ABBY, FEBRUARY 4, 2015
On my coffee run, in my afternoon stupor, they jolted me awake. Boots thwapping on the pavement. Shouts in rough unison. Their flags were scraps of red and black, flown on poles that swayed drunkenly above Third Avenue, above their shaved heads and topknots and hoodies. Three or four dozen people, dressed in black, faces covered bandit-style with bandannas and balaclavas, coalescing out of the air, seemingly, and doing their very best to stop traffic. Trucks and cabs nosed around them, unimpressed. I stood at the corner of Forty-Third Street, waiting to cross to the coffee shop, to pick up my customary Americano with steamed whole milk. This anarchic marching band flowed past me, me and my fellow office workers, we who require potent infusions of caffeine to make it until evening. The air around them crackled. Smack in the middle of Midtown, they were flat-out misbehaving, playing in traffic, barking like a riled-up dog pack. I have to admit, my heart revved as I watched.
Then I spotted Pete’s new school friend, Dmitri, his bandanna pulled down around his chin. A short boy, with arched dark brows and a peachy-golden complexion, a fleshy soft face with a round chin, almost pretty. He moved at the center of the marchers, who surrounded him like black plasma. He seemed to be in a position of power, this kid.
He was holding a large hammer in his hand.
As they passed, I called to him. “Not smashing windows, I hope?”
“Just heads,” he said, and he laughed. I wondered whether he recognized me as Pete’s mom.
Inside the café, the queue meandered from the door to the counter manned by harried baristas. I took my spot at the end, sliding my phone from my pocket, resigning myself to its distractions.
“Working your nine to five, Mrs. Willard?” I turned to see Dmitri joining the line. With him was a compact, powerfully built young woman in black combat boots and coils of fuchsia hair.
“You bet,” I said. “And is this your after-school activity?”
He grinned and nodded. “And this is my comrade Twiz. Twiz, meet Mrs. Willard.” He still had the hammer in his hand.
“Hey, Mrs. Willard.” Her smile was wide, quick, swooping cheekbones and deep brown skin, and her hot-pink locks waved like antennae around her head.
“Abby,” I said.
“I didn’t realize Pete’s mother was a Midtown prole,” said Dmitri.
“Prole? As in proletariat?” I couldn’t stop myself from chuckling. “Are you two communists?”
“You could say we’re refuseniks,” he said, glancing at Twiz. “We refuse to take part in a fascist police state that supports killer cops.”
“We’re trying to communicate that killer cops are part of a bigger pattern,” nodded the girl. “The global rise in authoritarian violence.” The café’s pendant lights reflected in her eyes, which were slightly tilted, adorably doe-ish, and fiery with conviction.
“Belarus is like ground zero for the next wave of fascism,” Dmitri said excitedly. “Anders Breivik, the Norwegian mass murderer? You know he learned how to kill in a neo-Nazi training camp in Belarus?”
“I didn’t know that,” I said.
“And did you know the consulate is right over there?” Twiz pointed to a bland office building across the street. “The president is visiting today. Which is why we’re marching. Lukashenko,” she added, helpfully. “A soft dictator exporting white fascism. Right there above the Banh Mi place.”
“And I’m sure you know the American oligarchy supports the police state, keeping us all in line,” said Dmitri. He gazed at me, frowning. “By cashing a corporate paycheck, you’re kind of buying in.”
“Or kind of buying groceries,” I said.
Twiz nodded sympathetically. “The system is rigged against all of us.”
I felt myself getting annoyed now. “I admire your passion, both of you. Your willingness to put yourself out there.” I turned to Dmitri. “But I wish you’d leave Pete out of this.”
“Pete’s his own person, Mrs. Willard,” said Dmitri, with an abashed shrug.
“Abby,” I said, grimly.
“You want to march with us, Abby?” said Twiz. “You have nothing to lose but your chains.” She flashed her wide smile again, then she jerked her chin toward the counter behind me, causing her hair to toss like a flowering shrub in a breeze. “Heads up—it’s your turn.”
I turned to see a barista glaring. “Ma’am,” he barked. “I’ll ask one more time. What do you want?”
A FAIR QUESTION. Consider the detective, and the email that arrived just as I sat down at my desk again, having refused their invitation to march, sitting back to sip my Americano.
Looks like charges will be dropped, so chief wants me to close this circle. Come in, please, just a few forms to fill out.
Pete is on a trip with his US history class to the Boston Freedom Trail, I replied. And he wrote, let Pete learn his history. He’s a minor, you can sign on his behalf.
I’m in Midtown and I work full-time.
I’ve got a division meeting in Midtown later. I know a place we can meet and get this done. 6 p.m.?
So while Pete trailed a tour guide in a white-powdered wig and Dennis cheered Benjamin at JV basketball, I found the detective in the bar of a steakhouse near Grand Central. He wore another perfectly cut jacket, ash-gray tweed this time. He tipped his head and smiled when he saw me approaching. I felt nerves. Or maybe the tremoring was simply a train rushing by, racing through the tunnels not so far under our feet. A mostly empty highball glass sat in front of him, his hand wrapped languidly around it. He offered to buy me a drink, but I declined and asked the bartender to bring me whatever was on the nearest beer tap. “And how is young Pete holding up?” he said. “Keeping his nose clean?”
“Yes,” I said quickly. “No more trouble. He just fell under an influence, I think.”
“They’re good friends, he and the other one?” In the low light of the bar, his eyes looked darker, but still very keen.
I shrugged. “He just started at Pete’s school a few months ago.” I took a sip of beer. “It’s so tricky when you don’t like your kid’s friends. If you try to keep them apart . . .”
“It makes the other kid a rock star,” he said. “That is tricky.”
“You have any of your own?”
He nodded. “Two little girls.”
“Just wait. The teen years are too interesting,” I said. “But I want you to know, Pete is a good kid. A great kid.”
“Seems so,” he nodded, downing the rest of his drink. He waved at the bartender and ordered another—bourbon neat. Then he said, “I’ll give you some free legal advice, from a member of the New York bar. Take the time to get this record scrubbed.”
“OK, yes,” I said. “I appreciate your helpfulness.” I sipped my beer. “So you’re a lawyer too?”
He nodded. “I come from a line of cops and drunks. I thought I might improve on that. Graduated from Syracuse then Fordham Law, got myself a Wall Street gig.”
“Oh, that explains the excellent tailoring,” I said.
He glanced at me and gave an abrupt laugh, seeming to appreciate the flirty toss. “Hey, the suits were habit forming. I just looked too good to go back.”
I smiled. “So how did you end up in the precinct house?”
“I’m walking to work one sunny morning and a plane hits the tower right over my head,” he said. “I signed onto the force the next day. Which was probably a fucking idiot move.”
“A noble move, in my opinion,” I said. “And you’re a lieutenant? Sounds important.”
He shrugged. “Well, rank up from me and you’re chief of detectives, and that’s where swank really kicks in, plush digs, plenty of dollars. Not sure if I’m gunning for it or not.” He sat back and drained his glass, eyeing me. “I mean, I’m kind of a conflicted human being,” he said. “I think I might be cursed with a romantic streak.”
He unspooled that slow-rolling dimpled smile, and it made my chest warm a bit, in a way that I enjoyed. It made me feel a bit loosened. “Oh, I know all about that,” I said. “I’m what you might call a thwarted creative.”
“Well then, we’re both fucked,” he said. “But tell me something. What exactly thwarts a woman like you?”
I guess I talked too much. My art, and the fact that I’m not making it, is a subject I have discussed with myself for many years, and almost never air. An outpouring was not appropriate for that moment, but I was a bit loosened, after all, and maybe I needed to air it, and there he was, holding me in his keen and handsome attention. I told him about the coming of the babies and the money woes, how these forces chipped away at my time and energy, how my easel now stood draped by a bathrobe in the corner of our bedroom, my tubes of paints in a box under the bed, hardened, unused. How this was nobody’s fault but my own. How the road dipped and swerved and how I should have navigated the curves better. Gradually I became aware that the bar had emptied out, the happy-hour clusters disbanded into commuter trains and taxis and subways, and we were still there in the murk, he and I. His hand was resting heavily over mine on the bar. I felt drunk. Four empty glasses in front of me. I stammered something about needing to get home, about the forms. He spread the papers out on the sticky wood. I signed them. When he held the bar door open for me, I stepped out into a very cold, very black night. That surprised me. A few icy flakes blew around. In an unlit passage under construction scaffolding he took my arm, slowed me, and cupped my chin in his hand. In the steam from our excited breath, a small microclimate we created together in this freezing dark sanctum, a long kiss.
Then I pulled back. “I don’t do this,” I blurted, miserably.
He looked embarrassed. “Me neither. Really. As in, never.” He took a long shaky sigh. “What you were saying, it got to me.”
And then, this morning, a text: Lunch?
I regarded those letters on the screen for a long time.
She would’ve said yes. The experience junkie.
I don’t think it’s a good idea, I replied.
Then let’s just keep talking, he wrote.
Yes. Just keep talking. I was entitled to that, wasn’t I? A woman who did what was required, every waking minute of her life? Just keep talking.
Long ago, a therapist told me that keeping a diary was a good way to stay on course, emotionally. To gain perspective. And so, since the start of this strange new year, I’ve decided to start keeping a record. That’s what I’m doing right now.
And it does help, typing up these notes—but only up to a point. Because I still seem to be veering off course.
ABBY, FEBRUARY 6, 2015
“The whole family can get down on the floor and windmill. Windmill at home just like you’re doing now, that’s the way,” said Ms. Finch, the school’s movement coach, in her gentle north-England accent and gold-buttoned cardigan. Dennis and I locked eyes; I knew his would be filled with swallowed mirth, and they were. I felt a giggle rising in response. Alas, we are not a family that windmills. No. Dennis and I gazed at each other, struggling to remain appropriately solemn, certain that we would not be lying on the living room floor together like this, arms and legs waggling, not even to foster movement fluidity and improved classroom posture in our darling elder son.
“I never knew I could windmill,” said Dennis, slowly rotating one leg in the air. “It plays to my strengths.” He turned his head and winked at Pete, who returned only a look of angry misery.
As a toddler, Pete, inky-haired moppet of very few words, was diagnosed with a tongue-tangling set of learning disabilities and processing disorders. We’ve diligently pursued solutions ever since. This is why he and Benjamin are in this swank private school, after all, with its imposing Romanesque buildings, its kind and overeducated faculty, and charming administrators, so sweetly apologetic as they tack fees and charges onto their breathtaking tuition bills. Pete’s early trouble signs—the slow acquisition of speech, the stumbling, the biting. All a bit scary for Dennis and me, the shell-shocked new parents. We set our minds to do anything, everything, to make it right for him.
But now we were fifteen years on, prone on a musty Persian rug in the movement coach’s office, staring up into her nostrils and her yellowing spider plant. A bit jaded maybe. Windmilling wasn’t the answer to brick-throwing, we all knew that.
As we were getting ready to leave, Ms. Finch picked carpet lint off of my son’s sweater and said, “Well, the head of school was upbeat at assembly this morning, wasn’t she, Peter?” She opened her office door and turned to Dennis and me: “Application season just ended, record number this year.” She chuckled. “The way Ms. Vong shut down that police situation. If word had gotten out . . .”
“Word of what?” Dennis said.
“That horror show, the trash can. I’m right here down the hall from the vestibule, so I got a peek at the goings-on.”
“Can I go now,” said Pete. “I’m missing lunch.”
“They whisked it all away,” she said. She widened her milkmaid eyes at us, and leaned in, confiding. “A bloody awful mess.”
We watched him stride off, shoelaces trailing, and yes, her door was just a few steps from the vestibule, with its scrolled iron coat hooks and polished wainscoting. The trash cans were all gone.
ABBY, FEBRUARY 9, 2015
I arrived at work hungry and my lunch route took me yet again past the old lending library. A few days earlier, I’d even ventured in, even bought a membership. Slicked up, refurbished, but the old books still filled the stacks, still moldering mostly unread. Each aisle I walked along, each corner I peered around, she wasn’t there. I borrowed two books by Daphne du Maurier. And now they sat, unopened, on my desk at work. Rebecca. The House on the Strand. Perhaps I wouldn’t actually read them, but I did enjoy the look of them, the spooky pastel covers.
I checked my phone again. Two days since I’d heard from him, and then just a line— Life is short, I have been thinking of you.
Turned back to my tedious task of the day, tagging a design for production. A new drug for attention deficit disorders. One-eighth-inch margins, 2-point leading. Pantone color 4225 for the background. Alaskan blue.
Peeked at my texts, just to be sure.
Nothing.
Should I go past West Twelfth Street on my way home?
No, I should not.
Maintain a grip, Abigail. Consider how this man is a police officer, consider how he has a spouse and children. Consider how you do too.
Fifteen days have passed without me seeing her. And then, I am going to get my lunch down in the hold of the great barge of Grand Central, and there she is, exiting the Oyster Bar with a short-legged man, bit of a belly, with thick waves of brownish-gray over his collar and a scuffed leather messenger bag over his shoulder.
Michael Hutcherson? My first boss in New York City. How could it be.
He’s holding the door for her, she walks past him—the chunky shoes again, the blond-tipped waves, the eyelashes—and his gaze sweeps over her from the rear. And then she smiles back over her shoulder. They head up the ramp, through the tiled passageway toward the street level. I don’t think about it: I follow. Outside, at the corner of Madison, the corner of the Grady Advertising building, that towering paycheck factory of silver and blue glass, they stop. I stop a few yards behind them. He leans toward her, glances around a bit. Let me go in first, he says. It’s nobody’s business, right?
She smiles. Right. I’ll wait here for a few minutes. I’ll be up in a bit.
Hutcherson pushes through the revolving doors, sun flares on the glass.
The bastard.
That’s my voice, I realize. Did I just say that out loud? Did I just speak?
She looks over her shoulder, alarmed. Her eyes meet mine. Was there a flicker? Yes, just a flicker. Did she recognize me from the stairwell on West Twelfth? Or is she seeing who I was? Her.
She turns away and starts moving quickly toward the entry’s revolving doors, the flashing noontime glare again, and I’m following her, quickly, close behind, and I say, blurting it, breathless—
“This is strange for me too, but listen. We need to talk—wait—”
She’s at the spinning door, hurling herself at it, almost. And I follow fast, in the next quarter-slice, my eyes on her. The door ejects me into the lobby, I reach for her arm and then suddenly—whomp—I slam into something hard and I’m down flat, one hip afire with pain.
“Jesus, what’s the problem?” A security guard reaches over, pulls me up by my arm. “You OK?”
A waist-high white marble barrier, a desk-slash-fortress wall, extended clear across the echoing entry space. I’d barreled straight into it. “When did they put this thing in?” I asked, rubbing my throbbing hip and straightening my clothes.
“The barricade? Long time ago. Right after 9-11,” the guard said. The girl had vanished. She was nowhere. “You gotta have your flash pass to get by here now,” the guard said. “You got a flash pass?”
February 10, 2016
From: J.Leverett@deepxmail.com
To: GarrettShuttlesworth@physics.humboldtstate.edu
G, the Abigail Willard case—please put your brain on it asap. I know police work isn’t your turf, but a quantum physicist is supposed to explain the fucking inexplicable, right?
Hope you caught our Orangemen pounding Georgetown. A slaughter. A beautiful thing.
ABBY, FEBRUARY 11, 2015
TO DO THIS WEEK:
Research watercolor classes: Pratt. SVA, New School
Tax appt
Pete: vitamins
Ben: dentist
I record my to-do list to show what was at the top. Seeing her, of course. She appeared to be what my Aunt Louise, MSW, would call a harbinger of inner change.
I’ve decided she’s my new imaginary friend, sent to remind me of something. To remind me of what I am meant to be doing, maybe.
I sat in my cubicle, staring at my monitor, at a half-finished insert for an erectile dysfunction drug. I left the penis hanging and searched for the School of Visual Arts website. In seven minutes, I was signed up for art school again. Just a night class, watercolors—but this was a step of some significance. If only for one evening a week, a dedicated return.
ABBY, FEBRUARY 13, 2015
The all-school sing under the vaults of the old chapel. The boys had been dreading it, complaining and asking to skip it. I had been anticipating it with a swollen heart, swollen with memories of them as cherubs, eyes gleaming and fixed on the music teacher, standing at her piano in red wool poncho and matching beret. “All You Need Is Love”—Pete, in kindergarten, piping up with “Everybody now!” Benjamin, running toward me as the second graders fanned out into the pews to present red carnations, dropping the flower in the aisle and then snatching it up again and throwing himself at my lap, eyes shining and his heart, I can still feel it, beating urgently against the top of my thigh like a minnow swimming, as he caught his breath for a few seconds before skipping back to his spot on-stage.
Velvet cheeks, wispy locks, marrow-tender skin. My little creatures.
Now at the sing my boys stood in the back row, barely mouthing the words with faces fixed in a carefully calibrated mix of boredom and sarcasm.
Seeing them, though, there amid their classmates, the boys ranging in heights and angles and skin eruptions, the girls so primped and poised, the children I’d been watching since they were small. The sight of them, a cluster of teen angels surrounded by stained glass and organ pipes, made me tear up, just as in earlier years I’d cried from the sweetness of it all. It was still so sweet, and so bittersweet.
I sniffled through “What the World Needs Now,” wishing Dennis had been able to make it. I’d stolen time from work, but he was under the gun.
Then it occurred to me to look for Dmitri. Was the antifascist warrior there? Yes, he was. Tucked in among some girls in the second row, matched by height. He appeared to be singing full-throatedly, I thought I could even pick out his bright treble in the mix.
After the concert, the parents clustered in the theater lobby, eating butter cookies and drinking Dixie cups of apple cider.
“Abigail, right? Benjamin’s mom?” A round woman in an orange sweater and outsized eyeglasses seized my hand in hers, warm, cushioned. “Joanie Werner. Serena’s mom. With the braids? And the attitude? So, Ben says you used to be an artist.”
Used to be an artist.
“Yes, that’s right.” I smiled at her. “My husband was also. I mean, I guess he continues to be. We both do.”
Her eyes widened. “Where do you show, the two of you? Which gallery?”
“Neither of us has representation just now. Dennis is full-time at an engineering firm.”
She nodded sympathetically. “And you’re in marketing, I think? Here’s why I’m pestering you. I got roped into soliciting donations for the spring auction. I’m hoping that you—or your husband or both”—she giggled—“could donate an artwork.”
“I don’t have anything new.”
“Any old one will do.” She had turtle-esque eyes and thick black brows that bounced as she unfurled more sentences. The auction committee and the building committee and digital microscopes for the new science lab. A theme for the fundraiser. Monte Carlo or Old San Juan.
I hadn’t shown a work in public in almost twenty years. It hardly seemed possible.
Only one of my paintings hung in our home, in the narrow hallway just outside Pete’s bedroom. He had titled it Black Bird. I had once upon a time titled it Shade Study #1. It was uncharacteristic. The blackness.
“So I can put you down for a donation? It would be a generous gesture. Such a uniquely generous gesture. For the cause.”
“Yes, I’ll find something.”
“And your husband? Something of his too?”
“I’ll have to ask him. I don’t know.”
“We’ll need it by March fifteenth.” She rested a hand on my arm and squeezed it. “Thanks so much for all you do, Abby. You are amazing.”
Someone started screaming then. A cluster of parents and children backed away from the building’s exit doors, moving in unison, fast as a sidewinding snake. “Was that a cat?” she heard someone say.
General alarmed murmurings. The word “decapitated” stuttered over and over. Joanie Werner grabbed the arm of a teacher rushing back into the lobby. The woman was breathless. “Animal cruelty!”
Elizabeth Vong appeared before the doors. “The item has been removed,” she called out. “They’re taking care of the situation, please stay put!” She looked around brightly at the now silent crowd. “Your scholars gave us a lovely spring sing, didn’t they?!”
Pete was nowhere in sight. I spotted Benjamin at the far end of the lobby, huddled on a staircase with some classmates, his hair covering his eyes. A jumble of elongated limbs and abandoned song sheets. A girl’s head resting on his shoulder. I approached, but, seeing me, he frowned, and I thought the better of it.
DENNIS HALF-LAUGHED, half-sighed when I told him that night about Joanie Werner’s request. “Shit, I’ve got nothing,” he said. He and I stood side by side at the kitchen table, folding laundry, a bottomless task—and, these days, our most reliable mode of creative fulfillment. For example, he liked to construct neat layer cakes of T-shirts, coded by color and logo content: music, sports, miscellaneous. He arrayed them across the table at precise intervals, in the manner of Donald Judd.
“There is that one piece of mine,” he said, “in the coat closet.”
“You’d sell that?” I hunted for color and pattern matches in the mountain of socks, then bundled them and arranged them in tonality order along the table edge. “I don’t think you should.”
Dennis chewed on his thumbnail and sighed. “I might get fired this week,” he said.
I didn’t know how seriously to take this. Yes, he had put a few things on his corporate card that weren’t, technically speaking, necessary for his job. That new surround-sound video projection system in our living room, though, yes, sometimes he did need to watch videos for work. But mostly he watched action movies with the boys and surfing movies on his own, late late at night. Yes, there were a few meals at not inexpensive restaurants in which I played the role of, for example, a building inspector from Trenton.
But this was part of life in New York, where you worked too many hours and never got paid enough, so you tried to pad out the sharp corners of life just a bit when and where you could. Isn’t that right?
This is how Dennis understood it, anyhow.
“So they fire you. You could get a studio again.”
“Yeah. And we pack the boys little cans of cat food for lunch.”
“We could squeak by, at least for a little while.”
“Squeaking by.” He stepped back and scowled at his fabric towers. “Sounds like death.”
He stacked the folded garments into a laundry basket and carried the load up the stairs, where they would soon be recirculated by the boys into heaps on the floor.
ABBY, FEBRUARY 20, 2015
“The inner smaller violets are factually alike.”
A crisp-mannered teacher named Forest Versteeg led the SVA class, and he began the first evening with a slideshow derived from Josef Albers’s observations on the perception of color. In my new sketchbook, I carefully recorded this line, the caption beneath a block of orange, black, and purple rectilinear shapes.
Of course, I had more or less memorized Interaction of Color during my studies in Providence. But after an interval of so many years, the images from Albers thrilled me again. My pulse raced to see those stacked and piled swatches, the flat fields of solid tones, so blunt and straightforward on the physical plane, yet so infinitely malleable in the mind. After all, as Versteeg reminded us, no color is the same for any two people. My rods and cones mix a different hue than yours do, my violet is not your violet. And these personal hues are, in turn, overlaid with a personal patina of emotion and memory.
The bars of blue and red, for example, on the cover of the Albers volume. They were visible from my bed, the book splayed spine up on the milk crate I used as a nightstand, the first time Dennis stayed the night with me. I can see his yellow hair, pale and stiffened by sweat like the strands of a dried paintbrush, as he lay, exhausted, asleep. I can taste the pebbly old raisins I chewed on while he slept, all I could find in my student kitchen.
The first class ended with an hour of painting, value and color studies. I worked in a range of greens. Versteeg’s neatly cuffed jeans whispered rhythmically as he strolled behind us, watching us in our silent work. He paused for a long time behind me, each time he crossed to my side of the room.
Finally, the hour ended. A bustle by the sink as class members rinsed brushes and pallets and dried them with flannel rags.
“So . . . Abigail Willard?”
I turned away from the crowd at the sink to find him standing just behind me again. Steel-framed glasses, pale stubbled cheeks. I nodded. “Abby.”
“I was a gallery assistant at Broder and Wilcox. On an internship from the High School of Fine Arts. I remember the opening night of your solo show, so impressive—you must’ve been what, early twenties?”
I could feel my face reddening, a helpless sensation. Humiliating.
“Twenty-five or so.”
“I’m not sure what I can teach you, Abby,” he said, solemn. “Our roles should most likely be reversed.”
I tried to counteract with a broad smile and assured him I was desperately in need of review. I said starting back at the beginning felt so refreshing.
“It’s certainly your right,” he said.
I could feel other students listening with curiosity. Their bustle had gone hush.
“I used to search for your work online,” he said. “I always wanted to buy a piece for myself.”
He wondered why I’d vanished, he said. Why, he wondered, did I stop showing my work? What happened?
This should be astoundingly flattering, this whole thing. So how come I wished to melt, wicked witch–like, into the floor, leaving only my little brushes behind?
“Life happened,” I said, with what I hoped was a light chuckle. “See you next time.” I fled.
ABBY, FEBRUARY 23, 2015
As it happened, the former Broder and Wilcox gallery was now a gourmet grocery, just across from the sporting goods store where I took Benjamin to buy new cleats, the spring sports season approaching and his feet, as ever, lengthening. The big window was slapped with paper signs advertising Tuscan olive oil and cheese from the Pyrenees.
I sent my son ahead. Try things on, I said. I lingered in front of the grocery.
A February night in 1994. Almost three years had passed since I’d left New York for grad school, since the time of Eli. The debris of it still shifting, settling, inside me. But somehow, I’d landed back in the city, with Dennis, our twin MFA diplomas drifting somewhere in our messy sublet on Flatbush. And then, this show at Broder and Wilcox. Jillian Broder’s gallery was not messy, it was not on Flatbush. It was a blinding white box with wood floors on Broome Street, prime SoHo, cast-iron columns painted white, and a spotless acre of window overlooking the street. That night, a soft dry snow started falling just as the plastic cups were being stacked on a card table and the jugs of wine were being unscrewed. Within minutes, powdered sugar frosted every branch of every tree on the street, revealing their shapes, giving them glamour, so they looked like a line of skinny wild-haired girls. The snow gently covered the dirty cars with clean blankets. I remember feeling grandeur, momentousness, as I stood before that expansive and towering window, waiting for the first guests to show, looking out at the snow. The purple shadows fell down from the buildings across the way and I remember exactly what I thought: I was thinking, so this is a beginning, this is a kind of birth too, and it’s every bit as miraculous and world-altering as the kind when a squinting little newborn comes slipping out of its mother’s body. A new life is being born in this gallery tonight, and god it’s embarrassing now but it really felt that way to me. Like the moment the gallery’s double glass doors swung open and the first strange pair of eyes in a stranger’s face rested on my work, the cosmos would register my arrival. Maybe the snowflakes might pause mid-fall so that I could go outside and walk between them, view them from all sides, and know that, yes, I’ll always know that this moment happened, and that everything else sprang from it.
One work sold. A small still life of grapefruit, painted in the classroom of Hans-Dietrich Bremer. I never even learned who bought it. But that’s what you hope for, when you set brush to a new canvas, that it will at some point sail away, this vessel of your soul, into the wider world. The other paintings from the show are wrapped and buried in those racks in the basement.
“I’m starving, Ma.” I went into the grocery and bought Benjamin a tiny five-dollar bag of chips. Then I went across the street and bought him the shoes.
And as I sat on the subway headed for home, jostling shoulder-to-shoulder with my younger son, who was lost in some television show on his phone, I told myself: you made the correct choices, you did what was required. There’s a nobility, surely, in unrealized dreams. Are the blossoms on that weeping cherry tree in our backyard any less beautiful because they don’t bear fruit? Dreams that don’t come true are not any less dreamed.
I was exhausted, with a pounding headache, by the time I got home. Benjamin kick-boxed around the backyard to test his new cleats. I threw up in the toilet and lay down for a nap.
ABBY, FEBRUARY 25, 2015
For Forest Versteeg’s class, I decided, I needed new boar’s-hair brushes and tubes of M. Graham watercolor paint, the kind with a little honey blended in for extra unctuousness. Cadmium red, of course. Naples yellow. Prussian blue and raw sienna—these two mixed together, I remembered, create a deep, cool-hued green-blue-black, the color of a pond in dense shade.
I walked into New York Central Art Supply on Third Avenue, and the ancient floors under my feet creaked in some dormant sector of my brain. I would know that sound anywhere. I would know it from my grave. And then the smell wrapped around me like a hug. Acrid and penetratingly clean. The sharpness of the pigments, the dry dusty scent of pine wood and canvas.
I declined a clerk’s offer of help, preferring to examine the racks of brushes at my own pace, pulling them from their labeled slots, running their exquisitely soft tips on the back of my hand. I chose a wide flat one and a skinny round one and was turning to choose a plastic palette for mixing paints—I knew just the kind I wanted, with the row of dimples along one edge.
And there she is. End of the aisle. Pulling down a box of charcoal pencils from a high shelf.
Hello, I bleat, surprising myself.
She looks up from the box—she’d been reading the label on the back. She nods uncertainly. Black diamond-patterned tights, flat white sneakers. A pale-pink denim jacket.
Do you know who I am?
A tiny frown. She shakes her head.
You. This sounds insane. I moved a step toward her. She is sidling back, away. I mean, you later.
Okay. She hugs the long flat box to her chest.
My name is Abigail Willard.
Her eyes grow all wide and wary, eyelashes loaded up with mascara, lids precisely edged with liner. I spent a lot of energy on makeup back then. The long sessions in front of the mirror. Pleased at what I saw.
And your name is?
She says very slowly, hesitantly, People call me A.
A for Abigail. Right? I understand that I may sound demanding, or scary, but I continue. Am I right?
She stares at me.
Listen to me, I say.
She stares. Her eyes replicate Pete’s, the brilliant lit-from-within brown slivered with black. Unnerving.
You will take steps and make choices, I say, my voice cracking now. They could be the wrong ones. They could be.
You’re out of your mind, she murmurs, backing away. She drops the box, which unlids itself in midair, the black pencils raining in a clatter, dark hashmarks all across the floor. She’s gone. I’m slowly picking them up, and she’s gone.
I don’t recall how I got back to my desk. I sat through the 2:30 marketing meeting as if deaf and dumb.
SESSION NOTES
A left the shop without completing her purchase.
She says it’s not surprising that you’d encounter disturbed people at an artists’ supply store.
The strange woman might be some kind of omen, she says. Perhaps having to do with poor choices. Says she should end the affair with her boss, though she now realizes this could pose difficulties.
ABBY, FEBRUARY 26, 2015
At a baleful hour on this midwinter night, a mom named Katherine Erdmann called to say that Pete was passed out in her sunroom. “He’s so big, I can’t budge him. And Jeffrey is on business in Sao Paolo.”
Annoyingly, she pronounced this place name with a perfect Portuguese inflection, though it was three in the morning and Katherine Erdmann was not Portuguese.
She opened the door, in a long zip-up robe, squinting. I’d never seen her without her glasses. They made her look much smarter. “I think they were drinking. I’m not sure what they were doing. Eliza is crying in the bathroom and the rest of the kids have gone home.”
Pete’s cheek was pressed up against an enormous ceramic pot, the stems and leaves of a sizable peace lily bent over him as if to tend to him. Spittle gathered in the corners of his mouth, and he snored softly.
“Look at our darling sprout,” said Dennis. “Christ.”
“I was out at my book club. Go Tell It on the Mountain.” Katherine looked at me and whispered, “James Baldwin.”
“I know, I know.” I reached down and waggled his foot. He whimpered.
“Who brought the booze?” said Dennis.
“Oh, I’m sure it was that Dmitri,” Katherine said with a shake of her head.
Again. Dmitri Petimezas. Troubling urchin. I’d asked around about him at school. No one knew exactly who his parents were, they never showed up for anything. I’d spotted him lately, a few times, on the front steps in the morning, dressed in an expensive puffer coat, always the latest basketball shoes. I even searched online. His Instagram profile photo caught his pretty face laughing, covered in paintball splatters. In the few posts, he posed in various European cities.
“Dmitri was questioned by the cops that morning, that whole incident last month, the vestibule thing.” She frowned at them. “But then so was Pete.”
My stomach plunged, Dennis and I exchanged grimaces. “How do you know he was questioned?” I demanded. “I didn’t hear that.”
She shrugged. “I’m lucky. Eliza tells me everything.”
“Pete, can you get up?” Dennis grabbed one of his arms. It flopped like a rubber tube.
Bushwhacking through the peace lily. I got behind him and tried to lift his head and shoulders. Dennis grabbed a foot in each hand. On his dirty white sneakers, handwritten letters, in red marker: ANTIFA. RAGE BRIGADE. We budged him about six inches, he stirred. “I don’t like tequila,” he moaned.
ABBY, FEBRUARY 27, 2015
It was a long night of ruminating, sitting by my delinquent child’s bed, making sure he didn’t choke on his own spew. Eyelids radish-red. Strands of hair snaking wetly across his forehead. Maybe a little drool at the lips, reminding me of baby days, until a tequila-infused belch jolted me into the now again. Plenty of time to think and rethink. Visit and revisit.
Pete, questioned by the police. Again, the police and my boy.
Antifa? What on earth.
And speaking of police. The detective and I were texting every day now. In the space of a month, it had become rampant flirtation. He joked about showing me his favorite Caribbean beaches. “I have family there, the islands. I know the sweet spots they don’t share with the likes of you.” Sometimes the conversation strayed into serious confessions of our frustrations around marriage, kids. Harmless, or not?
The sightings. Five times in two months. That seemed harmful. Terrifying.
The foundations of my life seemed to be sliding, hairline fractures appearing.
My long trail of ruminations led to Eli Hammond.
Eli and that girl.
He’d pull a paperback—Down and Out in Paris and London or The Sheltering Sky—from the back pocket of his jeans—remember how people walked around with soft, worn books in their back pockets, volumes sized and bound to be kept close in just that way, ready to be thumbed and wielded like totems?
Romania, Gaza, Somalia. We need to go. See it through our own eyes. Don’t you want to see it? he asked.
His eyes were the color of a clear sky sinking into darkness. When he talked this way, when I was lying there gazing into them, I wanted to see it all.
Instead, he left me behind. The returning memory of his eyes made tears come to mine, as I sat there over my sleeping son.
She was not merely a reminder, this girl. I was beginning to see: she was some kind of destroyer.
Finally, I left Pete’s bedside to dress for work. My face felt frozen with exhaustion as I sat on the train, arching over the canal and the rooftops and the scrap-metal yard. You don’t have to recalculate the losses and the gains, refigure the cost of everything in your life, I told myself. All you have to do is get through this day.
ABBY, FEBRUARY 28, 2015
“Is that a cricket bat?”
“Yeah,” Dennis said. “That’s a cricket bat.”
I played the videos over and over, sitting up late on the sofa with Dennis: black-hooded marchers, clamoring signs and slogans in many languages, DEATH TO COMPLACENCY, NAZIS RAUS, ALIANZA ANTIFASCISTA. Brutish weapons in their gloved hands, sledgehammers and wooden cudgels. Footage of shattered shop windows, burning trucks, the soundtrack of foreign sirens, wailing, strident. These antifa, these global antifascist brawlers, who fought in the streets and sometimes committed violent and dangerous acts in the name of freedom and justice. Our sixteen-year-old dabbling in this? Could we forbid it? Ground him? After dinner, we had cornered him in his room to talk about the drinking at the Erdmann house, and Pete had assured us he was finished with that. “I’m not really interested in that kind of partying,” he’d said. “You don’t have to worry about it.”
But surely there was reason to worry about this other, unnerving new interest. “Let’s just stay on top of it,” said Dennis now, as I clicked on Antifa Square Off with Riot Police in Hamburg, a nighttime action, orange flames flaring, whistles, chanting, police impassive behind plexiglass shields. The footage ended abruptly when a protester blocked the camera with a black-gloved hand. Dennis shut the laptop’s cover and turned to me. “We just keep close tabs, make sure homework gets done, no more incidents. I mean, you can’t mandate a person’s beliefs, right? Look, it’s antifascism. At least he’s not, like, pro fascism.”
Yes, I agreed that would be worse.
“And at least he has a passion?” he said. “Isn’t that what the school’s always saying—encourage your kids to develop a passion?”
“I doubt this was what they had in mind,” I said. Dennis offered a tired smile, kissed the top of my head, and went up to bed. I opened the screen again, stared at figures scrolling by, a pixelated frieze, wavering in and out of focus. One video after another, over and over. Finally I fell asleep there, the laptop dying alongside me.
In the morning, I dragged myself up to our room, bare feet shuffling up the stairs, and Dennis and I dressed, tugging our clothes from the grip of the ornery little closet, as if all were normal, just another workday.
As if all of this were normal. Normal, that some kind of international strain of rage had infected our child.
Normal, to be indulging in a strange semi-dalliance with the law officer assigned to a case against this firstborn son.
Normal, to see yourself, as you were then. Talk to yourself even.
Normal, to be teetering with every step you take, on your path to the office, to the supermarket and the bank and the school, skirting the abyss between true and false, past and present, dream and reality.
Normal, to be passing Bryant Park, rushing through gathering dusk on your evening commute and see yourself there, on the steps, sitting, smoking a cigarette. Right under the lion. In your pencil skirt and a pair of puffy white sneakers.
Grabbing a cigarette before getting on the train.
Freeze in mid-stride, practically fall over.
You see the brand of smokes. Marlboro Reds. You’d picked up this habit, the first week you met Eli, stealing his Marlboro Reds.
You hesitate. You notice the almost-plump hands, the bitten fingernails. The tender wrist stacked with thin metal bangles.
Then, a nausea hits you again, a fear that you’ll vomit right there at the corner of Forty-Second and Fifth, with the rush-hour mobs swirling around you.
The feeling passes. The girl rests her cigarette on a ledge, now she reaches into her messenger bag and pulls out a wand of lip gloss.
And then you remember this moment, this day. Yes, you see the file box next to her, overstuffed with ragged houseplants and a mess of papers. She has just quit her job at Grady Advertising. She has decided that office life is not for her. Not for her, sitting in a cubicle all day.
She is free.
She has quit the job to pursue her desire to be a serious painter. This is what she tells herself. But you also recall: you’d just met him. The first flash of intensity. So fresh, so powerful. It was hard to get out of his bed.
She applies the lip gloss, tosses it back into her bag, and straightens up. The lion, above, watches you with stony skepticism.
I need to talk to you.
You realize you haven’t said this out loud. So you rush up to her, say it again. I need to talk to you.
She pins you with her gaze now. You again, she says.
All around the two of you the rush continues, as if there has not been a massacre of time and space, right here in their midst; they don’t seem to register that laws of the universe are bending as they dodge around with stress and love and anger on their faces.
Their faces are infinitely different. Only two are the same. Yours and hers.
Let’s go somewhere and sit down, you say. If we could just figure this out.
We? There is no we. I’m not going anywhere with you. She stabs the cigarette out on the plinth beneath the lion’s paw. His pupil-less eyes, regarding this, and everything so wrong that is happening here.
I’ll give you my card, you can see our name.
You fumble in your bag, searching, open your wallet, dig around hoping to find a stray business card. No one uses business cards anymore, but the corporation still insists you have one.
And yes you locate one single card, corners dog-eared. You hand it to her; she reads it with a furrowed brow. Novapharm? That’s where you work?
It’s a good job, you say. A good paycheck.
She looks up at you. I’m done with paycheck jobs, she says. Never again.
It works, you say. This life works.
But do you love it? Do you love this life?
Her eyes, set wide, opened wide, questioning. You have to look away from them, to try to formulate a response.
You’ll see, it’s not like you think.
The card flutters to the ground. She has dropped it.
Maybe because it’s your only card it seems important that second to rescue it, but it’s just past five on Fifth Avenue and the sidewalk is jammed, and brogans and pumps are stepping on it now, it is skidding across the pavement. Finally you retrieve it. It’s your only one.
You straighten and return to her, but she has gathered up her box and purse and is slipping into the stream of people, slipping away.
But did you read the name, you hear your voice shout. Our name. I am trying to help you. Save you!
You realize you have no idea why you’ve said this. Save her from what?
As she disappears, your eye comes to rest on a pack of teenagers just down the block from the library. A kid with a shock of blond hair—your shock-headed second son—locked in a kiss with a girl. Green parka, gray corduroys—that must be him.
Voice out loud again. Benjamin! Or was he a figment of the imagination too? The kids seem to hear it, the call of a watching parent. They scatter like pigeons, disappearing into the park.
Dr. Tristane Kazemy, FEBRUARY 29, 2016
It is leap day. A movement exists now, a campaign, a meme perhaps, she’d seen it all over her feeds, to encourage one to take risks and adventures on this date. It happens only once every four years. A l’année bissextile. Once every four years, and so the thinking goes, why not take a leap?
Le Neuro opened at 7:15 a.m., and she was already there, waiting. Only a fellow, not a full staffer yet, so no key, not yet. In this wintry dark, the campus was deserted, bleak as tundra. She stood outside the entrance stamping her feet, waiting for the first keyholder to arrive.
The trees had turned metallic in the cold, trunks like steel columns, twigs like bent wire.
It’s 7:25 now, and she had to admit it, besides feeling deeply cold, she felt deeply angry. Perhaps this Willard case, when she broke it open, would force the attention of her bosses Laurin and Buccardi. Perhaps this incredible dossier, the bulging virtual folders of scans and transcriptions and analysis—perhaps it also contained the raw materials of her future. Certainly, it could be a career-making case; certainly, at last, it would bring the promotion that Buccardi kept saying she deserved. And with it, a copy of the entry key to Le Neuro.
She wasn’t the type to cry sexism. Still, Laurin. Always the Monday-morning murmurs about snowbound liaisons a Mont Blanc. A crisp “mademoiselle” tossed in her direction could tilt the weekly departmental like a veering ship. Laurin was most definitely a factor.
All of this must be forgotten in the lab though. By eight she had been allowed inside and already had immersed herself once more in the dossier. She gazed at the neurological scans, the contents of one woman’s head, luminescent blue-black and white, across two monitors. Today is leap day, she told her brain. You must leap.