Chapter 14 Lily #2
The portraits made me feel melancholy, wistful, even a little bit angry.
I was looking at a third that showed a man—no, a boy, he had a boy’s apple cheeks and dense, sun-bleached eyelashes—with a line of stitches along his cheekbone, holding his hand to his chest. The tips of his fingers were missing.
I lifted another sheet. This one showed a woman in a bathing cap, with a smile that edged toward a grimace.
She was turned to the side with a slice of crowd behind her, and she had reins gathered in her hands, beads of water running down her face like tears.
One of the girls who used to ride horses off of diving platforms on the boardwalk and land in those shallow pools.
The thought of the impact made my teeth ache.
Boardwalk and street scenes, facades of shops and billboards that had been torn down for years.
Woolworth’s. Planters Peanuts, Irene’s Jewelry, the Schmidt’s Beer clock.
A woman with her mouth painted into a perfect cupid’s bow and a Miss America sash draped across her chest as she looked out across a stage, wringing her hands.
“I love them. I mean, they are sort of depressing. But they’re so …
human. Vulnerable.” I thought of the artists Philip Louis had been signing at the gallery the past few years.
The post-modern, post-beauty, post-meaning types.
Everything they did was ironic, arch. I had almost forgotten that painting could make you feel like this.
That the right work brought you into it, then sent you back out into the world, ready to reinvest in the details of your surroundings.
They were so different from so much of the work I was seeing in the city: These paintings were simpler, unafraid of approaching sentiment, of asking people to feel something.
They didn’t give me the sense that I’d had when looking at a lot of contemporary stuff, like I wasn’t in on the joke.
After everything with Matthew, I craved that kind of earnestness.
“No argument there. A little too human, if you ask me. I prefer landscapes and still lives, myself. Snowy woods and fruit arranged nicely in a bowl, all that, thank you very much. But you can come look at them some time, if you’d like. There’s more in the other bedroom.”
There was a signature on the bottom right corner of each canvas, but I couldn’t make it out, just the swoop of an S at the beginning of the last name. Most of them had dates, too, ranging from the eighties to the late nineties, but nothing since. “Have you ever showed them to anyone?”
“Other than you?”
“Like a professional? They’re really interesting, Mil. Someone might want to buy these. Maybe even a museum. Or the Atlantic City Historical Society?”
“Oh, I doubt that. He bought them for nothing, a few dollars each, I think. They don’t have any value.
God, I wish this was one of those Antiques Roadshow situations.
I’d get myself a nice little condo in Palm Beach in a second.
” She turned and rustled through another garment bag. “Aha! Here’s what I was looking for.”
She held up a red gingham sundress with a halter neck. It looked, I thought, more like a tablecloth than something to wear.
“Take this. It will look adorable on you. Perfect for this time of year. Now all you need is some handsome boy to take you on a beach picnic.”
“Thanks,” I said, taking the dress, the old cotton supple and soft.
I didn’t bother to tell her that I was planning on staying away from handsome boys for a while.
“It’s been really nice talking to you, Mil.
I hope … Would it be okay if I came back later this week?
I’d love to talk more, and maybe look at the paintings again. ”
“I would love that,” she said.
As I crossed the street back home, I felt a familiar hum in my nerves—one that reminded me of sitting in my first art history course freshman year, watching slides of paintings click by, color-struck, nearly twitching with excitement.
I tried to recall all of the portraits one by one.
The man with the tattered ears and slack jaw who operated the roller coaster out on Steel Pier, a cigarette pinched in his fingers.
The woman with a flower pinned to her lapel and a piece of yellow carbon paper crumpled tight in her hand.
The man with a prosthetic arm from the elbow down, the way the artist had emphasized the mechanical gleam of it in the light.
This painter wanted people at their weakest or their greediest or their most pandering selves.
I wondered how I could find out more, if that swooping S in the signature gave me enough information to start with.
Here, I thought. Here is where everything changes, the upswing.
This is when I start inching my way back to who I’m supposed to be.
IN CONTRAST to the buzz of excitement about the paintings, my shifts at the spa had been brutally dull.
I had forgotten the reality of service jobs: the stretches of hours spent both waiting for something to happen, for customers to serve, and also hoping that you wouldn’t have to do anything at all.
Or the exhaustion of having to be subservient to the customers who did come in, the brutal self-effacement it involved.
Yes ma’am, of course, sir, please, allow me.
My pleasure my pleasure oh no it’s really my pleasure.
By the end of every shift, I felt numb and empty.
On my way out I often stopped at the bar, exhausted, ordering a drink or two because it felt like something to do, because it felt good to be the one who was waited on, who got to make requests.
Then, walking lazily through the rows of slot machines while I waited for the drifty, buzzed feeling to wear off, I watched men in VFW hats and women wearing fanny packs that bulged like exterior organs smoke Marlboro reds and sigh at their bad luck.
I saw the prostitute with the peach tattoo every now and then: sucking on an ice cube at the bar, crossing and recrossing her legs every time a man walked by, then relaxing into a slouch when he looked away.
Rubbing her eyes as she sat on the curb waiting for the jitney, her stilettos in her hands.
Once I walked past her in the hallway near the Guest Rewards lobby.
I braced myself for her to mock me again, but when she saw me staring she just frowned, then reached into her pocket for a packet of Sweet’N Low, tipped her head back, and shook it into her mouth.
She always wore the same style dress, and I could usually see the stem and the leaf of the tattoo peeking above the fabric.
Once she had styled her hair in a dramatic swoop over her face, but when she turned I could see that underneath it she had a black eye.
Clara didn’t come back to the spa until my sixth week there, early in the morning, while I was alone at the desk.
She wore a purple bandana tied around her head and a matching purple halter top, a belly button ring with a dangling charm in the shape of a flower that glinted and jiggled as she walked.
“Good morning, lovely.” No sign of the worried girl I had left behind in the shop.
She made it look so easy—smoothing over the rough parts of her life.
“How have you been lately?” There was a bemused curl to her lips that suggested she knew the way I had fallen apart on the boardwalk as soon as I’d walked out of her door.
“What did you do to me?” I asked, leaning toward her so that I could whisper. Speaking with her about her gift, as she had called it, made me feel insane.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, but you sound crazy. Do you mean the reading?”
“Shh! Yes … you … you did something to me.” Maybe she had been angry about what I had seen.
I understood that—the desire to punish anyone who witnessed your pain.
Hadn’t I done the same to people who had known me here, after Steffanie died?
If only for a moment, to make yourself feel as though you weren’t so weak.
“Like what?” She smirked. “A hex? A curse? You broke a nail?”
“No, I …” I thought about trying to explain to Clara what I’d felt on the boardwalk.
Like I was in the grip of a vise, the light-headedness, the breathlessness, the wild, jostling thing that was my heart.
Eventually a woman had come out of one of the nearby souvenir shops and offered me a cup of water.
It had helped, not so much the water, but feeling seen, her hand tentative and gentle on my back. “Never mind, okay. Why are you here?”
“I want to use the spa.”
“Clara, you know I’ve been warned not to let you back there.”
“I’m a paying customer.” She wiggled her fingers into the pockets of her shorts and produced a crumpled fifty-dollar bill.
“Doesn’t matter. Number one, I don’t think you’re even eighteen years old yet. Number two, even if you pay, I’m not supposed to let you in. Emily said you stole the hair dryer the last time you got back there.”
“How would I do that? They are screwed into the wall.”
“She said your nails were bleeding when you left.”
She shrugged.
“Would you please stop doing that?” I asked.
“What?”
“Shrugging like that. Like you have no idea what’s going on, what anyone is talking about. What you’re doing … you know everything. I don’t know how, but you do.”
Out of the corner of my eye I could see a trio of women coming down the hall, Swarovski shopping bags slung over their arms. I guessed that they were a 10:00 appointment, and Emily would be in any minute.
I believed in Clara, but I didn’t want Emily to see that I did—Emily, who found it so easy to shoo her away like a fly. She would think I was stupid, weak.
“Please go, Clara.”