Chapter 7 #2
Calla relented. “You’re right, you’re his daughter too. Toward the end, he talked about you all the time. He asked about what
you were doing. Remembered things about you that even I had forgotten. The way you would only eat blueberries in pancakes,
never on their own.”
“Because of the seeds.”
“How scared you were of the owls in the woods. You used to sneak into his and mom’s room, wailing about those owls. He said
you’d snuggle right between them with your cold-ass feet.”
“I remember.” Both parents on either side of her, a star-pricked sky through the window. Making wishes until her eyelids drooped.
Back then, safety was a promise hung on the cusp of dreaming.
“He said that he’d subscribed to the Forster’s newsletter, did you know that?”
“Good for him.” She forced the ice to wrap around her chest. Freeze the heart, protect the internal organs.
“Whenever they mentioned the art conservation, he’d look for your name.”
Vivi walked away from the installation and sat heavily on the bench, staring at her hands. Calla sat next to her.
“Why are you so unforgiving?” she asked. “So hard?”
“Dammit, Calla,” Vivi said, so loudly that the student docent by the check-in desk glanced up. She lowered her voice. “I had to become hard. I became hard so you could stay soft.”
“Listen to me, Bee. I’m grateful you were there when we were kids. But that was a long time ago. I’m good now. You can just
be.”
“What does it mean, that you’re good now?”
“I’m not using. I haven’t had a drink since last fall. Well, I mean, I haven’t been drunk since last fall.”
“And how long will that last?” Vivi knew she should be encouraging. That’s what a good sister would do. But she was afraid
to believe it. Love and fear, fisting together, impossible now to pry apart.
“It’ll last this time.” Calla nodded at her. “You’ll see.”
Vivi thought of Calla’s stints in rehab, her long silences, her frequent disappearances.
Calla’s addictions were constantly biting at their heels.
If it wasn’t alcohol, it was the pills; if it wasn’t the pills, it was some new obsession that wrested her so completely from reality that Vivi would have to spend months pulling her back.
A phone thrown into Lake Michigan, a teetering pile of bills that called to mind those gut-turning visits from debt collectors in Deer Creek.
What if, what if, the endless refrain. It could have just as easily been Calla in that truck, speeding with booze in her veins, thrown through
the windshield into a heap.
Calla handed her the book she’d been holding. It was a bound catalogue raisonné of lesser-known French Surrealists that she’d
snuck out of the art history library. Vivi flipped through the book. Ly wasn’t well-regarded or prolific enough to merit his own catalogue, but he had a handful of paintings in this one. Calla
stopped her turning at an entry of Moonbathers, one of Ly’s final paintings.
“This one,” she said. “This one isn’t like the others.”
Vivi saw that her sister was right. Where Ly’s paintings were usually claustrophobic in color and composition, this landscape was peaceful and comparatively minimalistic.
Navy spears of wheat tumbled across a foreground trampled by leopards with piercing yellow eyes. Above, the moon’s tear dribbled
across the canvas in a smeared line. In the far background of the painting, there was a small structure with a sloped roof,
nearly subsumed by the foliage around it.
Moonbathers
1936
15 x 22 cm.
Oil on canvas
Private Collection
This small-scale piece by K. P. Ly signifies a new direction for the Surrealist painter.
While the majority of Ly’s work is inseparable from his Indochinese birthplace, Moonbathers presents an unabashed celebration of the bucolic French countryside.
The landscape is warped, with a weeping moon and a menagerie
of animals only found in the artist’s imagination. Again, Ly’s psychic unrest overlaid on a dreamscape that only he could summon. Yet, perhaps, in this turn toward the pastoral, we can see a new artist emerging too.
“You see it?” Calla jabbed toward the structure at the back of the painting. “It’s like you were saying. The cottage. The
chateau or whatever.”
“It could be a shed. Or something Ly added for composition’s sake.”
“This was the only painting he’d ever done that depicts the French countryside. During that very same summer where Justine
Allard hosted an artist in Arles. There has to be a connection.”
Once Vivi looked past the trappings of the Surrealist nightmare in the painting, she could recognize the wet sprawl of the
Camargue countryside that had lured artists like Van Gogh and Gaugin decades before Ly arrived. Moonbathers could have been the very painting commissioned by Emil Blanc for his sister, a gift for Justine’s hospitality during Ly’s bleak period.
“This is all guesswork,” she protested.
“We have to start somewhere. And I have a feeling about all this.”
“I should do more research. There’s bound to be more about the Allards’ estate.”
“You, always researching. Let’s get a hotel. We can take this catalogue with us. No one will notice.”
On their way out, Calla stopped in front of the installation, We Die Alone. She pulled a pen out of her pocket. “This generation of artists. Such a defeatist lot.”
“Leave it, Calla.” Vivi pulled at her arm, to no avail.
Calla glanced around, and spying no docents nearby, hastily changed a word on the placard taped to the wall. We Die Together.
Vivi shook her head. But before she followed Calla, she took a photo of the placard. It was, she thought, a better title after
all.
To: Vivian Nguy?n [v_nguyen@]
From: Samuel Noi [samnoi@]
Subject: the perils of rationalizing
Vivi,
I’ve tried to understand why you did what you did. Not just stripping Blue Mirror but leaving us without a goodbye. Because you did leave us, didn’t you? Was it the key that scared you away? Was Phoebe too
much for you? I won’t regret her, of course, but I regret that I didn’t listen more closely to your needs. Only—you never
told me what you needed. I thought it might have been us.
Loving you has been an impossible cipher. Once I think I know the solution, the puzzle has changed again, numbers rearranging
into a new sort of taunt. I wish I’d never set my mind to that puzzle, to you.
I’m angry in a way I’ve never been before. Even putting aside what we’ve meant to each other, your professional betrayal was
unforgivable. Of all our colleagues, I considered you my partner. You loved the art. I trusted you would not harm it without
reason. But now I’m left wondering: What is the reason for all this risk? Was it worth it?
I say that you did an unforgivable thing, yet there’s a part of me that wants to be able to forgive. Not for you. But for
me and for Phoebe. I don’t want to live as you do, with my heart walled off from any reprieve that might have been freely
given.
I hope you are at peace with your decisions. In the end I guess I don’t need to understand them. Only you do.
Samuel