Luck (34 page)

So this clumsy moment is her fault? That’s hardly fair.

“Now,” Max continues at last, presumably having seen what he aimed to, or his fill. “Now I have something just for you people. Soon I will open the third room to everyone, but first a preview only for you of the other work of Nora’s we are showing. If,” he offers his arm to Nora, “you will indulge me a little more? Shall we?”

All right. If it’s important to him. For sure it won’t mean anything special to any party-goers except them. Some of them. The women.

This time Nora and Max lead the way through the crowd, which continues to bend for him. Beth pushes her father’s wheelchair. Sophie and Hendrik follow behind. Max takes a key from his trouser pocket, turns to others pressed near. “In a few moments,” he tells them. “For now, however, if you don’t mind, the artist and her group only.” Once unlocked, the double doors slide apart from each other on tracks. Max keeps them open just wide enough for first Nora, then the wheelchair and Beth, then Sophie and finally Hendrik to enter. The room is high and bright and smaller than the two outer galleries, and, when Max pulls the doors back together
and relocks them, the noise suddenly diminishes so radically it seems almost like silence.

Sweet Jesus
, thinks Sophie.
Heavens
, thinks Beth. She leans forward into the wheelchair. Sophie leans back into Hendrik.

Nora turned in bed, she leaped up, she screamed. Beth arrived from one direction, her nightgown awry, and Sophie ran, grappling with her robe but otherwise buck naked, to find fortunate and unfortunate Philip, lucky and unlucky Phil, cooling in his bed. Now here he is again. There’s no end to the man.

A little white card says the piece is untitled and NFS—not for sale. Max feels, and Nora agrees, there’s no need to say more.

Is it art? Reviewers and critics will no doubt generously, or gratuitously, render their judgments, but meanwhile Sophie, Hendrik, Beth and for sure Beth’s father don’t have any idea. They’re not experts. They do know it’s not something any of them would hang over a sofa or fireplace. Nora, the only one besides Max who has seen it before, believes that, whatever else it is, the piece is beautiful, and if it is complicated and even ambiguous, well, so are affections and fates; not least her own. When the show is over, it will hang on the largest unbroken wall of her studio where, by and large, she thinks she will be able to live with it, although admittedly would not care for it in her living room.

This is how love bends and modifies and reshapes itself over time and new circumstance. This is how it ends up:

Philip hangs in a frame two-plus metres high and a metre and a half wide. Not everything is contained within the frame, which itself is roughly cobbled together from strips of walnut left behind in his workshop. There are actually three Philips, which some may judge a mistake, unnecessarily
confusing. That would most likely be Philip’s impression, as a matter of fact, as a passionate advocate of simplification in his own work.

Oh well.

Touching the outer edges of the frame is his middle-aged, final figure, hands on thickened hips, spare flesh on his torso, stocky legs leading to feet set firmly on the base of the frame. A tiny navy-blue-ink inscription on his left hip says, “Climb aboard, matey.”

He is evidently naked, but his full-canvas depiction is blocked by a smaller Philip, this one sunny and pink and holding a glued-on photograph of himself raising a fish, toasting the camera with it. In the photograph he is grinning. The painted figure wears the same grin, and its other hand holds a length of narrow glued-on wood with fishing line running off it and out of the frame, a green whirligig lure knotted on to its end. From the lure dangles a tiny, lacquered newspaper headshot of Nora herself. This might leave an impression that she regards herself as having been cruelly and possibly unfairly caught, but that is not her intention. Her intention is to suggest the taut line between them. The fishing line and lure come from his tackle box. The figure itself falls between youth and middle age. It, too, is presumably naked, with a defined waist and muscled thighs, and feet that slip into the feet of its older counterpart as if they were slippers. It is the form of a man finding his feet. Also it is still the man to whom Nora could say, “Want to go fuck in the woods?” and he would drop tools and off they would go, although by then more often to soft bed than adventurous forest.

It is the centre, third, smallest Philip, though, on whom the eye is intended to begin, and also end up. This is Philip as Nora first saw him: slim and young, empty-handed and
naked, staring out boldly, his eyes a real challenge. Within those eyes, darkening them deeper than they were in life, is a mixture of ash.

Ash also streaks across his limbs and shades his jawline and cheeks. It tints his uptilting, rosy, wavering penis.

Ash hints that in the perfection of this moment, its radiant randomness and several glorious outcomes, there are other, shadowing factors to consider as well. These suggestions also darken the background.

Ash adds a predictably gritty texture, tempering but not too much toning down the bold, hopeful goldenness of his youth.

Nora’s youth, too.

It wasn’t as awkward to work with as she’d feared, finer and different but really not much more challenging than sand, which she has used in the past. It was not sand, though. She couldn’t say it was exactly Philip either, but it was unsettling, at best, to sprinkle portions of it into paint, mixing it in until the desired shade and density and consistency were created, then drawing her brushes through it, applying it. That Philip could disappear, then reappear in this diminished, foreign form—that took some getting used to. Some moments of real revulsion, to be honest, at the beginning.

There were worse finds, harsher materials. A few bone shards that didn’t entirely burn. Two darkened, unincinerated teeth. In the painting a blue stream, a real blue ribbon, flows across a corner, with tiny burnished blocks of wood samples along its shores. The two teeth are tucked among them, not very noticeable. The bone shards stick like rocks out of the stream.

You’d think he did nothing but fish, so much presence has she given this watery theme.

In the end, there was a morsel of ash left. She considered tossing it, as Sophie once suggested, into the actual river
where he fished, or around his workshop, something like that. Instead she has kept it: a skiff of leftover Philip dusting the bottom of a very small ring box. She may yet give it to Sophie; what better place than a funeral home?

Even Sophie has not seen this piece before. She was in and out of the studio at Nora’s invitation throughout many of the pieces that are hanging in the outer galleries now, and of course she spent many hours posing herself, but when Nora finally said, “I think I’ve got the ash project more or less figured out,” Sophie drew the line there. She understood there were things she was never going to understand about Nora. She wasn’t even disgusted any more by the idea of Nora using Phil’s ashes. She just didn’t want to see it.

She also suspected not much good would come of it, and her first view supports that. “Those are remarkable likenesses, Nora,” she says. “Lively, like Phil. Nice and bold.” She does not like the piece, however. Even though it’s large enough to contain multitudes, it looks cluttered, neither one thing or another, not even one Phil or another, and none of the three Phils is Sophie’s. Not one pays special attention to his clever hands, for example. Also, not one shows him from the perspective of lying beneath him. Also, the eyes are too dark, and do not shine with anything like sympathy, or tenderness.

This is Nora’s version of him, not Sophie’s.

She looks more closely. Oh, dear God, what’s that by the stream of blue ribbon? Could those two pebbles be teeth? It’s months since Sophie’s been sick, but this could do it. She puts a hand over her mouth. The other returns to her belly, a shield. She leans back harder into Hendrik, whose hands are firm on her shoulders. Does he imagine her overcome by these views of her naked dead lover? Does he fear that, confronted by the perfections and splendours of Phil’s vanished
flesh, she regrets the loss, and that in comparison to this bedecked, painted man, he himself comes up short? She takes her hand from her mouth and reaches it up to his, intending to let him know that beyond nauseating teeth and ash, bad enough, these depictions are only distressing for being all history and no hope.

Hendrik is mute, but then he didn’t know Philip. Beth says, “Wow. That’s really something. It’s big. It’s sure got a lot in it, hasn’t it?” So it does. Trust Beth for the obvious.

Look at her father, though—he is growing more agitated, making loud garbled sounds, now gibbering, now nearly howling, “Nononono,” and shaking his head violently, flinging his arms wildly. He may not know the person in the painting, and certainly he can’t know what it’s about or what it contains, but something is causing grief in his poor addled head, his poor distressed heart.

He is giving, unmistakably, a stingingly negative review.

It doesn’t help that Beth starts pat-patting his shoulders, then pushing down on them, her mouth tightening. If Philip hadn’t died so early, he might have grown into somebody demanding and feeble, he might have become a burden as well. Beth presses more firmly. She’d like to smack her father.
Shut up and sit still
, she is inclined to cry, as she has heard mothers cry to their children in stores. Mothers don’t get to smack their children in public without somebody interfering, though; much less can a daughter slap a distraught and disabled father.

This painting of Philip, it’s like he’s a god or something. Which he was not. Which diminishes Nora further, doesn’t it? Beth glances sideways at her. What caused her to think Nora was worthy of the life Beth was offering? Such devotion should have had an object that would hold up over time. The
fact something didn’t unfold as foreseen doesn’t make it not real. Nora does that tonight, she makes it not real, with her ordinary self and with these portrayals of a corrupt and unworthy man. For once, even though he’s maddening, her noisy, frantic father makes sense. This room is too bright, the visions of Philip are disruptive and false, and the actual people turn out to be shadowy. It’s good to have come, just to know this, although it makes her a little angry, too. It’s not nice to find out you’ve wasted hopes on things that don’t measure up.

How fine it would be to be whisked right out of here and be instantly home, tucked up in the big bedroom, in the high, wide bed her parents occupied through their marriage, the lights out, her father restrained in his own bed downstairs, their sordid night-time rituals all taken care of. Except this is not a magic world. Beth takes a deep breath. “It’s interesting, Nora,” she says, “interesting work, the whole show,” as if she has properly scrutinized the whole show, “not just this. A lot of work. I think my dad’s had enough excitement, though. I’m sorry, but I think we should leave.”

Sometimes he comes in quite handy.

“That’s too bad,” Nora says. Although it is not. “But I’m glad you were able to come.” Which is not very true either. “Will you come back, do you think, when it’s not so crowded and loud?” Not even Max, Nora expects, wishes for that.

“I’d like to, but I doubt it. It’s not so hard getting around our own neighbourhood, but it’s complicated, coming downtown. Maybe since you’re living here now, you could visit us someday at my house? You and Max both? And you two, if you’re ever in town,” Beth adds, turning to Sophie and Hendrik. She is not unaware of forms of politeness, and her circle of acquaintances is very limited. Mostly, though, if
there’s one thing she knows nearly for sure it’s that you never know what can arise more or less out of the blue. “I still remember how to make a good tea. We don’t get many guests. It would be nice.”

“We’ll see, shall we? We’ll be in touch.” Although Nora cannot foresee a circumstance in which she would suddenly crave a jaunt to the suburbs to see Beth. What an awkward, mute occasion that would be! So these words are just standard courtesies. They don’t mean a thing; even though there is, in fact, something in Beth’s father’s desperate limbs, the strain of his face that cries out for transformation.

“Nononono,” he is crying, his eyes jumping from the painting of Philip to the faces of Nora and Max. As if it’s their fault he’s upset. Which maybe it is. It must be terrible to live in such constrained, baffled fashion. Max leans to place his older-man’s hand on Beth’s father’s arm. “I am sorry,” Max tells him. “You are going home now, do not be worried. Perhaps I shall see you again on some better day.”

Max’s voice does settle him down somewhat. His eyes keep darting anxiously, but his voice falls to an unhappy murmur. Although this may be only a matter of Beth turning the wheelchair away from the people and the painting towards the doors, which Max is quick to unlock and open. No one has protested, nobody has said, “Don’t go yet, Beth, please stay a while longer.” Well, they wouldn’t, would they? Nobody cares, nobody has ever asked her to stay.

“See you,” she says. “Nora. Sophie. Thanks for inviting us, Max,” and off they wheel, Beth and her fortunate, unfortunate father, his wheelchair something of a battering ram against the current of people. At the front door Beth pauses, she turns, she looks coolly back, one last, long, measuring scrutiny of each left-behind face.

Now, with the doors to this gallery opened, other people begin to drift in. “Well,” Nora says finally. “That was pretty weird, wasn’t it?”

“Of course it was,” Sophie agrees. “It was Beth. I’m surprised, though. I wouldn’t have thought of her as somebody who’d dedicate herself to anyone but herself. Well, except,” she grins, “maybe you. But isn’t it odd that she’s taken this on when she never mentioned him before and we even assumed he was dead.”

“It is a kind of death,” Hendrik suggests. “Very hard. It can take a long time.”

“Still, we know she’s alive and well, in her way,” Nora says. “She looks healthy enough, and she’s certainly not vain any more. Rather the opposite, by the looks of it. At least she has a home and a family of sorts, I suppose.”