Chapter 15
One Year Before
A Saturday in late September. The art glitterati appeared at the entrance of the Arlington Arts Collective in Bucktown, wearing
their coats for the first time in the season, reaching for Sancerres over Pinot Grigios. They were newly returned from holidays
abroad, awaiting their next acquisition with bated breath. Promise hanging like garlands in the air.
Fueled by industry curiosity and Dominic Arlington’s hefty connections, Enmeshment had been well positioned for success. Initially, it did not disappoint. In one review of the opening, Vivi read about how
guests wandered past Calla’s mixed-media paintings in collective awe. They were titillated into reaching for their pocketbooks,
until one by one, discreet red stickers appeared beneath each piece.
Everyone agreed: Calla’s work straddled a fine line between horror and beauty, presenting an unforgettable indictment of modern
womanhood. If things had been different, Enmeshment might have cemented Calla’s place in the halls of young artists to watch.
But, seemingly on the turn of a dime, Calla’s opening had devolved from one of dazzling promise into one of chaos and regret.
That was the moment when Vivi entered the gallery.
She’d been running late, scouring the proposal she was submitting for a conservators’ conference in London.
If she were selected, it would be her first international conference and her first time abroad.
And perhaps such an opportunity might blossom into others.
More travel, more art, more freedom. She frequently lost hours to the proposal.
Samuel proofread so many drafts that he could cite each argument by memory.
As she sent the proposal off with a swoop of triumph, she glanced at the clock. Cursing, she threw on her coat and raced northwest
in a cab. There was an accident by the river that slowed her down, so by the time she finally arrived at the gallery, the
opening was well under way. Vivi could only hope that there was enough of a crowd that Calla wouldn’t miss her.
Calla hadn’t told her anything about Enmeshment. In fact, she’d been downright cagey when Vivi asked about it. A surprise, Calla said. Earlier that summer, the sisters hadn’t
been talking as much as they usually did. Will catch up after the show, Calla had texted, adding a custom button emoji, her preferred signature. When they did speak, it was in snatches, always
over the phone and never in person. Calla was, by turns, shaky with nerves and overconfident in her work. Enmeshment would be either a disaster or the greatest thing Dominic had ever shown in his gallery. Mediocrity had never been an option
for her.
Vivi was so glad to see Calla producing at all that she pocketed her worries and gave her sister space. It’d all be over after
the opening anyway, and Calla would come racing back on the fumes of success, more ideas crowding that voracious brain of
hers.
At the gallery, Vivi pulled the door open and brought with her a strong gust of wind that nearly knocked her into the crowd
gathered by the door. Her expectant expression faltered, then slid off altogether.
Calla, wearing a sleek black sheath, looked drawn as she stood next to Wayland and Dominic. The three of them formed a beautifully
lit diorama in front of one of Calla’s pieces, Clio, named after the goddess of history.
Clio was priced so much more expensively than the rest of the pieces in the show that patrons speculated that the artist hadn’t really wanted to sell it at all.
In predictable fashion, that speculation led those same patrons to determine Clio to be the most valuable, even if the reasoning behind that valuation was opaque to them. It had been the first painting to
sell.
Vivi herself was the subject. The underlying photograph was one that Wayland had taken of her when they were teenagers. That
first photograph, snapped in his childhood bedroom when she’d visited him after he sprained his ankle in the woods, was both
earnest and imperfect, a frozen sample from an epoch she’d rather forget. Her hair from her homegrown cut was matted at the
temples and a spot of acne budded on her chin. Her mouth was slightly agape, as if she were on the verge of speaking. Way
had displayed the photograph on his bookshelf, an act that filled Vivi with such embarrassed joy that she could hardly look
at it without flushing.
In Clio, there was no such nascent tenderness, no unhurried nostalgia. Calla had blacked out Vivi’s eyes and inside of them, she’d
painted a scene of a wedding, supplanting Vivi’s face for the bride’s. Inside the narrow opening of her mouth, a woodland
tableau, dimly articulated yet striking, ghostly. Vivi hardly had time to consider Clio before the argument pulled her attention away.
“You stole them,” Wayland said. He was staring with dumbfounded fury at Calla. “My photographs.”
Dominic glanced at Calla. “They’re his?”
“I was reimagining them.” No trace of apology marred her words.
“You didn’t ask,” Wayland said.
“You would have said no.”
A murmur traveled through the crowd. It wasn’t plagiarism, not quite, but what Calla had done was certainly an unlawful appropriation.
All the more scandalous because the work belonged to the artist’s husband. In the back, near the bar, a journalist scribbled
in her pad, her tongue jiggling against the corner of her mouth in gleeful schadenfreude. Someone was muttering, Is this performance art? But Vivi immediately saw that they were serious, all three of them.
“Hold on,” she began.
“This is an unforgivable theft,” Wayland said, as if Vivi hadn’t spoken.
“What’s mine is yours,” Calla said, still placid.
Wayland sneered. “No wonder this is your first show, after all those years. Tortured Calla Nguy?n, who could never bear not to be the center of attention. And for what? You can’t create; you can only steal. What else have
you taken for your art?”
Vivi pulled on his arm. The accusation, if he let it stand, would never leave Calla. “Way, that’s enough.”
He shrugged her off. Calla seemed callous in her distance. Eyes at half-mast, as if she were appraising a stretched canvas
that wasn’t quite up to par.
“Why?” he asked through a stiff jaw. “Just tell me why.”
“For the same reason you keep fucking other people. Because I could.”
Vivi wanted to curl in on herself. Their rage hurt her, physically hurt her. She said, faintly, “Stop it, you two, stop it.”
She remembered wailing the same thing at her parents as they shouted above her head in the farmhouse kitchen. As a child,
she’d always been afraid someone would discover their family’s dysfunction, then barge in to separate her and Calla. The memory
summoned the old fear, tinged with crippling humiliation. She began to shudder as she took in the shocked faces around her,
the sly photographs and texting fingers, eagerly sending out tentacles of gossip that would reach all corners of the city
before long. You’ll never guess what happened with the Nguy?n sisters tonight.
As if finally attuned to her pain, Wayland and Calla turned to her, equally beseeching. Part of her wanted to go to Calla;
the other part longed to reach out to Wayland. If she could be their bridge, maybe she could mend this rift. All she knew
was that she wanted to erase their confrontation, even if it meant turning from the truth and asking her sister to hide from
it with her.
Vivi said, “Tell him, Calla, tell him you didn’t do it. This was a misunderstanding. You would never.”
Pain flashed in Calla’s eyes, like lightning caught in a bottle.
Vivi could see her sister’s thoughts, as clearly as if they’d been written in the air.
Vivi was choosing Wayland over her, leaving her behind.
She’d broken their ironclad alliance. Deeper than the force of that betrayal, Vivi sensed Calla’s puzzlement.
All their lives, each sister had served as the other’s witness, affirming what was real and what was fantasy.
Yes, he really slapped you, and it was wrong.
Yes, she really left us, and it was wrong.
Yes, yes, yes, it all really happened and it was wrong.
What happened when the witness began to lie? When it turned out that the story of one’s life had been written not with ink,
but with water that, under the press of time, dries to nothing?
Seeing all this in her sister’s expression, Vivi immediately regretted her words. She reached for Calla, an apology on her
lips, but it was too late. Calla had begun to flinch away.
“Don’t touch me.”
Dominic tried to take control of the situation by laying his hand on Wayland’s back. He meant to placate him, perhaps, or
lead him out of the gallery so that his fury could diffuse into the night. Accustomed to agreeable patrons, people who revered
him and his gallery, Dominic could not anticipate Wayland with his wild eyes and stoked anger. Way jerked from Dominic, then
raised both palms to push him away with a force that made Dominic’s teeth clatter. There was a popping sound. For a moment,
Vivi thought Wayland might have seriously hurt Dominic.
But it was Dominic crashing onto Clio, his shoulder tearing through the bottom half of the painting. Vivi’s teenage face, crooked-toothed and sallow, unbeautiful
and yearning, the farthest thing from a muse, towered above him. The younger her, lofty in her installation, was judging the
group of them. All that talent and potential, and where had they ended up?
Vivi wondered for a time afterward if Wayland had done it on purpose, but the truth was, it didn’t matter. Intention, an afterthought
to consequence. Amid all her other concerns, she felt a pang for Clio. The piece had, for the briefest of moments, made her feel cherished. Despite the urgent and sinister tones of the piece, Calla had painted her as a powerful goddess, not a cowering kid. In her sister’s eyes, she was strong.
A silence settled onto the gallery. She thought Wayland was going to walk away. He should have. But instead, he took the nearest