The Unfinished World (5 page)

Shortly after the funeral, her father's uncle asked Louise for a portrait of her parents. Instead Louise sent a violent, angry sketch, the paper almost torn through in places from her heavy crosshatching. It suggested a car, a vast mechanical wreck. Two shapes were crumpled in a heap of what looked like twisted metal, gears, wheels. Clarence was very unhappy when she folded it crudely and stuffed it in an envelope addressed to the uncle.

Well, she said. He asked for a portrait of the two of them.

Louise, he said gently. She was her father's daughter but she'd inherited her mother's black anger. It burned through her sometimes
like a chemical fire, brief and devastating and utterly unstoppable. Clarence had no choice but to watch and wait until his sister had cooled into some new shape, until she emerged from the fire patient and calm and even harder than before.

Their mother was always a beauty, tall and fair and well-made. But the lovely brow concealed a deep hurt, a void where pain replaced love, replaced joy, replaced even sadness. Their mother had been a locked box for years.

But every now and then when even she felt the pull toward other people, it was Clarence whom she sought out, Clarence to whom she gave her love and her talent and her self-sufficient steadiness. Louise belonged to their father; she had the same scientific curiosity, the same dancing-but-dogged mind. She had her father's merry eyes and dark hair. So naturally her mother gravitated toward her own mirror, the pale, delicate Clarence, with his bright hair and great gawky height. He was the only one allowed to use her pottery wheel. He was the only one allowed to kiss her good night. He was the only one allowed to love her.

To create life, one must be a keen observer of faces. A raised eyebrow, a crooked laugh, the width of irises. The lines that snake away from the eyes like tributaries, the shadows of cheekbones slicing backward. The way the mouth holds itself just so.

Louise sleeps, dreams of feathers and wings and wild flight through darkened skies. Someone is singing. She sees a flock of pigeons
overheard and she remembers something about a town square and December 2nd. Then she wakes, head on the pillow buried in down and feeling wrecked and confused.

Oh. Noel's pigeons. Noel's exhibit is opening in a few months and he needs pigeons. He needs a hundred of them, some installation in a public square. He's hoping he'll be arrested. She needs to get the eyes right, those terrible pink eyes, slick and toxic as rainbows in an oil spill. She's been putting these off because she hates pigeons. She hates to work with something she hates. But Noel does pay her. So she must become again the impartial scientist, immune to any human notion of what is beautiful. She must make a dream of the homeliest birds.

The adults at the funeral watched the young teenagers holding on to one another's hands and were glad to be anything but them, despite their youth and beauty and brilliance. There was something waiting to go rotten in them, everyone could see it in the tableau they made. Everyone could see the future would be difficult to find.

But brother and sister found the past instead. They've kept the memory of their parents alive. In the sightless visages of animal corpses, in the slick wet surface of clay, they create memories of their parents. Gargoyles with their father's grin and their mother's long gaze. Monkeys and cats and turtles with their father's broad nose and their mother's way of tilting her head back just a little, as if to take in more of the world. Clarence works his clay on the wheel, digs his thumbs into the earth, while Louise preserves skin, stretches it over new bones, molds the clay eye sockets and paints the details of claw, of tooth, of pupil and iris. Everywhere the faces of their own creators. Every day they are burying their parents;
they have created a forever cemetery for those lost and broken faces.

At Noel's for dinner. Teesa, his wife, parks a pair of lamb chops in front of Louise and Clarence, and Louise finds she can't quite get her teeth through the blackened meat. Teesa is a horrible cook.

Oh, is it hard for you to eat animals, then? asks Teesa. I suppose it must be. I didn't think to ask.

I'm fine, says Louise. I eat meat.

That's so interesting, says Noel's mother. Her name is Mrs. Ralph Mattson. That's how she introduces herself, without herself included. She's always there at dinner but never seems to eat anything; Louise watches in fascination as she breaks her meal down into component parts and packs it away in her sleeves, her wallet, her pockets. Once Louise watched her tuck a slice of ham into her bra. She doesn't know if the old lady is crazy or just repulsed by Teesa's terrible food. That's so interesting, she repeats, uncertainty flitting over her features. She spears a lamb chop with her fork and opens her pocketbook.

Long silence, broken only by the staccato bursts of forks and knives scraping ceramic. Finally Clarence puts his fork down, says, That gallery that you recommended said no.

Noel swigs wine, shakes his head. Sorry, Clarence. We tried, but he wasn't sure he was interested in pottery. Guess he wasn't.

Not my pottery, anyway, says Clarence mildly.

Noel protests, but Louise is not surprised. Clarence has been working on a new series, modeled after the urns the ancient Egyptians used to store the vital organs of their dead after embalmment. Except that Clarence's urns are made of the vital organs themselves.
Louise's favorite is an urn sculpted to look like a bloody, hollowed-out heart, aorta and superior vena cava sitting atop the lid like gloves for alien hands. They have not been popular with Clarence's usual gallerists, who want something pretty they can sell to the tourists. The tourists don't want to drink tea from a teapot that looks like a lung.

We'll keep asking around, says Noel. Those pieces are so brilliant. We know a friend who's working on some project involving ritual—maybe you two could do something together? Clarence shrugs. He's never made art for anyone else. He just does things to see if he can do them. And when he finds he can, he stops and does something else.

Teesa pours out coffee, burnt as the lamb chops. She knows that Noel and Louise are having an affair, but claims not to mind. She prides herself on being unconventional, so she mentions it frequently, with an air of studied boredom. Teesa is one of those people who substitute scarves for personality. Now she dances back to her chair, and watches Louise put down her knife and fork. Oh, she says, I'm always so impressed with your table manners, you and Clarence.

She is forever saying things like this to Louise and Clarence, as if they were feral cats skulking about a farmhouse. As if they were not quite civilized. Louise wants to bite Teesa's thin freckled arms in revenge. Instead she says, quite politely, Oh, we're not exactly Grey Gardens up at the estate, you know. We have running water. We even bathe sometimes.

Noel yelps, his way of laughing. Mrs. Ralph Mattson finishes putting away the last of her food and taps Louise's arm. My dear, the old woman says, gumming the words through thick red lipstick caked over her lips, a bloody cave of bad dentures. That nightmare
mouth tells Louise she'd like her little dog to be preserved when he goes. I do think it will be any day now, she says, clicking her tongue.

I can do that, says Louise. Would you like him to be playing? Hunting? Sleeping?

I think mounting a nice-looking bitch, Mrs. Ralph Mattson says cheerfully, and Clarence starts coughing. He looks at Louise, who shrugs, so he continues to drink his coffee with the sort of ferocious delicacy he uses whenever he encounters anything carnal. Louise has never known, of course, if that extends to his affairs, and she does not care to ask.

Louise has been loyal only—almost only—to her brother and father in love. This is not to say she has been a virgin; she has always been open and in fact almost generous in matters of the skin. But in matters of the heart she has been lured but once, long ago. She fell in love with a complexion, pale and soft as ivory silk, lips ripe and rosy, too pretty, almost, to be a man's face at all. And yet there was nothing at all soft about him. His mind had strong legs and his eyes were hard and gray. The beautiful lips shaped determined phrases, anger often braided into the words.