Lydia's Party: A Novel (22 page)

“What do you think?”

“Now, that’s just wrong!” Celia was slamming the steering wheel again. “She was perfectly fine.”

“No, she wasn’t. She had a splenic tumor. She was dying, too. Her whole world was me.”

“Elaine would have taken her. I would have. Besides, it’s all so Egyptian. Throwing everyone into the tomb with the pharaoh.”

“Like I’m the pharaoh.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Slow down. You’re going to get a ticket. Listen, I want you to do something for me.”

“What?”

“I want you to talk to Norris, make her feel better.”

Celia made a retching sound. “Why don’t you? Since you’re so out and about these days.”

“I tried to,” Lydia said. “I can’t get her attention. Overachiever types aren’t as amenable to these kinds of visitations, apparently.”

Celia turned to face Lydia, really hurt now. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Eyes on the road, please,” Lydia said. “Don’t argue about everything, Celia. Don’t argue with a dead person. And stop being so competitive. It’s tiresome.”

Celia stepped on the gas.

“Just give her a break,” Lydia said, after a minute. “I know you. You’re all going around dissing her, not inviting her to anything. I’m just saying, let up. Maybe she’s changed. For one thing, you need to go see the paintings. She made me look like something out of Burne-Jones. A wraith bound to earth by only an orange casserole.”

“Ted’s loving that casserole,” Celia said, glad for the change of subject. Lydia had made a present of it to him the morning after the party, along with the leftover stew that was in it.

“I know,” Lydia said. “Listen. Just try being Norris’s friend. If she invites you, go. Make the others go, too. You weren’t going to, but you should.”

Celia didn’t answer.

“There’s something else you should know.”

“Oh, great.”

“That guy you and Elaine were gossiping about? Kamal? It’s not what you think. He was my student and we got back in touch. It’s a long story, Norris can fill you in. But that’s why he came to the funeral.”

“Wait.”

“Let me finish. I was trying to set it up so he’d get the scholarship but he has to reenroll, which then makes him eligible for the GI Bill, which is great, but then technically he wouldn’t qualify for this but he needs it because if he quits his job to go to school how is he going to pay child support? So I asked Norris to finagle it. Be his sponsor.” Lydia was talking fast now, as if she were running out of time. “She’s the one who brought him to the funeral, so she could meet him. Anyway, I thought you should know, if you’re going up there. So you don’t jump to conclusions.”

“What in the world are you talking about?”

“Got to go. Thanks for the ride.”

Maxine stood up on the seat and leaned into Lydia. They blurred into one.

“Wait! Where are you always going off to?”

“Aspen,” she, they, said, dissolving into a flurry of swirling snow before Celia had even stopped the car.

Less than a month later, almost exactly two years after Lydia’s last party, Celia sat with the other women at the big steel-and-glass table in Norris’s house. The table was covered with food, an odd assortment of offerings—the usual potluck dishes—combined with an elegant spread of appetizers prepared earlier by Kamal, who’d left the premises after setting out artful platters of steamed artichokes and homemade aioli and turning down the heat on the sweet-potato-stuffed Cornish game hens in the oven.

The conversation had moved from Betsy and Ted to Spence, who, it appeared, had stayed in the house. Someone had seen him there the previous summer, mowing the lawn.

“I heard he’s working now, at that yoga studio.”

“I heard he adopted a pit bull, from an animal shelter.”

“Two, I heard.”

“I heard he was dating,” someone said.

Celia nodded. “Peter took Griffin to a Cubs game and they saw him in the bleachers, buying a hot dog for a woman who looked exactly like Lydia.”

“A hot dog!” they all shouted.

Now the women were telling Lydia stories. Celia decided to go ahead and tell her story after all, absent certain significant details about Norris. When she got to the part where Lydia said Aspen, Maura gasped.

“But she never skied a day in her life,” Jayne said.

“We’re not talking about skiing,” Celia said.

“We’re not talking about life,” Elaine said.

“Maybe it’s a metaphor.”

“For elevation.”

“Heaven!”

“Oh, please.”

“Snow. A clean sweep?”

“A fresh start.”

“Ted told me she visited him.” This from Betsy.

“That’s not fair,” Elaine said. “Why would she visit Ted and not me?”

“He says it has something to do with the pot,” Betsy said. “You know, that big cast-iron thing she gave him that morning? He says it has to do with spiritual essences absorbed by stone. It’s why they have so many ghosts in England, he says. All those stone houses.”

Elaine rolled her eyes.

“Anyway,” Betsy said, ignoring Elaine now, addressing the group. “He says he heard her voice, when he was making jambalaya.”

“What did she say?”

“Ted, you are too friggin’ fat,” someone said, in a spooky voice.

“That would have been his feet talking.”

“He’s lost weight, actually,” Betsy said.

“What did she say?”

“Just his name. He claims he was alone in his kitchen and heard his name spoken out loud. In Lydia’s voice.”

“That’s pretty anticlimactic.”

“Not the way he tells it,” Betsy said. “He says he got down on his knees and prayed.”

“To the ghost of Lydia?”

“To the jambalaya!”

“How should I know who Ted prays to these days,” Betsy said, annoyed now.

Norris appeared with a fresh bottle of white wine. Elaine had asked for red but Norris didn’t trust her not to spill.

“Let me top off everyone’s glass before we go into the studio,” Norris said.

Full glasses in hand, they trooped through Norris’s exquisitely spare rooms. They passed her collection of Japanese erotica, shuffled shoeless across her bleached oak floors. Betsy asked for a detour through the kitchen. There, tucked behind a juicer, Elaine spotted two full bottles of cabernet. One was even open.

Elaine was insulted and took it as a license to snoop. Celia hung back, too, and as soon as they were alone Elaine opened the refrigerator. They’d expected to find a comically unappetizing assortment of vitamins and cruciferous vegetables, but what they saw was even better. Sitting in the middle of a pristine and otherwise empty shelf sat a dinner plate that held a beeswax figure sculpted in the shape of a muscular male nude.

They stared into the glowing interior. “I suppose this is what Norris plans to serve us for breakfast,” Elaine said.

Celia just shook her head.

“People!” It was Norris, rounding them up.

Celia and Elaine hurried down the breezeway connecting the main house to the studio and joined the little group outside the closed studio door.

“Let me say something first,” Norris said, squaring her already square shoulders. She looked from face to expectant face. “These paintings are about something I didn’t realize I needed to make paintings about, something I hadn’t thought about much, before.”

“Other human beings,” Elaine whispered.

Norris glanced at her, continued. “As you probably know, I haven’t worked from the figure much lately. Or really, ever. And maybe I should have asked your permission before I went ahead. I’d meant to ask you to come up for sittings, but the photos got me started and after that . . .” Norris looked around at the attentive but not yet fully comprehending faces, then shrugged. “Memory just seemed to be the way to go,” she said. “Please don’t anyone be insulted.”

Elaine shot Celia a dark look. Celia pretended not to notice. “I also want to say this,” Norris continued. “I think of this show as a kind of tribute, to Lydia.” She paused, embarrassed. “For bringing us together.”

Norris turned her back on the surprised murmur and opened the studio door.

“I thought she hated us,” Elaine said, to no one in particular. They all filed in.

•   •   •

Around the perimeter of the enormous white-walled studio stood seven seven-foot-tall, five-foot-wide paintings. Each was a full portrait of a single figure. At the far end of the studio stood an eighth painting, even larger, a double portrait of Lydia and Maxine.

“Where’s Malcolm?” Jayne whispered.

Elaine snorted. “He got cut,” she whispered back. “He wouldn’t take off his coat.”

“He’s not here,” Norris said. “Neither is Betsy’s dog. Only females.”

“And Ted,” Betsy said, insulted.

“Sorry. Of course,” Norris said. “And Ted.” They all turned to look at the painting of Ted.

Incredibly, Norris had painted him nude. He stood, up to his ankles, in a clear pond bordered by a lavishly imagined version of Norris’s hyperabundant garden. In front of him, in both hands, he held Lydia’s orange pot, which mostly covered his genitals. Ted’s hair and beard and the pot, also a wisp of visible pubic hair, were all painted the same glowing color, a mix of alizarin crimson, cadmium yellow, and titanium white.

Ted appeared lit from below, the orange of the pot reflected in a bright slice on the ample underside of his belly. Another slice of orange appeared under his double chin and, as if the enamel on the pot had bled into the surrounding air, orange light glinted on the pond’s surface, which was broken by ripples around Ted’s thick ankles. The little coarse hairs on his legs picked it up, too, as did the mackerel clouds in the sky. Ted’s blue eyes shone weirdly. It took a minute for them to notice that, reflected in the twin convex mirrors of both eyes, blazed two tiny forest fires.

For once the women were speechless. Betsy looked like she might cry. “He’s the only one I asked to come for a sitting,” Norris said to Betsy, as if she’d asked.

After the women had recovered from the shock of seeing Ted, and so much of him, they began to mill around, sipping from Norris’s big wineglasses.

“These are incredible, Norris,” Celia said. There was no point in denying it. She’d returned to the painting of Ted, transfixed by his casserole-covered crotch.

“Thank you,” Norris said, knowing it was true.

She knew it was her best work yet. She’d taken a risk and it had paid off. She’d put the photographs away, painted from her composite memory of twenty years, giving the women—and Ted—glorious versions of their own bodies fabricated from her rich and generous imagination.

“You gave me back my beautiful boobs,” Elaine said, for once not sarcastic.

“It’s how we’ll look in heaven,” Maura said, standing in front of her own portrait, in love with her body, maybe for the first time. Norris’s version of her was better than any surgeon’s. Celia glanced over to see if Maura was making a joke but she didn’t appear to be.

Norris didn’t know about heaven, but Maura had the general idea right. She’d meant them to look their best. The passing thought of painting them exactly as they’d looked that Saturday night had yielded to this more interesting, encompassing idea, each woman a composite of her best features over a life—the thought-sharpened faces of middle age, the smooth bellies and dense high breasts of youth. Even Ted’s paunch looked firm, royal.

“This is gorgeous,” Celia said. She’d drifted away from Ted and was standing in front of the painting of Lydia and Maxine.

Norris had painted them standing at the edge of the water, with no sight of land behind them. The lake was green. Maxine was in front, body in profile, like a prize heifer, her head turned to face the viewer. Silvery water dripped, flowed from her face as if she’d been drinking from some source so bounteous that it ran out of her like a fountain. Her broad muzzle was black and velvety, as it had been when she was a puppy, her orange eyebrows furrowed with intelligent concern. Lydia, naked and lovely as some medieval Eve, stood modestly behind the dog, one pale hand resting on Maxine’s broad black flank.

Celia loved it, though she didn’t know what Lydia had been talking about. She couldn’t see what was so Burne-Jones about it. And the orange pot Lydia had referred to was nowhere in sight. Still, Lydia had told her to go look at the painting and now that Celia had seen it she wanted it.

“It’s nice, isn’t it,” Norris said, stepping back and squinting. It wasn’t a question. It was plain truth that it was nice. Better than nice.

“What are you going to do with it?” Celia said. “I mean, after the show comes down.”

Norris shrugged. “My dealer’s shopping it around. A collector in Houston is interested.”

“I want it,” Celia said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I want to buy this painting.”

Norris almost laughed. “Oh, Celia. Don’t be ridiculous.” She crossed her long arms across her flat chest. “Natalie charges a fortune.”

“I understand that,” Celia said. “I’m not asking for a discount. I’ll pay on installment—that’s how it’s done, isn’t it? But I want it.”