The Whole World (25 page)

One of the people waiting to cross the street was Polly.

Tears cut streaks down her face. “Liv?” she said, incredulous, before taking off back toward Trumpington Street.

“Shit, Liv,” said Peter. Acting out my entire point, he left me and ran after her.

I hadn’t told Dr. Keene or Peter—or anyone—about the letter from my dad.

After the divorce, Dad married someone else and had a baby. I’d told him not to do that. I don’t care who he’s married to but I told him not to have a baby. I remember this one time that I had a friend over, this was when Dad and Mom were still married, I had a friend over, and he said: “Excuse me, sweetheart …” as he passed by her to get to the patio. My head had snapped up. Because he always called me “sweetheart.” That was what he called me. But he used it for this stranger to him, just because she was a girl. I learned a lot about my dad. I learned that what I thought was a special name was just really the way he talks to girls. It’s just that I was usually the only one around, so I’d thought it was mine. I learned a lot about my dad. So I knew what would happen if he had another baby.

It was a girl too.

They named her Viola, to go with my name. From
Twelfth Night
. I got here for college before they could make me do any babysitting. The baby was all right, I guess. But then Dad wrote me this letter.

Viola wasn’t talking when I left, which was normal. She was a baby. But I guess she never got very good. So now he says she needs a speech therapist, and also to attend a special preschool, for “special” kids. Which is fine. She’ll do fine. But then he said that for him to pay for it, I’d have to come back to California, into the state system. And live with Mom.

That letter had come yesterday, the day before they dredged the Cam, so excuse me if Nick wasn’t the first thing on my mind.

There is nothing wrong with UC Berkeley or wherever but there is a lot wrong with living at home. And a lot wrong with having your college money go to a toddler’s preschool. There’s no way I was going to go with Mom to family therapy, and spend my life shopping at strip malls and stuck in endless traffic. There’s nothing aesthetic or bearable about any of it.

You’ll notice he hadn’t asked me to live with him. I wouldn’t, but he was supposed to ask.

I’d first started painting because I liked being in charge of something, some small thing: this square of canvas. I liked being able to make it whatever I think it ought to be. And beautiful—I could make something beautiful. It could hang in a world of chain restaurants and giant parking lots and roads as wide as the Mississippi and clogged to a standstill, but be, itself, beautiful. I did it out of desperation.

Now, across the ocean, I’m feeling for the first time like I’m not gasping for beauty anymore. It’s here. I’ve found my inspiration here, and, instead of rebelling against my surroundings, I’m being fed by them.

He wanted to take that away from me.

Do you know that the British students pay hardly any tuition? Same for the Europeans. But everyone else really has to cough it up.

And do you know how Polly manages being a foreigner here, with her dad in prison? Her whole town has taken up a collection for her tuition and living expenses.

Do you see the difference? I can’t get money out of my dad, and she gets money out of everyone she’s ever known. People like to take care of her. It’s that weak thing she has going on. I’m too strong. I come off that way. People think I don’t need, and when I reveal that I do, like with Nick, when I make myself vulnerable, it freaks people out. It doesn’t fit with what they’ve thought about me.

People want consistency over depth, which is bullshit.

My first plan didn’t have any stealing in it at all. I wasn’t going to be able to continue at Cambridge, that was clear, but I didn’t have to go home. I had already set up with Therese, another Art History major, to spend the Christmas holiday with her family in Switzerland. The colleges rent our rooms to conferences outside of term, so I’d had to find somewhere to go. And I did. It was going to be amazing.

And I thought,
Okay, I’ll look for some kind of under-the-table au pair job while I’m there. I’ll set up a real life. I’ll paint. It’ll be even better than Cambridge
.

There was time in that plan to make a change, like turning a slow barge.

So that proves that I’m adaptable. I’d already come up with that plan and the letter had only arrived that morning.

Then, after Peter ran after Polly outside of the Sedgwick, and I’d jaywalked across Pembroke Street, I saw Therese turn the corner out of Free School Lane. She was with someone who had to be her older sister. They looked just alike except the sister was a little taller. They had bags from the haremlike custom perfume shop.

“Oh, Liv!” Therese called. We fell into step together toward Emmanuel College. She introduced her sister Annick, and I said something about looking forward to the holidays.

“Yes, I know, but there’s a little problem,” Therese said in her precise, pretty accent. “You see, our cousins have invited us to meet them in the Pyrenees. To ski. I’ve missed them so much since leaving home that I really can’t say no. It wouldn’t be home at Christmas without them.”

“That sounds wonderful!” I said. “Wow!”

I’d never gone skiing before. But I knew it was this amazing rush. It would be like all the good part of falling—the whoosh, the freedom—without a crash at the bottom or the jarring restraint of a bungee. You could, if the mountain was high enough, and you made wide enough S curves, fall for a very, very long time. The only maybe-problem would be equipment rental fees. Were we staying at a lodge or at someone’s house? Would everyone bring their own skis and could I borrow? I had to hammer all this out.

They stopped short of Emmanuel and veered into The Rat and Parrot. I followed them into the pub, because I had to. Details needed sorting. I didn’t have any cash on me, but I figured it was okay to sit with them so long as they ordered something. They each got a glass of white wine; I asked for water. Therese and Annick talked family stories while we waited at the bar for our drinks. I tried to memorize the names they used—Henri, Luc, Paul. All their cousins were boys. Maybe if I flirted the right way they’d pay for my meals. “One pound sixty,” the man behind the bar said, pushing my glass toward me. He’d poured my water from a bottle, not from out of the tap. He’d put a lemon slice in it.

Therese and Annick clinked money onto the bar and took their drinks toward a table. I had exactly one pound in my pocket, just that one thick coin.

Everything froze. Everything in the arrangement of figures in this scene drew the eye to my glass.

I laid my coin on top of theirs. They’d overpaid with a round number, either to tip or just because they didn’t want to waste time getting change.

He gave me 10p change from the whole transaction. I wrapped my fist around the skinny silver disc and held it tight.

“Do your cousins bring their own skis? Will I need a special outfit?” I asked, joining them at the table. I had to get practical. I had to figure out what to borrow. My friend Gina skis….

“No, you don’t understand,” Therese said. Expensive water sloshed over the side of my glass when I lifted it for a sip. “It’s my cousins’ invitation. It’s not my place to extend….”

“I know that,” I said, like they were slow.

They looked at each other.

“I don’t even ski,” I clarified.

She and her sister smiled. “Then you won’t be sad!”

I stayed to finish my water. I had, after all, paid for it. I listened to their stories and brainstormed about Christmas presents.

They walked off with linked arms. That’s a European girl thing. Sometimes you see French girls hold hands. Their small posh shopping bags bounced off their thighs as they walked.

I had to be out of my room in a week.

I wanted to be like Gauguin. I wanted to have an adventure and paint it, paint from some wonderful life. I didn’t need to study for that; I just needed to live it. I couldn’t be satisfied with painting in defiance of banality anymore. I needed to be surrounded by beauty—not luxury, but beauty.

It would be possible to make one great gesture and get away with it. It would be possible to take enough to get somewhere good.

I had to try. What kind of a person would I be if I didn’t try?

I think about Gauguin a lot. He wasn’t nice to his family, but he was important to the world. I think about that for obvious reasons. And when he ran away, it wasn’t cowardly. He was running to something, not just away. That’s a beacon to me.

When we still had the money—we really had had all that money once—we spent a weekend in San Francisco, me and Mom. Dad was working. We ate at crowded restaurants, and stayed in a boutique hotel. We went to an exhibition at the MOMA about the effect of photography on Impressionism. There were examples of how photography became part of how some painters worked, like if they used a live model or a picture of one, and how they came to see discrete moments within action, like the breakdown of the motion of a galloping horse. But the best part, to me, was how they photographed each other, and how they experimented with that. These painters playing with their new toy had a grand time. They created. And they horsed around.

The photo I most remember was of Gauguin, in someone’s house or studio. The label called it “Gauguin playing the harmonium.” And so he was. But the label neglected to note the hilarious: Gauguin wasn’t wearing any pants. I mean that in the American way, not the British way. He had boxer shorts on, but no trousers, and yet he was fully, formally dressed on top. It was hilarious. It was a moment between friends, nothing sexual but simply casual. Maybe he didn’t want his trousers to get wrinkled. Maybe they were itchy. The museum label was disorienting; was I the only one who noticed? Was everyone else, including the curator, thinking,
That’s just Gauguin. He’s so often unclothed while playing the harmonium that I don’t even notice anymore
. I swear I was the only one who laughed out loud the whole time we were in that gallery. I felt isolated, but superior too; was no one else actually looking?

That’s what it was like, living where I did. I was too often the only one who noticed something, or wanted something, or thought something was special or beautiful or funny.

There was this house in our town that was burgled. The thieves left a Picasso. It was hanging on the wall, right there, and they carried out the television and the computer, walking past it, back and forth. It was an original, signed Picasso litho worth $40,000. But in suburban California, only sappy, ostentatious Kinkades get treated like art. Picasso can’t even get himself stolen. That’s what it’s like back home. If you recognize a Picasso, if you notice Gauguin isn’t wearing pants, you’re the foreigner. It doesn’t matter that I was born there. I’m a foreigner.

Now thinking of that Gauguin photo just puts Nick in my mind: Nick half-undressed. Nick only half-rumpled, Nick holding back. He’s ruined that for me. It’s not funny anymore.

It’s important for me to make it clear that Nick’s not all that. He’s not. He’s just some guy with an accent and floppy hair; God knows there are enough of them in this town. God knows, half the men in this town wear knee-length wool coats and winter scarves striped with their school colors. Everyone talks like he does. But I was vulnerable to that. Americans are. We feel superior to the traditions that sort people into classes, but we envy them too. They’re romantic. I let myself get all romantic about the whole English thing, and he was a piece of it. I wasn’t in love with him. I was desperate for him. Those are two entirely different things.

Because Polly was so prissy about me reading Gretchen’s emails, I didn’t tell her the interesting part. The other biographer had offered money for the photos.

I immediately thought about selling some to her, of course I did. It was the same as someone looking down at the ground from a height. You think about what a jump would feel like, and the fall, and the splat. It doesn’t mean you’re considering it, it’s just a mental journey. You see it and think what it would be like.

After I got the letter from Dad, I thought about it a different way.

It would have been so easy to scan a few. I could even just take pictures of them. The biographer wouldn’t be picky about the source. She wanted them, right? So she wasn’t going to get all righteous and say no.

Except for Gretchen having gone all nuts. Just like that, everything done. Not just for now, but done in a final way. Even the portrait photograph of the two sisters together, which used to hang in Gretchen’s bedroom, was gone. She’d told Nick to actually get rid of everything. That’s crazy!

Maybe he’d thought so too….

I stood up straighter. Maybe he’d recognized that it was ridiculous. Maybe he’d tried to save Gretchen from herself. Maybe he’d saved those photos somewhere before he disappeared….

Maybe he’d saved me.

It was easy to get to Nick’s house: Just go all the way up Madingley Road. For all the web of curvy, crossed lanes downtown, the roads out of town are long, straight spokes. Madingley Road heads for, well, Madingley village. People take this road to get to Churchill College, and the Observatory, and the four thousand white crosses of the World War II cemetery of American soldiers. I took it to Nick’s house, which is right across from the vet school horses.