Twisted Fate(13)

“Maybe,” I said. “There’s more to people than their cool cars and their pretty clothes.”

“Right,” said Becky. “There’s their cool artwork and cool ideas and awesome bodies. And if he’s on drugs, he’s on something better than what we’ve got. We should check that out, no?”

I sighed and shrugged. Maybe I was overreacting. Maybe I did have a crush on him. So little went on in Rockland it was easy to fixate on anything new that came along. And she was right in a way, Graham was cool. It would be something to know how to build a car or make movies. The things we did most were skateboard, talk about how we hated school while actually taking all the best classes and competing for class rank, listening to music and getting high, and wandering around the sleepy harbor town at night.

Graham had had some other, deeper life. It showed on his skin. I didn’t know what it was that drew me to him and made me resist the very idea of hanging out with him at the same time.

Becky tossed her cigarette on the ground and stubbed it out with her toe and then she put her arm around me and we started walking back in to our next classes.

She said, “C’mon, lovebug. I think things are really looking up!”





My mother told me not to marry an older man who had a child. Too big a restoration project, she said. But I never believed her. The truth is I fell in love with both of them. David brought Graham to an opening I had in Washington, DC. David was, of course, charming as usual, impeccably dressed. Tall, thin, handsome. He was a scientist and worked for the government, but he seemed so sweet, so human. It was wonderful to watch him with Graham.

I could see right away what a smart little boy Graham was, and creative. I knew that I could give him something he was missing—not just a mother, but maybe a way of looking at the world. I bought him his first camera when he was seven, and he took pictures of other kids. He took pictures of me and David. And later we got him the video camera. Made sure he had something to occupy himself, help him understand the world around him and make use of it.

My work began selling well and I had money coming in and was able to get a bigger studio. I had work bought by the National Gallery, in London. It was right around then that David asked me to marry him, and that’s when my mother said, Don’t do it. You’ve got your career, you don’t need anybody to look after you. But that was precisely why I did marry David! Unlike her generation, I was getting married by choice. I didn’t need a man to support me. I could do whatever I wanted, and I wanted a family—one that I didn’t need to start from scratch. I didn’t want to take time out of my career to be pregnant and have a baby, and here was a child I could help out, because he needed a mom.

Later, when we would go to my mother’s house in Connecticut for Thanksgiving, she fell in love with little Graham too. That’s the way it was. He wasn’t shy then. He was my little protégé, learning everything there was about how film worked and the visual world. And he was his father’s son—learning everything about battles and strategies and looking at the world from a scientific distance. David worked for BAE Systems as a military aerospace strategist, based just outside of Washington in Virginia. But he was a simple man at heart, with good taste. He still loved to set up the telescope in the yard, and we would all lie out there together looking at the stars. Graham loved that most of all. He would ask millions of questions about how far away the planets were, was there life out there, how did light travel. It was only natural that he became who he was. Mechanically inclined, an artist, a boy who looked at the stars. Someone who thought about war and life and death.

I wish he’d never had to think so deeply about these things. We thought he was in good hands with Dr. Adams and on the new prescription. We thought the art helped his healing. The work he made . . . beautiful stuff, I have to say—even though I’m biased. The lawyer for the other family wanted to have his camera taken away permanently as part of the conditions of his probation, but of course, that was absurd. There was no way that was going to happen, I mean, I really put my foot down on that, and we had the lawyers to make sure he got out of there without some humiliating damaging sentence. He was a child! Sixteen is still a child! People don’t know what they’re doing at sixteen. If anything, the fact that he was trying to make art from a bad situation—I mean, that his initial response was to turn something terrible into something he could understand—was the most human thing that came from all of it.

Anyway, this new work had a maturity to it I don’t think I’ve ever seen in a young artist. Especially the work he did in Rockland. Scenes from bridges, long camera shots with the telephoto lens. Things you can barely make out but that seem intimately familiar. Interviews with people intercut with digital feedback. It’s all very exciting.

I think Graham had been a lonely kid this past year and he needed to process and understand what he went through. I think that was true the last year in Virginia too. I won’t have people saying it was the art—that it was the art that caused all our sorrow. The truth is some of his art is the only consolation. It’s the only thing that still remains.





I saw her waiting as usual in her black jeans, that alert, funny, “I’m about to be in trouble” look on her face. “Tate!” I called to her, and she looked up and grinned sheepishly, walked in, and sat down as I shut the door. This was becoming a pretty common ritual with Ms. Tate.