The Shimmering State

by Meredith Westgate

  When Lucien goes over those years in his mind, trying to remember how they got to that one afternoon, the guilt clouds his memory, covering every time he did show up. His mother had gotten better so many times. The cancer always came back. Lucien thought his heart couldn’t take it anymore. But then it did. He wished he could stop feeling anything—the hope, the disappointment, the fear. And then that last week, the last day, in his apartment in Bushwick, six feet on the table, smoking weed with his roommates, he finally did. Their smoke fogged the room, dimming it like an old, poorly developed photograph in his memory.

  “I’m sure you had your reasons,” Liv says, finally piercing his familiar spiral. “You’re a good person, Lucien.”

  “I don’t see what one has to do with the other. Good people do bad things all the time. Look at me, I even treat my grandmother like shit. I can’t help her. I wait to visit someone who doesn’t even recognize me, or want me there.”

  “That’s not true,” Liv interrupts. “You do not treat her like shit, Lucien. Just your being here means something.”

  “That’s what they tell every family who has to watch a loved one die.”

  Liv grabs his hand under the covers.

  “Think of all the times you were there, it’s not your fault that the one time—”

  “But I begrudged her,” Lucien says, vomiting the words—and then there it is. “That one time, I actually begrudged her. My roommates could just sit there, lazy and high. I watched them ignore calls from their parents all the time, they laughed and groaned each time their phones rang. They blacked out and woke up places they didn’t know. They’d gone through college either drunk or hungover or high. All those years I lived at home, I treated my cell phone like a fucking pager. I wanted her to stop interrupting my life.”

  Lucien cannot stop talking now; each new emotion expressed—confessed—demands another. He watches Liv’s face as he speaks, waiting for the disgust, the horror, to show. He is almost baiting her now, what more could it take?

  “I hate myself for saying this, but it felt good ignoring her. Hearing my friend yell at her like that. I remember feeling so satisfied. I’m an adult, I deserved to have some independence. To have something for myself. She was my mother and I loved her, but apparently I never fucking forgave her for being so sick.”

  “You’re human,” Liv says. “You’re allowed to be angry. None of it is fair.”

  Now all Lucien feels is grateful, for the pace at which Liv keeps talking so he can breathe; grateful for the even, unfazed tone of her voice; grateful for the fact that when he looks at her, blurred through tears that he won’t let run, she is looking straight back at him.

  “She was my favorite person. Now she’s gone and I’ve got nothing but free time. I’ve got nothing. That was all I wanted, right?”

  “The more you talk about her, the way you miss her, maybe then it’s like she’s still alive.”

  “Maybe,” Lucien says, and all he can think about are the pills.

  Both of them lie in silence, staring at the ceiling. Then Liv presses her hand into Lucien’s chest. He must’ve fallen back asleep. He almost can’t believe he said all that. He rubs his face. Salt from a dried tear sticks to the outer corner of his eye.

  “What’re you doing today?”

  “I was going to see my grandmother this morning.”

  “Why don’t we go to the beach?” Liv says. “Your grandmother will be there tomorrow, and you deserve to have some fun. Plus the air will be clearer over there.”

  Lucien rolls over to think. He appreciates the attempt at diversion, Liv finally understanding. He still wants a cigarette. Or better, one of the pills in his apartment. He didn’t mention those in his plans for the day. Now just the thought of that promised escape, the moment before he leaves his body, energizes him and takes him out of his despair enough that here, beside Liv, he can think of another way, too. Before she starts talking again, he leans into her, his face against her bare shoulder. Her skin is cool, even under the covers. The smell of her skin, coconut and citrus, makes him forget. He traces a freckle on her bicep with the tip of his tongue. Liv giggles and blushes as he moves toward her collarbone. He gets up on his knees, straddling her, then wraps an arm under her waist and pulls her down off the pillow so she lies flat, hair sprawled like a halo above her head.

  * * *

  Liv drives Lucien back to Echo Park for a quick stop on the way. She needs to drop off a fresh case of collagen bone broth at Astral Bodies. Going south on Sunset, Lucien feels a subtle effervescence under his skin as they pass the Vista.

  “Another superhero movie?” Liv says. “They never show anything good anymore.”

  Lucien isn’t listening; he’s too focused on getting up to his apartment to grab a pill from his coffee grounds while she is distracted downstairs. To prolong the remaining pills, Lucien has begun grinding them into a powder and pinching a bit into a water bottle, to keep a subtle wash over everything he does. Just enough to keep him out of his own head. Just enough to crest without the obligation of understanding all that comes up. Only the escape. Only the forgetting. Enough to fill the emptiness inside of him with Florence’s lingering wholeness. Her calming, optimistic synesthesia. With her he feels yellow. He feels sweet.

  Lucien finishes the water bottle before they even reach the Westside. He’s never enjoyed a car ride more in his entire life, though from the way Liv keeps smiling at him, she clearly thinks this chilled-out state is thanks to their conversation earlier.

  When at last the ocean appears at the end of every street, Liv parks the car and leads Lucien toward the long wooden ramp to the beach. The tall palms lining the street level of Santa Monica above bend as though they, too, are stretching toward the breeze. Together they weave past beach cruisers in candy colors, fast and silent automated scooters, and the stream of tourists holding tightly to their children’s hands as they look in all directions, the dazed attention of vacation making them harder to navigate around. Liv turns onto the sand, and they walk on the seemingly endless stretch of beach to the ocean, in the direction of Venice, where the pathway gets sandier and gradually there is more spray paint, skate parks, and weed wafting in the air. Lucien looks back to see the Ferris wheel fading behind them, Malibu all but hidden behind the haze.

  Just then Lucien’s phone starts ringing; it’s Natasha.

  “Natasha.”

  “The prodigal son, he lives! How are you? Don’t tell me, you’ve gone LA on me. Am I catching you during yoga on the beach? No really, don’t tell me, I’ll kill myself. It snowed four inches today.”

  Lucien laughs good-naturedly, his palms already starting to sweat with the reality setting in. He cannot believe he picked up. He hasn’t listened to any of her voicemails because in some way, he knows. He owes her new work, a new show—or nothing. They have nothing to talk about without that.

  And he doesn’t mention that he is, in fact, at the beach.

  “Snow sounds nice. Have you seen the news?”

  “Fires look awful. What is this world?” she continues. “Anyway, Lucien. You’re a hard guy to track down.”

  “I’m sorry, things have been—”

  “I’ve been calling because I have something too good to share in an email. We’ve got a show with Gagosian at the Frieze—and get this, darling, they want to show one of your pieces. Now do you love me?”

  “What?” Lucien hardly believes it, news like this without any new work. “Which piece, how’d this come about?”

  “I want to hear you say it first.”

  “I love you, Natasha.”

  Lucien feels Liv’s side glance. If she could see Natasha, late forties, just five feet tall, glinting silver hair.

  “It’s a retrospective honoring your mother.”

  Lucien’s heart drops. Any lingering high evaporates.

  “No one could do that without your work, of course; that entire series was so good. Just brilliant, and such a hit. They’re thinking of the one in th
e kitchen, silk pajamas. Now that the house is sold, and after the Times article, it has a certain cachet. But the one on the respirator with the clouds overlaid was also getting a lot of buzz if I remember. God, here I go. Sorry, I’m calling for your input. Though we might need to be flexible. Lucien?”

  “Sorry, yeah. Right. No, any of those, whatever they think.”

  Lucien’s mother was with Gagosian; of course they were interested in this series.

  “Okay, so here’s the rub,” Natasha says. “I want to pitch some new stuff, too; a sort of while-you’re-here run at another show, right? It’s amazing that the excitement is still there for that work, really, but we need to leverage that before it’s old news, or before you become too locked into one style, you know? Lucien, this is Gagosian. You won’t get their eyes again soon.”

  Lucien feels dizzy at the thought of those pieces—his mother’s face to scale, no makeup, overlaid with the cloudy ether he’d spread with a palette knife. They feel almost prescient now that she’s gone, unbearable. Before it’s old news. Lucien had dispersed his mother among the clouds when they were still together, sent bits of her up to the heavens for her to see. Those were pieces he could only do while he could still hear her in the next room. How could he look at them now?

  “Lucien?”

  “Sure, yeah, that makes sense.”

  “So you’ve got some new work?”

  “I do, yeah.”

  He lies. Whether to spare Natasha or himself—what’s the alternative, though? Actually I haven’t done anything worth showing in months and I may never again.

  “Fantastic. I’ll set up a call in the next week or two to video chat; or we’ll fly you back. Can the new stuff travel? What’s the scale? We can always print here first, if they’re large. Before you start to play.”

  You should leave me, too, he thinks. Last one standing, just finish me off.

  “Lucien, have I lost you?”

  “Let’s do a call first,” he says.

  “I truly cannot wait. Hope you’re inspired out there.”

  Lucien glances back at Liv, staring out to the ocean.

  “Hope everything’s good with you, Natasha. I’ll talk to you soon.”

  Lucien cannot imagine going back; not to the city, or to the shows. Those pieces, bigger than him, so much bigger than her. But he also can’t stand the thought of staying away, or missing it. Natasha hardly even presented it as a choice, did she? There was no question there. How could he miss an opportunity like that? His mother wouldn’t want him to. And yet—a retrospective, already? How could he bear that either? She hardly felt gone. Fuck the shows; fuck the memory. That’s what his mother would have said. You have to take care of you. That’s what she’d have done, too. Through the work.

  The air around him disappears, his breath shortening, the panic returning. How did he even get here? Liv stands beside him, waiting at arm’s length. He hands her his phone and begins to peel off his shirt, unbuckling his pants down to his boxers and leaving them as he runs, sand sprinkling the backs of his shins, chest-first into the low tide. First is a shock to his chest, the grunt-searching for breath, and then—submerged—no hope of anything touching him. Not here, where the physical sensations of his body overpower everything, even his ability to breathe, bobbing in the waves.

  The Santa Monica Mountains are silhouetted in varying depths of purple in the distance. Beyond those, a dull gray has settled from the smoke in the distance. Surfers in the water look focused in an untroubled way that feels so far from Lucien’s reach. Once he’s out of the ocean, Liv leads them back to the pedestrian path on the Venice Boardwalk, with its mix of tattoo parlors and Australian cafés; people eating breakfast burritos next to a shirtless man yelling at the seagulls that Jesus Saves!

  A blueness hangs in the air, the sun just starting to go down and further silhouetting the mountains, shades that would look surreal if painted as they appear, in purple and cobalt. Sharp shadows cross the sand, peaked from the breeze. Maybe he will come back here with his camera, and another water bottle that seems to be giving him new eyes; or is that just the pressure from Natasha, finally manifesting?

  No, this is more. His eyes, finally working.

  Families on the beach pack up their things; many of them under tents with coolers undoubtedly drove hours to get here for the day. The little children running past him will be zonked out in the car within ten minutes of being back on the road. The thought of them in the backseat while their parents talk and drive is nice, but now Liv is saying something about how tech bros dominate the real estate here, making it inaccessible and impossible to find a place for under two million. They are also ruining the once cool restaurants with SF vibes, she says, but Lucien can’t stop looking at all the families.

  “Since we’re over here,” Liv says, sounding nervous for a moment, “maybe you can come with me to this Friendsgiving? It’s right nearby.”

  “Liv, I dunno.”

  “Please please please. We’ll stay five minutes, eat some food, and head back east. Come on, I’m starving.”

  Lucien feels manipulated, and now trapped. But he is starving, too.

  They turn into alley after alley—Lucien now understands that half of Venice is alleys—until a grid of canals unfolds before them. Here the light is still stretching. Charming houses reflect themselves like Narcissus. A swan floats by, rippling their mirror. Elaborate patios are set right along the walkway, with barbecues so close passing voyeurs could grab a hot dog.

  They stop on the arch of a wooden footbridge and look out across the canal at a tiny log cabin, a beach cottage, the modern glass cube boldly lacking an exterior wall or two, another tiny Swiss chalet. Liv holds her phone out over the edge to take a photograph, and when Lucien looks down, for a moment he doesn’t recognize himself. Then a family of ducks floats under the bridge, breaking their reflection into ripples moving in separate directions.

  Voices come from behind a row of hedges framing a trellised archway. Inside the gate, a manicured lawn with succulents, flowering cacti, and a trickling water fountain leads to a modified cottage with high peaked ceilings and a front of all glass. Inside is bohemian chic, with whitewashed wood and mismatched art on the walls. Bright pops of color, a leopard pillow or two. This is the kind of beach house you might see on a network sitcom, likely far beyond the means of any characters, but unassuming in its charm.

  Liv points to the hostess, who she describes as a celebrity stylist, in the kitchen. The kitchen is open format, with brass details and a large pink marble island. Most people seem to be congregated here, which is promising. No party oriented around food can be that bad. The crowd cheers in the kitchen as the hostess, Amelie, flips a burger into the air and onto a potato bun, with cheese, smashing it together until it oozes. Lucien is relieved there appears to be no turkey, no stuffing. Another table holds dessert after dessert, brought by guests based on the mismatched plates and containers. There is something surprisingly chic to serving the most casual food executed to perfection. The lack of pretense in the kitchen; the lack of inhibitions in how many one might eat, as the smash burgers pile up, ready to go back around the room. An actress Lucien recognizes from a CW billboard he drives by every day walks past him as she takes a bite of her burger. She takes so long to chew that by the time she swallows she has already put the plate down and is engrossed in another conversation.

  A few guests sitting on couches in the living room look familiar to Lucien, likely from his time photographing events in New York. He looks away when one of them seems to be watching him back; maybe they recognize him, too, though they’d never figure out why. The party reeks of the type who lives between New York and Los Angeles, never sticking around long enough to really get either one. What is New York without the struggle? Los Angeles without the boredom? To live in both places is to belong nowhere, but people claim it with pride. Lucien watches in amazement as, one by one, people walk over and start new conversations. The group is unusually welcoming, a
s most rooms are where everyone is someone—because the assumption is that you are, too.

  “Lucien is an amazing artist,” Liv says, and Lucien must have zoned out because another guy, early thirties, wearing an ill-fitted denim jacket, stands with them. He takes a bite of smash burger and opens his eyes wide, nodding as he chews.

  Harry, a talent manager, tells Lucien what he does like he expects him to already know who he represents. But now all Lucien can think about is how Liv knows his art, and what she might have dug up online. Or does she just want him to be talented and so proclaimed it? He isn’t sure which is worse. He wonders if she has seen the series of his mother. The rawness that made the collection a success also sent him running and now here he is, thinking about it again.

  “He had a show at Wes Neilson. And his dealer just told him today that they want him to come to the Frieze this year. With Gagosian.”

  Lucien cannot believe her; he only told her about that because it made him anxious, the idea of resuming his work around his mother. He told her because he wasn’t sure if he was ready.

  “Liv,” he says. “That’s not definitely happening.”

  “Well, they want you,” she says proudly. “The question is if they’ll get you.”

  Again, he sees this other side to Liv. She prides herself on being grounded and detached from all the things most people clutch, yet here she is, parading him around despite knowing how he feels. If this is what she wants from him, she’ll be disappointed.

  “So what kind of art?” Harry says loudly, as if repeating himself. “I mean, that’s probably gauche. What’s your medium? Isn’t that what they say?”