Dismantled (9 page)

“Y
OU’RE LATE
,” T
ESS ANNOUNCES
when he walks in the door.

Fuck. He forgot all about her appointment at the gallery and that he’d promised to be back early to watch Em.

Henry has spent a lot of time standing around in galleries with Tess over the years, drinking shitty boxed wine, smiling like a good husband during openings and parties. He always nodded patiently as some earth-mother type said, “You used to do some sculpture, didn’t you? Tess tells me your work was ah-
maz
ing!”

Henry could never stand all those pseudo-artsy women with their flowing clothing made from organic cotton and hemp, their necklaces and bracelets with clunky beads and words in Sanskrit. The art they make and sell sucks. It’s all the same. Wishy-washy watercolors. Tired nature photographs. Simple little vessels made from clay that are supposed to represent the birth of the goddess within. If you’re going to make crap, why bother?

“Got caught up at the office,” Henry says, biting the inside of his cheek.

In his pocket, he carries an unopened pack of cigarettes he picked up at D.J.’s (he hasn’t smoked since college) and the mysterious paper he just found when he stopped at the mailbox at the end of the driveway. It was there, on top of the bills and junk mail, sealed in a plain white envelope with only his first name written on the outside. Once he opened it, he found a carefully folded sheet of matching notepaper with a phone number written out neatly. It looks like a cell number, but one he doesn’t recognize. There was nothing else in the envelope.

“I called the office and they told me you left two hours ago. I tried to get you on your cell, but you didn’t answer.” She stares, waiting for further explanation, but he just stands in silence, takes the bottle of aspirin from his pocket and pops three into his mouth. “Sorry,” he says, chomping down on the bitter tablets.

He can’t tell her where he’s been, how he couldn’t even bring himself to go up the damn driveway and take a look at the old cabin.

“I’ve got to go,” Tess says, shouldering her big leather purse. “Emma’s in the pool.”

In. The. Pool.

The words are bubbles of sound reaching him.

“She shouldn’t be swimming without anyone watching her,” Henry says, already crossing the kitchen to check on Emma. How could Tess be so careless?

Henry races out the sliding glass doors, across the patio to the pool, where he sees Emma practicing her butterfly. Her arms move in perfect circles, her face bobs in and out of the water.

Fine. She’s fine. This time.

Her swimsuit has one of those backs that go between the shoulder blades—Tess would know what they’re called. The muscles of her upper back and arms ripple as she slices through the water. Strong already, like her mother. Emma gets to the deep end and stops, smiling broadly at him as she catches her breath.

He hears the Volvo start in the driveway.

“Mom said it was okay,” Emma tells him as she treads water. “The chemicals, I mean. She said when you shock it, it just has to sit overnight.”

Henry nods. Lets himself breathe. “Nice butterfly,” he tells her.

“I’m not sure I’ve got the leg part right,” she says, then pushes off for another lap.

He watches Emma swim, and when he’s sure he can’t take any more, he hurries her out of the pool by saying the clouds are threatening.

“Thunder,” he tells her. “Lightning.”

“The sky is blue!” Emma whines. Henry points to the small, but dark, clouds in the western sky.

“They’re coming this way,” he lies. The lie feels thick in his throat, and once again, he imagines his lungs full of water, imagines himself sinking to the bottom of the pool trying to save her. What having no air might feel like. He imagines what he’d see if he looked up, through the water at the sky—if the blue in the sky would make it seem like the pool went on forever, impossibly deep.

Emma gets out, complaining. She towels off then goes to her room to change.

Henry makes shish kebabs on the grill: chicken, red peppers, and pineapple covered in a gooey sweet-and-sour sauce. He serves them with Minute rice and the world is good.

He touches the folded paper in the pocket of his pants, puzzling over it before sitting down to eat, decides to call after dinner. He gives the bottle of aspirin next to it a shake.

Emma’s sitting at the table in a T-shirt that has a seahorse adorned with sparkling sequins. Her towel-dried hair is pulled back in a loose ponytail.

“Daddy!” she shrieks, already bordering on hysteria. “You forgot to set a place for Danner!”

Henry bites his cheek, takes a long sip of wine. “I didn’t know she was coming.”

Emma stamps her foot. “I told you! I told you! You never listen!”

“I thought maybe you and I could have dinner alone. Maybe Danner can come for dessert.”

Emma pushes her plate away without touching a bite, folds her arms tight across her chest and gives him the silent treatment. The if-you-can’t-acknowledge-Danner-then-I-won’t-acknowledge-you treatment.

Knowing he’s as good as beat, not wanting to ruin the evening, Henry stands up, gets out the extra plate and silverware, and sets a place beside his daughter, across from him, for their guest of honor.

“Wine, Daddy. Danner needs wine.”

“Of course. Of course she does. I imagine Danner is quite the connoisseur.” Henry opens the cabinet, gets a glass and sets it down on the table, grateful that at least he doesn’t need to fill it. In the beginning, he did. Platefuls of untouched food had been wasted by Danner. Finally, Tess managed to convince Emma that an invisible girl must need to eat invisible food.

“If she ate our food,” Tess explained, “it would show through and wouldn’t it be embarrassing for her to be walking around fully invisible but for a stomach full of chewed peas and baked chicken?”

Emma fell for it. Henry kissed Tess on the nose, leaned in and whispered, “Brilliant,” in her ear.

“D
ANNER SAYS SHE DOESN’T
like that word.”

“What word is that, sweetie?”

“Connoisseur. She says it’s pretentious.” She pulls her plate back in front of her and uses a fork to carefully take the chicken, peppers, and pineapple off the skewer, arranging them in neat, segregated piles.

“Sorry to have offended.” The words are stiff. He’s trying to be patient, to not snap at his little girl, give her a good shake, and tell her he’s had it up to here with all this Danner bullshit.

When, he asks himself, did I turn into such a prick? He remembers how he passed the turnoff for the cabin only hours ago, tossing away any chance at destroying whatever evidence might be left in spite of his promise to Tess. A prick
and
a coward.

“That’s all right.” Emma stabs a chunk of pineapple, pops it into her mouth and begins chewing, stopping from time to time to turn to her left and laugh at whatever terribly witty thing Danner happens to be saying.

Whenever Henry asks his daughter about where Danner came from, she’s vague.

“She must have a home,” Henry says.

“She lives here, with us.”

“What about when she’s not with you, where does she go?”

Emma smiles. “She’s never far. She always sees me. Danner sees everything.”

After the
how did you die
conversation in the car, Henry has resolved to redouble his efforts. He hears himself sounding like a grim late-night cop-drama detective.

“What does Danner look like?”

Emma pushes rice around on her plate. “Like me, only different.”

“Is she your age?”

“Almost exactly. Her birthday is just before mine. But she doesn’t get red velvet cake.”

“Do you think she was once a real girl?”

Emma makes a frustrated growling sound. “She
is
a real girl, Daddy.”

“I mean, do you think other people could see her?”

“Everyone could see her if she wanted them to.”

“So she doesn’t want us to see her? Your mother and me?”

“Not yet.”

When Henry had gone to Tess with his concerns this morning, she told him he was overreacting. Emma was still in bed and Tess was busy in the kitchen.

“She’s an imaginative girl, Henry. An only child who’s invented the perfect playmate.” She turned her back to him to start grinding the coffee. Henry waited for the noise to stop before continuing.

“But what about the whole death thing? Don’t you find that the slightest bit disturbing?”

Tess dumped the ground coffee into the basket and flipped on the pot.

“She’s a young girl trying to make sense of the world. That’s it. Her hamster died last fall. Her grandfather before that. She’s just working it all out in her own way. Stop being so freaked out. And for God’s sake, stop asking her all those questions. You’re going to ruin the game for her.”

Some fucking game.

Tess turned away again, started getting cups and bowls down from the cabinets.

“So what am I supposed to do when she’s talking away to Danner about being dead?”

Tess turned back to face him, cradling the three bowls and two coffee cups.

“Play along. Believe it or not, you were once creative and whimsical too, Henry. See if you can call on that part of yourself, hmm? For Emma?”

So that’s what Henry tries to do now. He takes his well-adjusted, child-psychology-reading wife’s advice and plays along.

“Shish kebabs are Danner’s favorite,” Emma tells him, her mouth full of red pepper.

“I’m glad. I aim to please.”

Maybe Tess is right. Maybe Danner is just an extension of Emma, a creative way of testing out one’s place in the world, of always having someone to talk to, someone to reaffirm her thoughts and feelings.

Emma sets down her fork. “Danner has a secret.”

“Oh yeah?” Danner and her secrets. She’s always telling Emma things she isn’t supposed to reveal. Henry takes another gulp of wine, glances over at the clock, wonders how late Tess will be. He imagines her walking in now, breezing into the kitchen. He prays for it. His eye ticks. An involuntary contraction that begins with a feeling like a tickle in the outside corner of his right eye. It usually means another headache’s coming on.

“She says I can tell.” Emma wipes her mouth with a napkin, dabbing at the corners daintily, like a lady at a tea party worried about ruining her lipstick.

“Well then, what’s the big secret?” Another tick. He rubs at the eye, keeps his fingers there, trying to soothe it.

“She knows your friend.”

“What friend is that, honey?”

Play along,
he thinks to himself. Play along.

“The lady who made Francis.” Emma looks so casual as she says this, like a little girl who’s just asked if you could please pass the rice.

Henry sets his fork down with a noticeable tremor in his hand, opens his mouth to say something, but only a hollow gasp escapes, an empty bubble of sound, and there he is again, at the bottom of the pool, unable to save anyone, especially not himself.

D
RIVING HOME FROM HER
appointment with Julia, owner of the Golden Apple gallery, Tess is elated. Julia sold three of her new paintings this week, all to one woman—a summer person, Julia explained.

“She wants to know if you’d be interested in doing some commissioned work,” Julia said and handed over a folded piece of paper. Tess opened it up and in neat script was the name
Claire Novak
and a cell phone number.

“She asked all about you,” Julia continued. “Where you studied. Who your influences are.”

They’d left Julia’s office and were standing in the bright white gallery, where another painting of Tess’s hung—daisies in a cobalt vase—along with an eclectic selection of other artists’ work: collages; still lifes; photos of insects; landscapes painted on old pressed-tin ceiling squares; and a few pieces by Georgia Steiger, who did tapestrylike portraits using felt and yarn. Georgia was eighty and had been using a walker since her hip operation last fall. Her work was the best thing in the gallery and she was the most successful of all the local artists, her pieces hanging in a couple of folk-art museums. A local filmmaker had even done a documentary about her—
Woven Lives: The Art of Georgia Steiger
.

“What’s she like? This Claire Novak?” Tess asked, studying a new piece of Georgia’s: an old man in a wheelchair, yarn face twisted into a toothy grin. Whenever she looks at Georgia’s art, Tess can’t help but wonder what she herself might be producing at eighty. Will she still be painting? Or will she have given it up, realizing, at last, that she’ll never come to greatness?

Julia hesitated, then, smiling, answered, “Intriguing.”

Tess couldn’t remember the last time she had caught the interest of someone intriguing. Well, she could remember, but it was a long time ago. Back in college. She wasn’t supposed to think about that, let alone talk about it. And this, this was real life. The present. Here and now. She turned away from Georgia’s portrait of the old man in the wheelchair, and tucked Claire Novak’s number into the breast pocket of her linen shirt, where it seemed to flutter a little, like a butterfly against her heart.

T
ESS FEELS FOR
C
LAIRE
Novak’s phone number in her pocket, steps on the gas, speeding a little now. The pink-and-purple chicken in front of the Seven Bridges Egg Farm glows in the final rays of sunset, seems to move as the light changes, inching toward the road in some barely discernible way.

She’ll call Claire when she gets home. Or maybe tomorrow. She doesn’t want to seem too eager. As she drives, she goes over what she’ll say to Claire when asked about her education, her influences. More important, she thinks about all she’ll leave out.

Tess spent four years studying art at Sexton, a small liberal arts school in the center of Vermont that had, at full capacity, no more than two hundred campus students. The dorms were cottages, complete with kitchen, lounge, and fireplace. There was the clothing-optional dorm, the vegan dorm, the women’s dorm, the substance-free dorm, and of course the substance-friendly dorm.

Junior year, Suz appeared. Tess had seen her standing in line in the cafeteria at breakfast the first day—she got only coffee and dumped about eight sugar packets into it. She was a tall girl with straight, pale blond hair and amber eyes and was wearing combat boots, black leggings, and a flowing earth-tone silk tunic.

“She transferred from Bennington,” one of the girls sitting at Tess’s table said.

“Why the fuck would anyone leave Bennington to come to Sexton?” another asked.

“She got kicked out,” the first girl said. “She set a fire in the dorm. Claimed it was an accident.”

“No, that’s not why,” said yet a third girl, Dee, who had a face full of piercings. Her boyfriend Lucas was on the admissions committee, so Tess figured she should know. “She got kicked out for a prank. She painted the dean’s house black, windows and all. Did it one night while everyone was sleeping.”

“Impressive,” said the first girl.

“Yeah,” said the second. “If she did that here, she’d probably get independent-study credit for it!”

They all laughed, watched Suz take her coffee outside where she sat on the grass, took out a plastic pouch of Drum, and rolled a cigarette.

Suz took a sculpture-studio class with Tess and spent the first two months outside, constructing a fifteen-foot-tall man out of scraps of wood and tree limbs. She used a chain saw to cut pieces and worked from a stepladder. As a finishing touch, she gave him a gigantic, out-of-scale erection that nearly pulled him off balance, making him tilt slightly forward. Jon Berussi, their sculpture professor, clearly loved it.

“This,” he said, shaking his arms at the sculpture, “is what you should all aspire to. Look at the lines! The symmetry. Look at the flow she’s got going on here, people.”

“Would you consider it modern primitive?” Spencer Styles asked. He had a pointed ferret face and wore black clothing that was a little too big on him. His family had tons of money, and here was Spencer rebelling with his Salvation Army wardrobe, the pockets of his trench coat full of books of poetry and existential philosophy. He was always trying to impress Berussi; to talk to him artist to artist.

Suz shook her head. “I’m not into categories. No artist should be put in a box.”

Spencer’s girlfriend, Val (who would one day become Winnie), smiled. She was a skinny girl who dressed in hippie clothes and had long, unkempt dark hair covering half her face. Val never spoke in class, but she would visibly cringe whenever Spencer opened his mouth, as if she just knew he was about to embarrass himself.

Berussi, a fifty-something bear of a man with wild gray hair and beard (both of which he kept confined in ponytails), said, “I’d consider it great art. That’s what matters, people. Suz is right, in the end, all the categories, movements, and schools are bullshit.” He put his hand on Suz’s shoulder and Tess heard Spencer whisper to Val, “He’s totally boning her.” Val shivered.

Berussi took a photo of Suz’s sculpture and brought it to admissions, suggesting it be put in the new catalog. The admissions director agreed only after cropping the photo off at the waist. So in the spring Sexton catalog, there was a photo of the giant wooden man with Suz next to him on her ladder, banging on his shoulder with a hammer.

When the sculpture was finished, she sent invitations to the whole school to view what she called an “Art Happening.” Everyone gathered around the giant man after dinner, bundled up in the early November cold. Snow started to fall as they waited for Suz.

Tess zipped up her parka and shoved her bare hands, raw and red from the cold, deep into her pockets. All around her was the buzz of anticipation:
What,
people asked in hushed whispers,
is the kooky new girl up to
?

Spencer stood in his long black coat, doing his best to look bored, as if he was above all of this. Val was half a step behind him, head upturned, watching the snow fall through her chin-length shaggy bangs.

Suz came out of the sculpture building wearing a hooded cloak, carrying a lit torch.

“Maybe she’s a witch or something,” said Dee with the piercings. Dee took a swig of the bottle of schnapps she was holding and passed it to Tess, who had a tentative sip, her teeth aching from the sweetness; it was like a liquid candy cane.

The crowd parted to make way for Suz and she strode silently through the students and faculty, right up to her sculpture, where she paused, closing her eyes.

Tess held her breath.

In the silence, they could all hear Suz making a low buzzing sound. The noise got louder, turning into more of a groan, then she opened her eyes and touched the lit torch to the tip of his penis.

“No!” Berussi wailed, but it was too late. The flames spread down the penis, and onto the body. Within minutes, he was engulfed, the scraps of lumber and tree limbs cracking and popping—Tess had had no idea a fire could be so loud. The group moved back, away from the heat. The penis fell off, followed by the arms. Then the rest of his body collapsed in, leaving only a pile of burning wood that no one would guess had once been a sculpture.

“Okay, it’s official—she’s fuckin’ crazy,” Dee said, her teeth chattering as she moved closer to the heat of the fire and took another gulp of schnapps.

“Totally pagan,” a hippie girl in a peasant skirt and poncho said.

“Brilliant,” mumbled Henry, the brooding sculpture student Tess had had a serious crush on since freshman year.

Spencer shook his head disdainfully, pulled his coat around him tighter, grunted, “Come on,” to Val, and started to walk away. But Val stayed, eyes fixed on the fire. “Suit yourself,” he told her, heading off on his own.

Suz tossed the torch onto the flaming remains and pulled down the hood of her cloak.

Someone made a coyote howling noise.

A joint was passed around.

A guy in a floppy leather hat said, “Where’re the marshmallows? There should totally be marshmallows.”

Jon Berussi was near tears. “Why?” he whimpered, reaching out to clutch Suz’s cloak. “All that effort…it’s such a waste.”

Suz smiled. “Don’t you get it?” she asked. “It’s the ultimate act of creativity. Destruction is transformation. In order to be reborn, you have to die.”

“But your sculpture,” Berussi said. “That will never be reborn. It’s gone. Ruined.”

“The energy behind it is stronger than ever,” Suz said. “Can’t you feel it, Jon? Can’t you feel how this makes anything seem possible?”

He shook his head mournfully.

The smiled disappeared from Suz’s face. “Then you have nothing to teach me anymore,” she said, turning her back to him.

T
ESS TOSSES HER KEYS
into the red ceramic bowl by the front door, on top of Henry’s. His keys are on a ring with a silver horseshoe that Emma had picked out for him last Christmas. “For luck,” Emma said.

“Home!” Tess calls. She hears the TV but no other signs of life. The kitchen is tidy, the dishwasher running. The air smells tangy, acrid. Henry has barbecued. An empty bottle of merlot is in the recycling bin.

“Shit,” Tess mumbles. It’s not even seven o’clock.

She finds Emma on the couch, engrossed in a movie in which a group of very attractive people are shooting at each other and shouting obscenities. Emma’s sitting with her legs tucked under her, a package of Oreos open on her lap.

“Where’s your dad?” Tess asks, reaching for the remote and flipping until she finds a cartoon.

“On the phone,” Emma answers, not taking her eyes off the TV, which now shows a cartoon octopus washing a leaning pile of dishes, pulling them from the bottom until the tower finally crashes down on him.

Tess finds Henry in her bedroom, the bedroom that used to be theirs, lying down with his eyes closed.

“Hey,” she says. “Another headache?” She takes off her earrings, sets them on the dresser.

Henry sits up, his eyes red and glassy, and nods.

“Who were you talking to?” she asks.

“Was I talking?” Henry looks alarmed.

“I don’t mean just now. Em said you were on the phone. Who was it?”

“The phone? No, I wasn’t on the phone.”

He’s clearly lying. He has this way of looking just to the side of her face, somewhere over her shoulder, when he isn’t telling the truth.

Was there even a time when they’d told each other everything? Isn’t that what young lovers are supposed to do—stay up all night confessing each sordid detail of their lives? Not Henry and Tess. They had secrets from the start. Henry never talked about his feelings for Suz, which were obvious. And Tess never did tell Henry that she’d had a crush on him for three years before Suz finally pushed them together. Tess thinks that those first secrets were like seeds, and now a wild garden grew, the lies all tangled, untended. It’s a dangerous place.

“So how was your evening with Em?” She leans down to un-buckle her shoe.

He looks pale but seems surprisingly sober.

“She told me Danner knows the lady who painted Francis.”

Tess feels herself shiver involuntarily. The hairs all over her body rise, as if lightning has struck nearby.

“Emma loves that damn painting,” is all she can manage to say.

“I think it’s pretty fucking spooky. Yesterday, she’s asking Danner how she died. Now today, Danner claims to know Suz.” Henry tries to keep his voice calm, rational. He’s just stating the facts. But Tess sees the panic in his red eyes. Hears the tremor in his voice.

“I think maybe you’re overreacting,” she tells him, sticking to her role as the rational skeptic. It’s far safer that way.

That does it. Tess sees his face go from practiced calm to angry panic.

“Overreacting? You don’t know how fucked up it was to hear her say that.”

“Keep your voice down,” she warns. “I think it’s just a coincidence. Emma loves the painting. She doesn’t know a thing about Suz, just that she’s an old friend.”

“A dead friend.”

“We’ve never told her Suz was dead.”

“No,” Henry agrees. “No, we haven’t. And that’s my point. It’s as if she knows.”

Tess takes a deep breath, lets it out.

“Christ, Henry, I really wish you wouldn’t drink so much. You’re not thinking clearly. And it’s no wonder you get so goddamn many migraines. Sometimes I think if you didn’t drink so much, then maybe…”

“Maybe what?” Henry asks. His brown eyes are soft, expectant as a dog’s.

“Nothing,” Tess says. She turns her back to him, begins undressing, which she should probably be doing in the bathroom, but screw it, this is her bedroom. She unbuttons her shirt slowly, feeling his eyes on her.

Does some part of him still want her? If she turned now, would he come to her? She unzips her trousers and lets them fall to her ankles, then steps out of them and moves to the dresser in only panties and a bra. She’s pulling out an old pair of paint-stained jeans when she feels Henry’s hand on her lower back. Tess freezes, waits for the hand to move, for his other hand to join it.