Chapter 4 #2
She turned to the huge canvases leaning against the walls of the loft.
She remembered those too. Each multimedia collage consisted of a black-and-white, blown-up photo of a different woman’s face.
One could see the cratered pores on the women’s cheeks, the fine hairs on their earlobes.
Taken alone, the photographs would have offered tender portraits of modern women.
What made the work unique was Calla’s collaging of those photographs.
Where the eyes and mouth of each subject should have been, she’d darkened the surfaces to black, then painted scenes of violence atop.
Modern hellscapes of tortured animals and burning buildings and burly men wielding axes.
One sensed that the women were haunted by all that they’d seen, silenced by grim memories.
The theme of entrapment was driven home even more with a fine layer of gilded netting thrown over each piece.
Each was named for a different Greek muse.
All of the paintings from Enmeshment were there in the loft, unsold, unloved. All except for one.
Calla handed her a mug of chamomile. “Behold: the evidence of genius. The deluded artist on a crazed spiral.”
“You’re not crazy.”
“Tell that to the press.”
“I didn’t know you kept the paintings.”
“No one else wanted them. Bad investments don’t tend to sell well. That’s what I am now, the worst investment.”
“And Clio?” Goddess of history. Portrait of Vivi.
“Rotting in a dumpster on the South Side, I’d guess.”
Wine soaring through the hushed gallery. A push, a rip, a show abruptly ended. Later, cold wind pitching across Vivi’s cheeks
like a slap, her breath caught in smoke and regret.
“Do you want to talk about it?” asked Vivi. “Your show?”
Calla’s jaw hardened. “I’m good.”
“And Wayland?”
“In South America, screwing some nubile young muse. I don’t want to talk about him either. Show me what you got, Bee.”
Vivi handed her the phone with the photos of the stripped Blue Mirror and explained what she’d found. She could feel her sister’s mounting excitement next to her, the way she bounced on her heels. Calla’s energy had always been a dervish in a room, sweeping everyone else up with it.
“So I’m right!” she crowed. “Ly has got to be connected to our family. That woman, Vivi, she looks just like you. The freckle!”
Vivi’s hand rose to touch it involuntarily. “Slow down. We don’t know anything.”
“You think Blue Mirror was the offering from the letter?”
“No, I don’t. It was never missing or hidden.”
“But the women were.”
“Then what does the sundial have to do with anything? No, the offering has to be something different. Dad didn’t leave anything
else in the shed?”
“Nothing except more printouts of K. P. Ly’s paintings, like I told you. Maybe Dr. Quan will know more. You took a class with him, didn’t you?”
Paul Quan, hotshot Surrealist scholar and Yale-educated, tenured professor at Rathmore. Vivi had never forgotten his bombastic
manner. He once threw a pencil at a master’s candidate who’d confused Modigliani and Magritte. His grading was famously harsh,
but she had somehow scraped an A- in the class, the highest mark anyone had gotten out of him in years. Still, her final paper
had bled with insults written in his heavy, red scrawl. Don’t be dense. UNCLEAR. Have you ever even SEEN a painting, Miss Nguy?n? The thought of facing him again made Vivi break out in phantom hives.
“I looked Quan up. He’s currently working on a collection of correspondence from Emil Blanc, a man about town in 1930s Paris,
friend to all the bohemian artists.” Vivi paused. “I also read that Blanc was K. P. Ly’s agent back then. Before he disappeared.”
“Which means Quan might know about Ly.”
“He might be able to authenticate the handwriting in the letter, at least. But I don’t know that he’d be inclined to share
his research. He’s a genius, but he’s famously mercurial.”
“Aren’t they all.”
“A few years ago, he wrote a paper about Ly’s use of blue. It was pretty obscure, but it means that he knew something about Ly. Maybe Dad came across the article and that piqued his interest.”
“Dad? Who never even picked up a book?”
“He never looked at a painting either, that I know of—but here we are. Maybe he had more time in retirement. Here, I printed
out Quan’s article for you. And I checked out this book on the Surrealists from the Forster resource library. It has a few
mentions of Ly. We need to learn everything we can.”
Calla waved her away. “And we will. Dr. Quan is giving a public lecture on campus tomorrow. I registered us both. We can speak
to him there. See what he and Dad talked about.”
“He won’t like being cornered like that.”
Quan avoided people at all costs. In her time at Rathmore, he’d refused to hold office hours in rank defiance of university
policy. He did not contribute service hours or sit on any academic committees. In his entire career, he’d only supervised
three dissertations, and he’d only passed one of the three. But no one dared to challenge him. He published voraciously and
his presence alone drew art history scholars to the otherwise unremarkable Midwestern college.
“Who the hell cares. Won’t it be nice to see ol’ Rathy?”
“We need a plan, Button.”
“You know what we need? A cigarette.” Calla rifled in an end table, then emerged with a pack of Hestias.
“I’m trying to quit. Samuel doesn’t like it, especially around Phoebe.”
“A little smoke never hurt anyone. We’re secondhand Sallies, and we’re just fine.”
“Are we?” Vivi asked dryly.
“Besides, everyone needs one vice, even perfect Vivi. And you can tell me all about your boring Ly research while we smoke.”
Calla’s tone was as cajoling as it was as a child, when she tried to coax the last Little Debbie cake from Vivi.
Or all those times she inserted herself when Wayland invited Vivi to a movie, jumping into the back seat before either of them could muster the heart to refuse.
She dangled the Hestias back and forth in front of Vivi and, with a sigh, Vivi took them from her.
On the fire escape, they lit the cigarettes and peered up at the smoggy sky over the city. A train on the Pink Line rattled
in the distance, an echo of the conductor’s announcement drifting toward them. Last stop. End of the line. Nicotine filled Vivi’s veins.
Calla swung her bare feet lightly over the edge of the rail. The red paint on her nails was chipped, her second toe slightly
longer than her first, pinky toes curled inward, like puppies seeking warmth. Vivi knew no one else’s body, except her own,
so well. Calla’s smell, her sounds, her movements, the unrest of her emotion; all a part of Vivi’s genetic code.
When Vivi was young, after May had left them, she sometimes pretended that she was Calla’s mother. Wiping her face of Kraft
mac and cheese, tying her shoes on the walk to the bus stop. Forging their father’s signature on field trip permission forms.
Even now, she had the urge to yank a brush through Calla’s knotted hair. Do you want them to call CPS on us?
Back then, the worst threat would have been for someone to separate them, and even now, decades later, Vivi could never completely
shed that fear. In the child-corner of her mind, she felt as if the world were conspiring to separate their family, one by
one, as if they were on a firing line being picked off by invisible assailants. Bitterly, she reflected that this fear was
her mother’s most meaningful legacy to them.
May’s leaving was so sudden that none of them were prepared for it. (How could one, after all, prepare for such a thing?)
They’d filed a missing-persons report, but the detectives were unsympathetic. They pointed to the note that May had left on
the kitchen table for her husband. Don’t worry. I need to take care of myself for awhile. There were no floating bodies, no Jane Does that might offer terrible absolution. Only silence and more questions.
Vivi would sometimes hear Tu?n in his room, babbling in Vietnamese, words that made no sense, except for the way he repeated their mother’s name. During
that time, the sound of May’s name had become synonymous with sadness for Vivi. It wailed so loudly inside of her that she
would look around, startled that no one else could hear the keening pitch. It was cruel of the world to keep going, but it
did; it never halted once.
Maybe May was his last thought, as Tu?n soared through the windshield, toward the hardened arms of the tree trunk. That love that obliterated him.
“Do you think he meant to do it?” Vivi asked. The idea wouldn’t stop clutching at her.
Calla stopped swinging her feet. She didn’t have to ask what her sister meant. “Do you?”
Tu?n could have been on another bender, despite his claims of sobriety. Maybe he’d relapsed. Pushing that lead foot until the
truck passed sixty, seventy, up to three digits. Headlights swinging with abandon.
What would it change, Vivi wondered, if he had wanted to die? After all, she never truly expected their father to stay. For
weeks after May left, Vivi would listen for the door at night, expecting it to creak open, for Tu?n to start up his truck and leave. Yet, against all odds, he never did. He drank and threw dishes and got furious and lolled
like a shot creature on the recliner, hungover, reeking. But he stayed. And in the end, maybe Vivi wished he hadn’t.
The sisters were silent, watching the city below them, feeling between them that familiar heave of contradictory feeling.
Their loyalty to one another, tangled with the resentment of their circumstance, mixed up with an underlying and mistaken
notion that the other sister had it easier. What was “easy” anyway? Not life. Not love.
Hundreds of windows twinkled around them, each holding the fulsome weight of grievances and elation, of unpaid bills and charred
dinners and unspoken, private beauty that vanished in the swell of morning. Vivi and Calla stubbed their cigarettes, squashing
out the light.