“I know. I know. But it makes me so sad that the person closest to me, my theoretical best friend, the only man in my life, is foolish and unreliable. He makes me feel bad about my life: I expected other kinds of people in it. Sometimes I think keeping an old fool in your life tells you too much about yourself.”
“Do you ever try to talk to him?”
“Talk to him! There are years of talking to him. But even if I try to change, try to talk to him about our problems, he still makes me the bad guy against him, with his big eyes and his ‘sorry, sorry, sorry.’ Then he goes underground and screws me royally first chance he gets. In the end, I don’t have the power to change his deep commitment to himself to crap up his own life.”
“That’s him. What about you?”
“Regina, I want to do something about it. I do. But instead I seem to be stuck like a crazy person wandering the streets of my own mind constantly complaining about him to any imaginary person who will listen.”
“Do we go left or right at this next turn?” Drew said.
“What?” Regina was startled.
“Quick! Left or right!”
“Left.”
CHAPTER THIRTY SIX
i.
Uncle Roscoe struggled into the kitchen with a heavy case of mineral water bottles. He carried the case with difficulty in both arms and put it down on the kitchen table with relief. Doris came in right behind him, carrying large bags of groceries in each arm. She tried to put them down on the table but the case of bottles took up all the space.
“You should not have brought that in first,” Doris said to Roscoe, “If you had not brought that in first, we could have brought these in first, and then we would have had more room to put these away and then those away.”
“What’s the difference? We’ll put them all away at the same time.”
“It is metaphysically impossible to put them all away at the same time,” Doris said, putting the grocery bags on the floor. “In our earthly time-space ratio, only one thing at a time can be put away. Not all at the same time. So therefore we are confronted with a choice of firsts. If you had not brought that carton in first--which you have--we could have put these grocery bags away first.”
“Well, we can still put the groceries away first. So we’ll put those away first.”
“First,” Doris pointed out to him, “to put groceries away first we first need to sort them on the table so we can put them in the right places in the cupboards and refrigerator. And we can’t sort them on the table because that is on the table. Now we have to put everything in that case away first and get it out of the way so that we can sort these grocery bags and put them away.”
Roscoe suddenly picked up the heavy case of bottles in both hands and with a grunt dropped it to the floor. He picked up the two grocery bags and placed them on top. The couple glared at each other for a moment before Doris quickly began to sort items from the grocery bags on the table.
“I hope you didn’t break anything,” she said.
Roscoe opened the refrigerator door and stood by ready to receive the food to be put away. He knew Doris always liked to do this in an assembly line process. He was neither angry nor defeated by the bickering with Doris. It was just routine.
Regina let the screen door slam on purpose to alert them that she was coming through.
“So, that’s where you two were off to at the crack of dawn this morning,” she said to them, “hunting and gathering.”
From the moment Regina had arrived two days ago and entered the familiar large rustic, wood-beamed living room, cradled in light from the huge picture window that looked out on the rocky ledge and softly lapping water, she vowed to enjoy everything---and everyone.
“Hello, darling. Was the swim wonderful?” Doris said to her sweetly. Then added: “It wasn’t the crack of dawn. It was 10 am. The middle of the afternoon for those of us who really love summer.”
“Hi, sweetheart,” Roscoe said, “We got the mineral water you wanted. It’s right here. Want some? You must be thirsty. It’s not cold, but I can put in some ice...”
“No, Roscoe, not now,” Doris scolded him, “she can wait. Can’t you, dear? It will only be a few minutes before we get all this away and then you can have the whole kitchen to yourself...in the meantime you’ll have a chance to change out of that wet suit…..”
“Of course. Don’t worry about me,” Regina told her, “....I’m just fine. Can I help? My god.....look at all those bottles...one large one would have been enough for me....you shouldn’t go to all this trouble for me...I really...”
“Nothing is too much trouble for our little artist.” Roscoe said. “What a thrill to have you doing your next work here. With us. And what a special treat for me to finally be with my favorite niece,” Roscoe said, hugging Regina affectionately.
“Roscoe, leave her alone. She wants to work.”
“No, that’s alright,” Regina told Roscoe, “I’m taking the day off. Drew will be leaving and I want to spend some time with him before....”
Doris cautioned, “But I do hope, dear, that he doesn’t distract you too much. You don’t want to waste this precious time. You know you’ll only be mad at yourself again.”
“Actually, I’m not quite ready to work. I’m still circling around that scary white thing inside… the canvass,” she explained to their puzzled faces.
“I don’t blame you,” Roscoe said. “I could never do what you do. I could never put something private out for all those people to see. And having shows like you do...suppose they don’t like what you’ve done! My god!”
“What’s really difficult for me,” Regina said, “is not what they think, but the difference between what I want to do and what I am able to do.” She laughed at herself. “I’m always so unhappy with my work, it doesn’t matter if other people are or not.”
“Poor baby,” Roscoe comforted.
“Poor baby, nothing,” Doris said to Regina, “Talent is a gift.”
“Gift? Funny. I always feel so burdened.”
“Now that’s what you’re here for,” Roscoe said, “No more burdens. You just rest. Swim and paint and don’t worry about a thing. It’s so great having you here. And I get to try out all my weird and strange concoctions on you!” He jokingly held up a box of Jell-O and a can of tuna fish.
“You make it, I’ll eat it,” Regina challenged.
“Ah, damn it!” Roscoe said suddenly, “I forgot to get those big broiling pans. The throw-away ones. Our metal one is a mess, and I’m tired of cleaning it. Doris, you didn’t get them, did you? They were on the list.”
“No. Not on my list. Sorry.”
“Well, I’m going back to get some,” Roscoe decided, “I want to get all this survival business over with so we can get down to the interesting excesses! Unless you don’t want me to go out again?” he whined to Doris.
“Of course I want you to. Why wouldn’t I want you to!”
Roscoe shrugged defensively for having annoyed her, picked up the car keys from the hook by the door and left.
ii
“I am no longer beautiful,” she once said to Roscoe.
Doris could see it in her face: the door closing; slowly swinging shut, and like in a dream she was helpless to stop it. Certain things were now irretrievable, and they just would never happen to her again.
“So I guess I’ll have to be nice instead. After all, now even my old lovers are old.”
She was hoping for a laugh. Or at least, forgiveness.
Roscoe smiled, but did not reply. He was not in the mood for Doris’ thrashing against the crushing inevitability of what faced them both. He often thought: When I was young, the life of the old was meaningless to me. Why does it take us by surprise, since we see it happen everywhere. When we were young we told ourselves we would refuse to be old, thought that the old were old because they didn’t refuse, that they went like lambs to the slaughter, that growing old was an outside force they could defend themselves against and didn
’t. When, then, do we become surprised that we can’t refuse…..?
Neither of them was able to refuse. This was one of the few things left to them in which they could find comfort and understanding in each other.
“I knew you when you had hair,” Doris often told Roscoe.
He was glad to have someone else who carried his history within. He felt this expanded him, amplified him. Might help to reconstruct him. For so long, you think it’s your world then suddenly find you’ve been bumped into the wings and can’t get back onstage.
Hope would heal them if they could retrieve it. But it was hopeless:
Teenagers die of loneliness before they find it; the old after they lose it.
iii
While they waited for Roscoe to return, Regina and Doris took their freshly poured mugs of hot coffee and drifted into the parlor with the big picture window.
“I love this room,” Regina said.
“We all do.”
After a few moments, Regina chose the old wooden rocking chair next to the window. Her bathing suit was now completely dry. Doris rested her coffee on a side table and went about leisurely straightening up the room from the activities of the evening before.
“You seem very unhappy,” Doris said, “and I don’t think it is just about Marius anymore. I know something is wrong.”
Did Doris find out about the bomb threats? That was impossible. Did Drew tell her? He promised. No, Regina could see Doris didn’t know, but she had picked up something else, something that had made itself known to Regina only now that she felt safe here, and the constant sense of danger no longer crowded out her entire being.
Even though Doris did not think Drew was an appropriate companion for Regina, she was concerned enough to ask: “Are things going well with Drew? I thought you both were……”
Regina became convinced from this question that Doris was still unaware of the crisis overshadowing her life. And she wished to keep it that way. Why bring it here when she was here to get rid of it.
“Drew is ok, and I like him; but his being in my life doesn’t hold when he’s not around. There is nothing of him that he leaves that I can use when I’m alone. And that’s important to me since I choose to be alone a lot.”
Doris waited.
Then Regina added, “Not like it was with Marius.” She could never stop talking about Marius with those who knew him. It was a way of conjuring him up to still be with her.
But then she said: “I’m not going to paint anymore.”
Doris stopped in the middle of the room and looked at her.
“But you’re all set up….Why would you not….?”
“That’s the point. I came here so eager to try something new. New for me. Something in nature instead of the artificial light that so eludes me. I hoped for the platinum color of the sky. But even as I was getting ready, I knew I couldn’t do it anymore.”
“Of course you can do it! A tornado couldn’t stop you….”
Not a tornado, but perhaps Regina’s old habit of relentlessly picking at her own life could.
iv.
She was in one of those phases when she told herself that art was useless, that it doesn’t feed anybody, doesn’t take away pain, or make the world better; it couldn’t pluck answers out of the universe.
Then she would argue with herself that it was good for the soul. And finally, she would slump under the realization that, regardless, she herself could not manage to produce anything that was good for either body or soul.
She felt the work she did fostered the joy of life for no one, while in order to do it, she had to kidnap herself in a place with no air, no light, and no color. She believed that if she didn’t have the crucible of the painting life over her head, she could be a force in the world. But instead, she was paralyzed by her own selfish absorption, by her need to indulge in being dreamy, vague, detached, and alone; jealously and zealously keeping herself away from ordinary life so that she would, without excuses or harm to anyone else, be able to dash back to her beloved silky aloneness, an aloneness she savored like eating creamy vanilla pudding, an aloneness where she was careful not to get involved in doing things for people, or the world.
She wouldn’t even get a dog.
And now, since she feared any minute she could be gone, she needed to rethink everything.
“What else could you be but an artist!” Doris said.
“I have no right to be an artist. What do I really know…..? All my life I’ve believed my reality was the only reality….not listening to the world when it was trying to tell me that I knew nothing….”
“So, you’re normal,” Doris pointed out.
“No. There are people who behave differently. Who do things that mean something. There has to be something better I can do with my time…..the world needs more social workers and fewer artists.….”
“Please…” Doris said, “Doing good for the world is pretty tricky.”
CHAPTER THIRTY SEVEN
i.
It was true.
Regina had tried many times to help others and always seemed to get it wrong.
There was the old man in her building she inconveniently dragged to his doctor’s appointment on the wrong day.
And the offer of her lunch to the homeless man trying to keep warm in a doorway with a sign: “Need money for food.”
“How would you like my lunch?” Regina said.
“What do you have?” the man asked.
“A nice big roll with…..”
“Does it have butter?”
“No, but…..”
“Don’t want it.”
“Well, I also have some milk and some fruit…”
“No coffee? What kind of fruit?”
“An orange…..”
“I don’t like oranges. Do you have an apple?”
Regina left him a dollar.
Reading to the blind, she coughed, sneezed, wheezed, and apologized until they politely told her it was all right to stop. The offer of help to her confused neighbor, who rang her doorbell every ten minutes wanting more of what Regina had just given her, but which the poor woman couldn’t remember; the big commitment she took on to mentor a troubled teen toward a career choice, who only saw her as a free ticket to movies and junk food. The chaos, pettiness and inefficiency of volunteer work seemed to define Regina’s efforts. In this regard, she was like one of those people who just can’t grow plants, although, obviously many others can.
“Artists, in my view,” Doris said, “aren’t here to do good works; they are here to get us past the bad. Bad work is mostly what kind of work there is in the world. And for all the people trapped in these lives, art is that part of life that still hopes. Besides, artists are very deficient as do-gooders.
Regina, honey, this is just a mood. We know you were meant to be a painter and not a social worker because you have painted a lot of paintings, and you have ideas for paintings, and experiments with paintings and more paintings waiting in the wings. It’s so ironic that you are saying all this now. Other people have been trying to talk you into giving up being a painter for a more sensible course of activity for years….but you always go back to your real work.”
“I no longer have the courage to be an artist.” Regina felt she had become an all around life coward. No doubt some of it was because of the threats she could not share with Doris. Yet in spite of what she was telling Doris, and herself, she knew deep down that painting was her assigned task in the universe. But assigned by whom? By what? In any case, she was sick of living under whatever terrible tyrant was in charge of an assignment she never volunteered for. “Even I don’t understand why, when I paint, I am always in so much anguish over so little,” Regina said, “why the useless effort makes me feel so abandoned by my inner self, as if I were falling off the edge of the earth into the arms of an enemy.”
“I think it might help, if you would just stop thinking of art as a Holy Sacrament,” Marius once told her when she complained to
him that she was tired of the war between her compulsion to do it and the realization that it was useless.
“If I don’t do it,” Regina asked Doris, “what would be the loss? Someone else surely has done it already, or will do it. Artists think that if they themselves don’t give the sacred message, whatever the hell that is, no one will get it. Well, my own mediocrity has stopped me in my tracks more than once. But now it’s for good. No more….”
“But you have too much talent to stop….”
“….and not enough to go on. There is absolutely no value to it. From now on, I just refuse to do it anymore.”
Suddenly, Doris heard Roscoe pull up in the car. “Well, here we go again,” she said.
Roscoe burst into the room with the disposable broiling pans and a garish plastic Frisbee from a local gas station.
“Catch”, he yelled, throwing the Frisbee at a startled Doris. “Let’s play!”
ii
THE REAL PARABLE OF THE TALENTS
One Monday morning, early… maybe too early…. at the beginning of the world, God gathered together all the people he would someday create. He wanted to distribute to each of them a gift he had so proudly fashioned.
He called this gift: Talent.
But although God created Talent, he found it had a few strange problems.
Try as he might, he could not make Talent stay in one piece.
He pushed it and tied it and watered it and cut it down and sewed it back and stretched it and glued it and still Talent broke in two parts: 1) Desire. 2) Ability.
Now this was making things difficult. It would be hard enough to give one gift to every person that would ever be in the world, but two gifts to each person would be a big job, even for God.
For one thing, two gifts would take up twice as much space to store. And for another, it would take twice as much effort just to carry them: it would cost twice as much money, and it would take twice as long to give them out. Now time was not something God had a lot of, considering that contrary to popular belief he did not reside in heaven, but in a place a lot like New York City, which was why he was such a grouch and why it was important that he get on with the job fast, using the least amount of space he could get away with.
How best to give out this gift of Talent soon became a major strategy issue for God.
Eventually it was the only problem he could think about. And as we know, if enough attention is given to a particular problem, a solution has a good chance of being found.