Jen excused herself and Jim from the usual Christmas festivities at her parents’ house in Youngstown, and the attendant $300-per-head surcharge on said festivities, by informing her mother that she had taken “a last-minute house-sitting gig for a friend.” This statement was, at least in legalistic terms, true. The alternative arrangement could be fairly labeled as “last-minute,” as it had presented itself one week before the purported date of Jen and Jim’s flight to Ohio and would have required Jen to cancel said flight, had she ever booked the flight in the first place, which she had not. The alternative arrangement could be likewise accurately described as a “house-sitting gig,” as Jen had indeed repeatedly assumed seated positions in the house as part of completing the terms of her brief employment there, and, much to her shock, had been given free rein of the house while its occupant was abroad for the holidays, though Jen had no plans to sleep or eat in the house or otherwise use it as a short-term residence.
“Who is this friend?” her mother asked on the phone, after Jen had fended off her queries about the prospects of Jen receiving a refund for the canceled flight that she had not booked. “Is it that Meg?”
“No,” Jen said. “It’s an older lady—I met her recently through work—who’s helping me with some of my art stuff.”
“Oh. Well,” Jen’s mother replied, in the mock-sobbing tone she used when she wished both to display disappointment and to make a deflective joke about her own ostentatious display of disappointment, “we sure will miss you at Christmas.” Kruss-muss. Jen’s mother laughed nervously.
Jen’s mother made it easy for Jen to lie to her, or to lie by omission. But it was never easy for Jen to deduce if her mother knew she was lying, by omission or otherwise.
The omission, in this case, took partial form as Mrs. Flossie Durbin’s limestone Renaissance Revival town house. Via her assistant Dakota, Mrs. Durbin had invited Jen and Jim to stay in the town house over the holidays while Jen finished the portrait of Mrs. Durbin, which she was mapping out and modifying from a candid snapshot she’d found on New York Social Diary, even though Mrs. Durbin had gently insisted on two traditional and serenely pointless “sittings.” In her previous visits to this particular Durbin residence, Jen had simply edited out her surroundings for fear of gawping at them, as if she could pretend that she and Mrs. Durbin were performing in front of a green screen for a hybrid animation/live-action film. Now there was no one but Jim to look at Jen looking, yet she was still afraid to peer too closely at any of Mrs. Durbin’s furnishings or possessions, much less touch, use, discuss, or apply her body weight to any of Mrs. Durbin’s furnishings or possessions. If Jen’s eyes rested on any single sconce or vase or rock-crystal candleholder too long, her brain would transmit grisly flashpoint images of clattering disaster. A violent muscle spasm chucking her arm across the faux-marbre Florentine chimneypiece, smashing a terra-cotta vase to the floor. A blot of chocolate or grease or dog feces achieving self-awareness and smuggling itself in from the outside world on Jen’s coat sleeve, dive-bombing the herringbone-tweed linen sofa or accenting cotton toile de jouy and trompe l’oeil boiserie. A sleepwalking spell ending in the bloody caterwauling death of a Regency convex mirror.
“I feel like we should lay down towels before we sit anywhere,” Jen said. Jim was taking a book down from a polished walnut bookcase in what Jen’s mother would have called Mrs. Durbin’s “living room” and what Jim had decided to call the “ballroom,” and Jen reflexively raised both hands, fingers fluttering, as if Jim were about to lock into a trance by which unseen forces would seize control of his body and command his arms to lob the book squarely at the chandelier overhead.
“You’re going about this all wrong,” Jim said. “If there were ever a time to have towel-free sex in somebody else’s bed, and then to sleep in that bed and maybe even sit down on that bed, it is now.”
“Can you put the book back?” Jen asked, chewing on her left thumbnail.
Jim put the book back. “That’s a Sterling Ruby in the gym, you know,” he said, lowering himself carefully into what Jen guessed was a hand-marbleized leather armchair.
“And that’s a John Currin right behind you,” Jen said, switching to her right thumbnail. Jim reared around to see, too quickly.
Jen would have preferred it if she and Jim had confined themselves to what Mrs. Durbin called her “study,” which was presently empty on the eve of being redecorated and thus contained little that could be maimed or destroyed by an errant footfall or direct eye contact or the onset of a previously undiagnosed seizure disorder, save perhaps for the fireplace and the ebonized oak flooring and the glass of the double casement window looking out onto the park, and, of course, Jen’s work-in-progress canvas. The study was where Mrs. Durbin had sat, in a since-disappeared button-backed fauteuil covered in gold silk jacquard, on two successive Sunday afternoons while Jen sketched her, backlit by the winter sunshine angling low and feeble through the window. Mrs. Durbin’s hair was the color of white wine. Her eyes had the alert and well-rested result of the most advanced and subtle blepharoplasty. For their first “sitting,” Mrs. Durbin was upholstered in what Jen guessed to be a Chanel suit; on the second, a Givenchy brocade jacket and cigarette pants. Mrs. Durbin said very little. She would have been the oldest and serenest and richest of the Judys, satiny in her stillness and so astonishingly thin that her thinness seemed less the product of frenzied Judy-esque willpower and more as if Mrs. Durbin had hired a team of experts to hack into her mainframe and recalibrate it to run smoothly and silently on 30 to 35 percent less energy than other, less optimized Judys.
“What speaks to Mrs. Durbin about your work is that it is unabashedly upbeat, literally in-your-face, which goes against the grain of how we’ve been feeling as a culture lately, in what have been difficult and—frankly—depressing times,” Dakota had explained to Jen over the phone. “She says it’s like you’ve taken the temperature of the culture, shrugged, and just thrown the thermometer away. And now that the economy is starting to turn a corner, it’s like you were ahead of the curve all along. Two thousand ten is going to be your year!”
Jen tentatively positioned her ass on the edge of a cane-back chair near Jim, then stood again. “I still feel uncomfortable that Mrs. Durbin fundamentally misunderstands what I was trying to do,” she said to Jim. “I wasn’t presenting joy. It’s more about the fake ways we present ourselves to the world, the masks we put on. I was trying to dramatize that, or satirize that. The idea of the portraits in Pam’s show was pretty straightforward—it was creating a maniacally happy stock-photo counterpoint to the bureaucratic horror and sadism of our health-care system.”
“Are you dictating a grant proposal?” Jim asked.
“I didn’t even know that at the time, but Pam did,” Jen said. She tried again to lower herself into the cane-back chair.
“You could look at it this way: It’s not really your business whether Mrs. Flossie Durbin gets it or not,” Jim said. “Arguably it’s not even your business to define what there is for Mrs. Flossie Durbin to get.”
“Do you think there are surveillance cameras in here?” Jen asked.
“Your job is to make the stuff, and then it belongs to the world and it’s out of your hands,” Jim said.
“You’re right,” Jen said. “And it’s not like Mrs. Durbin’s portrait is going to have that same feeling of—”
“—of delirious happiness that you’ve been impaled on an electric fence,” Jim said.
“This will be a pleasant and benign portrait of a benign and pleasant woman. It’s just weird to think that a happy false façade was just what we needed after the financial apocalypse. If we’re all openly unhappy, then at least we know what we’re dealing with.”
“That part of your grant proposal might hold up if we weren’t all pretty openly unhappy already,” Jim said. “Also, Jen.”
“What?”
“Look around you for a second.”
Jen laughed again and shaded her eyes with her hand. “I know.”
“No, seriously. Look around you.”
Jen lowered her hand, rolled her eyes, then rolled them around the room.
“Look at where you are. Look at what you’re doing, and who you’re doing it for.”
“I know. I don’t understand how this happened,” Jen said.
“Let’s go have some towel sex,” Jim said.
“Okay,” Jen said. “But not here.”
Jim bolted up from the armchair and Jen winced. As she grabbed her things, she saw a new email on her phone.
Pam <raddenpamela@gmail.com>
Thursday, Dec 24 6:31 PM
To: Jen <Jenski1848@gmail.com>
Subject: Please fwd to Franny
Dear Jen,
Do you want to get lunch sometime after the holidays? Paulo and I are back from Colombia on the 2nd. Also, I’m attaching a photo of a new friend for Franny. She should arrive in the spring.
Love,
Pam
Jen opened the attached image and at first she thought she was looking at the sonar footage of the wreckage of the flight that had disappeared without a trace the previous summer. Then she realized her mistake, and she yelped with honest and unguarded delight even as a narrow seam of dread began to open up inside her.