So he stayed up in New York, with her — Melanie — trying to get his stuff exhibited in her GoToIt gallery. Still flogging the dead horse of his clichéd pictures of Chicago’s downtown homeless. He called me most weekends, usually from a bar when he was drunk. In between trying to harass me into signing a “contract” he had sent down, allowing him to exhibit those horrible pictures, he would make everything out to be my fault. — You never want to come out and enjoy life. You’ve reverted back to being the no-fun fat girl from Potters Prairie you were when I first met you. I tried my best. But I guess we are what we are, he’d muse: pretending to be sad, but sneering and dismissive.
His words ate away at me. I kept trying to work through it, but they resonated in my head. It was like a switch I couldn’t turn off.
And Mom kept sending me food. She always had. Her brownies, cakes, and pies, wrapped in those vacuum-sealed packs, arrived in a box each week, sometimes twice a week. Back in Chicago, in the loft, I just put them out where the other occupants or our constant traffic could gratefully munch through them. Here, alone in the house on 46th Street, they were all mine. Previously, I had just guiltily trashed them or let them go stale, but now I started to reward myself with them again. When I was rushing with the sugar or feeling that comforted, satiated way, I couldn’t hear Jerry’s voice. The voice of disapproval.
The weight came back on, and as for the art, I got stuck. I could put a lump of clay on a wheel, but I couldn’t form it. The welding I kept messing up. My touch and eye were out of sync. The molds wouldn’t set right. I took out my frustration on the suppliers, criticizing the quality of the materials they sent me. Inevitably, they stopped supplying.
Then Jerry told me that he was opting to stay in New York for a while, as it was more “vital” and “real” than Miami. In reality, he’d left me for Melanie Clement, that immensely privileged daughter of a wealthy financier and his fashion-designer wife. Melanie’s trendy GoToIt gallery ran one space in TriBeCa and another out in the Hamptons. I heard she was opening a third in Brooklyn, which promised to be “a new cutting-edge environment for more challenging artists.” I assumed this was the niche Jerry was desperately trying to wedge himself into.
Yes, and he still had the audacity to keep hassling me to sign a release form to exhibit the photographs of me at Melanie’s gallery.
I kept refusing.
He stopped calling.
I got fatter and more depressed. I couldn’t understand how I’d gotten from Chicago — fulfilled, successful, and in a relationship — to this lonely, humiliating existence in Miami. I was so desperate that I went back to Potters Prairie for a break, weighing in at over two hundred pounds. Dad didn’t seem to notice. He only really spoke about his work, usually to complain about Menards driving him out of business. Mom was actually pleased. — I thought you were anorexic before, and she’d shovel another slice of pie toward me. — I was so worried!
It wasn’t all a waste, though. I’d enrolled to do another taxidermy course with an experienced instructor who gave one-on-one tuition. Kenny Saunderson was a manic guy who existed on coffee and chain-smoked. He was an amazing taxidermist, specializing in waterfowl, and had once been world champion in this category. I admired his skill at gutting, cleaning, stuffing, and reconstructing dead swans, ducks, geese, and restoring them to some sort of former beauty. I wasn’t afraid to get my hands dirty. It was the only time I felt like myself.
But most of the time I was slumped with Mom and a jumbo bag of Doritos in front of daytime TV. My depressive descent was even more rapid than back in Miami. How could people live like this? I wanted to go, but couldn’t face Miami right away; I drove back to where I now regarded as home, Chicago.
I returned to the West Loop. The building that housed the Blue Gallery was now being remodeled as condos. All that was left of Blue was the website. Although most of my friends had gone, Kim was still there, working for a downtown advertising agency, and I stayed with her in her Wicker Park apartment for a while. It was great to just hang out, to see the towers of downtown, hit the old neighborhood bars like Quenchers and the Mutiny, hear the El train rattling above me in its baritone of turbulent metal. But I couldn’t stay, as I had to try and get reengaged with my work. Although I had done nothing in it for a while, I missed my studio and headed back down to Miami.
Seeking to continue my taxidermy education, I found another tutor there. I wasn’t exactly revitalized by my break, but I was at least trying to work, on both smaller and larger mammals. Davis Reiner was a tall man with a hangdog expression and a smoker’s cough. His lean body, and his tanned, sagging jowls, drooping down the sides of his wrinkled face, reminded me of a friendly Great Dane. Although he was much older than me, I was lonely and warmed by his kindness, and I slept with him. Like many taxidermists, he had the rough, heavy hands of a man who worked for a living but which were so deft when it came to more intricate measures. I scarcely minded the slack flesh of his wattled turkey neck swinging down on my chest, and his flinty but glazed eyes, fierce with purpose. Aged and a little gross he might have been, but this guy wanted to fuck me.
But Davis’s attentions didn’t stop my eating. I ate and I ate and I ate. Jerry started calling me again. Telling me I was worthless in one breath, begging me to let him show the pictures in the next. I was ashamed and humiliated by his hold over me. Broken, I told him to send down the contract. That I would sign. I was confused and depressed. I stopped sleeping with Davis, stopped going to class. I sat in my house, unable to work: eating, watching TV, watching the walls close in on me.
It reached its zenith that night, when I was driving around, thinking that I would stop the car on the Julia Tuttle Causeway, get out, push through the jagged undergrowth, climb the balustrade, and drop off into the dark, cold waters of the bay. It seemed the only way out. There could be no other salvation. I wasn’t just driving around aimlessly. I had put a small note inside a Ziploc bag, placing it in the pocket of the ridiculous pink sweatsuit I was wearing to make myself appear “breezy.” It had the words scrawled in capitals:
THIS IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH.
The embarrassing thing was that I had snagged myself on some thorns and it took a while to work free from them. Then I was too small and fat to scale the barrier with ease. Instead, I was soon crying in frustrated rage as I tried to haul myself over, screaming hatefully through the lashing rain that I was useless, even to the last. Then I heard the screeching of the brakes from the highway and lights spilled everywhere. I grabbed my phone and called the police. Then came the shots. I saw Lucy get out the car, and the terrified look of the man who had been banging on her window. Then the gunman came into view. He walked right past her. Then she kicked him and he went down. I moved closer, filming her straddling him. When he peed I stopped recording.
Lucy.
In my mind’s eye I see her jogging in Lummus Park, hair pushed severely back in a ponytail, magnificent breasts bouncing (although in reality they never did, secured as they were by an unyielding sports bra), her face set in that mode of cool, vicious determination.
Who is she? Why does she care about me? What is the pathology that drives her, in the way my subconscious pushes me — with its need to be dominated, bossed, and manipulated? My low self-esteem — treating every compliment and accolade like it was a booby trap. But that’s me; what is going on with her?