Love Maps Read online

  “Why didn’t you call? I would have come in to see it.”

  “I didn’t dare. You’ve been barking at me for a month straight.”

  Sarah winces. “I’m sorry.” She walks over to him. He throws the ball at her. She tries to catch it, but it snaps her finger back and continues its trajectory. “Ow! What am I going to do, Gus?”

  “Get the ball.”

  “No, I mean really. What am I going to do? I can’t paint.”

  “Get a job. You can’t concentrate when you’re worried about money.”

  “I’m not worried about money.”

  Gus gives her a look. “You should be. Maya’s not going to keep you on payroll, is she?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Has she called yet?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t been answering the phone.”

  *

  Gus gets her a job at Le Bucks. It’s a good place to work, as far as restaurants go. It’s owned by a couple of rich art school pals who’d set it up to have a place to hang and provide their friends with cash. No fine dining, just a bunch of painters, potters, puppeteers running around, trying to remember which platter goes where. On slow nights, they sit around the bar and gossip; on fast nights, they make a fair amount in tips. Sarah gets calluses on her feet and new muscles in her arms and starts to feel much better. She reprimes the failed highways, sanding the gesso more thoroughly than usual, enjoying the labor involved, even the close feeling of the mask she wears. There is great satisfaction in erasing all of that mud, returning to pristine fields of white. She sets the canvases up around her studio, beautiful rectangles and squares, sublimely empty, waiting. She won’t start anything until she feels ready. She was too impatient before.

  For now, she has the restaurant to keep her occupied. She is surprised by how much it interests her. Not the patrons, they’re old hat—crackpots and artists and potheads—but the loudness, the urgency of people when they’re hungry, the layout. The different rooms for different functions, the sour-smelling basement freezer, hanging ham carcasses, the crates of produce, leaves poking out, hoping for sun, the narrow, creaking stairs, the fury of the kitchen, the washing, skinning, deveining, deseeding, chopping, parboiling, sautéing, rendering, the sizzle of fat, the weighing and measuring, the arrangement. The order when the plates leave the kitchen, the chaos when they return.

  There is also a waiter whose name is Falk, a Buenos Aires–Detroit hybrid, his narrow hips encased in paint-splattered jeans, his face fine-featured, his eyes big and bright. He follows her around, studying her as if she knows the answer to a nagging question. She does not return his gaze. He is twenty-two. But she keeps finding him next to her, bumping her shoulder in a way that is not unpleasant. One night, as they are cashing out, he grabs her by the elbow. “You’ve got to at least try my beer. I make it from scratch.”

  He lives on MacDougal, up a crooked staircase with peeling banisters that look much like the ones in her place. “I’m so glad you’re here,” he says once she’s inside, sidestepping the socks on the floor. He washes a glass carefully, uncorks a ceramic jug from the minifridge, and pours it ceremoniously. Her mouth puckers at the sharpness. He laughs, his mouth wide, his eyes sparkling. “I hope you like bitter.”

  He finds a photo album hidden under a tray of nails and screws and shows her a faded picture of his grandmother’s house in Argentina, an enormous blue farmhouse with a tile roof and red chickens in the yard. “That’s her neighbor Nadi,” he says, pointing to a tiny figure in the garden. “She got rid of my warts when I was a kid.”

  “How lovely to have a place like that to go back to.”

  “I’ve only been there once,” he says. “My mom’s place in Buenos Aires is more like here.” His hair brushes her forehead. It smells of wool or baked earth or dried beer foam, she doesn’t know, just that it smells good.

  In the morning she tries to slip out quick, wanting her own shower, her own soap, her own silence, but he won’t let her go until she’s had some coffee. She sits in his bed, hands curled around a chipped coffee mug, as he rummages around in the closet, grunting and cursing as things clatter down. Eventually a collection of homemade skateboards is laid out for her inspection. She admires each one, feeling somewhat dutiful and wishing he wouldn’t look at her so eagerly.

  “Try this one,” he says, tapping a particularly wide board toward her.

  “No thanks.”

  “Just try it.”

  She’s never been on a skateboard before, and rather enjoys teetering around his obstacle course of a room. He stands by the window, his bare chest lit by the sunlight, indecently supple. She comes to a stop before him. Holding her elbows, he steps onto the board with her. It is big enough to hold them both, but his added weight upsets the angle and Sarah loses her balance. He pulls her back and readjusts himself. After a series of minute shiftings and adjustments, they reach a point where they can both stand still, sharing the board together, the soles of their feet and toes alert to every tremor, the air electric.

  “Do you do this with all your pals?” she asks lightly, hoping to confirm that he does indeed have other pals.

  “Mami, you’re crazy,” he laughs, and falls off.

  *

  She is at the studio, eating Chinese food with Gus, moo shu sauce all over her fingers, when the buzzer buzzes. It’s late. Neither she nor Gus is expecting anyone.

  “Maybe it’s your Falky-Falky?” Gus suggests with a grin.

  Sarah goes down and finds instead, much to her astonishment, Maya. Her hair is limp, her skin is wan, her body is half obscured by an elaborate mass of flowers. Peonies, lilies, roses, bell-shaped blossoms, Queen Anne’s lace. A wall of white and green, overly fragrant.

  “What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be on tour.”

  “You haven’t been answering my calls. I thought I’d better pop over.” Maya hands her the flowers. “In any case, it’s better to apologize in person.”

  Maya has never given her flowers before. Sarah can’t remember if she’s ever even apologized, but she must have. They’ve been in fights, though never anything like this. Sarah takes the bouquet, wondering what in the world she’ll do with it. “Whoa, this is heavy.” She heads toward the elevator, then remembers that Gus is up there, still pretty much in his off-with-her-head mood.

  “Let’s go to Walter’s.”

  The bell attached to the door clangs as they enter. Sarah nods at Walt, with his bifocals and ever-sparser crew cut. The place has been here since forever, her favorite 24-7 diner, fake blueberry muffins shiny in their Saran Wrap encasings, a 1930s Coke dispenser, vinyl booths. They slip into one. Sarah props the bouquet of flowers next to her. It’s as tall as she is. Maya holds her chin in her hands, an expressionless, exhausted look.

  “When did you get in?”

  “Just now. I came straight from the airport.”

  “That was a nice review in the FT. You seem to have been doing okay without me.”

  “I didn’t mean to do what I did, Sarah. I mean, that wasn’t my intention. I thought you would be in your studio and I wanted to say goodbye in a better way. But instead of you, there were those fucking highways taking over your whole space, and I just, I just saw that X-Acto knife. I kept expecting you to come in and find me. I thought if we could fight, I mean physically punch and kick, everything would be all right. But you never came back. I was angry about that too. If you weren’t going on tour with me because you wanted to paint, then why the hell weren’t you painting? What were you doing?”

  “I was walking.”

  “Oh god. I went crazy, really crazy. Like Max, in one of his fits.”

  “Don’t bring him into this. He never hurt anyone.”

  Walt comes over with two greasy menus. “How you doing, Sarah?” He eyeballs the flowers. “Someone die?”

  “No. Well. Someone, somewhere, but we’re alive and kicking. They’re pretty, aren’t they? You want a coffee, Maya?” Maya doesn’t answer, lost in he
r own grief, so Sarah orders for them: “Two coffees, please.”

  Walt takes the menus.

  “Maya,” Sarah says softly after Walt has gone.

  Maya raises her gaze toward her, her famous honey-colored eyes so anguished and repentant that a weird little giggle rises in Sarah’s throat. Maya’s eyes water over.

  “Don’t cry.”

  Maya presses both hands to her face. Walt slips their coffees onto the table. Sarah scoots in next to her sister, enveloping her in an awkward hug. She holds her for a long time, until the sobs cease and Maya’s hands fall to her lap. Quietly, Sarah strokes her sister’s hair, remembering a time when they were kids, out in Nebraska or somewhere, one of those places on the way to somewhere else. They were in a cow pasture—Maya, Max, Ma, and Sarah—eating Pepperidge Farm cookies from a bag. Sarah laid in the grass, resting her head on Ma’s lap, the rough black fabric of Ma’s dress scratching her cheek. Ma had smiled down at her, tugging her fingers through Sarah’s curls. Och och, such hair. Just like your father’s. Maya had been jealous of Sarah’s hair. It so clearly marked her as Max’s.

  *

  The next day, she flips through the circuses, looking for an untitled picture, never completed, of Max running away from home. It wasn’t a circus. She had wanted to balance the circuses with something of Max’s world, but it hadn’t worked, her knowledge too fragmentary: a town in the Carpathian Mountains, his father the shochet, six brothers and sisters, all said to have died in the war. The painting had been crude and stick-figure-like. A village on a hill with pine trees and a single-engine plane swooping overhead. Max, with his beard and curly hair, on the road outside the town, looking up at the plane. He hadn’t wanted to be a rabbi. He’d wanted to know what it was that made planes fly. He’d walked through summer and fall to get to Vienna. Never went back, never saw any of them again. Never once spoke about it; all of her knowledge, her paltry knowledge, came from Ma. Where had she put it? It’s possible that she’d thrown it out when she edited her paintings. But she couldn’t imagine doing that. She’d wanted to work on it. She’d had an idea for winding the road all the way to a miniscule Vienna, suggesting summer and fall by the changing colors of the leaves on trees alongside the road.

  She goes to work, the lost painting chewing at her mind. Could Maya have destroyed that one too? She had resented Max and used to wonder if he was really her father, although she’d been quieter about that since he died.

  Hardly anyone is at Le Bucks: the old lady with sunglasses who sometimes wets herself, a table of punky Brits. She and Falk amuse themselves by playing with the old-fashioned double-plated scale, kept for decoration in the dining room. It’s a beautiful thing, big and brass, the same design she’s seen in etchings from the Middle Ages. Falk puts his order pad on it, and they place bets as to whether it’s as heavy as one fork or two. A line of thinking that eventually leads to what she calls the equivalencies of balance. Half a melon equals a bag of split peas. A cleaver equals two butter knives and a cupcake. A chicken breast equals an old wet rag.

  A few days later, she sketches out a study. She hardly thinks about the composition; it just appears. A simple golden background taken over by a brass scale. Instead of food, there’s a feather on one plate, a rock on the other, the feather slightly outweighing the rock. She tacks it to the wall, recalling that Bambi Peterson had gone through an icon stage. She knew how to roll gold. She’d call her. She had an idea.

  1982

  It’s January, dark by five o’clock, the city slick with sleet. Sarah is at Le Bucks, running a forgotten plate of sole meunière to table 12, thinking the food looked better before it was so overly arranged, when she stops in the middle of the aisle. He’s outside, folding up an umbrella, in the same trench coat he wore at the funeral, looking like a clean-cut guy in a 1940s movie. She spins around and just misses colliding with the busboy, a classical still-life painter named Shun Li. She shoves him the sole meunière and runs into the kitchen. Past the bellowing chef. Down the basement steps. Past the boxes of vegetables, the sour-smelling mops, the buckled freezer door. Where is she going? She ducks into the employee bathroom, locks the door, and clutches the sink. It’s a cramped, paint-chipped closet that smells of disinfectant and basement mold. Not a great place to hide. And why is she hiding? He doesn’t know that she’s here. He probably came because of the Times review. He’s one of those uptown people looking for atmosphere. She can’t believe she’s hiding out from someone looking for atmosphere. She splashes water on her face and gropes around for a nonexistent towel, hitting the plastic angel that hangs from the lightbulb chain. She wipes her face on her apron, lowers the toilet lid, and sits. The angel swings back and forth, pendulum-like.

  She returns to the floor. Falk winks at her. Philip, seated at the bar, talks to a red-haired man. He doesn’t see her. Well, why should he? He’s facing the bar, not the restaurant. She weaves her way to table 12. They smile up at her, a portly, pearly gathering, celebrating the close of a business deal. Yes, yes, they got their sole. All is well. She smoothes her apron.

  Philip has turned around. He’s watching her. He’s not as good-looking as she remembered. He’s too pale. He smiles. It’s a lovely smile, kind of lopsided. Her arm shoots up.

  “Holy smokes,” she says.

  “Holy smokes, yourself.”

  He grins and nods at the red-haired man beside him. “Meet Clyde. Clyde, this is Sarah, the Cinderella from Conningsby’s funeral.” She and Clyde shake hands. She and Philip don’t. “You should have seen her,” Philip says. “Rushing off in the middle of the night. I’ve got to get back to New York!”

  “Still drinking Scotch, I see.”

  “Can I get you one?”

  “After my shift.”

  Philip looks a little embarrassed. “I may as well tell you this isn’t totally a coincidence. Tori told me you were working here.”

  A slow smile spreads over Sarah’s face. Falk taps her shoulder. “Table 7 wants their check.”

  “All right,” says Sarah, adding up the total.

  Falk remains beside her, looking over her shoulder as if to check her math. She introduces him. He crosses his arms in such a surly manner that she wishes she hadn’t. Philip and Clyde remain through her shift, parked on their barstools. Philip drinks successive Scotches, but they don’t make a dent on his posture. If anything, he sits straighter as the night goes on. By closing time, he looks like a drill sergeant surveying a shoddy company. He couldn’t have been this rigid in Tulapek, but perhaps he was. Perhaps it’s just seeing him in New York. She remembers that she hadn’t wanted to see him in New York. Falk cashes out. She nudges him gently.

  “Come have a drink with us.”

  “You’re crazy, mami. They look like they play golf with my father.” He grabs his skateboard, his hair falling over his face, his disgust so pure that she admires him for it.

  “Come on.” Clyde, slightly tipsy, tugs at her elbow. “You gotta show us around. Philip’s so square, this is the only happening joint he could come up with.”

  “You’re from out of town?”

  “I’m from elsewhere.”

  “Where?”

  “Pennsylvania, the Quaker State. But I’m moving to Connecticut.”

  *

  They go to a bar she knows in Chinatown, a twenty-four-hour place with chickens clucking in the back and flickering purple fluorescent lights. She’s chosen it for its antiromantic lighting. They order Tsingtaos. Philip looks around warily.

  “It’s all right,” she says, “I’ve been here before.”

  “With who?”

  “Oh. A Chinese gangster.”

  Philip wipes the rim of his glass with a napkin and pours his beer.

  “Where did you get that posture?” she asks.

  Clyde laughs. Philip tries to look more relaxed, but he only looks more uncomfortable. She feels terrible.

  “My father liked me to sit up straight.”

  “Was he in the military?”

/>   “No. Just extremely correct, if you know what I mean. He didn’t like irregularities. He used to mow the lawn at ninety-degree angles. If a line wavered, he was sure afterward, even when the lawnmower lines had disappeared, that the grass didn’t look right. He would have liked Mondrian if he’d bothered with art.” Philip smiles at Sarah. “How’s the painting going?”

  “Pretty good. And the building?”

  “Ironclad.”

  “Ironclad?”

  “He’s a security specialist,” says Clyde. “Buildings that can’t be broken into.”

  “Of course,” says Sarah. The name of Philip’s company is High-Security Design. She ought to know, she thumbed over his business card enough. “You don’t do prisons, do you?”

  “No. Too many regs. No room for innovation.” He glances around the room. “I like this place.”

  “You do?”

  “Well, it’s better than Le Bucks.”

  “He’s a snob about trendiness,” says Clyde. “You should have seen him in school. No patience for anything fashionable.”

  “You went to school together?”

  “A fashionable one,” says Philip.

  They sip their beers. Sarah’s glad Clyde is there. He makes things easier. She smiles at Philip and he smiles back. He has a wonderful smile. She looks at the table next to theirs. A trio of ancient-looking men plays cards.

  “Think they’re gambling?” asks Sarah.

  “Sure,” says Philip. “The Chinese always gamble. I read it somewhere.”

  “Everything’s gambling,” says Sarah.

  Philip raises an eyebrow. “Some things are.”

  “My father was a gambler,” says Clyde. “Gambling sucks. I hate cards. What you need is good, honest contact. I’m a hockey man.”

  Sarah groans. “I hate sports.”

  “Hockey’s not just a sport, it’s an art. It’s physics.”

  “It’s guys on blades beating the hell out of each other.”

  “Exactly. It’s sublime.”

  “You ought to meet Gus. He thinks basketball is bringing him into a new plane of existence.”