Results May Vary (25 page)

After all I do only want to advise you to keep growing quietly and seriously throughout your whole development; you cannot disturb it more rudely than by looking outward and expecting from the outside replies to questions that only your inmost feeling in your most hushed hour perhaps can answer.

—Rainer Maria Rilke to Franz Kappus, February 17, 1903

Something I did, on the formerly rare occasions when I needed a moment at work to clear my thoughts, was to get up and walk into the galleries. I didn't have a favorite place to go, since most of our exhibits were only transitory, so I tended to let my feet wander where they would.

That morning, I found myself in the Alex Lim gallery. The exhibit I had developed with Alex featured a series of works he had done using antique books: He had, with a meticulousness that even I could hardly comprehend, programmed a laser cutter to pierce delicate and impossibly small holes at selected intervals, and varying depths, throughout the thickness of the book. The result was that, when the books were opened to the intended page, the words behind the pierced sections showed through, fitting into and yet altering the meaning of the text on the pages displayed.

I had assembled the exhibit, and written the copy for it, to discuss Alex's concept of creating a physical narrative within a narrative. The artist using his hands to impose a new iteration of the story that had originally been breathed into life by the writer. But that morning, as I stood motionless in front of one of Alex's tiny, perfect, beautiful books, I thought about layers.

Alex had deliberately picked the spots he had lasered out. Having chosen them, he'd known what the finished, altered text would say. But the truth was, he could have chosen any of these hundreds of pages to start with, any others of the pages to drill to, any others of these words to eliminate and reveal. Every page was a layer, and every layer had its own words. They weren't all revealed at once, and each page, each layer, said different things, but they were all part of the same story.

I'd thought I'd read the book of Adam from cover to cover—reread it till it was soft and tattered. Hell, I'd thought I was practically a co-author. But he had only ever let me read certain pages. There were some never revealed, and others where only a few selected words were permitted to show.

And I myself was not much different. There were layers I'd hidden from myself, even in the midst of the decision that was supposed to be the greatest reckoning of my life. I hadn't called a lawyer because I hadn't been ready to say goodbye to my husband. It was, at the end of it, exactly as simple as that. Months ago, I should have looked in the right places, for the right information, and moved forward with what I had told myself, as well as everyone who mattered, that I wanted to do. And yet, I hadn't. I'd been grateful for New York's waiting period, because it had let me procrastinate. And the procrastinating had let me hide. It had taken finally passing through to the other side, where I was truly ready for the marriage to end, before I could set my feet upon the path to do it.

My divorce attorney turned out to be exactly no more, and exactly no less, than I needed. I had selected him because he had the highest Yelp rating for family lawyers in the western Massachusetts region, which was proof that, despite my initial thought of,
Wait, there are Yelp pages for lawyers?,
people like me were exactly why such things existed. It took us one afternoon meeting to set up all the paperwork, including the statement enumerating the financial arrangements I was requesting: the share I'd paid into our savings and retirement accounts, and a payment plan for the house. It was fair, and reasonable, and I had every hope that Adam would agree to it. The house in particular, I thought he would; his parents had put both our names on the deed, but he'd never wanted to live there in the first place. Letting me gradually buy out a property he didn't want and hadn't spent a dime on seemed to me the least he could do.

As I sat with my pen poised over the complaint form, the strangeness of it gripped me. I was really doing it; there it all was, all the proper information with the proper dates and the proper names. Including the one I was going back to: Caroline Fairley. It beckoned to me, like a long-missed loved one. Miss Fairley felt like a lighter me, a freer me; I was looking forward to being her again.

Four days later, Len the lawyer sent me confirmation that Adam had been served. And the oddest thing was that I didn't hear from him. Even if he had accepted that we had to end this—after all, he'd finally admitted to being, albeit reluctantly, in love with someone else—I'd thought he would at least acknowledge what I had done. Given past precedent, I was expecting a letter. But there was nothing, not even a text.

And in the meantime, I couldn't seem to get away from missing Neil. It was a full, 360-degree sort of missing. Not just for what I'd thought would be the most obvious loss—the pleasure we'd found together—but every single thread he'd woven through my days. His texts; his emails; the thrill of hearing his voice in the hallway at work and thinking,
That's my man, and nobody knows;
his affectionate kisses; his music; his pancakes; his stubborn intellect; his deliberate, thoughtful approach to parenting; his devotion to his daughters; even his daughters themselves.

All of it added up to the fact that I missed his warm, steady presence in my life. Even when I hadn't seen him in a few days, the knowledge that I was about to, or that I could pick up the phone and call him anytime I felt like hearing his voice, had done far more to fill up my loneliness than I had realized. And so had the fact that there was somebody who wanted me and cared about me, who I wanted and cared about, too.

The one thing that made it hurt a little less was knowing that that fact hadn't changed; I was the one who'd thrown the brakes here. But I knew I had to, for his sake as much as my own. And the desolation that roared into the void created when I pushed him away—it told me I'd been right. I needed to feel it. I needed to let the loneliness in.

One afternoon toward the end of January, I was marking up a loan agreement for a piece I wanted to borrow from a collector when the museum's receptionist beeped me to answer a call.

“I have a Diana Ramirez for you, do you want to take her?”

“Oh my god!” I yelped, dropping my pen. “Yes! Yes, I want to take her.” God help me, I'd all but forgotten about her.

A moment later, we were connected. “Hi, Diana,” I gushed, aware I sounded like the teenage fangirl of a pop star, yet completely unable to stop myself. “So nice to hear from you! How were your holidays?”

“Oh, you know…family,” she said, with her easy laugh. “This is where I give you the obligatory ‘Sorry I haven't called, work work work, blah blah work' routine, so let's just skip over that this time, okay?”

“Sure,” I laughed. “Consider yourself excused. What can I do for you?”

“I got the little menu that you sent—that was super cool.”

Are you going to pay for any of it?
my brain yelled, but all I said was, “Great, I'm so glad you enjoyed it. My sister designed it, actually.” Something inside me pinched at the thought of Ruby, whom I hadn't spoken to since the disastrous revelation in Vegas.

“Did she? She did a nice job. I was calling about something you had on there—the residency for that artist, Farren Walker. Is that the woman you were telling me about when I visited? Who used to work at the print shop and then started doing her own art?”

“That's her,” I said, gratified that I'd been right: Diana had been paying attention to Farren's work.

“Do you really think she'd be up for hosting me at her studio? I'm thinking about donating some money for her, but I'd love to see how she works. It sounds interesting.”

Diana Ramirez, tech darling and noted corporate raider, sounded…self-conscious.

“Oh my gosh, Farren would
love
to have you. And I'd love to take you. I'm overdue for a visit to her anyway, so this is perfect. When would you like to come up?”

“This Saturday, maybe? Is that nuts?”

Yes, it is,
I thought, but I dug my cellphone out of my purse with my free hand so I could text Farren:
Nice, cool rich lady wants to come to the studio this weekend and maybe donate some money for a residency. Please tell me you're free?

“Well,” I stalled, “I'll need to check with Farren of course, but—”

Good thing I just whipped myself up a fresh Rich Lady pie,
Farren replied.
Got some stuff in the works I think you're going to dig. Bring the dame on down!

I grinned. Farren was a loose cannon, but I was pretty sure she'd behave herself around someone who might decide to give her a job. The woman was crazier than a bag of cats, but she was sure as hell no fool.

“All right, Diana, you're on. Farren wrote me back that she's been working on some great stuff and she'd love to host you this weekend.”

“Oh, that's awesome,” said Diana, sounding genuinely excited for the first time since I'd been in touch with her.

I reminded myself that just because Diana was interested, that didn't mean she would ever actually part with the dough. Neil had told me about a donor he'd courted for two
years
before the guy finally coughed up a check—for a whopping $5,000. But still, when I hung up the phone, I was smiling for the first time in a week.

You belong in the most secret part of you. Don't worry about cool, make your own uncool. Make your own, your own world.

—Sol LeWitt to Eva Hesse, April 14, 1965

Farren's house was like something out of
Anne of Green Gables:
tucked away on a back road, around a corner, at the bottom of a hill, half screened by the plumy evergreens that loomed above it. Currently surrounded by heavy white drifts as was the rest of western Massachusetts, the house was small and of indeterminate age, with dormer windows and various additions so tiny as to seem almost pointless poking out of the structure on every side. Farren's husband (the second one) had been a builder before ALS brought him down a few years back; working on their house had been his favorite way to spend time until the disease stole his body.

The lady of the house greeted us at the door in a shirt, apron, and jeans so crusted with paint I could barely see how she folded them—though on second thought, I was inclined to think folding wasn't really much of a thing for Farren. More than anyone else I knew, she reveled in messiness. She wasn't filthy in the way that leaves decomposing food around and accumulates dust rhinoceri instead of dust bunnies—but she was about six inches short of that.

“Well, howdy, dollface!” she yelled, clutching me into a hug so robust I almost toppled over. “Awfully nice to see ya. What's shakin'?”

“Oh, not too much, just divorcing my husband,” I said. Being around Farren always brings my own naughty streak out of its usual state of deep cover.

“Damn it, girl. What happened to trying?”

“Long story,” I sighed. “And no,” I added repressively as I spotted the question brewing in her eyes, “the redhead has nothing to do with it. Anyway, enough about that—let me introduce you to Diana. This is Diana Ramirez; we went to college together.”

“Farren Walker,” she said, sticking out one paint-smeared paw. When she saw Diana hesitate, she rolled her eyes. “You're fine, it's dry. Come on in, girls, let me fix you up a bite to eat.”

Farren, it turned out, really had whipped up a pie. Farren loves to bake, but the difficulty with her offerings is that her creative brain tends to take liberties with the ingredients in ways that yield mixed results of tastiness. From the
Cooking Light
still open on her bright turquoise kitchen counter, I could tell that this pie was meant to be a simple blueberry one, yet what Farren served to us appeared to contain as many sliced canned pineapples, mandarin oranges, and maraschino cherries as blueberries. I knew if I asked her, she'd tell me the pie had needed to be more colorful.

“So, Farren,” I said, setting my fork on my plate after I had worried down the pie, “what is this new work you wanted to show us?”

She bounced to her feet and headed for the kitchen door. Diana and I followed, our boots squeak-crunching as we picked our way along a narrow pathway carved into an otherwise unbroken twenty-eight-inch-deep drift of snow. I had a pathway like it at home, myself.

Farren's pathway led to her studio, a building nearly as large as the house itself, which had been built by Farren's husband to her exact specifications. It was a wonderful space, with high ceilings and paint-spattered concrete floors, all of it lit by the massive assemblage of windows that made up the north-facing wall. As always when I stepped inside this place, my pulse accelerated at the sprawl of pure creativity: Half-completed canvases hung from the walls, and color tests and various inspiration images were pinned thickly to a tackboard near the door. My favorite part was Farren's supply area, where immense tubs of paint, their sides drooling with dried spills of color, squatted next to a rack containing her tools and her screens.

“Okay, before I show you the good stuff,” Farren said to Diana, “silk-screening for dummies: the Farren Walker technique.”

With a flourish of her hand, she reached into her rack and pulled out a large metal frame with an expanse of mesh stretched across it, similar to the kind window screens are made from, but more finely woven. On the surface of the mesh, a chemical treatment had created a semi-opaque layer, through which a random scattering of irregularly shaped holes revealed the mesh itself.

“Now, traditional silk-screening, as a printing method, is done with liquid ink,” she said. “It's used to create color and pattern. That was Andy Warhol's thing. But I thought it would be more fun to juice the ink up to a real paint that has some heft to it.” Farren plopped the screen onto the dark gray test paper she had set up on a nearby table, then spooned a few ounces of viscous, shimmery paint into the screen. With a squeegee-like tool, she smoothed the paint around the screen, pressing it into the pattern area, then set the squeegee aside. She took the screen by the edges and, with the gentlest possible touch, rocked it gently from side to side, angle to angle; then she slowly lifted it away.

“Et voilà!”
Farren said, and I offered a spontaneous burst of applause in response to her showmanship. There on the paper was the image she had created by pressing the paint through the holes in the thickened mesh: a soft, glittering galaxy of stars, not just spots of color but each with a thickness and body all its own. “I made it pretty thick, to show you how it works,” she said, “but when I use this screen for artwork I start thin on the paint and slowly build it up to more layers.” She pointed over Diana's shoulder, at a piece she'd made using multiple layers of the screen, including some where the paint was transparent and yielded only texture.

“Oh wow,” said Diana. “I see it now. That's so cool how you thought to do that.”

“One of the things I think makes Farren's work so special,” I said, slipping back into curator mode, “is the way it's more controlled than painting, but more complex than printmaking. And it has depth, but it's definitely not sculpture, either.”

“I'm special!” said Farren, wiggling her hands and pirouetting in place. “All right, come on, let me show you the Big Kahuna.”

With Diana and me trailing behind, Farren scurried to the center of the room, where a huge canvas sat braced on two sturdy wood tables that had been shoved together for the purpose.

“Wow,” I said, stepping closer for a look. It was the largest piece I had ever seen Farren create. Her work had been slowly but surely growing larger over the years, starting with prints about the size of the front of a T-shirt and, as she gained confidence and gave rein to her curiosity, moving out to more traditional artwork sizes. But this new piece was so large I wasn't sure how she'd even gotten it inside the studio.

I stopped short before I drew too close, momentarily overwhelmed by the complexity of it. “It's…a map?”

“A maze,” Farren said.

The bottom layer of the work looked like an abstracted city map, rendered in tints of gray and white. The “streets” were marked with names, but, sure enough, none of them progressed for any great distance across the canvas; everywhere I looked, the streets turned or stopped, forced into corners, walled in by delicate ridges of paint that must have been made by one of Farren's special screens.

But the map itself wasn't the only thing. Row after row of yellow dots marched across the canvas, following the rigid lines of the streets, but here and there, one was missing. And as I looked closer, I could discern subtle variation among the dots themselves: They were all the same diameter, but the shapes of some were crisply formed, where others were slightly smudged and flattened. Overall, the work was only partially completed; below a certain point, the lines for the maze streets were barely sketched in, and the dots layer was absent completely.

“This is amazing,” said Diana, peering close. “What's with the dots?”

“When I started working with the thicker paint,” Farren said, “I noticed that it didn't act consistently like ink does. It responds to the presence of the screen in different ways. More or less the same, but with these tiny little differences. The differences are my favorite part.”

“And what about the missing dots?”

“They started happening naturally. The paint would cover too thinly and not press through. Or one of the holes in the screen would get clogged without me realizing it. So I made a few more screens with holes missing, to reproduce the inconsistency.”

Diana looked at her quizzically. “You didn't want it perfect?”

Farren split a pumpkin seed with her teeth and spat the shell into her hand. “Perfect is boring.”

“Spoken like a true artist,” said Diana.

“It is. Perfect is no way to live. Perfect isn't life.”

“Perfect is the goal,” said Diana. “Or, if not perfect, there has to be a predictable result. You made this screen so you can reproduce the effect of these dots in a consistent way, right?”

“They look consistent, but they're not,” said Farren, smiling. “What do you do, Diana?”

“Software,” Diana said, and Farren clapped her hands together.

“Damn! I would have said engineering or science. But I was close, though, right?”

“You were.”

“Is it engineering software?” Farren said, narrowing her eyes cannily.

“Dating, actually. I developed a group of dating applications for cellphones.”

“What, something like that Crush app thing?” said Farren. “I have a couple of fellas I talk to on there.”

“It actually is Crush,” I said. “Diana is the founder.”

“Well, by golly! Imagine that. So you developed software to tell people how to fall in love.”

“I developed software to help people
find
each other,” Diana said. “What they do once they've met is completely out of our control.”

“Aha!” yelled Farren, thrusting her index finger at Diana like a rapier. “And there you go. Honey, aside from love, art is the most subjective thing there is. You're never gonna have a predictable result. Not in how it gets made, or in how people feel about it. So what I like to do is start from a place where I expect that something's going to turn out a little weird. That tension between what the eye expects and what it receives is the coolest thing to me.”

“Like those vision trick things?”

“Not even. Just the difference between what looks like perfection, and the imperfection it actually is.”

“Well, can you show us on the painting?” I said, needing to steer the conversation back to the artwork.

“Abso-tutely,” Farren said, and whipped out from her apron the smallest screen I'd ever seen her use. About the size of an address book, it was more of a stencil than a screen, and as she set it to the canvas and daubed paint onto it I realized why. The maze was too haphazard to be put into a repeating image like a screen would make; Farren only wanted the shape and height of her individual lines to be consistent.

“Are the dots supposed to be the guidelines for the maze?” said Diana suddenly. “I mean, from our perspective we can see that they overlay it, but if you were in the maze and you were walking, and you saw these dots, they would look like the path.”

“Nailed it in one,” said Farren, not breaking her concentration as she fitted her stencil into place on a new row of the maze. “The dots are the guidelines we think we see. But they're only an illusion, not the thing that marks the path.”

“And they're untrustworthy themselves,” I said. “Weird shapes, occasionally missing.”

“They don't take us where we think we're going to go,” Diana said. “The maze stops, and turns, and changes course.”

“It sure does, doesn't it?” I said quietly, as I stared at the artwork. Farren's husband died before her sixty-third birthday. It would have been the year of their eighteenth anniversary—not their fortieth, as it would have been for Adam and me when we reached that age. Her first husband had left her for her cousin. Two months later, her brother's best friend asked her out on the date he'd wanted for twenty-five years.

Diana was quiet on the drive back to my house from Farren's studio, staring out the window at the snowy hills. I considered trying to draw her out, engage her about Farren and the art, but it seemed too greedy. I wondered, though, what unexpected turns a life like hers could have taken, a life that had led her so young to such spectacular success. None of our conversations had ever yielded mention of a partner, and maybe that was something.

She came back to herself when we reached our destination, though. “Thank you so much for arranging that,” she said from behind her scarf, stamping her sleek black boots on my frozen driveway as the wind blew ice crystals across our feet.

“My pleasure,” I said. “Can I get you anything before you go? Hot cocoa? Another slice of fruit cocktail pie?”

“No, thank you. I've got to get going. Stupid phone's been blowing up all morning. I had it on vibrate,” she added sheepishly. “Sometimes that's the closest I can get to unplugging.”

Those corners in the maze didn't always sneak up on you, it occurred to me. Sometimes you could steer yourself right into one with your very own hands.

“Come on in and warm up before you get back on the road,” I said. “Half an hour. You did tell me you liked my kitchen.”

She laughed. “All right, cocoa sounds great.”

“Did you enjoy yourself at Farren's?” I said, while we waited for the kettle to heat up. “I know she was thrilled for the chance to show off.”

“She's fantastic,” said Diana. “I love people who do their own thing fearlessly like that, you know?”

I cocked my head, evaluating. I was pretty sure it would be all right to ask. “Am I crazy, Diana, or did you not like me in college?”

She met my eyes and smiled ruefully. “I was jealous,” she said. The words slipped out easily, the way things do long after we've stopped giving them importance.