Love Love (39 page)

It seemed as if everyone was frozen under a spell until Judy ran out. Roger followed, their footsteps hammering echoes in the silence.

“What happened?” Kevin asked Claudia. “What the fuck?”

Claudia sighed, tightened the bandanna around her head. Kevin knew he was pissing her off, but he didn't care. “Right now, Judy's work is one of desperation. The first one she sent you, that was real. I can see it in her strokes, the confidence, the attitude. With each subsequent sketch, it ebbs away until this last one has none of it, not a whit.” She held up another one Kevin hadn't seen, two women in tennis skirts sitting on a bench, topless as they breastfed the tennis ball they each cradled in their arms. “They've been neutered, as if they were started by her but completed by someone else. Displaying her works as is would be like showcasing the decline of an artist, and that's not what this show is about.”

Kevin peered at the drawing to see the certain mistakes that Claudia saw, but what was the point? This was her domain, and he knew how immutable her mind was once she made it up. All he saw in his sister's work was wonder, how she took a blank canvas and drew something that had existed only in her brain. It was magic, this act of creation, and Claudia had sullied it.

“Bullshit,” Alexa said. “All of it, all utter bullshit, Mom.”

Claudia crossed her arms and addressed her daughter. “Now you know better than that.”

“Contrary to popular belief, this is what she does better than anything else,” Alexa continued, ignoring her. “It's positively Olympic, her ability to screw with your mind.”

“I meant every word I've said. That's called integrity.”

“She hasn't told you, has she,” Alexa said to Kevin. “She hasn't told you what happened when she suffered her nervous breakdown, excuse me,
vision
, when she stopped being a reasonable person and became the monster that she is.”

Claudia clapped twice, and the circle around her began dispersing. “We still have a gallery to open in less than half an hour, folks.” She turned to Alexa. “You can keep talking, but no one's listening, my dear.”

“You and your stupid fucking Tiny Claudia,” Alexa said, and she headed for the exit herself.

Already Claudia's assistants were at work in the background, removing the panels that were supposed to showcase Judy's works. Hammers unhinged nails; pieces of the beige matte boards passed from one assistant to another like a fire brigade.

Kevin clutched Claudia by the arm with enough force for her to emit a small yelp of complaint. He wanted to keep his voice steady, but he could feel himself losing his cool.

“Everything was ready to go here,” Kevin said. “All you had to do was just let it go. If you'd just let your people do their fucking jobs . . .”

“I can't go against myself.” She yanked her arm free of his grip. “That's what it would've been, me doing something that no longer felt true.” She picked up Judy's painting off the floor, the shattered glass an intricate spider web that obscured the sketch underneath. “This might feel like the end to your sister's career, but have faith that it's just the beginning.”

“No,” he said. “There has to be a limit.”

“A limit?”

“You're a child, Claudia. You're worse than a child, because you're an adult but you don't act like one.”

Claudia shook the broken shards into a garbage can, the pieces sounding like white noise as they hit the metal. “That's how you really feel?”

“I've never been more sure of anything in my life.”

She placed the framed sketch on a rolling cart and stood in front of him, close enough that he smelled her familiar scent of paint and sweat. “Then we're done, you and I.”

“Fine,” Kevin said.

“It is. You're not the first one to no longer understand who I am, and you won't be the last.” Her voice was about to break, but then she fought it off. “I know this is my lot in life.”

With that she walked away, toward the gap where his sister's works were supposed to be tonight, a white space that was now being populated with long-backed white chairs and round white side tables, an area where people could gather and debate the finer points of art and all its elusive definitions.

He felt a hand on his shoulder.

“It seemed best if I stayed out of the way,” Denise said. “With what was going on.”

“I'm sorry,” he said. “You didn't even get to meet Judy.”

“That's all right. I've gotten my fill of art and artists for the evening. Possibly for my lifetime. What should we do now?”

“What I want,” he said, “is to go home.” Except home was across the country, and getting a ticket tonight would basically bankrupt him. Still, he tried, calling the airline as Denise held the door open for him. The please-hold Muzak annoyed his ear.

Outside, the air was cold, and sitting on the stoop was Alexa, her legs pulled in close.

“Hey.” He crouched down next to her. He handed his phone to Denise, who nodded and took it.

“My mother's crazy,” she said. Her eyes were red, her voice gravelly. “I'm sorry I ever mentioned her to you. She wasn't like this, always. She used to be a normal person.”

“‘Tiny Claudia,' you said. What did you mean by that?”

“A hallucination. She's always been a manic depressive, but one night she had a huge fight with my dad and she was gonna kill herself. Emptied her bottle of sleeping pills and had shoved them in her mouth when she saw a tiny version of herself at the bottom of the bottle.”

“A tiny version . . . ?”

“She swears it was her.”

“She hadn't actually taken the pills yet. So this hallucination was not drug-induced.”

“That's why she insists it was real. She spit the pills out, rinsed out her mouth, told my father to go fuck himself, and became who she is.
Somebody who does what she feels, regardless of the consequences, because to her, going against herself is taking those pills.”

“Claudia's theory on life is like communism,” he said. “On paper, it's great, but its actual execution leaves much to be desired. Do you want to go somewhere or something?”

She shook her head. “Eventually I'll have to come back here. She's still my mother. I have no other place I can go, except home.”

“I got somebody,” Denise said, and she handed Kevin's cell phone back to him.

He introduced the two ladies to each other then took the call. The best the rep could do was to book a flight three days from now, one that had a pair of connections, from San Francisco to Dallas to Denver and finally Newark. He still had to pay another three hundred dollars, but he took it.

“Back in Jersey on Tuesday,” he said.

“You're not coming back to Mom's tonight, are you,” Alexa said.

“We're gonna stop there now so I can pick up my stuff,” Kevin said, “but no, I won't be sticking around.”

“And you're not coming back to the tennis club, either.”

“Maybe as a member, like you.”

“I have a match next Saturday in a local junior tournament. The girl I'm playing is six foot one with the wingspan of an airliner. Ridiculous serve. Would you consider being my coach?”

“I don't know how much help I'd be,” he said, and he meant it, because in the end, tennis was a long-distance boxing match, you against your opponent. “But I'd be honored.”

“Good,” she said. She dusted herself off, looking once again like a prom queen in her strapless dress. “Then this is still not good-bye. Because I hate good-byes. In fact, I'm just going to walk back in there now so I don't have to say it.”

They watched her do exactly that, disappear into the squinty brightness of the Hive.

“I like her,” Denise said. “One of your students?”

“Was,” Kevin said. “I quit my job at the club.”

As they were about to leave, the thin man who came with the media crew hurried through the door and hailed Kevin.

“Someone told me you're the brother of the artist Judy Yoon Lee?”

“That's right.”

“I'd like to talk to you, but I have to go back to the opening. Can I get your number?”

Kevin gave him his number, the man typed it into his smartphone, and then he was gone as fast as he'd come.

“The saga continues,” Denise said.

They walked down the Embarcadero to get to Denise's car, past the giant gray Pier 35 building until the bay came into view. At night the city was a living jewel, lights from the distant Treasure Island twinkling gold. Sailboats glided through the darkness while inland, a pair of skyscrapers was outlined like neon lights. The beacon atop the Transamerica Pyramid was a cold white orb.

“You can stay at the Sanctuary, if you like,” Denise said. “I know we have beds open and you're only gonna be around for a couple days.”

“That's really kind of you,” he said. “My wallet thanks you as well.”

“I have a shoot tomorrow, but the next day I'm free, so I can come by to see you off.”

Denise clicked on her key fob, and her car blinked its headlight eyes in response. They both got in, but before she pressed the starter button, she turned and looked at him. Under the street light, her Barbie doll made-up face looked wrong, because she was frowning.

“What's the matter?” Kevin asked.

“We leave our lies behind in the Sanctuary. We're not there yet, but we will be soon, and I'd rather get this out in the open now than later.”

“All right,” he said.

“I'm not your sister,” Denise said. “Not your half sister, not even one percent.”

Kevin breathed into his belly, breathed out, puffing his cheeks, then again. He was doing his stroke breath, right before he approached the tennis ball and struck at its center. It used to calm him down; he hoped it still worked.

“Why?” he asked.

“Because of Norman. He's helped me through a lot of hard stuff, and I didn't think he was asking much, but as it turns out, he was, because I like you, you're a good person, and I'm no good at lying anymore. I used to be better at it.”

“He asked you to pretend to be my sister?”

She nodded. “I thought it was crazy, too, but he loves you, and he doesn't think he alone is enough to keep you.”

“Keep me? What the fuck does that mean?”

“I don't know. It's what he told me, and I'm probably fucking that up, too. He should tell you himself. He comes every Monday, tomorrow, for counseling sessions at the Sanctuary.”

“I can't believe people take advice from this man.”

He knew this was a slam against Denise, but he didn't care. To be lied to like this—it was just an awful thing to do to anyone, but from his own father? But maybe it made sense. Making a home movie like the one Norman had, the man clearly had problems.

“I'd like to explain at least my portion of this mess,” Denise said.

Kevin said nothing. Just when he thought this day couldn't get any shittier, it did. He sank into his seat and turned away from Denise. She started the car and they drove down the street, the environmentally friendly hum of the Prius's hybrid engine filling the cabin. The girders of the Bay Bridge rose like mountain peaks as they approached it from the south, the cars in front and the cars in back sharing the common goal of leaving this city behind.

PART III

THREE DAYS IN NOVEMBER