CHAPTER 22
The Beehive bylaws have a clause that gives “display and/or show privileges” to each resident artist “as long as rental fees are not in arrears.” This consideration wouldn’t make a hill ‘o beans difference if the shared space was of normal size. However, its saving grace is its cavernous size, and ideal capacity for a party, or an art show. Belinda seized on the clause and I reserved the date and time weeks ago, to the surprise, if not angst, of Binny (“Is this for real?”) and, in order of appearance at my honeycomb, Alfred (“Congratulations. Hey, is this something we all can get in on?”), Bert (“Good for you. So, what kind of security can you guarantee for our artwork stored in the hives? You might want to get a ten-million dollar theft and damage policy, just for the night.” I told him, “Fuck you.”), and Vendulka (“I heard what Bert said. What a dick, yo? You just watch me on him that night. I’m a buzzbird and he’s a rotted meat.”); on the other hand, Zeppo’s drop-in wasn’t expected (“I won’t anticipate an invite. You’ve got outside people to please.”) because he’s the most private of us all. It irks me that he doesn’t exhibit his work.
All bon mots in place, Zeppo and Al helped me move the powwow table to a spot beside the elevator (while Bert seethed behind his tent flaps) so that my showcase pieces had the entire alley to display well. We also collected the assorted paint cans and easels and stored canvases along the back wall, de-cluttering a further one-thousand square feet.
This morning, I sprang for breakfast and tickets to a MOMA exhibit for the hive Queen, Consort, and drones. I wanted to have the warehouse for Belinda and me to position the Mythos. The group trooped out early. Belinda sat on the couch with her ear attached to the black bakelite phone, on yet another call to someone, through someone, known by someone.
Now I race around the studio to set the stage before moving the sculptures into place atop squares of tape I masked out last week. We’ve drawn the curtains across our honeycombs, and wisely zippered or tied shut the flaps. When I stand at the end of the aisle, I notice that the height of the canvas walls is at least eight feet, from the back wall straight on to the elevator. With door flaps in place, the space looks more like a military encampment than ever. Belinda thinks out loud and groans. I recommend to leave it, and can see its advantages. The ancient mortals were warrior peoples; their lives often opened and closed on the battlefield. Their gods and goddesses represented this glory and sacrifice. “If our guests don’t get it, I’ll tell them in my speech.” “Are you nervous?” “Are you?” We stand together, twitchy and nailbitten.
In two hours we have five sculptures set on their square wooden pedestals up the main aisle. By mid-afternoon, the remaining eight figures are positioned. Classic motifs — swords and hammers, tridents and lightning bolts — mix with the unexpected: a wheelbarrow; a rocking chair; fishing tackle with rod; a swollen female belly; the sigh of “checkmate”; sparse hair and baldness; creased eyelids; and the blind sight of a wise smile. The aura they create is infective of their beauty. I walk around them like a general inspecting his staff, or a convert his new brothers and sisters. If this is pride showing, my sister must be hearing this through her daily prayers, and praying all the harder for the fall not to crush me. I shake my head, breathe deeply to loosen the tightening in my stomach and chest. With the distracting work completed, butterflies tickle my insides, and I consider the helping hand of a drink. But I don’t want to rely on alcohol, and so put this out of mind. The warning is obvious: too loose a tongue yields foolish words.
Belinda herself reacts pensively, as the work has slowed. She paces the aisle, makes figure eights through the sculptures. She phones the caterers, worries over the spotlights (we debate over their positions). Her nervousness is funny to me, but I don’t laugh. I nod to her, my chin up. It’s our sign to give it to me straight.
“Minus, I’m confused.”
I point toward the back wall. “Zeus doesn’t have to lead, but he has to be in this first group,” I explain. “Not around the far corner. It’s more than an expectation. My idea has always been to disassemble the learned ideas we have of the ancients. Hey, I can use that in my speech.”
“Yeah, honey, I get that,” Belinda says. She turns around and walks a few steps, and, turning again, she sits on the low bench swiped from the powwow table. She doesn’t face me when she says, “Why are you palling around with Karen Kosek?” She doesn’t give me time to answer. “Everything you’ve told me makes her certifiable. Where is– is this going somewhere?” She looks for my answer. Grief has lined her face, and, here under the intersecting lights, it is shadow-brightened, scary. She looks suddenly older, and far less the naïve Heartlander come to the big city. I think this has been my disrespectful notion all along. Shame drops my half smile, which she takes for some admission about Karen.
“That was all before I’d really talked with her, Belinda. She’s not schizoid, not deranged … not beyond any normal name-calling we all suffer from. Would my relationship with her be simpler to understand if I labeled her an eccentric?”
Belinda thinks that I’m meandering from the point, her point; her overall objection.
I say, “We’re all perfect oddballs in our unique way, which consequently makes her, hand on my heart, ‘normal.’ Belinda?! Don’t be jealous, or feel threatened. There’s no reason for it. I’m a — well, not a disciple — I’m interested in her. Like a boy at the beach who meets –”
“People have seen the two of you, Minus. Together. In the park. And you’re not a boy.”
“Not holding hands, I hope you don’t mean to imply. Or … or anything else.”
“No, no. I’ve been told … nothing like that.”
“And your inference?” I’m not surprised by her half-accusation as much as I feel sideswiped by why this hasn’t happened sooner. And why now, of all days and hours in the day? I don’t know, and I don’t think she’s planned for this moment. “Or is this a … no, I’m not stepping in that river. Lots of slippery rocks.”
“Oh God, you and those silly metaphors.” Belinda slips one hand into the other and twists. “Do I have to be worried about this? Hand on your heart.”
So I am to be mocked. Mocked, and I must accept it. Justly deserved, perhaps. There’s too much circumstantial evidence floating between us. Nights away and disappearances. And, lately — longer than lately — too much distance in our words; conversations we’d come to look forward to, even rely on after long days under the city’s heavy, dirty thumb, have cut themselves short. Too little of the getawayfromitall joy we’d grown into before the work buried us. Only, I’ve done nothing wrong. “Convince her, not yourself,” I hear my mother’s voice say from the back of my mind. I say, “We haven’t seen each other so much, lately. You and I, that’s what I mean. I’m beginning to … it’s not like us to … we both have separation anxiety, or something.”
Belinda rolls her eyes. She’s not happy. “I’m not a fucking child standing at the kindergarten doors, you idiot. Jesus Christ.”
“I was actually comparing us to my childhood dog, Blackie,” I say. “He hated it when I left for school. Mom told me he’d go nuts and….”
Belinda isn’t listening. She’s looked away, exasperation spilling out as a sigh. Does she want me to back down? I don’t like being tested. It spells of game playing. The second time in a month. Telling her to mind her fucking business is not my style, nor what she deserves.
“Are you sleeping with this Karen Kosek woman?”
I raise my arms, and they make two exclamation points to my answer. “No,” I say. My voice is calm, not too soft. Not imploring. It surprises me. I drop my arms, the exclamations slap against my thighs. Silence grows, but we don’t turn our backs to each other. Nevertheless, the Titans won’t come to my rescue. Mary Catherine’s God is not standing behind any of the curtains. Dad is waiting at the loft, though, probably eating potato chips and sipping a cold beer. That’s why she has chosen now to confront me. We’re alone. Finally. “Define sleeping wit
h?” I ask myself. Belinda is searching my face for those clues we learn about “the cheater” who is unable to hide his shame, taken from Masterpiece Theater tele-plays (turgid pre-Victorian novels or, further along, Edwardian farce).
“Okay,” she says. She holds herself back from saying more; though not before thinking about what I’ve said. What I’ve just admitted. The muscles in her face slacken, she chews on her lip, looks down the aisle at all the canvas tarpaulins hanging on the wires. I wait, unmoving. When she speaks, the noise startles me in all that silence. “I’m not going to disbelieve you. You’re the love of my life, Minus.” I see a tear, many tears, cupped in her eyes. This is the time for me to hug her. I don’t want to, though, and I walk behind the line of sculptures and feel the canvas walls brush my arm. Then, with an abrupt passion, I turn back and stride to Belinda, who now has hunched her shoulders, one hand wiping at the skin below her eyes. The moment is with me to do more than the chivalrous gesture. And the moment is magical among my Mythos.
“Belinda,” I say, and feel my knees bend, taking my body on a slow descent. When one knee touches the floor, I take her hand. Her eyes grow large, and she tries to pull back her hand. I don’t let her. We begin a tug-of-war until she cries, “Minus! Don’t ask me that question.”
“But I want to! I have the words. Let me –”
She’s relented only to let me hold her hand for now.
“And the feeling?”
These words strike cruelly at my heart. “Of course there is feeling,” I say. “That’s how I’m able to find my voice. Don’t doubt me now. Not now, when…. At least –”
“I already know the question!” She nearly shouts. “You don’t have to say it. I asked you first, remember? Only now, it’s different. Not changed, but different. Your love, I cherish that. I sense your feelings all the time, honey. You do so much for me. It’s just that –”
“Just what?” I stand up.
She hesitates. Now when she pulls on her hand, I release it to her, which she slides out from my fingers, slowly, sensually. “Minus, your heart is with me. That’s what I really needed to know anyway. I wasn’t playing a game. Not then. Not now. Don’t think that. Back in May, everything was different, and I was upset, and anyway I loved you less then than I do now. And back then I loved you a real lot. I know that sounds stupid.” She looks down at her feet, putting her hands on her hips. “Just – let me think a while.” When she looks at me again, she sees something I don’t even want to imagine. “Come on,” she says. “We need to go change for the show.”
We wait for the elevator, quietly, side by side, and hold hands spontaneously, as we always had before that day in May came along. She wipes at her eyes, asks if she looks rodent-like, and knows the answer from my pause and idiotic inspection of her face. The clank which the door makes when I raise it offers Belinda some cue I’m not aware of, because through the noise her voice scores a clear tone.
“Thanks, Minus.” She takes a look at the sculptures. “You chose to ask me with your creations looking on. But I pushed you into that.” She wipes at her cheeks once more, looks at the smudges on her hands, wipes the grunge across the seat of her jeans. “I’m not sorry for that. Your ancients really must have known something. Look at what they gave us.”
I say, “I think they gave us the chance to tell ourselves, ‘Live while you can.’ ” I don’t confess that my interrupted proposal had nothing to do with the Mythos. What would be the point of that? Besides, age and death is not something you think about when you want to propose marriage to a woman. On the other hand, both subjects get due voice when vows are exchanged.
“Sure,” she says. “So, yeah, that.” Another pause, during which we both must hear the other’s heartbeat, the buzz from the overhead lights, and a jet making its final approach into JFK. “Minus. I want to tell you that … I want to answer you. I – I’ll let you know.”
We move into the elevator and I reach for the strap. Was this more than a guy in my position could ask for? This is what I believe.