“SHE THOUGHT WE WERE ridiculous, you know.”
“Who did?”
“Miss Prokoff. I could tell.”
“Well, it was her fault. She wouldn’t give us any kind of a straight answer. I don’t know why she said we could interview her if she didn’t want to tell us anything.”
“She’s done it all a million times before, that’s why.”
“You always have to defend everyone, Lizzie, it makes me want to throw up. I thought she was an old bitch. And really, never mind feminism, could you stand to look like that? I’d rather be dead. Do you have any money on you?”
“About six dollars. I thought she was absolutely amazing, she was so fierce and alive and sort of unbowed. I kept thinking, God, I hope I can be like that when I’m old.”
“I knew you’d make some big romance out of it. I’ve only got about three dollars, and that’s counting change; we’ll have to settle for McDonald’s or something. I’m starving.”
They, too, had been invited to the party after the opening, but Belle’s dizziness had returned, along with wavy lines in front of her eyes, as soon as she stood up; in consequence, her celebration was deferred for a month, though some of the visitors from New York headed for the restaurant anyway. “I was counting on at least getting a decent meal out of my aunt,” Heather says now, which is pretty much what the curators are saying about Monica over their drinks: “She could at least have told us to charge the dinner to her.”
Only Lizzie is in an exalted frame of mind, a habitual state with her lately, after a winter of deep and unalterable gloom. “You ought to go on Lithium,” is what Heather says, unfeeling as always, though Heather herself, just last fall, swallowed two hundred aspirin after a postdoctoral fellow in cultural studies ditched her for an associate professor. It was Lizzie who took her to the infirmary, Lizzie who brought her magazines and corn chips when she could sit up again. Though they grew up privileged, as Belle suspected, they are not unscathed, these two; there is a forlornness in each that the other sensed from the beginning.
“You can eat the whole nine dollars’ worth,” Lizzie says, “I’ve got to go on a diet,” at which Heather tells her that she is probably anorexic on top of everything else. But this, at least, is not true; Lizzie has gained all of four pounds in the past two months, the result of happiness, and of eating Oreos in her lover’s bed at three in the morning. Having grown up in Australia, and been weaned on aniseed sticks, the man she is in love with has a passion for the sugary treats of American childhood. America, he tells her sternly, is a Mickey Mouse country, but then so is Australia, and at least America has Oreos and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and Mallomars.
She is pleased to be getting back early, so that she can call him that much sooner. Back in the apartment she shares with two other graduate students, she drags the phone into her bedroom for privacy, squatting on the dirty rug just inside the door, while in the living room her two roommates stare despondently at the television, as she used to do. The whiz of bullets mingles with the sound of ringing at the other end. Just when she has counted twelve rings, and is starting to worry, he picks up.
“It’s me.”
“So it is,” he says, “so it is. Hang on a minute.” There is the comforting, familiar sound of his single chair being scraped across the uneven floorboards of his loft. “Go ahead. I want to hear all about it.”
“She was amazing,” she says, in a rush. “Really wonderful. Like someone who’s lived through all the pain there is and come out the other side.”
But he is silent, waiting, she knows, for news not of Belle Prokoff but Clay Madden, any gleanings she can offer — the sight of the splattered floorboards in his studio, an old drawing of his on the wall, a story his widow told that everyone doesn’t know already — so he can hoard it to himself. Apart from junk food, Clay Madden is the chief justification he finds for the existence of America. When he was in art college, back in Melbourne — Lizzie would have been three years old — and the museum there bought a vast Madden that the taxpayers howled at the price of, he went and looked at it every day for a year. It was that painting that had made him abandon figuration, all those atmospheric landscapes and portraits that had already won him a modest reputation in his native city. “Mr. Doherty draws like an angel,” said Sir Kenneth Clark, in town to give a lecture, and his remark was quoted throughout the school. After seeing the Madden, he stopped drawing like an angel. Belle Prokoff is not the chief point of interest.
“Did she have anything of his around?”
“No. There were a couple of hers on the wall. And then we went to her show. I don’t know why you say her work is so bad. I think it’s beautiful.”
He snorts. “It’s wallpaper. Pretty decorations. She probably can’t afford to keep his paintings out there, the insurance would cost too much. Did she talk about him to you?”
“A little. Only when we pressed her. She told us about meeting him and said he’d always supported her work, stuff like that. You could tell she’d said it all a million times before. I felt like such a fraud, because she thought I was an art historian too. But I was really glad I went.”
“Tell me exactly what she said about him.”
“It’s all stuff you know already. About how she went to see him because they were in some show together, she’d seen his name on the card and didn’t know who he was, and then she was knocked out by the paintings. You told me that story yourself.”
“Did you see his studio?”
“Yes.”
“You lucky bugger. I’d give my left nut to get in that place.”
“It’s her studio now.”
“I don’t know how she can paint in there. Who was at the opening? A lot of honchos?”
“I guess. I wouldn’t recognize them anyway.”
“Did you all go out to some posh restaurant?”
“No. She almost fainted at the opening. She’s old, you know, and she gets these dizzy spells. So the dinner was canceled. We went to a McDonald’s on the way back.” She waits for him to say, “When will I see you?” or “What are you doing tomorrow?” but the silence extends itself.
“Have you been working?” she asks finally.
“Of course I’ve been working; I’ve been changing the glaze on that red painting. It looks fucking beautiful now. Not that anyone will notice.”
“Someone will notice,” she says staunchly. “The people who know anything will.” This is the role she has taken on, as bearer of hope, chief purveyor of consolation. And she believes everything she says — she has read all his clippings, every last word; she is convinced by the promise they hold forth. Some day there will be a new reckoning.
The last time he had a show, several months before she met him, three downtown painters wrote him admiring letters, telling him how much his work meant to them; the owner of a prestigious gallery spent half an hour in front of one canvas and then told his dealer, “Blood was sweated over this painting.” A critic for an intellectual journal said it was “some of the most satisfying work I’ve seen this year … Paul Doherty is our most intelligent geometric abstractionist, one of the few contemporary painters able to give meaningful form to his obsessions.” There was even a glowing review in Art in America.
But the New York Times said nothing, and only two small canvases sold. Lizzie, to whom he told the story the first time they went to bed, grieves over this fact even now, though she believes it is only a matter of time before things change for him. Meanwhile, the art world’s refusal to grant him his due seems to her the single obstacle to their happiness.
She has had some experience in dealing with the inexplicable, being powerless to change what is clearly unfair. When she was fourteen, her mother was crossing the street in Stamford, on her way to a shop where they repaired old china, and got knocked down by a hit-and-run driver. The cracked Spode platter she was carrying smashed into a million pieces, and she was in a coma for a week. For two years after that, she was in and out of hospitals with mysterious seizures and spasms, until one of them killed her. But Lizzie still believes, as an article of faith, that one should always remain hopeful.
Anyway, there is nothing irrevocable about what has happened, or failed to happen, to Paul. Things could change any day, although sometimes, lying awake beside him, she is stricken by the thought that she has never seen him really happy, and maybe she never will.
Finally he remembers her. “So what are we doing tomorrow? Are you coming over?”
“If you want. I could bring something for dinner.”
She will take the subway, changing several times, to the shabby neighborhood in Brooklyn where he lives surrounded by Polish butchers and Ukrainian bakeries. She will cook dinner on the one working burner on his hot plate, while Monteverdi plays loudly over the speakers, to drown out the heavy metal sounds from the loft up-stairs. Then they will smoke a joint and go to bed in the sealed-off freight elevator he has converted into his bedroom. Afterwards, in the middle of the night, they will pad around naked, licking chocolate off their fingers and looking at his paintings. At some point she will show him the letter she received this week from her old professor at Amherst. He had planned to go to London this summer to do research for his book on Carlyle and the hermeneutic tradition. Now his wife has contracted Lyme disease, and he wonders if Lizzie could go in his stead. Ever since the letter arrived, she has been trying to think of a respectable reason for refusing; what worries her is that tomorrow, when she tells Paul about it, he may not plead with her to stay.
They agree that she should buy some shrimp to cook in his wok, he will pay her back, and now, the arrangements made, she can go peacefully to bed. Replacing the telephone on its wobbly perch in the living room, a stand that someone’s mother once used for plants, she says good night to her roommates, who barely look up from the TV. Then she washes her face with the expensive black soap, made from mud and seaweed, that is her one remaining luxury, removes her contact lenses, and crawls between the covers with a copy of Lolita from the Columbia library. She has been anxious to read it because Lionel Trilling said it was about love, and love is all that interests her these days. Most of her mental life, in fact, consists of reflections on the subject. She has decided that Plato was right, that all her life she has been searching for the part of her soul left behind at birth, and now she has found it. No matter how often she has this revelation, it always retains its power to move her.
Paul Doherty does not know, because she keeps him from knowing, how much of her time is spent thinking about these matters; he believes that she, like him, has whole hours, days, when her mind is fixed entirely on what she is doing. She wouldn’t tell him that even her mind is not her own these days. She has been taken over by a foreign power; what used to be her center has dissolved into a random collection of particles, held together only by consciousness of him.
Occasionally, coming up for air from some book she is reading, having forgotten him for three whole minutes, she wonders why the return of awareness does not please her, why it feels instead like a constriction in her heart muscles, a niggling uneasiness akin to pain. But even this thought seems like a betrayal, not just of him but of the avatars of love, a heresy that she squashes at once, lest she be left with the larger question of what she is planning to do with herself, why she’s been placed on this earth at all. So far, he is the most plausible reason she has managed to find.