Love Maps Read online

  Now she leans in toward Sarah, informing her of who is who and why they are there, her eyes sparkling with enjoyment. Who lost money to what. Who’s sleeping with whom. Who just came out of rehab, court, counseling. Sarah can’t keep track, nor does she really try. It’s Maya’s rich crowd, sheikhs in French shirts and expensive cowboy boots, builders with geometric ties and bald spots, fashion people who will go anywhere Maya leads them. There are a couple of people from the art world too. Maya, after much training, has learned not to point them out, though Sarah can tell she’d like to.

  “What do you think about pirates?”

  “Pirates?”

  “I’m talking about this year’s tour. What if I ditched love songs and concentrated on pirates? Stella thinks it’s a good idea.”

  “Stella?”

  “I’m very clear on your opinion of her,” Maya says, “but she has brilliant intuitions. She knows exactly who to approach. And when. You know Reagan uses an astrologer. I’m not saying I like his policies. But you have to admit, the guy’s got power.” Maya spreads out her hands as if she’s made an incontrovertible point.

  “I thought that Stella advised you on property values. Since when has she gotten involved with your set list?”

  “You don’t like pirates?”

  “I do. But you only have three months to prepare, so why not stick with what you know?”

  “I’ve been preparing. You’re out of the loop, you’ve been so absent recently.”

  Sarah sees Gus, her studio mate, wandering the floor below, looking lost and rumpled. “Oh, poor Gus, look at him. He’d like pirates.”

  Maya smiles. “Yes, you’re right about that. Go down and say hi to him. We can talk about this later.”

  Gus gives Sarah a big kiss, sprinkling champagne on her shirt. “Whoops, sorry. Can I get you a glass?”

  “No thanks, I’m going back to the studio after this.”

  “I’m staying here and taking advantage of this shrimp. This place is amazing. What’s Maya going to do with it? Think she’d give it to me?”

  “Probably.”

  “Think how tall I could make my totem poles.”

  “Lord have mercy. You’d need a lot of tin cans.”

  An hour or so later, someone starts chanting Maya’s name. The orchestra stops playing, and all you can hear are more and more voices shouting for her.

  “I never said I’d sing, you jokers,” Maya drawls. “Think I’m going to give you a free concert on top of everything else?” She lets them roar a little longer, then with a Mae West saunter steps into the light. Gus grins. He loves Maya. He slept with her one night last year and gloated about it for six months afterward. Sarah doesn’t usually get upset over that sort of thing; she and Maya often end up with the other’s old boyfriends. But Gus wasn’t an old boyfriend. He was a best friend, a more rare and more prized possession in Sarah’s book, and Maya’s too. Sarah is still slightly piqued, although not so much that she can’t see the humor in it. She elbows Gus in the ribs.

  “You’re drooling.”

  “Can you blame me?”

  “Dans le port d’Amsterdam

  Y a des marins qui chantent

  Les rêves qui les hantent

  Au large d’Amsterdam

  Dans le port d’Amsterdam

  Y a des marins qui dorment

  Comme des oriflammes

  Le long des berges mornes.”

  Maya begins quietly, in a whisper that travels to the far ends of the warehouse. She toys with the lines until Brel’s passion catches her and she gives in, her voice opening into a lake of anger and desire that engulfs the whole audience. Except for Sarah who is still mulling over Gus. Maya senses this. She leans toward Sarah, her voice rising, thin now and trembling. Sarah can feel it in her chest. A vibration going straight into her heart. Maya’s eyes shine into hers. It’s hard not to melt when she looks at you like that, as if you are the entire world. Sarah stands firm, staring back proud and dry, until the ridiculousness of the situation strikes her, and she can’t help but smile. They both do, like when they were kids, ending a staring contest in a fit of giggles.

  “Dans le port …” Maya sings, joyful now, still gazing at Sarah, funneling all the energy of the crowd into her. Sarah feels it enter into her, a sensation of heat and expansion, a feeling that is almost embarrassing in its surfeit of pleasure.

  *

  Sarah and Gus share a studio, an enviable space in an old iron building in Chinatown that used to be a pillow factory. It was one of Maya’s first purchases. The windows are cracked and sooty but enormous, big enough to let the light in no matter how dirty they are. A scratchy jazz station plays as Sarah mixes paint, linseed oil, turpentine. Highway #3 hangs on the wall. It’s gigantic by her standards, six and one-half by five feet. It took her ages to get the first coat on. The median is invisible, the asphalt a dense strip of gray that blurs into the land. The solidity of the road works, ditto the gusty sky, but the land needs something. The geometry of farm fields? Something wilder—the prairie. That’s what she wants, impenetrable grass. Conningsby once told her that the grasses that made up the prairie had been so dense and tall, they could have ensnared an elephant. She imagines the tendrils and stalks and brambles, the massive tangle of them pulling an elephant into their midst. She wants the feeling of that at night, when you can barely see it but know it is there.

  The elevator cables creak. Probably Gus, only halfway through banging out his anvil totem pole. She misses his period of quietly gluing metal to wood. She dabs a dark shade of gray onto the canvas. On a whim, she smears it with the palm of her hand. She studies the result on the canvas, then examines her hand, interested in the way the paint gathers in the lines of her palm, and the resemblance of these palm lines to the veins of a leaf, and what such lines might look like transposed into prairie grass.

  “Hello!” Maya calls in a company voice.

  Sarah wipes her hand on her pants, confused. Maya is usually too busy to drop by her studio unannounced. A woman stands slightly behind her, slim and elegant, with sharply cut white hair. “Do you know Violet DeMeunys? She’s doing a show on contemporary history paintings. I told her about your circuses.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” Violet says, in a way that conveys that she might be interested in making Sarah’s acquaintance, but probably not.

  “Hi,” says Sarah. She has told Maya a million times that she does not want or need help in the art department.

  “Maya is quite keen on your circus paintings. I’d like to look at them if it’s convenient.”

  “I’m flattered, but I don’t think they’re what you’re after,” says Sarah. “They are more personal than historical.”

  “Sarah, for fuck’s sake, just show her the pictures. Where are they, anyway? Last time I was here they were all over the place.”

  “That’s because I was arranging my storage area,” Sarah replies before marching to the storeroom, furious in the pure way that a child is furious. She flicks on the light, illuminating a good-sized room, one wall of which is covered with recently installed vertical racks, already filled to bursting. She had been happy, finally organizing her paintings, remembering ones she’d forgotten about, dusting them off and putting them in order. But at this moment the too-full rack feels like an admission of defeat. “I’ll leave you guys here. The circuses are in the upper-left area.”

  The last time she showed the circus paintings had been a couple years after art school. An itinerant curator had fallen for Circus #4, a portrait of Ma, spangled and young, with a snake around her torso. But she put it in a show that was almost all conceptual feminist art and it ended up alongside a bloody tampon chandelier. On opening night, no one saw Ma and her snake. They only shuddered and wondered if the chandelier tampons were real and if the blood would drip down on them. Perhaps if Circus #4 had been placed somewhere else, people would have seen it. But perhaps not. And more to the point: shouldn’t it have been able to overpower some stupid tampons? W
hy is she compelled to paint stuff that can’t compete against bloody fucking tampons?

  Violet and Maya come out of the storeroom, chatting about a tennis game.

  “Thank you, Sarah,” says Violet. “The paintings are beautiful, but you are right, not quite what I’m looking for. Is this what you’re working on now?” She squints critically at Highway #3. “Quite a change. Very masculine. Well,” she kisses Maya’s cheek and nods to Sarah, “nice meeting you.”

  “You too,” Sarah says.

  “I’ll see you out,” says Maya.

  A few minutes later Maya returns, glaring and stormy.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” says Sarah. “I didn’t ask you to bring her over.”

  But that’s not what Maya’s upset about. She leans against a column, arms crossed over her chest, and looks at Highway #3 as if she’d like to pick a fight with it.

  “Since when are you doing abstracts? I thought you were against abstracts, the paintness of paint or whatever it was.”

  “It’s not abstract. It just looks that way. It’s the highway at night.”

  “It’s enormous. It’s like nothing you’ve done before. I felt like I had totally misrepresented you. It was embarrassing.”

  “The circuses are the same old circuses, and that’s what she was interested in.”

  “Yes, but this is what hits you when you walk in. Violet’s right. It is masculine.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? Because it’s big? Because it’s gray? Women can’t use gray?”

  Maya takes in the other paintings and studies four highways propped and tacked against the wall. “When did this begin? Where did you see this highway?” Then, quietly: “Oh fuck. It was in Michigan.”

  “On the way back,” says Sarah, trying to sound nonchalant. She had told Maya little about these new paintings because she associates them with Philip, and she hadn’t told Maya about Philip because she met him at Conningsby’s funeral, and that was a subject best left alone.

  Maya stares at her, long and hard. “You’re not wearing your egg.”

  “What?”

  “That ivory pendant with the charm. You wore it at the party.”

  “Oh yes, it’s at home. I didn’t want to get paint on it.”

  “You wore it in Michigan?”

  “Yes.” Sarah returns her sister’s gaze steadily, but there’s no telling if Maya believes her.

  *

  A month later, having completed another three enormous highways, Sarah realizes that they don’t fit in her storage closet.

  “What this means,” says Gus, who’s been trying to help her make space, “is that you’ve got to stop being so high and mighty and do something with them. They’re great, Sarah. You could get someone to show them.”

  “I’m not high and mighty. I just don’t like knocking on doors collecting rejections.”

  “Well, yeah, join the club.”

  Gus rolls her a joint. “Come on. I’ll help you take pictures. You can use my camera. It’s better than yours.”

  “You’re so proud of that damn lens.”

  “It’s a lens like no other.”

  There is nothing she hates doing more than shuttling her slides from place to place, the eyes of gallery girls glazing over as she mentions her scholarships and honorable mentions, all of which she received ever longer ago. But she has slides taken with Gus’s fancy lens, and she even has Gus when he is free, loping along beside her, distracting her with tales of his aunts in Buffalo, and doing an excellent job pooh-poohing all those who pooh-pooh them. With him or alone, she dedicates precious days, days that might be spent at her studio, to buzzing buzzers and trudging up creaking wooden steps to obscure little galleries hidden on the top floors of buildings, edgy places where she might have a chance. She introduces herself to owners. She calls, if not all, at least a large portion of the contacts in her address book. At the end of an exhausting and dispiriting week, she stops by the Simon Perez gallery, not to drop off her slides—the place is too intimidating—but as a treat to herself. She likes what’s on the walls.

  Simon Perez happens to be in, talking on the phone in the back room. He’s got a reputation as a ladies’ man, and when he turns toward her, she perks up immediately. She can play this game as well as anyone. She walks into his office, disregarding a rail-thin assistant who gives her the evil eye. Perez is still on the phone, but his attention is on her. He’s probably in his sixties, with coarse white hair coming out of his nostrils, a wide flared nose, and smart blue eyes. He’s not a man to sleep with, but definitely one to have a drink with. Or just to flirt with for five minutes. She likes his vibe. She hands him her slides. He takes them, smiling. He seems to have forgotten the person on the other line. “Eh?” he says when the voice gets so loud that Sarah can hear it. “Mmm hmm. Mmmm.” He holds Sarah’s slides up to the light and squints at them.

  Sarah tries not to gloat as the assistant leaves the office with a loud clacking of heels.

  “I’d like to see them in person,” he says when he gets off the phone. Sarah invites him to come by her studio, and leaves the gallery with a bounce in her step. It might just be ass. But it’s her ass, not Maya’s.

  The very next morning, she gets a call.

  “Simon Perez?” says Gus, impressed and amused. “I better be here when he comes. I’m not leaving you alone with that guy.”

  But when Perez arrives his flirtatiousness is gone, replaced by a gruff seriousness, as if to make clear that this is strictly business. He wanders around with his hands in his back jean pockets, his shoulders slumped forward, cocking his head at the highways which she has propped against one wall, and the Alligators and circuses which lean against another. She hovers by his side, rationing her cigarettes, then chewing on the inside of her cheek, trying not to analyze each shift in his expression.

  “Nice work,” he says after a while. He pulls his ear, twisting the lobe thoughtfully. “I’m interested in those dark planes.”

  “The highways?”

  He nods. “Let me know where you go with that. I’d like to see more.”

  Gus, who had kindly desisted from banging on his anvils when Perez was there, wheels her around as soon as he leaves.

  “He didn’t say he’d show them, he just said to keep in touch,” Sarah concludes, but she’s grinning too. She rubs her ribs after Gus’s strong hug. “I can get back to painting now, right?”

  “Yes.”

  She plunges back into her work, trying to make up for the lost week behind her and the lost time ahead of her. Maya’s tour begins in six weeks.

  *

  Maya’s tours, her adult tours, had been Sarah’s idea, born in those dark days after Ma and Max’s plane went down. There was no family land to visit, no aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins to clutch onto, no graveyard to lay flowers in, no speck of ash to throw—nothing, a big, gaping, enormous gulf. They’d had a small memorial for friends, but Sarah had wanted more. She wanted movement. She wanted a feeling of what they had done together. Maya had been skeptical. She had been out of the music business for years. But Sarah wouldn’t give up. She had booked that first tour herself, culling names from Ma’s old address book, a modest-seeming affair, four shows in two weeks. Yet Maya’s performances had been anything but modest. It’s possible that they had forgotten how good Maya really was. More likely, she had smashed through the last traces of her girlishness. Sarah remembers thinking how unfair it was that Ma and Max could not be there, that they had to die in order for Maya to achieve such a thing.

  *

  Sarah paints. She sleeps most nights in the studio and is up at the crack of dawn. Her mind is silent, in such a visual place that words and phrases hardly enter. When they do, they seem thick and incongruous. It’s not a problem at the studio, for Gus knows enough to leave her alone. But it’s hard on Sundays, when she and Maya have their brunches and she can’t keep up with their normal banter. The paint builds on itself, giving the flat surfaces depth, mesmerizing
her when she takes her cigarette breaks, or simply slumps, exhausted, worn out by focus, on one of the salvaged car seats that Gus keeps around the studio.

  Gus pulls at her shirt. “Come. I’ll buy you dinner.”

  She shakes her head, her eyes fixed on a thick gray streak that needs to be widened.

  “Give it up,” Gus says gently, rubbing her shoulder. “You’re leaving in a couple of days. You’re not going to finish this.”

  “But I have to.” How to explain? She’s been working nonstop for three months and you would think that feeling of urgency would have faded, but instead it’s stronger, a pull toward the paint that is deep and greedy.

  They go to a bar with a pool table and order burgers with pickles and lots of mustard. The food hits her like a surprise. “This is the best thing I’ve ever eaten.”

  “That’s because you’ve forgotten what food tastes like.”

  “Oh come on, I eat every day.”

  But it’s true that she’s been subsisting mainly on coffee and cigarettes, supplemented by her weekly poached eggs with Maya. She licks the salt off her fingers, for one sweet moment happy as a cat.

  *

  She goes home to her apartment that night. Gus is right, she’ll never be able to finish. She may as well wash her hair. Her scalp itches from days without a shower. The tears start when she’s standing under the showerhead. She wipes her eyes, not sure why she’s crying. She clearly needs some sleep. She also needs to wash her clothes and think about what she’s going to pack. She checks that her passport is still valid. Just barely; it will need to be renewed in six months. She frowns at the picture of her face ten years younger, a Sarah still in art school, her cheeks so full they are almost chubby. Ma used to pinch those cheeks. Not Max. He’d watch Ma pinch and Sarah wince, and hold back.

  Their plane had gone down only months after that picture was taken.