Lane got up early, in the grips of a familiar momentum. The project was starting to shift, to turn into something more than she had hoped. She had a lunch with the restaurant people later, so she organized her sketches to present her progress, taking pleasure in the way they added up to more than the sum of their parts. This magical coalescence didn’t always happen with a piece. It was like falling in love, in a way. The same high.
She heard a tentative knock on her studio door, and the girl peeked her head in.
“Lane, would you like some eggs?” Ava said. “I’m bored of cereal.”
“No,” Lane said.
“You should eat something, though. What can I fix you?”
“I’m working.”
“I miss Oliver,” Ava said.
“Me, too. Least he knows when to be quiet so I can think.”
“Sorry.”
Ava backed away. Lane heard her making noise in the kitchen for a while until finally she left on her bike. The girl disturbed Lane. Being around a child was strange—children bent time, changed the shape of it. And she looked too much like Louise.
The current project, the Marigny restaurant, was massive, ambitious. It would be her best work. It would stand after whatever was happening to her had finished happening, after she was gone. As she drew, time retreated, twisted, frolicked. Because of the subject matter, partly, the depiction of an era barely remembered by the city’s oldest trees and buildings. The past, the past. Memories, coquettish time, like Louise, little Lulu, cavorting in the water at Perdido Bay, those summer trips to the beach. Brown as a nut, staying under for longer than was probable, breaking the surface twenty yards away. Lulabelle, Louise-iana, Ouisie, Lou. Love erupted, broke, a violence no one had explained to Lane and for which she was unprepared. Lane, helpless and bound, alone with love that too often seemed interchangeable with terror.
Louise in her two-piece pineapple swimsuit, yelling Mama, watch! She dived from the pier and came up at the tip of the sandbar, too close to the channel where boats passed. Love took the form of conjured-up horrors: kidnappings, impalings, drownings, accidents. Love crashed into dread, lapped constantly at the shore. The long limbs and strong body of her daughter were so vulnerable. The sharp bones of a gar sliced her foot as she ran on the sand.
Those years killed painting. All Lane’s energy centered on her daughter, and when she managed a few hours in her studio she’d felt like a hobbyist, her powers diffused. And for what? Louise left as soon as she was able. At the end of each day, when aches, hunger, or sheer fatigue brought the work to a halt, one thing was clear: that day was never coming back. Lane would try to rest and not think about how every moment of not painting was gone forever. She worked in a state of constant anxiety, in a rush, propelled by engines of panic and denial.
She hated to leave her studio, but it couldn’t be helped. She drove to the CBD for lunch with the restaurant group—it was the financial people, not the chef. The chef she wouldn’t have minded. She recognized the haunted hungry energy about him, the ambition, his attention always divided between the world’s insistent processes and his vision. Today, she was led to a table for three: Lane, and two people in suits she had met before, a man and a woman. The man, Philip, fussed over the wine list, engaged the waiter, asking his advice.
The tedium of lunch. Small talk, food talk. The menu was some kind of Asian fusion thing. She ordered the special without caring what it was. Noodles maybe? Fine. The wine came, and some minutes of discussion about traffic, the weather, and then the entrées arrived. Glass noodles, shredded herbs, unrecognizable. They gushed about the plating. The woman, Myrna, photographed her food before she ate it. She tucked her phone into her handbag and turned to Lane.
“Thank you for meeting with us,” she said.
“Oh, sure,” Lane said. “It sounded urgent.”
“We’ve had some problems come up,” Myrna said. “Issues with construction that are going to affect our time frame.”
“Time frame?” Lane repeated, frowning. The words had trouble making sense. Time, framed. Framing time was useless. Time was a figure moving under the surface of the bay and breaking somewhere else, scattering droplets, catching the light. Might’s well try to frame water. Your frame would be driftwood soon enough, and rusty nails.
Philip said, “We’ve had some delays. It’s setting us back, we don’t know exactly, yet. At least ninety days. We’ve had issues come up with the historic preservation board, some structural problems with the building. It was a bit of a blow. You know what they say, no telling what’s there until you open up the walls.”
Lane had never heard anyone say this. “Three months,” she said. She was ready to start, she’d nearly completed the prep. Now it would have to wait until fall? Impossible.
“There’s another thing,” Philip said. “There may be some shifts in the design. We’ve got the architects and the contractors on-site, working out solutions. We’ll have to do some creative problem-solving to stay within budget.”
“Old buildings,” Myrna said. “You know how it is.”
“Once we have the new plans, we’ll get them to you.”
“So the work I’ve done?” Lane said.
“We are hoping the changes won’t be too drastic,” Philip said.
“We ought to have a better sense of it in the next few weeks,” Myrna said.
“We should talk about your schedule,” Philip said. “We’d like to keep you, we love your work, obviously. It’s been a part of our vision since the beginning. But we definitely understand if you don’t have the flexibility.”
“Definitely,” Myrna said.
Finally Lane understood the point of the meeting. They were letting her go. The research, the plans. The weeks she had spent fruitlessly, the hours she’d never get back.
“Lane,” Philip continued, “we were hoping to keep you on retainer in event of this kind of delay. But unfortunately any extra funds will be eaten up by the construction fees, the redesign, and pushing the opening back.”
“We hope you’ll be available when we’re ready,” Myrna said.
“We hope the changes won’t be too extensive,” Philip said.
“We won’t have anything left in the budget for a redesign,” Myrna said. “So when the walls are up, if you’re available—”
“And if you can use what you’ve done already,” Phillip said.
“Or adapt it pretty easily, obviously,” Myrna said.
They were talking about money. Lane did not give a shit about the money. The lost time tunneled like a wormhole into the irretrievable past. She wanted to leave. She could not abide the rest of the lunch.
The waiter came by and Philip and Myrna asked question after question about the dessert menu. What kind of bread was used for the bread pudding? Baked in-house? What whiskey was added to the sauce? When finally they ordered coffees and a cobbler and, of course, the bread pudding, Jesus, they cared so much about the details of their every aesthetic experience though they didn’t comprehend the first thing about what it meant to actually make something. These people were nothing but eaters.
Lane stood, disgusted. She smiled thinly. “I’m afraid I have to run,” she said. “I can’t stay for dessert.”
They rose from their seats, promising to keep her updated, to be in touch, and please, if she found herself unavailable, would she be kind enough to keep them in the loop? Of course, yes, best of luck with the redesign, etc., etc., each of them shaking her hand, and finally she was out, walking the two blocks to the pay lot where she’d parked and then lurching uptown through traffic, to her useless sketches.
She didn’t know how much time she had left, but it wasn’t enough. Losing the restaurant mural terrified her. Three months. Would she even have three good months? Lane knew something was wrong with her, and it was getting worse. She got disoriented. She forgot things, sometimes important things. At times this troubled her and other times she scarcely believed anything was amiss. She wasn’t stupid, but she couldn’t remember what she couldn’t remember. The problems came and retreated at random, as did her awareness of the problems. Being around people was more trying than it used to be, of this she was sure.