A Slender Thread (9 page)

“I miss Oliver,” Margot said.

“And things are . . . good with him?” Lacey pushed open the back door and Margot followed her out to the car.

“Everything's fine,” she said in what she hoped was a reassuring voice. She loved Oliver. She couldn't imagine her life in New York without him. His recent bouts of insecurity were part of life. Alex and Lacey's marriage couldn't always be perfect either. How would they cope with all they were facing now? Wink was right in sensing that something was wrong. Yet a child had no way of discerning what her parents were like as a couple. That private side of marriage was unknowable. Margot tried to imagine Alex and Lacey alone together. In light of all that had happened, what did they talk about? Were they able to tell each other everything? Perhaps they knew each other so well there was no need to talk. After all, they had been together since childhood. Maybe they shared a tacit understanding, some kind of marital telepathy that went beyond words.

Margot had not told Oliver everything about her own past. Some things—yes. But not all. Was she making a mistake in holding back?

Lacey backed up the car and began the drive to the bus terminal. The sky was blue today and the air cold. “I just wish,” she said, “that your . . . life was more . . . stable.”

“You don't need to worry about me,” Margot said, feeling defiance creeping into her voice. “We're fine.”

“I know that.” She gave Margot a brief smile and said nothing for a while. After a series of bridges and causeways they wound their way into Portsmouth.

“Have you ever thought of painting again?”

“I could never go back to it now,” Margot said, thinking of her awkward attempt to draw the bittersweet. She was glad that Lacey had dropped the topic of Oliver. It was hard to explain to Lacey that she didn't need marriage, children, and hosting family holidays to be happy. “It's been too long,” she added. “Besides, I love choosing art and showing it. That's more than enough.”

“You were very good.” Lacey pulled the car to a stop at a light. The traffic was heavier. Holiday shopping season had officially begun.

“Not really.”

“You were. You just let . . .” Lacey closed her mouth.

Margot waited. Lacey seemed to have given up her thought.

Finally Margot spoke. “I don't want to paint now.”

The light changed to green. Lacey accelerated. “That's not right,” she said emphatically.

“It's fine with me. Having Oliver around is enough artists for one household,” she said in a joking way.

“You are better,” she said.

“Come on.”

“You are.”

“Look, it's ridiculous to argue about this.”

They had arrived at the bus terminal. Lacey pulled the car into one of the fifteen-minute parking places and turned off the engine. The bus was due to leave on the hour.

Margot stared down at her lap. Why were they even talking about painting or her life with Oliver? How could she have forgotten the real problem, even for a second? “Lacey,” she said, “the girls are concerned. They sense something's wrong.”

“Did they say something?” Lacey's face was pale in the unflattering light of the car. The fine lines around her eyes seemed deeper.

“Wink is worried that things aren't right between you and Alex.” Margot felt guilty about betraying her niece's confidence. She had never been disloyal. Being younger, and not their mother, Margot had found her nieces were inclined to share their feelings with her. “Toni senses something, too.”

“Alex and I are going to be fine.”

“I think you should tell them.”

Lacey slammed her hands against the steering wheel. “Don't tell me that. I know what I'm doing. I'm their mother. Not you.”

Margot moved closer to the door, feeling as if she'd been slapped. A few fat clouds blew across the sky, covering the sun. The air in the car grew chilled.

“If I say it,” Lacey said, her voice measured and determined, “if I tell them, then it's . . . true.”

“I just think it's better to be honest with them. Please, let's go back to the house.” Margot tried to keep her voice gentle. She wanted to persuade her sister, not anger her further. “I could change my ticket and stay another day,” she said, realizing that taking some kind of action might make a difference. “It might be easier for you if they knew what's going on.”

“Absolutely not.” Lacey straightened and drew in her breath. “I don't want to upset them. We're going to be fine.”

“But you're not fine. I want to help you.”

Lacey shook her head and jutted her chin out resolutely. “We'll be okay. I can manage.”

“Lacey, you can't manage everything.” Some things with her sister never changed. Lacey always had to be in charge, the one in control. Margot had convinced herself that this was a good quality, this strength, this endurance. Alex was usually willing to go along with his wife. Yet during the course of the last few days, his outlook had seemed to alter, as if his determination to carry on was draining out of him, like a tire with a slow leak.

A huge silver bus roared past them toward the bay designated for the route to Logan Airport. Other travelers got out of the waiting cars.

“I don't have to leave,” Margot said. “Let's go home and talk to the girls together.”

Lacey shook her head and turned to open her car door.

Margot got out of the car and took her bag from the backseat. Lacey came around and hugged her sister. “I don't want to go,” Margot said.

“You have to.” Lacey inhaled deeply and smiled. “I'm fine. Really.”

Margot hesitated and then went to the bus. She was the last to board. After stumbling down the narrow aisle, she took a seat by the window at the rear. A moment later the driver backed out of the bay and circled to the far side of the terminal. Margot looked back at the parking lot. Lacey's car was gone.

 

Saturday evening Oliver prepared to leave the apartment at five thirty to take the subway downtown. His return flight to New York had been easy. That morning Jenna had served him a bagel, as good as any in New York, and delicious strong coffee. He had been grateful for the time with his daughter. Maybe Margot would come with him on his next visit.

Leonard Witt, a thirty-year-old British artist, was having an opening at the Gearing Gallery in Chelsea. Another young talent on the way up. Carl Van Engen, Oliver's dealer, had told him that some important collectors might be there; he thought it would be politic for Oliver to make an appearance. This whole business of art was wearing him down. He hated parties, schmoozing, talking the talk, trying to act like some kind of personality, the famous artist who'd soared to the top in the nineties.

Oliver particularly hated going to parties alone. Margot's flight arrived at six and he had asked her to join him at the gallery. He wished they could just spend the evening at home, and felt bad that they had to go out. He'd kept missing her calls while in Atlanta, and realized too late that he'd forgotten to charge his cell phone.

Tonight Hector was the doorman on duty. “Hey, Mr. Levin. Evening on the town? Senora Margot still away? Must be—I don't see you smiling.”

“Margot's on her way, Hector. After she leaves her things here she's joining me downtown. She may need a taxi.”

“Don't you worry. I take good care of her.”

Oliver thanked Hector and walked to the subway. Oliver had purchased his apartment, located on Riverside Drive and 109th Street, from an elderly aunt when he first started to make money as an artist. This was not a typical artist's address, not being in one of the edgier neighborhoods downtown or in Brooklyn. Indeed, Oliver was somewhat embarrassed by his upper-middle-class background. He didn't advertise the fact that he lived in this upscale West Side location, though when he had bought the apartment twenty years ago it was a neighborhood in transition, inhabited by Columbia professors and students. Over the years, with the inevitable gentrification, fancier shops and restaurants had taken over the commercial blocks.

The cold night air improved his mood somewhat. He would get back to work tomorrow. He had three canvases in progress now, each one pulling him, begging for his time.

The subway car was bearable at this time of night on a Saturday. It irked him to see young kids, plugged in, legs extended, lounging in the train while an elderly, obviously tired woman held fast to a pole after possibly a day of cleaning hotel rooms or offices. Looking around at the young people in his immediate vicinity tonight, he realized that they would consider him old. How had that happened?

Oliver arrived at the gallery just after six and tried to make his way over to Marie Stone, an artist close to his own age. They had had a joint show together a few years before. She was a large woman, easy to spot in the crowd on the far side of the room. After many years of working as a painter, she had recently switched to sculpture. The humorous clay statues that she had been producing lately made him think of mythic figures on Valium. It was hard to look at her work without smiling. Marie was easy to talk to. It was as if they shared the same artistic vocabulary, yet her work had taken off in an entirely new direction. She saw him and waved.

Oliver nodded and eased past a group of young people dressed in black, presumably other artists. One girl's blond hair stood up in short spiky tufts. A wraithlike redhead beside her was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt. A green and purple snake tattoo slithered down her pale arm. Two men, both in black leather jackets, looked like they needed shaves, and one had the kind of thick black glasses that Oliver's father had worn back in the sixties.

The room was packed and the hot air was filled with the scent of cheap wine and overripe cheese. Margot called it gallery breath, and refused to drink at openings. He paused and looked at one of Witt's paintings. Abstract, intense color, and yet the swirl of paint on the canvas grabbed Oliver, sucking him in and making him wonder where this energy came from. Forget spare minimalism. This guy was a cross between a controlled Renaissance master and the splattering of a Jackson Pollock. The canvas was not large and yet, the painting worked. This young guy had talent.

Oliver took a glass of white wine from a waiter passing with a tray and headed toward Marie. Just then he felt a tug at his arm.

“Oliver, how are you, dear?” Hannah Greene looked up at him.

Oliver dutifully bent and kissed both of Hannah's leathery cheeks. Her silver hair smelled of cigarette smoke. “Good to see you,” he said. “How's June?” He looked across the room in search of Hannah's partner, June Wallace, a stringy woman who wrote bad poetry. But she was a rich poet, thanks to her father, who had once owned motel chains in the Midwest. Hannah and June had been a couple for more than twenty years and lived in a brownstone on West Eleventh Street. They owned two of Oliver's paintings.

“She's at a reading, a woman from her poetry group.” Hannah was in her sixties, a short, heavy woman who had probably never had a waist. “June is loyal to her friends.”

Oliver nodded, trying to think of a reply. Someone behind him jarred his elbow, nearly causing him to spill his wine down the front of Hannah's dress. “Sorry,” he said, glancing at her.

She patted the brown velvet that rippled across her bosom. “Not a drop.”

Oliver shifted his glass to the other hand and tried to wipe his wet hand on his corduroy trousers.

“That's quite some painting you have at Van Engen's,” she said.

“Does that mean you like it?” He forced a smile.

“Ha!” Hannah barked a laugh in reply. “Well, of course it's good. June says she doesn't know where you get those odd figures, the ones who just seem to turn up.”

Oliver was momentarily taken aback by June's blunt comment. He didn't know where some of the lone people came from either. He had explained once in an interview for
Art News
that his paintings were stories that came to his mind, and as he worked, the figures often seemed to emerge from the paint itself, as if he had no say at all as to who came onto the canvas. Over the years, he had come to accept his process. Still, the unexpected shapes in his work disturbed him.

“I'm working on something new. You and June should come down to the studio.”

“We'll do that. Junie likes to keep an eye on her artists.” Hannah looked beyond Oliver to the entrance. “Oh, my,” she said. “There's Leonard Witt. Do you know him, dear? June already bought one of his pieces. Come on. I want to introduce you to him.” She took Oliver's still moist hand in a decisive grip. Oliver swallowed his annoyance and let himself be led across the room toward the throng of people circling the artist. He glanced back toward Marie, hoping he could excuse himself from Hannah, but she was now lost in the crowd. Hannah bulldozed ahead, and just before reaching Leonard and his admirers Oliver saw Margot come through the front door.

She looked dazed as she entered; then a second later she nodded and moved toward him. Her lovely eyes, the color of the sky after a rain, met his. He pulled his hand out of Hannah's grip, excused himself, and made his way over to Margot. He held her briefly. She smelled of the cool night air, and faintly of lily of the valley, her favorite perfume.

He sensed that something was wrong. “Are you all right?”

She squeezed his arms. “Later,” she said.

 

Oliver handed Margot a glass of wine. She leaned back into the sofa cushions, finally at home, totally exhausted. They had gone to dinner with Carl Van Engen, Marie Stone, and some younger artists from the opening who had studied with Marie at NYU. Margot had never figured out who was with whom, and she had remained on the periphery of the conversation. The restaurant was a Korean barbecue restaurant and her sweater now smelled of kimchi.