The High Season(43)

    Lucas. Ignoring him, she wended her way through the maze, looking for the ax. There was a newly empty section where paintings had been shrink-wrapped and stacked against one wall.

“Mike’s paintings are gone,” she said.

He leaned against the doorframe, then looked at the dust and reconsidered. He brushed off his shoulder. “Adeline took them to the city. She was horrified that he stored them out here in all this humidity. No doubt she’ll have dinner parties and hang them in the dining room.”

“How entrepreneurial.”

“Yeah. He’s her new project. He doesn’t seem to mind. Can I help you with that?” Lucas reached over and shifted a box. She wriggled through the space to get to the far wall.

He bent down. “What are these boxes marked PETER CLAY?”

“Some things he gave me when I left,” she told him. “He chewed me out for leaving him, and then he felt guilty, so a few weeks later I got a big box of crap. Paint. A couple of canvases. I never used them.”

“Why not?”

“I stopped painting.”

Lucas swept his hair back and crouched down. When he looked up at her, he looked vulnerable, boyish. “There’s so little of him left. The studio was basically destroyed on 9/11. The rest was scrutinized and handed off to the foundation. Adeline has cataloged every scrap.”

“It’s just paints and brushes.”

“It’s his, though. Can I see?”

Ruthie was unexpectedly touched by this. She thought only artists had a romantic relationship with materials. She flipped open a toolbox and found a box cutter. She cleanly sliced through the tape.

Lucas closed in eagerly as she pulled back the flaps. The smell of paint and solvent hit her. She was swept back into Peter’s studio, cans of brushes, carts covered with paint spills, canvases turned to the wall, a cassette player splotched with paint. Everything had been smeared or stained with paint, even the coffeepot.

    She remembered the kitchen chair with the red leatherette seat where he’d sat staring at the canvas on the wall—what had happened to that chair? Left outside on the street for someone to pick up, not knowing that it contained the ass imprint of an artist who had defined his generation. And the stacks of art magazines that in a frenzy Peter had once painted white and bound with cord, creating a massive white sculpture that the assistants often perched on to drink soda or coffee and bitch about him behind his back? Had that been cut up and destroyed? She had never thought about that before, that Peter’s studio had been a hazmat site, most likely.

Lucas pawed through the box eagerly. “These are all his colors.”

“Yeah.” That was the point, the uselessness of the gift and maybe its malice; Ruthie did not paint like Peter.

“And a couple of small canvases,” he said.

She nodded. “They’re works of art in themselves, really. Hiro had the best frame shop in the city, maybe the country. Peter would only let him build his canvases personally. That might be the last of them. Hiro died a year after Peter.”

She picked up the ax and swung it experimentally.

“Holy shit,” Lucas said. “What are you doing?”

She slid through the boxes and marched to the tree. If she could hack at her own life she would, at every limb—job, house, husband. Or hack away at assumptions. That she would never make a fuss. That she would just go away.

She raised the ax. The trunk was barely two inches in diameter. She was no Paul Bunyan, but she could do this.

“Maybe you should calm down,” Lucas said.

She swung at the tree. She felt the shudder of one clean, excellent cut. Again and again she swung until the trunk splintered. She tore it away from the stump, twisting until the living stalk snapped.

    “Okay,” Lucas said. “And now we’re going to do what, exactly?”

She staggered with it to the car. She popped the trunk and wrestled it in. She yanked the door and fell into the front seat, scratched and dirty and bleeding. She toppled over the gearshift.

Her nose against the cushion, she breathed out and in. The leather smelled of old coffee, dry leaves, and something else, something elusive but desperate, the scent of years spent coaxing an engine past a hundred thousand miles.

My life is shit, Ruthie thought.

She was pathetic, a faded woman standing at a dinner party, hoping not to make an ass of herself, and making an ass of herself. Since Mike left she’d been living like a tiny gray mouse, compressing her bones to fit into the smallest crack, skulking along the baseboards. Sniffing out the crumbs. Chasing the cheese. Until she’d scurried right into the trap, and been broken. Snap!

Lucas stuck his head in the car. “What’s with the tree?”

“It’s a present.” Maybe she was drunk. She couldn’t tell.

He placed his hand on the door. “Come on, I’ll drive and taxi back. This is much more interesting than the party.”

“I have to deliver the tree.” She clambered like a Great Dane over the gearshift, all snuffle and hindquarters.

Lucas slid into the front seat and pulled out. They drove in silence except for Ruthie’s murmured directions to Helen’s house.

The lovely shingled house sat quiet as a cat. Ruthie saw Helen moving across a window. She directed Lucas to pull over. She lurched out of the car and wrestled the lilac tree out of the trunk.