Black & White (8 page)

“If you put the landscapes on the same wall as the Clara pictures, they’ll look like shit,” says Kubovy. “Excuse my language.”

Clara looks up. She’s pretty sure he just said a bad word. And Ruth, who has been in a kind of dreamy contemplative mood, as blank as the blank walls, snaps to attention.

“What did you say?”

Kubovy shrugs. “It’s my job to tell you the truth. The landscapes are derivative. Immature. I see nothing new or fresh in them.”

“But you took me on after you saw those slides—”

“That’s true,” says Kubovy. “I suppose I saw some glimmer of talent. But nothing compared to the Clara photographs, Ruth. Surely you know that.”

Kubovy walks over to a rolling cart, on which a series of large crates are stacked, each labeled with black Magic Marker on the light, splintery wood:
Clara with the Lizard. Clara, Napping. Clara in the Fountain.
He pries open the slats of wood on the
Clara in the Fountain
crate and carefully removes the photograph, bits of tissue paper floating to the floor. The photograph is five feet square—bigger than Clara’s whole body—and framed in simple black lacquer. Kubovy struggles to carry it over to the wall.

“Rico, Brian!” he calls into the back room, and two young men materialize. One of them is wearing a bandanna on his head, just like the bandanna Clara has brought for her Western Barbie outfit.

“Let’s give this a try,” says Kubovy.

Rico and Brian hold the photograph up to the wall. Clara gathers her three Barbies together on her lap and watches. She hasn’t seen these pictures before—not in their final form. She’s only seen the Polaroids Ruth has taken, sketches, ideas, the barest outline of the real thing.

Now, she sees herself. So gigantic! So much bigger than she actually is! She remembers the night—it was very late—Ruth woke her out of a deep sleep and bundled her into the elevator.
Where are we going, Mommy?
Clara had asked her.
Just to the courtyard, sweetheart. Everything’s set up. It won’t take long, I promise.
As the elevator made its slow descent, Clara looked at her mother in the dim old-fashioned yellowy light. Ruth always looked most beautiful when she was in this state. Clara didn’t have the words for what the state was, exactly. But it seemed to her to be something akin to
bursting.
Bursting with what, she wasn’t sure.

In the courtyard, the lighting was set up, two tall pole lamps and the silver reflector disk. Ruth had brought down a thick wool blanket, even though it wasn’t cold out. She wrapped it around Clara.

“Let’s get you undressed,” she said. The blanket was itchy. Clara remembered they had used it for a picnic in Central Park earlier in the summer.

As Clara stepped out of her pajama bottoms, Ruth glanced up at the sky.

“Look, sweetheart,” she whispered. “Look at the moon.”

“It’s a full moon!” Clara said, her clear voice piercing the silence of the night. “I see the man there—the man in the moon!”

“Ssshh,” said Ruth. “We don’t want to wake people up.”

Where was the doorman? Ruth must have asked him to stay inside his booth. Maybe she gave him a tip, the same way she sometimes did when he hailed them a taxi on Broadway.

“Okay, Clara. Let’s climb into the fountain,” said Ruth.

“But we’re not allowed,” said Clara.

“Just for tonight.”

Clara climbed up on the edge of the fountain and dipped her toe into the two inches of water inside the stone basin. It wasn’t too cold. The water was still, because the fountain part had been turned off for the night. Beneath the green-black glassy surface of the water, hundreds of copper pennies, nickels, dimes, even quarters gleamed like stars.

Ruth quickly approached her with the light meter, holding it up to Clara’s bare chest. She then adjusted the aperture on her camera. Clara knew better than to talk right now. She felt the heat of the lights on her body. Her mother was crouching, aiming the camera up at her, squinting through the lens.

“Hold your arms up in the air, Clara. Like you’re a part of the fountain. Like you’re reaching for the moon.”

Click.
Ruth checked the light meter again.
Click, click, click.

Rico and Brian are holding
Clara in the Fountain
in the puddle of light cast on the gallery wall. The photograph slips a little, and they right it; their arms are getting tired.

“Perfection,” says Kubovy. “I’m seeing it—the whole gallery, with just these eight extraordinary images.”

“I don’t know,” says Ruth. She is standing in front of Clara, partly blocking Clara’s view of her own naked body, pale and shiny as marble, arms flung wide in the moonlight.

“Ruth, please—listen. Listen to me. This is your introduction. Your debut. No one knows you yet. Artists can spend their entire lifetimes recovering from the wrong first impression.”

“Mommy?”

Ruth doesn’t turn around. She folds her arms, cocks her head. She is lost in another world, the world she goes to when she’s inside her pictures. Sometimes Clara imagines that they are together in that black-and-white world, that the place inside the pictures is the real one and this—all this is just a rehearsal. A setup. Like the way she and her mother stage the pictures before they actually get made.

“Mommy?”

Clara has to pee really badly. She doesn’t know where the bathroom is. She looks around, but all the doors look the same. They don’t even have knobs.

“All right, Kubovy.” Ruth sighs. “I hope you’re right.”

“I
know
I’m right.”

Kubovy walks back over to the rolling cart of crates and begins to open the next one, cursing as he nicks his finger on a staple.

“Let’s start to sort out the placement,” he says. “I think—”

“Mommy!”

Clara crosses her legs hard. She feels a tiny bit of urine wet her panties. She never wets her panties. But now, out it comes. Down the side of her leg. Pooling around her bottom.

Ruth wheels around. Clara is sitting in a puddle on the floor.

“Oh, no!”

“I’m sorry, Mommy.” Clara begins to cry. She cries and cries, until she feels wet everywhere: her bottom, her cheeks, the front of her dress. “I tried to tell you—”

“God,” mutters Ruth. She buries her head in her hands. “I can’t even…what the fuck is my—”

“I have an idea.” Kubovy sweeps over, holding a paper towel with which he quickly wipes up the offending pee. “Clara, I’m going to take you for a very special treat. Let’s leave your mother here for a few minutes”—he motions to Rico and Brian to open the rest of the crates—“and you and I will go get some ice cream.”

Clara stops crying.

“Have you ever had this very special Italian ice cream? It’s called gelato,” says Kubovy. He reaches a hand down and hoists her to her feet.

“But my dress,” says Clara.

“It will dry in the sun as we walk,” says Kubovy. He makes it all seem like a grand idea.

“Mommy?” Clara says. “Is that okay? Can I have gelato?”

Ruth turns to her. Her eyes are dim. She seems very far away.

“Please don’t be mad at me,” Clara says.

“Oh, honey.” Ruth scoops her up and hugs her. She presses her lips hard against Clara’s cheek. “You’re the one who should be mad at
me.
”

T
HE STREETS
of the Upper West Side are not made for wheelchairs. The sidewalks are uneven, an obstacle course. A cracked bit of pavement or a pothole can stop a wheelchair abruptly, tossing its inhabitant forward. The curbs, a series of little cliffs, sharp angles at every intersection. The only way to traverse them is to tilt the wheelchair back and carefully, with all one’s strength, inch the back wheels forward, little by little, until they gently bump the street below.

Add to this, late-winter slush, icy patches, frozen gutters backed up with sooty snow. Clara isn’t wearing gloves. She left hers at home in Maine, and she keeps forgetting to borrow a pair from Robin. In Clara’s memory, New York is not a freezing-cold place. Not compared to what she’s grown accustomed to, the endless string of twenty-below days, the thermometer outside the kitchen window permanently stopped, frozen somewhere well south of zero. Her hands—the knuckles red, the skin chapped—curl around the plastic handles of her mother’s wheelchair as they wait for the light to change from red to green.

Thank goodness for Robin’s clothes: a heavy oversized cashmere sweater, a pair of post-pregnancy jeans from before her sister snapped her body back to her usual size two. These, along with a few turtlenecks and some warm socks purchased at the Gap, have kept Clara going for exactly eight days. She cannot possibly lose count of how many days she’s been here. Each morning, Sammy reminds her.

You’ve been gone for five days, Mom. That’s a long time.

Now it’s six. Six whole days.

It’s been a week now. Why are you away? Are you and Daddy getting a divorce?

Clara has tried to reassure Sammy, but she knows that everything she says rings hollow. She can’t give Sam an answer as to precisely when she’s returning to Maine—though at least Clara has promised her that (my God!) she isn’t getting a divorce. All these years—staying at home with Sam—they’ve been such a tight little threesome. It has to add up to something, doesn’t it? To some sense of peace and security? Clara and Jonathan have never taken so much as a weekend away without Sammy. Surely, Sam will weather this absence. It will close up around her as soon as Clara gets home.

An older woman, bundled from head to toe in a black coat, moves expertly past Ruth’s wheelchair, one hand holding a cane, the other a blue-and-orange Fairway shopping bag.

“Look at her,” says Ruth, from the depths of the wheelchair. “She must be eighty.”

Ruth’s breath makes a vaporous cloud, disappearing as it wafts up toward Clara’s face. Ruth is well insulated; she’s wearing an ankle-length shearling coat, and Peony has tucked a soft blanket around her. A fur hat covers her head.

“I want to be just like that when I’m eighty,” says Ruth.

The
WALK
sign lights up, and Clara eases the wheels down to the street.

“What do you think?” Ruth asks. She’s a little breathless. Actually, they’re both a little breathless. Clara’s out of shape, hasn’t been hiking in Acadia National Park lately. Who is she kidding? She hasn’t been on a hike in more than a year. Her arms are shaking from the effort.

“Did you hear what I said?” Ruth asks.

“What?” Clara steers around a pothole the size and depth of a bowling ball.

“Eighty,” says Ruth.

“Yeah, amazing. She looks great.”

“You’re not listening to me!”

They’re on the corner of West End and 77th. Their destination, a holistic oncologist, just two blocks farther downtown. They should have taken a cab, but somehow that had seemed more daunting: folding the wheelchair into a cab’s trunk, holding on to Ruth to make sure she didn’t slip on the ice, sliding Ruth into the narrow confines of a backseat. That is, if a cab would even have stopped for them. Strollers, wheelchairs, walkers, canes, pets, suitcases—all these might make a driver speed on by, hoping to pick up a simpler, less demanding fare.

“I’m sorry,” says Clara.

“I’m trying to give myself some hope here. Can’t you understand that?”

“Hope,” Clara repeats. This is today’s news, a curveball. Ruth, it seems, is ricocheting around the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. At the moment, she has made a flying leap from acceptance to denial.

Or who knows. Maybe she knows something. Maybe, despite all the stark evidence on the Internet—eighty percent dead within eighteen months—Ruth has peered inside herself, inside the black caves of her own lungs, and seen herself rising above the statistics, climbing to the top of the highest curve of the most infinitesimal number and holding on, as if to a sturdy branch in a hurricane, waiting for the wind to die down all around her.

Who the hell knows. Clara rings a bell next to a brass plaque:
ABRAHAM ZAMITSKY, M.D.
A buzzer sounds, and she pushes Ruth’s wheelchair through the door, only to be faced with two steep steps down to the office door below. How can an oncologist not have a ramp? How many patients are trotting in here on their own two feet? A holistic oncologist, in particular, might well be the last stop—after the chemo, the radiation, the trials and pills and potions of regular doctors have failed. Clara summons her strength, then tilts the wheelchair back and eases it down the first step. The wheels teeter precariously for a moment on the stair, threatening to slip too quickly down.