Carry the One (4 page)

“I don’t know anything about how to do this,” Maude said. It was the first thing she said.

“Shhh,” Alice said, kissing her, biting her lower lip.

“Here it is, so much later and—”

“Yes,” Alice said.

And then Maude was crying all over Alice’s neck, but at the same time pushing Alice’s hair back, snagging her fingers on a few small snarls, making Alice wince. Then dragging her big, stupid model’s lips down the side of Alice’s neck, stopping when she ran into the hollow at the very beginning of shoulder, where she sucked hard, drawing skin between teeth and tongue.

Something dumb and profound stirred inside Alice, like sound running over the tiny filaments of the inner ear, tendrils of coral rustled by a tropical sea. As a lover, Maude was not artful, only blunt. Before they even made it to the bed, her hand was so far in that Alice could feel the chunky silver links of Maude’s bracelet clicking against her where she opened up. “Can you hear me?” Maude said. “I’m trying to tell you something.” And suddenly Alice was so wet she was embarrassed. She was the hostage in the darkened cellar, or in the forest clearing, a gun pressed into the small of her back.

This was how it began again.

She was awakened the next morning by the smell of butter sizzling. She pulled on some jeans, a T-shirt. Maude was at the stove, fixing an omelet.

“In college I worked at the Happy Pan,” she said, and her moves did appear assured. She whisked the eggs into froth, then slid them
into the buttered pan. She was a study in motion efficiency and body English—a shove then a quick flip and the omelet folded onto itself. This seemed to Alice not just an inconsequential set of assembly-line skills, rather another sparkly aspect of an overwhelming whole. All through the night Alice had tried to break down the elements of Maude, then add her up, but she kept getting lost in the higher math, the exponential blur.

Like now. Maude, turning quickly, pulled an about-to-be-lit Marlboro from between Alice’s lips, slid her hands under Alice’s arms to lift her onto her feet, then pressed her against a blank stretch of wall.

“Your choice,” she said at Alice’s ear, already unbuttoning Alice’s jeans, “omelets or smoke or sex.”

Alice experienced Maude like a drug—an element facilitating sensory change.

What happened from there was all the same thing, just in different locations. In the studio. Also at Maude’s apartment. At the movies. At Chez Josie, a cheap French restaurant down on Lincoln where, while feeding each other crème brûlée, they were asked to leave. On the third beach down from Fullerton. Maude laid claim to Alice and Alice, in turn, surrendered the territory of herself. She made herself utterly vulnerable, and not just sexually. By two weeks in, she had told Maude so much of her darkest stuff—unsavory fantasies, of course, but also low moments of pettiness and envy, descriptions of various embarrassments. She could make herself thrillingly ill imagining the betrayal and treachery ahead. Still, all this exposure seemed necessary to set their course.

They broke only for work and Maude’s classes. She was finishing up her nursing degree. (She put Alice’s limbs into splints, made the bed with Alice still in it, listened to Alice’s heart, checked the pressure of the blood in her veins.) She said there wouldn’t be enough years in front of the camera to make a career of modeling; she would need a backup.

Maude wasn’t out as a dyke; this was not the whole problem, but it was the largest piece. She was the daughter of a mother who ran a tight ship. Marie’s children were expected to get married, to someone Marie approved of. Someone Catholic. Then it was time for a baby, a bun in the oven. And then, they didn’t want little Timmy or Lucy to grow up an only child, did they? The family was already on Carmen to get knocked up again. Family was what mattered, and got celebrated at every possible occasion. Weddings of course, baptisms, first communions, confirmations, anniversaries. Maude had not yet found a way to let her mother know how far she had veered off this program. Marie already thought Maude’s friendship with Alice was unhealthy. Alice couldn’t really blame Maude for ducking, but she still didn’t like being forced back into the closet herself. This was, she supposed, one of the pitfalls of bringing someone out.

That she wouldn’t be able to bring Maude all the way over wasn’t her biggest fear. In a deep recess, an inchoate space where thoughts tumble around, smoky and unformed, Alice’s biggest fear was that she and Maude and the accident were tied in an elaborate knot—that her true punishment for what happened that night would be God, or the gods, or the cosmos giving her Maude, then taking her away. But this had not happened yet.

Maude told Alice the worst medical story. She had been working at the hospital long enough that by now there
was
a worst. It was a degloving, a man brought in from a factory accident. He’d been caught in a machine, his skin peeled off in one piece down the bottom half of his body. Maude had degloved Alice’s soul. If Maude left, Alice supposed she would never get over her, that the application of time—even in great quantities—would not be up to the job of getting over Maude.

This, of course, put Alice in a very bad position. She could never quite be relaxed and normal around Maude. A haze of supplication, she knew, hovered over her like incense at an altar. This was another part of the problem. Maude would have had to be a better person not
to use this advantage, and she was not; she was merely an ordinarily good person. Maybe, Maude would speculate, when she’d finished school she should move to New York for a while, to wring as much as she could out of modeling. Or she should move to L.A. to see if she could break into movies. Her fascination with hypothetical versions of herself was bottomless.

When she was attentive to Alice, though, it was with such ferocity and ardor that Alice was stunned, went around for days at a time exhausted and exhilarated, bleary, bumping into things, her spatial sense way out of whack, her mouth bruised, her joints aching, hollows under her eyes, her appetite engaged only by strong lures. M&Ms. Fries with mayonnaise.

Alice saw this disorientation as a good thing, maybe the best thing, but Maude was ambivalent. She would suddenly get claustrophobic. Alice was too close for comfort, or too intense, or too complex; Maude would need to get away to sort things out, or breathe some uncomplicated air. For Alice, unfortunately, the air was always uncomplicated. She only ever loved Maude. That was where she was every day. And so she could only stand still and breathe shallowly and brace herself through Maude’s tremors and vacillations. Bad weather that would pass.

Today, a Saturday, Maude was sleeping in, dozing on her stomach and Alice lazily traced the edges of her shoulder blades, thinking what she knew was a fatuous lover’s thought—that they look like the place where wings would be attached on angels. And then suddenly this moment was zapped by the door buzzer.

“Oh shit. I forgot,” Alice said, looking at the clock. “Carmen and Gabe.” It was one p.m. on the dot. Carmen was always on time.

“Did we interrupt anything?” Carmen said coming out of the elevator, probably sniffing sex in the air. Carmen didn’t much care for Maude. Alice wasn’t sure why, but was certain this would smooth out with time.

“Hey big guy,” she said to Gabe, and set him up with paper and finger paints, then got Carmen and Maude moving. “Let’s hang some paintings.”

“Over a little more,” Alice gestured at Maude and Carmen with a freshly lit cigarette. They were each holding on to a side of the painting’s stretcher, and made an odd pair of helpers. Maude in threadbare cords and a Superman T-shirt, yellow leather Moroccan slippers; Carmen coordinated in burgundy wool slacks and a peach sweater. She was wearing makeup. Her hair was, as always, perfect—heavy and dark, spilling lustrously (but in an organized way) over her shoulders.

Everything about Carmen was organized. She kept an appointment book and a little wipe-off marker board on her refrigerator door to keep track of her days on at the shelter, her pickup times for Gabe at day care. She was in possession of a schedule, a child, and a husband. Carbon steel kitchen knives and a new sofa—as opposed to Alice’s sprung red velvet junker brought down from the co-op. She had a serious approach to every aspect of life—motherhood, her job, her political work. Still a ways shy of thirty, Carmen had Alice beat hands-down in the race to adulthood. Coming at life as Alice did, from a more oblique angle—a lack of any real plan at all, a tenuous relationship, a line of work that yielded no security of any kind—it would be easy for her to ridicule Carmen as a tight-ass, but she didn’t, ever. Their alliance was deep, formed in the trenches of childhood where they were each other’s landsmen, comrades in strategy and survival, in warding off the contempt of their parents, and in protecting their brother. These positions had been set up early and were not subject to realignment. So she and Carmen always approached each other carefully, with respect—minor diplomats, one from an arctic, the other from an equatorial nation, attempting to understand each other’s customs, participate in each other’s holidays.

Crushing out her cigarette, Alice headed over with pencil, hammer, and nails. This was the last and largest canvas for the show, which was to start Friday—a group project of the artists who had studios in this old laundry. They were getting write-ups in the
Reader
and
Newcity
. They might get some real traffic through here.

“I see hordes descending,” Maude said. “I hear hoof beats.” She was always encouraging about Alice’s work.

Alice said, “There might be people, but they could just be cheese-seekers. There. Perfect. Don’t move.”

“It doesn’t matter if they come for the cheese,” Carmen said, leaning against the wall a little dreamily, filling in the blank of Alice’s future for her while Alice pounded in a nail. “The more people, the larger presence you have on the scene. You’re entering the marketplace.”

“Maybe,” Alice said, but really she was happy for her sister’s belief in her, to hear her use words like “presence” and “marketplace,” which until now they’d only used in reference to their father, a painter whose presence in the marketplace of art was fairly large. He encouraged Alice’s aspirations until she started being taken seriously. Now he was subtly dismissive. Horace saw every other painter as a threat, now even (or maybe especially) Alice.

“Finish,” Gabe said from the floor, but didn’t look up. Then, he found he was mistaken, that something wasn’t quite finished, and so he just kept painting.

“Man.” Alice hunkered down behind him. He had painted, from memory, his backyard and, in the corner, Carmen’s garden-in-progress. It was all there, wobbly and from about four different perspectives, but there. The beat-up garage, a doghouse left behind by the previous owners, a trellis draped in clematis, his father asleep in the hammock. It wasn’t really a child’s painting.

“All here,” he said. Each of his fingers was dabbed with its own color. He was a tidy little guy.

“Yeah, well, this is—” Alice didn’t say it was incredible, that at two
and a half he should only be up to green and brown trees, round yellow sun, stick-figure humans. He hated being told he was too young to do things. “Next time we’re moving you up to a brush.” He wore a striped jersey tucked into the elastic waist of his pants. His bottom was padded out with trainer pants. Despite being an artistic genius, he was not yet 100 percent potty trained. His hair fell over his eyes as he painted. He looked like a kid from an earlier era, or a smaller place, heading into the rougher neighborhood of real life.

Maude came over and added her own flourish of praise. Sometimes Alice got a little rush around all of them being related. Siblings paired off with siblings and now a new generation extending their presence in the universe. Sometimes this seemed so cutting edge, as though they were creating a new, hip version of family. Other times it was as if they were all from the same holler and didn’t get out enough.

It was a family tree that looked better in the abstract than in real life where, truthfully, Alice found Matt dull and Carmen was wary of Maude. Or rather what Maude turned Alice into. Carmen didn’t think love should be about casting a spell over someone. She thought it should be a more balanced constellation of emotion, about mutual support and prospering. She had made all this clear to Alice, which put a hard brace on further conversation on the subject.

Alice and Maude fetched Cokes for everyone. Carmen scanned the room. “These are just wonderful paintings, Alice.”

Alice wished she shared her sister’s assurance. She understood that she was a good painter, but she wanted to make important paintings, and that was loamy ground—importance—difficult to gain footing there. In her better moments, she could get euphoric with the potential for making these paintings that were pushing around inside her, like the ghostly pains in her legs through the nights of her adolescence when she was doing the last of her growing.

In an interview that hadn’t yet taken place, Alice would say her work was most influenced by Gerhard Richter, Lucian Freud, and Balthus.
She wanted to paint humans in ways that set up a disturbance between the painting and the viewer, ways that disrupted the conventional notions of portraiture. Her current subjects were women wrestlers from the forties and fifties. She painted them as they were in their heyday, drawing from posters and photos of their matches. She also painted them now, from life, in their various retirements. These were amazing women, having made themselves up out of spit and bravado. A few months back she had a small show in a storefront gallery—the first of these portraits—and it nearly sold out. Alice attributed the small success of these paintings to their subjects as much as to her rendering of them.

“Oh, did we miss some—” Carmen started toward the canvases propped on the wide windowsills at the back of the studio. Midway across the room, she stopped, saw what these paintings were, understood they would not be part of the show.

Alice never talked about these portraits. She never brought them out, but neither did she hide them. She had completed one so far, had two more in progress. They were all of the girl, in different poses, at successive ages. When Casey Redman hit the windshield, all Alice could register were her stunned eyes. The first time she really saw her face was when she was already on the ground, expression no longer present. So, although the girl in the paintings was going through the motions of growing up—floating on a raft on an indigo lake, sitting inside a snow fort, dancing awkwardly at a birthday party—she was always wearing cutoffs and a thin pink and green madras shirt, the only clothes Alice ever saw her wear. And her face was as dead as a saint preserved inside a glass altar.