I gave her the rest of the story in the most straightforward way I could muster, and it still felt muddled and strange. The first piece I saw at the show was a single canvas tacked to the wall, unframed, ragged at the edges. There was a streak of green paint at the top and several more below it, seven in total. The first six streaks were various greens: pine, emerald, bottle-green, seafoam. Someone had penciled letters next to each stripe. R, R, R, R, R, R, and M. The last streak, marked with the M, had much more yellow than the others, more of a chartreuse. In the next room, I saw a painting on the wall: a girl curled up in a wing chair, wearing a dress that was the same color as the last slash of green on the canvas. She was looking across the room at something, unaware of the viewer. It was a well-executed painting but restrained compared to Ramona’s newer work, mannered and too careful. Not good enough to be shown with Matthew’s sculptures, and not what I had expected from her at all.
In the next room: one of Matthew’s sculptures, small for him, delicate even. Oh no, I had thought. What had happened? He always called that kind of work timid. More like toymaking than art. A placard on the wall said The Flame. As far as I could tell it was abstract, made from peels of metal welded into a fan shape. I tried to read the negative space but nothing emerged for me. People around me were nodding. What? I wanted to ask. What did they see that I couldn’t? Around the corner, another small sculpture. It had the fluidity of Matthew’s larger works—it was called The Idea, and it looked to me like smoke—but again, the scale was disappointing. A photographer came around the corner and took my photo, and for a moment the brightness of his flashbulb left stars in my eyes. I saw that photo run somewhere else later, I couldn’t remember where, but my eyebrows were knit together, like a disapproving schoolmarm’s.
Temporary walls sectioned off the warehouse space. They were genius for building tension, having the viewer wind through that maze; meaning, wholeness felt just around the corner, but all I could feel was frustration. Matthew told me once that I was his muse, but I had yet to see myself in any of his pieces. I wondered what Ramona was up to, too, going behind my back to Philip Louis, or to Matthew, or however it had happened. I pulled out my phone and texted her.
Why didn’t you talk to me about this???
I rounded the next corner and was shocked to see, mounted on the brick wall, a photograph of Ramona and me, blown up very large, five by four feet.
I realized quickly that it had to have been taken through the window of the wine bar where I had met her in Alphabet City—I remembered Ramona’s outfit. We were both reaching for the check, but you couldn’t see our tabletop, so in the picture it looked like we were holding hands. But who would have taken it? And why? Neither Matthew nor Ramona even worked in photographs. I looked closer but didn’t understand until I backed away. There was Matthew’s face, reflected in the glass, imposed over us both.
Matthew, answer me! What is this?
I nearly tripped rounding the next corner, pushing past people, even stepping on someone’s toes. A painter and his wife were looking at a series of Matthew’s sculptures, six in total. They seemed to be in pairs. The first was called Lily I, the second, Ramona I Lily I was tall, nearly nine feet if I had to guess. Ramona I was three feet. You hardly noticed her at all. In the next sculptures, Lily II and Ramona II, Lily was perhaps a little shorter, Ramona about the size she was in real life—five and a half feet tall. And by the third, the sequence had established a victor: Lily III was six feet tall, and Ramona III had grown to seven. My hands were shaking as I typed out another message to Matthew.
Where are you? Is this a joke?
We need to talk. NOW.
Someone looked at their phone and laughed. And yet I still didn’t understand the extent of the show, its depth, its scope.
Then the sound of static crackled through speakers—had they installed a PA system for this?—followed by a rustling noise. Then, a moan. A man’s. A woman’s. Mine. Matthew’s. He had recorded us in bed. And then, a third voice. Lower pitched, sort of a growl. Matthew groaning. You like that? Ramona. And there we were, the three of us, dubbed together, becoming louder, orgasms harmonizing. I covered my ears, but I could still hear everything. When it was over, reduced to a series of breathy pants, a giggle, the smack of a kiss, the track started over again. I thought I was going to throw up.
The walls finally opened into a large space at the back of the studio, where a screen showed the feed, in real time, of all the messages I had sent to Matthew that night. Next to it was another screen that showed the photos that had been taken since my arrival: me wringing my hands, me frowning at the young girl who had been assigned to stand with me in the lobby, Ramona and me—she looking completely composed while I looked angry, drunk, my eyeliner smeared, my eyes shining. There was another framed piece full of letters—letters!—that Ramona had sent to Matthew. The painting Ramona had done of Matthew, her first male subject as far as I knew, was large enough to fill ten feet of the west wall. He was naked except for a necklace I had seen Ramona wear a few times, a Saint Agatha medal on a piece of leather cord. I felt my knees give, and I threatened to fold in on myself right there, like an injured deer.
Then, I heard a laugh. Matthew’s laugh.
They were standing together at the end of the room, Ramona and Matthew, their backs turned to me, talking to someone I couldn’t see. Ramona was the first one to feel my stare, and she turned, the corners of her mouth ticking up in a smile.
“What the hell!” I shouted at them, slipping again in my shoes. I was vaguely aware of a photographer’s bulb flashing at the corner of my eyes, but I couldn’t think about him, about anything else other than my need to scream, to demand an explanation, to feel someone seize my shoulders and find myself home in our bed, waking up from a dream. The man they were speaking with edged away when he saw me approach, touching Matthew on the elbow, mouthing that he would call.
“Lil.”
“Don’t ‘Lil’ me.” He held out his hands like I might charge him. His hair fell in his eyes like it had the first night we met. I loved him, I hated him. I wanted to ruin him, but I would have let him put me in a cab and take me home if he put his arm around me in the right way.
“This is disgusting, Matthew. How did this even happen?” I was spitting the words between gritted teeth. “You two weren’t supposed to see each other. You were never supposed to meet. That recording? When the fuck did you record us having sex?”
“Lily.” He braced me by the shoulders, turned me away from where a circle of people had gathered to watch us. “Listen to me, would you? Before anything else happens. We did this for you. Ramona and I. For all of us.”
“For me? What part of this is for me? Please, tell me how that works. I’d love to hear you rationalize that.”
He lowered his voice, and now he was whispering. “Everyone in the city is going to be talking about this show, writing about it. And who represents Ramona Avalon?”
“Hell if I know.”
“No, Lily. She’s your client. She wants to work with you.”
“Well, she probably shouldn’t have fucked my boyfriend then.”
“I’m telling you, Lily.” He picked up my hand, pressed his fingers into my palm. “First of all—it’s fake, okay?”
“Doesn’t sound so fake to me. You moaning her goddamned name sounds pretty real.”
“Lily. The sex, it happened, okay? But it’s just a means to an end. I’m telling you. This will make your career. You didn’t want to be a gallery girl anymore? Guess what? You’ve got the attention of everyone in town. You’ve got more control than you think.”
“Control? I’m a pawn! You turned me into a spectacle? Cheated on me? You’re broadcasting what I sound like in bed? If you think anyone can respect me after this, you’re absolutely insane. And if this is supposed to help me, why couldn’t I be in on it?”
“You know that wouldn’t work—it needed to be authentic, raw! Lily, you of all people should appreciate this. We made
art out of normal life. This stuff happens all of the time—people messing around on one another. It’s just acting. Really. No genuine feelings exchanged.”
Ramona had broken away from a group of buyers and edged against my side, between Matthew and me, whispering in my ear. “We talk about this stuff all the time, Lil. How people crave stories more than anything else. We just gave them that.”
There was one brief moment when I stopped to consider whether they might be right. Whether I could intellectualize this away. How much easier everything would be if I accepted their reasoning. It was so tempting, to pretend it might actually be okay.
“I was trying to help you,” I said to Ramona. My voice had dipped into another register, one below the anger. I sounded sad and shaky and small. “I cared about your work.”
Philip Louis pulled Matthew away and the two of them leaned together, whispering and looking in my direction.
“You’re angry. I know. But Lily,” she said, “he will tell you one thing about all this, and let me tell you another. You need to be free of him. His name. What about you? What about your name?”
“What are you talking about?” I spat.
“It will feel good, to take something from him. Admit it. To take some of that success for us, to use it to our advantage. Whatever he says, the way I look at it, this show was about you and me, about the conversations we had about our work, our goals. We will be unstoppable after this. We will leave him in the dust.” Her lips were so close that they brushed my ear. She looked down to where my hand was clamped around her wrist, looked back up at me. I didn’t care that she might be right about Matthew. I let go.
I shouldered my way between them, slipping out of my shoes as I walked. One of the shoes slid off my foot. I kicked the other off with a grunt and stopped to pick them up. I could hear that awful tape still running: me and Matthew and Ramona orgasming together. I looked up to see that painting of Matthew, that smug smile on his face, like he could see me coming. Like he’d seen me falling apart, since the moment he posed.
I swung one of the shoes at the canvas, the heel catching in Matthew’s painted neck. Behind me I heard the sounds of people gasping, some cheering. I got one more swing in, this time ripping Matthew straight through the chest, before two men grabbed my arms and led me away. “I left the next morning.”
“Lily,” Clara said. “That’s insane.”
“I know. I still don’t know whose version of things to trust.” It had felt good to tell someone the whole story, to unload. Clara, unlikely as it was, seemed like the right person for it. She didn’t have Emily’s ruthless, withering judgment. She wasn’t going to weep with sympathy the way, say, my mother would. I had managed to hold it together as I spoke, but I could feel that familiar lump forming at the base of my throat. But I told myself it would be insane to cry in front of Clara. Clara, the teenager with cigarette marks on her fingers.
“How about neither of them? Those two both sound like psychos.”
“You’re probably right about that.”
“So why do you still want him?”
“It’s not even that I still want him, exactly. I know I can’t go back to the way things were. But when we were together, I just kept thinking that my life would be better with him, more exciting, more interesting than it could ever be on my own.” It was the most honest I had ever been about Matthew. I was always sure that his life would be better than mine, and that the best thing I could do was stick around for the ride.
“Yeah, you’ll never know when he’s about to cheat on you with one of your friends.”
“It wasn’t cheating, exactly.”
“I don’t care what you say or what they say. That’s not art. What about your life? Why can’t that be an adventure? Why can’t you be that person to someone? Instead you’re just going to attach yourself to this asshole like a … like a barnacle.”
“I’m not a barnacle!” Though I might have been offended, it only made me laugh. Soon, mostly without reason, we were both laughing, tears at the corners of our eyes.
“Excuse me,” a man’s voice said from behind us. “But you ladies mind if I sit down with you?”
I watched Clara’s face shift again, the oversweet smile, the shift in her posture, the crossing of her legs. “Well, it’ll cost you,” Clara said, changing her voice so that it was syrupy sweet. That quickly, I thought. She tipped her chin down so that she was staring up at him through her eyelashes. “One drink each.”
“Clara,” I said, my voice low, a warning. She gave me a look that I had seen before: regret for the way things were, and that I was too blind, too sheltered, to possibly understand.
LUIS
HE DIDN’T THINK IT WOULD go on, past the first one. That initial release, the thrill of color and heat, the pleasure of being the one who undoes. He used to get the same thrill from making things, but maybe now he’s too far gone. Too angry. Too lonely and separate from everyone else. The girls at work still watch him like he’s contagious, or else they ignore him. Even the one who has her father’s kind eyes. He still thumbs the two-dollar bill, thinking he could show it to her, like proof. But he’s worried she won’t know what it means, that it will be one more reason for her to think he’s broken or strange.
He’s set three more fires since that night when he burned the house—one fire for each time the men left him with bruises and scratches, the cut above his eyebrow that might scar, and the cops hadn’t stopped them, only watched from behind the shine of their sunglasses. Each house feels like relief or even revenge. Maybe if he keeps going, the cops will finally be sent out into the city with work, real work, to do something other than laugh at the people they’re supposed to protect. With every fire, he feels a weight lift from his chest.
Of course his thrill comes with new worries. What would happen if the police knew it was him? How many years would he spend behind bars? Swallowed up in a prison, disappeared from the world. The nerves that keep him awake at night, staring at the ceiling, are only calmed by more fires. Sometimes he will sit in his room and strike a match, just for a little taste of heat, a hint of power. A mere reminder of what he’s capable of. He’s seen the pictures in the papers—the dark husks and charred frames, the firefighters in their yellow helmets, the stern lines of their mouths.
He still follows the girl, too, though he doesn’t know what he wants from her. Maybe he wants to simply say he sees her. He sees her pain, which must feel like his when he thinks about his grandparents. The ache between his ribs. The sense that the city stole them, too; stole something he’ll never have back. He practices writing out the words, the ones that inch toward describing what he means. He writes I SEE on a scrap of paper. He tries to think of what else there is to say, but there aren’t any words that could protect him—he hopes I SEE will be enough. He folds it in half, then in half again, until it’s small, another secret he’ll keep close until the time is right.
He takes to carrying the scrap of paper in his pocket, and soon it becomes as worn and soft as the two-dollar bill. He follows the girl on her lunch break, sometimes through the parking lot. He follows her to the boardwalk again, where she goes to the red-haired girl. While she was inside, he told himself he’d give her the note and the bill that afternoon, in the bright glare of the sun. But he noticed another man standing just outside the door, waiting, listening, his eyes so pale they looked like glass. Something about the man scared Luis—the way he stood or cocked his head toward the doorway. As though he owned it all.
He goes for another one of his walks that night, a lighter in his pocket, still thinking of that man’s stare, the angle of his head, the strange smile that looked a little like a grimace. The buildings of the city are spread before him, like a buffet, but none of them have the right feel. Nothing calls to him, summoning him in the way he’s come to expect. He walks farther, alongside the Black Horse Pike, underneath the spotlit billboards featuring bright blue drinks, platters of seafood, or big-breasted women in their underwear
, blowing on a pair of dice. How beautiful it would be to set one aflame, to see one of those garish, ridiculous signs ablaze, an island of fire high above the grass.
The marsh. He won’t do it, but he likes the fantasy of it—the picture it creates in his head. He steps off the shoulder of the road, into muck that swallows his shoes. He looks back toward the skyline, the places where it’s gone dark, the hulking rectangles of concrete where the beautiful buildings were. If he lit the marsh, a straight line of lighter fluid drawing the fire across it, it would look as if the whole city was burning, about to be swallowed whole.
Of course, the marsh is actually quite peaceful. He used to come here to trap crabs with his grandfather when he was a boy. He thinks he could still find his way back to the creek where they used to find the blue claws, where they might find a nest of young birds, their feathers a wild fluff on their heads. He steps deeper into the grass, flies circling his head—he remembers that well, too, his grandfather taking aim and slapping them away.
Above him, the neon sign of the Sunset Motel casts a feeble yellow glow on the grass. He sees a hint of glitter that, for a moment, he takes to be water, a slice of the creek sparkling under the light. He steps closer, pushes through the grass, and what he sees makes him feel the way he did when Gold Tooth punched the air out of his lungs.
For the first few seconds his brain rejects what he sees, though the understanding seizes his limbs, his guts. His brain can only understand the scene before him in a series of shapes. The curve of a calf. The angle of an elbow. A parabola of hair. The arch of eyebrows. The thick lines of clotted blood that must be cuts. Then he processes colors. The white-blue of the skin, the rings of purple around their necks. The bruises. The glint of gold: an ankle bracelet dangling a dozen little charms. The smell hits him next, the smell he thought was a part of the marsh but must be them. He hits himself in the face, slaps himself hard a second time. He closes his eyes and waits to wake up from a dream. Flies land on his eyelids, his arms, the back of his neck. He steps closer, reels back. One of their faces looks collapsed. And their eyes are open. They see him, judge him. They know everything he’s done.
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