The Secret of the Nightingale Palace (9 page)

“If we go to Applebee's for dinner,” Anna said, “I could have a glass of wine and not have to worry about driving us back to the hotel.” At this point she considered her evening glass of wine to be indispensable to her sanity.

Goldie held her hand to her eyes to make out the restaurant beneath the sharp rays of the setting sun. “What luck,” she said, as if the probability of having an Applebee's near their hotel had not been something like 75 percent. “I could eat there every night.”

It struck Anna as ironic that she had to travel with her grandmother, a habitué of La Grenouille and JoJo in New York, in order to familiarize herself with American chain establishments. Goldie loved restaurants and loathed staying in, even for a single evening. “That's just eating,” she always said. “I
dine,
and you have to go out for that.”

Oddly, Ford—the objectionable Ford—had been much more picky than Goldie, who could see the value in an occasional Big Mac. When he traveled, he carried along guidebooks that pointed the way to “authentic regional fare.” He would skip lunch rather than eat fast food. When they went to New Orleans, he plotted their itinerary based on where they would stop for meals. Anna could remember buttery pillows of biscuits, and mashed potatoes as rich as whipped cream, but she could also remember a Thousand Island dressing that tasted like chunky mayonnaise with sugar mixed into it. In comparison, Anna found Applebee's palatable at least. “Well, we know what we're getting,” she said. They had, after all, eaten at an Applebee's for lunch.

Later, after dinner, as Goldie started to get ready for bed, Anna said, “I'm too edgy to sleep.” She felt she had suffered a wound the previous night, and a day spent with Goldie—even one that had been excessively polite—had not allowed it to heal. “I think I'll take the portfolio down to the lobby with my drawing stuff and fiddle around for a while. Do you mind?”

“I couldn't care less,” Goldie replied, sitting on the edge of her bed, pulling off her knee-highs. “I'm not even going to wash my teeth.” Without her stylish clothes on, she looked much older, but Anna refused to see her grandmother as vulnerable in any way. She considered Goldie's physical frailty as just a trick to put you off your guard.

And indeed, after Anna had pulled off her jeans, put on a loose cotton skirt, a T-shirt, and her espadrilles, Goldie let an expression of complete distaste cross her features. “That's what I'm talking about,” she said.

Anna had hoped Goldie's politeness was a means of making nice after the attacks of the previous day. Now, though, it seemed that she wasn't finished yet.

Anna looked down at her clothes. “What do you mean?” she asked.

“What I mean is you're a pretty girl and you don't even make an effort.”

“I need to make an effort to go sit in the lobby?”

“I wouldn't walk into a gas station without making an effort. All the beautiful clothes I've given you, and the way you dress you might as well wrap yourself in a roll of toilet paper. If I had looked like that, Marvin Feld never would have noticed me. I'd be a pauper lying at the bottom of a pig sty.”

On another night, when she was feeling stronger, perhaps Anna could have ignored such talk. Tonight, though, she felt raw and vulnerable, worn down from all these days alone with Goldie. Worse, she heard a contempt in her grandmother's voice that reminded her of how, all those years ago, Goldie had spoken to Ford. And then, without any other thought, she cried, “I loved him!” and for that moment she felt it as deeply as she ever had in her life.

Goldie looked confused. “Loved who?”

“You know who I'm talking about. I loved Ford. Can't you understand that?”

Something shifted in Goldie's face then, some flash of understanding, perhaps, and her resolution seemed to falter. Then the moment passed. Her expression grew hard again and she said, “That's not even worth whatever change you keep in that ugly backpack.”

For one brief moment, Anna had felt a flicker of hope that finally the two of them might begin to understand each other. Now she pictured the great expanse of North America looming in front of her, an infinite line of tractor-trailers, each of which had to be passed, like her own labor of Sisyphus, from coast to coast. Whatever shaky support had held up the last of her civility suddenly collapsed. “Why are you always such a fucking bitch?” she asked.

Goldie froze on the bed, her stocking halfway down her calf. These were not words that Anna could remember ever being uttered in her grandmother's presence. Goldie clearly understood them, though. Anna saw the tiniest flinch in her eyes, but when she spoke, her tone was as forceful as ever. “I am a lady,” she replied.

Anna knew that she had to get out of the room as quickly as possible. She didn't want to give her grandmother the satisfaction of seeing her in tears. She put her hand on the outside door and swung it open. “A lady,” she said, “would never act like this.” Then she stepped out into the hall, letting the door slam shut behind her.

Downstairs in the lobby, Anna sat down in the breakfast area, set the portfolio and her drawing materials on the table, and walked over to the hot drinks bar. Her hands were shaking as she poured herself a cup of tea. Wouldn't this have happened eventually anyway? Putting Anna and Goldie into a car together for all those long miles was bound to cause combustion. It would have been more convenient, of course, if the flare-up had occurred in Cleveland, where the large metropolitan airport could have offered Anna an exit from life on the road (she imagined her father flying in and taking over as chauffeur). But surely there were planes out of Indiana, too. In any case, Anna and Goldie would not be getting back into that car again. Anna felt no regret for what she had said upstairs—she actually felt a sense of exhilaration for having spoken the truth—but she didn't like that she had lost her temper, and worse, she cringed at the prospect of what lay ahead for her: return to her house on Waynoka.

Better not to think about such things. Better to sit in the lobby and draw until she could assume that Goldie had fallen asleep, then sneak upstairs and deal with it all in the morning. Anna carried the tea back to the table, sat for a moment until she began to calm down, then opened the portfolio and pulled out her pencils and sketchbook. Every few seconds she glanced toward the elevators, half expecting to see Goldie hurling herself across the lobby in her bathrobe, ready for battle. The lobby remained empty.

Feeling more at ease, Anna began to page through the Japanese prints, as she had taken to doing every night now. They calmed her after the days on the road, and she found them inspiring, too. A keen knowledge of her own limitations kept her from comparing this artwork to the illustrations she made for
Shaina Bright,
but she found that she could learn from what these long-ago artists had created. Each image, each individual subject, each alteration of perspective, taught her something new about design, or light, or color. During the crisis of Ford's illness and death, drawing had helped to distract her from her personal troubles. She knew, however, that the comics she drew these days did not approach the quality of those she had made before Ford got sick. In her earlier years of creating
Shaina Bright,
Anna had developed a style that was both minimalist and highly expressive. The slightest alteration in the profile of Shaina's neck, for example—a hard line, say, instead of a delicate curve—could indicate a drastic shift in the character's mood: under pressure from Superintendent Markley, calm and practical Shaina Bright had turned irritable and huffy. Once Anna returned from her “hiatus,” though, she struggled more and yet failed to achieve the same effect. She would stare for hours at the page, or discard drawing after drawing that seemed heavy with effort but uncommunicative nonetheless. Oddly, the popularity of the comic didn't suffer.
Shaina
had developed an avid fan base. As long as new stories continued to appear, readers didn't seem to notice what had become horribly obvious to Anna, that
Shaina Bright
was little more than a collection of lines on a page. The fact that no one cared about the quality of the work bothered Anna even more.

Looking through the Japanese prints, then, reminded her of how much she loved to draw. Within a few minutes of gazing at the portfolio, she had picked up her pencils and begun to copy, taking comfort from the steady accumulation of lines and the familiar friction of pencil on paper. At first she glanced up now and then, still anxious about the possibility that Goldie would appear in the lobby to berate her. But Goldie did not appear, and little by little Anna forgot everything but Hiroshige's images in front of her.

The pictures were, in general, extremely solitary—village streets at night, isolated mountain roads, a small group of travelers paused along a rural path—and that emptiness gave them a terrible lonely quality that in Anna's present state seemed to speak directly to her. She focused most intently on an image of farmers in a field that sliced through a deep ravine. In the near distance, a few people walked along a quiet road. Still farther, two mountains emerged from a fog-covered valley. Here was the simplicity and eloquence that Anna had lost in her own work. The farmers were represented by little more than scratches of black on the page, but the
shape
of those scratches articulated the hunched back of arduous labor as precisely as anything Anna had ever seen. That these shapes could be pared down to their elements meant that the artist deeply understood the human form and the ways in which toil made itself known in the body. There was no need for extraneous detail. A line, a scratch even, could say it all.

And then, without much thought, Anna tore the copy out of her sketchbook, set it beside her on the table, and began to conceive of something new. The jumble of emotions in her mind—her fury at Goldie, her recollection of Ford, her need to draw, her fascination with these lonely Japanese pictures—suddenly coalesced into a single desire. She wanted to draw a new comic. Instead of the adventures and tribulations of a pert teenage forest ranger, Anna wanted a comic that reflected the dramas of real life. And not just any life. Her own.

She decided to draw a scene that marked a moment of intense emotion, the scene that had come to mind so vividly when she heard the contempt in Goldie's voice upstairs. The drama had taken place in Goldie's living room at the Sherry-Netherland, at the end of Anna and Ford's first and only visit to New York. Although, throughout the weekend, Goldie had remained ostentatiously civil, Anna had seen immediately that her grandmother did not approve of Ford. It was clear in the way Goldie curled her lip when she looked at his clothes, which were clean and neat but
vin ordinaire,
as Goldie would put it. And Anna heard it in the way Goldie spoke to him. No matter what her grandmother said—“You're ordering
beer
at JoJo?”—she always managed to sound appalled. By the time Anna and Ford stopped by Goldie's apartment on their way to the airport, Anna understood the complete failure of the visit. She suspected that Ford had recognized it as well, though he only mentioned Goldie one time when they were alone, saying, “You and your grandmother are more alike than anyone else in your family.” Had she refused to have sex with him that night?

For her drawings, Anna envisioned three comic panels, a triptych of disaster, so to speak. The entire drama took place in about ten minutes, and now, all these years later, she found it hard to believe that a few heated words could have had such long-term and drastic consequences. In drawing it, she hoped to understand more precisely what had happened then.

Anna began with the three of them seated around the coffee table in Goldie's living room. To make clear the awkwardness of the moment, and to try to achieve the profound simplicity that she saw in the Hiroshige prints, she concentrated on a single element for each of the three human figures: the stiff line of Ford's back (he must have been heeding the words of his own grandmother, “
never slump
”); the tiny dot of Anna's mouth, around which formed all her pinched anxiety; and for Goldie, the backward tip of the head, which enabled her to look down her nose at them, even though she was the smallest person in the room.

The second panel depicted the moment the phone rang. Goldie rose and crossed behind Ford's chair to answer it. Ford had gained weight recently, and he hadn't bought clothes to cover his increased bulk. Consequently, his polo shirt rode up his back, which meant that the view for Goldie was all too clear: Ford's ass, exposed over the top of his khakis. As she drew, Anna discovered that of all the marks she put on the page, only three really mattered. The first was the fat scratch of the butt itself. The other two formed a pair: the knifelike point of Goldie's eyebrows. Anna, on the other side of the coffee table at the time, had seen the look on Goldie's face, and she had seen immediately that all was lost for Ford. Drawing the scene now, she almost laughed at the irony of employing Hiroshige's style for such a drama. Yes, a single well-placed line could change the entire mood of the image. But could Hiroshige have ever imagined that the power of a picture could revolve around the crack in a person's rear end?

Goldie had taken her time on the phone. After she hung up, she walked straight to the front door and opened it. “Young man,” she had said, “I'd appreciate it if you went downstairs and let me have a few words with my granddaughter.” Drawing from memory, Anna's only concern in this image was Ford. In the final panel of the triptych, he filled the page as he walked out the door, his slouch so extreme that, in Anna's drawing, no light shone between his shoulders and his ears. That vision of Ford had felt like tragedy to Anna at that moment. But years had passed, and Ford was dead. You couldn't just throw the word
tragedy
around right and left anymore.