Louisa’s first assignment at Wrynn College of Art was paint home. She’d left home a week ago, and now, as she looked out the classroom window, it startled her still to see hills and sullen, huddled townhouses, the New England sky close and cold, nothing like at home, where the sky overwhelmed the land, a drama of clouds and rain and strange shafts of tawny light.
She’d never been on her own before. Her year at South Louisiana Community College didn’t count. She had slept in her old bedroom, borrowed her mother’s car to get to class, worked the same shifts at Chez Jacqueline, eaten Sunday dinner at Grandma and Pepere’s.
Louisa was homesick. It was normal, she told herself. Even at nineteen-almost-twenty, it was normal. And so, alone in her studio, she’d cried a little as she painted Lake Martin at dusk, bald cypresses echoed by their dark reflections in the water. It was a placid scene, but ominous, tinged with danger, curdled at the edges like a faded bruise. In the background, low, swollen clouds gleamed with uncanny clarity and a flutter of pintails took off over the marsh. In the foreground, an ibis waded in the shallows, its bow-shaped beak slicing through the water. Its plumage was a soft, unglossed white, except for its black wingtips. Its pearly blue eye met the viewer’s.
She’d chosen an ibis because Grandma had once told her that it symbolized resilience; it was the last animal to take shelter before a hurricane, and the first to reappear after the storm.
“No, not resilience,” Mom had said, overhearing. “Regeneration. And wisdom.”
Danger, Louisa thought. Optimism.
“Dinner,” Pepere added. Hunting ibises was illegal, but he’d grown up shooting them for the table and occasionally still brought one home. The meat was orange and fishy-tasting.
Now, a thousand miles away from him, Louisa stood alone in an empty classroom. She’d arrived early to secure a spot on the southern wall, and she was pleased with how her painting looked there, bathed in that diffuse northern light, what Mom called painterly light. One window was cracked to let in a breeze, but the room still smelled sharply of oils and turpentine. Afternoon sun gilded the floorboards. As Louisa’s classmates arrived and hung their own work, she turned to the wall and ran her fingers over the thumbtack holes. The other sophomores all knew each other already, had spent Foundation Year together, and in their presence, Louisa felt furiously shy.
Maureen walked in, a manila folder under her arm. All professors went by their first names at Wrynn, which did nothing to make Maureen less formidable. Though her wardrobe consisted entirely of overlarge T-shirts and paint-stained cargo pants, the pockets full of jangly objects, she carried herself with the pugnacious confidence Louisa occasionally saw in certain older women who’d stopped caring what the world thought of them.
“Everyone ready?” said Maureen. She opened the folder. “We’ll go alphabetically this time. Louisa Arceneaux, you’re up.” She pronounced her surname “Are-SEE-necks.”
“ARE-sin-no,” Louisa corrected her softly. “It’s French.” She shifted so she was standing next to her painting with her back to the wall. She hugged her sketchbook to her chest as her classmates, all fifteen of them, gathered around her in a semi-circle. Only Maureen brought a chair, its legs squeaking against the floor. She set it in front of Louisa’s painting and sat down, crossing her arms.
There was a long silence, her classmates’ faces unreadable. Maureen wore bifocals, and she had a habit of tipping up her chin when appraising a painting, as though she were looking down at it. Finally, Jack Culicchia, who wore a baseball cap embroidered with eat the rich, spoke: “My problem with your painting isn’t that it’s kitschy, exactly.” He stood near the back, but he towered over everyone, his voice carrying clear across the room. He was known for his digital mashups of assassinated presidents and murdered rappers: The Notorious J.F.K, Tupac Lincoln, Freaky McKinley. “My problem with it is that it screams ‘I’m from the South,’ but it’s, like, Southern Gothic Lite.”
Louisa bristled. She wasn’t just from the South. She was from Acadiana. Expelled by the British from Nova Scotia, her Acadian ancestors had settled in the swamps of southwestern Louisiana before it was even a part of the United States. Pepere, who as a child had been beaten for speaking Cajun French at school, had served as an interpreter for American troops in France during World War II. She wasn’t Southern, she was Cajun.
Louisa flipped to a blank page in her sketchbook. She hunched over and wrote southern gothic light, slowly, in neat cursive.
“What do we think about the formal elements?” said Maureen.
Emma Ochoa, who made brooding canvases about being in a long-distance relationship, said something about the blue in the clouds picking up the color of the bird’s eye and giving the painting nice movement. Demir Ozcelik, who was Turkish and movie-star handsome, smiled at Louisa and praised her use of red in the cypress bark.
Movement, Louisa wrote. Cypress bark. Red.
While making the painting—building the frame; stretching and gessoing and sanding the canvas; sketching out the composition, consulting her photos of Lake Martin, refining her lines with each iteration—Louisa had fallen in love with it. She’d seen what this painting might do, how it might make someone feel. She’d hoped to convey how intensely she experienced the landscape of her home, how heavily the air weighs, hinting at deluge and decay, how plants grow with such vigor that a cat’s claw vine can crack a house’s foundation.
“The brushwork is really accomplished,” said Alejandro Díaz, who always wore the same pair of lace-up boots, which Louisa took to mean he was probably also on scholarship.
“Say more about that,” said Maureen.
“Like, the texture of the paint on the surface of the canvas, the impasto. It’s almost liquid, like stormy water. Sort of a form-follows-content kind of thing.”
Impasto, Louisa wrote. Frenzied.
“Good technique,” said Karina Piontek, Louisa’s roommate.
Karina stood apart from the group, slouched against the wall. She had her long hair gathered up in both hands. She’d been braiding it as she listened to the crit. Now she dropped the braid, letting it unravel. “But I feel like I’ve seen this painting before.”
Louisa wasn’t sure how she’d ended up with Karina as a roommate. The other sophomores had singles, or else they roomed with friends. And Karina was wealthy—her parents were art collectors, and the other day Louisa had sat behind her in lecture and seen her order a pair of $200 sunglasses. Surely she could’ve had her pick of housing. Louisa had decorated her side of the room with family photos and a Festival International 2009 poster from two years ago; Karina had hung only an oval mirror and a small canvas that evoked a squall at sea and seemed, in its perfection, less painted than conjured. Karina hadn’t been mean to Louisa, but she hadn’t been nice, either. Each morning she woke at seven and drew in bed for an hour, sketchbook propped against her knees. Her duvet was creamy white with thin threads of pale blue, but she didn’t seem to care about dirtying it. Louisa had admired this ritual and resolved to imitate it, but the other day when she’d pulled out her own sketchbook, Karina had looked over and lifted a single pale eyebrow. Wordlessly, Louisa got dressed and went to the common room, where, instead of drawing, she spent an hour playing Angry Birds on her phone and brooding over whether her roommate liked her.
Since that morning, Louisa had continued to wake at the same time as Karina, but instead of drawing in bed, she fixed a mug of instant coffee in Hope Hall’s kitchenette before walking to Williams Park, the bluff that overlooked the town of Stonewater, where she drew the skyline until her first class at nine. She skipped breakfast to save dining room credits—her scholarship covered only the smallest meal plan—and puts lots of sugar and milk in her coffee to compensate.
Maureen gave Karina a sharp look. “You’ve seen it before? Explain.”
Karina shrugged. The truth was, Louisa would’ve liked to draw her. She wore elegant, billowy clothing, wide-legged trousers and floor-grazing skirts, patterned shawls and complicated wraps. Her face had an austere, graven quality, like an ancient statue, and she had the most magnificent hair Louisa had ever seen: thick and silky, a sort of icy blond. Once, Louisa dreamed she’d cut it all off with her X-acto knife while Karina slept. Another night she dreamed about kissing her.
“It’s pretty and skillful,” said Karina. “But it’s just a landscape. It’s just a bird. What’s it trying to do? What’s it trying to say?”
You weren’t supposed to talk while being critted. Just a bird, Louisa wrote. She thought about how Karina knew what she looked like first thing in the morning or when she came back from her shift at the cafeteria, fingers pruned, smelling of dish soap. Crit was a different, more brutal kind of intimacy.
“If the painting’s meaning could be expressed in words, why would she paint it?” said Ivy Morton. A foxtail always hung from her back pocket—real or fake, Louisa couldn’t tell.
“It’s an accomplished painting,” said Karina. “I’m not saying it’s bad. I’m just reminding Louisa that art has to do something.”
In her sketchbook, Louisa wrote Do something and drew a quick little doodle of an egret. Every artist had something they drew for reassurance. For her it was birds. She’d gotten this idea from watching Mom, who was always doodling intricate little insects all over her grade books. She wondered what Maureen drew for comfort. What Karina drew.
“What about self-expression?” said Ivy.
“What about it?” said Karina.
“What if the painting reflects an experience of Louisa’s that you’re not aware of?”
“Just because something is meaningful personally doesn’t make it meaningful as art. It’s, like, just because something actually happened doesn’t make it a good story.”
Louisa wrote meaningful? under the egret.
“Enough,” said Maureen. “You’re veering too theoretical. I’d like you all to go back to discussing Louisa’s painting now.”
Face burning, Louisa looked at her canvas for the first time since the crit had begun. She saw it now as Karina did. How was it possible to love something so much when you were alone with it only to hate it as soon as other people saw it?
Alejandro spoke: “I don’t think the painting’s about a bird. To me, it makes me really aware of time. I think it’s about the moment before something terrible happens, the loneliness of being alone in that moment.” He had delicate, almost pretty features and wore a gold chain that disappeared inside his shirt. Louisa wondered what hung on it. Something glib? A stranger’s dog tags? Or something sincere, like a crucifix?
“Yes.” Maureen nodded. “Maybe it’s the contrast between the large, smooth areas in the sky and the active, textured water. It has this contradictory quality of both stillness and movement that Louisa executes well.” She opened up the manila folder again. “All right, Jack Culicchia, you’re up.”
They shuffled to the opposite side of the classroom, where Jack had hung a piece titled Still Life with Family, a dark, blurry painting in shades of ochre and burnt umber, where the only distinguishable objects were a pair of ashtrays, a broken mirror, and several pink pills. A few conflicting interpretations were proposed. Jack seemed pleased. Louisa hovered near the back of the semicircle and kept quiet. Then they moved on to Alejandro’s painting: a hazy rendering of a deserted city bus stop at sunset, telephone wires crisscrossing a sky of pink and gold and nightwater blue.
“I have this theory,” said Maureen, “that every male artist goes through a telephone wire phase.”
Louisa glanced at Alejandro in sympathy, but his face betrayed no reaction.
Karina went last. Her painting was a large abstract piece that seemed to mute the paintings hanging alongside it. She was unafraid of bold colors, cursive loops of pink, pools of blue, slivers of black. To these glowing fields of color she’d added bits of cloth, frills of lace, even embroidery. The result was a painting so lively it seemed to leap off the wall. It teased the eye; it took up space; it was unapologetic. It seemed to say: “All those aesthetic dogmas you old men spent your lives squabbling over? Here they all are, in bed together!”
Jack Culicchia said something vaguely critical about the painting being self-consciously feminine, but it was largely admired. Karina absorbed the praise without expression, long arms folded over her chest. She didn’t take notes.
After class let out, Karina paused at the top of the Painting building’s steps to light a cigarette. As Louisa walked by, Karina called: “Hey! You heading back to our room?”
Louisa turned. “Yeah?”
“I’ll walk with you,” Karina said, coming down the steps.
“Okay,” Louisa said warily.
They set off across the green. Students lounged in the grass with their sketchbooks and water bottles emblazoned with Wrynn’s crest: an ornate W above the words Pro Arte Utile, Latin for “For Useful Abilities.” This motto was the butt of many jokes, but Louisa, who’d read up on the school’s history, thought it made sense. It had been founded in the 1800s by early feminists who wanted women to apply the principles of art to trade and manufacture to become economically self-sufficient. Nowadays, Wrynn was co-ed and its students seemed less interested in trade and manufacture than in curating their aesthetic identities. Your identity, inseparable from your work, was what you’d sell when you went out into the world.
“Do you have siblings?” Louisa asked Karina. She wasn’t sure that she wanted to be friends with her roommate, but she’d been taught it was polite to ask people questions about themselves.
“No, it’s just me.”
“I’m an only child, too. I used to beg my mom for a sister.”
They passed under one of the stone archways. It was a lovely school. Ivy, brick, a clock tower, paper-pale houses converted into classrooms. A spare, Puritan beauty—“quaint as fuck,” people said—though one often blighted by rogue installation artists erecting sculptures on the quads in the middle of the night. They were made of things like Legos and packing pellets and old furniture, but the administration let them stay till they fell apart. Louisa had applied because famous artists had studied here, people whose work hung in museums, whose names appeared in her Art History readings. Sometimes she had to pinch herself: I am here.
Did you have Maureen last year?” Louisa said. “For Painting?”
“No. First semester we had Ellen Hoang. And then we had Clark Strickland.”
“How were they?”
“Ellen was fine. Clark was kind of a dick.”
“How so?”
“Oh, he was just sexist. He’d encourage the girls to paint from life and the boys to do abstraction.”
“Yikes,” said Louisa, though what was wrong with painting from life?
“Old school macho bullshit,” said Karina, exhaling a cloud of smoke. “That was Clark’s thing.”
They fell silent as they crossed Valence Street. Casting about from something to say, Louisa asked Karina what she’d done over the summer.
“Um, I traveled a bit.”
“Where’d you go?”
Karina tossed her cigarette into the street, then stopped in the middle of the sidewalk to light another. “A few different places.” Her gaze snagged on something over Louisa’s shoulder. Louisa turned to see what it was. They were standing in front of the Wrynn Museum, where a banner advertised a new exhibit by someone named Robert Belfer.
“I know him,” Karina said abruptly.
“Robert Belfer?”
Karina nodded.
“Like know him know him?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve never heard of him. How did you meet?”
“Through my mother,” said Karina, in a tone that invited no further questions.
The rest of the walk passed in silence. When they got back to Hope Hall, Karina went to take a shower. Louisa was debating what to do—it was early for dinner, but if she went to the cafeteria now there’d be fewer people to see her eating by herself—when she noticed Karina’s sketchbook peeking out from her bag. She hesitated, then furtively crossed the room and slipped it out, flipped through it quickly. God, Karina was talented. There were studies for future abstract paintings, sketches from their figure drawing class, some lustrous pastel work, and—Louisa made a little noise of shock in the back of her throat—a drawing of Louisa’s own face. In the drawing, her eyes were downcast, half-closed, her lips slightly parted in an expression of bliss or stupefaction. She wasn’t sure she’d ever made such a face in her life. It was a beautiful drawing, intimate and violating. Down the hall, she heard the shower stop. She closed the sketchbook, stuck it back in Karina’s bag, and went off to a dinner she was no longer hungry for.
◆
On her first afternoon off that semester, Karina went to the Wrynn Museum to see Robert Belfer’s retrospective. The museum was a silvery glass-and-steel cube surrounded by stately brick buildings. At night it glowed softly, like a child’s nightlight. At the front desk, Karina flashed her student ID and took a map from the attendant, though she didn’t really need it. She’d been here many times before, the first when she was fifteen for the opening reception of The Harry & Fiona Piontek Collection: Fifty Works for A New Age. In his toast, the curator had called the loan “an extraordinary act of philanthropy,” which was another way of saying “tax write-off.” She’d felt ill-at-ease at the reception, disgusted by people—their chatter, their picture-taking, the way they fawned over her parents. When Harry and Fiona threw parties at home she was free to hide in her room.
Karina unfolded the map to double-check what floor Robert’s retrospective was on and noticed a new private collection on loan. She always liked to browse other families’ collections, if only to assure herself that hers was superior. Wealth begat unhappiness—Karina didn’t know anyone who was rich and happy—but also beautiful things.
She took the elevator up to Selections from the Jeffrey & Abigail Rahman Collection. The gallery was empty save for the security guard in the corner. There was a game Karina liked to play in museums. It was called “We Have One Of Those.” In less than a minute, she’d scored her first point:
Katsushika Hokusai
The Paddies of Ono, Suruga Province
Polychrome woodblock print, ca. 1833
We have one of his. The Pionteks’ Hokusai hung outside the door to Harry’s study: a mountain range etched with threadlike paths. To Karina, it evoked the vast unknowable. Her parents’ tastes tended toward modern artists, though as Harry always said, “Dead is better. Limits the supply.” The Hokusai was an exception, an investment piece they’d all grown fond of. Harry had bought it shortly after the 2008 crash, when prices for Classical Japanese art were moribund.
In the next room Karina found an Agnes Martin, an oil on canvas from the sixties. We have one of hers. It presided over the dining room table. Karina had grown up tracing and retracing its serene, fine-lined grid at every meal, tuning out her parents’ arguing. As Karina took in the painting, she realized she wasn’t alone.
“Shhh!” she heard someone hiss. “She’s right there.”
Karina turned and saw Emma Ochoa and Ivy Morton—in her head she always called them Long-Distance Relationship and Foxtail—sitting on a bench opposite a Jasper Johns flag (we have one of his).
“Hey,” said Foxtail.
Karina had slept with Foxtail’s boyfriend last spring, a mussed, handsome boy who talked too much about himself. Sometimes her femaleness vexed her—even now, in 2011, women’s art was ignored and undervalued—but not when it came to sex. Apart from art, sex was the force majeure of her life. Even when she was a virgin, she’d felt it thrumming inside her: her desire and the desire she aroused in others. It had made her feel powerful to fuck Foxtail’s boyfriend, but Foxtail had found out. Wrynn wasn’t very big, fewer than a hundred people per class, and Karina soon found herself friendless. And then, after what had happened in studio last semester—well, Foxtail had been there. Doubtless she’d helped spread the rumors.
“How’s your semester going?” said Long-Distance.
“Fine.” Karina smiled her iciest smile.
“Glad to see you’re feeling better,” said Foxtail, trying and failing to hide her amusement.
The guard walked by, his walkie-talkie crackling.
“Thanks?” said Karina. “See you around.”
Long-Distance and Foxtail wore identical thin-lipped smirks as they said goodbye. Karina tried not to care. She continued playing her game.
Yves Klein
Untitled Blue Sponge Sculpture
Dry pigment and synthetic resin on natural sponge, ca. 1960
We have one of his. A winged statue in the downstairs bathroom, a twist of sky against the white tile. After Harry and Fiona bought it, they’d flown to Paris to renew their vows. Each time they went to auction and bought a new piece, they became, if only for a short time, utterly besotted with each other. Like clockwork, the fighting always resumed a few weeks later. “Your father and I have the exact same taste,” Fiona had once told Karina in one of her rare voluble moods. That was why they’d fallen in love, she explained. Their affinity was all the more remarkable given that, unlike Harry, Fiona had grown up poor. She was from Lawrence, Kansas and had been eighteen the first time she set foot in a museum.
Karina’s phone vibrated in her pocket, jolting her from her trance. A text from Louisa: I’m washing my towels, want me to throw yours in too? It’s no trouble.
Karina tensed. She didn’t know what to do about Louisa. Penelope Mandelbaum, her freshman roommate, had refused to live with her again, so she’d entered the housing lottery and pulled a terrible number and ended up on the summer waitlist. She’d promised herself she’d stop asking Harry and Fiona for help—which was how in August she was assigned to a double with a transfer student. Louisa Marie Arceneaux, the email said. Breaux Bridge, Louisiana.
The first thing Karina did was look her up online. But the internet held little trace of Louisa. No Facebook page, only one brief mention of her name in a local newspaper, something about a high school track meet.
Karina expected to disdain Louisa, as she did most people, but when she met her in person a few weeks later, she felt a hollow, falling sensation in her stomach. Louisa was small and birdlike, dark-haired with neat features and large, hooded eyes. It wasn’t till late that night as Karina lay sleepless in her narrow bed, Louisa’s deep, steady breathing marking the seconds, that it came to her: Louisa reminded her of Wally. It was something in the eyes, in the mouth. A certain way she held herself.
Karina had slept with girls before, but Louisa unnerved her. It wasn’t just her attractiveness, it was the directness of her gaze, the clarity of her sight. You could see it in her art. In crit, Karina had had what her old therapist, Dr. Ellis, called a “defensive lashout,” which was another way of saying that her innate capacity for cruelty had sensed an ingress, a cleft, and had swollen to fill it.
Ruthlessness, Karina reminded herself. She replied to Louisa’s text: no.
It wasn’t until the very last room in the gallery that she saw it:
Egon Schiele
Reclining woman in black stockings
Gouache and black crayon on paper, 1917
I have one of those. I have her. Karina’s heart sped up in recognition. The reclining woman was Wally. A drawing of the same model hung in Karina’s childhood bedroom, sinuous lines tracing the dips and crests of her thighs and buttocks. Her hair, a tangle of rust-red dabbed with fallow green, fell in snarls to the middle of her back. Her chin was propped in a loose fist, elbow jutting into the foreground, a wash of blush on her cheeks. Her lips were slightly parted, her eyes turned down in an expression of half-bored amusement, as though whoever had caught her attention was on the verge of losing it. As a child, Karina had pictured her living a hundred different lives. She’d often conducted long, one-sided conversations with her, particularly on sleepless nights when Harry and Fiona were downstairs screaming at each other, but she hadn’t learned the woman’s identity until she was thirteen, when one of her parents’ artist friends, a pretty young photographer named Ines, had wandered upstairs during a party and poked her head inside Karina’s half-open door.
“Heya,” Ines had said, and Karina, who’d been sprawled across her bed reading a Tamora Pierce novel, startled.
Ines was new to Harry and Fiona’s circle. Young, a few years out of grad school. Up-and-coming artists often came to Harry and Fiona’s parties, hoping to place a work in their collection.
“Just surveying the holdings,” Ines said with a crooked grin. She looked around with interest, her eyes, dark with mascara, widening as they flicked from the fireplace to the ensuite, where Karina was mortified to see a pair of her panties balled-up next to the toilet.
“Wow,” Ines said. She wore a red dress and high-heeled sandals. In one hand she held a sweating flute of champagne. Her fingers were strong and broad, the nails trimmed short, the nail beds bitten, worried-at. “What are you reading?”
Karina showed her the cover of The Woman Who Rides Like A Man. Ines smiled knowingly. “I loved those books when I was your age. So much gender-bending, right? So much sex.” And Karina didn’t know what it was—the curl of Ines’ lips, or maybe it was how the neckline of her dress bit into the soft flesh above her breasts—but she felt a gut-wrench in her stomach, like the drop on a roller coaster. Heat rose under her skin, but Ines wasn’t looking at her anymore; she’d seen the drawing of the red-haired woman. She drew close, examining it.
“That’s not a Schiele, is it?”
“Yeah.”
“It is? Like, an original?”
Karina told her yes, it was.
“In their kid’s bedroom,” Ines muttered to herself. Turning to Karina, she said: “Do you know who this woman is?”
Karina shook her head. The red-haired girl had always seemed real in the same way characters in books seemed real. But that the girl was someone who’d actually lived and breathed and cried and eaten and menstruated—this possibility hadn’t occurred to Karina.
“This is Wally Neuzil. She was Egon Schiele’s muse. She’s in lots of his other work.” She sipped her champagne, considering the drawing. “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?”
Karina’s pulse jackrabbited. “Yeah. She is.”
Ines smiled at her. “How old are you?”
“Thirteen.”
“Wally was sixteen when she met Egon.” Ines glanced back at the drawing. “She was his lover, you know. Can’t you tell, from the way he drew her?”
Karina could. Ines came and sat down on the bed next to her. “Wally didn’t just pose for Egon, she handled his whole life, all the paperwork, his rent checks, all the administrative stuff. He would’ve been nothing without her.” Karina thought of her own mother, how she was the one who kept the house running, who made Harry’s travel arrangements even though he had a secretary, who planned all the parties, hand-lettering the invitations in her little study on the third floor. How Harry was always saying to her, “What would I do without you?”
Karina couldn’t meet Ines’ gaze, but she also couldn’t tear her eyes away from her legs, the way her thighs spread across the floral pattern of the duvet. “Wally and Egon were married?” Karina ventured.
Ines snort-laughed. “No. She was too low-class to be his wife. He dumped her and married someone rich. And before that he got accused of molesting little girls. Sorry, I probably shouldn’t say that. Tender ears and all.”
“No, it’s okay,” Karina said quickly. “I know about…”
But Ines stood to leave then, smoothing her dress over her hips. “There’s your history lesson for tonight. You’re a lucky girl to have Wally Neuzil on your wall.”
Karina never saw Ines again after that night. The next time she heard Ines’ name, her father was complaining about her on the phone—she’d published an open letter condemning the Pionteks’ lack of support for women and artists of color. Karina later found it online: it was cogently argued, psychologically shrewd—particularly the parts concerning Harry’s behavior—and it bespoke both formidable intelligence and profound bitterness.
In the distance, the guard’s walkie-talkie hissed and crackled. Seeing Wally on this sterile white wall, Karina felt not homesick exactly, but unmoored. Harry had repeatedly refused to allow her to bring her Wally drawing to school. Not even the events of last semester or her desolation over the summer had softened him. “You want to stick a priceless work of art in a dorm?” he’d said the last time she’d asked. “Are you insane?” Which, after everything she’d been through, had felt especially cruel, even coming from him. He’d been in a foul, dangerous mood for years now, it seemed, since the financial crisis. It was always a relief to get away from him, from his anger and contempt, and from Fiona, too, from her weakness, her helplessness, the infuriating way she cowed to Harry. But Karina still missed that sense of groundedness that she felt when she was alone in her bedroom with Wally.
Karina could hear Foxtail and Long-Distance’s voices in the distance, getting closer. She located the staircase and escaped to the third floor, where she found Robert’s exhibit. Robert Belfer: Thirty Years of Sound & Fury.
She skimmed the wall text: scathing political satirist….the overlapping realms of culture and politics…challenging assumptions about the role of art in the public sphere….
The funny thing was that Karina had never thought of Robert as one of her parents’ artists. To her, he was the soft-spoken man who doodled cartoons on napkins and helped her persuade Fiona to let her order a second Shirley Temple when the three of them had lunch together. That whole year, Fiona had been different—light and sunny. Happy. It was the only time Karina could ever recall her mother seeming truly happy. In retrospect, of course, it was obvious that she and Robert had been having an affair.
Karina hadn’t seen Robert on campus yet, but he was doing a Q & A next week that she planned to attend. She hoped he’d recognize her. It’d be nice to finally have a friendly face at Wrynn.
She wandered through the exhibit. Among the works on display were blank 1040 forms on which Robert had inked silhouettes of US troops and fighter jets (Death & Taxes), an oil painting of Ronald Reagan rimming Margaret Thatcher (Our Two Great Nations), a brooding, tumultuous canvas teeming with disembodied hands and feet (the wall text explained that they represented the Latin American victims of military juntas), and an ACT UP poster.
The work was a little disappointing. Robert’s paintings seemed to want to spoon-feed their audience. And even though they were meant to be provocative and politically charged, there was something sort of pandering about them.
She made one more loop, then went back downstairs to the lobby. Night was falling as she left the museum. In the distance, clusters of students migrated toward the dining hall. She followed them, out of habit more than hunger, feeling unaccountably sad.
Excerpted from the manuscript “Bowerbird”