The Colorman (23 page)

“Stop,” Gwen said, as always, impossible to thank or praise. “Stop, I can't stand it when you grovel!”

“I'm not groveling,” Rain retorted, bruised. Gwen's sharpness seemed to jump from somewhere else. “It's Thanksgiving, after all,” Rain said. “I'm just giving some thanks…”

Gwen chuckled and then looked out the great glass window at the gathering darkness. “Days seem shorter up here,” she said.

“The city, too, Gwen. You just don't notice it there,” Rain said.

“Why did you turn off your phones? What's going on up here? You had me worried.” She gave one of her conclusive sniffs.

“I just…” Rain was embarrassed. Somehow in front of Gwen, depression seemed self-indulgent.

“You've been working,” Gwen said, glancing at the sideboard with a lift of her chin. She was giving Rain an out on the tougher topic.

“Oh,” she said dismissively. “I don't know what those are, really.”

“They're what you have to do,” Gwen said. “They're all women.” Gwen was confident as always in her assessment. Then she asked, “Are you looking for somebody?”

“What?” Rain asked.

“Seems you're looking for a missing face.”

“Oh, those,” Rain said. “I found them on the Internet. Mugshots.”

“Guilty women's faces,” Gwen said. Another knowing sniff escaped. She held out her wine glass for Rain to refill.

The candle appeared to be glowing brighter now as the light dwindled around them.

“Your father never spoke to you about your mother,” Gwen said. “It's marked you.”

“I'm fine,” Rain said, annoyed. An old refrain between the two of them. Gwen would insist she had crippling pathos. Rain would deny it. “Lots of people have broken oddball families. It's not that unusual.”

“You don't even know your own history,” Gwen said. “And you need to. This work you're doing. It's good.” This was rare coming from Gwen, and Rain was almost alarmed. Gwen never handed out unequivocal praise. Most especially not about art. Her highest compliment was typically back-handed, like
not bad
.

“But you can't hole up like a hermit for the rest of your life. You need to live,” Gwen said. “You need to function.”

Rain felt her cheeks getting hot. Having her pain acknowledged both thrilled and shamed her. What she was feeling was real. She wasn't just lazy and self-indulgent. At the same time, she couldn't bear the unfamiliar flattery.

“I'm functioning. I wasn't even painting for a while. This is a step forward,” Rain insisted. “I'm doing much better now.”

“You were conceived here, Rain. Did you know that?” Gwen asked.

“Sort of,” Rain said, taken aback for some reason. “I guess.”

“Your parents never married.”

“What? No.” Rain said, confused. “What do you mean they weren't married?” It wasn't that it mattered to her, but she was unsure where all this was going.

“John planned on telling you about her, sometime,” Gwen said. “I think the longer he didn't talk to you about her, the more difficult it seemed.”

“Wait,” Rain said, moving back slightly in her chair. “Why are you telling me this now? What's this about?”

“John never liked to talk about her, even though I tried to get him to. He meant to. He always said he would, eventually, and then one day he's gone and you lose two parents at the same time.”

“It doesn't matter, Gwen,” Rain said shaking her head, but not looking at her. “I just didn't have a mother, that's all. It's not a big deal.”

“It is,” Gwen said. “Believe me, I know it is. Look at Robert and Barbara. Both my own children, both live in California.” Gwen's children were almost old enough to be Rain's parents themselves. Gwen always joked that they were trying to be as far away from her as possible, but she never made any attempt to blend her families. Just let people be.

“I was a terrible mother, I know that.” Gwen raised a hand toward Rain and turned her face slightly away at Rain's protests. “No, I was.”

Rain saw that same guilt washing over Gwen's features. That guilt she was painting, the guilt she felt, too. A universal, unquenchable and impotent guilt.

“You've always been good to me, Gwen.”

“Not motherly, though,” Gwen said, looking up at Rain squarely. “You just never had a mother and I'm sorry for that. I've seen what it did to my children. Neither of them ever had children of their own. I was absent in every way.”

Rain suspected Gwen was dancing around something she would never detail. But equally, she thought Gwen was too hard on herself for not being the über-mom that was expected of women of her generation.

“I think they've forgiven you by now, don't you?” Rain asked.

“Why should they? That's up to them, anyway. Nothing I can do anymore.”

They sat in comforting silence.

“Your mother's name was Alice,” Gwen said.

“Yes. And?” Rain said, closing her eyes. “Look, it's okay that Daddy never told me about her. She doesn't matter. She gave birth to me, that's it.”

“Alice Morrow,” Gwen added.

Rain willed her facial expression to flatten, to keep the strange bits of recognition from washing through her while she tried in vain to hold her molecules as they were. “That was her maiden name?” she asked finally.

“No,” Gwen said. “She was married.”

“Are you sure it's Morrow? Because…” Rain trailed off, glanced up at Gwen.

Gwen sat looking at her calmly.

Rain met Gwen's gaze. “She was married to James Morrow?” she asked, feeling molecules shift.

Gwen nodded.

“What did—,” Rain sputtered. “Did they—? It was an affair?”

Gwen rolled her eyes and stood, taking plates with her and clearing the table. Sometimes her gait was crooked and she tilted into furniture as she walked across the room, but she had a kind of grace with her aging body that was unparalleled.

Alone at the table, Rain felt her eyes welling up. They filled, they overflowed, they spilled down her cheeks. She pursed her lips to switch on that lever in her brain to shut down emotion. The lever failed. Sobs pushed against her pressed mouth, pumped at her throat. She sputtered and coughed in a battle with her baser self.

Gwen came back, poured more wine for Rain, and then wrapped her arms around Rain's head and shoulders.

“This is so…so-o s-stupid!” she exclaimed, plastering a crazy smile on her face and looking up at Gwen even as she continued to cry. “I don't know why…why I'm crying!” she said, but then she stuffed her head back against Gwen's soft bosom again.

“I'm disappointed to have to break this to you, but it's a biological thing,” Gwen said. “Mothers are no joke.”

“How can I need what I never had?” Rain asked, calming herself with logic. “Can you be an alcoholic if you've never had one drink?”

“If a tree falls in a forest…?” Gwen countered. “My mother was the original ice queen,” she said. “I used to spend every spare moment I had at my friend Mary's because her mother had a
lap
!” She gently let go of Rain and resumed a position across from her. “My mother never once told me she loved me, never ever kissed me, never held me. My father was much older, and she never spoke about her past, which was murky and veiled—a dancer maybe, although that may have been euphemistic, I don't know… My brother and I went to live with her family after my father died. A distinct and shocking decline in circumstances, that was, though my mother kept the furs and jewelry. Even there, we never learned anything more about her. It never stopped me loving her, though, wanting her, needing her approval. Ridiculous.” Gwen shook her head. “Cruel, empty person that she was. Finally, I woke up and begged to be sent away after my brother went to college. One of my older half-brothers helped with that. I think that saved my life.”

Gwen raised her glass and took a sip of wine. Then she looked at Rain as though snapping out of a reverie. “Why am I telling you this? Because a non-existent mother can be even more powerful than one who is right there to disappoint you,” she said decisively. “I think you need an exorcism.”

“Oh, my God!” Rain blurted, laughing.

Gwen smiled. There was a shared sense of humor between these two women, one that they both valued and which linked them together.

“So here it is, Rain,” Gwen said. “This is everything I know about your mother. Alice Morrow left her husband, became John's lover, gave birth to their child and then died about a month later.”

“I thought she died in childbirth,” Rain said.

“The easy explanation for a child,” Gwen said. “‘Postpartum complications don't really nail down a date. She was from Norway originally. Her maiden name was Gudrid Loss, but she always hated her first name, so she chose Alice when James brought her to the U.S. From Alice in Wonderland.”

Rain shook her head, tearing up again.

Gwen waved dismissively. “I'm sorry I'm the one to bring this to you.”

They sat in silence a bit longer until they both heard the crunch of gravel under the wheels of Gwen's hired car. Gwen glanced at her cellphone. “I still have a little time.”

“She left James Morrow for Dad?” Rain asked. Gwen nodded. “Did James know? Does he know now?”

“He must. They were all friends before things got mixed up,” Gwen said. “Remember, it was the seventies.”

“Dad was already in his fifties, wasn't he?” Rain asked.

“And very handsome and very broad thinking and accepting,” Gwen said.

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“She was a painter. Your father appreciated that, evidently, more than her husband did.”

“That doesn't make sense.”

“Well, of course, nothing is simple. I don't know why we're always driven to distill things down to truths when there's no such thing.” Gwen was oddly cheerful.

“I always thought I'd killed her,” Rain whispered.

“Nothing is ever simple,” Gwen said. “But anyway, I'm sorry you ever had to think that.” Gwen snapped her diminutive Fendi purse shut and looked at Rain for a moment. “John never ever felt that way.”

Gwen collected her coat and scarf.

“I always thought…” Rain said hurriedly, trying to get this all in before Gwen left and she would have no more answers. “I always thought Daddy felt a little bit resentful of me, like maybe he tried to make up for being angry for what I'd done to his life.”

“Rain,” Gwen said. “I know very little, most of which is probably distorted by confused egos, bruised hopes and all that romantic claptrap. But your father and I were together for many years and I loved him with all my heart. One thing I know for certain is how he felt about you. He adored you and considered you perfection in every way. You were a gift from the cosmos, he always used to say. He hadn't known what he'd gotten into with Alice. Might not have chosen that path for himself, but, as things turned out, he said he found out what real love means. With you.” Gwen kissed Rain on the top of her head. “And, as far as I'm concerned, he left you to me, and I've decided to keep you. So I'm telling you what I know, and I'll talk to you about it whenever you need to. But I need you to keep a phone on. And you need to come see me in the city. Come for dinner. Let me see you.”

Rain remained in her chair, looking down at her wine glass as she absently ran a fingernail over the foot of the glass.

“See me out, sweetheart,” Gwen said. Rain stood and followed her out.

As she got into the car, Gwen cal ed, “I want to see that larger work you sketched. Have it ready for me by the new year.”

And Rain let go a wide, grateful smile. “I will,” she shouted as the car rolled away into the night. “I will!” She watched the tail lights fade down the road, grow briefly as they stopped in front of the factory, then pivot as they turned and disappeared.

The night air felt delicately layered, like some rarified Mediterranean dessert, the warms and cools of the air yielding and slicing each in to each with a nutty smell of drying leaves letting off atomized bursts of spice and flavor.

Standing out on the porch listening to the sound of the gathering night, Rain took big gulps of night air, tasting its delicate balance, feeling on the verge as the earth prepared to take the turn at solstice, at the outer edge of something, her wine-sluiced veins feeling that thrust, that throw outward of gravity and orbit. The stars laughed at her, at this great flinging that only pulls back in again and again.

Rain wanted to hold onto that feeling, despite knowing it was partly the wine, but she felt certain she was letting herself feel again. Maybe for the first time since she had moved here. As she turned to go back in the house, she noticed the box she'd returned to Morrow weeks before sitting discreetly by the door again, like a besotted animal returned to the master who'd kicked it. A few leaves had blown over it, so it must have been there for a while. Rain brushed it off and carried it inside.

She cleared the dishes and even put a pot of water on to boil. Feeling almost like a regular human being, she decided to attend to the big box she hadn't yet opened, sitting alone on the table in the middle of the studio.

A little key with a jewel-like key ring hung from the lock. It looked like a refashioned pendant with a bit of its chain holding the key. Rain turned the key carefully in the lock and heard a buttery, metal click.

As she opened it, a beautiful scent greeted her. Inside the box were well-waxed maple, cedar and deep-green, velvet-lined dividers. There was the smell of linseed oil sharpened with a little bit of turp or mineral spirits. But as Rain leaned in and breathed deeply, she thought she could detect something else. Jasmine, vanilla? It almost smelled like some vintage perfume, like Arpège or Chanel No. 5, but it was hard to tell with the complicating mix of raw material in the box.