another generation. There were several Chinese girls who’d been adopted by Caucasian parents and these were among the very best Brearley students; there was a single dazzling-beautiful Ethiopian girl; but there was no other Filipina-American adoptee so far as Leanda knew.
Why did you adopt me, if you didn’t want me. If you couldn’t love me—this, Leanda had never asked Gabriele.
SHE’D BEEN TOUCHING the tattoo area, that throbbed and burnt her fingers. She was sure this had to be the infection. But to call 911—this would be an irrevocable decision.
She wondered if she was being ridiculous—Carroll would laugh at her.
She thought If an ambulance comes for me, that will begin a process I can’t stop. She thought of her father in Chilmark, how upset and anxious he’d be to learn that Leanda had been admitted to a hospital in Manhattan, with an infected tattoo. Her father had become increasingly irrational in his dislike of Manhattan he called a hellhole, in the summer a sauna. He’d resent feeling that he should travel all the way to Manhattan to see his daughter in the hospital, if the ER didn’t discharge her. She thought He will hate this. He will know how weak I am.
At some point that night Leanda lost her balance, slipped and fell heavily on the hardwood floor. Her stupid bad luck, she missed one of the rugs and struck her knee on the floor, stunned with pain. She began to weep, helplessly.
You deserve this! Whatever it is.
THE JOHNSTONS WERE a distinguished old New England family.
Invariably it was said of Jayson Johnston (b. 1938, Bangor, Maine) that he was of a distinguished old New England family.
In the 1870s, Jayson Johnston’s great-great-grandfather moved to New York City. By the turn of the century, he’d built a small brownstone mansion at Park Avenue and Seventy-fifth Street and soon after the family acquired ninety acres of hilly land in the southwest corner of Martha’s Vineyard, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.
The brownstone had long ago been sold. Of the ninety acres at least twenty remained; the house was a shingle-board farmhouse with somewhere beyond a dozen sizable rooms. There was an old hay barn, and there was an old icehouse.
The irony was, Jayson Johnston (who was to live out most of the remainder of his life on Martha’s Vineyard) frequently made the statement that he hated islands.
Jayson complained to interviewers, as to anyone who would listen, that as long as you were on island, you lived a myopic and miniature life.
He’d been coming to Chilmark for nearly eight decades. It wasn’t a fact he was proud of, he said.
No matter that some of the most beautiful photographs of Jayson Johnston’s “later years” had been taken on island.
There was a fragment of a bull’s spinal column that had turned up in a field, Father used as a doorstop in his studio. Leanda had shrunk from seeing this, as a child. She shivered to think how a living creature had ended up in such a place. A bull was large, noble—handsome. All living things were recycled for the use of other living things, she knew. But it seemed so cruel.
He’d taken photographs of the vertebrae, in a patch of sunshine on a stone path. Dried autumn leaves, a crack in the stone path. Intricate shadows of the vertebrae, like lace.
AT THE WEDDING in the Old Whaling Church in Edgartown Leanda had sat with the family of course. She’d sat between her father (his foot in a cast! he’d fallen down a flight of steps and broken his ankle) and her aunt Elsie. It was a relief that she’d disinvited Nick—her father was in a sulky mood, you couldn’t tell if he was feeling physically unwell or just brooding. He wasn’t unhappy about the wedding—he hadn’t so very much interest in his older children who’d long ago slipped free of his grasp and so seemed less real to him than the youngest girl who was still his.
Leanda understood this. Leanda knew it wasn’t the time to challenge this assumption.
In the old Greek Revival church where the most elegant Vineyard weddings were frequently held, Leanda had felt something turn in her heart. It was beyond admiration for—envy of—her vivacious sister who was marrying Stanley Cummins III who was an investment banker in Boston. It was not even disappointment, that no effort of smiling could quite disguise, that Maggie hadn’t asked her to be one of her bridesmaids. (In fact, Leanda hadn’t expected to be asked. But pride wouldn’t allow her to reveal this.) She’d been devastated to understand that never would she be married in this historic old church, never would she be married to any man of whom the Johnstons would approve, or even like. She knew.
For she’d had a birth mother of whom—(anyone could surmise)—she’d have been ashamed, if she’d known the woman. For the woman had given up her baby. What
kind of person gives up her baby? People like the Johnstons and their friends and neighbors on Martha’s Vineyard and in Manhattan didn’t give up their babies. In their world, a baby is precious. A baby bearing their DNA is priceless. In the other world, which is most of the world, a baby is very often unwanted.
Leanda thought It’s a curse that can never be lifted. Yet they tried to love me, I think.
Certainly, her (adoptive) father had tried to love her. Of all of the Johnstons it was Jayson who hadn’t the capacity to be hypocritical. He said outright what he felt, and he felt exactly what showed in his face.
She’d tried to be “festive,” however. She was the most reliable of people, not only willing to behave as others wished her to behave, but positively eager to do so.
She’d helped prepare for the party. Two hundred guests! She’d tried hard to prevail upon Gabriele to come, and had nearly succeeded. She’d helped organize the wedding rehearsal, the rehearsal dinner. She’d gone on errands into Vineyard Haven as she’d been bade.
She’d helped reason with Brook on matters of overwhelming if ephemeral significance. She spent time with her father who was irascible and depressed, shuffling about with his foot in a heavy cast. (He’d broken his foot in a mysterious fall, in the house. The closemouthed way in which this fall was spoken of by the relatives, you had to suppose he’d been drinking.) If she’d burst into tears, it was safely in private.
At the party in the Chilmark house, she’d been urged to drink Champagne. A delicate “flute” of the most exquisite Champagne.
Fairly quickly people were drinking too much. Fairly quickly there was much laughter. Carroll and her half-sister Quinn were urging Leanda to dance with X, Y, Z. Names had flown past her, like inebriated hummingbirds. Leanda was wearing a pale blue silk sheath and a jade necklace her father had brought back to her from China; she’d begun to feel precarious in her high-heeled shoes, to which she wasn’t accustomed.