“Yeah, but Dad, it’s like having the Gestapo for a mother!” he protested.
“That’s bull. You’re just mad because she busted you.”
“But a whole month? Nobody else’s parents are this strict!”
“No? Well, I guess you got the short end of that straw.”
He flopped facedown on his mattress, squashed his pillow over his head, and groaned. I heard Marissa before I saw her standing in the doorway. She was harassing her big brother with an impromptu ditty. “Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Andrew’s in troub-le.”
“Hey, you,” I told her. “Am-scray.”
But Andrew had bounded off his bed and was chasing her down the hallway. “Shut the fuck up, you little brat!” he screamed, flying after her down the stairs. Marissa was screaming, too—more theatrically than from fear.
“Mom! Help! Andrew’s trying to hurt me! And he’s swearing, too!”
And from the kitchen: “Andrew Joseph Oh! You’re in enough trouble with me as it is! Don’t you dare lay a hand on her!” I had to grab her wrist to stop her from whaling on him, and when I did she freaked. Yanked her arm back and stumbled backward, sobbing. “Hey,” I said. “Annie? It’s okay.”
“Don’t you ever grab me like that again!” she screamed.
At supper that night, Ariane shared the good news that she’d gotten a 96 on an algebra quiz and that, in her French class, her group had placed first in their Parisian culture presentations. “That’s great, honey,” I’d said, a little less enthusiastically than I’d intended. Pouting into his plate, her brother mumbled, “Yeah, way to go, Brainiac.” Annie’s attention was drawn to Marissa who, with her straw, was blowing bubbles in her milk. “What have I told you about not doing that?” she asked, slamming her hand on the tabletop. “If you don’t cut it out, I’m going to reach over there and smack you one!”
“Go ahead,” Marissa said. “I’ll just report you for child abuse.”
Annie’s lower lip poked out and she left the table in tears. “Well,” I said. “I don’t think we’re ever going to be mistaken for a Norman Rockwell family.” One of the kids asked me who Norman Rockwell was, and instead of going into it, I told them to get their butts off their chairs and clean up the supper dishes. Addressing Marissa, I said, “And you, Little Miss Smart Mouth, sweep the floor and then sit down and write an apology to your mother.” Marissa wondered why she was the one who had to apologize, when it was Annie who had threatened to hit her. I stared her down. “Okay, fine,” she muttered. Then she turned to her brother. “What are you smiling at, Dogbreath?”
At the entrance to our bedroom, I looked over at Annie. She was facedown on our bed. The lights were off. “Hey?” I said.
“Hey what?”
“Rough day, huh? You all right?”
I waited. “I just need to be alone,” she finally said. Later, after I’d turned off all the lights and climbed into bed myself, she rose and left the room. The next morning when I woke up, I realized she hadn’t come back to our bed all night. I found her asleep on the window seat that looked out on the back of the property. My suspicion was that the events of the day had triggered some old, unresolved stuff for Annie. Something from that rough childhood of hers that she was always so unwilling to talk about. Concerning my wife’s history, I had long suspected that she’d been abused, either physically or sexually. Most likely when she was in foster care. But from the start, Annie’s rule about her childhood was crystal clear. She didn’t want to go there, and she was adamant that I not go there either. I knew precious little about her life before the day I walked into the dry cleaner’s that first time, and that was the way she wanted it.
But anyway, good for my word, the next morning I loaded up our van with plywood and two-by-sixes, hammer and nails, and a padlock I’d picked up at the hardware store. I inched the car down the narrow packed-dirt footpath to the Jones brothers’ old cottage, steering around rocks and ruts, bending tree branches as I went. When I got to the cottage, I laid the planks across the brook, but there hadn’t been much rain that season. The water was down to a trickle. Out behind the place, there was evidence galore of Andrew and his buddies’ clubhouse shenanigans: spent firecrackers, empty pint bottles of applejack, a rain-wrinkled Hustler magazine. Someone had toted a hibachi out there. In the grass beside it were a rusty can opener and three or four scorched aluminum cans with blackened food on the bottom.
Inside, on the windowsill by the back door, marijuana seedlings were sprouting from half a dozen flowerpots. So those little shits were cultivating, too. The floor was littered with playing cards, someone’s ripped and stained backpack, several more skin magazines, and half a dozen roaches at the bottom of an empty Pringles tube.
There was something else in there, too, I now recalled: a number of strange-looking paintings on cardboard, similar in style to The Cercus People. There was one larger painting: Adam and Eve naked in the Garden of Eden. When I looked at the back, I saw that he’d painted it on a legless old card table. From that one and the ones on the floor, I realized that Andrew and his buddies had propped up the four or five that featured naked or bare-breasted women. The paintings were garish, amateurish; the women looked misshapen, more bizarre than sexy. But then again, to pubescent fifteen-year-old boys, female toplessness of any kind could rev up the testosterone. Hadn’t those saggy-breasted native women in National Geographic, some of them smiling toothlessly, stirred my ardor way back when?
I had never paid much attention to this ramshackle old place at the rear of our property, but now I looked around at what had been the Jones brothers’ home. I rocked back and forth on the buckled linoleum, ran my fingertips over the water-stained wallpaper, the enamel kitchen tabletop with its coating of dust and grit. I walked over to the ladder that led up to the crawl space in the eaves. Looked at the rope and pulley system that they had rigged up to raise and lower it. When I climbed that ladder, I squinted into the crawl space and saw them: another couple dozen or more of what I assumed were worthless paintings, plus stacks and stacks of old magazines: Look, Life, Coronet, the Saturday Evening Post. I climbed back down the ladder, stacked the paintings Andrew and his buddies had carried down, and put them back up there where they belonged. Then I raised the ladder, wound the rope around the hook in the beam, and cinched it tight. Outside again, I saw what she meant: that roof was sagging dangerously. Someone could get hurt. So I hammered, padlocked, and secured the place. And as far as I knew, ten years later, it was still secured.
Viveca called me the following Monday with two proposals, one expected, the other a surprise. If I decided to sell The Cercus People and could verify with my attorney that I was the owner of the painting, she would pay me forty thousand dollars for it. It was a very generous offer, she assured me; I’d see that when I had the painting appraised. Then she moved on to her second proposal: a September swap—her apartment in New York or, if I preferred, her place at the Cape, in exchange for my home in Three Rivers for their wedding. “Please say yes, Orion. It would be such a lovely surprise for Anna.” God, the nerve of this woman.
“What about the Gardner Museum?” I said.
“They wouldn’t budge. They told me that if they made one exception, it would open the floodgates. So I thought of Plan B: a quiet country setting that would be a reasonable commute for our Manhattan friends, and your place would be perfect. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought about those deer we saw. It would be such an idyllic setting.”
I told her I was sure there were idyllic places in Greenwich or Westport, and that the commute for the New Yorkers would be even shorter. Or, closer to Three Rivers, there was the Altnaveigh Inn or Bella Linda. “Besides,” I said. “I doubt Annie would feel comfortable being married here. I imagine if you ran it by her, she’d tell you that.”
Viveca sighed. “Okay, Orion, I have to confess to a bit of benign subterfuge. This is what Anna wants, but she’s too shy to ask you herself.” After they had gotten back from Boston on Saturday, Viveca s
aid, Annie had told her how much it would mean to her if they could be married at the place she’d called home for so many years, with her family gathered around her. “And that includes you, of course,” she assured me. I thought of that thing Marissa used to say when she was in high school: Gag me with a spoon.
I told her no.
Would I at least think about it?
I said I didn’t need to think about it. “Find someplace else.”
After I hung up, I stood there, staring at the phone. Why did I always let this woman flummox me? And why was she pushing this idea? Was it about The Cercus People? Was she hoping to poke around the property and maybe find more of Jones’s paintings? It wasn’t that I thought she’d do anything unethical, but that conversation we’d had about the art theft at the Gardner Museum was still on my mind. It was like that expression the college kids always used: I’m just saying . . .
When she called back two days later, there was no more mention of the house or the wedding. It was all about the painting. If I sold it to her, she could go as high as forty-five thousand, no higher. With the economy as unstable as it was, the art market had destabilized as well. If she could find a buyer for The Cercus People, she had to make sure she could make back her investment.
I told her I’d have to get back to her—that I hadn’t had time to get it appraised. Did I want that referral? she asked. I said no, I’d take care of it on my end. Fine, she said. Whichever way I wanted to handle it.
I brought Jones’s painting to two nearby museums. Sondra Zoë, the director of the Hitchcock, said I shouldn’t hold her to it—outsider art was not in her area of expertise—but that forty-five thousand dollars seemed to her like a fair offer. Sal Tundra, the director of the Benson Museum, did know outsider art, although his specialty was voodoo artists from the Caribbean. He’d heard of Josephus Jones, he said, but didn’t know much more than what I could probably find out on the Internet. Tundra, however, also surmised that Viveca’s purchase price was fair. “But you could always counteroffer. Tell her you need fifty thousand and see what she says.”
When I called her back, I told her I would consider selling her The Cercus People for fifty thousand. Agreed, she said. For an additional five thousand dollars, she wasn’t going to quibble. Would I be sending her the letter from my lawyer verifying ownership? I didn’t have a lawyer, I told her, and I wasn’t going to go looking for one. But I’d dug up all the paperwork from when we bought the house, and our agreement stipulated that we owned whatever contents had been left behind. “Still,” she said, “I’d feel more comfortable if I had a letter verifying that.” When I told her I wasn’t going to pay some attorney to state what I already knew, she said all right then, fine. She’d FedEx me the check that day and would hire a courier service to come and get the painting. Would Friday morning work for the transfer? It wouldn’t, I said. I reminded her that I’d said I would consider selling it, but I still hadn’t made up my mind and didn’t want to be pressured about it. There was a long pause on her end. “All right,” she finally said. “How much more time do you need to decide?”
“Well, let’s put it this way, Viveca. If and when I want to sell it, I’ll let you know.”
I heard her exhale. She asked if she was competing with another collector. “Are you trying to engage me in a bidding war? Is that it?”
“No,” I said. “I’m not that cagey and it’s not about the money.”
“Then what is it about, if you don’t mind my asking.”
If I’d been honest, I would have told her it was about leverage. About taking back some of the power from the woman who’d caused my wife to leave me. “I just like the painting,” I said. “It’s about my keeping it, not about my selling it to someone else.”
“Very well then. Let me know.” Click.
In the end, I said no to selling the painting but yes to her second proposal—partially, anyway. They may be getting married in Three Rivers, but the ceremony’s not going to be at our house. Marissa and Ariane will be bunking there, and maybe their mother, too; I’m not sure about that. But Viveca won’t be. She’ll be staying at the Bella Linda Inn, where their wedding’s going to be. That was where I had to draw the line, whether or not she’s letting me stay at her place up here free of charge. She won’t be sleeping in the bed I used to share with Annie. And if she goes over to the house and pokes around, she won’t find The Cercus People or any of those other Josephus Jones paintings, either. I’ve made sure of that. So I guess you could say I’m like that sagging roof of the Jones brothers’ little house down in back. I partially caved, but mostly not. . . .
Here’s the sign for PAMET HARBOR and TRURO CENTER. I put on my blinker and, at long last, exit Route 6. I should be there in just a few minutes; the real estate office is less than a half mile off the exit. But the drive up here has taken me five hours instead of the usual three. It’s almost seven thirty. They’ve got to be closed by now. . . .
D’Andrade Realty—here it is. I pull into the crushed clamshell parking lot. No lights on inside, just like I figured. But when I get out and walk toward the building, I see that the rental agent has left the key inside a business envelope taped to the office door. “Christophoulos-Shabbas Cottage” is scrawled across it in red Sharpie. Viveca would not be pleased with this casual a system. In a five-minute phone conversation, she mentioned to me twice that some of the artwork at her summer place is extremely valuable, so whenever I go out, I should make sure to lock the doors and windows and put on the alarm system—instructions in the loose-leaf folder on the coffee table.
Viveca’s “cottage” turns out to be a stunning split-level contemporary—a far cry from the rustic beach bungalow I’ve been imagining myself hunkering down in for my soul-searching retreat. I slip the key into the double lock, turn the knob, and enter. Walk down the three steps into the foyer and look around.
Jesus Christ, what a place!
Chapter Seven
Annie Oh
Remembering my past has riled me up. Minnie’s left for the day, and I could use a drink. But rather than helping myself to one of those fine wines that Viveca buys, I go instead to the utility closet and take out Minnie’s jug. Grab a coffee mug from the kitchen and carry my mugful of Carlo Rossi into Viveca’s bedroom. I pour, drink, pour some more, drink some more. I sit on the edge of her bed—our bed—and stare at those four bridal dresses. I should be getting up, walking down to my studio instead of thinking about the wedding. . . .
Nothing’s ever neat and tidy. Perfect. If the girls want to be there and Andrew and Orion don’t, well, I just have to accept that. It’s their prerogative. And maybe Andrew is too busy. Maybe that’s all it is. And Orion? Well, I can appreciate why he wouldn’t want to be there. I think it was generous of him to say yes, the girls and I could stay at the house the weekend of the wedding. His only condition was that Viveca not stay there, and I can appreciate that, too. When I explained it to Viveca—how it must feel from his perspective—well, she didn’t like it but she accepted it. Had her assistant book her a suite at Bella Linda, where the reception’s going to be anyway. It’ll be more convenient for her. . . . And anyway, who knows? He hasn’t said one way or the other if he’s coming. He may drive back down from the Cape and be there after all. And if he does come, I’ll feel . . . relieved. It will show me that he loves me more than he hates me because I fell in love with her. Because I fell out of love with him.
And if my born-again son isn’t coming to the wedding because he’s standing in judgment of me—assuming that Viveca and I are subverting God’s plan or whatever—well, it’s my life, not his. I became an artist, moved to New York. I’ve earned what’s come to me. I work hard at what I do. . . .
But so did Josephus Jones. A bricklayer by day, a painter by night. It’s strange that Orion and I bought the property where he used to live and work. Is it just a coincidence that two unschooled outsider artists just happened to . . . or was that God’s plan, too? What was it that woman said to me
that time? That coincidence is God’s way of staying invisible? Could it have been Josephus Jones I saw out in our yard that day? . . . And that other time I’ve never told anyone about, when I was down it the basement, working on one of my pieces. When I looked up, that same man I’d seen before was standing there. Watching me. I jumped, looked away for a second. And when I looked back, he wasn’t there. Was that just something I imagined? Or dreamt, maybe? Sometimes when I was working down there late at night, I’d start to doze. . . . No, it’s ridiculous. I don’t even believe in ghosts. . . .
But I believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. How can I believe in one and not the other? Well, if Josephus Jones has been tracking my success from the Great Beyond, I’ll bet he’s a resentful ghost. He ended up stuffed in that well out back and I ended up here in this luxury apartment.
I can feel it approaching: the cyclone. I grab my mug and drink some more of Minnie’s wine. Sometimes when the weather in my head changes, I can hear his voice. And I don’t want to. Not today, when I’m already feeling so vulnerable. When I’m here instead of at my studio, working.
Tell me something, Annie. And be honest.
Shut up! Go away!
What is it that you want?
I want this: my life here in New York with Viveca.
Anything else?
I want my kids to be safe. I want Orion not to hate me.
Ah, very nice. Very unselfish. But you can’t fool me. What is it you really want?
I want . . . to make my art.
And aren’t I an integral part of that? When the cyclone comes toward you, isn’t that because of me? After all, Annie, I know your secrets, your shame. Like it or not, I’m in your head. It’s me who starts the cyclone.