Lydia's Party: A Novel (23 page)

Norris sat alone in her empty studio in a shaft of mid-morning light, drinking a cup of hot water and lemon juice. The women had just left—they’d spent the night in the guesthouse, which Kamal had vacated for the weekend. He needed to visit his grandmother, he’d said, although Norris had pointed out he didn’t have to leave. There was plenty of room in the main house, she’d said, if he wanted to stay, just this once.

After a long breakfast—Maura had brought coffee cakes and Betsy brought fruit and Jayne made omelets and Celia made mimosas—the women headed out en masse just as the shippers arrived to pack the show. Now the work was well on its way and the women were driving by caravan back to Chicago.

They’d decided to convoy in the driveway, on their way out, in case someone’s car broke down, they said.
It’s three hours
, Norris had said.
It’s not like you’re crossing the Rockies in Conestoga wagons.
She knew it would take them twice as long, that every time one stopped to go the bathroom they’d all have to stop and then they’d spend half an hour at some truck stop, buying snack food and aspirin. And Elaine needed cat food, she’d announced, at least a dozen times. She, with Maura’s encouragement, had adopted a stray of indeterminate gender that she’d named George Eliot, and it was all she talked about.

What a bunch of old ladies they’d turned into, Norris thought, standing in the driveway, waving good-bye. She could hardly believe they were her oldest friends. Possibly her only friends. Though, until last night, half of them could hardly stand her.

•   •   •

Norris stared out the window now, toward the pond. She was thinking about her trip. She was supposed to leave in two weeks, fly to New York for the opening, meet with collectors. Natalie had set up dinners.

Norris had made up an excuse when Kamal suggested he go along this time. “For moral support,” he’d said, handing her a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. As if she needed moral support.

“Why don’t you be my immoral support and be here when I get back,” she’d said, and then was sorry when she saw his face. But she couldn’t allow that. Could she? That blending of worlds? Sam would be there, probably with his new girlfriend. He should be spared his mother’s randy side, at least for a few more years, shouldn’t he? Although it wasn’t really about Sam. He was an adult now, with a sex life of his own. The truth was she didn’t want some tagalong sycophant.

Though that wasn’t fair, she thought. Kamal wasn’t Jay. She felt a little bad about that whole thing. He’d left in a tearful rage one night, brandishing the Beretta, briefly holding it to his temple before she’d disarmed him. She’d grabbed his phone off the bed and threatened to call his mother. Norris knew he kept her number on speed dial. She got the locks changed the next day. Kamal wasn’t like that. He was a grown-up, a marine. Though he was starting to get restless with their arrangement, she could tell.

Men have feelings, too, Norris
. She remembered someone saying that to her once. Who, though? Andy? Her mother? Lydia, of all people?

Norris looked around the empty studio and exhaled. She felt good about this, at least. It was going to be a good show. Two paintings had already sold—the one of Ted and the self-portrait. She hadn’t planned to include herself but then decided to, after she figured out how to keep it from being too personal. She’d painted herself rigidly frontal and completely nude except for her face, which she’d swathed, burka-like, in a green paisley scarf. Really, the only part that was a portrait was the eyes; the body was just a pretty decoy.

Natalie had told Norris she thought she could sell the whole show. The big painting of Lydia and Maxine would bring a lot, she’d said. The thing with Celia wanting it had thrown Norris for a loop, though. In the old days she would have just laughed in her face. Celia couldn’t afford a painting like that, even if she paid on installment for the rest of her life. Did she think Norris would be shamed into giving it to her? Ridiculous. It wouldn’t even fit in her fussy little house. Though Norris understood what Celia really wanted, and it wasn’t that painting. She wanted a memento, something of Lydia. Norris hoped Peter would talk Celia out of it.

It bothered her, these messy complications, everyone’s wishes and wants and hurt feelings. They encroached on her freedom, took up her time. How was she supposed to sustain these newly deepened
relationships
—even the word made her queasy—if everyone kept making such unreasonable demands? Breakfast parties that took half your day, red wine for Elaine, who was guaranteed to spill, travel privileges for Kamal, whole paintings for Celia, sixtieth-anniversary parties, for God’s sake, for one’s elderly former in-laws that required the breaking of bread with one’s ex and his wife.

Norris had been trying her best not to think about it. She’d stuffed the invitation, which she’d received from Sam two weeks earlier, back in its (shocking pink) envelope and slipped it under a book, but the thought of the thing lurking there nagged at her. Betty and Hank’s neighbors—with Sam’s help, apparently—were throwing Betty and Hank a surprise pizza-and-stuffed-meat-loaf party at the Traverse City VFW Clubhouse. Tomorrow.

Sam kept texting her, then e-mailing, trying to get her to say she’d go. The messages came in insistent little blips. “Dad and Janet will be there. They told me to tell you you should come.” “Gram would love to see U.” “We picked up the flat-screen TV today. I’ll add your name to the card.” “Shirley’s gonna sing!”

According to the invitation, the Stemwinders, the seventeen-piece all-VFW-member band, led by tubaist Gil Cross, was already rehearsing. “Dancing to a selection of big band favorites” would commence after lunch. Norris could picture the sheet cake now.

How did reasonable people manage all this nonsense, and still get anything done?

Never mind, she thought, taking a sip of hot lemon water. The main thing was that the work was good. Finished, packed, and gone. And now her studio was empty again, except for two tiny photos she’d tacked to the wall.

Norris dragged her chair over to sit in front of them. One was the Polaroid she’d taken at the party, two years before—Lydia in front of her fireplace, looking jaundiced and shrunken in too-bright lipstick, with that enormous orange pot in her lap, weighing her down like a stone on a leaf. The other photo was thumbtacked next to it. It showed the second, smaller painting of Lydia, the one Norris hadn’t shown them, which was still in the storage closet.

She got up and went to the closet, dragged the painting from where she’d hidden it behind a blank stretched canvas, and brought it over to lean against the wall in front of her chair. The painting looked like a smudge in the bright white studio. It was almost monochromatic. She’d ended up using all tones of gray—yellowish gray skin, bluish gray sheets—sick room colors. It showed Lydia half covered with a sheet, only her head and neck and bare wasted arms showing. Her eyes were open—conscious, staring. She was shrunken, but still herself. In the dark, hovering over her body, Norris had painted the ghost of the orange pot.

She’d based the painting on the dozens of photographs and charcoal drawings she’d made at the end, showing Lydia in bed, her by-now-colorless hair across the pillow, sheets tumbled like waves around her wasted body. Norris had asked Lydia’s permission, first to draw her and later to make the photos, and Lydia had agreed to it all. Norris wasn’t sure she would, and had wondered whether it would be too terrible to go ahead in secret after Lydia fell fully into unconsciousness, but she hadn’t needed to. The first time Norris asked, Lydia had nodded once and said, whispered actually, “Fame, at last,” then closed her eyes. The second time she’d raised her hand a few inches from the sheet, and let it drop.

In most of the drawings Maxine sprawled next to Lydia, big, solid, and black. In some, Lydia’s eyes were half open, dog and woman staring out as if already from the afterlife. In one Lydia even appeared to smile a little. That really happened, Norris remembered it, though it seemed incredible now. She’d never shown that drawing, or any of them, to anyone.

What a strange time it had been, Norris thought now, looking out the window at the snow that had begun to fall. She could hardly believe now that any of it had happened, that they’d gone through that together, she and Lydia, that they’d talked that way with each other, finally, as they never had before.

Then Lydia died, and Norris put the drawings and photos away. It wasn’t until she was finishing the big painting of Lydia and Maxine, eighteen months later, that she got them out again.

She’d laid them all on the floor of her studio one morning, as reference, she’d thought, and spent the day looking at them. The next morning, she started a new painting, and in a week it was finished. At first she thought it belonged in the show, as a transition piece, a hint of more to come, maybe, or just as a dark note, but in the end she saw that it didn’t belong. In so many ways, it didn’t match the others.

Norris had wondered, as she’d worked on the second painting, if it was too strange, too personal. She’d wondered if people would think it was exploitive somehow, if they’d understand that it had been a collaboration, that Lydia had agreed to this, wanted it, even. But there was no way to prove that, and finally Norris decided she didn’t care what people thought.

She hadn’t shown it to anyone yet, though. Partly it was that she didn’t know what to make of it. The painting was smaller than she usually worked, and much looser, more transparent. She’d drawn in charcoal first, on the canvas, and then painted over the drawing so the charcoal blended with the paint and the turpentine and made the whole thing gray. She’d planned to add color later but then she didn’t. It might be a study, she thought. Or it might be the beginning of a new series, all loose, all gray, all Lydia.

Norris turned the painting to face the wall and went back to staring at the two little photos. The double orange dots of the casserole pulsed in the all-white room.

Usually this was the best hour of all, after everything had been carted off and she was alone, between projects, on the verge of a new idea. Anything was possible now; everything was. This must be what it was like to be a virgin bride, she sometimes thought, waiting for her groom. Sometimes she started a new painting the same day.

But today felt different. For the first time in a long time, maybe ever, Norris didn’t feel like working. She felt a strange new impulse, one she’d heard of but never experienced. She wanted to take a break. She felt like taking the day off, maybe the whole week. Or two. Maybe she’d take a vacation, she thought, a vacation from her life, from being Norris.

Though she wasn’t sure she knew how. Always before, after she’d packed up work for a show, she’d returned to the studio immediately. That day, when possible. And it wasn’t just will that drove her back, her famous self-discipline. She wanted to, looked forward to it. She always had ideas for new work, was impatient to start the next thing. Usually by the time she’d finished a show her mind had moved on to something else and it had happened this time, too. She’d started a new sketchbook midway through the painting of Ted. She’d written
Deities
inside the front cover. She was thinking of doing more figures, maybe a suite of twelve, possibly the Greek gods. She planned to use Kamal as a model.

Oprah = Zeus?
she’d written under a torn-out magazine picture she’d taped to one page. She’d crossed out Zeus and written
Athena
and under that she’d written
Zeus = Bill Clinton?
She’d made a little sketch of him in a suit and tie, his face looking pouchy and soulful, holding a thunderbolt on his lap. Next to that was another sketch that showed him naked, heroic, ithyphallic.

But these were cartoons, not paintings. Nothing there, she decided, tossing the sketchbook aside.

She sat in her low, overstuffed armchair, the one she’d liberated from her grandmother’s sewing room fifteen years earlier. It was upholstered in pale yellow and cream silk that had gone dingy with time, an incongruity in the otherwise stark white studio. It was the one soft thing she kept there, and the comfort of it allowed her to sit a while longer.

She imagined twelve twelve-foot paintings of gods and goddesses with Baroque lighting, maybe in flight, seen from below, like Tiepolo angels. Maybe she should go to Venice, she thought. See the Tiepolos again, get inspired. Maybe she should do it now. She could, she thought. She had time. She certainly could afford it. She could leave today, fly to Rome, catch a connecting flight, and be there by tomorrow night. Walk from church to church, stopping by the water to eat sardines in lemon juice and drink espresso. It was a pleasant thought. But even that, the thought of such a trip, felt burdensome, like entertainment, not inspiration. She didn’t feel like being a tourist, even for art.

She’d rather walk in the woods, she thought. She closed her eyes. Blessed quiet. She could not get enough. Maybe it was time for a change of a different sort. A real break. Painters who taught took sabbaticals from teaching to make art. Why couldn’t she take a sabbatical from making art? Though what else she’d do eluded her.

•   •   •

Why did people even make art, Norris wondered, her eyes still closed. She knew what she would have said before, ten years ago, ten days ago, even. Because she could. Because she was good at it.

Flannery O’Connor had said that, Lydia once told her, a long time ago, when they’d had the discussion, before it became clear that Norris was going to be successful and that Lydia was not, when they could still discuss the idea of talent and success freely, theoretically.
Why do you write
, someone had asked O’Connor, Lydia told her.
Because I’m good at it
,
Lydia said she’d said. They’d laughed. It had seemed so simple at the time. Was that a good-enough reason anymore, though? Norris had to wonder.

•   •   •

She opened her eyes. Things were different now.

The show was done and Lydia was gone, and the thing was, awful but true, there was a part of her that was a little bit glad. Norris didn’t have to answer to her anymore, didn’t have to go to anymore of her parties, didn’t have to look at her and feel guilty. Now the whole thing could be laid to rest.