The Queen Gene (3 page)

“I come play now!” he demanded. “Mommy come get now!”

I whispered, “I’ve got to get him, but
this
, my good man, is not over. You have been very bad today. Tonight I shall exact my revenge,” I winked suggestively.

“Counting the minutes, my dear. Counting the minutes,” he said. Then raising his volume, “Who’s ready for a snowball fight?!”

Chapter Three

The next week, Jack reminded me that we only had another twenty days before our first visiting artist and his wife arrived for their six-month stay with us. The other two would follow shortly thereafter. “Let’s get away for a few days before everyone starts arriving,” he suggested. Eventually, Jack and I would leave guests on their own, but we agreed that for our first season, we’d stay put and make sure everything ran smoothly. “Let’s visit your Aunt Bernice in Florida,” he suggested. “I’m freezing my ass off.”

“Daddy freezing my ass,” Adam said, giggling. I was amazed at how he’d gone from chubby-cheeked infant to little boy in just the past six months. Like his dad, Adam had thick brown hair, a broad face, and mint green eyes.

“Watch your mouth in front of the baby,” I scolded. “He repeats everything we say.”

“Daddy’s freezing
his
ass off, not yours, little man,” Jack corrected. “Think about it, Luce. Bern’s always asking us to come to visit her. It’ll be warm in Hollywood. We can take some time off from house repairs and just hang. You’re always saying you miss Bern since she moved to Florida and we moved here. Let’s go.”

“Maybe,” I considered. “We’ve got so much to do, though. Oh! By the way, thanks for rewiring my office. I can finally turn on my space heater and computer at the same time.”

“Look, I said I’d get to it,” Jack defended himself against what he thought was my sarcasm.

“No, I really appreciate your fixing the wiring in my office because —”

Jack interrupted. “I didn’t rewire your office. It’s on my list, but I haven’t done it yet.”

“That’s impossible, Jack. You told me the computer and heater couldn’t run at the same time unless the area was rewired. I had both on yesterday, so it had to have been rewired.”

“Not by me,” he rebutted. “Maybe Tom stopped by while we were out. I mentioned it to him.”

“Honey, Tom and Robin are in Jamaica this week.”

“See how smart they are by escaping this cold? Come on, baby. Let’s make like the neighbors and fly south for the winter. One week. We’ll be ready for Maxime and Jacquie. Besides, they’re staying here for free. They’re not expecting the Four Seasons.”

The house wasn’t in perfect shape yet, but the guest cottage Maxime and his wife Jacquie would stay in was comfortable. Jack and I had been hard at work for a full year, and yet it felt like we’d only made a dent in our list of repairs. We fixed the heating and plumbing in both guest cottages and were almost done with construction of the third. As I mentioned, we fully remodeled the kitchen and built a deck. We insulated, plastered walls, re-roofed, upgraded windows, and refinished 3,000 square feet of hardwood floors. Still, the place needed a lot more work and the landscaping was in dire need of tender loving care. Nonetheless, Jack and I were living our dream. When Maxime and Jacquie arrived in February, the dream would become reality. In early March, Chantrell the cellist would arrive, and by the end of the month, when his cottage was ready, Randy the glass sculptor would come to join us. The plan was to open our home to the community over Labor Day weekend for an art show where people could look at (and hopefully buy) Jack’s paintings, Maxime’s ink pen sketches, Chantrell’s recordings, and Randy’s sculptures.

Jack and I were amazed at how many applications we received after we posted our advertisement on the Internet last summer. Most were dabblers simply looking for free room and board, but more than a hundred were serious artists, all worthy of our support. I loved Maxime’s work in which he used a pin point to dot his ink onto the page. When you take a step back, his work looked like a black-and-white photograph, but upon careful examination you could tell that it was a composition of hundreds of thousands of tiny dots. Shades of black and gray were created by altering the density of the ink points. I fell in love with the concept of art that could dramatically change its appearance by repositioning the viewer. It was beyond a mere transformation in look. Maxime’s work took on the qualities of an entirely different medium when the viewer moved himself just a few feet. This seemed to drive home the basic principle that perspective and distance affect perception. Maxime was my choice. I must admit I also liked the fact that his wife was my age and seemed to have an easygoing manner about her. Perhaps it was because Maxime’s portraits of her conveyed a certain sense of etherealness. Maybe it was the photograph of the two of them hiking that Maxime submitted with his application. Whatever it was, I felt I would enjoy having Jacquie around the house for the season.

I also liked Chantrell, but she was really Jack’s pick. He said he wanted to be sure that not all of our guests were visual artists, but I think it was her long flowing red hair that Jack really liked. I wasn’t jealous. I knew that Jack appreciated how hard we’d worked to get our marriage back on track and would never screw that up by straying. The fact that he noticed beautiful women was not the threat it would have been a few years ago.

Chantrell said she had been part of a research project that investigated the claim that cello music made plant life grow better. It sounded like the flaky sort of assertion my mother would make. In fact, Anjoli once brought a harp player to her apartment while I was visiting to see if he could cure my insomnia. Chantrell, however, had well-documented evidence that suggested plants grew up to thirty percent faster when they heard cello music for three or more hours a day for 21 consecutive days. We were really going to need to hire a gardener in before she arrived. Chantrell asked if she could plant two vegetable gardens on our property when she arrived this spring. One would be right outside her studio, giving it exposure to her music the other would be out of earshot of her cello. Research had never been done on vegetable-bearing plants, only flowering and fruit-bearing trees. We figured, what the heck? Chantrell is exactly the type of person we weren’t meeting when we lived in the suburbs of New Jersey. Jack and I figured if we were going to start an arts colony in the mountains, we may as well open the doors to people and ideas we considered a little far-fetched. And who knew, she could be right.

Of course, there were artists who were just a bit too bizarre for our taste. Some guy sent in a photograph of his painting titled
Various Stages of Orgasm.
He dipped his fingers in different colored paint as his intensity level rose. It began with periwinkle smatterings with his fingertips, which then became more curved and fluid. Then, the up-and-cumming artist moved into more dramatic, straight diagonal scratch lines in yellow and green. Finally, it appears he grabbed fistfuls of red paint and threw them onto the canvas as he climaxed. “We gotta try this sometime,” Jack teased when we saw the photos. I don’t have a problem with art that is sexually provocative. I just couldn’t get past the horror when I thought about what our cottage would look like on the mornings after he painted. Jack and I once watched an episode of
Real Sex
on HBO where couples had sex using dozens of different types of food from chocolate and butterscotch ice cream to self-adhering rainbow-colored sugar bullets called Dickin’ Dots. Instead of being titillated by the kinky exhibitionists frolicking around their white sheets, I watched in horror, thinking
that’s gonna stain
.

Then there was the guy who painted a Freddy Kruger mask on Mona Lisa, and made Rodin’s Thinker hunch over to snort a line of cocaine. His letter said it was a pulling together of classic art with modern issues. We thought it was just plain trite.

We almost accepted a woman who melted plastic toys until they were flat as pancakes. She called it “Hot Toys” and said it was a commentary on selling trends to youth, but I just thought the colors looked cool. As a parent, I suppose there was some sick satisfaction I derived from seeing Baby Bop fried like an omelet. Jack said the toys were probably melted in a microwave oven, but we still couldn’t run the risk of inviting a potential pyromaniac to our tree house in the woods.

Jack and I mutually agreed on Randy the glass sculptor from Napa Valley. He found a way to use blown glass in concert with stained glass to create windows that were sculptures. At the sight of just one of his square-foot window inserts, we were sold. The glass pieces were cut into tiny geometric shapes to create a pink sunset over the 3D mountains. He claimed to have never been east of Michigan, but somehow managed to capture the exact view from Jack’s and my bedroom, which is exactly where we placed Randy’s piece. We had to cut out a piece of our window and have a wooden frame built around the sculpture to make it work, but it was worth it. No one sees our bedroom without commenting on our unique window.

Jack’s voice returned me to the present where he was still lobbying for a getaway to Florida. “Here’s the deal,” I began. Jack looked at me in eager anticipation. “I’ll call Aunt Bernice and ask if she’s up for a visit, but you have to strap on Adam’s carrier and take a hike with me right now. Five miles. And at the end you must say, ‘Thank you for making me appreciate the glorious winter.’”

“I have to say ‘glorious’?”

“Did I tell you Bern’s condo just put in a new Jacuzzi down at the pool?”

“Grab Adam’s backpack and let’s go, glorious wife.”

I realize we’ve only lived in the Berkshires for a year, but I know I’ll always be awestruck by its beauty. A crisp layer of pure white snow carpeted the woods around our property. I loved the sound of how it crunched beneath our feet as we walked. It reminded me of chewing cereal. Bare hickory and ash trees stood stoically, lining our path. Oak tree branches and pine needles were dusted with white powder from the season. Though it was a little over forty degrees, the sky was bright blue without a trace of cloud and the sun was shining as if for only Jack, Adam, and me. On these hikes, it was the unwritten rule that we said as little as possible. During the spring, I had been prattling on about an article I was working on when Jack hushed me. “Listen,” he said. We heard the ravens rustling about, rebuilding their nests. We enjoyed the squishing of damp earth beneath feet and the breeze rustling the maple leaves. At that moment, I learned not to pollute the forest with my chatter. Even Adam abides by this rule and only speaks up to alert us of something truly amazing, like he’s seen a deer or made a poop.

I watched my breath escape and tried to make rings like people do with cigarettes. It never works, but I always try anyway. Glancing to my left, I smiled at the sight of Jack in his thick flannel jacket and wool hat carrying bundled Adam in his hiking backpack. As if he were reading my mind, Jack glanced at me and winked. “This is nice,” he said. “You look pretty.”

I turned to thank him and tripped on a large rock hidden beneath the snow. My ankle rolled inward and I heard a snap. “Are you okay, Luce?” Jack bent to the ground where I had fallen. He untied my boot and examined my ankle, asking if it hurt when he moved it from one side to the other. “Does this hurt? How ’bout this? What about up and down like this?”

“It all hurts, Jack!” I said, trying not to cry for fear of frightening Adam. Jack filled his hat with snow and made an ice pack for my ankle.

“Do you want me to carry you?” he asked. Jack’s offer to carry Adam on his back and me in his arms was a generous one, but I said I could make it the quarter-mile back to the house. Jack found a large tree branch for me to use as a cane, and I hobbled back home. I looked like my Aunt Rita, who walked with a limp and a cane until she died suddenly at a Red Lobster in Florida last year.

Chapter Four

We returned home from our hike to the sound of the phone ringing. It was Anjoli calling to tell us that Paz had not responded to his hypnotherapy. “I may have to take him to Brazil, darling!” she cried. My mother periodically visits a healing center in the Amazon jungle where the longitudinal and latitudinal position on the map makes it the ideal place for recovery. Recovery from anything. That’s the way things work in my mother’s world of magical thinking. According to my Anjoli, the healing center was very exclusive and only accepted a handful of applicants. To qualify, one had to place his or her hand on a sheet of paper, hold it still for an hour, then send the paper in to the center for analysis. They would only tell you whether or not a person has been accepted to the program. They never give their handprint diagnosis because they don’t want clients to “put their energy into disease.” Mother has gone twice now and says they are gifted healers. Nothing was bothering her, but Anjoli just knows the week in Brazil prevented something terrible that was on the horizon.

“Hold on, Mother,” I said. “Jack, can you change Adam’s diaper, please? I think it’s poopy.” He shot me a look as if to say,
Gee, thanks.
I returned with one that let him know I owed him.

“That reminds me,” Anjoli continued. “I had Paz’s stool analyzed to see if the trichotillomania might be related to diet.”

“And?” I urged her to continue.

“Well, naturally I’m feeding him exactly what his nutritionist suggested, darling, but there’s hair in his stool. Isn’t that horrid?”

“He’s
swallowing
the fur he pulled from his paws?”

“He’s a very disturbed little dog,” Anjoli said. “Thank the divine spirit he found me. Perhaps we’re together for a reason. You know what the woman said when I had my past life regression done years ago, right?”

“I know, I know, I saved you from a fire during the French Revolution and now we’re together so you can repay your karmic debt.” Where would I be without my mother’s constant salvation?

Anjoli switched gears. “When are you coming to the city? I miss my baby!”

“I’m sorry, Mother. Jack and I just agreed that we’re probably going to see Aunt Bernice in Florida next week. If she says it’s okay, that is.”