Notes from an Exhibition (23 page)

Winnie only watched long enough to recognize two of her friends’ brothers then she turned and ran home.

The house was empty when she came in. Her parents were at some boring drugs company party to mark a retirement or something. She turned on lights. She felt an urgent need for lots of light. She went directly to Joanie’s room and started to go through her things. She felt sure all the answers she needed would be there.

It was a mess, of course, unlike
her
room. Clothes and makeup were everywhere but also records and books and art things. For a few minutes it felt as though all Winnie’s life, all her good-girl years, had been leading up to this so that at this crucial juncture where her sister needed her to be strong, she could act with absolute, unquestioning authority. She felt as if she was a force of light dispelling a darkness that had been allowed to gather too thickly in one place. She found a tin with pot in it and cigarette papers. And pills with no proper box or wrapping on them … She found a school folder full of photographs of people of all ages exposing themselves. Some were of tribespeople, torn from Dad’s
National Geographic
collection, some were of white women, presumably torn from
Playboy
, which she had seen in his briefcase occasionally, and some were of men and women in the underwear sections of mail-order catalogues. The juxtapositions disturbed and puzzled her. Then she found a stash of drawings.

Most of Joanie’s art was in a couple of portfolios at the foot of her bed and was familiar. The naked women drawings had been torn up by Mom. But now she found another stash, hidden under Joanie’s mattress. These were of naked men. Boys. Boys they both knew, some of them. Boys from the Flemings’ rec room. And they were touching themselves or …
offering
themselves.

If only her parents had been at a dinner instead of a cocktail party, things would have turned out differently. She would have had time to calm down or maybe even taken herself off to bed and seen the situation more clearly in the morning. Instead, they came home while she was still weeping in a huddle on the stairs and she had no sooner seen their worried faces looking up at her than she felt a child again, not remotely a teenager, and everything had come spilling out in a confused tumble. If Mom wasn’t sober when she came in, she sobered up in seconds and within half an hour had packed a bag full of Winnie’s things and driven her to her grandmother’s farm an hour outside the city.

Winnie liked it there and was relieved to escape the tensions at home, the need to be an adult, and even to have the perfect excuse for avoiding the humiliation of a Prom night with no date. Missing graduation was no big deal either, since she graduated but with predictably mediocre results. Her grandmother was all kindness and simplicity, feeding her, setting her to collecting eggs and gathering kindling, asking no awkward questions.

When Mom fetched her back a week later she explained very carefully that Joanie was ill, in her head, and had obliged them to place her in the Clarke. She wouldn’t go into details, she was too ashamed, but she had evidently decided to blame the whole affair on drugs and made Winnie promise that if ever some boy tried to get her to smoke marijuana she would run straight to the police.

Dad was only slightly more forthcoming. Driving Winnie into town one day he admitted that Joanie had lost control and started to see things that weren’t there.

Nobody said anything about the pornography or the drawings, which presumably were all burnt. Winnie wasn’t about to confess that she had kept one of the drawings, the one of Josh MacArthur, for herself, having stuffed it under her sweater as they came through the door that night. She had uncreased it by pressing it between books beneath the spare room mattress at her grandmother’s. Now that she had got used to its startling contents, she had to admit it was beautiful, even though it was beauty of a dangerous sort she could never share with anyone.

She visited Joanie in the Clarke a few times but hated going there. The staff members were so kind and clearly cared for her sister and it was nothing like the asylums in horror films but she blamed herself for putting her there and for the things they were doing to her; the drugs and the electric shocks.

This guilt only intensified when Josh MacArthur suddenly asked her on a date after coming up to commiserate most politely after church one Sunday. It turned out he had been keen on her for months but was shy because he thought she disapproved of him.

‘I always found I could talk to Joanie,’ he said. ‘Seeing as she talked to me first. But I never wanted to ask her out. Only you.’

She sat with his sisters now to watch him play hockey. Actually the violence of the sport was so unbearable she tended to spend a lot of the game watching through her fingers or playing with her gloves and listening to the terrifying, slick sound of the boys’ blades on the ice and the bloodthirsty yelling of the crowds. She became a regular guest at Mr MacArthur’s table and she had let
Josh go beyond kissing her face to kissing her breasts, one and then the other. He was scrupulously fair in dividing up his attentions but she doubted she would ever have the nerve to ask him about Joanie’s drawing of him.

When Joanie suddenly hissed at her, during a visit, to bring in her driver’s licence for her, it seemed like a chance of making amends. Not least because it involved doing something behind her parents’ backs. She didn’t think she would use it for one moment but she had seen enough of Joanie’s life on the ward now to understand how such a small symbol of independence could be precious there. It would help remind her of who she was.

Then the bleak midwinter Sunday arrived when a police car pulled up outside the house while they were entertaining the MacArthurs to lunch and they had heard, just like that, that Joanie was dead, pushed in front of a train by some crazy Irish girl with whom she had escaped.

‘But I don’t understand,’ Mom kept wailing until finally her father asked her
what
. ‘How she got her driver’s licence.’

‘She took it with her everywhere,’ Winnie told her, briefly catching Josh’s eye. He was standing there, still holding her by the arm as if he felt the tragedy would sweep her out of the house like a hurricane if he didn’t. ‘She liked to say that way she could just take off if somebody asked her.’

The crazy Irish girl was never traced and had either melted into the crowds at Niagara or crossed the border and joined all the psychos and druggies drifting around New York. Her mother came to the funeral; a tiny woman, apparently so shocked and ashamed she had lost all power of speech.
Winnie coped, probably because she had Josh to support her now. He had asked her to marry him and she had said yes. They were keeping it a secret until after a decent interval but it helped her stand apart from her parents and not feel implicated in the whole sad mess of them any longer. She also liked to think that, in dying, Joanie had somehow given her a bit of her strength of character. She wasn’t so scared any more or so pious. Her faith in Jesus had gone under the train wheels with Joanie, though she was saving that bombshell for after a decent interval too.

Then, out of the blue, she received a postcard of the Empire State Building. It was unsigned and had taken months to reach her because rain or snow had blurred the number and it had been delivered to an empty house far along her parents’ street which had only just been sold to a young family. All that was written, apart from the address, was
Boo!

It was probably a silly joke from some girl from Havergal she never saw any more, one of those girls with the dirty-minded brothers but, although all the evidence was to the contrary, she liked to think it was from Joanie. Joanie, she liked to pretend, had escaped them all and gone to live out her rebellious destiny somewhere wives didn’t enthuse about Betty Crocker and husbands had more to talk about than life insurance and sports. She kept the postcard in the attic, in the same cardboard box as her wedding veil and the drawing of Josh with nothing on but a boner.

She liked to think it was Joanie’s way of saying she forgave her.

It was one of those perfect Manhattan spring days she realized were familiar to her entirely from their Hollywood facsimiles and they were finishing a long and delicious lunch in a little bistro. The leafy square behind them bore all the hallmarks of recent gentrification: clean pavements, fresh paint, an organic bakery and a civilized coffee bar with red leather club chairs and the day’s newspapers. They had paid for their own flights but the gallery had put them up in the tiny apartment Thalia Koralek maintained for guests in a new condo development in what had been a derelict school. Thalia had explained that the district, derelict school and all, had been a no-go area only a year or so ago, a network of crack dens and sordid squats, a fiefdom of some drug gang on which the new mayor had waged a protracted war. The new colonizers of the district had retained just enough touches of the square’s bleak past – and what Thalia called
street
– to
lend a teensy trace of danger to flatter the incomer’s liberal heart.

Now tree blossom blew down upon grass untainted by dogshit or hypodermic and well-fed children played in a remarkably clean sandpit. The city was still recognizable but barely tallied with the grim place she had passed through on her way to Europe.

‘That’s because you’re considerably richer than you were back then,’ Antony told her, catching their waiter’s eye and scribbling in the air for the bill. ‘God knows where you stayed then and I doubt you did much shopping.’

The show didn’t open until that night – they had finished the hanging only yesterday – but already a third of the pictures had sold thanks to a catalogue-mailing.

She wondered for a moment how he would cope at the opening but of course he would cope beautifully because he treated everyone the same. He would confess to being a schoolmaster not an artist in a way that would disarm even the most status-conscious collector and would pay the toyboy handing round canapés the same attention as the banker with a Nicholson over his fireplace. She was far more nervous than he was and it would only get worse as the evening approached. She had beta-blockers to stop her stammering or sloshing her wineglass when Thalia introduced her to yet another intimidating journalist or moneyed stranger.

Antony’s gift was that he could never be intimidated because he didn’t care, or he cared only about the things that carried moral rather than social weight. Listen as she might to his calm good sense, she could never emulate
him and supposed it went back to childhood conditioning; she was the product of her mother’s pathetic self-consciousness while he came from a line of men who accepted everyone as they found them and guilelessly assumed they would return the courtesy.

He paid the bill and idly fiddled with the scrap of paper. She reached out for his hand and stilled it and, before she knew it, they were holding hands across the tablecloth in a way they’d never have done at home.

‘Couple of middle-aged honeymooners,’ she said and he just said yes and smiled to himself, turning his hand round beneath hers to caress and then gently grasp her wrist in a way that made her want to go back to the tiny bachelor pad with him and draw the curtains. Only it was too minimalist to have anything but white roller blinds, which would let in too much light and leave her, at least, frozen with inhibition. So they would probably do no more than lie there and fall asleep then wake all muddled and cross.

She was still jetlagged but in a pleasant way that simply left her feeling unreal and floaty, as though her actual body were several blocks away leaving this lightweight dream self to drift pleasurably along behind. They had spent the morning walking – because it was too lovely a day to lose to museums and Antony had read that sunshine on the face was a way of helping the pineal glands adjust to a new time zone. They had strolled here and there, stopping for coffees and consulting an amusingly humourless architectural guidebook borrowed from the guest flat. Then they had taken one last look at the hanging and reassured Thalia they were still in the country and would
show up in time to meet the people she wanted them to meet. At once egged on and made nervous by hearing about the advance sales, Rachel had gone shopping for a new outfit to lend her courage.

Everyone they encountered there, male and female, seemed immaculately groomed. Hair, nails, makeup, shoes; nothing was left to chance. The money they could have spent on food they blew on looking as if they earned double what they did. Antony assured her it was good to stand out as the artist and that a less kempt appearance would be a badge of distinction and Englishness but, as the morning wore on, she became more and more conscious of her bashed-up shoes and broken nails and unnurtured, provincial hair. Even the vast women climbing down from an out-of-town tour bus were manicured and coiffed. So she had bought the most expensive dress she had owned in her life, some bargain shoes to match and made an appointment at three to see to her hair and nails.

‘But you won’t have talons like Thalia?’ he asked her.

‘Fat chance,’ she said, ‘with ruinous stumps like these. But they can sand them down or something and give me some clear lacquer and do something with all the dead-looking bits of old skin around the edges.’

‘I’d never noticed those.’

‘Neither had I!’

They had laughed a lot. They were lighter together here, easier, and it wasn’t until they sat down to lunch, exhausted from all the walking and shopping, that she saw it was because they were temporarily childless. Apart from the occasional day trip, they never went anywhere
as a couple. She hated travelling and he loved being at home so it never happened. Being on their own at home when Petroc was out with friends didn’t count because the house and its clutter was so insistent a reminder they had a family. Freedom for her had long since come to mean solitude in the attic or out in the studio. It came as a pleasant surprise to find she could feel this pleasant sense of airy detachment with Antony at her side, could actually share it with him.

‘I used to worry, you know,’ she told him as they walked back across the square past the children on swings and the young men playing basketball, ‘that it would feel strange when they’d all grown up and left home. I used to think I’d cling on to Petroc for dear life. But now I can’t wait, bless him. I mean I can but …’

‘I know,’ he said and gave her arm a little squeeze above the elbow as he steered her over the road.

He held her to him in the little lift, burying his nose in the front of her hair, and, with only a token mumbling from him about
feeling a little tired
, they went directly to bed and made love without even pulling the blinds. She mutely encouraged him to take her from behind, which she preferred these days as she felt her back was ageing better than her front, and he readily obliged so perhaps he felt the same about keeping her eyes averted from his sliding perfection. And they fell into a delightful, jetlaggy sleep with his arm still flung about her chest and her toes still pressing the tops of his big feet. She fell asleep smelling the good smells of him and clean bed linen and hearing the bouncing of the ball against the metal mesh of the basketball court and looking at her smart
shopping bags lined up neatly on the bedroom armchair full of reassurance, like young but competent maids.

She did not hear the phone ring. She woke on her own to the sound of the bedroom door shutting and the realization that Antony was talking next door.

‘No!’ she heard him say, and the complaint of a kitchen chair being roughly sat on. ‘Where?’ and then, ‘What time was this?’ and then ‘Where are the others?’

She pulled a borrowed dressing gown about her before opening the door to join him, robbed of abandon by a completely unfamiliar edge to his voice. He sounded frightened. Raw.

Hearing her open the door, he turned. His expression made her dizzy. Suddenly the floor seemed unwalkably slippery and she slumped on to the nearest chair, just as he had, as he said, ‘Tell them we’ll be on the first flight we can, Jack.’

As he hung up, there was nothing for her to ask but, ‘Who?’