“That’s okay, Edith. It’s a good question. I’m okay for a few months, and then I don’t know. My gallerist wants to put together some . . . memorial show, it seems like to me, although of course no one will call it that. The things I had finished and a number I hadn’t.”
“Then I’ll buy some. I don’t have anything on my walls but twenty years ago.”
“I hope that won’t be necessary. Maybe I can give you one.”
In the way that it sometimes does for people whose rapport has advanced very quickly, the open speech had dried up, as if to reflect on how recently theirs had been a cordial but transactional relationship. They assessed each other in the silence, making eye contact then letting it break.
“Well,” she said. “I could bring you some lunch tomorrow. Will you be here?”
He was. She did. For weeks it became his only routine, and he had showered for it, cracked windows here and there, swept.
—
“WHY DON’T YOU CALL IT A Living Question,” he’d said, over coffee with his gallerist, a woman whose hair was always mounted asymmetrically and who typed intermittently on her smartphone as she spoke to him, ostensibly taking notes.
“Oh, that’s good,” she’d answered, not detecting the dark humor in his voice, spitting a little through the signature gap in her front teeth.
“No, Ivy, it’s—I’m the—”
“Of course this is all up to you. But I was thinking we could mount them from finished to un-, so we’re sort of watching the progress in reversal, almost a record of decay.” Her voice was rich with her own regard for it. Thomas tried to cover the disgust he felt appearing on his face with a hand over his mouth and a series of discerning nods.
Chased by absurd nightmares of poverty in which debt collectors followed him in Groucho Marx masks, Thomas had agreed to meet Ivy for the sake of his practical future, but the thought of his unfinished pieces on display, the naked lines in pencil, made all the pulse points in his body raise up and hammer.
In the weeks that followed he agreed to almost everything she suggested, curatorial statements and promotional photos and times and dates. He made clear that he would not be in attendance at the opening, and she didn’t protest, his absence being something she believed might sell. Several anticipatory write-ups appeared, which she forwarded to him, and which remained unread.
The night that people in ironic jumpsuits and vintage fur coats gathered in oblique lighting before his paintings, he was perched on tiptoe in Edith’s bathtub, making marks in pencil on the wall above it. Thomas had kept one for her: six by four feet, a pictorial rendering of continental drift. Over several years, in fertile browns and cold blues and sylvan greens, he had translated the formation of the Appalachians, the dwindling of seaways, the birth of glaciers, the rise of submerged islands. He had worked at it as though it were a marriage, fighting with it and watching it change, and he was glad to appoint it here, let it alone.
He felt the hum of his telephone in his pocket and silenced it without a look. It was Ivy, texting to say that some tech celebrity, the founder of a location-based dating app, had purchased a triptych of his paintings. The sale could support him for a year, two if he was careful.
When he had finished he called to Edith in the kitchen, where she was cursing to herself and filling the building with the smell of a roast, carrots in brown sugar and butter. In another life, one he had enjoyed until just recently, he would have refused to hang it there, would have warned her that the steam from her long baths would warp it. Instead, he offered her the strength of his forearm as she climbed over the porcelain lip, and they raised the wooden frame of the canvas together, making small adjustments as they searched for the nails he had driven, commenting on the angle, tugging at it until it was straight, and flush, and bright.
Later, he would come to wonder. As she lay in the bath, her mind going, did she consider what hung there? And was it the thing that called her back, to her cluttered papers, to her life’s quiet routine; or was it the thing that lied to her, muddling chronology and nibbling at private truths, and led her, with a gentle hand, away?
PAULIE TRIED not to give in to the feeling but some facts rendered him melancholy no matter what kinds of songs he’d been playing or if the clouds were forming pointy faces or if he’d run into any ugly dogs that day.