Do you know another great thing about Nicco? He wasn’t a social media person. You couldn’t just look him up and find out everything about him. Or rather, look him up and see some perfect version of him. He worked a lot too, to pay rent and living expenses, and so when I got back, I couldn’t see him for a few days. We talked on the phone and passed photos back and forth, and that’s how I got to experience his regular life. There was his cereal box (Chex) and pieces of his bedroom (a stack of books, a messy bed, a pile of laundry). There was a meal he and his roommate were having (pizza in a box) and his morning stubble (sigh). I tried to keep our house out of the images. I still hadn’t told him about Lila. I sent a lot of pictures of Max, who wouldn’t let me out of his sight since we got back.
The night before I finally got to see Nicco, Jake was in the guest bedroom again. Another crate had arrived while we were gone. Why he opened some of the crates and not others—no clue. But he had his hammer out, and a screwdriver, and he was working to dismantle the outer wood frame.
Maybe I was in a good mood because I was going to see Nicco the next day. Or maybe it was because Lila, noticing my coldness to Jake after their fight, had grabbed my elbow on the stairwell, right under that huge picture of her, and spit the word, Please. But I went in there. I told myself that there might be something great to show Cora. I’d just had a long talk on the phone with her, about how she’d met a guy she really liked at a softball game, how Meredith was being all critical, but even more, how she’d decided to start a blog about important female artists no one had really heard of. Cora was always doing something amazing like that.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hiya,” Jake said.
I plopped on the floor. Max sat his big, hot self right next to me. “Man, I wish you’d just open all of these.”
“Yeah?” He stopped what he was doing and looked at me.
“Yeah.”
“You like ’em, huh?”
“Who wouldn’t? They’re so cool.” I felt a sick little twist inside when I said it. A guilty twist. I mean, they were cool, but I could hear my own voice, kissing up, acting all admiring, trying to get his approval. I didn’t know why. I still don’t entirely understand it. If I’m being honest, I wasn’t there just because of Lila and Cora. Why do we still crave the approval of people who make us feel bad and uneasy and who are cruel? No idea. But I needed it. I wanted it.
He grinned. He tilted his head and lifted one eyebrow and examined me as if he were a judge at an art show. He gave me that look again, as if I were really something. He chuckled, almost like a proud dad. And it was kind of great. It made me feel really good. It helped push that bruise and that fight into the past. My own father gushed and fussed over me when I saw him once a year, but he didn’t know me. He was a different sort of ghost. His absence was even louder than Lila’s presence. But this was a real guy who lived with us. Looking at me. Seeing me, right there in that room. He might not be perfect, but at least he was there.
“Well, I can’t open them all, or else I gotta pack them all.”
“Why would you have to pack them? Are they going somewhere?”
“I can’t keep all these. I’m a broker.”
“You mean you’re getting broker and broker buying so many?”
He cracked up. “Something like that.”
“Come oooon,” I whined. “Hurry up and get it out. I want to seeee.”
“All right, all right,” he said. “You could help, you know, instead of sitting there on your ass.”
It took maybe a half hour to free it from the box. Wrapping was everywhere. The painting was beautiful but strange. Bold, colorful stripes, a figure with just a red oval for a head, but no face. “I really like the colors. But… weird. No face.”
“Female Torso, Kazimir Malevich. Oil on wood.”
“I don’t get why they’re all women. All these paintings.”
He ignored me. He was gathering up the layers and layers of mess we’d just unwrapped.
“One more!”
“I told you, no way. I’m gonna have to get professionals to come package it up to ship. Plus, the best ones are hanging right here in the house. What about the one in the dining room? Did you take a good look at that?”
“Not really.”
“For God’s sake. There’s your prizewinner.”
“What is it?”
He smiled, pleased. He paused for dramatic effect. “Jacqueline. Pablo Picasso.”
“No way.”
I was stunned. Honestly, my mouth fell open.
“Yup.”
“And it’s real?”
“Yeah. It’s not so crazy. He made, like, ten thousand pieces of art.”
“Who was Jacqueline?”
“His wife. Last one he had before he died.”
“Oh.”
“All I know is, she was twenty-six and he was seventy-two.”
“Gross.”
“Supposedly, he drew a dove on her house with chalk and then gave her a rose every day for six months until she’d go out with him.”
“Uh-huh, wow, roses would make you forget he was a creepy old guy.”
“Yeah, well, she never got over him after he died.” He made his fingers into a pistol and shot at his head.
“Oh, God. You’re kidding.”
“Nope. She was crazy about him.”
“Or just plain crazy.”
“And, hey, she was ancient compared to another girl of his. Marie-Thérèse Walter. She was seventeen and he was forty-five.”
“Whoa.” It made my stomach feel sick.
“White Room,” he said.
“What? That crying woman with the yellow hair?”
“Girl. Crying Girl is the title.”
“She’s a little old to be a girl.”
“Lichtenstein. Enamel on steel.”
“No way. Really?” He nodded. “Why is she crying?”
“Over a man, probably.”
I scrunched my face, but I couldn’t argue with that. If you looked at it, I mean. She doesn’t look like she’s crying over a missed promotion at work.
“Old Roy Boy.” Jake chuckled. And then he winked at me, as if we were both in on a secret. “Lichtenstein loved women.”
The wink, Picasso’s young girls, the way he said “Lichtenstein loved women”—for a split second, I felt like we had turned down some unexpected road. And then Lila pushed the door open. She had to shove it a little, from all the wrapping. She wore her short green satin robe, with her hair loose to her shoulders. “What are you guys doing?”
“Look,” I said. I pointed to the painting.
“Faceless. Super,” she said. “Just a body, huh?”
She was right, but I could hear her tone. It meant, Uh-oh, watch out.
“You feeling better, honey?” Jake asked.
“It’d be nice if someone offered to get me a cup of tea or something.”
“I’ll make you a cup of tea,” Jake said.
“My throat is killing me. And, Syd, baby, you really need to get some friends.”
Wow. It came out of nowhere, that cruel little bomb. It felt like a slap.
“God, Lila.”
“What?”
“That’s so mean.”
“I’m just saying, it’s not good to be always hanging out here with the adults.”
“My friends are at home, because I’m here.”
“Come on now, girls…,” Jake said.
“I don’t know what has gotten into you since Christmas.”
Even without her makeup, she looked beautiful. She supposedly didn’t feel well, she was “coming down with something,” but her eyes were still so blue and her features so perfect. It didn’t matter, though. I saw ugliness. I saw her urge to inflict pain on other people, on me.
“You are such a bitch.” It came out before I had a chance to think. I’d never talked to her like that before. Never. And now it was like I’d removed a cork from a bottle where a serpent had been curled up and waiting. The room filled with a horrible energy, and she roared and then lunged at me.
I ran. I ran out of the room and down the stairs. She was behind me. I felt her grab at my hair. I fled out of the open White Room doors and across the patio. I darted down the 104 steps into the darkness of China Beach.
The tide was in. There was only the slightest strip of shoreline. You had to be careful out there. You could get caught on a bed of rocks and find you had nowhere to go. I stood on the sand in my T-shirt and shorts, my heart pounding with anger and fear and adrenaline. I could hear voices up at the house, traveling down. The surf rolled out, a crickle-crickle of water against pebbles, and then it came back in with a boom, rolled across my bare feet, sprayed seawater against my cheeks. My feet sank deeper into the sand with each wave.
Before, I’d wanted only to be close to Lila. To have her attention and her love. But now I felt misunderstood, and weirdly, wrongly accused. And, too, I felt something burning that had only sparked before. Hate. It curled up inside me and rose, the way a flame does when a match is struck.
Hate is dangerous. Hate makes you feel like doing dangerous things. Vengeful things. Things that would get her back. I’d wade out in the waves, or walk on the high beams of the house next door, or fling myself at that construction worker and let him do whatever he wanted. I’d slap her, or dig my nails into her skin. I’d strike a real match, or leave and never return. The possibilities seemed endless.
“Syd? Syd-Syd?” she called.
Great.
Lila never came down to the beach. And now here she was, struggling down those steps, her hand against the wall for support. She couldn’t see well in the dark. This was one of her things. Something about the rods and cones and the particular shape of her eyes.
“Baby? Come on. Let’s not do this.”
I wanted to run away, but there was nowhere to go. I stood where I was and folded my arms. I watched the moonlight dance along the lifted tips of the waves.
She stood next to me in that green robe. We were about the same height now, I realized. She wore these satin slippers, and they were sinking into the sand and were likely ruined.
“Syd, please.”
I didn’t say anything. She started to cry.
God.
The waves crickle-crickled across the pebbles. And then, boom. Crash.
I sighed. The thing was… even when she was raging, she seemed like she was four years old. A little girl. I felt sorry for her. My anger slid away, leaving a slime trail of guilt. There were lots of little girls who weren’t little anymore. Daddy’s girls, lost girls, harmed and lonely girls. Crying Girl.
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you still love me?”
“Of course.”
Neither of us said we were sorry.
The point is—it was complicated. The point is—it was confusing.
The point is—it was getting intense, very intense, at the house above China Beach.
I think of her standing there on the sand, crying like that. And I think of her words in that restaurant, about power. But men and women both—we learn about power and powerlessness from our mothers and fathers first, right? And they learn from their mothers and fathers, and so on and so on?
Fix that shit.