“Do you see it?” asks Bea.
“They’re portraits.”
“No,” she says, “they’re portraits of the same woman.”
Henry lifts a brow. “That’s a stretch.”
“Look at the angle of her jaw, the line of her nose, and the freckles. Count them.”
Henry does. In every image, there are exactly seven.
Bea touches the first and second. “The Italian one’s from the turn of the nineteenth century. The French one is fifty years later. And this one,” she says, tapping the photo of the sculpture, “this one’s from the sixties.”
“So maybe one was inspired by the other,” says Henry. “Wasn’t there a tradition of—I forget what it was called, but basically visual telephone? One artist favored something, and then another artist favored that artist, and so on? Like a template.”
But Bea is already waving him away. “Sure, in lexicons and bestiaries, but not in formal schools of art. This is like putting a girl with a pearl earring in a Warhol, and a Degas, without ever seeing the Rembrandt. And even if she became a template, the fact is, this ‘template’ influenced centuries of art. She’s a piece of connective tissue between eras. So…”
“So…” echoes Henry.
“So, who was she?” Bea’s eyes are bright, the way Robbie’s sometimes are when he’s just nailed a performance, or done a bump of coke, and Henry doesn’t want to bring her down, but she’s clearly waiting for him to say something.
“Okay,” he starts, gently. “But Bea, what if she was no one? Even if these are based on the same woman, what if the first artist simply made her up?” Bea frowns, already shaking her head. “Look,” he says, “no one wants you to find your thesis topic more than I do. For the sake of this store, as much as your sanity. And this all sounds cool. But didn’t your last proposal get nixed for being too whimsical?”
“Esoteric.”
“Right,” says Henry. “And if a topic like ‘Postmodernism and its Effects on New York Architecture’ was too esoteric, how do you think Dean Parrish will feel about this?”
He gestures to the open texts, the freckled faces staring up from every page.
Bea looks at him in silence for a long moment, and then at the books.
“Fuck!” she shouts, taking up one of the giant books and storming out of the shop.
Henry watches her go and sighs. “Not a library,” he calls after her, returning the rest to their shelves.
IX
New York City
March 18, 2014
Henry trails off, as the realization dawns.
He’d forgotten about Bea’s attempt at finding a new thesis, one quiet detail mixed into a very loud season, but now, it’s obvious.
The girl in the sketch, the painting, the sculpture, is leaning on the rail beside him, her face open in delight.
They are walking through Chelsea on the way to the High Line, and he stops, halfway through a crosswalk, realizing the obvious truth, the gleam of light, like a tear, in his story.
“It was you,” he says.
Addie flashes a dazzling smile. “It was.”
A car honks, the flashing sign gone solid in warning, and they run to the other side.
“It’s funny, though,” she says as they climb the iron steps. “I didn’t know about the second one. I remember sitting on that beach, remember the man with his easel, up on the pier, but I never found the finished piece.”
Henry shakes his head. “I thought you couldn’t leave a mark.”
“I can’t,” she says, looking up. “I can’t hold a pen. I can’t tell a story. I can’t wield a weapon, or make someone remember. But art,” she says with a quieter smile, “art is about ideas. And ideas are wilder than memories. They’re like weeds, always finding their way up.”
“But no photographs. No film.”
Her expression falters, just a fraction. “No,” she says, the word a shape on her lips. And he feels bad for asking, for drawing her back to the bars of her curse, instead of the gaps she’s found between them. But then Addie straightens, lifts her chin, smiles with an almost defiant kind of joy.
“But isn’t it wonderful,” she says, “to be an idea?”
They reach the High Line just as a gust of wind blows through, the air still edged with winter, but instead of folding in against him, sheltering from the breeze, Addie leans into the wild gust, cheeks blushing with the cold, hair whipping around her face, and in that moment, he can see what every artist saw, what drew them to their pencils and their paint, this impossible, uncatchable girl.
And even though he’s safe, both feet firmly on the ground, Henry feels himself begin to fall.
X
New York City
September 13, 2013
People talk a lot about home.
Home is where the heart is, they say. There’s no place like home. Too long away and you get homesick.
Homesick—Henry knows that one is supposed to mean sick for home, not from it, but it still feels right. He loves his family, he does. He just doesn’t always like them. Doesn’t like who he is around them.
And yet, here he is, driving ninety minutes north, the city sinking behind him as a rented car hums under his hands. Henry knows he could take the train, it’s certainly cheaper, but the truth is, he likes driving. Or rather, he likes the white noise that comes with driving, the steady concreteness of going from here to there, the directions, the control. Most of all, he likes the inability to do anything else but drive, hands on the wheel, eyes on the road, music blaring through the speakers.
He offered to give Muriel a ride, was secretly relieved when she said she was taking the train already, that David had gotten in that morning and would pick her up from the station, which means Henry will be the last one there.
Henry is always somehow the last one there.
The closer he gets to Newburgh, the more the weather changes in his head, a warning rumble on the horizon, a storm rolling in. He takes a deep breath, bracing himself for a Strauss family dinner.
He can picture it, the five of them sitting around the linen-covered table like an awkward Ashkenazi imitation of a Rockwell painting, a stiff tableau, his mother on one end, his father on the other, his siblings seated side by side across the table.
David, the pillar, with his stern eyes and stiff posture.
Muriel, the tornado, with her wild dark curls and constant energy.
And Henry, the ghost (even his name doesn’t fit—not Jewish at all, but a nod to one of his father’s oldest friends).
At least they look the part of a family—a quick survey of the table, and one can easily pick out the echo of a cheek, a jaw, a brow. David wears his glasses just like Dad, perched at the end of his nose so the top line of the frames cuts across his gaze. Muriel smiles like Mom, open and easy, laughs like her, too, head thrown back, the sound bright and full.
Henry has his father’s loose black curls, his mother’s gray-green eyes, but something has been lost in the arrangement. He lacks one’s steadiness, and the other’s joy. The set of his shoulders, the line of his mouth—these subtle things that always make him seem more like a guest in someone else’s house.
This is how the dinner will pass: his father and brother talking medicine, his mother and sister talking art, and Henry dreading the moment when the questions turn toward him. When his mother worries aloud about everything, and his father finds an excuse to use the word unmoored, and David reminds him he’s almost thirty, and Muriel advises him to commit, really commit—as if their parents aren’t still paying her cell phone bills.