Still Life with Bread Crumbs (2 page)

Not a gunshot, she realized suddenly, recalling the events of the day. She must have been sleeping more soundly than she thought not to have realized what was happening above her. She reconstructed it as best she could, given her utter ignorance of the situation. First a wire trap snapping shut hard as the lever was tripped with a sound like a gunshot. Now the noise of an angry animal thrashing around in the trap, turning the metal cage over and over like an amusement park ride. Bam bam bam.
Finally she was certain she had gotten it right. As for the smell, her imagination failed her. She made a faint sound, somewhere between a prayer, an exclamation, and an obscenity.

Skitter skitter skitter. That’s how it had started. “There’s something in my attic,” she had told the exterminator in town, but he was too busy with a tick outbreak at the nursing home. (False alarm: a squashed engorged mosquito on the top sheet of a woman with an excitable niece.) Instead he’d suggested Rebecca call a roofer. “If you got something in your attic, it’s because you got some way into your attic,” said the exterminator, who was wearing a T-shirt that said
YOU BUG ME
, except that the bug was a drawing of an actual insect and not a printed word. “No point me getting it out, then you having to call somebody anyhow to fix the hole.”

“There’s something in my attic,” she had told the roofer. He’d stood on a metal ladder as the sunlight faltered in late afternoon, a small flashlight in one hand. “Would you like me to hold the ladder?” Rebecca had asked. “I spend a lot of time up on ladders,” he’d said, shifting the flashlight to his other hand. “Is there a hatch in your hall?”

“Pardon?” Rebecca had said.

“Well, we’ve got two related problems here,” he’d said when he emerged from the attic crawl space through the hatch in the hall. “The first is that there’s a coon living up there. The second is that he’s got easy access and egress. There’s a corner of your flashing with a big hole in it. He’s climbing that pine tree in the back and using the hole to get in. I don’t think he’s got a way out of the attic and down into the house. No scat, right?”

“I don’t believe so,” Rebecca had said vaguely. The roofer’s conversation was full of mysteries. What precisely was flashing? Scat she thought she had divined from context. The idea that a raccoon was living above her was deeply unsettling.

“Oh, you’d know,” the roofer had said. Rebecca couldn’t remember his name. He was big, with fair hair and a ruddy tone
to his skin. His eyelashes and eyebrows were so light they were practically invisible. There was a line of pink skin along his part as he bent his head to put the flashlight in his tool bag. The exterminator had recommended him. “Roofers are thieves,” he’d said. Apparently this one was not a thief.

He’d taken a card from a banged-up metal case in his back pocket. Rebecca thought his hands cried out to be photographed. They had light hair on the backs, and were covered with scars—small lines, larger circles, a big snaky one that was a pale pink and covered the side of his palm. On his left hand his index finger was missing the last joint. In black-and-white the scars would be more prominent, Rebecca knew, the hairs a kind of faint cross-hatching.

“Bates Roofing,” the card said. “Family Owned Since 1934.” Grandfather, father, son. Someday this man would be too old to climb a ladder and a young fair-haired man would show up to check the flashing in his stead. By then she would be long gone. Maybe by next month she would be long gone. Her apartment in the city had been sublet for a year. She’d signed a lease for the cottage for a year, too. She sighed and let her eyes close. An uncomfortable bed, a room with no outlets, a raccoon overhead. Surely she could get a visiting position at a college in San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago. Someplace where a super worried about the condition of the flashing, whatever flashing was.

“Give me a minute,” the roofer had said, opening the back of his truck.

He’d baited the trap with one of her bananas. He’d wanted peanut butter, but she had none in the house. In the refrigerator there was cream cheese, two bagels she’d brought from the city now hardening into a food artifact, a six-pack of Diet Coke, a cold chicken, and some lettuce. In the pantry there was canned soup and tuna fish and a half loaf of bread with a faint rime of mold around the edge of the last slice. She had to find a supermarket, she thought as he put the baited trap into the attic.

The trap, she thought now, staring up at the ceiling in the dark. Overhead the crashing stopped, then started again. She lay in bed in the unyielding darkness wondering what time it was, whether it was too early to get up. (It was 2:08, too early to get up.) The roofer’s card was on the kitchen counter, next to a list: bottle opener. Scissors. Trash bags. Spaghetti. He’d said to call if she thought the trap had been sprung. “How will I be certain?” she’d asked. “You’ll know,” he’d said. He’d been right. The trap had been sprung, in her muscles, her nerves, her fingertips, the soles of her feet. The house was nothing but the darkness, the odors, and the noise of a trapped raccoon thrashing his way from one end of the attic to another.

Maybe the roofer was imagining all that when he’d looked at her and added, “You know what? I’ll just stop back in the morning in case we get him overnight. Let’s hope it’s not a mom with a couple of babies.”

Was the roofer’s name Joe?

There was a long silence, and she shut her eyes. Then the crashing began again. It sounded as though it was over the living room now. How did I wind up here? Rebecca thought. How on earth did I wind up here?

The J. P. Bradley Prize was endowed in 1982 by the man who had invented the electric fence. His manufacturing company and his patent had made it possible for him to fulfill his greatest dream, which was to paint, mostly oil paintings of country scenes, houses and barns. They were the kinds of paintings good enough to be sold but not for very much, but nothing—not the house on Nantucket, not the compound in the British Virgin Islands, not the plane or the sailboat—gave him as much pleasure as an envelope from a small gallery in Williamstown or Ocala with a check for five hundred dollars and the name of the person who now had a Bradley over the mantelpiece or the dining room breakfront.

The prize he created, now overseen by his two sons, was designed to recognize an artist whose body of work “illuminates
the human condition.” It was meant to be the apotheosis of an artist’s lifetime work, and so most often was given to someone of advanced age. It was not uncommon for the Bradley winner to use a cane, or even a walker. Several years before it had been given to a muralist who had begun his career with the WPA decorating the interiors of post offices and who had gone on to create murals for the great public buildings of cities around the world. He had had a fatal stroke three weeks before the Bradley dinner, and his life partner, who had been forty years his junior, had accepted the award in his stead, weeping through most of his remarks. The Bradley sons had been displeased.

This perhaps explained the most recent choice for the award.

The official public announcement had landed on the Oriental runner in the hall of Rebecca Winter’s apartment just two months shy of her sixtieth birthday, printed on thick silky paper, like the kind used for diplomas. Rebecca had turned it over in her hands before finally opening it. There was no question: a distinguished list. Painters, sculptors, one architect, one Broadway set designer. And at the bottom, her own name: Rebecca Winter, photographer. The first woman to win the Bradley Prize. The youngest ever. That’s what the
Times
would say in their story.

To Rebecca, it was now official: she was done. Yesterday’s news. In your heyday, you got attention; in your senescence, prizes. Who said that? Oscar Wilde? Benjamin Franklin? Rebecca had a habit of ascribing her cleverer thoughts to someone else. Just in case there was any confusion about the fact of the matter, she said it aloud, looking at herself in the arched mirror over the red Chinese chest in the foyer: you are officially yesterday’s news.

She had known it for some time, seen it reflected in the dwindling royalty checks, the infrequent engagements and invitations, the reactions when she introduced herself at parties. The stages in the life of a person who has become publicly known
are easy to recognize, from the shock and amazement—“Rebecca Winter? Really?
The
Rebecca Winter?”—to a faint confusion—“Photography, right? The kitchen stuff? Oh, I love your work!”—to simple incomprehension. Slowly she worked into campus visits a description of her career that would have been unnecessary—unthinkable—twenty years before, when there had been posters, postcards, sold-out shows, honorary degrees, auctions.

“Everyone’s waiting,” her agent, a woman with the metabolism of a hummingbird and the face of a toucan, had started saying a decade ago. Her name was Tori Grzyjk, so everyone called her TG, except for her competitors, who referred to her as No-Vowel Tori, or NVT. Everyone was afraid of her, but none more so than her own clients, none more so than Rebecca. “Everyone’s waiting to see what you do next.”

TG was in London the night of the Bradley dinner, “scouting new talent.” Rebecca was old talent, although not as old as most of the talent in the room at the Manhattan Arts Club. She wore her black crepe pants and a black and gold kimono jacket and had her trademark silver bob blown dry professionally. She wore Indian cuff bracelets and enormous onyx earrings. Her date was Dorothea, who had designed the earrings. The Bradley sons looked concerned at cocktails until someone told them that the women were friends, not lovers. “She has turned the impedimenta and minutiae of women’s lives into unforgettable images,” said the elder Bradley son in presenting the prize, struggling with the pronunciation of
impedimenta.

“That’s it?” Dorothea whispered at the sight of the landscape in the gold frame with the engraved plate at the bottom. The Bradley sons had a stockpile of their father’s paintings, and each year one was given to the prize winner. Rebecca had been awarded an inoffensive painting of a red barn with several blots denoting cows in a distant field, the sort of thing that would have found a happy home in the dining room of a country inn.
Dorothea’s eyes widened at the sight of the envelope taped to the back.

“A lousy thousand bucks?” she said afterward in the cab uptown.

“It
is
the Bradley,” Rebecca said, tucking the envelope into her bag as her bracelets clanked, trying to maintain her dignity. She couldn’t tell Dorothea that she had never been so glad to see a thousand bucks in her life.

In her bag, next to the check, was the index card she had seen on her way to the ladies’ room on the Manhattan Arts Club bulletin board.
CHARMING COUNTRY COTTAGE FOR RENT
, it said in sharp calligraphy. Although her ex-husband had long insisted that
charming
was synonymous with “too small, with bad drains,” Rebecca did the math the next morning, looking out over the water towers of the west side from her kitchen window, and determined that if she rented out her apartment at the accepted exorbitant New York rate, she could afford the cottage, pay the fees for her mother’s nursing home, manage the premiums for her own health insurance, put something into her retirement account, help with her father’s rent, give a hand to her son, Ben, when he was short, and still put away some money each month for the surprises and emergencies that always seemed to arise. When she was young she’d been able to live on almost nothing; now so many people depended upon her, so many bills appeared each month. Car insurance, life insurance, homeowner’s insurance. And living in the cottage would provide inspiration, she thought. A change of scene always brought inspiration, people said. Everyone was waiting.

“Rebecca Winter,” the woman breathed, her face pinking up the way a baby’s did at birth. It was like a prayer, like a sigh, like old times. “It’s an honor,” she added. She put her hands out to take Rebecca’s. She had the kind of soft hands that are always warm and just a little moist, that look like a baby’s hands, with dimples at the knuckles. She had dimples in her cheeks and chin, too. For a passing moment Rebecca wondered if she had dimples everywhere.

Then the woman added, “My mother had your poster on our refrigerator,” and ruined it. For a moment Rebecca had been forty. Now she is sixty again. No, she is a hundred. She is a prisoner in the amber of her own past. “The artist formerly known as Rebecca Winter,” her son, Ben, had once said, apropos of something she can’t remember, and when he had seen her face he had hastily added, “A joke, a joke, a really bad joke.”

She needed to reclaim the basic syntax of her daily existence, upended in this strange little town. Each morning in the city she had done a half hour on the elliptical machine in her building’s gym while watching the news on a flat screen overhead. Here, when she had asked the man at the gas station about a gym he had directed her to what she realized was the local high school. As a substitute she has decided to walk, but there are no sidewalks and the first morning a truck had come around a curve, fast, veering away to avoid sideswiping her, the driver’s middle finger a small stanchion in the rear window as he screeched away in a plume of exhaust fumes. Minutes later a woman with a tight white perm, a halo of hair, had pulled up next to her and rolled down her window. “You need a lift?” she’d asked. If you walked on these roads, everyone thought your car had broken down.

The dimpled woman had greeted her inside the closest thing to a coffee bar in town. Rebecca was amazed to find even this amid the hair salon (Cut and Perm, $20 on Wednesday, and she’d shuddered), the hardware store, the insurance/travel/accounting agency office, the secondhand furniture place that always seemed closed. The director of the arts program in Wilmington or Asheville, she couldn’t remember which, had made a comment once when he was driving her to a lecture about how all of America looked alike now, but he’d been glaring at a gaudy stretch of Staples, IHOP, Piggly Wiggly, and Home Depot. This part of America looked alike, too, the tired tattered Main Streets where the old bank building had been turned into a restaurant that failed, where the aspirational businesses, the dress shops and bookstores, were doomed before they’d even opened. And yet here stood a place called Tea for Two (Or More), with a cheery little anthropomorphized teapot on the sign, smiling, waving with its handle, breathing steam through its curly spout. Rebecca would have counseled against the parenthetical phrase. Apparently that was the common reaction, since the woman addressed
it almost at once, at length. Sarah Ashby, proprietor. That’s what it said at the bottom of the menu.