good housekeeping is a thing of the past
It seemed to her that at the show many of the pictures were alike. If there was an inventive thing among it all, it was something she did not notice, despite all the things that cried for a look.
Where was she? Why was she here? The thought that this was just a pastime was somehow galling. She looked down at her drink and saw the lime lying lifeless beneath a few pieces of vanishing ice. The place was too hot, even with the small number of people. Was it the lights? Were they too harsh? Were they somehow stealing the air away?
Walls of pure white, little things on a tray, small glasses of social lubricant – but there she was, trying to figure out what it all meant. There was an image, part of a woman’s face. It was the eyes looking up and to the right, a partial bit of the cheekbone, the slight ridge of the nose, and an eyebrow. But then swirls of something, smoke?, faded around the edges and there was nothing else of the form. She looked at the title card. Gouache? What even was that.
The portrait to the left—was it a portrait? Could you call what this was a portrait, or was it figurative art? It was the same, a bit of something real, but then surrounded by something not. There were barriers to shoulder in the portrait, ensuring that it was not connected to something else. Was the artist trying to focus her attention on just the one thing, as if that gave it meaning? Or was he trying to put a limit on what he wanted to portray? Why this?
Above her, a fan slowly circled.
I should leave. But she didn’t, and really didn’t have a reason why. It seemed to be admitting some failure. That the inability to look at these things for ten minutes, to like these what-have-yous, was baring some flaw. There was that time, perhaps ten years ago now, that she had last been out and done something like this. Aldo had been the kind of person that liked this. There was no shortage of comment. “Isn’t this one just fun,” he’d say. “There’s this little bit here at the edge, and you can see he just wants something more to happen here. Why do you think that is?”
“Perhaps he just wants to put an exclamation point on it,” she said.
“Yes, I think that’s just it. There’s the whole thing, just in these two square inches. Forget about the rest. It’s there, but it’s just there.”
And that would be their afternoon in ten minutes. There were the other things, the walk across the Sheep Meadow, the restaurant, drinking a little too much, and then the afternoon up in his apartment. All of the rest of it never came into her head unless it was from that moment, that one conversation.
Her mother had a theory. “Cal,” she said, “there are only four decisions you get to make in your life. Only four real decisions. What you major in at college, who you marry, whether you have kids, and what you name them.”
Mother had been like that. Sudden pronouncements after years of going with the flow. The moves from one place to another, further and further down the East Coast as the retirement money had gotten tight. It hadn’t seemed to bother her. “I’ll just find another place in North Carolina.” And there had been no shortage of them. Small towns, close to the sea, full of new people she never seemed to have any trouble meeting. Endless numbers of Christmas cards flowed to the former neighbors of Thisville and Thatville, Upper Whatsis and Lower Wherehaven.
She had carried on, until she couldn’t any more. There was the exclamation point on it. On the day her mother had passed away, Cal was on a train heading home from work. She might as well have been on the lunar surface. The call couldn’t reach her, the message came too late anyway. It was a neighbor who had found her. She had passed away in her sleep, simply. The four choices she had made were Child Psychology, Theodore Graham, one daughter, Cal.
Aldo had understood when she went away. And he seemed to understand as well, when she hadn’t come back. New York was going nowhere, she had said. This seemed as good a time as any to admit that. She’d take a few months and sort through her mother’s things, then she’d see what happened next. The rent was cheap, and she had enough to cover the rest of the lease while she saw what was what. The therapist she started seeing down there had given her a clean bill after ten visits and off she went.
He had asked her in one of those long phone conversations at the end, “Don’t you have any feelings about any of this? It just seems like you should.”
“I do,” she said. “But let’s not make this about nostalgia. That seems like making something be there that isn’t. I’m not going to be homesick. New York was never going to be my home.”
The artwork was very New York. She could tell just by looking at it that the artist had spent time there, either in one of the design programs or working as an illustrator. There was just something about them all that made them look the same. Or not quite the same, that wasn’t it. It was more like a sensibility, something that made them all point toward the same direction. No one said anything the same way, but they all meant the same thing, even if they held something back and played a little at being mysterious.
Someone had to do it, be mysterious. There was always someone doing that. She could remember other galleries, other museums. In those places there was always someone hiding somewhere. This was no different. Her eye followed the smoke and her brain started asking questions. Who is this person? Where is the rest of their face? Why did she end up here?
If she was really ruthless about it, there were no answers to any of those questions. It didn’t matter who had stood for the drawing, or the photo that eventually became the drawing. That person wasn’t here. The rest of their face was somewhere else, moved on to other things. The thing here had a life of its own now.
It’s just so white in here, she thought. This was the code of these places, nothing to distract you from the art. But it’s just so white in here. There didn’t seem even to be a place where you leave a scuff mark with your shoe, even by accident. The light was so pure that it would swallow up the mark. There was no texture even. When she thought of the orange-skin appearance of the walls in her apartment, they were beige, but at least there was something there. These seemed like a cartoon infinity, and if you looked in the right place between the art, you could see off into a place of no horizon.
The last one she looked at was by the same artist. “R. Meakham,” she read. It was a shadow. Unlike the others, there was no arm, no head, no part of an expression. The pigment was thick in one place, then trailed off into the smoke that figured into the others. Somehow, there was still a person there. She squinted at it, but there was nothing obvious. Still, she could have sworn there was a person under that. A face? There was no face, no lips. Could it have been a shoulder or a back? Nothing, it was all black. But under all of it, there must have been something that was not a trick of the light.
“I’ll take this one,” she said to the woman with the name tag.
There was a moment. It was just a pause, perhaps because Cal had come seemingly out of nowhere. Or perhaps it was just this piece, which had hung toward the back, although not for any reason that was immediately apparent. The moment was there, but the woman with the name tag blinked.
“Please, let’s just make this happen before I forget the whole thing,” Cal said, even more abruptly. “The whole thing gives me a migrane, to be honest. But we seem to have picked each other, so that’s that.”
There were arrangements, but it arrived the next week, escorted by someone from the gallery who could not be convinced to drive the nail at the cost of any tip. That meant the new picture went over the console, on the nail from the old picture. “It looks lovely,” the driver from the gallery offered. “You have a lovely home.”
I certainly do not, she thought. But you have to start sometime.
Mike Olivo is the managing editor for Teachers College Press at Columbia University. He lives in New Jersey.
General board, Fall 1992 to Spring 1994