Love Maps Read online

  The night is particularly hot. The fan must be doing some good, but it feels like it’s blowing fevered breath on her. She dreams about a grizzly bear eating her passport. In the morning, she lies on her futon, contemplating the image of the bear, who was not very grizzly, more like Smokey the Bear but without the clothes, gamboling about, doing some sort of bear cancan, the blue corner of the passport peeking out of his enormous mouth. The fan whirs. Sounds from the street filter in through the open window. Garbage trucks. Taxi horns. Laughter. Then quiet. A long, thoughtful quiet which is strange for New York. She lies still, barely daring to move, then bursts into laughter. The bear ate my passport. The dog ate my homework.

  She reaches for the phone. Maya’s not home. At nine, she calls her office. Maya has a ten-minute opening at ten fifty. Would Sarah like to schedule a call? “No, tell her I will be there in person.” She takes another shower, the effects of which are thoroughly undone by the hundred-degree musk of the subway.

  She enters the cool hulk of Maya’s Midtown office feeling like a traitor. Leon, on the phone, blows her a kiss, then calls after her, “Seriously, ten minutes, Sarah. She’s got an important meeting.” Sarah waves back to the secretaries and almost bumps into a balding man in a bolo tie stepping out of Maya’s door, Maya right behind him.

  “Sarah, darling! How fun to have you drop by. Say hi to Richard, dear. This is Richard Ponset. Richard, this is my sister Sarah.”

  Richard’s eyes light up, as if he would like nothing more than to stand in the doorway chewing the fat for the next half hour. “Pleased to meet you,” he drawls.

  Sarah pushes past him. “Pleased to meet you too.”

  They both stare after her. Then Maya laughs. “Oh, don’t mind her.” She sends him off with a kiss on the cheek.

  The back wall of Maya’s office is covered with black-and-white photographs of her buildings, posters from her shows, snapshots of celebrities and potentates wrapping their arms around her. Right in the middle hangs an early painting of Sarah’s. Sarah turns from it toward the window. Tarry rooftops. Stalwart water towers. No clue as to how to proceed.

  “Well, what’s up?” asks Maya rather distractedly, searching for something on her desk.

  “I need more time to finish this series.”

  “Oh, here it is,” says Maya, leafing through a file. “A break will do you good. You’ll get back and everything will be very clear.”

  “It’s very clear now,” Sarah says firmly. “I’ve got to stay.”

  Maya looks at her blankly.

  “I know it’s sudden, and I’m sorry. But I feel that I’m on the verge of something with these paintings. I can’t stop right now, I’m too close.”

  Maya’s eyes blaze, but her voice is controlled. “I have been trying to get Henri Vernhes face-to-face for over a year. He is due in about two minutes. You think this is a good time to have this conversation?”

  “I’m sorry, but I had to tell you in person.” She reaches toward her sister. “Don’t be mad.”

  “Of course not, why would I be mad?” Maya says so coldly that Sarah freezes, her hand still outstretched.

  *

  Sarah gets back to her studio, her blood still rushing. She can’t concentrate on painting, which is just as well because the phone keeps ringing. First it’s Leon, begging her to change her mind, and quick. Then Maya’s dressmaker, Patrick, an old friend of both of theirs, saying much the same thing. Then Stella, threatening her with some cosmic retribution.

  She returns to her apartment. The phone’s ringing there too. Maya’s agent. Old boyfriends. Everyone chiding her. She unplugs the phone, lies on her futon, stares at the tin ceiling. The dents and blobs of paint, the fuzzy remains of a cobweb. At six a.m. people start buzzing her door. Or maybe it’s just one person persistently standing there, pushing the button every half hour. It’s not Maya; Maya would just come up. Sarah stares at the fire escape across the way, some brownish spider ferns hanging neglected. A couple of girls in miniskirts and high-tops pass by on the opposite sidewalk. They are giggling, their foreheads almost touching, sharing some secret. Sarah gets into her painting clothes. The person at the buzzer is Maurice, a soft-faced documentary maker with an Afro and a Rasta T-shirt. She’d always thought he was primarily her friend, not Maya’s.

  “Hey, Sarah, just passing by.” He’s nervous, squirming around like a two-year-old with a wet diaper.

  “What did she tell you, Maurice?”

  “Who?”

  Sarah glares.

  “Don’t look at me like that, man. She’s worried about you. You’re acting strange, trying to cut off your ties. You can’t do that. She’s your sister.”

  “Maurice, please. I’m not cutting off any ties. I’m just trying to get some work done.” She shoves past him.

  “What’s up with you?” he shouts after her. “What are you doing to your crew?”

  *

  She is too frazzled to paint. She wanders around in circles, smoking, then stops to rest her forehead on the sooty window. The smell of fish and dumpster mush rises from the street below. Her skin feels stale and tacky as flypaper.

  *

  She awakes to the bleat of the buzzer, her skin sticking to the vinyl upholstery on one of Gus’s car seats. It’s morning, but just barely, the city still sleeping.

  Maya’s town car crowds the narrow street below. She leans against the hood. Sarah bypasses the creaky industrial elevator for the faster stairs. The air is cooler than it was, misty. Maya wears an outfit that must have been from last night, a long, green dress intricately patterned with lighter and darker shades. Fish scales. It’s a mermaid dress. She opens a brown paper bag and takes out two cups of deli coffee. “Regular, no sugar,” she says with a smile. The warmth in her voice cracks Sarah’s chest wide open.

  “Nice dress.”

  “Just pack your bags and come. What’s the point of going without you? It’s madness.”

  Sarah touches her cheek. “Why don’t I join you in a month or so? I should be ready for a break by then.”

  “You won’t. Don’t you see? You’ve been doing this ever since I had that dream.” She touches Sarah’s throat, her fingers electric. “Please, Sarah! This is a pattern. There’s still a chance you can break it.”

  “There is no pattern, Maya. I just want to paint for a few extra weeks.”

  Maya keeps looking at her, waiting, waiting. But there is nothing to wait for. At last she steps away from Sarah. “God help you,” she murmurs, and turns quickly.

  Sarah watches the limo trundle off. And then the empty street, after it has disappeared from view.

  She can’t paint that day either. Walking seems to be the only thing she’s capable of. She heads toward Broadway, the sun slicing across the sky, then uptown, sweating in her tank top, brooding on the wads of gum that dot the sidewalk. There are people all around her but they don’t feel real. New York is a ghost town, the pedestrians in their sundresses and greasy pants projections in some future exhibit, showing how crowded the city once was. She walks through the morning and deep into the afternoon, eventually taking cover in a bar.

  She drinks too much, and just avoids going home with a fat Greek contractor. She wakes in her own place, glad that she at least saved herself from that. He had oddly soulful eyes and a florid, greedy demeanor. She gets up and splashes water on her face. Outside a traffic jam, the honking of horns, irate drivers, plumes of exhaust adding their mark to soot-streaked bricks. New York. What she wanted. She walks to her studio. At the corner on Franklin Street, she sees a paintbrush lying on the curb.

  It looks like one of hers.

  It is.

  A shiver passes through her. She walks, but feels like she’s running, her legs prickling, her breath short. There were sirens last night. She imagines Maya tossing a match, torching the building. It’s her property. She could make a fortune in insurance claims. She sidesteps an old bowlegged woman, workmen lugging boxes. Here’s her block, the dumpster, the desperate
ragged flyers pasted to every available surface. The pillow factory is still standing. She beholds it, oddly deflated. The dusty grooved ironwork, the grills, the graffiti. Nothing has changed. She goes up to the fifth floor, biting her lip, then gasps as she pulls back the elevator grate. Here it is. Lesser damage, but damage nonetheless. Puddles of gesso, squashed tubes of Mars Black, razor blades. Her canvases are in tatters, her studies and gouaches trampled upon. She checks through Gus’s area and her storage room, terrified, but it is only the highways that are ruined. Every study, every sketch, every completed and uncompleted work. It is quiet, so quiet that she can hear the electric hum of the Woolworth’s clock, the faint whine of the fluorescents, the whirling rush of her thoughts and blood. High-heeled footprints lead out of a gesso puddle. She doesn’t need proof. Still, she crouches over, staring. She gets down on her knees and puts her hand on one of the footprints, gently, as if she’s touching a fragile artifact. The sobs that rise out of her sound strange to her ears, like those of a wounded animal. She’s too stunned to know if it’s Maya that she’s crying for, or the lost paintings. She only knows that her whole body hurts, as if she’s been torn in two.

  Chapter 5

  Connecticut, October 1997

  Sarah tossed slivers of garlic into the olive oil and watched them brown around the edges. She breaded two fillets and slipped them in, side by side. In the woods out back, the Metro-North rumbled down the track, jiggling the dishes on the shelves and the silverware in the drawers. In the winter, when the branches were bare and the interior train lights were lit, you could see the passengers’ faces. The train was why she lived here. Partly, its noise made the rent affordable, but more importantly, she liked it. When she was a girl and they were living on West 155th, the el had run only feet away from their apartment. The Great Lisbon Earthquake! She and Maya would flail about in the narrow hallway, shaking things up even more.

  She used to amuse herself, imagining how she would convince Philip that the train tracks were an asset. She had thought he would come back. He had pulled out so incompletely. What man leaves the arrowheads he found as a kid, his transcripts, his bank accounts in the hands of someone he no longer loves? He had asked for and she had sent his passport and Social Security card, but that was all. They had never even divorced. She’d had a recurring fantasy that he would burst through the door as she was doing the dishes. What the hell are you doing in Connecticut? She’d turn, exposing her enormous belly, flummoxing him. Relentlessly sappy and soft-focused: the two of them standing close together, not having to say a thing, this child moving inside her and the train rumbling outside.

  But he’d never come back. Hardly even called, arranged everything through Samuel.

  She uncorked a bottle of Rioja and took a draft, barely tasting it. And tomorrow? If he came, how would she ever explain herself? Seven years is a lot different than seven months. He’d take one look at Max and get so mad that he’d leave all over again. She refilled her cup, rubbing her stinging eyes. She should have told him. She knew that. She should have done it when she realized he wasn’t coming back. She should have hired her own lawyer to send a letter requesting a divorce and informing him that he had a son. The problem was, the realization hadn’t come in a flash, but in dribs and drabs. And it hadn’t come completely. There was still, even now, this festering, ridiculous hope, a gooey little slug with its antennae extending toward the slightest possibility. It was pathetic. Other people got over these things.

  She slipped his letter out, not to read it, just to see his handwriting, the familiar ache of it. There was a terrible noise. The fire alarm. Smoke was billowing from the frying pan, explaining her stinging eyes. Her fish, her sole! Two tiny black shards. She switched off the burner and threw the pot in the sink, resulting in a ferocious crackling and hissing. She grabbed the broom. Max ran into the kitchen, his hands over his ears.

  “What’s happening, Mom?”

  “Fucking fire alarm.”

  “I thought we were supposed to say darn.”

  She jabbed the broom handle, trying to dislodge the alarm from the ceiling. You had to knock it off the plastic base, so that it would hang down, tethered by its red and green wires. Only then, if you stood on a kitchen chair, could you reach the off switch. There was also a stepladder in the basement. But the broom was generally easier. Sometimes.

  “You think the fire engine’s going to come?” asked Max.

  “No,” said Sarah, finally whacking the alarm so effectively that it both slid off its base and stopped ringing. It dangled from the ceiling, a dirty white disk of molded plastic, silent at last.

  “You want me to help with dinner?”

  “No,” said Sarah, her pulse racing. “I can take care of this. What you need to do is your homework.” She poured a fresh glass of wine. “I’ll call you when I figure out what the hell I’m making.”

  Chapter 6

  New York City, September 1981

  “You got the commission? Fucking A!” She hugs Gus. “That’s amazing!”

  “Ah, it’s nothing, a sculpture garden in Buffalo.” His grin is wide as a house. “I found some excellent trash too. An anchor, a giant one,” he says, spreading his arms to their full extension. “Oh, a whole bunch of stuff. It’s down in the truck.”

  “Want me to help unload?”

  “No, keep painting.” He looks over her shoulder, only then taking in the empty feel of the studio. “Yo, what happened?” He wanders over to her space and casts a critical eye over the freshly primed canvases. “Where are your highways?” He touches her gently on the arm. “What happened, Sarah?”

  She explains, feeling as if she’s confessing her own crime.

  “Maya destroyed every one?”

  “Only the highways. It’s all right. I can repaint them.”

  “It’s not all right. If anyone trashed one of my sculptures, I’d twist his head off.”

  “You want me to twist her head off?”

  “Well, she deserves it, doesn’t she?”

  Gus and his friends drag stuff in from the elevator—fenders, axles, gears, pipes, bedsprings, the anchor, a rusty old basketball hoop. They grunt and scrape and shout, asking where to put things. She stares at the canvas. She had blocked out the lines of the highway yesterday, and was trying to remember whether she had applied a layer of translucent gray to the entire canvas the first time she did Highway #1. She can recall the finished canvases vividly but the stages they went through are less clear.

  *

  The next day, she brings Philip’s card into the studio and tacks it up on the wall, hoping that its mojo will help with her work. But it doesn’t seem to. It doesn’t seem to be working at all. In a few weeks, she produces two overly worked smears of black and gray. It’s not her imagination: they really suck. She shouldn’t have tried to do it from memory. You have to react to the paint itself, not copy what you think you once did. When she imagines the highway, all she sees is a line of pavement stretching into the dark.

  “Sarah,” Gus says softly, “forget them. You already painted them. You can’t go backward.”

  “But Simon Perez.”

  “He’ll look at other stuff.”

  “He saw my other stuff. All he liked was this and I can’t do it.”

  “What about a basketball lesson? I’m telling you, it clears the mind.” This is his latest thing. He’s nailed the hoop he found in the upstate junkyard to the far side of the studio and takes out the ball about five times a day.

  “Since when did you get athletic?”

  “I’ve always been athletic, I’ve just kept it hidden.” He rolls the ball over to her. It’s dumb and orange.

  “I prefer smoking.”

  *

  Her palette is a swamp, globs of paint and dust and stray bristles fallen from old brushes, bristles that used to belong to animals, that used to perform a useful function, warming, covering, sticking straight up to signify anger, fear. Now they slip out of rusty metal paintbrush bands and get
stuck in sad blobs. She’s never been blocked before—well, maybe for a few hours, but not this eternity of day after day. She gives herself formal exercises, interlocking squares of light and shadow, but the results are so dull and dispiriting that she stops even that.

  She walks. A dull haze hangs over the city. The sounds of the street are distant, as if they’ve traveled through cotton to get to her ears. That stab of pain and exhilaration she had upon first seeing Maya’s rampage has turned into a festering sore. She drags herself around the city, buys newspapers and sits in cafés, reading for hours, her butt sore, her eyes bleary. New York Times, tabloids, Le Monde diplomatique.

  In late September, in the back pages of the Financial Times, Maya’s latest headshot smiles out at her.

  How can I express the emotional blitz that one endures listening to her? There is no room to hide in sentiment or judgment. She forces you to look unblinkered into the tenderness and cruelty of love. For whether she is singing of the ocean, or the trials of a bitter chambermaid, her real subject is love. Its abundance or lack or mismanagement. One cannot look at her without thinking of love, she trembles with it.

  A shout wells up in Sarah. She leaps up from the table and heads for the street. Idiot! Why are reviewers such idiots? Someone is yelling, loud enough to pierce her scrambled brain. Her waitress. Halfway down the block, a broad, red-faced woman with short white hair runs toward her, waving the bill. Sarah gives her a twenty and rushes off, too mortified to wait for change, the newspaper still crumpled in her hand.

  *

  She sharpens a pencil and stands in front of a blank sketchpad. She draws a spiral, wavery but identifiable. A doodle. A companionable shape. Gus bounces his ball. She looks up. Her eyes clear. He has finished his upstate sculpture. A gravity-defying balancing act, the gigantic anchor he recently found flying midair, barely attached to an I beam.

  “Wow, Gus. It’s great. When did you finish it?”

  He bounces his ball, shaking his head at her. “A couple days ago.”