My Beautiful Failure (17 page)

My legs felt warm and loose after the ride, but when I saw the light in Dad’s studio my body tensed again. I carried Triumph to my room. It was not until morning that I realized I’d let another week pass without writing my paper.

S
aturday, December 3. I hovered outside the den while my family watched the weather reports. Uncle Marty, who had a weather radio, was calling Dad with updates every half hour.

“What’s wrong with people?” Mom complained. “It’s New England, it’s winter, and it’s cold. Does that mean they have to stay in all day?”

Dad flipped the channel. “The TV stations have to make a big deal out of it. That’s how they get their advertising dollars.”

“I can’t believe that guy said ‘brrr,’” said Linda. “It’s such a cliché.”

“It won’t be that bad,” Jodie added. “
The Old Farmer’s Almanac
says flurries, then sunny and cold. I checked it three weeks ago.” Jodie had forgiven my father after he went to her house, alone, to apologize to both her and her parents.

“I don’t know about the
Almanac
.” Mom said. “I don’t
see how anyone can predict an entire year’s weather in advance.”

“I don’t either. But my mom says they’re usually right. She uses it to plan all our vacations.”

Jodie’s vacations were a sore spot for Mom. Once, her family flew first class to Palm Beach, Florida, and invited Linda along. Jodie’s mother took both girls for spray-on tans without asking Mom. That was when Linda first began staring at herself in the mirror and calling herself “Lucky Linda.” Mom told her she shouldn’t be obsessed with her appearance.

“Pretty rules one, Linda,” she said at the time. “Smart rules the world.” But I think the real problem was that the trip was expensive and Mom and Dad could never duplicate it.

Mom grabbed the remote from Dad. She surfed for another opinion on the weather.

All of them were in for a shock tomorrow, when I brought a girl home for the first time. Mom would like Jenney’s manners and smarts. Linda and Jodie might tease me. But Jenney would see how I lived. For better or for worse. How much I had to put up with.

A
t one thirty in the morning, Dad was still up. Mom was asleep—no sound there—and Jodie and Linda were snuggled in one bed under the watchful eye of Linda’s Garfield. It was a special night for those two: Linda lent Jodie a nightshirt of our grandma’s with a disco scene on the front, and Jodie asked if she could keep it, and Linda said yes. They would probably both write about it in their diary.

“Okay, Dad,” I said, “let’s bring it on home.” At least he was in pajamas, not paint-spattered clothes. “It’s a lot of stress, Dad.”

“Almost done, Billy, almost done. I got an idea for suspending some of the work with fishing line.” He sat beside the living room coffee table, where he was cutting the line into equal lengths with a pocketknife.

Dad looked so dedicated. Maybe I should make an effort, I thought, by doing some last-minute chore for the show.

“Do you want help with anything?”

“Yes. Would you do me a favor?”

“Sure.” I sat on the couch, ready to help with cutting.

He put the knife down and rested his hand on mine. “When you become a dad, don’t be staid and predictable. Surprise them once in a while, okay? Be the kind of guy who keeps a surprise up his sleeve.”

D
ad ate a sandwich and went to bed. Maybe he fell asleep like the other three, but now I was wide awake. I kept thinking about the weather and about how the show would probably be ruined, and how Dad might have to have shock treatments again or be hospitalized or spend his life looping crazily from lows to highs. I couldn’t relax. I felt tight and inanimate, like a surfboard laid on a roof rack. But then Jenney’s voice crept into my mind.

Tough day, Hallmark?

I wiggled my toes, and my shoulders and back melted into the pillows.

A
s I dressed for an early bike ride, bare tree branches waved in my window, and a few brown leaves blew across the street in parallel lines. No snow yet.

Outside, the frozen grass crunched under my feet like cereal. I mounted my bike and rolled down the hill. The houses had a feeling of sleep, or if not sleep, waiting. A mile out, the inns and hotels across from the beach were shuttered for the winter. The damp beach looked useless and insipid. There seemed to be no point to its being there when people weren’t using it. But that was our perspective, not the beach’s.

I leaned my bike against the boulevard railing and stepped down. The ocean, sometimes so fearsome, was a puddle today. The half-inch waves struck the shore like a glass of water spilled across a tablecloth. I picked up three large rocks and tossed them into the deepest water I could reach, and each made its own mushroom cloud. A few yards out, black-and-white shorebirds sat one per
boulder, each sure his boulder was the best and the most important. Everything I saw was more vivid than usual. I had a feeling of before and after, of a decision being made. When Jenney met me, I wondered, would she be disappointed?

Near the beach was the tennis court where Dad had tried to interest me in the game. When I was eleven I thought I had gotten as good as Dad, until I watched him play with his friends and saw how he really served.

The sky held back the snow in a big curve, like a hammock holding a body. One person was out jogging. She wore an iPod and a T-shirt that said
ARMY
. Her breath made a cumulus in the cold air, and her face shone holiday red. But when I said hello she glared as if I shouldn’t be here. When you were a guy alone, girls glared at you.

I pictured Jenney riding a Raleigh, and pretty fast too. Soon I wouldn’t be alone. Jenney and I would take the bus, or her car—she had a car—to western Mass., to the Berkshires, and do a century in the mountains. That was a hundred miles in one day.

I sat on a bench as the snow began to fall. The sky released its weight in tiny fragments like skin cells. After a while I rolled down the walking path on a sheet of white unmarked by footprints or paw prints. My bike drew a solid line one and a half inches wide. Unlike the foot and paw prints, my track let no one guess how large I was.

In a gazebo above the cliffs, I unwrapped a sleeve of Fig Newtons for my breakfast. The punctuation-size seeds resisted my teeth. Beyond the cliffs was Havenswood, a forest where I often rode the trails. The path was dry
there because the snow got caught up in the trees. I gave it my all for twenty minutes. My speed blurred automotively the house foundations and stone walls that marked property lines no longer recognized. I came to a destination: more a point in time than a point of place. I didn’t have my watch or phone, but in my heart I knew it was nine o’clock. In one hour she could be at the house. I stored up breath and turned Triumph around. Like the day I sat with my hand on the phone receiver and dedicated my service to my close family member, I had no idea what was about to happen.

A
s Triumph climbed the hill to my house, the sky was flat and gray. Aside from one of Dad’s posters taped to the mailbox with a bunch of silver balloons, the house looked normal, the way it did when it housed the five of us and no outsiders. Unassuming, predictable, and safe. Hard to believe that in twenty minutes, people—including museum people and reporters and Jenney—would or would not arrive, and Dad would or would not make a fool of himself. The sky was as gray as tin, but the snow was slowing, and I would have liked to paint this feeling as I stood in the road and counted the last five flakes falling on the asphalt around my feet. I waited to see if they would stay frozen or dissolve. When they melted, I took it as a sign that the day was getting warmer. A good sign.

I
carried Triumph through the vacuumed, dusted, and plumped living room. The show was out in the garage, but Mom and Dad must have cleaned inside for people who needed the bathroom. I wondered if Jenney would come inside and whether, being rich, she would think our house was nice. Yesterday I had picked out my jeans, shirt, and sweater. I never really ironed, but I folded and stacked the clothes so they would be smooth. Now I took a shower and washed my helmet-felted hair, checked my shirt buttons to give Jenney the impression that I noticed what I looked like. I went to the back of the house and stood inside the screen door one last time.

I stepped into the garage and saw artwork hung at every level along the splintery walls and on the posts, resting on tables arranged in a square, and on temporary dividers made of plywood. In the center several small marine paintings hung from fishing line, as if they were floating. My family was too busy to notice me. In the left corner,
Jodie arranged some notebooks and a vase of flowers on a card table. Dad took one more look around the room. He must not have slept, because his eyes were creased. He clenched his hands as if he were praying. Mom and Linda held tight to Dad on either side. All at once the four of them looked in the same direction—toward the gate that joined the driveway to the yard. Dad unlinked himself and stepped forward.

T
rue to Gordy’s word, he and his dad were the first guests. Gordy half-hugged, half-choked me and gave Mom a box of fancy cookies that she put on the refreshment table. Donald Abt wore a leather jacket and motorcycle boots. Although he was a lawyer, he looked hip because he hung out with musicians.

“Pretty exciting, Bill,” he said. “You’ve waited a long time for this day, I hear.”

The doorbell rang, and Dad’s friend June arrived with two of his coworkers. She carried a bunch of white helium balloons printed with the phrase
WOO-HOO!

“Not a very intellectual message, I’m afraid,” she said, “but they express how I feel.”

“Me too,” said Dad. Linda tied June’s balloons to the mailbox with the other bunch. Gordon, Donald, and Dad’s office friends walked along the back wall. They stopped at the fruit-bowl series.

In the center work—titled
Where Does It Come
From?
—each piece of fruit had a migrant worker’s face. Dad tried to capture in a few strokes the fatigue and tenacity of some workers in a
New York Times
profile he’d taped on the studio wall as a reference. The worker-fruits wore straw hats or baseball caps, and an entire bunch of grapes had kids’ faces.

“Wow,” Donald Abt said. “I feel that like a punch in the gut.” Gordy widened his eyes at me.

People from Mom’s museum showed up next. “The light at the top of your hill is remarkable,” Mom’s volunteer docent, Mrs. Armenian, commented. “Even on a gray day, it’s so—”

“Luminous?” Mom suggested.

“Yes, luminous. And the gray sky coming through the windows makes the colors in your husband’s paintings just
pop.
”

June zeroed in on the killer-tree painting. In white pants and a white parka with fur around the hood, she looked like a monarch in a Hans Christian Andersen story. Having been through last winter with us, she was probably worried like I was. I’m pretty sure she would have bought something whether Dad’s work was good or bad, but having seen something she wanted to own, she looked relieved and happy. I admired June even more.

“It was a wonderful fall, wasn’t it?” she asked me, laughing at the tourist-eating tree.

“It was a
really
wonderful fall,” I told her, thinking about my secret. I checked the door to see if Jenney had shown up yet. She and June would really hit it off. My mouth got so dry that I couldn’t close my lips after talking
or smiling. My head felt groggy and I wanted to nap. To avoid the rest of the day and to wake up when it was tomorrow.

Mom’s former boss, Pudge, arrived next with his husband, Kenneth. They gravitated toward the sunsets.

“Ruthless,” Kenneth said. “The way he subverts the clichés.”

Pudge spotted my sister wearing a velvet suit of Grandma Pearl’s with a partridge on the shoulder. “Linda—so elegant and grown up. I barely recognized you.”

Jodie offered Pudge and Kenneth hot cocoa from a tray. She and Linda had spent hours deciding on Styrofoam or real mugs. To underscore Dad’s environmental concerns, they decided to buy mugs at the dollar store and donate them to a homeless shelter after the show. Linda wanted to charge for the cocoa, but Jodie convinced her it should be free.

“You’ve thought of everything,” Pudge said.

“Is your coat real cashmere?” Linda asked Kenneth.

“It is.”

Linda saw me watching them. “See, Billy? It’s not wrong to have money and nice things.”

“As long as you remember there are some things money can’t buy,” added Jodie.

“That’s a cliché that should never be subverted,” Pudge agreed.

“Is that John Cage?” Mr. Abt asked. A phrase from the CD drowned under the highway noise.

“That’s right,” Linda said. “Dad wanted to go a little edgy with the music. Should I turn it up?”

I saw Gordy’s dad talking to Uncle Marty. They were both holding the notebooks Jodie had laid out on the table. The books identified the paintings by location and title, their size, and the medium (mostly oil). The first page had a photo of Dad along with his artist’s statement, giving his biography and telling how he got the ideas for the show. The cover said
ALL PAINTINGS PRICED REASONABLY.
I saw Linda’s hand in that.

“I’m so proud,” Uncle Marty was telling Mr. Abt.

“Your father is a really good painter,” Mr. Abt said to me. He got out his cell phone. “Do you mind? I’m going to make sure my law partner sees these. But he’ll probably say your dad didn’t set his prices high enough.”

My chest opened partway, and my head felt as light and empty as one of June’s balloons. I couldn’t believe Mr. Abt thought Dad’s paintings were good. Many times I pictured Jenney helping me through my misery. I hadn’t imagined her sharing my pride.