A Friend of the Family (20 page)

Roseanne turned out to be the sort of saleswoman who would do
any car-dealing father proud; she was efficient, knowledgeable, precise, and no-bullshit. I knew the Craigs would offer us a modest deal simply because I took care of them healthwise, but I also knew that we’d spend a bit more money on options we didn’t really need because Roseanne was closing the deal. She put us in a Jeep Commander and took us for a spin around the backstreets off Route 17, near the never-quite-finished Forrest Avenue overpass.

“Now, the nice thing about this car is that it has a much smoother ride and faster acceleration than you see in some competing models. Plus all the space you’d want in an SUV, but the mileage of a sedan.”

“Which is?”

“Eighteen city, twenty highway,” she said. She was sitting behind us on the center bump, leaning forward to facilitate conversation. The model we were driving had a GPS system, and Elaine kept checking it out even though she knew perfectly well where we were.

“You offer this thing in a hybrid?”

“Not yet,” she said, “but GM is working on some terrific hybrid models for 2010. When it’s time to trade this in, you’ll have a variety of large hybrids and plug-ins to choose from.”

“Come on,” Elaine said. “Nobody’s ever going to want to plug in a car.”

“You’d be surprised, Mrs. Dizinoff,” Roseanne said. “For over one hundred miles a gallon, people will change their behavior.”

“One hundred miles a gallon?”

“That’s just the beginning,” Roseanne said. Her voice was cheerful, but she was rotating her wrists in their sockets, and I thought I saw her wince. “Make a left up at the gas station — that’ll give us a shortcut to the office.”

“You okay, Roseanne?”

“Okay?” She blinked, stopped working her wrists. “I’m great!” I
wondered at her grin, whether she was hiding anything. “Really,” she said. “I’m really great.”

When we returned to the dealership, Arnie Craig emerged from some back room and gave us each an enormous, two-handed shake. “So what do you think of my little girl?” he asked. “Hell of a saleswoman, huh?” Craig was powerfully built, a few inches shorter than me but wide-shouldered and chunky-legged, and although he had a soft belly, there was something in his posture of the high school football player he’d certainly once been.

“Hell of a saleswoman indeed.”

“She really is,” Elaine concurred. Then she drifted off to take one more spin around the showroom and leave us to the details.

“They’re interested in the Commander, Dad.”

“Great choice.” He slung an arm around his daughter. “You trading something in? Interested in financing?”

“My wife’s Saab was just towed to Round Hill Collision.”

Arnie gave me a knowing look and Roseanne smiled. “Well, if you choose to finance, we’ll get you excellent terms,” she said. “Unless you’d rather determine the financing yourself. I know the doctors’ association sometimes helps with auto lending.”

She dealt with enough doctors to do her homework, one more point for her.

“I’m gonna go tend the floor,” Arnie said, giving his daughter’s shoulder a rub before letting it go. “You’re in good hands here.”

She rolled her eyes at me, smiling the whole time, then led me to her desk, modestly appointed with a family photo and a brightly painted miniature of Saint Francis of Assisi and her Berkeley diploma hanging overhead. Roseanne was, I’m sure, the only salesperson in the room with a degree from Cal, but she seemed quite at home in this environment. She’d probably grown up in this very room.

“Can I get you something, by the way? We’ve got pretty good coffee in the back, and I was thinking of asking the receptionist to call in for some bagels.”

“I’m okay,” I said. “Elaine and I just had breakfast at the Old Lantern.”

“Good omelets,” she approved. Good salespeople approve of everything you choose as long as they’re not selling it.

“Listen, Roseanne, we’re gonna take the car.”

“Don’t you want to check with your wife first?”

I gave my head a nonchalant shake, but she raised an eyebrow at me, so I complied. “Well, but I have a feeling. And I want to tell you how great you look, generally speaking. You feeling okay? Everything going all right?” Maybe it was inappropriate to ask her about her health at this juncture, but what the hell, we were going to buy this car, and I wanted to know. “Your wrists hurt?”

“My wrists?”

“You keep rolling them around.”

“I’ve been playing tennis,” she said. “Working on my backhand.”

“Well, that’s good — tennis is good. And you’re sleeping? Eating?” I wanted to ask if she’d gotten herself over to Owen Kennedy or anyone in his practice, but I stopped myself: this wasn’t the right place. “Energy levels?”

“Same as always.”

“Any particular changes you’ve noticed? Anything else?”

“Not really.”

“Not really?”

“I mean, no, I don’t feel that much different than I did before. Maybe a little tired sometimes, but it’s just that I’ve been working so hard.”

“Okay,” I said. I realized I’d brought the conversation to awkward
ground. We smiled at each other for a few seconds. “Well, I think you sold us a car. You’re a heck of a saleswoman—your dad is right.”

“It’s in my blood.” She smiled, rotating her wrists again. Tennis, she said. Fine, tennis. But the light from the window shifted, and I could see darkness under Roseanne’s eyes and knew that at the very least this girl needed more sleep.

“Should I get out the paperwork?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “Then afterward you should go home and take a nap.”

After we’d picked up the certified check and signed the papers, Roseanne handed Elaine the keys, dangling from a bright silver Craig Motors keychain. We drove back toward home full of appreciation for the Craig family, cheap gas, good credit, no traffic, New Jersey and its inestimable plenty. And I didn’t think about Roseanne Craig for a long time after that, my thoughts consumed, as they were, with my son and the direction in which his life was heading. But every so often, driving along Route 17, I would think about stopping in at Craig Motors and saying hello, maybe even taking a new Lincoln for a spin with Roseanne at my side. Making sure she was healthy—house calls, more or less. But I never did, and when the Forrest Avenue overpass was finally completed I rarely found myself on that part of Route 17.

S
CARCELY TWENTY-FOUR HOURS
after we brought home the Commander, I found Alec standing in the driveway, sniffing around his mother’s new car, peering into the trunk as if he expected to find some treasure there. He picked up and dropped the netting that stretched across the trunk, which was supposed to hold our groceries or luggage in place, lifted it high enough to snap, dropped it again. He slammed the trunk door shut and bounced the bumper up and down with his hands.

“May I ask—”

“Oh,” he said, turning around, a shy look on his face. He was wearing a filthy T-shirt and shredded jeans, and his entire person emitted the noxious smell of paint thinner. “I was just seeing what kind of load this Jeep can bear.”

“A load of what, exactly?”

He blew out through his nose. “I have some new paintings that I was gonna bring to this place in Harlem, the one with the owners—”

“You told me.”

“Right, well, the owner, the one I sort of know, she came to the Red Barn on Thursday and I showed her my slides.”

“And?”

“And she thought I might bring some actual art over and see how it worked in the space. She said she doesn’t really get what she needs from slides.”

“Therefore you want to drive your mother’s new car into Harlem.”

His face hardened. “Look, I don’t want to put you out or anything —”

Was it wrong for me to bristle at his sense of entitlement? Was it wrong for me to wonder why everything I had still belonged to my son? “Listen, it’s just that we brought this car home yesterday, and today you want to drive it to a still-not-necessarily-one-hundred-percent-safe part of New York City.”

I could see him ball his hands in his pockets. “Fine, forget it. I’ll tell the gallery I don’t have the transportation—”

But I hadn’t meant to get there so fast. “No, Alec, no, look. You can drive the car to Harlem, of course. I just—” He was glaring at my feet. “Just let me see the paintings first.”

“Why?”

“I’m curious.” He raised an eyebrow. “I just want to see what you’ve been up to locked up in that studio, that’s all.”

“Why?”

“Can’t I see my son’s paintings? Aren’t I allowed?”

He shrugged deeply. “Seems to me you’re allowed to do whatever you want.”

“Great,” I said. “So show me your paintings.”

He shrugged again and led me up those rickety wooden stairs to the studio above the garage. I hadn’t stepped foot in it since the day we’d finished renovating; now it was covered in drop cloths, stinking of oil paint and spirit gum, crammed with easels, frames, canvases, and large paintings stacked up against the walls. I blinked. This was exactly how I’d imagined it to be, how I’d wanted it.

“So which ones are you bringing to show the gallery?”

“I’m still trying to figure it out,” he said, gazing at his oeuvre and picking a scab on his chin.

“Did she ask for anything in particular?”

“Not really,” he said. “I think I should only bring four or five, you know, since I don’t want to look desperate, bring her everything I’ve ever painted. And in general she likes larger canvases, I know.”

“How about this one?” There was a large oil in the southeast corner of the room, brightly colored, a herd of deer racing headlong down a suburban road, mangling all the street signs in their way.

“Really?” He looked as if he was about to laugh. “You like that?”

“Is that funny?”

“No,” he said. “No, not at all. I’m just surprised we have the same taste. That’s my favorite one, too.”

For a moment I felt my chest fill. “It is?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I’ve been working on it for half the summer,
really trying to make it feel epic, kind of scary. Like the herd has been unleashed and is about to take over the whole world.”

“It does feel that way. Like an emergency, somehow.”

“It does? You think?”

I went closer to the painting. In the background, in muted tones, were the grim burning outlines of a city. The deer eyes glittered at me. “It feels like the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, almost. Except deer.” I sounded idiotic. “What I mean is—”

“No, no, I get it. That’s exactly what I was going for, a spirit of destruction, the feeling that we’re on some sort of collision course with nature. Except in my paintings, nature wins. In the real world, I don’t think it works out that way.”

“You get their forms so well,” I said. “How do you do that? You just see the deer in your head and are able to paint them?”

“From the back window,” he said, “I can see deer all the time. It’s almost a petting zoo out there these days, you know? I take pictures and bring up the images on my laptop, but half the time I don’t even need to look. I just have these pictures in my brain, the pictures go straight to my hand and onto the canvas.”

“That’s pretty amazing, Al.” The deer’s coats looked satiny. Their hooves sparked against the asphalt like metal.

“You think so?”

“Well, I’m no expert—”

“I know,” he said. “But you really like it?”

I turned to my son, surprised. He hadn’t seemed to give a fig about my approval since he was fifteen years old, and now here we were almost six years later, and he had that same look I remembered from his childhood, prickled eyebrows, a sort of hopeful twist of the mouth. Eyes big. Except now, of course, I looked up at him, since he was
a good two inches taller than his old man, and I felt pride gust up inside me.

“Alec, I think it’s terrific. They’d be fools not to take it.”

He shrugged again, turned back to the painting, hunched his shoulders, my big little boy.

“You’ll get a lot of good instruction when you’re back at school, right?”

He shot me a look, but I kept my posture nonchalant. “I guess. That’s what I’m hoping.”

“And there will be teachers, painters, instructors — they’ll get you ready to be a practicing artist. Take you to galleries, meet agents, that kind of thing?”

He nodded, stuck his hands in his pockets.

“What are you thinking?”

“Nothing,” he said.

“Nothing?”

“Would that be cool with you?”

“What?”

“If that’s what I ended up doing. If I ended up being a practicing artist.”

“I thought that was the whole idea.”

“I might not make a lot of money, you know.”

“I never thought you would,” I said. Then I realized how that sounded. “What I mean is, money doesn’t matter. Money will come, eventually, if you—’

“I know what you mean,” he said. His hands were still in his pockets, he was hunched, but his lips were pressed into a nice little smile.

We were quiet for a few seconds. “You want me to drive with you?” I asked. “To the city?”

“You want to?”

“Sure,” I said. “I’ve got nothing much going on today.” This wasn’t really true—I was supposed to make rounds, and then Joe and I had been talking about going to the driving range and hitting a few balls for the hell of it.

“Cool,” he said. “That’d be great.” And I could hear it in his voice: he meant it.

But in the end, Elaine went with him to the city—my pager went off and I couldn’t escape rounds as I had thought. She called me at the hospital to let me know that the woman at the gallery had rejected our son’s work. “She said it was, I don’t know, too allegorical? That he should go more abstract. She did seem to like the painting of your father, though. But not enough to take it.”

I was leaning against the nurses’ station, and watched as the catering truck brushed against a rack of IVs. “Is he okay?”

“You know how he is,” Elaine said. “Acting all tough about it. I think deep down he’s pretty hurt, but I’m sure he’ll get over it eventually.”

“Why?”

“Why?”

“Why are you so sure?”

“You know,” Elaine said cheerfully. “Rejection is part of the artist’s life.”

I hung up without saying good-bye. On my way to the driving range I stopped at home, went up to Alec’s studio, and took another look at the deer paintings he’d left behind. Allegory my ass. There were deer chewing down fences, chewing up gardens as I breathed. There were gas leaks, carbon emissions, big new Jeeps driving two small people down smooth suburban roads. There was destruction upon us, Alec knew it, captured it, and fleshed it out brilliantly, and
I felt confident the Harlem gallerist would one day feel like a fool for not having paid attention.