Please See Us

by Caitlin Mullen

  LILY

  ON MY NEXT SHIFT I waited until Emily was on her lunch break, then clicked around on the security system to see if there was any chance of looking at the archived footage—the system let me access the past twenty-four hours, but nothing beyond that without a supervisor’s password. We were able to access the hotel’s records to help with our scheduling and billing, but we could only see who was in the hotel at that moment—not who had stayed in the past or when. Just in case, I searched the name “Peaches,” but as I suspected would happen, the system didn’t turn up any results. Clara had wanted me to text her, though I found myself holding out. I was worried that once I told her I didn’t have news she could use, she would bail. And I wanted to keep her close, watch over her. I couldn’t stop picturing that man who had come into her shop. Couldn’t stop picturing Steffanie, the way that, before that night at the club, she used to snort when she laughed.

  I was struggling, too, to find anything else about the artist and the paintings from Mil’s. I had gone back to her house to take photos on my phone. As I crossed the street, I’d worried that they wouldn’t be as striking as I remembered, that I had only been impressed by them because they’d been so unexpected.

  Mil surprised me by greeting me with a hug. She was wearing a stack of bangles that clacked against my spine.

  “Sorry, I’ve got my armor on today.”

  “Oh, do you have plans? I can come back another time.”

  “Not at all. But you know how it is. Some days you just need a little … fortification. I’m so glad you like those paintings, but it makes me miss my husband is all.”

  “Oh Mil, I’m so sorry. We don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”

  “Don’t be silly. He would love this, a professional like you taking an interest in his stuff.”

  I winced. In New York, I was still best known as a hysteric or a pawn or, maybe the worst, a co-conspirator—someone just as cynical as Matthew who had accepted her role in the whole mess. “Mil, I work at a spa. Not sure how much of a professional I am anymore.”

  “Nonsense. You’re brilliant and you know it. You head on up, and I’ll get us some iced tea.”

  As I made my way through her house, I braced myself for disappointment. Back up that narrow, creaking stairway, wallpapered in a faded blue floral, into the little square of a bedroom with its chenille spread. I stood in front of the closet and held my breath.

  But as I brought the paintings out of the closet, propped them up along the wall of the bedroom to look at them in the light, I felt the same thrill, the same hum of purpose in my chest. The artist’s use of color was extraordinary, vivid and unexpected and strange. The painting Mil had mentioned, the demolition of the Traymore, showed clouds of gray dust lined in neon pink. It seemed to hint at the garishness to come, the blaring neons and gaudy mirrors, the pandering, hypersexed billboards. One of the paintings of the diving girl was done exclusively in shades of blue, invoking a somber, melancholy impression. Even her perfect smile was shaded a lovely, sad periwinkle. A smile full of secrets.

  After several failed attempts to dredge up anything remotely relevant via Google, I decided to go to the Atlantic City public library before my next shift at the spa. Someone had to know something about this painter—Atlantic City is too small a town to hold that kind of a secret. Someone would recognize the signature or point me to a tiny vanity-press book about local artists. I asked the librarian on duty who I could talk to about the paintings. I told her I thought that the painter might be working from photographs, at least for some of the paintings, given the time span they covered.

  “Well, I’m afraid that due to the latest round of budget cuts, the woman who maintains our archives is now only here on Mondays and Fridays. She’s the expert, but maybe I can help?”

  I scrolled through the images on my phone: the Victorian ladies on the promenade, the portraits of the soldiers and nurses, the sleek chrome-accented cars of the 1920s, the first Miss America contestants in home-sewn costumes—until I found several shots of the signature. The woman squinted at the screen, then frowned.

  “I’ve never seen anything like these before. Where did you say you came across them?”

  “In my neighbor’s house. Her husband used to collect them. She said he bought them from a man who sold used furniture and odds and ends on a street corner, but she has no idea who the man was or where he set up shop. Her husband passed away years ago. She’s going to dig through his papers, but my impression is he was something of a pack rat so it might take a while to find anything like notes or a receipt. I figured I would try you here.”

  She shook her head. “Sue might know. I would let you look at the archives, but I’m the only one here today and I can’t leave the desk. Unfortunately only a small fraction of our collection is digitized. We just don’t have the manpower to get most of it online. But she’s in, let me see, Friday at eleven. Can you try to stop by then?”

  My first bit of luck so far: I had a closing shift that day and would be able to pop in again before I headed over to the spa. “Sure, that works for me.”

  “You can try to research in our databases, too, but so many of our subscriptions have been slashed.”

  “Friday sounds great, thank you so much. I’ll come back.”

  “A few years ago, we would have been able to do so much more, but …” She shrugged and looked up. I became aware of how warm the library was, the muggy air pressing on my arms, and wondered if their air-conditioning had been cut, too.

  I left unsure as to whether I should be hopeful or depressed. Maybe Mil would find something useful. At least the name of the person who sold the paintings to her husband, any scrap of information I could grab on to. Though a part of me also felt apprehensive about finding out who the artist was. After New York—where everyone was climbing over one another to get their name out, to trade in on favors and name drops to get laid, to get money, to get attention—there was something so appealing about the anonymity of this painter. The way he or she had continued to document and interpret the shifts and moods of the city, whether ever recognized for it or not, had integrity. It was humbling to see the care the artist had put into these paintings, and I loved the way they opened up the city, the layers of the past that were invisible otherwise. Like the city’s memory of my father—lost.

  * * *

  I MOVED through the casino with the paintings still on my mind, seeing the casino and the people in it as the painter might have seen them. The senior citizens squinting at the slots. The rumpled-looking dealers at the empty blackjack tables. The hotel clerks bent toward their computer monitors. The exercise lent a strange dignity to everyone, made them seem worthy of being memorialized. That’s what I loved about portraiture—how it captured the way a person’s personality, their past, their secrets, their desires or disappointments, settled into their body, their face. Good portraits, like the ones Mil had, did that—they raised a single life, even an ordinary one, to the light.

  When I got to the spa, I stood in front of the door and stared through the glass, studied Emily standing at the desk. I wondered how the painter would have captured her. I knew she wasn’t religious anymore, and she would have hated to hear it, but there was a holy aspect to her face and hair. It had to do with the way the light came down from overhead. But that wouldn’t be the right way to paint her—there would need to be a hint of her slyness, her humor. That sneaky smile, the knowing, witty shine of her eyes. She looked up and saw me standing there, pulled a grimace, waved at me to hurry inside. Behind her, Luis was working a mop back and forth through the boutique, leaving wet zigzags on the floor.

  “I’m glad you’re here. There’s so much to do. We have a visit from corporate next week. Monday. Even Whitney will be here. Just got word from Deidre down in Charlotte. Carrie knows, too, of course, but naturally she doesn’t give a shit so it’s all on me—us—to make sure everything goes smoothly.”

  “Who’s Whitney?”

  �
��Christ, someone didn’t pay attention during training!” That was true. “Whitney is our COO.”

  “Okay, and what is she going to be doing here?”

  “Each spa location is rated on a points system across six different categories. Service, retail, facility, customer engagement, teamwork, and operations.”

  “Oh God,” I said.

  “Exactly. Poor Luis here is getting worked to the bone getting this place in shape. I’m coordinating with each department head—skin, nail, hair, and massage—to make sure we ace the service aspect. Mostly everything else is up to us. It’s going to be a nightmare. Anyway, we can talk more about that throughout the day—I’ll probably need to lean on you a lot.” Luis looked up and I saw that he had a cut on his left cheek, a bruise on the underside of his arm. I wondered if he had gotten into a scuffle. His mood seemed sour and he frowned as he worked. I would have to ask Clara more about him—why he seemed to make her nervous, what secrets she thought he kept.

  “Sure, let me know what I can do.” She studied me for a minute, a little smile coming into her face. “What?” I asked.

  “You’ve got some bounce in your step. You get laid or something?”

  “Definitely not. I’m working on a project.”

  “What kind of project?”

  “My mom’s neighbor has this stash of portraits in her house, just sitting there. Of Atlantic City throughout history.”

  “Sounds depressing.”

  “No, they’re amazing. A bunch of them are soldiers and staff from this old hospital—apparently the biggest World War II hospital in the country was here?”

  “Here here?”

  “Right on the boardwalk. It was one of the old hotels, and then a hospital, and now the original building is part of Resorts. I can’t make out the signature, but I want to see if I can find out who did them. Let me show you photos of it,” I said, clicking on the browser window. Emily hadn’t closed her last tab, and it was open to her homepage on her Sallie Mae account. Account Balance: $57,433, it announced, in a strangely cheerful yellow typeface.

  “Oh, uh. Sorry.” I pulled my hand away from the mouse, and she reached over to close the tab.

  “No, I’m an idiot for leaving that up.” She flushed. I made $11 an hour at the spa, and maybe she earned a little bit more, but probably not much. I would have been one of those people, too, buried under student loans, if we hadn’t received a settlement from the accident. It made me queasy to think about it. As though what had happened to my father had a price. I knew he was thrilled that I had ended up at Vassar, that he and my mom had planned to help as much as they could. And then, my senior year, when that check finally came in, and that balance shrunk to zero, I could only feel the kind of guilt that made it impossible to eat anything for the rest of the week.

  I was eager to change the subject. “Here, look at this.” I googled the Thomas England Hospital, scrolled through some of the images, enlarged the ones of the soldiers, the men who returned home missing limbs, doing stretches on a sundeck.

  “That’s the hospital?” She stepped closer to the monitor.

  I nodded. “There are people who say that Resorts is haunted by the souls of soldiers who died there. Noises, voices.” I had read reports online of guests waking to see the hems of hospital gowns trailing around corners, to hear moans in the middle of the night. I didn’t believe it, but there was something affecting about the idea that this hospital had loomed over our beaches, all those souls that circulated through its halls. Other photos showed platoons of soldiers in dark uniforms and heavy boots thrusting their bodies through drills on the beach. Camp Boardwalk, it was called.

  “Well, that would explain a lot. Maybe they’re the ones setting fires around here. There was another one last night,” Emily said.

  “Another one? Wait, how many is this now?”

  “Three, I think. Things are getting biblical-level bad around here.” She made her voice deep and somber. “By water also the world of that time was deluged and destroyed. By the same word the present heavens and earth are reserved for fire, being kept for the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men.”

  “Uh. Yikes.”

  “You wouldn’t believe how much of that shit is still rattling around in my brain.”

  “I guess so.”

  There had been a series of blazes in the city—empty houses, mostly. A boathouse that had been abandoned on one of the creeks after Hurricane Sandy. A stretch of dry brush near the entrance to the Revel. The police and the fire department suspected it was arson, but they didn’t have any leads yet. I’d driven past one of the sites on my way home from work: a two-story house near the bus depot, its façade charred black, its roof collapsed. I thought of the wildfires in California, the way that sometimes they would burn to reset the soil, to restore nutrients to the forest. I knew it wasn’t the same, but I wondered if these fires might have been like that—the city’s way of restoring itself, of regenerating through destruction. It was a nice alternative to the reality—that someone was setting fires just because they liked having something to ruin.

  The plant guy came in, rustling his garbage bags, ready to take away the month’s orchids and swap them out for new ones. I watched him lift the flower from the pot on the desk and drop it into the mouth of the bag, the delicate white petals swallowed in darkness, though when he saw Luis he straightened, gestured to the bag. Luis smiled at him and crouched at the man’s feet, removed the orchid, and placed it into an empty Windex bottle that he had cut in half.

  “Luis does that sometimes,” Emily said. “If he’s on shift when it’s plant day. He likes to rescue them. Otherwise they just get thrown away.”

  Luis retreated, cradling his orchid in the crook of his arm, and the man bent to his little wagon for another plant, dropped a new orchid, identical to the last, in the other one’s place. He left a small crumble of soil on the counter, and the earthy, damp smell of it briefly filled the air. Wild and dirty but real.

  After he left, Emily and I restocked lipsticks and pans of blush from the late summer color collection, Indian Summer Dreams. As I emptied my second box, I looked up at the photo of the spa’s founder, Geraldine Austin, that was mounted above the vanity mirrors in the boutique. That severe sheen on her leather riding boots, the gloss on the horse’s coat. The grim set of her mouth, as though she knew that, in sixty years, two young women would sit on the floor of an establishment bearing her name and we would let her down in a way too beneath her to even articulate.

  “Do you think that we are doing any good here?” I asked Emily.

  “What’s that supposed to mean? Are we good at our jobs? Customer service jobs are practically designed for failure. We have to depend on other people being patient, reasonable, sane, in order to serve them well. Or do you mean good good. Like morally? Because for starters, I’m pretty sure these lipsticks aren’t cruelty-free.”

  “I don’t know. Do we ever have the opportunity to help people? Do people really come here thinking that we can make them the better versions of themselves? Do we give them that in any way? Or are we just trading on their insecurities?”

  Emily lifted a stack of eye shadow palettes out of the box. “I don’t know. People confuse better and better looking all the time. I read that humans ascribe morality to people who are attractive, and they are suspicious of people who aren’t. Even from the time you’re a baby. We are preprogrammed to. Pretty equals good. Ugly equals bad.”

  “Great. So basically we’re helping perpetuate that bias?” If all beautiful people were good, Matthew would have been a saint. The high forehead and the hair that was always falling into his eyes. The arcs of his shoulder blades. The dainty divot in the middle of his bottom lip that I stared at while he slept. In a strange way, to think that my trust in him had been hardwired comforted me. But what a mistake. So much cruelty was committed in the name of beauty. And in the name of art.

  “Maybe. But I guess there are opportunities to do good. Last week,
this woman called to schedule services for her sister to celebrate the fact that the sister’s cancer had been in remission for three years. It’s kind of cool to be a part of that. Even though most of the people who come in here are raging lunatics. Or perverts. Or petty thieves.” Emily leaned back into a box of packing peanuts, rubbed her hands over her eyes. I still didn’t know much about her. I knew she rented a room from a family in Brigantine. That she took college classes at night. But I didn’t know what she did for fun, or even what she wore when she wasn’t at work, when she was finally able to shed the impersonal black blazer and pencil skirt. Once I asked her whether she had brothers and sisters, but the look on her face made me wish I hadn’t. When she was nervous, or anxious, she fiddled with the cross on the chain around her neck.

  “Why do you ask, anyway? I thought this was just your ‘get back on your feet’ gig.”

  I didn’t really know the answer. I had never asked myself at the gallery if it was good, or fair. I was getting what I wanted. “Just something I’ve been thinking about, I guess.”

  “One good thing about this company is that it’s almost entirely run by women. It could be a good place to start a career, in that sense. Even if they are as crazy as the guests most of the time.”

  “How are your classes going?” I felt self-conscious asking—as though I were creeping back toward the discussion we didn’t have about me seeing her loan balance, but I was curious, and besides talking shit on everyone else at the spa, school was the only other thing she’d open up about.

  She sat up, and I picked a Styrofoam packing peanut from her hair. “Okay—I’m taking exams next week, and then I start a new session. At this rate, I’ll be done in, oh, two, two and a half years.”

  “That’s great.”