Carry the One (15 page)

He examined several paintings quickly, then stopped at
Wish You Were Here
. The painting’s setting was the pool of a down-and-out motel, its colors a constrained palette of worn pastels. Leaves floated in the corners, a plastic water slide dangled over the lip, broken off halfway down. Its subject, faded to a ghostly presence, was a family. Alice had tried to render these figures as shadows, to make a vacation in this place where any initial impulse of hope had long been abandoned. She spiraled down inside herself watching the old man stand in front of it, then move back across the gallery to look from a remove. Suddenly his opinion held weight. She anticipated his worst criticism. She shared the curse of many artists—that praise beaded up and rolled off her while criticism stuck like glue, glue embedded with ground glass.

When he finished looking at Alice’s work, he was accompanied by the middle-aged man who brought him, toward the buffet table where he made himself a substantial sandwich of dark bread and smoked salmon. Alice thought, well, at least she wouldn’t have to talk with him, then saw Anneke glide across the gallery, snag him, and guide him slowly over.

Alice told him she was honored he had come.

“I had an appointment here anyway. With my dentist.” He tapped
his cheek with a thick index finger, tipped dark green with paint. His suit had the tight, boxy cut of an earlier era, its sleeves and pockets specked and dabbed with patches of paint. He went on insulting her. “It is nothing that I came here. The painting on the notice interested me a little. Now I have seen the others. I would say to you that these are good paintings. But they are part of your apprenticeship. Something is yet held back, I think. I would like to see what you do after these. You may contact me and bring me the paintings. I will look.”

Alice felt heat rushing across her face and turned away so he wouldn’t see this. When she turned back, he was still looking at her, waiting. She saw, finally, that he was offering something of value.

“I don’t know when that would be,” she said. “I don’t live here.”

“No matter. I am usually at home. You can bring me work when you are ready.”

Alice nodded and shook the hand he extended and started to say something, but he was done being social. He worked his hand free of hers, turned, and headed off toward the bar table.

“It’s remarkable, really,” Anneke said, “that he still paints.”

“I think,” Alice said, “he does it in that suit.”

“It’s true.” This was someone new, who had come up to join the conversation. “He always wears a suit and tie. Like painting is a business. Or at least he puts on the suit when visitors are coming.” Alice had been tracking this woman since she arrived—1940s gabardine jacket, T-shirt and long, baggy, foreign-legion shorts. Unattractive in an extremely attractive way. Like a minor figure in some artistic circle of the recent past. Those American dykes in Paris in the twenties. Someone on the fringe of the Bloomsbury group. Edith Sitwell maybe.

She was Charlotte somebody; Anneke introduced them. She was an artist herself, also the art critic for a local arts and entertainment weekly. She spoke excellent English, but with little slang and few idioms; she sounded like a friendly alien. “I have been to visit him two times. For interviews. Once he was happy to see me. The next time
he pushed me back out the door. His studio was like an explosion. Now he does not often leave. He paints whatever he finds in there, also what he finds inside his head. When he is hungry he pushes aside the mess on the table and puts his meal in the space he has made. Then he paints some more.”

Alice listened to the small echo created by this conversation, the space outside the words that told her she would sleep with this woman tonight. Everything between now and that eventuality was just filler.

“Do you have any of his paintings here?” Alice asked.

“Well, of course,” Anneke said, sounding a little insulted. “We have a gallery given to his work. On the third floor.”

“I could show her,” the Charlotte person said. So helpful.

The walls of this gallery were painted a dark, dusty red. The color worked to hold the paintings in place. Alice looked first at the water-colors, which were amazing in their layering and opacity. But what knocked her out were Verwey’s oils. The way they enlisted both vibrant color and near-total darkness. The paint thick as frosting, the casual brushwork nonetheless giving an architectural precision to the chaos, as though chaos were just a slightly more interesting version of order.

“This guy is great. Why hasn’t he gotten more recognition?”

“Well, maybe because he is not such an easy person.”

Alice made her way around the room a second time. “Man,” she said, “for all the time I’ve been at it, people have been saying painting is dead. But here, this is why painting won’t die. Because someone can make pictures like these.”

A little later, Charlotte asked, “Maybe, when you’re done here, you will let me take you away a little?” Alice’s original plan—to head back to the hotel to beat herself up a little, to recapture the melancholy of the afternoon—no longer seemed so compelling.

Charlotte had a favorite coffee shop, which was about the size of someone’s living room. They got Cokes in little bottles and shared a joint of
some weed called White Widow and Alice was soon stunningly high. Their conversation slowed and expanded. They talked about art and women, the difficulties of both. Rough commonalities in their childhoods, although Charlotte’s was grounded in an epic sort of poverty. Lard sandwiches, walls patched with newspaper, wearing other people’s shoes. Alice lost the thread here and there. When they emerged from the coffee shop, the sun had still not set; the day was staying open late for them. Charlotte stopped Alice and kissed her against the side of a church. They walked along the cobblestone streets, kissing some more as they went, the kissing a part of the walking. Boys on a boat passing along the canal beside and beneath them shouted out.

“What are they saying?”

Charlotte burst out laughing. “They are telling us to get a room!”

A few blocks over, on a side canal, Charlotte pushed open her front door and Alice pulled herself up the spiral stairs by the railing, Charlotte behind her. At the top, she reached past Alice to unlock a door and they were inside. The walls of the small entrance hallway were tacked full of drawings—extremely articulated studies of human organs.

“Being art critic at
The Daily Planet
—the name is from
Superman
so we keep it in English—well, it is not really a paying job. This is how I make money to live. Medical drawings. For textbooks. It is not such terrible work.”

“No, no,” Alice said, peering at the drawings, which were quite good. “I used to do meat.”

“You are saying meat?”

“Yes, for a market. I could show you how to draw an excellent lamb chop.”

“That would be so useful,” Charlotte said and it was as though she had made the funniest joke ever. Alice laughed so hard her knees went wobbly, and then Charlotte was also laughing. They laughed for what seemed about an hour. Everything had moved into slow motion. And then they weren’t laughing, and Charlotte was running a finger, tracing Alice’s ear, the line of her jaw, lavishing kisses on Alice, or more
accurately, started one long kiss that went on until they’d lost all grace and technique and were only eating each other’s mouths. Beyond the little foyer, the apartment was a blur of blue linoleum, walls the color of green tea ice cream, an old manual typewriter set on a wooden table, books and more books—in bookcases, but also in high stacks. Then an old iron bed they fell upon and Charlotte was undoing Alice’s pants, pulling down the zipper as Alice tilted her hips slightly, to help Charlotte slip her hand inside. Alice filled with gratitude.

In the morning, which arrived a little after four-thirty according to the clock by the side of the bed, Alice woke halfway and watched a gray-and-white cat eat kibble from a small bowl. A row of high, tall windows on the other side of the room sluiced watery sunlight into the room. She looked over at Charlotte, sleeping on her stomach, the side of her neck stained with hickeys. Without knowing it, this woman had been a Good Samaritan. She had saved Alice from a gin-soaked night alone in her hotel room, self-indulgently conflating her remorse with all of Europe’s.

Alice woke again. This time Charlotte was lying on her side, head propped up on her hand. She dipped to kiss Alice softly with sweet breath and slightly puffy lips. “So,” she said. “It wasn’t a dream. I really did spend the night with Alice Kenney in my bed.”

Before Alice left, Charlotte asked if she would sign her copy of the catalog from the show. The pen leaked a little black ink into Alice’s hand and Charlotte blotted it off, then kissed the palm playfully. Clearly she meant to flatter, but Alice felt snapped with a little whip. She hadn’t factored in that success was going to be a little tricky. Last night, she saw, had already been framed for retelling, a small prize this woman would show off to her friends. Alice saw the standard equation of attraction had been altered for her. Not only would she not have to hang her own paintings anymore, she would no longer have to rely on her own charms. From here on, for a time anyway, her name alone would be enough to slide her into the beds of admirers. A flinch of sadness caught her.

hammam [carmen in paris]

Carmen pretended to read
Out of Africa
(which had been gathering dust on her nightstand for the several years since she enjoyed the movie and thought she’d get right down to reading the book). As she pushed through chapter three, she was peripherally distracted by Heather in the seat next to her, felt-tipping a black spider onto the back of her hand.

Heather didn’t acknowledge Carmen’s interest. She was masterful at making it seem not as though she was ignoring Carmen, rather that Carmen simply wasn’t in the frame. To avoid any possible engagement, she had worn her Walkman through the five-plus hours they’d been on this flight.

On the other side of Heather was Heather’s father, whom Carmen had been dating since they met in the Proust class. Rob hunched over an open folder of paperwork. His calculator ran out of solar juice, and as he shifted in his seat and reached up to rejuvenate it with the light from the reading bulb, he looked over at Carmen and winked. Like they were linked in a conspiracy of fun.

Heather was fifteen and taking time off from school because of a problem Rob has been vague about. They were still at the stage with each other where they buffed up their kids’ résumés, swept any problems under the rug. But since Heather was so very thin, and because there was a therapist involved, Carmen supposed the problem was an eating disorder. Heather was along with them on this short business/pleasure trip to Paris at the therapist’s recommendation.

So far Heather seemed to hate Carmen, but not, apparently, because Carmen was her father’s new girlfriend. His last girlfriend—Tess, Heather talked about her all the time—was only seven years older than Heather. Which by all emotional logic should have been extremely hard for Heather to take. But apparently the two of them were great friends. They were taking a journaling workshop together.

For her part, Carmen couldn’t get a parental distance on Heather, who, with her studied hipness and basically black wardrobe, worked a kind of voodoo, thawed out a Carmen long since left behind, frozen in late adolescence. Heather lured this Carmen out naked and shivering, dripping into a blue puddle of unsureness. Heather was a reincarnation of the ruthless enemies of that time in Carmen’s life—the terrible, expertly snobbish girls in Carmen’s high school; the quiet, seemingly affable roommate who, after their first semester at Vassar, and without saying anything to Carmen, asked to be moved to another room. Back then, Carmen didn’t have a governor on her zeal. She was too political for a lot of people. She had tacked up Mao posters over her desk: “East Was Red” and “West Was Ready.” She had probably been too intense, always trying to shake sense into whomever, then bewildered when, instead of revising their beliefs or being galvanized into action, they simply chose to be friends with someone else. Heather brought out stuff in Carmen so far back, so layered over that she was astonished, really, to find it still existed, that it was still possible to rile it all up.

In their hotel room, once the baggage and rooms had been sorted out, Carmen and Rob were briefly alone together. She felt as though someone had been bumping her around with sandbags. It had been so long since she had traveled anywhere farther than a couple of time zones that she’d forgotten about jet lag. The taxi had brought them past the Arc de Triomphe, down the Champs-Élysées, and although everything was stunning in the morning sunlight, she had to be woken up when they got to the hotel.

She wanted to touch base with Gabe. But she figured the time at three in the morning in Chicago. To call would only unsettle everyone else in order to calm herself. Gabe was staying with Matt and Paula. Even if she’d pulled him out of school a little early, he wouldn’t have come along. He thought Rob was a total embarrassment and he was frightened of Heather. He said she wanted to drink his blood.

Rob spun around with his arms in the air. “
Formidable
, eh?” he said, in Berlitz Business French. “I love this place. I think I could even get into living here. Right now, though, we have to test the mattress.”

With this, he fell dead backward from the ankles, like a magician’s accomplice. His body thudded onto the bed, as opposed to bouncing. “Ah. Firm as a china plate. Great. We won’t be stooped over with hotel backaches. Come on, make out with me.” He looked at his watch. “Just for two and a half minutes. I have to leave soon. A very small commitment on your part.”

Carmen slipped off her shoes and acceded across the carpet.

He changed into his business clothes—soft black pants and shirt, and shoes that were like slippers. Rob’s business was one of smoothing things out. Based in Chicago, MarcAntony was a global chain of salons, and so he traveled about half the time to various franchises, checking on product sales and staffing problems, semaphoring new styles across the corporate seas. He had brought Olivia into their stylist training
program, which meant big bucks if she stuck with it, cutting hair in a first-tier salon instead of at Sharon’s Curl & Color on Irving Park, the only place Olivia applied to that would accept her prison cosmetology certificate. He definitely had a big heart.