Fierce Little Thing Read online

  Two days after I turned twelve, Mr. Jacobs dropped me at the Pierces’ loft in Chelsea. The door to the building was propped open with an apple box. On the third floor, a film crew was shooting a man in a trench coat running across the open space. Three times they shot the scene. There were dozens of people on set, and lights and mics and makeup bags, cameras, clipboards, headsets. I stood still for the first time in days and realized my feet ached from all the miles I’d clocked on Grandmother’s land since she’d informed me I was leaving. My sun-bleached hair still smelled of the Connecticut wind. I decided, just then, that I would have to leave the building and find somewhere else to stay; it wasn’t fair to burden these relative strangers with all the reasons for my wandering. But before I could go, Xavier’s scent presented him: musky BO, the mildew of air-dried jeans, Head & Shoulders, cafeteria French fries, a green apple Blow Pop, and Carmex. The room was bustling but all my attention stayed on the fleshy funk of Xavier’s long body just behind mine, a body I realized, only then, I had known for nearly as long as I had been myself. So I wouldn’t leave, not yet.

  The loft, one floor up, had been Philip’s studio since the seventies, back when he was a sculptor, but Grandmother was right, they’d lived uptown until Xavier turned ten, when the family decided on this “adventure,” a word I was to see Jane say with a slant of disgust at the corner of her luscious mouth. She wasn’t there that first day, though. She was in Ghana, buying fabric and goods to be marked up a thousand percent in her boutique.

  The loft was a warren of rooms made from canvases, pallets, and plywood. The whole place was splattered: mustard on the ceiling, red on the windows, evergreen across a large swath of the unfinished floorboards in the great room. A single yellow toilet was housed in a dank closet next to the stairs, and the kitchen consisted of a fridge painted black and a hot plate for reheating takeout. But the views of the Empire State Building and the Twin Towers, and the city to the west and the east—framed by nearly three-hundred-sixty degrees of windows, interrupted only by the stairwell and Jane’s toile curtains, and stacks of Philip’s abstract paintings—made it clear that the Pierces were rich in more than just money, although, make no mistake, they also had plenty of that.

  The fire door squealed across the concrete floor, announcing our arrival. A real-looking impressionist painting, featuring a herd of gloomy cows munching hay, hung just inside the door.

  “Oh, it’s dearest Saskia!” Philip cried from the center of the great room, as he lifted his attention from a canvas the length of a car. Royal blue streaked his beard. His kimono opened over a broad, hairy belly, gray Champion sweatpants, and volleyball knee pads. He smelled of sweat and turpentine and cigars. He took my duffle bag. He bisou’d my cheeks. “I’ll make a room!” He meant he would make an actual room. It took two hours and a dozen abandoned canvases, each one a solid color: magenta, puce, violet. “Can you believe,” he said, hammering them into a makeshift wall, “that I wasted so much time on these stupid color dances?”

  Xavier created a bed from a stack of two-by-fours, a futon mattress, and an electric green afghan. He strung up fairy lights. He scaled a twenty-foot ladder to hammer red velvet fabric over the windows. “I’ve got homework,” he said, when he was back on earth. I’d forgotten about school. No matter how many times Xavier brushed his forelock back, it settled over that right eye. I discovered that I wanted to land my breath on the pillow of his lips, which was called a kiss but didn’t seem entirely like a kiss when I imagined it. I didn’t want a thing to do with the rest of his body; mouth to mouth just seemed the most efficient way to suck him in.

  He caught me looking. “Want a snack?”

  I shook my head.

  “We’ve got Mexican Coke. The kind with real sugar. Everybody likes that.”

  “Okay, thanks.”

  This drew a grin, revealing his wonky tooth, which only made him more beautiful. He reached out. He pinched my deltoid. “Liar.” The lingering ache reminded me that to kiss him would be to lose him, and already I couldn’t afford that.

  Philip grunted. “We’ve been eating like bachelors, haven’t we, boy?” He stuck a finger into my side. “She needs sustenance. The diner?” He wiped his brow, hammer still clutched in his fist, and swept back into the open loft, where the evening had grown golden. “Saskia, you can help me ’til he’s done.”

  Out in the great room, Philip filled a bucket with paint the color of sunshine. He lined it up beside the canvas he’d been working on, a sea of blue—periwinkle, blueberry, azure. “Stand in the yellow.” It was a relief to be told what to do, even if the paint was cold and slimy as I slipped my feet in. “Start here. Make your way to the other edge.” I didn’t want to ruin what he had made. But Philip held out a hand. I lifted my right foot out of the sludge. The color fell away, back into the slop. The evening glow lit a path across the canvas. I strolled across the blue, toward the windows. I left a trail of gold behind me. At the other side, there Philip was again, waiting with a towel.

  3

  Xavier will expect to bang on the door, so I leave it standing open. He parks in front of the house. His footsteps are crisp and determined across the white gravel, but he hovers on the doorstep. “Saskia?” In rushes the smell of clipped grass, the chirrup of the chipping sparrow, whose genus and species name, Spizella passerina, mimics its rapid-fire song. The outside steals every last tendril of the Mother’s sour truth. “I tried to call!”

  In the pink bedroom, my feet burrow between teetering stacks of Trollope and Dickens. I didn’t make it to Topsy; too far. Had to barricade myself in Mother’s bedroom. From here to the bed, and the window beyond, the floor is a city of books; high-rises of words, sentences, and paragraphs. Downstairs, he hesitates. Good. If I can’t get to pleasant, at least I might achieve unmurderous if he waits, penitent, for hours.

  Then he speaks again, his voice delicate. “I’m not going in uninvited.” I think he’s talking to me, until I remember cell phones. “Absolutely not.”

  Could someone else be in that SUV, watching him? Could it be Billy? Wasn’t I clear? No visitors, even if you’re married to them.

  “Sask?” He’s off the phone. “Hello? Please, Saskia, I really need to talk.”

  A few breaths. Then another, softer voice issues forth from him; the tone he takes when he needs something. “Billy. Thank you for calling back.”

  But if it’s Billy now, who was on the phone before? Panic rears. Not today.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m so sorry. Can you just…” A sigh. “Baby, I told you. I’m doing this to protect you.” I wait. “I do. I do want to be with you right now.” But when Xavier’s voice returns, it is full of steel. “This could destroy us. I have to fix it.”

  It’s the grit in his voice. That’s all it takes to know: the thing that I (or we, if there is a we anymore) have feared for more than half our lives has finally happened, or is about to, or might. I amble down the stairs while Xavier begs Billy not to hang up. He lifts his muddy eyes. He mumbles a goodbye. That damned forelock, always, ever flopping.

  He carries his father’s height but none of the old man’s paunch. His skin gleams. It’s mostly products and dermatology, but I can’t help my envy. His mother lingers there, too, in the smear of his lips and careful waistline. He points to the threshold. “Is it okay?”

  “I don’t have Mexican Coke, I’m afraid.”

  I think he might pinch my arm, but he pulls me close. My bones creak against his chest. We pretend not to notice how he winces.

  4

  I was sipping jasmine tea at the kitchen counter when Jane returned home, her jet-black bob still immaculate after the international flight. Her suitcase rattled to the ground. Past midnight, her whispers tangled with the emergency vehicles wailing across town. “Philip, you don’t make this kind of choice without talking to your wife.”

  “There was no way to reach you.”

  “You could have called the hotel.” I wondered if her hairdo kept its shape o
n the pillow.

  “I did. You weren’t there.”

  “So you leave a fucking message.”

  And later: “What will you do when the press finds her, Philip?”

  “Fuck the press.”

  “Okay, but what will you actually do? Flipping them off is not a plan. You need to have a plan.”

  And later: “Remember Xavier’s third birthday, Philip? Right, I forget, that was the year you were buried in Nancy’s glorious crotch. Well, there was a reason I stopped talking to them. I knew something like this would happen, yes, I did, I even told you so, but you never listen.”

  I reached my hand into the space between my mattress and the wall to find Topsy’s most delicate part, right behind the ears, the part I only allowed myself to touch at night lest it grow rough too quickly. Every time I touched it, I knew I was one step closer to losing the last bit of you, but I couldn’t stop, especially when I thought of being asked to leave. It had been so much easier to imagine going on my own.

  But Jane let me stay. She draped her petite frame in both twin sets and saris, and the answer is yes, her hair always looked like that; she got it cut every five Tuesdays at a salon uptown. She didn’t exactly like me, but when she took us to the Buster Keaton retrospective at Film Forum, I cackled in the same split second she did, then caught the glint of one tooth in the cinema glow and realized she was smiling. A week later, in the kitchen, she said, “You laugh like your mother, like you might burst into tears at any moment,” and I tittered without wanting to, putting my hands over my lips as though I could catch Mother before she spilled out of me.

  Philip was always laughing—hilariously, vibrantly, abundantly. He painted at the center of the loft; sometimes we’d keep him company. At night, he went places we were not welcome, but the booze didn’t sour him, and Jane didn’t seem to mind. I hung the painting we’d made together over my bed. He called it The Good Path. My footprints, smaller than they would ever be again, were always traipsing from the lower left corner up to the sky.

  Xavier was as steady a presence as those footprints. Sometimes I’d cry out in the night and awaken the next morning to discover he’d come to read at the foot of my bed. He was loyal but quiet, like a mature Labrador retriever, although his body was all puppy; hands and feet enormous, limbs lanky and out of sync. He bumped his knees on everything and knocked over countless glasses of milk. We attended a new school downtown, a pseudo Reggio Emilia situation that Philip found, with six kids spread out over eight grades. We studied frogs for three months because neither Xavier nor I could think of anything better to suggest. “Well, at least the press hasn’t found her,” Jane said, over a takeout dinner of Cuban-Chinese. Philip shot her a look; he didn’t know that I knew about the tabloids. Xavier had saved as many of the articles as he could, hiding them in the loft below, the one the landlord rented out for shoots. The story had quieted by then, but whenever a child died at the hands of their father, you could find a mention of Daddy on page A11 or 12.

  We spent a year like that, a makeshift family: father, sister, brother, mother. Occasionally I’d come across one of Jane’s dog-eared home design magazines on the kitchen counter, belying her longing for ironed napkins and tufted couches. I couldn’t understand how she’d allowed this lifestyle; it certainly wasn’t her first choice.

  “Philip said he’d jump off the brownstone if he had to spend another second with the snobs on the Upper East Side,” Xavier explained. “So Jane said if he could support us, without using a cent of her ‘snob money,’ she’d move wherever he wanted. She didn’t think he’d be able to do it, I guess.” It was Philip’s figurative painting project, The Lewdnesses—close-ups of lips, elbows, toes at angles which made them look like much less tame body parts—that had funded the move. Parisian collectors were buying the pieces for tens of thousands of dollars each.

  “But he’s bored now,” Xavier said, his eyes darting around the loft.

  “He seems happy.”

  “He keeps painting the same thing, over and over. He says they’re a parlor trick now.” Xavier was right, now that I looked around: all those body parts pretending to be something sexier than they were. “That one over your bed is the most different thing he’s done in years.”

  One May Saturday, when Jane had gone to Japan, Philip took us to the diner, for “our favorite,” which was really his favorite—Reubens and cheese fries and Mexican Coke—and announced we were summering in Maine. We needed fresh air, which is what children need when it’s convenient for adults. Philip’s reps were breathing down his neck for new material, something just like The Lewdnesses but also not at all like The Lewdnesses, which is what, he expounded, gatekeepers require of artists in this hellfire we call capitalism. Then he asked what we thought, because at least he was the kind of parent discomfited by the fate-deciding part of his job.

  “What about Mom?” Xavier said.

  Philip let out a long, terrific fart.

  “Dad. What about Mom?”

  I looked out the window at Ninth Avenue. I thought about that light on the Devil’s Ramble. If I closed my eyes, I could feel every morsel of the day I’d be having instead of this one—standing at the lip of the ramble’s auburn promise, backpack heavy with cucumber sandwiches and a thermos of whole milk, looking down at the spot where your hot hand met mine.

  It was a seven-hour drive. Jane had extended her Asia trip. Xavier was concerned. It seemed downright revolutionary that one could grow tired of one’s spouse and simply stay in another country, but I kept that to myself. I ripped open the Salt & Vinegar Lay’s and passed them to the front seat. Xavier started crunching. The car filled with the stench of Philip’s cigarillo. I put my hands on the back of their sturdy necks. This pleased them.

  5

  “You really should reconnect the landline,” Xavier says, “or at least get a cell phone.” He has settled in front of the idle hearth. The grandfather clock grows loud as a sudden stillness hits the room, as though all the molecules in the surrounding world have made an agreement to pause. It’s rare, anymore, for your last day to come back unbidden, but here it is, a freight train of memory: the ticking clock when I came down from the second floor, meaning to go to the broom closet; the sound of Mother wheezing from this very room in which we sit, her voice wet with tears or blood. Maybe he had punched her in the mouth. I crept closer from the foyer. Then Daddy was in front of me, filling the doorway with his broad chest, a solid Polyphemus like the one from his bedtime stories, down to the detail of one working eye; the other one purpling, punched shut.

  Then, like a switch, what’s happening now comes back: a mower, the northern cardinal, the chipping sparrow, an airplane beginning its descent. Xavier’s eyes skim his father’s painting, tracing my girlish footsteps toward heaven.

  I perk up my face. “So? How’s the beautiful husband?”

  Xavier shifts his elegant gaze to the floor. His shoulders slump. They’re ever so slight, these movements. No one else would notice. Then he musters up a smile like mine. “Billy’s great.”

  “And your dad? And your mom?”

  “Mom’s fine. You know. Busy with her online shop. Don’t you and Dad email? He’s always dangling some tidbit about you.”

  I hear from Philip every few months. He’s been living in one of the Pueblos Blancos of Andalusia for years now, but I can never get him to tell me what he actually does there. Drugs, definitely. He’ll never answer when I ask if he’s painting.

  “I miss you,” Xavier says. It’s true; I am excellent when I’m excellent. But we both know I have not been excellent for some time.

  6

  Once we reached the thick, northern blue forests, Philip steered our caramel-colored Lincoln into a gas station. We were a few miles past a main thoroughfare of limestone stores shilling shovels and teacups. Across the street, an ivory church’s steeple pierced the sky.

  The gas station’s sign read JIMBOB,S. Ford 4x4s littered the parking lot. A menacing hook hung from a pole ne
ar the gas pumps, though I didn’t yet know that it was built for moose carcasses. Two women crossed the parking lot. The younger one said something out of the corner of her mouth and the other laughed with her head tipped back, revealing eraser-pink gums. Here was the country like I’d never seen it in Connecticut. Gasoline stunk up the car.

  Philip disappeared inside. I wondered why: we had plenty of snacks, there were only two stores in the country that sold his high-end cigarillos, and he hated asking for directions. He held the door for two men in work boots, arms strung with plastic bags. When the door closed behind him, bell ringing, the one in a Skoal hat sneered.

  Xavier roused from his nap with a dazed swivel of the head. “The fuck are we?”

  “Maine, I guess?”

  “Jesus.”

  Philip reemerged with a piece of paper held high. The men had driven off, but they had taught me to see him anew: his long beard with the braid at its end; his graying hair pulled into a low ponytail; the Metallica T-shirt, taut over his round belly; the paint flecks smattering his skin; and, on his bottom half, his signature longyi wrap cloth, this one a deep prune. “You kids ready?”

  The line of the shoulder belt had creased Xavier’s cheek. The Lincoln growled back to life. Philip waved the paper like the golden ticket. “Right where they said it’d be!”

  7

  “Have you gotten anything in the mail?” Xavier asks. The Vermont Country Store catalog—I could wow him with my collection of long-sleeved cotton nightgowns. And bills—plenty of bills. But sure, fine, the mail is not what we might call my strong suit. Correspondence goes into the mudroom, unopened. I’d like to get some credit for my capacity on the internet—my own email account! An online subscription to the New York Times!—but he’s scowling. “Simple white envelopes,” he prompts, “that might not seem unusual until they pile up.”