Chassie leaned forward and put her glass down on the table in front of them.
“I mean, don't get me wrong,” she said. “I don't know you that well, but I thought I got to know you a little and⦠Well, it just doesn't seem like you wanna live like this. Who would?”
“TMI⦔ Rain mused. “
Ten Merry Indians? Terribly Muddy Input? Terrific Managerial Involvement?
” She tried laughing at her own hilarity. Didn't really manage it.
“Yeah,” Chassie said. “
Too Much Information
. Okay. I hear you. I just want you to know that I love my brother. Love him to death, but he's not worth throwing everything in your life away for.”
“Oh!” Rain gasped, looking up finally, a little burst of adrenaline clearing her head a little. “Oh, ha ha!” she laughed. “No! Hunter? No⦔
“This isn't about Hunter?” Chassie asked, smiling with embarrassment.
“
This
,” Rain said, gesturing all around her like she was scratching turntables “is all an
illu-usion
!” She laughed again. “No, really. I'm fine. The Hunter thing was good. So good. It was just what I needed, the one good thing in a big stretch of lameness, patheticism, randomania⦠Don't you like it?” Rain gestured at Chassie's orphaned glass on the table.
“Too strong for me!” Chassie winced. “I need mixers, for God's sake!”
“Fresh out,” Rain said, allowing herself to look at Chassie calmly now.
Rain thought she'd handled the rest of the visit well. She knew it didn't last too much longer. She white-lied about spending some time in the city, told what she had hoped was a slightly exaggerated version of recent events, playing up the self-pity in order to appear to be coping.
Chassie said something about seeing her sometime, that she should come get some coffee, give Hunter a call if she felt like it. Rain was pretty sure she didn't pass out on the couch before Chassie was actually out the door. But she didn't have a very sharp image of her leaving either.
This definitely could have been a dream. Had it begun in a dream and then melted into regular? She was lurching through rooms, clubs and smoky back offices. Places turned one into another in that distinctly impossible but acceptable dream-like way. She was sick and trying to find a place to lie down. A place to be alone. But everywhere she went, people were crowding her, taking up couches and beds and extra chairs. She searched for a bathroom and lurched through hollow, institutional locker rooms, tiled vistas of porcelain commodes of all sorts, but they were all occupied or overflowing, stuffed with paper or gushing over. Then she was in the cabin, on the floor by the couch, and then lurching up the steps and out into the chill dawn, turning and tripping down toward the trail-head by the back of the house. She was still drunk, sick and confused. Half in the dream, she must have awakened herself from having to be sick. Coming to a teetery halt in the middle of the path Rain barely made it to the side by a tree before vomiting. Two large birds overhead screamed and squawked at her accusingly as she emptied out her gut into the leaves.
Her heaving breaths and the leaves drenched in her sick gave off a languid blue steam in the soft glow of the dawn. Rain turned and leaned her back against the tree, feeling the chill start to break through her hot skin.
The birds screamed and threatened overhead and she wondered if she was still in the dream.
But as Rain turned to walk back to the cabin, she spotted an odd shape in the path. A tiny square of something almost white. She stooped to pick it up. Canvas. A tiny postage stamp-sized piece of canvas with dense markings of paint on one sideâa piece from her destroyed paintings. She felt the swelling of amazement, looked up to the still shrieking birds. It must have stuck to her shoe, blown onto the van and released when she brought it back here to unload the stretcher bars before returning it. No miracles for her today. She half-ran back to the cabin, shut the doors tightly and locked herself in, falling back asleep on top of her bed as the sun finally started to burn off the dawn's haze.
Rain was not supposed to be painting. There were days that just slipped by without her notice, and there were days she leaned on hard to blow through. Like running a wind-up toy in the direction of its action, forcing it to blitz through its little routine too fast, occasionally slipping forward out of its gears so you have to back up a click in order to resume pushing it too hard. She spent one whole day over a pack of cards, doling out various solitaires one after another with a kind of amazement. Am I still doing this? Oh, man, yeah. Am I throwing away an entire day, a whole day into the garbage can? How many more hours, can I bear it?
In this same sloth, Rain entered the world of online infoporn. Blogs, news-feeds, celebrity gossip, a past-time in which she'd never really indulged before, having lived in the luddite paradise of vintage New York pursuitsâart, the bona-fide paper
New York Times
, plays and performance art with real, actual human-beings-in-the-flesh performing. But the twin dervishes of television and the Web have exactly the numbing, time-sucking effect she was looking for. Surfing while watching TV seemed to be the perfect combination, like cookies and milk.
Somehow, she realized later, she needed to tear herself down completely before she could rebuild.
Rain would not remember how she came across her first subject. Probably one of those celebrity carrion sites, the ones that spewed some new distraction every ten minutes. Since all of it rolled past her fairly loosely, she never was able to trace back why she found herself in a particular corner of the cyber-world. But her obsession became a county sheriff's site in Colorado where their daily siezures of felons, other offenders, and “transit holds” were posted in large clean digital files. At first, Rain told herself she was just collecting, just two clicks, right-click, select, didn't mean anything. But soon she started to draw them. She didn't collect just any mugshots. They were always women, always fairly young and never the guarded or the mirthful. Only those who looked somewhat raw. Who appeared fully aware of what was happening to them. These were brightly lit, direct face shots without any protection. Sometimes there were red eyes, runny mascara, and puffed noses. But Rain wasn't interested in the criminal caricature. Mostly they were DUIs, with some petty theft, the occasional drug possession and domestic battery. Most of the “transit holds” were longer-term criminals, and seemed more comfortable and less laid bare in their mugshots. She was surprised to find more than a few quite cheery faces among these troubled people, and it made her imagine a photographer trying to lighten his days by saying or doing something to provoke the incongruous grins. Something to belie and mask regret, desperation and fear.
She collected these images liberally since they were only posted for five days after their “alleged” incident. At times she would find the same face reappearing. This was an entirely different level of interesting to her, since, inevitably, they looked worse, emptied of their last traces of hope in the second or even third shot. Whittling down her haul to a few more interesting faces, she then drew some of those. Finally, one night, without fanfare, she pulled out the first paint box James had given her, and, working very quickly, she painted one of them in the same manner she had done all those self-portraits she'd hidden from Karl in the city. She had developed the habit long ago of penciling the date and title on the back of her work. On these mugshots she scrawled “self-portrait” along with a number and date. She told herself it was just because she hadn't noted the subject's name, but she liked what the title connoted. Renaissance artists would sometimes insert self-portraits into tableaux, where they stood in for a disciple or a king, and Rain had always appreciated that cheekiness. This full reversal, this using anonymous women in trouble as models for herself turned that tradition on its head in a pleasing kind of way.
They were her, after all. Circumstances had them living in Colorado and dealing with young kids, a violent ex-boyfriend, money troubles or just plain boredom. So what force kept her here, in this charming little cabin so near New York City, fighting with herself over making art or not making art under the influence of self-imposed jail-time and bottles of scotch. What forced these expectations on her? She hadn't chosen her father, but she had tried to follow him. He had been called a “shaper of culture,” a “prince of letters,” “influential and inimitable.” He never put pressure on her to be an artist or to shape her experience into art. Yet her life was steeped in it. The way doctors' kids, firefighters' kids and cops' kids grew up feeling that kind of responsibility toward the world, having watched it rule their parents' lives. It became difficult to justify turning away from one's inheritance.
The faces she was sketching put her in mind of the Mona Lisa, eventuallyâthe vague, indecipherable expression she looked for in the mugshots having that similar quality of multiplicity. Even the most raw of her subjects showed a kind of combination of awe and confusion when they weren't just completely giving themselves to the camera, total y present, total y exposed. They weren't Mona Lisa smiles: they were Leonardo all-and-nothings. It was that level of fascination that kept Rain at them one after another. The Mona Lisa, however, was what gave Rain the idea to incorporate the landscapes she'd been gathering behind the figures. Precipitous views down steep mountain-sides, river and train tracks running behind the subjects. Once she'd sketched them out, they appealed to her immediately. The women's eyes always glinted with the same two strips of sharp reflectionâceiling fluorescent fixtures behind the photographer. The glints were subtle and delivered a sense of interior space. Rain gave them careful treatment in each portrait and the result was an intriguing feeling of the subject being outside looking in.
Rain sketched out a plan for a larger work with a fulllength figure and a still life of petty crime accoutrements in the composition. Imagined ones, fictionsâshe wasn't particularly interested in the details of each person's real experience. Only in the stark emotion splayed on their faces. She snapped a number of shots of herself from the neck down in poses from classical antiquity to use for referenceâstrange little gestures of the hand, pointer touched to thumb, raised palm.
It occurred to her that Thanksgiving was coming up, or had it passed? Though she had been ignoring news programs, the TV ads and some of the specials she surfed past were starting to show signs of holiday hysteria. By this time, Rain had been away from the world for almost a month. She was starting to get used to this hermetic life, this oddball rhythm, this time alone with herself.
Someone knocked at the door. Not the postman's familiar crashing, but a normal knock. She was lying awake, so it was probably past two, but when she peered out the bedroom window wondering if Chassie had come back, and if she could hide from her, Rain was shocked to see Gwen at her doorstep.
“Just a minute,” Rain croaked, coughed and yelled again, “⦠just a minute!”
She threw on a pair of jeans and the first sweater she could lay a hand on. The place was a chaotic mess. Not exactly trashed, but maybe too well lived in. Luckily, she'd done a couple of weeks worth of dishes the day before, but she hadn't put any of the recent drawings or paintings away, nor the sundry supplies she'd only half unpacked and spread around the living-room tables. And she'd taped drawings all over the glass of the big window and laid them on the floor, everywhere.
When she opened the door, Gwen sighed heavily. She held two large shopping bags and turned to call to the driver in the black town car. “Six o'clock, Sergei,” she said, and he nodded and started back down the road.
Rain couldn't figure out if she was moved, touched, annoyed or horrified by her stepmother's visit, only that she couldn't manage to get a word out. She was just relieved not to be drunk this time.
“Well?” Gwen said, looking at her up and down without verbal comment, but her eyes lingered on the hair. “I turned down my nephew and his awful wife, hired that car and I'm here.” She held out the two shopping bags to Rain. “So, let's eat,” she said.
Rain took the bags from Gwen and looked at them. One was filled with take-out food containers, the other with bottles: wine and seltzer.
“Thanksgiving,” Rain said finally. “Oh.” And she stepped aside and let Gwen enter.
As Gwen crossed the threshold, Rain ran ahead of her down the living-room steps, set the bags down and quickly brushed aside the pencil portraits she had laid out in a careful grid on the table. She stacked them and tossed them on the sideboard alongside the dozen or so small oil sketches drying there.
Gwen walked down the steps, slowly looking around the place and took hold of one of the old wooden school chairs at the table.
She sighed and looked at Rain wearily. “Do you want to shower while I set the table?”
When Rain emerged again from behind the bedroom curtain, she saw the table set prettily for two, a candle burning and wine poured. Gwen was looking through the portraits.
“Gwen,” Rain said, feeling sheepish for some reason. “Gwen.”
Gwen looked at her. “Hmm. It's still blue,” she said, shaking her head with a smile.
Rain ran her fingers through her hair. She liked the way it had grown in with the dark brown roots giving dimension to the white. She might do without the blue tips now, though. They had faded to a bit of a robin's egg, rather than the original chemical blue she'd painted on there.
“Alright, now,” Gwen said. “Come on, let's eat.”
The food was to Gwen's standards, elegant without being fussy. Wild rice with currants and walnuts, pomegranate-glazed roast turkey, sweet potato galette with pecans and brûlé maple crust, a relatively plain stuffing and tiny pumpkin pie tartlets for dessert. Rain hadn't realized how tired she'd become of canned food. She felt longings filling up that had been gurgling along empty for weeks. Gushing praises on the meal, on Gwen's coming to see her, the wine, all of it, Rain could hear a clumsy desperation in her own voice.