The Tell (6 page)

She told him that night how she'd seen him on Wickenden Street one evening when she was coming back from Brindle, his shoulders hunched as though he'd been trying to disappear. It sounded like too many evenings to him when disaster tailed him like something stuck to the bottom of his shoe. She said that she'd like to make him less forlorn, if she could, and pull happiness out of his gloom. That he would be the best work she might ever do.

Later that night, she'd looked ghostly, moving pale and naked to the far end of the hall, where she stopped in front of a closed door. This seemed to be a sort of ritual of hers that suggested something terrifying behind the door. A month after he'd moved in, she'd shown him the angled space where the ceiling zoomed low to meet the pitch of the roof and went on forever, but she wouldn't go in. He smelled the closet's morbid breath while she'd giggled uneasily, dismissive of herself and her babyish fears, and explained that the dread was just something left over from her childhood. But she did not want that erased or revealed; she was content to leave it alive and intact, and she'd pulled him back when he'd tried to take a step in.

Tonight Mira was staying late at Brindle again, getting the place ready for the fundraiser. Owen sniffed at the loamy stink of the four artichokes he was steaming on the stove and imagined the smell zigzagging across town to reach her, stirring up her appetite, which always waned in these anxious pre-party days. Down in the kitchen, he shut off the flame and noticed how the last sunlight hit the many bottles of wine Wilton brought each time he came for dinner, washing the wall in a thirsty red. Wilton gave them other gifts as well that he ordered online and had delivered to his porch by UPS—buttery steaks packed in huge Styrofoam boxes of dry ice, cheeses, glowing golden kiwis, cakes from Chicago, black bread from Poland. And most recently, along with the artichokes, a quartet of honeydew melons, one already soft in the box.

Owen packed dinner up and walked to Brindle, taking his usual out-of-the-way detour through Fox Point, where he'd lived before he'd met Mira. The view from his third-floor apartment there had given him a slivered glimpse of the bay. There were times in that bleakest first year in Rhode Island when he'd felt he was drowning on land, and he counted on that spot of Narragansett Bay, black and streaked with red warnings from the Allens Avenue gas tanks, to keep him afloat. Every morning around five o'clock, the scent of baking Portuguese bread had woken him, making him intensely hungry. At the bottom of Wickenden Street, crowded with students and people out for a cheap dinner, a dim underpass led below the highway. Fifty yards of sidewalk were tacky with shit from the pigeons that perched and cooed on the steel beams. A truck roared above, shaking Owen. The Point Street Bridge in front of him was a structure beautiful in its dereliction. It was one of Mira's favorite places—the epitome of Providence, she claimed. The city had been fixing the bridge forever, and the fact that she didn't think they'd ever finish it delighted her. The bridge was the city's private joke, and like the city itself, corrupt, possibly dangerous, and endearingly rusted. The hurricane barrier, Mira said, was the city's single admission of vulnerability—and only then to the forces of nature. Orange-and-white traffic barrels and a regiment of cement barriers made the bridge appear amputated in midspan. The water caught every reflection so you felt as if you were floating above the city rather than standing at its base. On the other side of the bridge, past the fluorescently bright Hess station with its fortified cashier's booth, past Planned Parenthood devoid of its daily protesters at this supper hour, and one block in, was Brindle with its front door wide open to the warm, deserted street, and across from it, an empty lot surrounded by chain-link fencing.

Large windows on each of the two floors spread across Brindle's brick façade. The building had once housed supplies for the costume jewelry industry. Later, it had stayed vacant for decades, except for the occasional squatter or rat. Mira's father, in the family tradition of mindless acquisition, had bought it for reasons unknown to Mira, though she'd said it definitely wasn't because he saw an art school in it or her future. Occasionally Mira would still find a sparkle or chip of ruby or sapphire glass between the wide wood planks. She collected them in a jar she kept on her desk.

The foyer held a counter Owen had built out of plywood and given three coats of glossy white paint. Mira called it the snow bank. When she wasn't running around, Joy, her assistant, sometimes sat there. Unclaimed items were always piled at one end: a greasy Red Sox cap, a mitten, shirts, socks, a gutted cell phone. Mira's compact office was secreted behind a turn in the wall, and to the right was the gallery that ran the length of the building. The high ceiling was mapped with pipes and beams that had been painted a hundred times. The room was chaotic now with ladders, bulbs, tools, pieces of pottery, pictures, water bottles, the curling remains of a pizza Mira had ordered for the kids who'd stuck around to help her earlier. Diffuse circles of light fell on bare walls and on Mira, who was nailing something in a far corner. She lifted her face to him and put down her hammer. She sat back on her heels, smiling.

“The door was open,” Owen told her. “Is that really such a good idea? Anyone could just walk in.”

“And so you did just walk in. Anyway, Brindle
is
open to anyone, O.” She stood. “You're always afraid something bad is going to happen.”

He wanted to say, remember our own break-in? Remember how besieged that made you feel? He sensed violence's proximity everywhere. “You're not offering sanctuary here,” he said. “And it seems like you're asking for trouble, inviting it in. What's the point of that?”

Mira fiddled with one of her hoop earrings, a tic of patience and a reminder to him that she did fine on her own. But the skin under her eyes was puffy, and her expression was straining to be light. “Maybe I am offering sanctuary here. Anyway, I thought art was supposed to be a refuge. Like a church.”

“Not true,” he said, and smiled.

He didn't like that she would jeopardize her safety to make her point or excuse her nonchalance with a joke, but this was her realm and he knew he shouldn't say any more. She gave him a light kiss. Her breasts urged against her thin white cotton shirt as she put her hands at her waist and surveyed the room. Owen was struck by how peculiarly possessive he felt at that moment, as though he needed to pull her back from somewhere else. He wanted to take her into the office and claim her as his and only his, and cage her with his body.

“It's a disaster in here,” she said, “but in a few days this place is going to be sparkling and packed with rich people and big spenders who want nothing more than to give Brindle their money.” She spread her arms in front of a bare wall. “Right? Paintings here, pastels there, ceramics around the edges. People will be surrounded by things they can't resist bidding large sums for.”

“Bigger than large,” Owen said, slipping off his backpack and unloading dinner. “Massive and colossal.”

“Humongous,” Mira added. “And if they don't bid? Then what?”

Owen presented her the giant artichokes in their tin foil coats. They looked like steaming jungle oddities. Her delight was gratifying.

“Wilton brought them over,” Owen explained. “He said you'd told him you loved them. That you two were talking about your favorite foods.”

“True. Sweet.”

Did she mean the food or the man? Behind her, past the window and the awkwardly shaped parking lot and the Dumpster, he saw the bend of the river, the newest tent city erected by the service road, and beyond, the swell of College Hill. Somewhere in the darkening trees was their grand house, but he couldn't make it out.

“You seem a little tense,” Mira said, and ran a hand down his back.

He said he'd had a frustrating day at school; he'd had to send a couple of kids to detention for fighting, which always depressed him with its uselessness, and he was tired. The truth was, he didn't know why he was impatient with her, or what he was feeling, except unsettled.

“I'm sure I kept you up with the television,” she said. “I'm sorry.”

Last night, Owen had been awake with Mira watching reruns of
Ancient Times
again. Pollen had filtered through the window screens and hung in the colored light. The past of his childhood and the present with his wife next to him, there on the pond and here on this bed, Wilton an image then and a fact now next door, was a transfixing midnight confusion. Mira was absorbed, laughing, giving encouragement to Wilton. Owen's hand and the action's shadows played across her slim bare legs. His fingers had trolled her inner thighs, but finding no invitation in, had finally stilled.

“I was watching with you. That was me, remember? That was my hand on your leg?”

“Come on, O. Don't be snippy. You know I'm always like this before the fundraiser. I get a little crazy and scattered. So I leave the front door open. So what.”

Joy appeared in the gallery, soft-footed in her sneakers, red like Mira's. Her shy pink face was babyishly round at twenty-two, and she reached for her long ponytail like it was her consoling stuffed animal.

“I hope you like artichokes,” Owen said.

“I've never had one,” she said, growing pinker. Owen liked that she blushed at everything, as though she were just waking up to the sensual world all around her.

“Then I'll have to show you how to eat one,” Mira said, putting her arm across the girl's shoulders. “It's an art.”

She dimmed the lights, and they sat cross-legged on the platform at the front of the room. “Like this,” she said to Joy. She scraped off the soft meat with her bottom teeth. She took another leaf, and this time rolled the flesh around on her tongue, presenting it as a soft, green ball. Joy pulled off a leaf and slipped it into her mouth, miming Mira. It was like watching some fascinating, vaguely erotic ritual. Owen had always detected something charged about Brindle, even in his first visit. Maybe it was all that wordless intention poured into the lopsided clay pots and shaky pastel drawings. Maybe it was Mira's passion and purpose, the refuge she offered.

She stood and began to pace the room, her fingers dug into her pockets. She went back to the corner where she'd been nailing earlier and considered her hammer. “I don't know what I'll do if I have to close this place, but I think about it all the time now,” she said. “Don't you think it would be easier if I did shut it down? I could get a regular job. Or maybe not. But I could have time. I could have a clear head. I could let someone else do the worrying. I'd be free of it.”

Mira pressed her back against the wall. “I just wonder what it would be like not to feel as if everything were teetering on the edge all the time. As if
I
were teetering on the edge and about to fall off and pull everyone and everything over with me. Other people are a lot of responsibility, it turns out. There are so many problems, things I can't do anything about, no money. It's a struggle and it's getting overwhelming.” She pressed her hand to her chest. “I feel it right here. Maybe it's just heartburn, though.” She laughed. “Those artichokes.”

“But isn't this exactly what you like?” Owen asked, going over to her. “The teetering? Because it makes you feel alive? You like the edge.” He put his hands on the wall behind her, framing her face, and hiding her from Joy. “We'll find the money,” he insisted quietly, “and I'll do whatever it takes. I'll do more tutoring at night. You're not going to lose this place. I won't let it happen.” Why was the specter of defeat so close this year when the pressure had always been there? What did she now imagine was barreling toward her?

“You're lovely and even heroic, but you don't have to fix it for me, O,” she said, touching his cheek. “Maybe it's just time to do something else. Nothing so wrong with that, is there?”

“No, but listen to me. Brindle makes you happy, and you'd be miserable without it. I know that about you. I want you to be happy, Mira.”

She rankled at sentimentality and its thin solace, and her look said she suspected him of it now. She pressed her face to his forearm, not to console but to quiet him, then ducked under his arm and went to the open front door. “I feel rain,” she announced, returning to the gallery. “Rain on the night of the party. Lots of it. The whole stormy package.”

“That's not going to happen,” Joy said, working hard to sound upbeat. “We'll have perfect weather. We always do. It's going to be great, just like every other time.”

Owen went to Mira to pull her away from her foreboding, but stopped where a huge, lumpy, brown clay pot sat like an unloved mutt. Mottled and covered with blemishes of glaze, there was something especially furious and shitlike about it. Its ugliness was impossible to miss, and hard not to admire.

“Doesn't it look like it's going to come to life and attack?” Mira said, her enthusiasm rising now that she was talking about something solid and real. “I think it's amazing. The kid who made it—Cory—is this skinny little guy and he can't even lift it by himself. He loves the thing, but he told me he's ready to part with it if it brings money to Brindle. He was so serious about it, his first act of charity. I want to put it right there, in front. I want people to see it first thing.” Tears slid down her face. “I want everyone to see it and see what it's worth.”