Girl in Pieces (39 page)

“Coffee?” He pours me a cup from a French press, nudges a carafe of milk across the table. “The milk is warm, if you take milk. My grandchildren are feeding the horse.”

I slather a piece of baguette with butter. I'm hungry now; my stomach makes fierce noises. I bite the baguette; it's so light and crispy, it shatters against my sweatshirt, leaving me showered in crumbs. The old man laughs. “Happens to me all the time. I've never been ashamed of making a mess when eating.”

I brush the pale crumbs away. The baguette is pillowy inside, moist. The house is silent except for the sound of my chewing and the occasional rustle of the old man's newspaper. Gradually, I realize it's quiet outside, too. Strangely quiet. No cars, no voices, nothing.

“Did you know Quakers believe silence is a way of letting the divine into your body? Into your heart?” He shakes out the paper and leans in close to me. His eyebrows are like sleeping white caterpillars. “I've never been afraid of the quiet, have you? Some people are, you know. They need tumult and clatter.

“Santa Fe. High desert country. Isn't it beautiful? I've been in this house for forty-two years. This wonderful silence you can hear—what a
funny
thing I have just said—makes it the most divine place on earth. To me.”

He reaches over and curls his hand around mine. His skin is dry, dusty.

“It's a pleasure to have you in my divine home, Charlotte.”

I feel the press of hot, grateful tears in my eyes.

His name is Felix and he's Linus and Tanner's grandfather. Linus leads me around the house, pointing at paintings on the walls, sculptures arranged in corners and in the backyard, a huge expanse that looks out over rolling hills and the horse's stable. She takes me into a cavernous building flooded with light streaming from the skylights in the ceiling, where various canvases are hung on the walls and cans of paint, buckets of brushes, and industrial-sized containers of turpentine abound. Canvases are stacked three deep against some of the walls. A loftlike space has been constructed at the far end; a table with an old typewriter and a plain chair sit on the upper deck. There's a wide stairwell leading up to the loft. Beneath it are cluttered, top-heavy bookshelves. A young woman works quietly at a high pine table in the corner of the studio, sorting slides, holding them up to the light and studying them before placing them in different piles. “That's Devvie,” Linus says. “His assistant. She lives here, too.”

I limp around the studio, touching Felix's things gently, the pencils, the stray pieces of paper, the jars and tubes, the amazing and voluminous detritus: birds' feathers, stones of various sizes, old animal bones, wrinkled photographs, postcards with loopy cursive bearing exotic postmarks, a red mask, boxes of matches, heavy cloth-covered art books, jars and crusted tubes of paints, so many paints. One table has a series of watercolors on paper strewn about, slight and gentle washes of purple, conelike flowers. Another table is just books, heaps of them, open to different images of paintings and drawings, five or six Post-it notes pressed to each page with words like
Climate of the palette, Echo/Answer, Don't lie.
The floor is layered with old paint; I trip on a pair of battered clogs.

I look again at the canvases on the walls; I want to say they're sunsets, but they're not so literal. Something deeper, something inside the body, a feeling?
Isn't it beautiful?
Felix said to me. The colors are doing something together, I'm sure of it, I can feel it; playing off each other; some relationship is being described that I can't put into words, but looking at them excites me, fills me up, blunts the ache. I look at Felix's art supplies and wish I could do something right now, make something of my own. I remember what Ariel said at the art opening about Tony Padilla's boat-paint paintings:
Colors by themselves can be a story.
Ariel's paintings were a story beneath a surface of dark and light. I smile shyly at Linus.

“Yummy, yes?” She claps her hands, giddy.

Felix pokes the meat on the grill like it's still alive. Smoke froths his glasses and he rubs them on the edge of his shirt. I look at his gnarled fingers, the thickness of his wrists and knuckles. His skin is flecked with the faintest remnants of paint.

We're gathered around a long wooden table outside. The air is crisp. Tanner has lent me a fleece pullover. Linus is slicing a pungent white cheese and Tanner is carving slices of avocado. Devvie, the assistant, is in the house, fixing drinks and feeding the ancient, limping wolfhound. In the distance, the horse whinnies inside the stable. Strange sounds come from the dark desert beyond us. Whoops and whistles; rustling and bickering.

Felix slaps the glossy meat onto a platter and sets it on the table, flicking his napkin over his lap. He looks at the sky. “Probably one of the last times we'll be able to be out here like this.” He glances over at me. “December is when we get the snow. It's the most beautiful month here.”

He looks over his glasses at me and takes a long drink of wine, sighing appreciatively after he swallows.

“This heartbreak,” he says, sitting at the table, placing a napkin on his lap. “And I don't mean what happened with that young man, because those things, they come and go, it's one of the painful lessons we learn. I think you are having a different sort of heartbreak. Maybe a kind of heartbreak of being in the world when you don't
know
how to be. If that makes any sense?”

He takes another sip of wine. “Everyone has that moment, I think, the moment when something so…
momentous
happens that it rips your very being into small pieces. And then you have to stop. For a long time, you gather your pieces. And it takes such a very long time, not to fit them back together, but to assemble them in a new way, not necessarily a
better
way. More, a way you can live with until you know for certain that this piece should go
there,
and that one
there.
”

“That's an awful lot to lay on her, Grandpa,” Tanner says. “She's just a kid.”

Felix laughs. “Then I'll shut up. Ignore me. I'm just a blathering old fart.”

I keep my head down. I don't want to cry at the table in front of these people so I fill my mouth with the salty meat. I slide my fingers under my thighs to keep them from trembling, listen to everyone chatter. I am so empty inside, so ravenous for something that I feel like I could eat for days and not fill myself.

Later, in my single bed in the quiet room, the window cracked open just a little to the luminous sky, the cool air on my face, I do think about
momentous.
Was my father my first momentous? He was there, and then he wasn't, and I wasn't supposed to ask about him or cry, or be anything, really, because my mother was so upset.

Maybe Ellis was a puzzle piece, a big and
momentously
beautiful one that I knocked out of the puzzle box. I'm not sure what Riley was yet. Maybe he was part of the assembling, too? And I'm still not done?

I'm so unwhole. I don't know where all the pieces of me are, how to fit them together, how to make them stick. Or if I even can.

After a week, my fog lifts a little bit. I still sleep a lot, and I'm so tired, but walking doesn't hurt as much, and it doesn't seem like we're going anywhere soon, so I start investigating Felix's house, which is complicated and rambling. From the front, it appears small and square, but once you're inside, it spreads out in several directions at once, its complex nature hidden by cottonwoods and octopuslike cane chollas. (That's what the tiny book Linus gives me says they are. I take it with me when I walk outside. It distracts me to do simple things, like put a name to a plant.)

There are several bedrooms, all with plain beds and simple wooden dressers. Patterned wool blankets are folded neatly and placed at the foot of each bed. The main room is enormous, with dark, heavy beams crisscrossing the ceiling, like the bones of a skeleton, which Tanner tells me are called
vigas,
and there's an enormous stone fireplace against one wall. Devvie keeps it lit on the cooler nights and it's there that I like to sit, close to its warmth.

Felix has one room for just books, another with only records and a stereo and a slanted, forlorn piano in the center. The kitchen is at the back of the house, off a deck that looks out into the rolling, dark hills. The stable is down the slope, surrounded by coyote fencing.

The studio, Linus tells me, was built with something called genius grant money many years ago. It adjoins the back of the house, rising barnlike over the hills. At night, the coyotes come out, howling, wandering. Felix points out low-flying hawks to me during the day, their forms swooping over the cottonwoods in dark arcs. They cook together, Linus and Tanner and Felix: large, sumptuous meals of fruits and meats, breads and cheeses, papery spinach salads with walnuts and salty feta cheese.

“You know,” Felix says to me one morning, spooning blueberries onto my plate at breakfast. “I don't want you to think I'm some old workhorse, slaving away every day at my paints and pictures. Sometimes I don't do any work at all in my studio! I just sit. Listen to music. Page through my books. Maybe write down something I remember. Maybe write a letter.”

He pours more coffee into his cup. “Sometimes not working can be work, just more gently. It's important to just be, Charlie, every once in a while.”

My feet keep getting better. The cuts and gouges heal up nicely, though they're still tender. Tanner takes off my arm bandages and lets me see the new slashes, the new rivers. I feel hesitantly over the fresh lines on my stomach, but I don't look down.

I didn't go too deep, he says; I didn't need stitches. “Let's think of that as a good thing.” He drops the old bandages in the trash, unfurls a fresh roll of gauze.

One night while Felix is opening another bottle of wine, Linus calls me over to a tiny laptop set up on the kitchen table. It's been two weeks now and I've noticed that Linus disappears with the laptop every night after dinner for an hour. Tanner said she was talking to her kids over Skype.

All I could say was “Oh.” I didn't even know she had children. Or I guess she must have told me, but I wasn't listening. Ashamed, I realized I had never really asked Linus anything about her life, or her problems with drinking, because I was so consumed with Riley.

Linus points to the screen. I squint. It's a newspaper article, with a photo of artwork on a wall. My artwork. Manny and Karen and Hector and Leonard. It's dated two days after the art show.

Linus raps me on the skull. “Look, dummy. It's a review of the gallery show. Listen.” She reads from the review, which sounds nice enough, if a little snarky; the writer uses a lot of words I don't understand; I wonder why they just can't say if they liked anything or not. I catch some of what Linus is saying: …
seemingly caught adrift amid the digi-heavy and Technicolor nostalgia is a series of charcoal portraits…revealingly sympathetic…classical quirk….

“I think they liked your drawings, Charlie!” Linus nudges me in the hip. Her breath is fragrant with honey and green tea. Felix wanders over, waving a finger at Linus. “Click there, click there,” he says. Linus clicks; the screen fills with the faces of Hector and Karen, Leonard with his sorrowful eyes and hopeful mouth.

Felix says simply, “Very nice. Very strong line, my dear.” He removes his glasses. “But you don't feel it.”

I shake my head, surprised. How can he say I didn't feel it? I liked all of them and I worked hard. I wish I could answer out loud, but my words are still buried.

“It's all there, dear. Attention to detail. Beautiful gestural moments.” He looks right in my eyes. “But you don't
love
this kind of drawing. Or, at least, have a complicated passion for it. You need one or the other. Ambivalence is not a friend to art.”

Felix pats my cheek. “You have your skill, Charlotte. Now give your skill an
emotion.
” He wanders back to the wine bottle. “I have a room you can use,” he calls to me. “Devvie will get it ready for you tomorrow.”

Linus nods. “We aren't going anywhere for a while. True Grit's closed for God knows how long. Riley stole a hell of a lot of money, you know; people haven't been paid. Might as well enjoy ourselves.”