Lying In Bed (16 page)

The nude in the finely developed and nuanced platinum print had her back to the photographer. There was little light in the shot. Blacks, dark grays, a dozen tones in between. Heavy like velvet. One of his trademarks. Dark interiors. Dark situations. Dark emotions stirred. She had both hands by her sides, as if she had been standing there, watching, for a long time, immovable and statuesque. Her head was turned to a partially opened door: a man’s hand holding it open. He was coming in. We knew that from the way his fingers were pressing on the wood. From the way the meager light poured in, illuminating the front of her – the one part of her we couldn’t see.

Her nakedness was not artistic nudity. The photographer was suggesting a scenario of salaciousness. He was an interloper and voyeur. A talented, sensitive one, but still.

Your eye went from the man’s hand on the door to the woman’s form. She evolved from the shadows and became the focus.

Her naked legs were long, highlights drawing the viewer’s eyes to where they were parted, slightly, high between her thighs. Too far apart for it to be accidental. Too far apart for it not to be suggestive.

She was not only inviting in her lover, but the viewer.

I glanced at Gideon who was riveted to the photograph.

“What do you think of it?” I asked.

“Powerful.”

Like a culprit, I stole another look, trying so hard to experience it as if it were something I’d never seen before, but aware I wasn’t doing well at disassociating.

“Do you like it?” he asked.

I shrugged, not sure what I wanted to say or how much I wanted to explain to someone I didn’t know that well.

I’d waited too long to respond.

“Do you think it’s demeaning?” He asked, clearly trying to guess at what my issue was.

“No. I know the photographer, that’s all. It’s hard for me to be objective.”

“Judging from your expression, you don’t like him very much.”

“It’s complicated.”

“Sorry.”

“No, there’s no way you could have known. I didn’t even know it was here. It must be a new acquisition. And for the first time I glanced at the card beneath the photograph.

Doorway To

Cole Ballinger - American, 1978 -

A Gift of the Scofield Trust

I forgot about anything but the Cole I’d once known and cared for so much: he must be so pleased, I thought, to have his photograph hanging in such an important museum. And despite everything else I felt and everything I was trying not to feel, I couldn’t help but think about what an honor it was for Cole. I was thrilled for my stepfather and my mother, who I knew must be so proud.

They lived in Santa Fe now. And I didn’t see them as often as I used to when they lived in Vermont. But I spoke to my mother at least once a week and we exchanged emails on a regular basis. We were close.

We’d been through a lot together when my father died, when it was her and me and my baby sister. I grew up too fast then. I suppose I could find a therapist to complain to about that, but I never have. I’d had a rich childhood with a devoted mother who was also a fine artist. Whatever I suffered by not always having her at PTA meetings she more than made up for by giving me my own private space in her art studio and including me in her life the way few six-year-olds ever are.

So why hadn’t she told me about the photo in the museum? I’d never told her how deep the rift was between Cole and me. It was easy enough to avoid since the family didn’t get together
en masse
anymore now that everyone was living so far away from each other.

“Marlowe, just because you’ve opened yourself up once to someone – despite what happened – you can’t stay shut down. It’s damaging. To your soul as an artist.”

“I’m not shut down–”

He interrupted. “You are. Your face is closed. You stand with your arms crossed over your breasts. You lean back when I lean forward to say something to you. You look away if–”

“I don’t. I don’t.”

He nodded to me, indicating that I should look down at my own body language. And I did. My arms were exactly as he’d described. I concentrated on my posture; I was leaning away. Any closer and I would have been uncomfortable.

His gaze was too intense and I looked back at the photograph. Its message was even more profoundly disturbing. I was trapped. By one truth about Cole, by another about me, and by a challenge from Gideon to face my demons.

“You look as if you are awaiting a terrible verdict,” Gideon said.

I turned from the photo. “Not anymore.”

“I’m glad,” but his voice was still concerned and so comforting I felt it around my shoulders as if he had put his arms around me. I hadn’t heard a man talk to me with that kind of caring in a long time. It made me grateful and calm I looked into his face and our eyes caught. The connection went from being kind to kinetic. From being solicitous to being penetrating.

The sexual clench deep inside me was unexpected. And unwanted. But it was real. And while I stood there, with people streaming around us, not noticing us but the artwork on the walls, Gideon stood in front of me – not a client anymore. Not a stranger anymore either.

He’d looked at my face and read the expression in my eyes and had understood it.

And I didn’t know how to respond.

There was a
message on my machine when I got home, from Vivienne Chancey, telling me that the letters I had written for her had done wonders for her blossoming relationship but she’d hit a wall and needed me to do her a favor. “I’m going to email you a photograph I took in the desert, where I’m on location. If I send it today, could you write something that has some connection to the desert and how I feel and do it really quickly? How I feel about missing him, I mean. I know it’s not fair that I’m asking you to do it so fast. But I really need it ASAP.”

The message ended. The next began. At first no one spoke. There was a beat of silence. Then another. And then a third. And just when I was about to hit erase, I heard Cole’s voice.

“Marlowe did you get my last message? I think we should work this out before your mother and my father get here and–”

Pressing the stop button, I cut him off. It didn’t matter what he was going to say. We were long past arguing or blaming each other or trying to find a middle ground where we could come to an agreement.

I was angry at Jeff all over again for telling my stepbrother that I’d been in the office and seen the invitation. Furious with Jeff. I wanted to call him and let him know how I felt. To get in a cab and go over to his office and stand in front of him and ask him how he dared to interfere when he hadn’t been asked.

But that wouldn’t solve anything.

Jeff wasn’t the problem. Cole was.

He hadn’t even identified himself on the machine, assuming that I would know his voice. That was so indicative of him and the way he saw himself at the center of the universe. Even more insidious was that Cole managed to manipulate people into focusing on him without them realizing it.

Almost exactly the opposite of Gideon’s way had of not drawing attention to himself but of shifting the attention to you.

To me.

It was hard to even admit that.

Gideon had been attentive to me, I’d felt important. That what I had to say and offer mattered, and that in turn had encouraged me to open up to him.

Shivering, I walked away from the phone, sat down on the bed, picked up a cobalt blue silk pillow and hugged it to my chest. I shut my eyes.

The dark curls and marble green eyes were the first thing I saw. The olive skin, the strong cheekbones. The full bottom lip. The long fingers. The scars.

My insides ached.

After spending time with him that morning I wasn’t sure I knew him any better than I had before, but I did know more about him.

He was a sculptor. He’d taught sculpture at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York and had been tenured. Their iconoclastic artist in residence, he’d said. The youngest professor there. But he’d quit.

I didn’t know why, though.

I knew he liked coffee, black. And cookies. He favored blue jeans and always wore an old, beat-up Rolex watch that I bet had been his father’s for all the scratches on the stainless steel band and on the glass covering the face.

It was meager knowledge.

No. There was one other thing I knew.

Gideon was able to read my face. This man could tell what I thinking by looking into my eyes and watching how I moved. And no one before him had ever been able to do that. Not even Cole. Not even with my face engraved on his pupils. Not even with the two of us living in the same house and eating at the same table night after night and morning after morning.

It kept coming back to Cole, didn’t it? But that wasn’t going to last. It was only because his show was opening in a couple of weeks. Only because the
enfant terrible
of the current photography scene, the man who was destined to inherit Helmut Newton’s mantle, was about to jump to the next strata of his career.

And it kept coming back to Cole because for some reason he wanted my blessing to take that jump.

But I’m not religious. I’m not a saint. I’m not qualified to give my blessing to anyone. I cannot absolve my stepbrother. I don’t even know if I can forgive him.

If Cole needed redemption, he would have to find it somewhere else. He’d made his choices. All centered around what was best for him. He’d never cared what I thought before. Why start now?

Certainly not for my sake.

It had to be something else.

My mother and stepfather?

No, that wasn’t it. He simply didn’t care about anyone else that much.

It was the photographs, wasn’t it? Despite what he’d promised, he had to be using some of the photographs. I knew that there was one on the invitation. Of course there were more in the show. And he knew – somewhere deep inside of him – that what he was doing was wrong. Except Cole never felt guilt. Guilt was too selfless for him. It had to be a selfish reason.

What could that be? Was he worried that I would do something to hurt him? After all these years, what could I do?

Gideon had looked into my eyes and told me that it seemed as if I was waiting to hear a terrible verdict. And I was. I had been waiting for it for the last two years. Ever since my last conversation with Cole. The one that Joshua had overheard.

The next night
, I sat at my computer and reread the museum story I’d written for Gideon. It was finally finished and, reading it, I was embarrassed all over again.

This was a new emotion for me. This deep blushing inside of me that no one could see. I’d been writing letters and stories for the store for six months, but this had never happened before.

How could I send him this story?

I knew he was waiting for it.

He didn’t have his computer set up yet and so had no access to email; instead he’d asked me to print out the story and mail it to him. He’d told me he planned on writing it out in his own handwriting and sending it as soon as he got it. But I couldn’t imagine facing him again after he’d read these words and phrases.

These were not my fantasies. Nor were they his. And yet, more than anything I’d ever created, they were personal. I was certain that if I’d been on my own, without him there in the museum with me, I never would have thought up the scene that took place in the Venetian bedroom.

Procrastinating, I clicked the computer keys and called up the quick letter I’d written for Vivienne Chancy earlier that morning and reread that one instead.

Using her photograph of an arid desert, I’d made up a scenario about a woman longing for her lover, imaging him coming to her, waiting for him. It surprised me how the two pieces I’d written for Gideon had influenced me. There was a deeper passion to this letter for Vivienne than the other’s I’d written for her. There were even some similar themes in the letter for Vivienne and the stories for Gideon.

At least she’d benefit from my current state of mind.

I typed out her address and sent her email, with the letter as an attachment.

Then I went back to the story I’d written for Gideon, reading it once more. After making a few corrections, I hit the print button on my computer.

When the phone rang, I looked at the caller ID before picking it up. It was my mother. I answered.

After a few minutes of conversation that was clearly not what she’d called about, she told me that she’d talked to Cole and that he was worried about me.

“That’s nice of him. He shouldn’t bother.”

I took the phone to the oversize armchair in the living room area, moved a pile of fine origami paper I was using in a collage onto the floor, and sat down.

“Marlowe, I haven’t wanted to interfere. But Troy and I are concerned. Did something happen between you two that we should know about?”

Mother’s intuition. She knew even if she didn’t know it. But it was so long in the past there was no reason to hurt her now. She’d feel responsible. Guilty for not having seen what was going on in front of her eyes. No. Her camera had been in front of her eyes. That’s why she’d feel guilty.

“Nothing happened. We never see each other because you and Troy moved away we never have big family get-togethers anymore. So how is Troy? How are you?”

“Why don’t I believe you?” she asked, not answering my question.

“I don’t know,” I lied, “by the way, why didn’t you tell me that Cole’s photograph was in the Metropolitan Museum of Art? For God’s sake. I was there the other day and walked by it. You know how weird that is?”

“I didn’t tell you because Cole asked me not to. Back in January when he was out here and he told us about it he said he wanted to tell you himself. But tonight he told me you haven’t returned any of his phone calls for
weeks
.”

“Actually it’s longer than weeks. I’m surprised he told you though?”

“Why?”

The printer had stopped and the silence presented itself as a new sound. I got up and turned on the CD player, not caring what disc was on, but needing the sound to fill in the spaces that held all kinds of words and thoughts I didn’t want to hear.