Black & White (29 page)

R
UTH
D
UNNE (1947–)

The blank space after the date of her mother’s birth begins to break apart, become pixilated until a date of death begins to form.

“So in the pictures, that’s—that’s—”

“Your mother,” says Jonathan, his voice choked up.

“What do you want to know, Sam?” Clara asks. “You can ask me—you can ask me anything.” She gives herself over to an unfamiliar feeling. What is it, resignation? Relief? The muscles in her body—the tightness in her neck, her legs tensed as if ready to jump—all of it just melts away. Suddenly, she’s exhausted. She could curl up right here, on the stone floor of the museum, and go to sleep.

The art student is now looking at them with intense interest, focusing first on Sammy, then on the photographs, then back at Sammy. A glimmer of confused recognition.

Sammy looks closely at
Clara in the Fountain.
She seems almost to be ignoring the others. Of course, Clara realizes: In that photograph she’s almost exactly Sam’s age.

“What are you doing? Where are you?”

“In the fountain at the Apthorp,” Clara says. “In the middle of the night.”

“Why are you naked?”

“I was always naked.”

“In all the pictures?”

“Pretty much.”

Sam nods slightly—almost as if Clara has confirmed something she had already begun to suspect. Then she turns her attention to
Clara with the Lizard.

“How about that one?”

“That was the first picture,” Clara says. “The first ever.”

The chemical taste of rubber fills her mouth. Her skin feels damp.

“How old were you?”

“Three.”

“And that one?”

Sam points to
Naked at Fourteen.

“That—well, that was the last.”

“Why? Why was it the last?”

The questions are rapid-fire. For a moment, Clara can’t find her voice. There are so many answers to choose from.
Because it never should have happened. Because I wanted to die. Because I should have found a way to stop it the year before, or the year before that, or the year before that.

“Because it had to be,” Clara finally says.

Sam nods again. That knowing look in her eye. Was all this somehow inside of her already, this knowledge? She looks once again at the photographs, as if committing them to memory.

Then she turns to Clara and Jonathan.

“That’s cool, Mom—you’re in a museum. So now can we go to the café?”

R
UTH
and Nathan Dunne did most of their fighting outside of the house. From the time the girls were born, Ruth and Nathan agreed that their children shouldn’t be exposed to their arguments, which, though rare, could spiral into a place full of scalding rage. And so, with a few notable exceptions, they went out. To restaurants, to bars, to park benches where they sat, warming their hands around Styrofoam coffee cups while they tried—two fragile creatures trembling with anger—to make themselves understood to each other.

But not on this particular night. On this particular night—Clara is on the cusp of her eleventh birthday—the shouting starts only moments after Nathan returns from the office. Something, it seems, has happened. Clara doesn’t know what, and she sees on her mother’s face that Ruth doesn’t know either. But Nathan’s thin face is pale with fury, his lips dark red against the whiteness, as he sets his briefcase down by the front door.

He grabs Ruth by the arm and pulls her into the kitchen.

“We need to talk.”

“Not now, Nate. The girls—”

“The girls! Don’t you dare use the girls as an excuse!”

“What are you—”

Clara tries to follow them into the kitchen, but they’ve already moved on. Nathan has dragged Ruth through the kitchen, out the other side, and into her studio, closing the door firmly behind them.

“What’s going on?”

Robin has emerged from her bedroom. A Walkman dangles around her neck like a piece of tribal jewelry, and an algebra book is tucked under her arm.

“I don’t know.”

Robin scratches her head. Her expression is blank. She has just become a teenager and has instantly developed a teenager’s feigned boredom in all situations.

“I’ll bet I know,” she says.

“What?”

Clara can hear her father’s shouts, even through the layers and layers of soundproofing. He must be yelling really loud.

“Dad came home during the day today. I had just gotten back from school.”

“Yeah? So what?”

“So he went into the studio.”

Clara starts to feel a little nauseated. Like suddenly she might throw up.

“Was Mom there?” she asks. “Was Mom in the studio?”

“No. She had a doctor’s appointment.”

Now, the sound of a crash—something actually being knocked over and broken. Even at his angriest, Clara has never seen her father be physically destructive. It just isn’t like him. Maybe it’s Ruth. Ruth is more capable of breaking things.

Robin stretches her arms overhead and moves them from side to side as if she’s in a calisthenics class. Her T-shirt pulls out of her jeans, exposing a wide swath of belly. She lets out a yawn and then turns and starts heading back to her room.

“Where are you going?” Clara asks.

“I have to study.” Robin waves her algebra book in the air.

“But—”

“Oh, come on, Clara. What am I supposed to do, stand here like an idiot and listen to this?”

Robin shakes her head in disgust. Suddenly, she looks a lot older than thirteen. For a strange brief second, the veil separating the present and the future rises, and Clara can see her sister as the grown-up she will someday be. The tight little face, bunched up with worry. The business suit and briefcase, just like Nathan’s. The padlocked eyes that let no one in.

“I mean,” Robin tosses over her shoulder as she walks away, “it’s not like it has anything to do with
me.
”

Clara starts to speak, but no words come out. She has nothing to say, and she knows better than to say something stupid. Deep down, she is certain that there can be only one reason for her parents fighting in the studio. It’s her, of course. The shattering crash on the other side of the wall, the awful sound of her father’s shouts—it’s all about Clara. Only Clara.

Alone now, she sinks to the floor and leans her head against the wall. She can hear the pitch and tone of her parents shouting but can’t make out a word. She looks around the living room, gray shadows falling over the furniture in the early evening light. The huge old sofa, strewn with pillows. The threadbare wing chairs. The massive fireplace mantel, darkened with soot. And on the walls—hanging, leaning everywhere—the photographs. What was so special about them? She didn’t get it. When she had asked her mother, Ruth responded with the small smile she reserved for things she was certain Clara couldn’t yet understand:
It’s how a picture makes you feel, deep inside.

Clara looks slowly at all the pictures: the nude, the picture taken from high up in the sky, the crystalline image of a suburban family on their lawn. What do any of them make her feel? She focuses hard—anything to block out the sounds coming through the wall. Nothing, she decides after a few minutes. There must be something wrong with her. She feels nothing—no, less than nothing. A maw inside of her, a cavernous emptiness.

The door to the studio opens and Ruth flies out, her face swollen, cheeks wet with tears. She takes a couple of long steps across the room, looking wildly around. She doesn’t even see Clara at first, sitting there on the floor.

“Get back in here, Ruth. We’re going to finish this.”

Nathan’s voice, strung tight.

“I wasn’t
doing
anything with them,” Ruth shouts. “Why can’t you just accept that?”

“Because it’s not the point.”

Nathan emerges from the studio. From Clara’s vantage point she can see his shirttail hanging out from the back of his suit jacket. Ruth wheels around and glares at him. Her mouth is trembling with rage.

“What
is
the point, Nate? What made you think you had the right to go through my work?”

“Because I knew you were lying to me!” Nathan shouts.

“I had to lie to you! You gave me no choice!”

“Bullshit, Ruth. You could have stopped. You promised you would stop. We both agreed that—”

“Please.” The word bubbles up from inside Clara—no more than a whisper.

“I wasn’t planning to show the work,” Ruth goes on. “Kubovy hasn’t even seen it.”

“Oh,
Kubovy
hasn’t seen it,” Nate says. “Well, I guess everything’s fine, then.”

It is as if Clara is in a terrible magical bubble. She can see and hear her parents, but she is invisible to them. She holds a hand in front of her face, flexing her fingers. Why can’t they see her?

“Did you ever stop and think, Ruth? Or are you just too fucking selfish to—”

“Please.”
Clara says it a little louder this time.

They both wheel around and look down at her.

“Oh, baby,” Ruth says, stricken.

The two of them—Ruth and Nathan, who in this, at least, are completely, utterly together—crouch down so they’re face-to-face with Clara.

“We’re sorry, honey, you shouldn’t have—”

“Please,” Clara repeats. It seems to be the only word she knows.

“Please what, sweetheart? Talk to us. Tell us—anything.”

“Please.” She pushes past the lump in her throat. “Don’t fight.”

I
T HAS BEEN
so many years since Ruth’s dining room has been used for dining that it has become an extension of her office. The table itself—a Nakashima covered by thick protective pads—is piled with the overflow of magazines and newspapers from the foyer. A stack of recent invitations to gallery openings hasn’t even made it into the studio. It seems that Peony’s responsibilities now revolve solely around Ruth’s book; she has gone from intern to nursemaid to secretary to, now, a kind of glorified personal assistant whom Ruth can’t live—or die—without.

Clara removes the piles, one by one, and hands them to Jonathan, who stacks them neatly in a corner next to the sideboard.

“Sammy, can you give me a hand with these?”

Old coffee-stained issues of
Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly,
and
The New York Review of Books,
some of them dating back to 1998. Ruth could never bear to part with anything, not even a bunch of magazines. Maybe she really believed that one rainy day she’d sit down and read all these back issues, cover to cover.

“Why don’t we just throw them out?” Sammy asks.

Clara stops thumbing through a
Harper’s
essay about the first Gulf War, suddenly struck by the thought that, yes, she could indeed take these piles and walk them down the hall to the incinerator. She could do this—and Ruth would never know.

Her stomach lurches, a queasy excitement.

“You’re absolutely right, Sammy,” she says.