Anyway, even after I cleaned up the cottage, it was still a serious dump. The walls were old Sheetrock and particleboard, cracked from abuse, and the ceiling was open with exposed rafters. The roof was missing so many shingles that it leaked like holy hell. But a little indoor precipitation didn’t bother me. I just placed garbage cans and pots under the drizzles and went on with my business. Who cared? I had my own studio! It was the rat droppings that were more bothersome.
Actually, it was a good thing that the cottage was a pit because when you paint, you don’t want to have to worry about the floors. The floor of the room where my easel was set up was covered in the cheapest linoleum mankind ever produced fifty years ago, and now it was splattered with every color found in nature or not—my homage to Jackson Pollock.
But hey! It actually looked like an artist’s studio! The living room held a huge piece of half-inch plywood laid over two old sawhorses where I stretched my canvases over frames and prepped them with two or three coats of gesso, depending on the quality of the muslin or the texture of the material I was using. It was just way cheaper to make my own than to buy them already finished. And this way I could put together canvases of unconventional sizes and textures too. I mean, I could paint on denim or burlap. How to stretch a canvas was probably one of the most practical things I learned in college besides how to stretch a dollar.
Anyway, in the back of the cottage there was an old tin sink where I could clean brushes and a creepy bathroom if I was desperado. In the other little room, where they probably kept pantry items and so forth back in the day, I stored my paintings in open vertical bins made of two-by-fours just in case David Zwirner’s or Larry Gagosian’s car broke down in front of our house and they needed shelter. In case you’ve never heard of them, they own some of the most amazing galleries in Chelsea, if not on the whole planet. They’d say, So, young lady, what do you do here on Sullivans Island to pass the time? And I’d say, Well, I like to paint. And then they’d say something like What a coincidence! We’re art dealers. In New York! I’d whip out all my canvases and give them a cultural experience they’d never forget. They’d beg to represent me and fly me and all my paintings off to New York. There I’d have a one-woman show that would astound the press and everybody in the art world and I’d be an overnight sensation.
Maybe not.
Ah, let the girl have her dreams. I know, I know. Pretty over the top. Oh well.
Most of my current paintings were landscapes. I envisioned them in bold colors and sometimes painted them on other materials like seersucker or denim for texture and dimension. But I loved figurative painting too. For the pure fun of it, I’d been working on a portrait of Maisie as Mona Lisa, complete with that all-knowing smile. I loved taking people I knew and dropping them into a context that said who they were. And instead of having the pastoral background that da Vinci used in his painting, I painted a landscape with a llama. It was so Maisie. She’d get a hoot out of it if she ever saw it. Unfortunately, since the day the Impossibles confiscated her car keys, she rarely came out to the beach anymore. Maybe one day I’d surprise her with it. Meanwhile, it hung on my bedroom wall.
And I had a painting I did of Ivy as a little tiny boy, sitting all alone on the steps of a giant brick building, sort of like him in a big cold world. I used to worry about how he kept so much to himself. Our parents were really terrible to him when he came out. In fact, he didn’t even have the chance to come out as gay before they packed him off to that horrible camp. The camp made him believe he was a sinner bound straight for the fires of hell if he didn’t go straight. How was he supposed to do that? When he came home, he wouldn’t talk to anyone for months. All he did was stay in his room and cry. But eventually he got angry enough to rebel and he went back to normal—his normal. And my parents allegedly apologized to him but holy crap, there was a lot of damage already done. Their disappointment in Ivy was so obvious. I just kept telling him that they were dead wrong, that it was like hating your child for having kinky hair or one blue eye or some other thing that the child was born with. And while we’re being honest, who wanted to be like Clayton and Liz anyway? Amen to that.
Oh, Ivy! My sweet brother! One of the first paintings I ever did was a small acrylic of us playing on the beach when we were children. I copied the composition from an old photograph and gave it to him to hang in his first apartment to remind him how much I loved him. And then we broke down and cried. I hated it when he moved out of the house and left me with them. I knew the minute he left they’d begin a new campaign to mold me into some new improved version of themselves, which of course they did. After a while they gave up, probably because, as Dad said, I was just a girl and I’d wind up married and having babies and maybe painting when my own children went off to college. Their current hope was that if I couldn’t get a better job, then I’d make a brilliant marriage. Up until the other night, I thought marrying Porter Galloway would’ve been brilliant. Maybe I was just too sensitive but I was still so disappointed and plenty insulted. Big-time.
In fact, if I was going to paint stupid Porter Galloway today I’d put him up on a barstool and give him a wolf’s tail and fangs. You know, like that wildly famous Coolidge painting of the dogs playing poker? The other figures around him would be straight-up wolves and I’d be at the end of the bar, emanating purity with a big halo. I wonder how he’d like to see that hanging in a museum or a gallery? Or maybe I’d make him something even more menacing. I’d have to think about it. God, I was still so mad at him I could have slapped him right across the face. Although I’d been tempted to tell Ivy about the Galloway Insult the next day when I called him in San Francisco, I instead put it out of my mind and asked him about his and James’s stay in New York. When I asked, “How was it? Did y’all have fun?” there was an odd pause. I said, “What? What happened?”
“What? Oh? New York. Well, it was the same as always—crowded, dirty, scary cab rides, great food . . . you know, the usual. I got fabulous shoes at Barneys for half price and James got a three-hundred-dollar massage!”
He wasn’t telling me everything.
“Ivy? How long have I known you?”
“All your life.”
“What are you not telling me?”
“What do you mean? I’m not hiding anything!”
“Yes, you are. There’s something else, isn’t there? Does Dad have like a collection of sex toys or something like that in his apartment?”
“No! Jeez, Ash. Sex toys. No. Yeah, Big Clayton? No. No way. The only things he’s squirreling away are chronologically organized receipts for every nickel he spends.”
“No surprise there,” I said.
“I think I’m getting a cold, that’s all. I’m a little out of it.”
“Okay,” I said and let him off the hook. “I’ll dig it out of you later. So listen, thanks again for the money, Ivy. I’ll pay you back, I swear.”
“Whatever. Don’t spend it on clothes!”
“I would never!”
“I know. I’m just messing with you. Consider it a house gift for the old homestead.”
“The old homestead needs so much, it’s ridiculous. It’s sort of falling down in places. I mean, maybe it’s my imagination, but I think there’s more slope to the floors than ever.”
“Maybe it’s sinking.”
“Prolly. Anyway, Mary Beth and I are going to Home Depot tonight and we planned to start painting the house this weekend. Any thoughts on how to make this party the coolest thing ever?”
“So you’re really doing it, huh?”
“Ivy, if I don’t do something drastic I’ll be stuck in this life forever.”
“Okay, look, here’s my advice. Try to do everything first-class, you know what I mean?”
“You mean, I shouldn’t serve Singapore Slings out of a garbage can using a soup can as a ladle?” I started laughing just thinking about the look on his face.
>
“Mon Dieu! Quelle horreur!” he said, laughing. “Listen to your big bubba. Go to whatever restaurant supply place there is in Charleston and buy one hundred all-purpose wineglasses. No plastic! Be sure they fit in the dishwasher. Don’t spend more than a dollar apiece, okay?”
“Wait a minute. I need to write this down.” I grabbed a pencil and started making notes on the back of a junk mail envelope from AARP. The AARP mailings always pissed off my parents. “Okay. Continue.”
“Buy one thousand white paper cocktail napkins. Then go to Home Depot or someplace like that and buy ferns. Big, bushy sword ferns. Six of them. Buy white tea candles and little clear votive cups, like two dozen at least, to put up the front steps, all around the portico, in the bathroom, on the tables.”
“I’ll get four dozen.”
“They’re cheap enough. And ask Mary Beth . . .”
“Mary Beth,” I said in disgust and thought about telling him about her whoring around. Then I decided to save it.
“What about her?”
“Nothing.” I knew he knew I was holding back. That’s how it was with us.
“Oh, okay. Anyway, ask her where to get the best price on four bar-height twenty-four-inch round tables for the porch. And you’ll need two rectangular tables—one for a bar and another for stationary food.”
“Wait a minute! Aren’t Mom and Dad going to see all this stuff?”
“Hello? Hide it in the cottage. Is there still a refrigerator out there?”
Mom kept an extra refrigerator around for winter holidays and summer beer. She hadn’t touched it in a decade.
“Yeah, but it’s encrusted with who knows what.”
“Girlie? Get a sponge and put it to work! You can stash stuff in it. And tablecloths. You’ll need linens.”
“Right! What about booze?”
“I’ll text you a list of what to get.”
“Okay. Whew! You make it sound so easy!”
“I’ve been around the block, Miss Rivers. I’ve thrown a few soirees in my day!”
“Dang! I guess so!”
So for the next ten days, Mary Beth and I did our best to transform the entrance to our house, the halls people would pass through, the powder room, and the big portico facing the ocean. I had decided by then that if she wanted to take money from a man it was her business, because it was. I had all sorts of thoughts about that, like how it’s prostitution, but I really didn’t want to talk about it. Besides, I needed her help to throw this party. It darn near killed us, but on top of painting like mad, we pushed the two-ton piano out into the hall by the door to the portico and polished it until we could see our faces in it. But something had definitely changed between us. She knew that I knew she had done something really awful. We pretended that she had not.
“I’m never moving this again. I don’t care what my mother says.”
“You can say that again! But to be practical, we can put a fruit and cheese display on it,” Mary Beth said. “We can use that big cutting board? I’ll give it a good waxing.”
“Great idea.”
Next we pulled the old brass telescope out from the hall closet and buffed it up the best we could. It also seemed to weigh two tons.
“This thing is a real relic,” Mary Beth said.
“Yeah, I think my grandfather bought it in London or it came from London. I don’t know. It’s got an old story though.”
Then we fell in love with it, using it to watch people on the passing ships in the evening light and the stars later on at night.
“I didn’t know how awesome a telescope could be,” Mary Beth said. “I mean, I knew, but I never had one around.”
“Growing up, I always thought it was lame. But I liked it when Maisie would show me Mars.”
“Do you still know where it is?”
“Yeah, it’s up there,” I said and pointed to the ceiling.
“Yeah. Very funny. FYI. That piano is a twanging machine,” Mary Beth said. “Should we get it tuned?”
“Nah,” I said. “Who would play it anyway?”
“Um, did you know Tommy Milano was like a child prodigy or something?”
“Are you kidding me?”
“Nope.”
“Think he wants to come and play?”
“Maybe if it was tuned he would. And for you he’d play for nothing.”
“Piano music could be very chic, right? How much does it cost to tune a piano?”
“No clue, but we could ask him. Why don’t you call him?”
“Oh Lord, do we really want a third person in on this?”
“We can give him a tip jar,” Mary Beth said, with an expression that said she thought she’d just come up with a piece of genius.
I just looked at her wondering if my parents were going to kill me by beating me to death or by slitting my throat.
We were in deep.
We painted, we shopped, we obtained—and Tommy Milano said yes.
“Are you kidding?” he said. “I can tune it myself.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, really.”
“Wow.” What couldn’t he do?
Sure enough, as we were putting the last coat of paint on the door frames, Tommy was bringing the old piano back into pitch.
“Amazing,” I said, when he sat down and hammered out a little Beethoven.
“Thanks,” he said, smiling and switched to Paul Simon classics. “So what ever happened with you and that asshole?”
“Do you mean Senator Galloway?”
“That’s the one.”
“He’s unworthy.” I said this so seriously, as though I’d made an important life decision.
“You’re telling me?” Tommy said and grinned.
As much as I hated to admit it, Tommy was pretty sweet when he wanted to be. And I did not speak of Porter Galloway again.
“By the way, y’all can’t use this as a buffet table. I have to open her up. Otherwise, we aren’t going to get the maximum sound out of this baby.”
“Fine! Do what you have to do. Something tells me you know what’s best.”
I was so nervous my stomach was in knots and I wasn’t sleeping. I mean, what if my mother just showed up with more donuts? She would totally lose her mind and kill me dead.
When the mutually agreed-upon date arrived, we sent a tweet to the list of people we had from Mary Beth’s company and Tommy’s contacts too. I had a few people I’d known since we were kids but I didn’t really expect them to show. In any case, we all tweeted the following: Mango Sunset Party tonight at 7:30! Ash and Mary Beth’s on Sullivans Island. First fifty with fifty. Cash. Vintage cocktails and hors d’oeuvres with piano music and a view!
We had decided not to use Mary Beth’s caterer, thinking we’d make a little more money if we did the work ourselves. One of the older women she worked with said she’d help us for a nominal fee. It seemed like we had a plan. I was a wreck.
Mary Beth orchestrated the menu and I helped her fix all the food—millions of tiny meatballs in some Hawaiian pineapple–tomato sauce, pigs in blankets from Costco, giant wedges of cheese, also from Costco, and tons of crackers and strawberries. Basically we were serving what Lucy and Ethel cooked up for Fred and Ricky. And we made pitchers of mai tais to garnish with pineapple wedges and cherries on a toothpick. We got white wine too. And liquor. Everything on Ivy’s list was found and bought. One of Tommy’s friends, Ed something, was there to tend bar, which was all set up and looking very professional. The votive candles cast just the right amount of warm light as day faded before our eyes. Everything seemed to conspire in harmony, creating the perfect atmosphere. Even the ferns were lightly swaying in the breeze. We were as ready for a party as we could be. Maybe we wouldn’t get caught.
At six thirty the first car arrived. Four people got out. They looked nor
mal enough to me. Young professionals. Mary Beth and I were watching through the windows. That was when I noticed her new watch, probably bought with the money from Samir.
“Nice watch,” I said.
“Thanks,” she said and blushed deeply, running her hand around it, almost hiding it. “My mom sent it to me.”
“Really?” She was lying like a cheap rug. No way she bought a Michael Kors watch in the backwoods of Tennessee. “Do you believe we’re really doing this?” I said to change the subject.
“Yes. It’s okay. I know them,” Mary Beth said. “Should I go to the door?”
“No, you get the food going. I’ll take care of the money.”
She shot me a look but didn’t say anything. She knew right then I didn’t trust her because she had lied to me. She didn’t try to defend herself.
Without missing more than a half beat she said, “Right!” She started toward the kitchen and called out, “Tommy? Start playing!”
“What should I play?” he yelled back.
“What? Now we have to tell him what to play?” I yelled to both of them.
“I got this! I got this!” he yelled, laughing.
The next thing we knew, old Billy Joel songs filled the air, two more cars pulled into the yard, then three more, and soon my pockets were absolutely bulging with money. Every so often, I’d slip into my bedroom and throw handfuls of cash into a shoebox. Eventually cars stopped arriving and I felt like it was finally okay to mingle a little. The sun had fallen into the horizon and the edge of the earth was painted red as deep as a string of rubies. It was a gorgeous sunset. Just gorgeous.
People seemed to be having a wonderful time. I picked up empty glasses and balled up paper napkins. Almost every guest seemed to be around thirty, and Mary Beth and Tommy seemed to know lots of them. Must be nice to have fifty dollars to spend, I thought.