But maybe faith, faith of the lowercase variety, gets injected along with all that fear of holy thunderbolts. Because Luke had stuck it out all this time, though Clem was as slippery as one of her seals. Just before I left for Connecticut, he called me up in a funk, all the way from Miami. I was amazed. I was thrilled. “I’m sorry,” he said right off, “I’m hammered, okay, or I wouldn’t be calling, but everything I’m telling you is true, okay? If there was a decent bridge around here, I’d be standing on the edge looking down. That’s how crazy she makes me, that sister of yours.” Luke is a graduate student in engineering. Bridges are his main obsession, his passion (aside from my sister).
I said, “Then I’m glad you called.”
He said, “I could kill her.”
“Well, I’ve known that feeling myself,” I said.
He’d paid a surprise visit to Woods Hole. Clem, he discovered, had taken up with a guy from a construction site who whistled at her legs. They had been hanging out together on Clem’s front porch when Luke drove up.
“Maybe they’re just friends,” I lied. I knew about this guy. Clem said he was funny, uncomplicated, strong. She had a weakness for strong.
“She was sitting in his lap,” said Luke. “He looked like a frigging troglodyte.”
Clem had apologized to Luke after sending the troglodyte home, but she also told Luke he was a fool. It was nothing, a passing fancy. (That was true.) Anyway, where was he? Way the hell down in Florida. If he made a scene, she warned, this was the end. Luke spent the night in the Trailways shelter across from the ferry slips, then left. “Hysterical. She called me hysterical. What goes on in that mind of hers, what.” He’d called me, I realized, because he needed calming down. In our family, he calls me the Rational One. My dad’s the Dreamy One, Mom the Colorful One. Clem’s the Wild One—when she’s not the Heartbreaker, the Ball-breaker, the Nemesis, the Bitch on Wheels.
“I wish I could answer that, Luke. I think we’re friends, but we’re not, well, not exactly soul mates. Historically, we’re kind of like England and France.”
“But you know her.”
“Better than you?” I said. “Come on. And what goes on inside her head? Who knows? Something way out, I have to say. Something very Robinson Crusoe.”
“I wouldn’t idealize anybody so moronically reckless.”
“If there’s one thing she’s not, Luke, it’s a moron.”
“Maybe what I need is a moron. To fall in love with a moron.”
“When she’s scared, she holds everyone at arm’s length. You must know that by now.”
“Scared?” Luke laughed sardonically, but he was clearly tired, losing steam. “You know how you get to a point in a relationship where it feels like you’re lost in this jungle?”
“Well …” Right then, I pined to be that deep into any relationship. I could face lost in the jungle; just show me the jungle.
“No paths. No compass. Can’t see six inches ahead of you, branches wapping your face, bugs the size of rodents … and … tigers watching from the trees … This I do not need,” he concluded. “Am I crazy, Louisa, like she says?”
I couldn’t endure much more of his sodden sorrow. I said, “Look, it is you she loves. I shouldn’t say it, but I expect to see you married. Not now, not right away, but … she hates to admit it, she has these instincts—she fights it, but it is you, Luke.”
“She told you that?”
“If that’s what you want, you just need to be patient.” Listening to myself, I was appalled. She had told me no such thing. To Clem, there is no you in that singular sense. She’s vowed there never will be, though I don’t really believe her.
For a few seconds Luke was silent. I could hear him relax, breathing in my consolation. Wasn’t I the older one, the wiser one? If only, I thought, if only just once I could feel what it’s like to be inside her skin, to live with such intense abandon. Then I would be the wiser without question. Whatever there was to know, I’d know.
Like half the population of New York City, I am a struggling artist, and one of the things I was conveniently doing by holing up in the Katzes’ house was taking a break from the struggle. I’ve begun selling some of my pots—this year I’ve even had commissions, for a few sets of plates and a huge teapot—but I can’t stop wondering what makes me pursue this archaic talent in a city that takes no pity on anything quaint. Yes, there are exceptions like Betty Woodman, who’s managed to turn ceramics into high art by covering walls with great saucy arabesques of terracotta glazed in colors straight out of Matisse. Well, she sort of is Matisse;
Matisse on steroids, Matisse up to his elbows in mud. She also has a passion that I wonder if I share.
Lately when I’m working, I feel as if I’m in a play. I love the city, that much I know, but moving there only seemed to exaggerate my doubts about what I do, which sometimes boils down to making the containers from which people feed themselves. That’s fine, I suppose, but it feels more utilitarian than anything I ever intended to do when I was a reader, a thinker, a girl who recited poetry to her cat. And it doesn’t pay the bills much better than reciting poetry to cats. Fortunately, I have other skills with which to make a living. Because I also happen to like words. So I write a little, and I edit. This is how I came to work for Artbeat. It’s a monthly magazine, thick with glossy photos of paintings, sculpture, videos, and so-called installations. My job is to pore over the long, contemplative essays on the artists who make them, artists who aim beyond butter plates and mugs. I can carry batches of these essays back and forth on the train, back and forth to the beach.
The editors at Artbeat give me what they call the hot-potato essays, the ones that are transparently pretentious (but must be published for various political reasons), bloated with critical ego (often transparently pretentious as well), or just plain poorly written (on a timely subject that can’t be reassigned). I deal with meek authors who cannot put a sentence together and with vain authors who cannot put a sentence together. When I have no idea what something means, I am not (unlike the editors I work for) afraid to say so. I am paid to be a verbal backhoe. It’s not a job to choose if you need to be loved by the people you work for. That’s why the editors give the worst stuff to me.
I had two big essays with me that first week: one about a Scottish artist who makes strange, delightful confabulations from nature—towers of driftwood, gardens of ice, Herculean braids of grasses and leaves—and the other a provocative rant against Jeff Koons, David Salle, and a herd of other artists this critic believed to be the worst case of emperor’s clothing in decades. TONE IT DOWN!!! the editor in chief had scrawled across the front of the manuscript.
Hugh, the managing editor—who, as far as I can see, is much too nice to work with such sharks—had kindly added, just for me, an illuminating postscript. Author is protégé of Hilton Kramer.
One afternoon, as I sat on a velvet chaise in the Katzes’ parlor, poking my arms and legs to see if I’d burned myself at the beach, I spent an hour on the phone with Hugh going over specific gripes on the essay about the Scottish artist.
“Hugh,” I said, “is the guy allergic to commas? Reading this piece is like reading semiautomatic gunfire. It leaves you mentally out of breath.”
“He’s very big in L.A.,” said Hugh, sounding apologetic.
“And they don’t like commas out there?”
Hugh laughed. “I’ll have to look into that theory. But he attached this note saying that …” I heard him rustling papers on his desk. “Yes, saying that punctuation mustn’t be ‘impedimentary.’ ”
Now I laughed. “I’ll bear that in mind.”
“Oh, listen. Change whatever you like,” said Hugh. “I will deal with the fallout. That’s my job. Just how about this: how about no semicolons? I know he hates semicolons most of all. ‘Roadblocks,’ he called them on the last piece we ran.”
I agreed to hold back on semicolons. But I love them, I have to confess; I find their particular flavor of hesitation simi
lar to the lip I like to form on the large bowls I make, holding my right thumb up and slightly cocked, a hitchhiker’s thumb, as I spin the wheel, as the velvety lavender slip runs over the heel of my hand and down my wrist. The slight return of the lip allows you to hold the bowl securely, carry it heavily laden with apples or oranges across a room. I had brought one of these bowls as a present to the Katzes, and it sat on their kitchen counter. I was using it to hold their mail.
I took a shower and rinsed out my bathing suit. I fed the rabbits and birds their dinner, took out the hose and watered the garden, trying to conjure a rainbow. Half soaked in the end, I coiled up the hose, mixed a margarita, and (there being no Ella Fitzgerald, no Sarah Vaughan) put on Bob Dylan, Blood on the Tracks. It’s odd to spend your vacation with someone else’s music, especially when you’re alone. You’re free to let loose, unobserved, but someone else has chosen the words you belt out in private, the rhythms you can dance to like a fool.
I opened the front windows so I could hear the music out on the verandah, where I settled myself in the wicker swing. Before me stretched Leah’s wide bed of irises, the old-fashioned kind with big parchment petals. Beyond them stretched the lawn, unblemished; a swatch of road; some trees, maples and sycamores; another house; the early evening sky. I squinted until it all closed into glass chips of purple, apricot, cobalt, green. Listening to Bob, I dreamed of Sam.
I met Sam at a May Day party on the roof of his building. Sam is a painter who turns his dreams into comic neon landscapes brimming with colorful people and oddly shaped creatures. They’re alien but also alluring, funny and warm. Sam lives in a loft shadowed all day by the Manhattan Bridge. Everything shudders when the subways pass over, including Sam, who laughs all the time. His teeth are white as gulls, a little jagged, and his eyes the color of trout, pewter flecked with green. He is in his late thirties and has a wavy ginger-colored ponytail that nearly reaches his waist. At the party, we had to shout every time a train went by. “Life on the Transit Fault!” he shouted gaily. “Like earthquakes all day long, it’s wild!” He said his dreams were full of earthquakes; so then, for the moment, were his paintings: toppling buildings, tidal waves, cars and boats tossed to the sky, yet without any sense of doom. He took me downstairs to see them.
Artists are supposed to be an anguished lot. Not Sam, and that was partly why I fell for him. Also because he was full of surprises. One: that he was from Nebraska. Another: that twice a week he got up at four and drove to a marina at the end of Long Island, a place where you pay to go deep-sea fishing. When he came over to my apartment for dinner, he was all fired up from one of these trips, his nose polished red by the sun. The whole time he seemed to be blushing, hyperactive with rapture. “Thirty-five blues,” he exclaimed, “ravenous devils, mouthful of razors!” He showed me a Polaroid of himself on the dock with a fish half as long as he was tall. Over stuffed chicken breasts, I listened to him reel off fishing tales like so many love affairs fondly recalled. Over ice-cream sundaes, I showed him photos of my fruit bowls and teapots and fanciful ewers.
“Your colors are like fog and snow,” Sam said softly. “Fantastic and ephereal.” He sounded reverent. But did he mean ephemeral or ethereal? I didn’t ask. As happens to me at these moments, I heard my sister scold me: Loosen up there, Lou. Another time she caught me acting like a schoolmarm, she startled me out of it with her best James Brown. “Get on the good foot, unh-unh-unh, get on the GOOD foot!” she grunted, dancing like the proverbial funky chicken. She can’t sing to save her life.
After putting the dishes in my sink, I went to the bedroom to brush my hair and get my bearings. Now, I thought. Now. Breathless, I returned to the living room. There he still was, still glowing, his head tilted back on the sofa: snoring gently to my patterned tin ceiling. That was sometime late in June. Take it slow, I consoled myself. Sam could visit me out in the country, the ideal setting for romance. I pictured us under Leah’s pergola, sunset filtered through fragrant red grapes (however inconsistent the season). I thought of Clem, how she would have rolled her eyes and groaned at the image. “Boy,” she’d say, “if they’re out there to be found, you’ll find ’em, the looniest men on earth.”
“Oh no,” I would tell her, “not this one.” And on we would spar.
My sister was named for our grandmother Clement, a Louisiana belle who died of pneumonia when our father was eight. She looks, in the pictures he has, fragile and pale as a new gardenia. You look at her face and suspect this girl will die lamentably young. When my sister was born, she was sick all the time and had violent allergies to everything under the sun. She was practically allergic to air. I remember the raised voices, the lurid hospital halls, the frenzy of the too many times she came close to dying. Her face would swell up and she would gasp inaudibly, groping for air. Most vividly of all, I remember our mother’s panic (also, my wicked ambivalence). Clem outgrew these afflictions, however, and though she is fast approaching the age at which her namesake died, she is hardly so tragic or fragile; she is about as much a southern belle as I am a Canadian Mountie. Nevertheless, she’s had her brushes with fate.
From the time she could crawl, I bullied her, exercising a subtle form of terrorism (games, deceptively pleasant, at which she could never excel). It seemed only fair; everyone else was so deferential. For years, our mother was effusively grateful for every morsel of food Clem could keep down without breaking into hives. Ironically, Clem became extremely plump; when Mom wasn’t looking, I’d sing “Clementine” and make her wail. Four years older, I had an easy advantage, and for nearly a decade I could make her do just about anything. I was supreme, in charge. To be fair, I also took care of her. I read to her, watched her on the swings, kept my sadistic urges in check.
Then something shifted. She was stronger than me by the time she was seven, a born wrestler. Suddenly she no longer took my threats seriously. Try as I might, I could not regain her fear, her respect, never mind her trust. Well, I thought, this is what I deserve for being such a tyrant, for having assumed my regime was infallible. Tyrants, no exception, fall.
Clem has called me a loser, a wimp, a hopeless romantic. In return, I have called her a selfish, hard-hearted bitch. She tells me the men I fall for are creeps: pseudo-intellectual, stuck-up, effeminate creeps. Sometimes I look at the latest one and see in a flash that it’s true. By that time, however, the man in question has usually vanished, slipped out of sight under the waves.
Nights in the country were long. I would listen to the same records over and over. I was getting used to, even attached to, the music—what I came to think of as Mars and Leah’s pothead collection. I even sampled Pink Floyd, though Bob remained my favorite. One sweltering night, I played “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome” about seventeen times, so loud I was amazed the police didn’t show. It was the end of July. I had been there a month and Sam had not called.
Barefoot, I carried my glass of wine onto the lawn. The grass was warm and slick with the day’s humidity, the night’s first dew. I sang to the rabbits. The light from the house picked out their eyes in the dark like garnets. They watched me, ears erect, transfixed in their little prisons, probably terrified by the crackpot behavior of this weaving, tone-deaf creature. The pheasants and quail slept on through my crooning, heads tucked seamlessly under their wings. “Nighty night,” I whispered, suddenly teary. Poor doomed creatures, I thought. I made my way back to the house.
The rear entrance led into a small room that felt dank and medieval. The walls and floors were stone, so the air was always surprisingly cool. In the center stood a long wooden table, rough and gouged, a drain in the floor underneath. Along one wall hung raincoats, ragged elongated sweaters, umbrellas, and scarves. Below these were stacked several cases of wine. I imagined it had once been an icehouse or a larder for onions and turnips.
The rush of cool was a shock. I closed my eyes and felt dizzy. I am going to swoon, I thought, but I didn’t. I began to cry, woefully sorry for myself. I went into the kitchen, set do
wn my glass, and rested my head on the telephone.
Don’t call him, don’t call him, don’t call him, I warned myself then. You will have a cup of tea. You will write Clem. You will go to bed. I stood up, stoic, and followed my orders. I’m good at following orders.
Not that I was falling apart. Several evenings, I took advantage of Mars’s technospectacular kitchen and made myself elaborate dinners. I used the mortar and pestle, learned to grind my own spices. On sunny days, I biked to the town beach and worked on a new batch of essays. I put a dictionary and half a dozen very sharp red pencils in my knapsack, along with my towel and sun hat. I worked on my lap, Mars and Leah’s latest New Yorker serving as a blotter beneath the manuscript of the moment. “Articulata” was a piece on the proliferation of text in photography. Might we see this as a symptom of visual insecurity, or is it the strident, declarative end to our long-running romance with lensmen such as Adams, Weston, and even Walker? Might we venture so far as to interpret this trend—nay, this turning point—as an invigorating divorce of sorts? I looked up to see a gull eyeing my knapsack, venturing so far as to interpret its bulk—nay, its grease-stained belly—as a food station. “Well,” I said loudly to the gull, “might we indeed?” I squawked, and the gull scuttled away. I lay back and put the essay aside, weighting it down with my sneakers. I fell asleep in the sun. I dreamed that the author of the pompous essay turned out to be Sam. “That we is not royal,” he told me angrily. “It’s entirely actual. Look in your Chicago.” It turned out that somehow I had the wrong edition of The Chicago Manual of Style, that my copy was way out of date. I would lose my job. When I woke, the gull was back, standing at the edge of my towel and staring at me. The obvious question on his mind was Is she edible?
I rode back to the house by the longer, scenic route—past the shoreline estates, shingled mastodons waving bright flags—and stopped at the fish market. I love eating fish, but I hate buying it, the raw smell, the iridescent flesh. At Woods Hole, when Clem gave me a tour of the marine biology labs, I said no when she opened the door marked PATHOLOGY. Eviscerated dolphins, I said, were not my cup of tea. “Sometimes I think they are precisely mine,” said Clem.