Still Life With Bread Crumbs: A Novel

Rebecca tried not to look at Tad, which was difficult. It was like ignoring panhandlers on the subway: a clown commanded the eye. She had once been hired by a magazine to take pictures for a story on the vanishing circus. She had not been particularly happy with the results—too obvious, especially the acrobats in their spangled costumes and the clowns in their extravagant makeup, all dour and vacant-faced in repose. There had been some close-ups of the elephant’s eyes that she had thought were good, but of course the magazine had not used them. “They’re a little much for a general audience,” the art director had said, begging the question of why they had hired her to take them. Perhaps for the cover line: “Rebecca Winter Goes to the Circus.” That was during her heyday.

  She opened an email from TG: “Don’t get it.” It was her response to the photographs of the stone wall. She had nevertheless had some interest from the Greifers, the couple in Colorado Springs who had the largest private collection of Winter photographs. Sylvia Greifer had given the original print of Still Life with Bread Crumbs to Wellesley, where she had gone to college. It hung in the front foyer of the administration building, with a copper plaque. The students had started an a cappella group called the Bread Crumbs that sang only songs that had been performed or written by women. There was a lot of Joni Mitchell.

  If the Greifers bought just one of the photographs Rebecca would be safe for a while. She thought of the Mary Cassatt hanging in the hallway of Sonya’s apartment. Ben had dated an associate at Sotheby’s last year who estimated, sight unseen, that it was worth at least $100,000. “Shouldn’t somebody take a look at it?” Ben had asked.

  “It’s not my concern, or yours,” she’d said, although she’d often wondered the same thing. “The painting belongs to your grandmother.”

  “I could use a little cash,” Ben had said. He had no idea that the same was true of his mother. It was not useful for children to know about their parents’ money worries, although Rebecca would have found it useful to know that her own parents were going broke some years before they finally, stupendously, had. Her mother had been barely cogent when she’d signed the papers to sell the apartment where she’d once lived with her own parents and which her father had deeded to her and her husband. “You never had a head for business,” she’d muttered as she left the room. “She’s right, as always,” Rebecca’s father said, his head and shoulders down so low, his face so pink with chagrin, he looked like a boiled shrimp curved into the carved chair at the head of the dining table.

  TG’s new assistant—there was a new assistant every few months, the old one driven away in tears—forwarded an email from Carnegie Mellon about a visiting professorship the following fall. A semester in Pittsburgh, with a house provided and an honorarium she once would have thought insufficient but which now seemed eminently possible. She wrote to the program director to ask for more specifics.

  “May I join you?” the clown asked, sinking into one of the bentwood chairs before she could reply. The chair made a wheezing sound, or maybe it was the clown. She supposed it was useful, career-wise, for a clown to be heavy. Most of the clowns she’d photographed for the magazine had been round, except for one who was very tall and spindly and another who was a dwarf. “Little person,” the magazine writer had called him, but the clown had said, “Babe, let’s call a spade a spade, I’m a dwarf. My mother was a dwarf, my dad was a dwarf, they called themselves dwarfs. That little person stuff is crap.”

  The magazine made the writer take out that quote, and refer to the dwarf as a little person. They tried to make Rebecca shoot color, but she had refused.

  “Theodore Brinks,” the clown said, holding out a hand and then rooting around in a brown paper bag until he found a ham and cheese scone. “I’ve wanted very much to meet you. I’m an admirer of your work.” Rebecca’s artist friends hated being told that by a certain sort of person, who was not actually familiar with the work but knew of its existence. She had seen it over and over again at shows, the banker who invested in art for its resale value, the banker’s wife who wanted something to go over the antique credenza. “If only it was a little longer,” she’d once heard some woman murmur to herself while she stood in front of a smallish piece. Some of the artists she knew would gently bait the potential buyers, particularly if the show was doing well and they could afford to be cavalier about sales. “Which of my work do you particularly like?” one of them might say, with the resulting obligatory stammers and silences. It would be so easy for someone to do it to this man, with his pale mild eyes. He was the sort of person born to be bullied, the sort of person for whom school must have been like penal servitude, or being burned at the stake with wet wood.

  “I hope you don’t mind my saying that I liked the action figure photographs best,” he said, putting a piece of scone in his mouth.

  “Thank you.” So few people actually remembered the action figure photographs that he must genuinely know her work. “You’re a clown,” she said, to fill the empty space of chagrin she felt.

  He nodded, pressing down crumbs with his index finger, putting his finger into his mouth. “The Magnificent Mo Mo,” he said. “It’s a name even the littlest children can master. The Mo Mo part. And the adults seem to like it. The truth is that most of the business side is done with adults. Today I’m doing balloon animals at the opening of a car lot.” He waved airily to the front windows of the café. “I have an air canister in the truck. When I was younger I could blow them up myself, but now—no. A decent puppy takes two balloons.”

  “I love those puppy dogs,” called Sarah, who made no pretense of minding her own business. “Remember how you made a whole mess of puppy dogs when I opened the place? I didn’t even want to give them away to the kids until you told me they wouldn’t last.”

  “They deflate,” he told Rebecca in a low voice, as though it was an unfortunate trade secret. He was eating a second scone.

  “And the giraffes! Those were great. And those hat things, the kids loved those. You were the best, Tad, pulling those quarters from behind their ears. And the matchmaking! You should charge. Who was that girl you found that day? I didn’t even know her name and the next thing I hear, you introduced her to the guy who teaches science at the middle school, and they’re going out, and then they’re engaged, and did they get married? I heard they were going to get married.”

  “Valentine’s Day,” Tad said, using the edge of his pinkie to wipe crumbs from his upper lip, apparently to protect his makeup. “I’m performing at the reception.” He looked at Rebecca. “I enjoy bringing people together.”

  “You’re singing at the reception?” Sarah said, pulling up the other chair at the little table. Rebecca looked down at her computer. She had an email from the program director at Carnegie Mellon, with the subject line “Thrilled and delighted.” Tad closed the bag and rose from the table, straightening his gargantuan bow tie.

  Out the front window of Tea for Two, Rebecca and Sarah could see him reapplying red to his lips as he sat in the car. “He doesn’t like it when you call it lipstick,” Sarah said. “He prefers lip color.”

  “He’s a singer as well?”

  “Saddest story in town,” Sarah said, in that way people have of introducing a story they’ve told before and never get tired of telling. “He was a boy soprano. People say he had the most beautiful voice you’ve ever heard. He sang at the Vatican! That was on a tour of Europe with the choir when he was twelve. And let me tell you, I’ve heard the school choir at Christmas and they’re not necessarily a group that would get invited to tour Europe. I mean, they’re okay, but you don’t say, Vienna Boys’ Choir, or anything like that. But they even sang in Vienna, and it was all because of him. He made a record, too, and was on TV, radio, all the rest. Then he got invited to this big contest for singing kids in New York City, maybe at Carnegie Hall? Or Radio City, one of those places.”

  Rebecca thought she knew which one Sarah meant. It was called the Rothrock competition. Coincidentally the couple who had endowed it had
lived in her parents’ building. They had had an eight-year-old with a pretty singing voice who drowned at a Maine summer camp.

  “You can’t imagine what happened,” said Sarah, but of course Rebecca could imagine. Being a boy soprano had a shorter shelf life than being a supermodel. She could almost see it as Sarah went on and on, the boy with the pale blue eyes, insensible to the hormones coursing through his body as he stood on the stage at Alice Tully Hall. Apparently his choir director had chosen “Old Man River,” sung not in the bass range made famous by Paul Robeson, or in the dialect in which it had been written, but in a high register with crisp consonants.

  (To be fair to the choir director, he had never heard Robeson’s version, or seen Show Boat. He had heard the song only on a Frank Sinatra album. Even there it lost a great deal in translation.)

  “Like, right in the middle,” she heard Sarah say, her eyes enormous in her plump pink face, but Rebecca suspected that it might have been closer to the end. The biggest strain in the performance would be on the two most indelible lines, and she could feel the boy straining to reach the notes: I’m tired of living, and scared of dying. That was where his voice would break, in a room full of listeners, with a panel of judges just below him raising their pencils in the aftermath of the cracked crescendo, signaling his suddenly transformed life: the boy who had once been.

  She shivered. She remembered hiring a clown once for Ben’s birthday party. She couldn’t remember his clown name, but his actual name was Bob, and he’d arrived at the apartment wearing khaki pants and a polo shirt, dragging a large wheelie suitcase behind him. “I find that it’s better if I suit up and make up in front of the kids,” he’d said. “You’d be surprised at how many people suffer from coulrophobia.”

  “Fear of clowns?” Rebecca had said.

  “Exactly.” Bob had parked himself on an ottoman in front of the living room windows and as the seven-year-olds stared he had put on a layer of white, a big sprawling red mouth, some triangles of black around his eyes, a white wig that looked like doll hair after a washing. He had handed red foam noses all around, and then he had put a large one on over his own nose, and put on oversize black glasses, and made a silly clown face, and one of the little boys had let out a shriek and run to the bathroom. His mother had had to stand at the bathroom door for ten minutes—“It’s a clown, honey, clowns aren’t scary, it’s just a man in a clown suit, it’s fun, come on out, it’s just a clown, for Christ’s sake, Nicholas, it’s just a damn man in a clown suit, this is ridiculous, unlock this door, unlock this door right now, I swear to God”—before he would emerge. “Is he gone?” Nicholas had whispered.

  “It’s a harder job than most people imagine,” Bob had said as he packed up.

  “Saddest story in town,” Sarah repeated. “Well, maybe second saddest. Oh, Lord, I have to take those rolls out of the rising box. Tad is really good at fixing people up!” she called from behind the counter. “He’s found I-don’t-know-how-many husbands for girls around here.”

  “Assuming one needs a husband,” Rebecca said.

  “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle, right? That’s what my mom always used to say after my dad left. Although I was always kind of confused by that, to tell you the truth. I mean, I get it, but it seems a little—I don’t know, weirder than it needs to be. Fish? Bicycle?”

  Rebecca agreed, but did not say so. She was already on her way out, wondering what the saddest story in town was and how much a new coffeepot would cost her.

  GET A JOB

  She began hiking early, just after dawn, because of the heat. One morning she came upon another cross. It was a sad thing, the crossbar askew, and she wondered how long it had been there. Propped up at the bottom of the cross was a photograph beaded with dew. A little girl stood next to a woman, holding her hand. Both of them were wearing patterned summer dresses, and both of them were squinting. The missing front teeth suggested that the girl was six or seven. In some ineffable way the picture also suggested that they were happy, as though after the shutter had clicked they had turned to one another, the girl hugging her mother around the waist, the woman smoothing her daughter’s hair.

  (That is exactly what happened. The girl, now grown, often imagined, as her body was drawn down, heavy, into the peace of sleep, that she could just feel those long-ago arms around her back. There had been cookies and Kool-Aid after, and a wading pool. She still loved the taste of orange Kool-Aid, would until the day she died.)

  Rebecca took many photographs this time and tried to calibrate carefully where she was so she could return. She considered trying to map the locations in which she had found the crosses. The snapshot of the girl and woman was still sharp, but Rebecca knew it would begin to fade soon. The dew had dappled the image slightly, but only slightly, and Rebecca wondered if it had been placed there just that morning, just before she came upon it, and she looked around her. But no one was there, not a soul.

  As she walked on she heard a faint slithering sound behind her; the cross had fallen into two pieces, the crossbar falling atop the photograph. She went back and took more shots. There was something, she told herself. There was something here. As she looked at the image she felt both satisfaction and sadness. The girl still squinted against the strength of some long-ago sunlight, but the woman had disappeared, the crossbar obscuring her face.

  Rebecca had never spent much time with other photographers; Peter didn’t like it, which she had been dumb enough to find flattering. But when she was on panels or at openings, her male colleagues made their work sound like either hard manual labor—ladders, treks, small planes, hours and hours and shot after shot—or stupendous alchemy of which, unspoken, their genius was the greatest part. Rebecca had never seen it that way. She mainly found her good work to be accidental, and immediate. She shot Ben’s red toy truck, the garlic press and the cutting board, the section of the stone wall with the gap that registered black and ominous in the photograph. And somehow, sometimes, it worked.

  That’s what she felt when she looked at the cross photographs. She had not labored over them, or transformed them with the gift of her eye, at least not so she could tell. She just felt them. If no one wanted these photographs she would break her own rule and hang them on her own walls. If she ever had her own walls again. 5800. 1000. The numbers, so often considered that they had become automatic, never changed. She hoped someone would want these photographs. “Don’t get it,” TG might say, but she would be wrong.

  The next day Rebecca got a job.

  SITTING IN A TREE

  Turned out the main difference between sitting in a tree stand waiting for a deer with a gun and sitting in a tree stand waiting for raptors with a chip reader and a camera is conversation. You can’t make conversation while waiting for the deer. You can’t even smoke a cigarette if you are so inclined. You can have some coffee if you’re very careful about clinking the thermos and your arm motions are very slow and precise. But mainly you sit and wait for a buck to enter the clearing and bend his antlered head to the stream to drink, looking for a clear shot so that you don’t wound the poor guy and watch as he crashes, bloodied, into the undergrowth and the far environs, there to die, useless, instead of parceled by the butcher on old Route 127 into neat vacuum-packed packages with preprinted stickers: loin, chops, steaks, venison sausage, venison bologna.

  Thus sayeth Jim Bates.

  “Now, that’s completely different than when my dad and his brothers hunted,” he said after telling her that speech was acceptable if it was muted. “They’d field-dress it where it fell, then bring the deer back to our garage and finish the job. My uncle Fred put a trough sink on one wall and ran a water line direct to our septic just so they could butcher and clean. Then they’d package the meat themselves in brown paper and string. It’s neater now, but it loses something in the translation. There’s nothing like eating a piece of meat you’ve butchered yourself.”

  Rebecca didn’t know what to say. Nothing in the last
ten minutes of conversation was within her ken: the deer, the kill, the butchering, even the venison, which occasionally showed up as a novelty on the menu of some three-star restaurant but which she had certainly never prepared herself. She had also never expected to share the close quarters of a tree stand with a man who she suspected was wearing Old Spice and who would blithely utter the sentence, “There’s nothing like eating a piece of meat you’ve butchered yourself.”

  Just as Rebecca was attempting to frame a reply—with great difficulty, having never eaten a piece of meat she’d butchered herself—there was the sound of something tearing through the rough shrubbery at the edge of the clearing. A man in a cap and a mustard-brown canvas coat emerged trailing a small boy. The man looked up into the tree. The boy sniffed loudly. His nose was a mess. It was all Rebecca could do not to pull a tissue from her jacket pocket and float it down from the tree stand to his snotty hand.

  “Jim,” the man said.

  “Bill,” said Jim as the man jabbed the boy in the back. The boy’s face closed like the shutter of a camera. He wiped his nose with his hand. His father looked from Jim to Rebecca and back again so conspicuously that his head actually swiveled. She wasn’t sure, but Rebecca even thought she heard him say “Hunh.”

  “Janice good?” Jim Bates finally said.

  “She’s getting over the shingles,” the man said, looking away, the barrel of a long gun poking from a sling on his back. “I hear that’s really painful,” Jim said.

  “Do many people pass through here?” Rebecca said when the man and boy had moved on.

  “No. They’re just scouting deer trails so they’ll know where to set up to hunt.”

  There was an entire world out there about which she knew nothing. Field-dress. Trough sink. A language she suspected she had encountered only in nineteenth-century American novels. This man was sure of himself in this language. It was his native tongue. He wasn’t sure of himself the way her husband had been, with an overlay of condescension. After three hours in a tree beside him, she knew he was simply a guy who knew things, just as Sarah had said. She imagined that the things he didn’t know he didn’t feel the need to know.