“Is that what you think it is? Charity?”
“Well…uh…yeah. I mean, there are better-qualified nannies out there….”
“Better-qualified, maybe. But not better for Marin.”
“I’m not sure you’d still think that if you had any idea how often I let her watch Grease 3: The Return to Rydell….”
“You think I don’t know that? Of course I know that! Marin tells me everything.”
“She does?”
“She does. And why would I pay a stranger to take care of her when she can be with family? When I know you need the money? You need to stop feeling guilty about accepting help from others. You seem to have this idea that it’s somehow cheating, that it makes you a failure or something. But that’s what loved ones do, Jessie. We help each other. And you taking care of Marin helps me, way more than you realize. Do you think I would entrust you with the care and well-being of my only child if I didn’t believe you were the best person for the job?”
“I guess not.”
“…”
“…”
“I’ll do it.”
“Do what?”
“Be Marin’s legal guardian.”
“Really? Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“Don’t say yes because you feel guilty.”
“I’m not. I want to do it, though I hope I never have any reason to.”
“Me too!”
“I knew all along that I would say yes. I just…overthought it.”
“You have a tendency to do that.”
“Really? You’ve never mentioned that.”
“…”
“…”
“Grant makes me feel safe.”
“What?”
“I’m married to Grant because he makes me feel safe.”
“Hmm…”
“What?”
“Bridget says the same thing about Percy. When I ask her how she knows that Percy is the One, she says it just as plainly and simply as you just did. ‘I love him. He makes me feel safe.’”
“So?”
“I love Marcus. But he makes me feel out of control and out of my head. He is exhilarating and terrifying. I see and feel him everywhere, and I’m always grasping for equilibrium even when he’s not there.”
“So?”
“I feel like I’m always falling in love, falling and falling and falling. I can’t live my life in a perpetual free-fall, but I’m not ready to safely settle down, either…”
“Well, you can’t have it both ways.”
“…”
“What? I didn’t hear you, Jessie.”
“I know.”
seventy
Just moments ago, I thought FOREVER had finally arrived.
I was sitting cross-legged in the bottom bunk holding a package, turning the soft bundle over in my hands, trying to figure out how you managed to send it from the undeveloped woods along the Delaware River, and why it had come wrapped not in a mailing envelope but in plain tissue paper. I was debating the merits of your predictable unpredictability, and whether it was more appropriate to call it unpredictable predictability at this point. I was wondering if whatever was inside that tissue paper would undo all the conclusions I’ve made in the past seven days.
Because right up until the moment that I tore through the paper and discovered the thin, paint-smeared T-shirt, I believed this package was from you. But you already know that it wasn’t from you. It was from Hope. Or, according to the label sewn into the back, hopeweaver. One word, in an old-but-newish lowercase font, just as I had suggested. A $120 price tag was pinned to the armhole, and on the flip side, Hope had written a short note:
DON’T WORRY. I WASHED IT. XO, HOPE.
She came home just to drop this off before heading back to the studio. Hope had probably wanted to hand deliver it to me in person. I must have missed her by only a few minutes.
Now, this scene could have been more dramatic if I had been wearing the red ME, YES, ME T-shirt I retrieved from the MOM AND DAD box on Sunday afternoon, the one you had customized for me to wear underneath my high school graduation gown all those years ago. It would have been a hugely symbolic gesture, slipping off the garment that you made for me, yes, me and putting on the hopeweaver original, representing my choice of one of you over the other. But the ME, YES, ME T-shirt is still neatly folded among all the other archives I had returned to the cardboard box.
Back in high school, I always said that I wanted a boyfriend who was “the male equivalent of Hope.” Would I have ever loved you if my love for Hope hadn’t come first? Would I have ever loved you if Hope hadn’t left? Would you have loved Hope if she had stayed? If Heath had lived?
I know. Just so many more unanswerable counterfactuals.
seventy-one
I don’t know my way around the winding, one-way, dead-ending streets of the Financial District, so I had trouble finding the office building on Maiden Lane that was temporarily servicing as studio and exhibition space for Hope and her fellow artists. Other floors in the same building are being used as rehearsal rooms, so I got into an elevator packed with a taciturn, pasty-faced musician lugging a dented black case with a bell-shaped bottom for a large brass instrument, a ballet dancer with perfect penguin-waddle turnout shouldering a gym bag and smelling of eucalyptus sore-muscle salve, and two actors discussing audition reels and stints on soap operas who would be wincingly beautiful anywhere else in the world but here are just another waitress and bartender barely worth a second glance. These people wouldn’t know NASDAQ from NASCAR, and I couldn’t help but note the irony of the city’s last bohemians infiltrating the realm of the ruling class, that is, until some mogul buys the building and boots them all out.
The doors opened at the fourth floor and I was surprised when everyone in the elevator got out with me for Hope’s exhibition. This was not one of those spotless all-white boutique galleries you’d find in Chelsea. Nor was it one of those gritty, abandoned warehouses found in one of the last blighted stretches of industrial waterfront. Imagine a typical office floor where the unglamorous but necessary work is done. The accounts payable department, perhaps. Think gray walls, gray industrial carpeting, twitchy fluorescent lighting affecting a gray pallor on the cursed cubicle dwellers who review the expense reports and cut the paychecks of those being compensated far more generously than they are.
Hope shares this swing space with two other female artists. One’s medium was “suspended sculpture.” Her installation was titled “Cuntfight,” and I will try to explain it as best I can. It consisted of female mannequins dipped in primary-colored waxes, then covered in white feathers. These figures were then arranged in twos, striking various battle poses—a headlock, a foot-to-groin, a fist-to-the-face—inside chicken coops that hung from the ceiling via a system of high-tension wires. I know there is no ideal way to die, but death by inadequately tethered suspended sculpture is not the demise I had in mind. I avoided walking underneath the cages.
The second artist worked with “found textiles.” She created quilts made entirely out of objects scavenged from the garbage, each work titled after the corporate receptacles from which the materials had been retrieved. Kmart #3, for example. Or St. Luke’s Hospital #14. Her work was displayed on platforms all over the floor, in the space where the cubicles normally would be.
Hope’s paintings were hung on the opposite side of the space. I hadn’t expected so many people to attend the group show, but the space was crammed with hands clutching their plastic cups of cheap wine, faces nodding contemplatively, bodies swaying to the ambient music selected by the iPod DJ, mouths opening and closing and opining on the state of the contemporary art scene. It took me several minutes to wend my way through the throng, many of whom were predictably dressed in head-to-toe black. Others—like the Wiggity-Wack Retro-Wigger with his blond Gumby, patchwork Heathcliff Huxtable sweater, and thick dookie rope chains, or Little Miss Indian in her beaded moccasins, red, white, and blue feather
ed headdress, and pink Pocahontas nightshirt from the Disney Store—presumably saw themselves as 24/7 performance artists whose incontestably retarded fashions put the Care. Okay? and Fuckyomomma crowds to shame, and could inspire even Dexy to pledge evangelical devotion to the Gap.
I caught snippets of conversation, reminding me of a joke Hope once made about how her classmates at RISD often confused contemporary artists with con artists.
“…celebration of the sacred and profane…”
“…deconstruction of gender-specific archetypes…”
Hope was exhibiting a series of oil paintings titled “(Re)Collection.” A small placard explained the inspiration behind her work, in Hope’s own words.
In January 2006, I was on a road trip with my best friend during which we planned to visit our nation’s most expressively named cities. I forced her to pull over our rental car so I could check out a flea market held in a church parking lot on the outskirts of Virginville, Pennsylvania. There, for the price of five dollars, I bought a box of approximately 250 loose photos from the 1950s to 1970s. I was drawn to these unmarked snapshots documenting the major and minor milestones in an anonymous family’s life. I manipulate these images by computer and by hand, an amalgamation of old and new techniques. I combine the past with the present in medium and message, both restoring history and reinventing it.
For Hope, those photos told the real story of our road trip. But for me, they had been a totally forgettable part of the experience, a point not even worth footnoting in the infamous carjacking story, when, in fact, Hope had fanned those photos all over the table at the Bandit Diner, trying to get me to see their beauty, trying to get me to see what she saw in them. All I had seen was a pile of humdrum pictures of people we didn’t even know doing perfectly ordinary things that every family did: Blowing out birthday candles. Grinning in front of the Christmas tree. Posing stiffly next to a prom date. Showing off a shiny new convertible.
But now these reimagined images were striking. Moments once captured in stark black and white were painted over in vivid yellows, pinks, and purples. Hope used broad strokes that made each canvas appear slightly out of focus, giving each scene a muted, distant feel of a dream you lose upon waking. These paintings were at once familiar and brand-new. The close-up of a pigtailed girl howling with tears in front of the lit candles on her fourth-birthday cake brought me back to the meltdown I had on my bitter sixteenth birthday when my carrot cake came with vanilla frosting instead of the cream cheese kind. The awkward teenage couple in their polyester formal wear evoked the prickle of gooseflesh, the gasp of anticipation, when you unzipped my prom dress and let it fall to the floor….
I don’t know how long I stood there, oblivious to everything going on outside my own mind.
“You’re here.”
I turned around to see Hope standing right behind me. She smiled when she saw that I was wearing the hopeweaver original T-shirt with my broken-in jeans and the Chucks I’ve had since high school. She was lit up in a black-and-silver Lurex striped sleeveless cowl-neck sweater minidress. It was an outfit I would never borrow.
“Of course I’m here,” I replied. “I couldn’t miss your big Manhattan debut.”
“It’s not so big,” she said, hunching up her shoulders shyly.
Just then an antic guy in a fur trapper hat crashed through our conversation.
“Are you the artist?” he asked.
Her eyes flitted to the floor. “Yes, I am.”
“I fucking love your aesthetic,” he said in all earnestness.
“Thank you,” Hope said politely.
And then Trapper Hat proceeded to talk more with his hands than with his mouth about Truth and Beauty and Art without making much sense at all. While he jabbered, I turned back to the wall and tried to figure out how she had done it. I was as baffled by these paintings as I had been by the process that had transformed hundreds of colorful paper slivers into the mosaic of two smiling thirteen-year-olds.
Hope slipped beside me. “Oh, man, I thought he’d never stop,” she said, glancing over her shoulder nervously, worrying that he might come back after he refilled his plastic wine cup.
“How did you turn those pictures into these paintings?” I asked. “Or would knowing how you did it ruin the effect?”
She relaxed a bit. “Of course I can tell you.” And then she went on to explain how she scanned her favorite found photographs, then edited them via PhotoShop, zooming in and cropping out however she saw fit. She blew up the reworked image, now a blurry fragment of the original, and affixed that new print to her canvas. Finally she painted over the whole thing with oils.
“I—” she began, before being interrupted by yet another fan of her work.
“Combine the past with the present in medium and message, both restoring history and reinventing it,” whispered a wraithlike stranger in a suit of black leather who was lurking behind us.
“Er, right,” Hope said nervously before grabbing me by the elbow. “I combine the past with the present in medium and message, both restoring history and reinventing it,” she said in a mocking singsong as she encouraged me to move across the room. “It sounds so pretentious….”
“Don’t apologize. I was just thinking about how much of my past resonates in my present. I certainly have a hard time letting go.”
“Maybe the past doesn’t want to let go of you.” I glimpsed Hope’s fragile eggshell face, then quickly returned my attention to her work, which was infinitely easier to focus on.
“They’re beautiful,” I said. “Your paintings are like…” I grasped for a fitting way to describe the feelings these pictures evoked.
“David Hockney meets Diane Arbus,” offered a third stranger, one whose dyed-black asymmetrical bangs were cut right across his eyes, concealing half of his view.
Hope ignored him. “It’s like…getting caught up in someone else’s memories,” she said dreamily.
“Exactly,” I concurred.
And then the tears tore up her face.
“Jess,” she said. “I am so sorry….”
“Don’t cry,” I said. “You’ll mess up your makeup.”
But it was already too late. Dirty rivulets of mascara were already staining her porcelain skin. Hope is a loud, messy crier.
“I’M SO SORRY…,” she blubbered. I lunged for a hug. This is not something Hope and I usually do. We are not huggers.
“We don’t need to have this conversation,” I said, pressing my face into the back of her neck. She smelled of ginger shampoo and lavender oil; the latter, she had told me, is used as an inoffensive paint-thinning substitute for turpentine.
“But I want to tell you…”
“We don’t need to have this conversation,” I repeated firmly. “It doesn’t matter.”
Hope loosened her grip on me, so I could reel back and look her in the face. Her complexion was ashen, her eyes wide and petrified that another overly familiar stranger would bust in on our discussion to expound on her work’s Depth and Profundity.
“Let’s get you out of here,” I urged.
I had expected Hope to protest. After all, she had been working on “(Re)Collection” so hard and for so long at the expense of food, sleep, fun, and sanity, and goddammit, tonight was the time to celebrate. But she immediately brightened at my suggestion.
“I was hoping you would say that,” she said, unleashing a gust of pent-up air. “I can’t handle all this attention. I think I was kind of hoping you would rescue me.”
“Well, I’m here,” I said, smiling.
“Of course you are,” she replied.
I took her paint-splotched hand.
seventy-two
We got a cab. As we sped across the Brooklyn Bridge, I couldn’t help but cast a backward glance at Manhattan. I’ve lived in the city now for almost five years, and there’s still a part of me that retains that corny, touristy sense of wonder when I see the peak of the Empire State Building all aglow at a distance. Just give me a
pair of white sneakers and a fanny pack.
“Marcus and I have been together for more than four years.”
Hope was hesitant to say anything on this subject, the subject of you.
“That’s the most common time for long-term couples to break up. Four years.”
“Really?”
“Really,” I confirmed. “And this is all over the world, and across every racial, socioeconomic, political, and religious spectrum.”
“Do you even qualify as having been together for four years?”
It was a fair question, considering you and I didn’t speak to each other for two years.
“You and Marcus remind me of that Kahlil Gibran quote,” Hope said. “‘Let there be spaces in your togetherness.’”
“That’s…um…deep,” I replied.
“It’s engraved on every other wedding program in the NYC metro area.”
Just then I remembered something I had read in preparation for my interview with Dr. Kate, about how all relationships fall into predictable patterns if you study them long enough. Ours was so simple, and yet it had never occurred to me until right there, beside Hope in the cab between one borough and the other:
CONNECTION
SEPARATION
CONNECTION
SEPARATION
CONNECTION…
“There’s been too many spaces in our togetherness,” I said, almost in a whisper. “Our relationship is defined by separation. By silences.”
The funny thing is, I could have just as easily been talking about Hope and me. But she knew.
“It seems to me,” Hope said, “that you and Marcus need more togetherness in your spaces.”
For a few seconds the only sound was of the tires heartbeating over the dips in the road.
Ba-dump-dump. Ba-dump-dump. Ba-dump-dump.
“What the hell does that mean?” I asked.