Blasted (41 page)

And then it always fell short, it fizzled, broke apart into pathetic little shreds of feeling and blew away on the wind. Rutting to try and fill up that cold nothing after
I love you
, or that cold vast nothing that comes from not having been able to say it. Silence festering until I must do something, even if it's the wrong thing.

Fortunately it was Brendan, not I, who did something, and that was to send me home. “The opening is in three days,” he said. “I'll see you there?” It wasn't really a question. He also said, emphatically, that I was “suffering from the obduracy of the world.” Well, thank you very fucking much, Brendan, what does
that
mean? I walked, feet pounding the pavement. His work, as I saw it, was concerned with extracting the beauty and gore of the obvious – not trying to prettify or escape the world – sometimes frighteningly so. So was I suffering from the inability to see my way through the ordinary? Was that creature he'd found in the painting ordinary?
It's something I see in you
, he'd said as we'd begun the work. But that wasn't me.

God, I wanted to fuck someone so badly. Right now. Burning, I walked, I drifted. It is the opening of Brendan's show. It is beautiful. Painting after painting of me lines the gallery walls, darkly beautiful. I move through the crowds, elegant, modest, powerful. People congratulate me. I look over at Brendan where he stands alone, holding two glasses of ruby liquid in his hands, his blue eyes bright as old glass with the sun shining through it. He is wearing a white shirt open at the neck, his grey hair swept back, and he moves toward me with the wine. The people disappear as he comes closer until there is only us… I walked, and walked, the sidewalk unwinding under my feet. The summer had closed, sharpened. October would end in the day that my family feared and hated.

He throws his glass of wine onto the floor; crystal shards and red spatter the white walls, red splashes up onto the feet of the warrior woman painting; with his free hand he grasps the thick braids of my hair and pulls, forcing my head back. He pours the blood wine into my mouth, over my throat, between my breasts: chill. I press my body to his.

The wind rose up. I walked the day away, walked until the fantasies about Brendan numbed and went away, walked myself cold, until I found myself in the empty lot where Jason had parked his van. I sank to my knees on the gravel. A chain-link fence made a half-hearted attempt to separate the field from the parking lot, but here it had been cut and bent so that a person could slip through. I crawled forward on my hands and knees, into the hissing grass. I didn't bother to stand upright; the cool roughness felt good on my hands and I crawled through the grass like an animal. A great tree rose up and I leaned my face against it. I was so tired. A voice, thin and full of menace, filled my mind.
She's not ready yet.
And then I was falling, plunging into cold water and rough hands gripped at me, a man's angry voice, a woman's sobbing. I woke with a jolt. Night had passed, and I was freezing, and covered with leaves. The tree above me stretched naked into the sky.

Three days later, and it was the day of Brendan's opening. The event was at eight; I didn't stir from bed until the sun slanted steeply. At this rate I'd get bed-sores. I rolled over. Blue and Gil had stuck their heads through my bedroom door earlier in the day, saying cheerful things like, “See you at the opening!” and I had waved them away with a limp wrist and a growl. Yeah. They'd see me whether I was there or not. Painting after painting of me, naked as the day I was born.

I pulled the blankets over my head. I couldn't bear it. Even worse, I couldn't bear seeing Brendan after our last session. He
hadn't even taken me up on it.
A girl's pride can only take so much. Oh, God, how horrible if he
had
. I was lucky that he was a gentleman and a true friend.

Braced by this reflection I got up and tried to get dressed. I was acting like a girl, throwing outfit after outfit onto the floor in despair; quite a feat, as I possessed nothing that any real woman would remotely call an
outfit
. “Gill-iii-iiiil?” I shrieked, making it a three-syllable word, thinking he could help, but I was alone. I settled, for a change, on a T-shirt and jeans. A grimy white T-shirt and jeans that hadn't been washed in so long that the arse had gone baggy and I looked like a streel, Lord Jesus. I ate some toast as the last of the light leaked from the sky, and forced myself out onto the street.

The show was down by the water in the midst of a horrible condo-and-gallery complex on the other side of Lakeshore (Blue had confirmed for me that Brendan was big in the art world, even though he wasn't dead – although
he
claimed that he didn't deserve the attention at all and this was only “an exhibition conceived by a committee”). Pigeons crowded the sidewalk of Queen Street, thick as grass, waddling and shedding. Less menacing in crowds, surely, people thronging in the warm evening air. I was going to be late, I just knew I was. I tried to walk faster. A pigeon got under my feet, and instead of hopping to the side or, God forbid,
flying
out of the way, he limped along directly in front of me, head bobbing. I tried to step around him, but he only flew forward a few paces and the chase began again. A space opened out in the crowd before me, the sidewalk suddenly clear. Someone – a woman? – was coming toward me. A cloak swirled around her, made of something that shifted under the eyes, shiny yet soft and dense, now dark, now catching the electric light. Yes, it was a woman; it was her. The pigeon hobbled toward her, disappearing underneath her skirt. She seemed to float rather than walk. The cloak caught the wind and floated up behind, and almost it seemed that her exposed shoulder opened up like a disjointed bird, flesh obscene in the streetlights, bones rising out of her body; then the cloak drifted down again, covering it. Her feet shifted beneath a long skirt; red, strange red shoes made her feet resemble claws. Her beautiful face shifted under my eyes like the cloak. People streamed on either side of me, of her, like water parting for two rocks; I couldn't move. She was only ten feet away now. Her eyes burned, she reached out her hand. I tried to speak but my tongue lay weighted in my mouth like a stone.

Then, behind her, another figure. A tall, thin person in wire-rimmed spectacles and a flapping, dirty white raincoat. Birdman? – yet strangely unlike, younger, a boyish grin lighting his face as he spotted me. His long bird-like legs carefully stepping over each and every crack and join in the sidewalk –
Don't step on the cracks or you'll break your mother's back
. A pigeon – the same one? – flew up behind the woman toward his face. He paused, then made a mocking lunge toward the creature. The bird lurched desperately into the air and flew away, and the air filled with wings, a flock of pigeons with feathers pink and white and grey, soaring up to become black silhouettes against the darkness of sky. When I looked back at the sidewalk, the woman was gone. There was only a man, a thin young man wearing glasses and a dirty raincoat, walking past me.

His pale eyes met mine, and suddenly he grinned. His teeth were fantastically uneven, slightly pointed and yellow, and he winked at me. With a breath, a blink, he was away. There was a scent of green on him, of caves and wet rock. I turned and yearned for him to look back, but he soon disappeared into the crowd and was gone.

I got to the gallery and found my way to the doors, where an usher began to wrangle me for my invitation. “Invitation?” I repeated, dazed. The tops of some of the paintings were visible over people's heads – the place was packed, good for Brendan – and I wondered if I could use my likenesses as evidence of my right to be here. Not that the faces looked like me. Maybe if I stripped… As if reading my mind the usher began waving his hands. “I'm sorry – you can't – sorry.” It was a relief to see Brendan approaching us.

“Here,” he said, handing me something with a surreptitious air, his eyes feverishly bright, “I thought you might want these.” The usher evaporated, and I looked into my hand. Brendan had given me a pair of plastic glasses with a Groucho nose, mustache, and eyebrows attached. “So you can go incognito.” He gripped my upper arm and maneuvered me through the crowd, talking low, clipped and fast. He was, I realized, nervous. “Bloody openings. If there was ever any doubt in my mind that painting is a dead art, I need only – just look at this. People exhibit this kind of,” he paused, “
morbid frenzy
only in the face of death. Public hangings. Theatre openings. Literature, maybe, I don't know, I avoid book launches like the Black Death. No doubt they resemble this. The same people. The same talk. The same bad wine.”

We had reached the wine table. A pimply girl poured a glass of red stuff for Brendan, and he gestured for another for me. “No, thanks.” It had been weeks since I'd had a drink; I wasn't going to start here. I had a wistful moment, though, watching him take a sip from his glass, his eyes roaming alert and miserable across the crowd, remembering my fantasy of him and the red wine, but it was squelched fairly easily. Besides, he could never have smashed his glass upon the floor – it was plastic. I wondered why he was so cranky; this was his big night. And then a tastefully dressed trio approached us, benefactors of the gallery, I thought, perhaps board members.

“Here we go,” Brendan murmured, meeting my eyes with a ghost of his usual twinkle. “You might want to don your disguise.”

I watched amazed as Brendan chatted away to them, not babbling as I would have if I were half as nervous as I knew he was. He laid on the Olde Worlde Charme a little thick, but they loved it. He introduced me courteously as his “collaborator” and the female member of the trio raked me up and down with her eyes, then actually sniffed. The men looked fruity. I don't mean faggy, I mean like big bowls of stewed fruit, bubbling in their own juices. I squeezed Brendan's hand, excused myself and moved away. I wanted to see the work but that was pretty much impossible in the crowd.

I had definitely worn the wrong clothing. If I meant to stand out in painful relief, I couldn't have chosen a better ensemble. In this city of appearances, I appeared to have chosen deliberately to look like a skid, flaunting my non-arty poverty; there wasn't another pair of jeans in the place, let alone a dirty T-shirt. The bright lights of the gallery brought out every smear and stain on the thing; it hadn't looked this filthy at Blue's. I started sweating and the pits of the shirt emitted a faint staleness. I eyed the usher at the entrance; I could see him intermittently through the press of people. He had a suit jacket over a cheap white button-down shirt; I wondered if I could persuade him to switch with me. Come on, b'y, give me your shirt. I know it's not in the job description but show a little initiative, for God's sake, the model looks like shit.

It was with intense joy that I saw Gil across the room, chatting and waving his hands at a group of apparently deaf people. I drifted toward him, trying to appear absorbed in the paintings on the wall. None of the paintings within my view were of me, I noticed, relieved – and embarrassed by my former fantasy of an entire gallery devoted to me. Me, me, me. The nearest wall displayed Brendan's luminous objects, hung in strange, haunting groups: a milkweed pod a metre high, in thick silver impasto, below a massive tea cup, and a few feet away, a feather, silver-grey and purple.

“Realism,” a man said next to me through his nose. I jumped, thinking he was talking to me. “A realism Renaissance.”

“No,” a terribly thin woman next to him replied. “This isn't realism anyway.” She paused, staring at the paintings. “They chose some safe work for this show.”

“It seems to me I'm seeing ironic takes on realism wherever I go.”

“That's such a dead argument. Realism versus what?”

The woman walked away, and the man looked at me. “Well,
I
think the work is taking an ironic stance,” he muttered.

“Do
you
think it's safe?” I asked him.

The guy paused, then turned to look at the paintings before us. He was silent for so long that I thought he wasn't going to answer. “Well,” he said at last, “all I can say is, they make me nervous as hell.”

I finally made it over to Gil, who was still talking; Blue materialized. They were both a little drunk.

“Ruby!” Gil screamed and hugged me. “The lady of the hour!” He gestured at the wall in front of us. Someone had hung all the pictures of me in a row, five of them, glaring down at the crowd like the attack of the Ten Foot Tall Naked Women. I groped in my pocket to find and don my nose-glasses, blinking clownishly at the group. Most of them looked uncomfortable; Blue and Gil shouted with laughter.

“Beautiful, beautiful!” Blue said.

“Thank-YO,” I said, bending at the waist and trying to do a Groucho impression. “Brendan's idea.” I straightened up and put the glasses back in my pocket. “Whaddaya say we go stand, oh, I don't know,
somewhere else
?”

Everyone was silent for a moment, then, “You're the model,” a woman pronounced.

“The penny finally drops,” Gil said.

“Is it you?” She stared with emotionless eyes. Gil doubled over with laughter.

“Maybe it's hard to recognize me with my clothes on,” I resorted to the tired joke.

“The model!” Gil snorted and crowed.

“Gil is having a Sagittarian moment,” Blue remarked. Then he whispered to his lover, “Foot in mouth, dear.”

Gil went on to the woman, “I always knew you were a bit slow off the mark, but this just takes the …”

“
Definitely
a Sagittarian moment,” Blue continued. “Come on, Gil, let's get you another glass of vino.” I trotted after them like a kid at the mall.

Once a safe distance away, I looked back through the people at the paintings. On the far right hung the final work. I saw the shoulder open, the bones jut up like I'd seen on the street. Her eyes turned toward me, her hand, a claw, reached for me. I turned my back on the images and fled.