Maddie’s hand lit up and buzzed. She and her mother had just come down from a stroll on the High Line, which had been fine and brisk and golden in the late January afternoon, gilt clouds in armada formations, the usual mix of tourists, skater-boys and girls, nannies pushing elaborate strollers, walkers in puffer coats, readers hunched with their books on benches, loners. Birds flitting low among the shrubberies. Some Christmas lights still lit in apartment windows they could see into, and taped-up “Not My President” signs. Now they were heading for a drink before they made their way to Tribeca for a late dinner with this Asa that Marlise had been hearing so much about, the book designer. Then Maddie and Asa would take the train back to Brooklyn, and Marlise would return to her hotel, where she needed to think a bit more about the talk she was presenting tomorrow to some graduate students at the New School. It wasn’t a big visit; just guest-teaching a seminar for a professor, a younger woman who had been her classmate in graduate school. “Juvenilia, or The Glass Self,” Marlise was calling it, though large parts of her argument weren’t quite worked through. She hoped to engage the students in a conversation about the Brontë children’s imaginary worlds, Glass Town, in particular, and about some ideas she’d been tossing around about childhood as a glass-like construction (what did Shakespeare call the self, a “glassy essence”?), an asylum, in both connotations of the word—imprisonment and freedom—and to delve into some of Deleuze’s notions of the fold, about hidden and manifest identities, with a focus on the “apprentice pieces” of Emily Brontë and Robert Hayden.
Blah, blah. She knew this would all sound very old-fashioned to the students. It was still weird for her, this life as a sort of literary scholar, the unexpected attention she received in the wake of a small book she’d published on the marginalia of a number of Victorian women diarists. Could she make that work, she wondered, the baroque secrecy and the transparent paradox of glass? Actually, she was thinking hard about a glassy martini in a nice dark bar.
They continued walking, arm in arm, as Maddie chatted on her phone with one of her buyers. It was chillier on the street than it had been up on the sun-struck High Line. Marlise recalled the first time, five years ago or more, maybe, that she’d watched in wonder as her daughter looked down into the phone in her palm, unearthing with her fingertips the birthdate of Cindy Sherman, whose show they’d just seen at the MoMA, while at the same time cancelling a dinner reservation at one place and booking another, calculating, too, how long it would take them to get there if they walked or if they took a taxi or the train, and Maddie, responding to a text and sending another, never missing a step, keeping one hand at Marlise’s elbow, steering her down the Avenue without, Marlise knew, wanting to appear to be doing so, keeping them going in the right direction. It was always Marlise’s inclination, though she herself now possessed such a phone and could in fact feel it buzzing at her hip in her cross-body bag, to stop when she was lost, move out of the crush of sidewalk bodies, and rummage for a paper map. Glancing around now, it seemed to Marlise that everyone was looking down into lambent, upturned palms. Prophets. Saints, all of them.
As Maddie talked on the phone, Marlise thought about the show of Emily Dickinson ephemera they’d seen that afternoon at the grand old Pierpont Morgan Library. Or simply the Morgan, as they called it now. Years ago, Marlise had witnessed there a pair of Charlotte Brontë’s tiny folded gloves in a case, no wider than a gull’s feather. Anyway, the Dickinson show had been small, but thrilling for Marlise—that lock of red hair (Marlise had seen that before, in a library at Amherst), the hallucinatory wallpaper, restored and displayed. No wonder Dickinson woke in the wee hours, unable to sleep through the birdsong amidst all the blinding pink florals.
Not surprisingly, Maddie had been taken with the Herbarium that Dickinson had assembled when she was a girl, and began making some sketches from the pages on view, in her notebook. Maddie’s own drawings and designs, recently incorporating her studies of Islamic calligraphy she’d first seen on a visit to her father and his new wife at Somerset House in London, were now being shown in a few places, including galleries abroad, in addition to being turned into couture fabrics for dresses, coats, upholstery. She was working on a couple of collaborative art books, as well, including one for children. Marlise was wearing one of Maddie’s creations now, a tawny heavy sweater coat embroidered at the sleeves and hem with intricate, whimsical silk concoctions: stickleburrs, winged seeds, leaf tatter, as though she’d just come in from a traipse in the fields.
Marlise gazed a while at Dickinson’s Bible, tome plundered by that wild, iconoclastic mind for clues to what immensities and mysteries lay beyond this mortal coil. Maddie, continuing to scribble onto her pages ideas from the Herbarium, had said, as though she had eyes in the back of her head, “Why encase it in glass? Why not let us see inside it?” Yes, Marlise could see the point to that. Why not? She also thought she might know why not.
She crossed the room and stood looking over Maddie’s shoulder. “To me,” she said, “these herbarium pages have always felt like Dickinson’s poems.”
“Like a translation of them?” Maddie asked, peering once more at the preserved foliage on display, then closing up her sketchbook and tucking it into her backpack. “Something figurative? Mimetic, visually?” Marlise gave Maddie a hug. “Maybe. More like a premonition, the perfume or essence of them. Something she’d intuited in girlhood, something that was yet to manifest in her poetry. Ready to go?”
After Maddie ended her phone call, they continued walking, arms linked. Maddie turned her luminous, beautiful face toward her mother’s. “Aren’t you going to ask me about Paul?”
“Okay, how is your father?”
“Doing well. Old, though. Old-ish. Bald! He could only stay one night, passing through. Samira and the kids weren’t with him this time, the banned countries, you know. After all the time she worked in the states. He had to get back overseas. The twins are in something like middle school now, can you believe it?”
She gave Maddie a smile. Marlise was glad that Maddie seemed comfortable at last with the divorce and Paul’s remarriage, his move, his new job, new family. It had been years ago, and very hard then. But not hard any longer, she hoped.
“I’m hungry,” Marlise said. “Where is dinner?”
A place recommended by a chef friend of Asa’s, but there were no early reservations available, Maddie was saying, distracted suddenly as they turned a corner onto a side street navy blue with building shadow, though the cornices, rooftops, and water towers still blazed with winter sun. “We’ll get our drink at the Red Cat, it’s just up ahead, but first let’s duck in here. I’ve been wanting to see this.”
These Chelsea galleries, thought Marlise. Big blank brick walls and you’d think nothing here, old warehouses, an industrial door or two, often no signage, but inside, suddenly and always, opening up into something unexpected and often wonderful. The way she’d slipped into a Basquiat show by accident a couple of years ago, and found herself inside a wonderland of rooms hung with paintings and drawings of his she’d never seen before or since. She sometimes wondered if she’d dreamed the whole thing.
Maddie knew Elle, the young woman at the desk, and Marlise, after introducing herself, wandered into the gallery space while behind her Maddie lingered to talk with her friend.
Marlise took one step more, then stopped. She had an eerie feeling in her scalp and limbs, the way she sometimes felt before a migraine descended or if she were lowering a window against an electrical storm. The room was dim, with only the white walls spot-lit, hung with paintings. There was a door opening into a room beyond. Behind her, Elle was saying “yes, a retrospective. Works by the owner’s brother. . . . you know, Raina Newman, her main gallery is the famous one, in Geneva . . . the artist died decades ago, barely into his twenties.” And “Oh,” she said, louder now, so Maddie’s mother could hear, “the show proceeds chronologically, earliest work to the stuff he was doing just before he died. Just go on through at your own pace.”
And here they were, the paintings Marlise had seen so long ago on a postcard shown to her by someone, one of the aides, at the Institute. The ones that had been given an early showing in Philadelphia back when Silas was just a patient in his teens. They were much larger than she’d imagined them to be. The letters on the wall said “The Choke-Her Series (1965–1968),” along with excerpts from some contemporary reviews and some new commentary.
Maddie and Elle had joined Marlise, who was finding it hard to catch her breath. “Apparently they’re of the mother,” Elle was explaining. “A complicated relationship, I’d say.”
“Ha, ha, I’d never want to choke YOU, Ma,” said Maddie. Marlise squeezed Maddie’s hand. “These early pieces are prescient,” Elle continued, “especially considering that the artist kills himself in his mother’s apartment when he’s only twenty-one. An overdose, apparently. An old stash of drugs he’d had hidden away. The very drugs they gave him when he was hospitalized, to cure him, if you can believe that.”
As the young women moved into the next room, Elle was saying, “the family thinks he was depressed because, after running away from a hospital in a fugue state of some sort and being readmitted and given a series of ECT shocks, he’d been turned down for an NEA grant. The blow of that rejection apparently crushed him. But who hasn’t been overlooked for one of those, I’ve been turned down every year I’ve applied, haven’t you? And I’m over 30!”
Marlise felt as if she might faint. Through a blur of tears she looked down at the flyer Maddie had pressed into her hand. “Disenfranchised Bodies: A Retrospective of the Precocious Paintings of Silas Newman.”
What had happened to Silas?
Not Paul, not Tee, not even Maddie, no one living in her world knew about those years in Marlise’s life. About how Marlise had so long ago, in another story, been orphaned, sent to school, hospitalized for not eating until her trust fund ran out. How she had stayed for a while, unsupervised, and then fallen unconscious in an old family farmhouse during a blizzard when she was almost fifteen. None of them knew about the strange circumstances that led her Uncle Cole, dying of terminal cancer, to find her there, where he’d gone to kill himself, or about the strange man, a criminal as it turned out, who drove them through thigh-high drifts of belting snow and wind in the blazing cab of a pick-up truck to an emergency room. Nor did they know of her subsequent adoption by her god-father Maurice Miles, how she’d changed her last name to his and started going for a long time by Emma, Em, a subconscious effort, maybe, to start anew, and also to separate her real name from Silas’s (what had he said? “Look, your name contains mine!”), though she started going by Marlise again, Marlise Miles, years later, once her divorce from Paul was final. None of them knew about her life before art school, marriage, motherhood. No one but Tee himself knew she’d fallen in mid-life into life-changing extra-marital love with a man from whom she’d been long separated, but who had helped her turn, at last, through ardor and resistance, to an embodied life and a desire to endure.
Standing before the paintings she’d seen printed on a postcard so long ago, Marlise allowed a memory to seep back from the time after she’d been driven through the snowstorm and was reclaimed by good old Maurice, who returned to New Jersey from the West Coast to adopt her. They settled into a split-level on a mid-state cul de sac, where Maurice, more or less abandoned by his own sons and step-children, had managed from a home office what money had come of Cole’s holdings and the Paradise Close estate sale for Marlise (and himself, presumably). After some sessions with a local psychiatrist—the only one accredited in the New Brunswick area—Marlise, going by Emma, had enrolled in a large public high school, where she delved into and excelled in the study of English and studio art, life drawing at first, then print-making, and made friends with a group of drama friends who accepted her utterly, from the start, drawing her peripherally into their world of high school theater and regaling her with accounts of their weekend trips into the burgeoning queer scene in Manhattan, where their beauty and youth gave them purchase in clubs and drag shows. These gamine boys and bold girls, smoking under the shelters between buildings, talking about Ionesco, Siddhartha, Roxy Music—reminded her of Silas, but without his possessiveness and paranoia.
Accepted without question, but also not anyone’s particular focus, she began to recover. You’re sexier than you were when you showed up, her friends said. We made you sexier. She floated among them, a virgin, but that was okay, too. What excited her most those days: the outline of red maple leaves against sky. The art she was beginning to make. A line from a poem, “it is the blight man was born for. / It is Margaret you mourn for.” A cold, sugary swallow of ripe pear. The fragrance of a freshly pulled linoleum print, the inks still wet and rife with root-like musk.
When it was time for college, she’d gotten into all the art schools to which she’d applied, and focused her studies in intaglio printmaking, always serious, serious, but also, again, venturing into the safe but fluid shoals of theater through connections with a few of her friends from high school, also now attending the same fine arts college. Why, now, in this Chelsea gallery, standing before the early work of Silas Newman, was she thinking not about her own former life as an artist, her early success in showing her work, in landing a university job teaching printmaking, even earning a big award for her projects, her later work in the Fishhouse studio with adolescent girls, but rather of that one cast party after a student-directed production of The Tempest in the late winter of her senior undergraduate year? The director had decided to cast five women to play the part of Ariel, that most exquisite shape-shifter, appearing first here, then there, orchestrating, deploying, disappearing into air. Marlise was pressed into service as one of them. We’re the pussy posse, said Axel, another Ariel, a girl from Marlise’s poli-sci class who wore men’s dress shirts and ties and who gave Marlise long, frank admiring looks during boring afternoon discussions of the new Carter presidency and the recent election. It had been liberating and, she had to admit, fun to be out of the print studio and part of a sweaty throng of fluid, androgynous Shakespearean spirits, dressing and undressing in a crowded space backstage, acting as one manifold and antic whole.
Her own Ariel-time on stage was brief, her speech from Act II addressing Prospero’s old advisor, Gonzalo:
My master through his art foresees the danger
That you, his friend, are in, and sends me forth
(For else his project dies) to keep them living.
After delivering her handful of lines, she had to sing (“I can’t sing,” she’d protested. “The lady,” Axel had said, “doth protest too much, methinks”), and so sing she did, as well as she could, into the shapely ear of Eugene, a rather twiggy Gonzalo, a boy she’d known since high school and who would, Marlise later learn, die of the AIDS so many of her former high school friends had unwittingly contracted back in those freewheeling, carefree days. “While you do snoring lie,” she croaked out as best she could,
Open-eyed conspiracy
His time doth take.
If of life you keep a care,
Shake off a slumber and beware.
Awake, awake!
The cast party after the last performance had been at the off-campus house of a group of graduate student thespians. Amidst the drinking, the skunky sea-drift of pot, there had been dancing and impromptu recitations—the usual de rigeur and raucous throw-down competitions of Shakespearean profanity, delivered from tabletops and sofas—“Thou whore-son zed, thou unnecessary letter!” and “Thy wit’s as thick as Tewkesbury mustard”—theater people were so refreshingly self-conscious—but other lines as well, things Marlise didn’t recognize—“Try again. Fail again. Fail better”—and some she did. Axel, who, Marlise realized, reminded her of that long-ago girl with the beaver coat, grabbed Marlise’s hands mid-rave, dropped to her knees, singing “for thou art / As glorious as to this night, being o’er my head, / As is a winged messenger of heaven / Unto the white-upturned wondering eyes / of mortals,” before leaping to her feet and kissing Marlise deeply on the mouth.
With the unexpected sensation of wine and smoke from Axel’s tongue inside her, Marlise, Emma, felt the many stories of her body begin to stir. She didn’t pull away after the kiss, and Axel stood there, grinning. And then, as if by stage direction or Prosperian orchestration, an odd early March thunderstorm that had been rumbling around the outskirts of town all evening and brewing into the wee hours finally crashed over the house, and the lights dimmed, crackled. On. Off. On again. And went dark.
Complete silence followed, also as if by magical command. The record on the stereo skidded statically to a halt in the pong of sweat, cannabis, yeasty beer, spilled wine. Somewhere a clock ticked. Shadowy sensations of other bodies. Bodies slowly moving. A hand brushed her breast. Lips touched lips, smoke and wine of Axel again in her mouth. A hand slipped down between her belly and blue jean zipper, another up her shirt. Her nipples stiffened. She felt fingers up inside her. Wet there. Marlise reaching out, too, now, but where, to whom? On her knees. Someone, Axel?, unzipping, then a surprise, an erect cock, velvet skin, warm against her face. In her mouth. The valentine tip of it. Now in her hand. Someone tugging at her jeans. She slipped out of them with one hand, the other still holding the warm swelling cock. Bigger now. And coming in a hot silky jet just as she slipped it between her legs. Smell of ocean. What had Silas asked her, long ago, in the sunroom of the Institute? Can you smell the seawater in the air? She could. She did. More tumble then, sweating bodies inside each other, turning into each other everywhere. Rapid breathing, gasps, grunts, growlings in the dark. Sighs. Small cries. Panting. No words.
By daybreak, the storm had blown off, but there was still no electricity in the house. Enthralled at the heaps of partly clothed, sleeping bodies around her in the pearly dawn, Marlise dressed, gathered up her things and walked back to her dorm. A garbage truck groaned past, rank with vegetable peelings, vinegar, and wet newspaper. First birds in the sycamores. Whiff of green sap and storm-drenched mulch. A glimmer of almost spring. Of being in her body. “Awake!” she sang aloud. “Awake!”
For weeks afterward, as crocuses, snowdrops, winter-blooming jasmine emerged along the walkways of the quad, the party-goers flashed bruises, exchanged secret smiles in hallways, across classrooms and studios. Then one of the Ariels, Maxine, learned she was pregnant and had to go into the city for an abortion. The high of that night of the cast party began to wane. And then, suddenly, in late March, Maurice died of complications of undiagnosed lung cancer. A sadly underwhelming funeral was held for him back at the New Jersey split-level, organized by the long-ago divorced and suddenly italicized Sylvie, who flew over from England to organize things. Clusters of unreconciled step-children crowded the small rooms, drunk and milling about in suits. Em was worried—missed classes and studio time (Em had her senior show to get ready!)—all postponed temporarily by a series of meetings with lawyers.
Finally back at school, leaving the studio at dawn after a full night of work during the last week of classes, Marlise had been stopped by Paul, who was at that time a junior professor in the JAG fiscal law program and who was heading down to DC in the fall for a new job in the public sector. He asked her if she might like to have a coffee with him. He’d seen her in The Tempest, he said. Really, Marlise had wondered. And he’d seen her senior show, also, he said, which had opened at the student gallery space the week before. He thought she was very good. He had some gallery contacts. Would she be interested?
‘You stalking me?’ Marlise had asked. She kept walking. He kept pace. One thing led to the next, and within months, Marlise, as Emma Miles, moved to Virginia with Paul, who worked for the government in the District, but who also held a part-time professorship at a Virginia university. When they married, she kept her new name, Emma Miles. Paul was able to arrange an adjunct job for her in the studio art department on the merits of her art school degree and her luminous work, which she was beginning to show and sell. That part-time job would turn into a professorship of her own. Meanwhile, she also began to take graduate courses in English, the study of Victorian literature long a road not taken for her. Gazing now at Silas’s choke-hold paintings all these years later, Marlise acknowledged that, with Maurice dead, graduation looming, legal entanglements, and so much uncertainty in her future, Paul had offered her stability, money, marital sex, a way out of the thrilling but confusing spell into which the beginnings of her artistic and sexual awakening had thrown her, an awakening that had probably begun long ago, with Silas, his mouth circling her ears, kissing her inner thigh, showing her his paintings, and that was later fulfilled so wildly and unexpectedly by Tee in the short but life-altering time they’d had together.
After several attempts, she’d decided not to try to track down Tee, believing that he would have wanted it that way, finally, especially since she’d not heard from him and because she’d failed to reach him. Her monk. Besides, she felt him with her, all the time—his voice in her ear, slow down, make time, Emma, Em. But she’d never stopped trying to find Silas, and in many ways they, Tee and Silas, were, to her, inextricably linked. Both were still inside her, but Tee’s presence was still so physical, no doubt because of their sexual bond. Her relationship with Silas had been inchoate, and so he kept eluding her, despite the fact that he’d been the first person to really see and try to truly know her. She learned that Silas had run away from the Institute and evaporated into the very same blizzard through which Marlise herself had been rushed back to life. The hospital was unable legally to release his medical and psychiatric records to her, or any family contact information. Judging by the dates on the exhibition paper she now held onto, as if for dear life, he’d lived just a year after that. What had happened in that time? Where had he gone? How had he landed back in Switzerland with his parents who’d seemed to want him electro-convulsed and put away? What had driven him, at last, to end his life?
As recently as a year ago, Marlise had typed his name again into Google, but little came up, just the same two, old archived newspaper notices from the 70s. Not even a mention on a “bad dad” site, notice of a petty crime, or reminder of a neighborhood association lawn-mowing assignment, let alone an image of a person, a painting. No Linked-In profile, no Facebook account. Not even another Silas Newman. No obituary. She, Marlise, was sixty-one. If Silas were alive, he’d be pushing seventy. Perhaps he’d become a spy. She’d entertained that thought. Gone off the grid, putting all of that bi-polar paranoia to government use. Certainly there were many reasons to be afraid, especially these days. Standing in the dark gallery, she could guess now that the way he had died, by suicide, and the times being what they were then, no Internet, and his living with distant, estranged family abroad—well, somehow it had all been suppressed. And now, the exhibition brochure in her hands told her, the paintings that Silas’s sister, the gallery owner, had quietly been locating and acquiring over the years since his death, were being brought together and shown for the first time in a series of shows, first on the continent and now in the states.