Carry the One (27 page)

She was surprisingly wounded again later that night when Maude called, wanted to come over, as if all they’d been waiting for was a chance meeting.

Still, Alice said “Okay.” Then, “I’ve moved.”

“I know,” Maude said, and of course this was thrilling.

When she got back from Amsterdam, Alice bought a vast loft, the entire top floor of a renovated warehouse west on Randolph, a stretch that was now fashionable. After a couple of years of not being able to paint anything she was happy with, Alice was now finishing a series of portraits of notorious serial killers as boys. She was trying to ready the last of these for a solo show at Handel, an important gallery on Ontario. This was only a few weeks off. The show was important to her, and there were a million details around making it happen. It was not a particularly good time for her to be distracted.

While she waited, she thought about the perils of reunion. Tonight could be a small, grim disaster.

It wasn’t, though. When Maude came out of the freight elevator into Alice’s loft, everything turned delicious.

“Still mighty hot out there.” She wheeled her bike out of the elevator, propping it against a wall. “It’s okay while you’re going, but once you stop, you realize you’re pouring sweat.” She had changed into a tank top and loose linen shorts. The top was sweated through in patches. Her hair, in response to the humidity, was huge and wild. Like she just came, not out of an elevator, but out of Hawaii.

“Do you want some iced tea? I just made some.”

“Not really,” Maude said. “Let’s talk. But just a little.”

“You first,” Alice said.

“Okay. But how do I compress all this time? How do I pick the most important thing to say? I guess if I could only say one thing, it would be that it doesn’t go so well for me without you. So well as it does
with
you.”

“That sounds like a statement written by your lawyer.”

“I’m testing the waters.”

“The problem for me,” Alice said, “is that you scare me.”

Maude and Alice waited together for the conversation to continue. They were facing each other. Instead of saying anything more, though, Maude roughly pressed Alice against the wall.

“Hey,” Alice said. “I pulled my rotator cuff at the gym. I’m still—”

“Shut up,” Maude whispered.

“Just. Please. Don’t fuck with me this time,” Alice said.

“Shh.” Maude pulled Alice’s T-shirt up over her head and off.

They spent quite some time at the wall, also the wall adjacent to it, banging each other around, shucking each other’s clothes off, sweat washing down them in this airless corner of the loft, making them slippery as they moved against each other. In this way, they tried to reconnect with their mutual past, obliterating the sizeable chunk of their adulthoods that had happened since, in each other’s absence. It was a claim-staking enterprise, seeing if they still owned some substantial piece of each other. This was about much more than old times, or flexing muscle memory, or call and response.

Of course, they weren’t quite the same people they were when they left off. Older, of course, but also both had been touched by mild versions of celebrity and the attendant burn of exposure. They were more protected, more private. After early years waiting by their phones, they now had unlisted numbers, both business and personal cells, caller ID. They never picked up. They had made themselves less knowable.

“I have an idea,” Alice said when they were wobbling a little. “It’s a little conventional, but well, I’m thinking, why don’t we get in bed?”

When they lay down, Maude formed herself around Alice from behind. “Tell me what you really want.”

And when Alice rolled over and pressed her mouth to Maude’s ear and confessed, Maude said, “Oh. Well, you’d have to ask for that. Nicely. You’d have to say please.”

It was really too hot for arduous connection. Alice’s AC was broken and her ceiling fans were not up to the sluggish heat lingering from the day. She and Maude stuck to each other and drenched the mattress with
sweat. They drank all the Cokes plus the jug of iced tea Alice had in the refrigerator, then just started filling glasses of water from the tap. The icemaker couldn’t keep up with them. Maude went out to the White Hen and brought back two bags, put one in the freezer, dumped the other into the bathtub while it was filling, and they cooled down by stretching out side by side in the icy water, like patients in an old asylum.

“Hey,” Maude said, “You don’t smoke anymore.”

“It’s been years. Hypnotism and the patch. I still have moments when I consider it, but then I know I couldn’t stand to go through the quitting again.”

They got hungry and headed to the kitchen—suddenly modest—pulling on the old T-shirts and Gap boxers that were Alice’s pajamas. They made big sandwiches and ate them standing at the kitchen counter, then headed back to bed and slept for a long time, almost around the clock. Alice woke and watched Maude sleep on without her, face down. She went weak with relief, her knees buckling even though she was lying down. She had gotten exactly what she had not allowed herself to want for so long. She needed to make very sure she wasn’t misunderstanding what was on offer, so, a little later, when they were in the shower, she asked, “What are we doing?”

“Keep your eyes shut,” Maude said. She was pushing lather around on Alice’s head. “We’re fucking our way back to each other. We’re trying to reach in and grab the live cable. It’s going to take some more fucking to get to it, though.”

The old Maude was back, casting everything between them in huge, reverberating terms, like the construction of Stonehenge, the vanishing of Shangri-la. This must be what Alice wanted; she had waited for it so long.

Over the next day and night, Alice listened and inferred and put together a rough sketch of this new, revised version of Maude. She had been back in Chicago for a couple of months. Her acting career had washed out, the modeling gigs had thinned. Now she’d hit forty and gone back to nursing. She was in neonatal care.

“The patients are little,” she told Alice. “It’s easy to make their beds.”

Something was slightly off. Maude didn’t look quite like she did before, but it took a while before Alice saw that not all the change was about aging. The overall effect was of someone still youngish, but in a slightly suspended way. Also a little beat-up around the mouth. Alice suspected Maude had had work done, a lift, a little tucking around the eyes, lip injections. Maude was upfront about this when Alice finally asked.

“The price of staying in a vanity business too long.” She patted her cheeks, as though they were merchandise.

Alice said something along the lines of sure, so what? and hoped it didn’t show, her queasiness around this casual surgical revision. She herself had become more and more who she had always been, the ink darker, the etching deeper with each passing year. It was disconcerting to think that, in the meantime, Maude had been editing as she went along and might by now be in some ways less Maude than when Alice first knew her.

They took a break. When Maude left to straighten out the patch of her life she had missed these days in bed, Alice did the last bits of tinkering on the final paintings she had promised for the show. She was hopelessly behind.

She answered the million messages that had piled up on her machine. About a quarter million were from Helen Roth at the gallery. Another half million were from Carmen. Alice called her cell, then listened through a small catalog of Carmen’s suffering on Alice’s behalf.

“First I thought maybe you were away. I can’t always keep track of your schedule. Then yesterday I started to worry. I thought bludgeoning. Maybe garroting. I was about to come over and look for a corpse. Find your keys and—”

Alice cut her off. “Listen. Something’s happened. Something good. Well, you might not see it as good, but—”

“Oh no—”

“I think you’re going to be impressed at how much more serious she is now,” Alice said, but when Carmen asked “Serious how?” Alice couldn’t really articulate it.

“Oh honey,” Carmen said before she hung up.

By the time Maude came back a few nights later, the heat had broken; the weather had gone back to regular summer.

“Let’s go for a swim,” she said. It was one in the morning.

They biked over to the lake together, peeled down to their swimsuits and jumped off the retaining wall south of Fullerton. The water—surprisingly after all the recent heat—was a heart-stopping cold. They grabbed onto each other, went under again, and kissed as they exhaled great washes of bubbles. Maude flipped Alice onto her back and pulled her lazily along in a lifeguard’s cross-chest carry. They ignored a patrol car that was trolling for party animals and night swimmers. They let the searchlight brush over them, laughed when the cop started shouting through a bullhorn. They just swam on.

“Like they’re going to get those fat butts out of their cruiser and jump in after us,” Maude said. And she was right. The cops got a real call or just lost interest, and took off.

Alice treaded the black night water and lined up her next questions. “What about your mother? How are you going to stand up and defy her, and stay standing?”

“I’ll take care of that. That’s my problem and I’ll deal with it. I promise I will. I’m ready to do this.”

Alice tried to think if she herself was. This slight hesitation took her completely by surprise.

Eventually they emerged from the love shack, dressed up, and took themselves out to run the gauntlet of appraisal that awaited them. Carmen—leery, but as always trying to be there for Alice—had them to dinner. Rob was out of town, but Gabe was home from Providence for the summer. In the fall he would go to London for a semester to
study portraiture. This seemed peculiar. Although he had returned from performance back to painting, he worked primarily with a glue gun, objects found in parking lots, and razor stubble—his own and that of his friends.

He said he wanted to submerge himself in classical styles for a while. “Then I can dismantle the whole pathetic, two-dimensional notion of painting. Implode it. No offense, Alice.” He talked like this a lot lately. He used terms like “iterations” and “appropriation” in describing his work. Because Alice was famous; also, she hoped, because he loved her, he didn’t patronize her. Instead he talked to her as though she was Yoda, the Old One. Like she had secrets from a time when brushes were fashioned out of thistles, colors mixed from animal blood and plant roots. Alice cut him yards of slack. He was eighteen, smack in the middle of his jackass years. She’d been there herself once. Alice had been around for his growing up, witnessed his many transitions. Still, some moments she was purely astonished that this hulking baritone, this pretentious jerk used to be the baby Carmen put on top of the clothes dryer to get him to sleep, the skinny kid who spent about five years in a magician’s cape.

He was happy that his two aunts were back together, and had made for them one of his tampered landscapes. He had painted Maude and Alice into a bucolic scene featuring a thatched cottage. He said the paintings were ironic, but also not ironic. He tried to make his subjects look their best—shaved off excess pounds, filled in thinning hair, lifted a jowl when necessary. In front of the cottage, which is on a hill overlooking a dale, Alice and Maude sit in bikinis on webbed chaises. Maude holds a semicircular reflector under her chin. In front of them, next to a grazing sheep, rests a boom box.

“This is so great,” Alice said, but even as she was saying this, she was getting nervous. A terrible image had floated up in her mind. She could see the painting abandoned at the back of a shadowy closet, propped against a defunct, beige computer monitor or an LP turntable, a discard at some point in the long future where it would no longer be humorous to anyone, or a reminder of anything.

Alice and Maude made their re-entrance into society at a show Jean was putting on at the Green Mill. Sylvie Artaud’s farewell performance—her seventh or tenth, she’d been retiring for decades. She looked to be about one hundred by now. She sang with a wobbly grip on the hand mic, a handkerchief at the ready to blot tears shed at the sorrows detailed in the songs she sang. “At Least When I Die, I’ll Forget You.”

“You Passed Me on the Street Today (And Didn’t Know Me).”

It was a bubbly night. Jean was on a high with so many people packing the bar, itself a landmark in the history of jazz and cabaret. Carmen and Rob came with some friends of his Alice didn’t know. Also Nick. He was still on the straight and narrow. It was easy to look only at the downfalls, at the weakness they implied. Sometimes she forgot how much it took for him to pull himself back up out of a well that just got deeper, and how terrifying it must be for him looking back in, over the edge. And then even though she loved her brother hugely, she thought, fuck him, he saw the girl coming onto the road.

Tom Ferris was a surprising part of the mix, a party crasher. He had thickened over the years. He often wore a hat, even indoors. He was wearing one tonight, a little Rat Pack fedora. Apparently he was still—not so often as before, but often enough to be extremely annoying—sitting in his car outside Jean’s since she hooked up with Vincent.

Alice wasn’t crazy about Vincent, but then she had only met him a couple of times. He was ironic. He wore his hair short and gelled up like someone in his twenties. Had a cat named Fido. His sense of humor was a little snarky. He was a vet tech, which didn’t seem far enough along any career path for a guy in his forties. It sounded like the second career of a surgeon who’d lost his license for sawing off the wrong leg. But hey, he was single, and he seemed totally crazy about Jean.

Jean didn’t seem particularly ruffled by Tom’s appearance tonight. “He’s trying to intimidate Vincent. Vincent thinks Tom’s hilarious, like
a corny old joke. He’s a little lost is all,” she said to Alice. “Ever since his marriage fell apart. Apparently our affair was an essential component to the marriage working. Like a tree spike off to the side, feeding the tree. He actually told me that. That was the analogy he used.” She turned toward the stage where Sylvie was kicking her cane under the piano and pulling on long white gloves. “Hey, I’ve got to go introduce the old gal.”