All three of Walter Lann’s daughters blamed themselves
for their father’s suicide, but only Jamie, the youngest, kept it to herself.
Two days after the funeral, her sister Andrea was typically dramatic, holding
her head in both hands, muttering, “I should have called more often. I should
have listened to him. Maybe I could have seen the signs.”
“You live in Oregon,” said Karen, the oldest, from the
kitchen sink, where she was washing the last of the dishes from the elaborate
dinner she’d insisted on making, no matter how many times the other two
protested. “What could you do from out there? I’m the one who saw him every
week. I should have known what was going on.”
“That’s what I mean,”
Andrea said. “I live so far away. I just wasn’t there for him.”
“I was the one who should have seen him that day,” Karen
said for the third time in an hour. “He sounded so excited to see the kids. Who
knows what would have happened if I hadn’t canceled.”
“I don’t think he ever forgave me for moving,” Andrea
said. “He never understood how much my career means to me. He never respected
it.”
“He didn’t kill himself because his daughter’s a
chiropractor,” Karen said.
“I didn’t say that,
did I? I’m talking about the larger picture. It’s one more way he felt
alienated from the people around him.”
“Alienated,” Karen said disdainfully, followed by a hiss
of air between her teeth. “The man was sick. He had a disease, and I should
have gotten him help.”
Jamie hadn’t said a word for twenty minutes or more, but
neither of her sisters could have been surprised. She’d always been the quiet
one, the one who disappeared during dinner conversation. “The sensitive one,”
they’d said dismissively when she was a girl. Since she’d grown up, they’d
continued to explain her in the same offhand, condescending way, now saying
sarcastically, as if exposing not only Jamie’s pretension, but all the
pretension in the world, “the artist in the family.” To prove it they’d point
out her clothes, always casual and slightly frayed, her pale complexion, her
closely cropped hair. She never bothered to remind them that her schedule
didn’t allow her much time in the sun, or that she had to wear a uniform to
work so that when she was off she only wanted to wear what was most
comfortable. Tonight she had on a black dress, sleeveless and too short for the
occasion, bought a year ago for a cocktail party. She’d purposely avoided the
clichéd wardrobe full of black clothing, and now the only mourning clothes she
owned were a wool suit she’d sweated through at the funeral and a pair of
slacks she’d worn last night. They wouldn’t have listened if she’d told them
her haircut was fashionable in the city and quite expensive, the one thing she
always splurged on. It had always been easiest to keep quiet.
Since dinner had ended, she’d focused her attention on a
thread that had come loose from the edge of the tablecloth, rolling it between
a finger and thumb. The inside of her mouth was pasty and sour, but she
couldn’t get up to refill her water glass. Even the thought of stirring made
her queasy. Karen couldn’t cook anything that didn’t require a ten-step recipe
from the Kosher Gourmet Cookbook, an hour
of preparation, seven different spices, a sauce so rich that three bites made
Jamie full. She’d finished her whole plate tonight, two chicken breasts in a
sopping ginger glaze, a heaping side of wild rice, a mound of curried yams, ate
every last crumb only to keep her jaws working, to prevent any words from
spilling out of her lips. Karen had been pleased enough to say, “About time
you’re eating like a human being. I swear, one day I’ll go looking for you, and
you’ll just vanish, gone without a trace.” Andrea had raised her eyebrows and
smirked but hadn’t said anything. Jamie knew what she’d been thinking—Karen’s
image of a human being was distorted, her husband a shapeless tub, both her
children round and soft and soon to be asthmatic. She could hear them now,
walking around upstairs, their heavy footsteps rattling the ceiling fixtures.
Karen herself still had the bony shoulders all three
sisters had inherited from their mother, the protruding collarbones, the deep
hollows behind them, but her hips had rounded to nearly twice their original
width, her ass bulbous and out of place, jutting so suddenly away from her back
it looked fake, a prosthetic she put on to show solidarity with her obese
brood. She’d turned thirty-three a few weeks ago but looked at least ten years
older, her hair thinning on top and otherwise hanging in a loose fringe over
her ears. Her skin was sallow and blotchy around her neck and chin. Jamie had
never once commented on her looks, but several times, catching her stare, Karen
had talked without prompting about the ravages of childbirth, how hard it was
on the body, how she’d started to recover after having Ariel, but then
Noah—nine pounds, six ounces—had done her in. “You’ll see,” she’d say. “The
same thing’ll happen to you.” Jamie knew plenty of other women who’d given
birth, most of whom were still thin and fit, but she always managed to hold her
tongue.
She didn’t have to worry about listening to Karen’s
predictions today. Karen knew better than to talk about childbirth in front of
Andrea, who’d miscarried twice during her brief marriage, which had ended eight
months ago. Without Andrea around, Karen wasn’t shy about giving her
opinion—that Andrea had never struck her as nurturing enough for motherhood,
that her hips were too narrow for a natural delivery, that the reason the
pregnancies didn’t take was because a Jew’s genes didn’t do so well trying to
mix with those of an Irish Catholic. She also complained to Jamie about how
much they’d all paid to fly out to Portland for the wedding, the gifts they’d
hauled across the country, all the time she’d spent searching for a dress—why
didn’t stores carry anything that fit anymore?—the trouble she’d gone through
getting Will’s tux tailored. “All for nothing,” she said, waiting for Jamie to
agree. When she didn’t, Karen repeated, “Nothing.”
Now Andrea sat cross-legged on her chair, shoes off, back
perfectly straight, the length of her neck exposed before her hair flared out
from her skull in a spiky duck’s tail. She looked more like their father than
either Karen or Jamie, her features blunter, her skin a shade darker, her flat
chin identical to that of the man most people called Dr. Walt, a handful Major
Lann. She took a deep breath and crossed her hands over her belly, as if she
were trying to hold her guts in place. “I just don’t know what to do with this,” she said, lifting her
head briefly to face the ceiling and then thrusting it back down. “How are you
supposed to get over it?”
“You don’t get over it,” Karen said, slamming the door of
the dishwasher closed. “You just live with it.”
“How do you know?” Jamie said before she could stop
herself. Her voice was raspy and pitched too high. “What makes you such an
expert?”
“That’s it, honey,” Andrea said. “Let it out.”
“I never said I was an expert,” Karen said, a touch of
doubt and injury creeping into her voice. “I was just talking.”
“It’s not about you,” Andrea said. “She can’t keep all
this anger and pain bottled up. She’s got to express it somehow.”
The thread was now wound several times around Jamie’s
finger. She pulled it gently and enjoyed a faint pleasure in watching it strip
away from the rest of the fabric. “What are you doing?” Karen cried. “That’s my
good cloth!” She rustled around in a drawer and came out with a pair of rusted
scissors. Jamie pulled harder, unraveling as much as she could before Karen
grabbed her wrist and held it still. “What’s the matter with you? Why do you
have to ruin other people’s things?”
“It’s just a tablecloth,” Andrea said.
“It’s mine!” Karen shouted. Then a quick snip, and the
thread was free, dangling from Jamie’s knuckle.
Jamie had been in Karen’s house fewer than a dozen times
in the last five years, even though it was less than an hour’s train ride from
her downtown studio. Karen, of course, had made an open invitation. “Come
whenever you want,” she said. “I’ll make you a copy of the key.” She called
specifically to tell Jamie there was a free seat at the table for every
holiday—not only the standard ones, Rosh Hashanah, Hanukkah, Passover, but also
Sukkoth, Purim, Shavuot, and others Jamie didn’t remember learning about during
her few years in Hebrew school, Tu B’Shvat, Tisha B’Av, Simchat Torah. Karen
clearly enjoyed saying each name on Jamie voice mail, her accent exaggerated,
the words nearly gargled in the back of her throat. Jamie found every excuse
possible not to come, just as her father did. Luckily, her job—assistant
banqueting supervisor at the midtown Sheraton—gave her most of the excuses she
needed. Her hours were long and unpredictable, and often she was on call all
through the weekend. Her father hadn’t had the same luxury—he’d run a private
cardiology practice and set his own hours. When he ran out of excuses—a weekend
fishing excursion with colleagues, a date with a beautiful nurse he couldn’t
possibly cancel on now—he lashed out at the whole concept of Judaism. “Don’t
you think I get enough of this from my patients?” he’d say. “You know how many
people invite me to their synagogues and Shabbos dinners? Can’t you all get it
through your heads that I’m an unredeemable heathen?” Other times he’d grumble,
“What have I got to give praise for? A wife who left me and three daughters who
judge my every move?” No matter what he said, Karen still called and left
chiding messages. “Don’t do it for me,” she’d say. “But you know, you’ve got
two grandchildren who might really love you if they saw you once in a while.”
It was the familiarity of Karen’s house—on the western
edge of Essex county, in the heart of the Jersey suburbs—that troubled Jamie
most and kept her away. She suspected the same was true of her father. The
house might have been a replica of the one they’d all lived in until Jamie was
eight, when her parents decided they’d been living a life they didn’t want—a
two-story colonial on eastern Long Island, with a pair of bay windows, a swing
set in the backyard, pine trees that dropped dozens of cones into the driveway.
She remembered the pine cones best, especially the ten or so that Karen had
once hurled at her in a fury over a borrowed pair of socks that went missing.
The way Karen had decorated, too, was eerie, an updated imitation of the
domestic aesthetic her mother had accepted without question early in her
marriage and now openly scorned—paintings of sailboats and red barns, shadowy
mirrors in gilded frames, silk flowers in colored glass vases, ceramic lamps
etched with butterflies. The only difference here was the added Jewish flair,
the prints of the Western Wall, the dozen menorahs of various design scattered
throughout the house, the mirrors all now covered with bed sheets. There were
two of them in the living room, ghostly shapes on the walls where the sisters
now sat waiting for the first of the evening shiva visitors to arrive. This was
the last night of it for Jamie, thank God—tomorrow they would take Andrea to
the airport, and she would catch the Path back to the city, leaving Karen to
sit the last four nights on her own.
Now Jamie was sunken into a couch whose cushions had been
removed, fingering an antique mortar and pestle on the end table beside her,
the one thing that came for certain directly from the Long Island house—she
remembered a bitter argument after her father had once absentmindedly flicked
his cigar ashes into the brass bowl instead of a nearby ashtray. She didn’t
know how Karen had ended up with it, and until now hadn’t cared—but tonight it
was comforting to hang onto something so familiar. On the floor, Andrea sat
yoga-style, bending slowly forward until her forehead touched her feet. “You
don’t have to rub it in my face,” Karen said. “I don’t think I’ve even seen my
toes in two years.”
“If I don’t do this my hips spasm all night, and I can’t
sleep,” Andrea said.
“Some people are too busy to worry about their bodies all
the time,” Karen said.
“If you don’t take care of yourself now, you’ll regret
it.”
“I’ve got too many other people to take care of.”
“Thanks,” Andrea said. “Rub that in my face.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Karen said.
“Sure. What did you mean, then?”
“I was just talking about myself.”
“Well, you’re not the only person in the room,” Andrea
said.
Jamie’s apartment had her father’s post-marriage décor,
or at least as close to it as she could come without any money. Copper and
stainless steel kitchen ware dangled from hooks above her stove. Her bed was a
black futon she kept folded up during the day. No other furniture except a pile
of floor pillows in front of her single, grimy window. The stark white walls
she’d hung with her own meager imitations of Franz Kline paintings—she’d dipped
a sponge mop in black paint and smeared it across heavy posterboard. Her father
had had a real Kline, bought at auction that first whimsical year after the
divorce, and now she wondered, with a good measure of shame, whom he’d left it
to. Not her, she guessed, though she wouldn’t know for sure until the will was
read next week. The MoMA, probably. Dr. Walt had always felt guilty about
owning it, such an important work on display for only his few visitors—but he’d
never felt guilty enough to part with it while he was still alive. He justified
keeping it by noting that most museums had too much work for their limited wall
space, that whatever wasn’t being shown collected dust in midtown basements or
Queens warehouses. Jamie had made an effort to stare at the painting when she
was a girl, not because it captured her imagination but because she knew how much
it had cost. She was the only one of the three sisters who’d lived in the
Murray Hill apartment for extended periods of time, the only one who didn’t
mind sleeping on the leather couch or ignoring the little hairs her father
never bothered to rinse from the sink when he finished shaving. “You’re the
only one I’d want around here,” he’d said more than once, though he’d offered
the same invitation to both Karen and Andrea and hadn’t hidden his hurt
feelings when they’d turned him down. “You’re the only one who understands that
people have to have their quiet times once in a while.” He took great pride in
the apartment, the view onto Second Avenue, the way the wind whipped off the
river and whistled around the building’s stone cornices in winter. Most mornings
he talked to her from the bathroom while he shaved, Jamie still slowly waking,
peeling her cheek from the sticky leather where the sheet had pulled away. He
told her how much he’d loved riding the subways in from Brooklyn as a kid, how
he’d never once felt overwhelmed by all the noise and traffic and crowds of
Manhattan. “And all the women,” he said, winking at her in the mirror. “I’ve
never minded all the beautiful women.” He told her how stifled he’d felt during
his years in the suburbs, how there was no other place in the world to live but
this city.
She’d taken his words to heart, though sometimes it felt
as if she were living in two different cities—the one where she worked,
directing a ragtag group of recent college graduates and dropouts, most of them
sober for fewer than six hours a day, through a circus of weddings and bar
mitzvahs and corporate Christmas parties; and the other in her room above
Elizabeth Street, the corner beside the kitchen with her miniature easel and
her tiny paintings on scraps of scavenged plywood. Her father had had two of
her pieces hanging in his living room, too small for the space and dwarfed by
the Kline and a series of lithographs by one of his patients, who wasn’t so
much talented, she thought, as savvy and calculated, with his shocking
close-ups of raw meat and the innards of fish. Maybe all of them would go to
the MoMA, her paintings included—but even as she thought it she was disgusted
with herself, even more ashamed than when she’d wondered if she’d get the Kline.
Why couldn’t she focus on the thing itself, the fact of her father at his
dining table, a sleek black design from Sweden, with a built-in center vase—a
steel tube he filled with utensils rather than flowers, a pair of tongs, a
spaghetti spoon, an unused spatula—why couldn’t she picture him there as he’d
been most recently, slumped face down, the army-issued pistol they’d all
forgotten he owned still gripped in one hand, blood pooling on the slate tile
floor, no note, no hint of explanation in sight?
They were waiting for the doorbell, but the phone rang
first. Their mother, Jamie knew, calling for the third time in as many days.
She hadn’t made it to the funeral, though she did send an enormous bouquet—pink
peonies, giving off a stench her father would have hated. “I am sad,” she’d said the first time she
called. “But you know, he’s been gone from my life a long time already.” She
lived in California now, a faux Frank Lloyd Wright bungalow with a flat roof
and windows facing the ocean. It was far from her ideal—she’d talked for years
about her dream of living in the mountains, near a lake, an approximation of
her childhood summers in the Catskills, the happiest days of her life. Again
she was married to a doctor, again living a life she didn’t entirely want—but
now she was sharing it with a man who, unlike Walter Lann, made her happy
enough to go on living it with only the mildest regrets.
After the second ring, Karen was still struggling her way
out of a deep armchair, which, without its cushions, nearly swallowed her.
Andrea leapt up from the floor with a sudden limber movement, rocking from her
rear onto her feet without using her hands. She ran to the phone in an almost
cheerful way, kicking her heels up behind her, but then answered solemnly,
“Wexler residence. Can I help you?” She tilted her neck slowly to one side and
then the other. “Hi, Mom. Yeah, we’re all here. Day number three. It’s still
surreal.” Her face was sad but also somehow pleased and indulgent, as if all
this sorrow brought with it a secret satisfaction. Jamie didn’t doubt that
Andrea was partly enjoying this, the same way she’d somehow enjoyed her
miscarriages, her divorce, the drama and chaos that had consumed her during
each. When wasn’t there some upheaval in her life? Jamie couldn’t remember her
ever being at peace, not since high school when she had a new love or breakup
every three weeks. All her yoga and acupuncture aside, she felt alive only in
the midst of elation or tragedy—everyday, mundane emotions were death to her.
“The thing I can’t get a handle on is how we’re supposed to live with something like this. It’ll
never go away, will it?” Yes, she was enjoying it—and this tragedy would get
her a long way. She could carry it forward as long as she needed it, until the
next chance for elation took over. “I know,” she said. “I worry about her.
She’s too much like him. Everything bottled up. I’m trying to get her to let it
out.”
“She’s talking about you,” Karen said.
“I never would have guessed,” Jamie said.
“I’ll put her on,” Andrea said. “The more of us who try,
the better.”
“I’m not here,” Jamie said.
“Just don’t tell her she should cry,” Andrea said. “She
almost bit my head off.”
She brought the phone to Jamie and dropped it in her lap.
For a moment Jamie let it lie there. Her mother’s voice came through faintly,
“Jamie? Sweetheart?”
“Be patient with her, Mom,” Andrea called.
Karen said, “For crying out loud, pick it up already.”
“Hi, Mom,” Jamie said. Her voice had that scratchiness to
it still, and a quiver she hadn’t noticed before. “Don’t listen to Andrea. I’m
fine.”
“Sweetheart, you don’t have to be fine. You don’t have to
be anything you don’t want to be. Don’t cry if you don’t want to. Don’t talk to
anyone.”
“Thanks,” Jamie said. “I won’t.”
“Do you want to come out here for a while? Stay with me
and Jim? We won’t bother you. You can sit on the beach all day. The bar down
the street makes the best margarita I’ve ever had. A change of scenery might do
you some good.”
“I’ve got to get back to work tomorrow.”
“They’ll understand. They’ll give you as much time as you
need.”
“It’s the hotel business. They can’t afford to wait
around for people. It’s just the way it works.”
“Well, screw them!” her mother cried. “Quit. Who cares,
anyway? It’s not your dream job or anything.”
“I’ve got to make a living,” she said. “I’m not married
to a doctor.”
“Look,” her mother said. Her voice had altered in an
instant, all the compassion gone, a familiar hardness in its place. Soon she’d
be incapable of sympathy—when she was angry, her mother couldn’t hold any other
feelings in her heart, not sadness, not pity, not regret, not even love. Right
now, Jamie preferred her this way. “I know you feel terrible. I know this is
awful, and you want to blame me for it.”
“I never said anything about you,” Jamie said.
“Well, goddamn it, I’ve been gone a long time. He didn’t
kill himself fifteen years ago.”
“I don’t think it’s your fault,” Jamie said. “Not at
all.”
“If you want to know the truth,” her mother went on, hearing
nothing. “If you ask me, I saved that man’s life. For all the good it did me.
He would have done this years ago. You think he wasn’t a miserable bastard all
the time I knew him? You know how many times I had to pull him out of that dark
place he loved to dwell in? If it weren’t for me he wouldn’t have seen thirty.”
“Karen wants you, Mom. I’ll talk to you later.” She
didn’t wait for an answer before passing the receiver on. Karen squeezed her
arm as she took it, and all of Jamie’s muscles clenched at once.
“Mom, calm down,” Karen said. “No one’s blaming you. Of
course it isn’t your fault. It isn’t anybody’s fault. The man was sick. If anybody should have seen it
coming, it’s me. I’m the one who saw
him every week.”
As far as Jamie knew, she was the last person to see her
father alive. Or at least the last who knew him—her neighborhood wasn’t often
quiet, and certainly not at 3 a.m. on Sunday morning. Who knows how many
indifferent people he passed on the street and in the subway station, how many
people looked him in the face without seeing someone who would soon be dead.
His building’s doorman told the police he hadn’t seen Dr. Lann that night—he
must have come in through the garage, on Third Avenue. No one saw him again
until Monday at noon. He didn’t show up for three morning appointments, didn’t
answer his phone, so his partner, Dr. Koniff, sent a receptionist around at
lunchtime. The poor woman still hadn’t recovered, Jamie had overheard at the
funeral. The building manager had opened the front door for her and followed
her in tentatively, letting her come upon the terrible scene and scream her
throat raw for two straight minutes without even attempting to comfort her or
pull her away. Jamie, thank God, had been at work by the time the police finished
their business and started making calls. It was Karen they found first, Karen
who had to call Will and drop off the kids at a neighbor’s, who had to come
into the city and identify the body. Jamie felt for her, truly, having to live
with that image forever.
But she had an image, too, that would never leave her.
Her father’s face, at the door of her apartment in the middle of the night, the
familiar sardonic smirk on the same side of his mouth where he stuck enormous
Honduran cigars after work every evening, his bald, bullet-shaped head red from
drink and glowing from the glare of the hallway’s fluorescent lights. He hadn’t
knocked loudly, but she was up from bed, peeking through the spyhole while his
fist was still raised. She hadn’t fallen asleep yet, and the door was thin—but
also, she’d been half-expecting to hear his knock since the last time he’d
shown up this way, a month earlier, unannounced, half an hour after she’d come
home from work. She’d been alone that night and had opened the door for him
after snatching a robe from a nearby stool. He weaved into the room, knocking
against a counter before finally dropping onto the pile of floor pillows, legs
sprawled, feet splayed.
But even this wasn’t entirely unprecedented. Jamie
guessed he’d broken up with another girlfriend—she could count at least two
dozen since he and her mother had split, and probably as many that she didn’t
know about. Sometimes he called her after a fight, desperate to tell his side
of the story, to explain how this woman, too, had gotten him all wrong. The
first time she’d still been in college, and as he revealed intimate details of
his life—“I just wanted to sleep,” he’d said. “But she had to have her goddamn
leg draped over me all night”—she’d felt both titillated and disgusted, and
hung up without saying much more than, “Don’t worry, Dad. You’ll find someone
else.” Afterward she joked with her roommate about Electra, which they’d both recently read in Western Civ., but her
roommate’s laughter was nervous and forced. Since then she’d gotten used to
hearing more about Dr. Walt’s life than she wanted to know, not only about his
current romances, but also about his marriage to Jamie’s mother—how she’d
withheld sex to punish him, how he’d been convinced she was having an affair while
he was in Vietnam. Once she’d asked if he didn’t have anyone else in his life
to talk to, and his first reaction had been anger and defensiveness. “What,” he
snapped. “You think I’m some pathetic old man, I don’t have any friends?” Then,
after he’d calmed himself, he said, “You’re the only one who really understands
me. You always have. Remember, when you used to stay with me and I talked to
you about everything?” She didn’t believe what he said and didn’t think he
believed it, either. She didn’t understand him at all, though she’d been trying
hard since she was a little girl. She didn’t know what he wanted in life, or
what made him happy. She knew that he loved her, but didn’t know what he loved,
exactly, or why. Didn’t he realize how confused she’d been as a ten-year-old,
watching him in the mirror as he shaved, pulling his nose up so the razor could
slide beneath it, wondering what went on inside that pointy head beneath the
already thinning hair?
So his showing up on her doorstep in the middle of the
night seemed like a natural next progression, even if it did surprise her. What
she didn’t expect was the way he stared at her, judgmentally, scrutinizing,
even as he sprawled on the floor pillows. She thought again of Electra and her college roommate’s
nervous laughter, but that felt less than honest—his expression wasn’t sexual
so much as severely parental, in a way she didn’t remember seeing since they’d
all left the Long Island house. She was suddenly embarrassed by the coffee cups
littering the sink, the dust on top of the microwave—as much as she tried to
live like him, she could achieve no more than a poor approximation, no better
than the imitation Klines. Instead of talking about a girlfriend—if he had one
at the moment, Jamie hadn’t heard about her—he said, “I worry about you.” His
voice was hoarse, his words slurred. “I haven’t been keeping close enough tabs
on you.”
“What’s to worry about?” she said. “I’m fine. And who
says I need anyone keeping tabs on me. I’m twenty-seven years old.”
“You’re a fucking kid,” he said. “You will be until
you’re fifty. Just like me.”
“Oh, so you’re not a kid anymore?”
“Finally,” he said sadly.
“Well, I’m telling you I’m fine. There’s nothing to worry
about.”
“That’s for me to decide.”
“You want a drink or something?”
“I want to look at the merchandise,” he said, pulling
himself up from the floor with difficulty, nearly losing his balance when he
straightened to full height. He staggered to her easel. There were only two
paintings finished, still propped against the wall to dry, though they’d dried
two weeks ago, and two others barely started, nothing terribly inspired. “What
are these, flowers?” he said, with a good measure of disgust.
“Of course they’re not flowers. They’re abstractions.”
“Flowers. Jesus. You wouldn’t know abstractions from
iconography.”
“Since when did doctors know anything about abstraction?”
she said. “Just because you can buy a painting doesn’t mean you can make one.
Or tell anyone else how to.”
He ignored her. “Now this one,” he said, picking up the
smallest piece of wood, a ragged square the size of his palm. “Here’s something
interesting.”
It wasn’t much more than a sketch, something she’d done
in a moment of boredom, sitting in her underwear, staring down at her crotch.
That’s all it was, the two white lines of her panties meeting the black line
between her legs. There was nothing interesting about it, nothing even erotic,
though it was sex she’d been thinking about when she’d made it. She’d planned
to paint over it as soon as she picked up her brushes again, which hadn’t
happened for more than a week. But her father held it up now, examining it in
the light from a hooded reading lamp. “Clean lines,” he said. “Fresh
perspective.”
“It’s not finished,” Jamie said.
“That’s your problem. You always overdo things. Let well
enough alone.” He carried it with him back to the window and flopped down onto
the pillows again. “You need more guidance,” he said. “I’m sorry I’ve been
slack on the job.” He laid his head down and closed his eyes. They didn’t open
again. In five minutes he was breathing heavily, the painting hugged to his
chest—but in the morning it was back on the easel, as lifeless and unfinished
as she’d originally believed. Her father was already leaning against the
kitchen counter when she woke, a steaming mug in his hand. His scalp was pale
and wrinkled above the eyebrows. “I know you don’t make much money, but you’ve
got to be able to afford better coffee than this.”
“I took it from the hotel,” she said. “None of our guests
ever complain about it.”
“That’s because people are used to getting rooked when
they travel.”
“Well, next time you decide to invite yourself over,
bring your own goddamn grounds.”
His smile was back, a little sheepish now. “Yeah,” he said.
“Sorry. I was in a state. I guess you know that. Did I start talking about your
mother again?”
“Not this time.”
“Good. Maybe I’ve finally gotten that woman out from
under my skin.” He had an unlit cigar in his mouth when he was ready to leave,
and it bounced as he spoke. “Sorry again,” he said. “That’s what you get for
living in the city, I guess. Your crazy old dad showing up in the middle of the
night. It won’t happen again, I promise. No, I shouldn’t promise. But I don’t
think it will.”
And now here he was, a month later. This time she wasn’t
alone. There was a man in her bed, naked, asleep. Could she call him a man? A
twenty-two-year-old with thick shoulders and a flat stomach, one of her weekend
bartenders. It wasn’t the first time he’d come home with her, but the first
time in a couple of weeks. She could have him any night she wanted—what
twenty-two-year-old wouldn’t jump at the chance to sleep with the boss—but she
made sure never to let him get too comfortable or expectant. At most once a
week she put her hand on his hip during a shift, let her breasts brush against
his arm, asked him if he wanted to share a cab. She usually waited until the
night before her day off, so she could fuck him silly for twenty-four hours
before sending him on his way. It not only made going to the hotel bearable,
but filled her need for companionship well enough that she could spend the rest
of her free time painting. At least this was how things were supposed to
work—but she hadn’t made a singe stroke since the last time her father had
shown up.
The bartender, Rory, had been asleep fewer than ten
minutes, but the knocking didn’t wake him. His mouth was open, his lips
squashed against the pillow. The dimple on his chin was folded into a full
crease. He didn’t move at all when Jamie slipped out of bed. She grabbed her
robe again, this time in a heap on the floor. There were even more coffee mugs
in the sink than last time. She opened the door a crack and said, “It’s a mess
in here. You can’t come in.”
Her father had that stern, paternal expression again, but
his eyes were swimming, his face puffy. His breath was sour and sharp—he’d been
drinking something Jamie stayed clear of, vodka, maybe, or tequila. “I came for
my painting,” he said. “I forgot to take it last time.”
“I thought you weren’t going to do this again.”
He pulled a roll of bills from his shirt pocket and held
it too close to her face. “I’m your patron,” he said. “I’ve come for my
commission.”
He tried to push past her, but she held her ground. “I’ll
get it for you.”
His eyes widened. “Oh,” he said. “I see. You’ve got
someone in there. Good for you.”
“He’s asleep,” Jamie said.
“I want to meet him.”
“It’s almost three in the morning.”
“I let you meet my girlfriends,” he said. Then he added,
“Some of them.”
“Not very many,” she said.
“I want to know if he’s good enough for you.”
“Dad.”
“It’s not a girl, is it? You’re not munching rugs in
there, are you?”
She set her feet and her jaw. “You’re not coming in.”
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. I won’t wake him. Just let me
come get my painting.”
“I’ll bring it to you,” she said again.
She started to close the door, and as she did his face
contorted, reddening even more, his one visible eye bugging. “Let me in,” he
whispered, and put a foot against the door.
“I’ll be right back,” she said. Behind his drunkenness
was some kind of pain, she saw it clearly—or at least remembered seeing it now,
if she hadn’t recognized it at the time—but she didn’t let up her pressure on
the door. After a moment his foot retreated. He backed all the way off then,
leaning against the hallway’s opposite wall. Sweat stood out on his forehead,
but his desperate expression was gone—the sardonic smirk had suddenly returned,
as if all of his insistence had been an act, a test, his expectations
confirmed. When the door latch clicked, Jamie let out a long, stuttering breath
she hadn’t even been aware of holding in. She hurried across the room, grabbed
the painting from the easel, nearly tripped over Rory’s jeans on her way back.
Rory stirred but didn’t wake. She opened the door onto an empty hallway, the
fluorescent bulbs buzzing faintly, the grimy wall where her father had been
leaning hazy and far away. She felt more anger than guilt, furious that she
should feel any guilt at all. This time she slammed the door closed, and Rory
rolled over, blinking. “You feel like having another go?” he asked, and she
went to him, dropping the robe on the way.
Every night the group of visitors changed. The evening
after the funeral the house had been crammed with relatives Jamie hardly knew,
people who asked if she was still painting and then said how lovely it was to
have an artist in the family, though none, she was sure, had ever seen her
work. Two old women spoke only Russian and Yiddish and looked offended when
Jamie didn’t understand them. Last night it was her father’s colleagues and
army buddies, two of whom she’d overheard whispering about the pistol her
father had used—they couldn’t imagine trusting a rickety old piece like that
with something so important. “If you’re going to do it, you better do it
right,” one said. The other shrugged and said, “I guess it worked right
enough.”
Only one person showed up all three nights—Aunt Diane,
their father’s sister, who rang the doorbell twice, and then waiting no more
than five seconds, rang again. Again Karen tried to rock herself to her feet,
without any luck. Andrea was reluctant this time, but since Jamie didn’t make a
move, she pulled herself up from the floor with effort and went to the door.
She was a full head taller than Aunt Diane but seemed suddenly diminished in
the older woman’s presence, dwarfed by the frantic energy, the mass of hair,
the solemn, breathy way Aunt Diane said, “Hi, dear. This doesn’t get any
easier, does it.”
Aunt Diane had shown up at the same time each night,
carrying a box from a wholesale bakery on the highway between Karen’s house and
her apartment in Montclair. Danishes, coffee cake, éclairs. It didn’t matter
that Karen reminded her each time, “We can’t have those in here.” Aunt Diane
only huffed and said, “Not with that kosher nonsense again. This cost me
six-fifty.” Now she shoved a white box into Andrea’s hands and said, “Brioche.”
Then she pulled Andrea’s face down to hers, kissed her on both cheeks, and left
finger marks on her jaw. Aunt Diane was six years older than their father and
shared his square chin, his black eyes that had always seemed too close to the
surface of his face—though now Aunt Diane’s chin was tucked down toward her chest
by the beginning of a hump in her spine, and her eyes were hidden behind
bifocals, the split in the lenses cutting straight across her pupils. She and
their father had never gotten along, had avoided seeing each other more than
once a year though they lived only twenty miles apart. “That woman,” Jamie had
often heard her father say. “I don’t see how we could have come from the same
womb.” Now Aunt Diane claimed him as her lost baby brother, claimed them all as
the family she was obliged to take care of, since she didn’t have one of her
own.
She came into the room in a flurry, flinging her purse
and coat ahead of her onto the couch before dropping heavily next to Jamie.
“Couldn’t you put at least one cushion back?” she said. “These springs aren’t
good for an old lady’s butt.”
Karen was studying her hands. “You know, Aunt Diane,” she
said. “I really meant it when I said I didn’t want you to bring anymore—”
“You’re not going to throw out perfectly good brioche,
are you? You know how much it cost me?”
“Will isn’t happy about it.”
“He doesn’t have to eat any,” Aunt Diane said. “God
knows, he doesn’t need any.”
“I’ll put them on a paper plate,” Andrea said, carrying
the box into the kitchen.
“That’s right,” Aunt Diane said. “You wouldn’t want to
ruin the china with fine French baking.”
“If you can’t respect the rules of the house—” Karen
began.
“I’d have the sitting at my place, only it’s not big
enough,” Aunt Diane said. “Some people’s husbands aren’t patent lawyers.”
Andrea came back with a paper plate piled with pastries and set it on the
coffee table. “Some of us don’t have husbands at all. Some of us do just fine
without them, isn’t that right?”
Andrea straightened and ran her hands down her narrow
hips but didn’t say a word. Karen said, “Napkins.”
“What, you’re not going to cut them?” Aunt Diane said.
“Plastic knife,” Karen said.
“Got it,” Andrea said.
Aunt Diane huffed again, gathered the loose frizz of her
hair in one fist, and held it for a moment against the back of her neck. “That’s
right,” she said, and then released the hair, which sprung violently in front
of her eyes. “No goy flour on your cutlery.”
Jamie had felt herself sinking into the couch for minutes
now, the springs tightening beneath her, her pulse beating fiercely in her
ears, her veins, it seemed, straining against her skin. She still had her hand
on the mortar and pestle and now drummed the brass knob softly against the
inside of the bowl. Aunt Diane followed the sound and waved a hand in its
direction. “That’s really mine, you know.”
“What do you mean, yours?” Karen said.
“You can keep it,” Aunt Diane said. “But it’s mine.”
“Dad gave it to me.”
“Well, it wasn’t his to give. My grandmother left it to
me. But I don’t care. You can have it.”
“It’s mine,” Karen said firmly.
Jamie suffered a terrible moment then—she was suddenly
certain it was Aunt Diane who would inherit the Kline. Wouldn’t it be just like
her father to leave his most precious possession to the person who deserved it
least? Wasn’t it just like Jamie, too? The morning after her father had come to
claim it—the morning he’d carefully cleaned his pistol, loaded it, and unloaded
it into his skull—she’d given the unfinished painting of her crotch to Rory,
the bartender, the man—no, the boy—she slept with every week or so. A boy, that
was the only word for him—he talked like a boy, dressed like a boy, fucked like
a boy, and clung to her at night with a boy’s sense of propriety. She’d given
the painting without thinking, or thinking only vaguely of getting back at her
father for knocking on her door in the middle of the night. Rory was still
naked, padding around her studio in his bare feet, twice sloshing coffee onto
the floor, once onto his long, hairy toes. He paused in front of the easel and
glanced at the painting only casually. “You like it?” Jamie asked, admiring the
way his shoulder blades moved beneath his skin when he shrugged. “If you want
it, it’s yours.” He shrugged again, tipped his head in thanks, and picked it up
in his free hand. He held it a moment, looking for a place to put it down, and
then propped it back on the easel. Later, when he was dressed and heading for
the door, he shoved it into the back pocket of his baggy jeans, where it fit,
barely, bulging the seams and, she guessed, splintering the edges of the wood.
At the time she thought she’d tell her father she’d painted over it, that she
was planning to make him something better, as soon as she had time to
concentrate and get some work done.
She didn’t deserve the Kline any more than Aunt Diane
did. She took her hand away from the brass it had warmed and made sticky with
sweat and buried it in her lap. Aunt Diane turned to her then. “You know, you
don’t have to keep quiet all the time. You can say something every once in a
while.” Andrea stopped cold in the doorway, a stack of napkins in one hand, two
plastic knives in the other. Karen suddenly found her strength and pulled
herself to her feet. She took the knives from Andrea and started cutting
furiously into a brioche, not worrying that flakes fluttered off the edge of
the plate onto the coffee table, some even onto the carpet. Aunt Diane went on,
“This isn’t about you, you know. Your dad’s dead, remember? He shot himself,
and now he’s dead.”
Jamie was as far from hungry as she could have been, but
she reached for a brioche anyway, a whole one, and stuck the end in her mouth.
She chewed slowly, letting the flakes dissolve against her tongue, knowing how
hard it would be to swallow.
In an hour the house was full. Tonight there were Karen’s
co-workers and Will’s partners and people from their synagogue, all of whom
mumbled condolences and then sipped wine from paper cups, discussing work and
exchanging gossip. The brioche was gone. Any remaining crumbs on the carpet had
been ground underfoot. Jamie caught a woman lifting the edge of a sheet from
one of the mirrors to check her make-up. Will himself was downstairs now, in a
specially tailored suit that seemed designed to show off his full enormity,
lumbering from room to room with more cups and more wine. The tubby kids were
in a corner, stuffed into their dress clothes, coloring with crayons and
nibbling cookies. Andrea was with them, trying to prove what a good mother
she’d make, Jamie guessed, telling a story, making exaggerated faces, stomping
her feet. Noah, the two-year-old, gazed around in boredom, and four-year-old
Ariel looked terrified and on the verge of tears. Aunt Diane had cornered a
young lawyer in front of the fireplace, wagging a finger in his face. Karen,
the queen of the evening, sat in her armchair again, with women crouched on
either side of her, patting her arms, nodding as she repeated, “The man was
sick. I should have known it. I should have seen it coming.”
Jamie had given up her seat on the couch and was standing
close to the door when there came a tentative knocking, not on the door itself
but on the window pane beside it, a softly insistent tapping, all knuckle. She
had no excuse not to open it. The woman on the stoop was her age, maybe a year
or two younger. Her skin was darker than Jamie’s and pinker, her hair only
slightly longer and just as black. Her dress was similar, too, cut low enough
for a cocktail party, only it was wool, and a sheen of sweat covered the
woman’s neck and the exposed triangle of her chest. Her black clogs didn’t
quite match the black of her tights. “Is this—” she started, her voice high and
quivering, and then taking in the room, the shaded mirrors, all the people in
dark clothes, she finished for herself. “I guess it is.” Jamie knew who she was
almost instantly, without her saying a word. Her nose was the small, goyish
kind her father had come to like, her lips thin like Jamie’s mother’s. Her
hands were too large at the end of dainty wrists, the fingers red, nails
unpainted and bitten down to the cuticles. “Can you tell me—which are Dr.
Walt’s daughters?” she asked. “I was—a patient of his. I just want—”
“Over there,” Jamie said, pointing to Karen. “And there,
with the kids.”
“Aren’t there three?”
Why should the woman have recognized her? Why should she
be so disappointed—no, not disappointed, heartbroken—that she hadn’t? “The
other’s not here, yet,” she said. “She’s on her way, I heard.” If the woman had
been her father’s lover for long, surely she would have seen family photos in
his apartment. Surely her father would have spoken of Jamie, would have
described her, his favorite daughter, the only one who even attempted to
understand him. Surely there was still some resemblance between them, enough
for the woman to acknowledge, though her chin was finer, her skin paler, her
eyes deeper set. Surely whatever grief showed in her face was more profound
than that of a distant relative, a friend, even another lover. “I’m waiting for
her, too.”
She watched the woman approach Karen haltingly, her clogs
moving two steps forward and then one to the side. In the end she came around
the back of Karen’s chair and leaned forward, holding the neck of her dress
closed, though her chest was relatively flat. Her free hand hovered above Karen’s
shoulder, not touching, the ragged fingernails raking air. Jamie came close
enough to hear the trembling voice. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am,” she
said. “I can’t— I don’t know what else to say.”
Karen craned her neck around and blinked a few times,
trying to place her. She seemed annoyed for a moment to see someone she didn’t
know. But sympathy was sympathy, wherever it came from—she nodded, and her eyes
welled up. “You don’t have to say anything else,” she said. “This is the
hardest thing any of us have ever had to do.”
“Dr. Walt,” the woman said. “He meant— He was—”
“I couldn’t have done anything,” Karen said. “Even if I’d
wanted to.”
“He was very good to me,” the woman said.
Andrea turned her back on the kids when the woman
introduced herself, took one of her oversized hands in both of hers, and said,
“It’s so good of you to come all this
way.”
“I’ve been going to see Dr. Walt for years.” Her name was
Gwen, she said. She had a heart murmur. Everything about her was familiar, her
sad smile, her narrow hips, her bad posture, even her name. There had been
another Gwen, ten years ago, maybe, when Jamie was still in high school. That
Gwen had been the same age as this one, with the same nose and lips. “If it
weren’t for him, I don’t know where I’d be now.”
“We’re all going to miss him,” Andrea said. “I wish I’d
lived closer. I wish I could have spent more time with him.” Then, as if she
couldn’t help herself, she added, “He was such a hard person to be around
sometimes.”
Aunt Diane accosted Gwen behind the couch, told her how
she’d helped raise Walter, how she was like a second mother to him, how she
knew him better than anyone else in the world. What he’d done, she said,
unfortunately hadn’t surprised her at all. “He was always such a selfish
person,” she said.
“He never mentioned he had a sister,” Gwen said.
“Why should he?” Aunt Diane adjusted her glasses, peering
first through the upper half of her bifocals and then the lower. “Since when do
doctors talk about their families in the office? I’m sure he was busy examining
your chest.”
Soon Gwen was by herself, lingering beside the entrance
to the kitchen, watching the front door. Jamie followed. She could still smell
the remains of dinner drifting from the trash can under the sink, the tangy
ginger sauce that brought her back to the edge of nausea. She swallowed hard
and said, “He told you you were different, I bet. And I bet you believed him.”
Gwen pulled at her wool sleeves and scratched her
neckline. Then she didn’t seem to know what to do with her hands; they hung
awkwardly at her sides for a moment and ended up grasping her bony elbows,
forearms hugging her belly. She could have been one of Jamie’s co-workers, a
fellow supervisor at the hotel, or one of her college friends. Her earrings
were cheap silver teardrops, her chapped fingers free of rings. She would have
been as out of place in her father’s apartment as Jamie had been, as
intimidated by the Kline. “You said she was coming soon? There’s a cab waiting
for me. I can’t stay long.”
“So where’d he find you? Working at an art gallery? The
coffee shop at the MoMA?”
“I really was his patient,” Gwen said.
“You don’t have to lie to me,” Jamie said. “I know who
you are.”
“Really,” she said. “I’ve had a heart murmur since I was
in high school. My aunt sent me to him when I moved to the city.”
“So that’s where he was finding them now. Not even
bothering to leave the office.”
“I guess I know who you are, too,” Gwen said. “I know all
about it. Dr. Walt and his girls. I heard about plenty of them.” Her voice
lowered and so did her eyes. “And yes, he told me I was different. And yes, I
believed him. Didn’t you?”
She hadn’t planned this, pretending to be something she
wasn’t—but she fell into the role so easily, the rival, the former lover, and
she couldn’t help recalling her college roommate’s giggling after that first
drunken phone call from her father, and the shame it brought. “You weren’t at
the funeral.”
“I wasn’t—well,” Gwen said. “It’s been so hard.”
“Not just for you,” Jamie said.
“I was the last one to see him.”
“I don’t think so.”
Gwen nodded and went on as if she’d heard wrong, finding
encouragement instead of warning in Jamie’s voice. “That morning. I was there,
in the apartment.” She didn’t raise her eyes. They’d had a terrible night, she
said. He ended things. Again. For maybe the third or fourth time. Jamie could
see the white scalp through a part in Gwen’s hair, and against her will,
pictured her father’s stubby finger tracing the line from forehead to neck.
Gwen’s own fingers were picking at loose fibers on her sleeves, and Jamie
recalled the strange elation she’d felt earlier as she’d stripped the thread
from Karen’s tablecloth. “Whenever he wanted to break up he called me ‘kid.’
‘You’re a great kid,’ he’d say, and I knew what was coming. Usually I’d get
hysterical and make him feel guilty. One more notch on Dr. Walt’s belt, I’d
say. And then he’d take me back. I thought it would be the same—I’d go home and
he’d call by noon to tell me he was sorry. I didn’t hear from him all day. He
was so drunk, I thought maybe he’d slept in. I was the one who’d threatened to take all my pills. But I never
would have done it. Never.”
She
shook her head but still didn’t look up at Jamie, who’d stepped away now and
leaned against the kitchen doorframe. The smell of ginger chicken was too
strong—she had to breathe through her mouth, and even then it seemed to coat
her tongue. Andrea had returned to entertaining Karen’s kids, all three of them
sitting cross-legged on the floor, running their crayons over colored
construction paper. Karen whispered to a woman whose body matched hers, narrow
at the top, bulging in the middle. Aunt Diane watched Will filling her cup with
wine, giving little waves of encouragement as he tilted the bottle, and then
held her thumb in the air. Jamie’s father had taken her to dinner with that
other Gwen ten years ago, in a filthy downtown Thai restaurant that had smelled
of seafood beginning to turn. She was a sculptor, struggling, living in some East
Village hovel. The whole time her father kept winking at Jamie and touching
Gwen wherever her skin was bare—her shoulder, the back of her neck, her
earlobe, and under the table, her thigh. Jamie ate three bites of a red curry
that singed her lips and throat, and then took the train alone to her mother’s,
feeling aroused and humiliated and close to despair.
“When
did he do it?” this new Gwen asked. “An hour after I left? Fifteen minutes? Why
couldn’t he have waited a few days? A week? Why couldn’t he have been with
someone else first?”
“It’s not your fault,” Jamie said faintly. She said it
mostly because she didn’t believe what Gwen was saying. She couldn’t have been
the one to see him last. Not when Jamie was stuck with the image of her father
at her door, his eye straining as she shut him out of her life. That had to be
the last thing, the thing that sent him over. How much could she have meant to
him if this woman—this girl—had caused him to pull the trigger? “He was sick,”
she said, and then shook her head. “He was troubled.”
“It isn’t my
fault,” Gwen insisted, as if she’d heard wrong again. She faced Jamie then, her
eyes red, her mascara clumping and beginning to run. “He was the one who broke up with me.”
Her voice had grown loud enough for Andrea to glance up
from her drawing, for Aunt Diane to adjust her glasses and glare at them. Jamie
said quietly, “He wasn’t with you the whole night.”
“How do you know?” Gwen asked.
“He came to see me,” Jamie said.
“That’s not true.”
“About three in the morning.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I sent him away. I told him to go back to you.”
“He stormed out,” Gwen said. She was crying openly now,
wiping her eyes with the heels of her big red hands. “To get drunk. That’s what
he always did. When he came back he said he’d gone to his daughter’s. He wanted
to give me something to remember him. A painting of hers. I’d always loved the
ones in his apartment. He said there was another I’d like even more. He kept
calling me ‘kid.’ Do you know how awful that is?”
“We killed him,” Jamie said, without guilt, or anger, or
even accusation. As soon as the words were out, she knew there was no truth to
them. But they didn’t bring any relief, only more sorrow, more pain. The well
was bottomless.
Gwen’s hands were at her throat. “He was troubled. You
said so.”
“It wasn’t much of a painting. You wouldn’t have wanted
it.”
A shudder of recognition, and the last of Gwen’s
composure crumbled. “Oh God, you’re— I should have—” She reached out a hand and
this time managed to touch Jamie, two rough fingers on her wrist. “Oh God, I’m
so sorry. I can’t tell you—” And then she was heading for the door, a hand over
her eyes. The room had gone silent. Everyone was watching Jamie. She didn’t
care about the lawyers, Karen’s co-workers, the strangers who could judge her
all they wanted. But she hoped to find understanding in her sisters’
expressions, though even on Andrea’s face all she saw was confusion and
concern. Wasn’t this what they’d asked for? Didn’t they want to see tears streaming
down her cheeks, all of her feelings on display? Ariel started to cry, and Noah
quickly joined in. Karen whispered something to the woman crouching beside her.
“The artist in the family,” Jamie guessed, though it wasn’t true—she was the
waitress of the family, nothing more, a waitress in charge of other waitresses.
Andrea said, “That’s it, sweetheart, let it out,” but her voice was uncertain,
and she didn’t come any closer. It was Aunt Diane who came at her, arms
outstretched, fingers clawed with arthritis.
The front door was still open where Gwen had flung it
wide. Through it Jamie saw her, cutting across the lawn. And then she was
hurrying after her, snatching the mortar and pestle from the end table on the
way. “Hey,” Karen called. “That’s mine.”
“No it’s not,” Aunt Diane said. “Not really. But I don’t
care.”
“Just let her go,” Andrea said.
The hardest part wasn’t picturing her father slumped over
the kitchen table with the gun in his hand, or even picturing him pulling the
trigger—it was imagining him the moment before, when the pistol was oiled and
ready, when he believed himself so lonely and lost that nothing, no one, could
help him. How could he have gotten to such a point? How could anyone? The real
trouble was she could imagine it, all
too easily—for her father, for her mother, for her sisters, for herself. Just
one moment, that’s all it would take—one moment of utter desolation, absolutely
terrifying, no matter how fleeting. The .air outside was warmer than she’d
expected, and she felt sweat spring to her skin, replacing whatever had spilled
from her eyes. Here the grass was covered with acorns instead of pine cones,
and they crunched under her sandals as she ran. Gwen was across the street now,
climbing into the waiting cab, her dress, too short already, riding high on her
thighs. She couldn’t have the painting, but she would have something else to
take home, whether she wanted it or not. Behind, Karen cried, “Bring it back!
It’s mine!”