. . . Find the future, Chas Lacouture said, leaning back in his chair and allowing Ursula the view, the cloud-capped spires and fog-stockinged spindles of Middle City in breathtaking disarray all the way down the mountain’s face, bending and arching and standing on tippytoes, a troupe of colossal robot ballerinas prepping for showtime. And in that moment she felt as though she might do just that, she might venture into the streets of her brand-new home and find the future there waiting for her like an outfit in a window display, and it would be as easy as that: new outfit, new career, new life. She hadn’t known she’d give up on trying to be an artist after she moved here—a real artist, she had thought, whether idealistically or snobbishly, she’s no longer sure, not just a commercial artist—but she must have secretly been hoping she would, hoping she could give up, otherwise why would she now feel so little regret and so much relief? Her foray into the world of art had been a serious miscalculation, a boondoggle, her own personal Somalia, an effort to save a seething mass of humanity with a compass and a bowie knife. It’s only now she’s out that she realizes the profound and pitiless extent of her desire never to return.
In retrospect there was something more than a little monomaniacal about her last four years, spent painting and repainting the same theme in dozens of variations. They were all triptychs, some actually consisting of three separate panels, some divided in more subtle ways, but all presenting three distinct views of the subject at hand: in every painting there was an idealized world and an infernalized world and the everyday world in between—three takes on the same objects, or people, or landscapes, or even abstract geometries. It was odd stuff, it now seems to her, but she sent it out into the world full of hope of understanding and ambition for recognition. She allowed herself to imagine that her paintings would be accessible to and even resonate deeply with people, but for one reason or another her work never caught the attention of more than a handful of minor galleries, and only a couple of the pieces ever sold. And meanwhile, her kid sister moved to Middle City and began peddling her own little triptych: of wide-set eyes, perky tits, and long, skinny legs. This was the visual art, it seemed, that the world had use for. In the few brief phone conversations they had in the year before her breakdown, Ivy told her about all the work she was getting—she was slated to be on every runway, in every magazine, she bragged and bragged. The boastfulness was something new, uncharacteristic, but Ursula was too full of resentment and self-loathing to question it, and when Ivy stopped calling, it only fed Ursula’s bitterness even more, and she herself made no effort to renew their contact. Had she known that Ivy, in all her time in Mid City, had gotten just one major print ad and other than that only an intermittent stream of less glamorous jobs, mostly for foreign clothing catalogs, and that furthermore she was losing her protracted struggle to hold on to her sanity, Ursula would have acted differently, of course. But this doesn’t make her feel any better now. She knew there was no one else in the world to look after Ivy, certainly not their parents, and that alone should have been reason enough for her to keep tabs on her sister.
Looking after Ivy has pretty much always been Ursula’s job. Even before the divorce their father was never really a part of the family, and as for their mother, motherhood just never ranked among her various engrossing interests. So Ivy ended up mostly in Ursula’s charge, and despite their substantial age difference, they did what they could together. They walked to school and home from school. They entertained each other with storytellings and games of make-believe for which Ursula was a little too old and Ivy a little too young. They sat under a tree in the backyard and made marathon courses for bugs. In time it would fall to Ursula to answer all the body questions—when and what to shave, what to do about menstruation. Ursula took her job as surrogate parent seriously, as she took everything seriously. She was diligent in schoolwork and sports and hobbies, responsible to a fault, carving out self-imposed rules and parameters to which she would arduously adhere in an attempt to counteract the chaos of her largely parentless childhood. Her expectations of Ivy were likewise exactingly high, as was her disappointment when Ivy failed to live up to them. At a time when Ursula had enrolled herself in drawing classes and was spending two hours a day afterward working on her sketches, Ivy would sit on her own in an unused corner of the room, making drawings as well. To Ursula’s consternation, Ivy’s drawings were all the same drawing, the same exact cartoon mouse, over and over again. She filled book after book with this mouse, or rather mostly just fragmentary beginnings of it, sometimes just a line or two, the curved side of a face, a couple of eyelashes, a solitary whisker, at which point she’d abandon the drawing because something about it just wasn’t right, and she’d need to start again on a fresh page. Finally one day she put down her sketchbook, never to pick it up again. This would become a pattern. Ivy would obsess over something every waking minute for weeks or even months and then abruptly walk away and forget all about it.
From an early age Ivy was branded the spacey one. Other kids made fun of her for her indifference toward their games and their company, and Ursula, incensed, would stand up for her time and again, but Ivy herself never took offense. She never got upset, never defended herself, never seemed to care about anything deeply. She didn’t do sports, didn’t make friends, didn’t do well in class. Ivy’s behavior galled Ursula at the time, but over the years she would come to realize that it stemmed from the fact that deep down Ivy thought that nothing she did could possibly matter. Her self-esteem was so low that she was less a child than a pale, flitting ghost, both to herself and to everyone around her.
After Ursula graduated from high school, she decided to attend a local college and keep living at home so she could be there for Ivy, but over the next four years Ivy herself was there less and less. She made a couple of friends, a pair of precociously sophisticated and alienated girls from the neighborhood, and spent all her waking hours in one or the other of their homes. Over that time her body grew from scrawny to lithe; her wide-set eyes went from weird to exotic; and suddenly she was the prettiest girl in school. Wherever she went, boys tracked her motions with longing, and girls with jealousy. She visited Ursula’s campus once, and even the college-age guys couldn’t help themselves from staring, their desire pathetically plain on their flushed, confused faces, while Ivy, to Ursula’s rage and amazement, demurely encouraged them, flirting with shocking expertise. Her looks had given her something that, if it was not exactly confidence, at least resembled confidence from afar. She could playact any way she wanted now, and people would more or less follow along. She became almost inhumanly self-sufficient, her own best friend, doing and saying whatever she felt like and never thinking of the consequences. Back in the neighborhood, a mystique began to grow up around her. Kids would tell stories about her, mostly involving drugs, and after a while Ursula stopped refuting them. She doubted they were true, but she was no longer completely certain. Ivy slipped further and further from Ursula’s control, and fairly or not, Ursula felt unappreciated and even, in a way, betrayed, and finally she washed her hands of her sister altogether and left for grad school in another state.
From then on she would see Ivy only through the time lapse of summers and holidays, and the rest of the picture would be filled in through tales she’d hear from friends, about Ivy’s monthlong school absences, her failed classes, her nomination for homecoming queen and subsequent nonattendance of the ceremony. When Ivy told her that everyone said she should be a model and so that was what she was planning to do, Ursula made one last attempt to guide her, telling her she didn’t have to do that, necessarily, she was capable of other things in life. But by then Ursula was bitter about her own life, about her own lack of success of any kind, and her bitterness turned to jealousy when she saw Ivy’s Hugo Banzer ad in Glamour magazine—a cool, gorgeous, disaffected Ivy slouching on a Mid City subway car in a stretch silk slip dress with her knees haphazardly parted, next to a chiseled guy in a T-shirt and snakeskin pants. In that moment she decided that Ivy epitomized all the things about the culture that conspired to make people unhappy, all the glitz and shallowness and materialism and facile beauty worship. Underneath this lay a more personal sense of outrage at the idea that Ivy had coasted through life without making the slightest effort and was now a success, whereas she herself had always worked like a dog, and still there was no reward in sight for her. It took Ivy’s crack-up for Ursula’s bitterness to melt into all the old feelings—the duty, the sorrow, the guilt, the rending, hopeless love.
So Ursula has taken up the old mission to save her sister one more time. She doesn’t know whether her learning about trendspotters will end up giving her any further access to Ivy’s inner world, but it may at least give her some access to an outer world, a world beyond her ever-shrinking sense of the possible in life. Chas and Javier will teach her to read the future in the colors of ties and the flavors of snack foods and the lyrics to pop songs, and maybe this future really will be different from anything she has previously thought possible, maybe it really will turn out to be more than just a fairy tale, more than an idle longing, a fatuous idealization, a story she tells herself when her life gets too oppressive, when she’s walking along a busy avenue trying not to inhale the more or less constant car exhaust and a homeless man is walking alongside her talking about how his limousine broke down and he needs change for the train, or when she’s on the train just before it goes around a curve so loud it makes her want to scream to equalize the pressure in her head, or in the sad silence when she turns off the TV after wasting an hour of her life watching celebrities promote their latest hairdos and personalities, or when she’s in bed at night, like now, desperately needing to clear her mind of thoughts about money and fame and respect and other things she doesn’t have and will never have and will never stop hating herself for wanting. She takes a breath, and another, lying on her back, the soft weight of the pillow over her eyes, and tries to imagine the future, the postironic future, the future of the savage girl’s dreams. What will it be like, this future? There will be no Middle City, for one. There will be no Lady of Nazareth Hospital, no airless, windowless psycho wards smelling of steamed eggs and antiseptics, no corner-mounted TV sets bristling with snide, self-satisfied car salesmen and fashion models, no fashion models period—self-satisfied, self-loathing, schizophrenic, or otherwise.
She takes a breath, and another, slow and deep, exhaling the present, exhaling her anxiety, her loneliness, exhaling the stale air of her still coldly unfamiliar apartment, breathing the future in. It starts with a warm energy like sunlight in her lungs, gently massaging her muscles. The warmth flows into her nerves, her veins, until she can feel her heart beginning to glow. She closes her eyes. It’s a warm, breezy, sunlit day in the Light Age, and the trees are ten feet thick and a hundred feet tall, and she’s lying in a canoe, looking up into the glimmering, flickering scalework of leaves on the underbelly of the sky, and the whiff of wild roses cleanses her from the inside out. On the riverbanks, flowers are now blooming luxuriantly and sending delicious waves of summer scent over the eddying water. The trees are broad-based and sturdy, and the forest goes on forever, with trees of all kinds—pines, hickories, chestnuts, oaks, willows—interspersed with meadows and ponds. Sustainable living has made of the forest a lush garden of fruits, spices, and medicinal herbs, teeming with deer and elk and foxes and ruffed grouse. There is no hunger, no want: it turns out that poverty was something created by money, and there is no money here, no mass production, no advertising, no entertainment industry. Work is an opportunity to feel the power of the muscles and the health of the mind, and play is meaningful, a ritual for reconnecting one’s spirit to the spirit of nature. Both the work and the play are something to look forward to, but at the moment there is nothing to do but enjoy the gentle motion of the boat, the intimate trickle of water against its sides, the warmth of the future sun on her eyelids, the coolness of the future breeze in her nostrils, as Ursula’s boat rocks and drifts her peacefully, lovingly, almost unironically, even, to sleep.