Gail Bowen - The Nesting Dolls

The story was over five hundred years old, but it hadn’t lost its power, and as I lay with my back against Zack’s side and watched a snowdrift move incrementally up the glass patio door, I was content. The Green Knight had just challenged the gall, the gumption, and the guts of Arthur’s court, when Taylor knocked on the door and, without waiting for an invitation, came in. I was grateful she hadn’t wandered in fifteen minutes earlier. She was still in her pyjamas and, as she took in the scene, her mouth curled in a smile that was both affectionate and pitying. I had seen the smile a thousand times – it was her late mother’s smile, and during the years when Sally and I had been best friends, it had often been directed at me.

Taylor sat on the corner of the bed. “Were you guys reading to each other?”

“Zack was reading to me.”

“I’ll bet you’re the only parents in my entire school who do that,” she said. She hugged her knees to herself. “I came in to see if you’d heard anything about the baby.”

“Nothing yet,” I said. “Delia’s going to call Zack this morning.”

“So we don’t know why the baby’s mother gave him to Izzy?”

“No. For the time being, I guess we’ll just have be satisfied that the baby’s fine.”

“That’s good,” she said. “I woke up in the night wondering… ” Taylor swung her legs off the bed and went to peer out the patio doors. “So are we going to church in this?”

“I think we’ll stay put.”

Taylor yawned and stretched. “Good, then I’m going to grab a bagel and go out to my studio. I’ve started this new piece, and I’ve been having a problem. This morning I figured out that if I… ” She moved her hand in an arabesque of dismissal. “Well, never mind what I figured out.” She gave us her new Sally smile. “You two probably want to get back to your reading.”

After Taylor closed the door, Zack turned to me. “I sense that she no longer regards us as god-like.”

“She’s a teenager,” I said. “We’re starting to recede into the background.”

Zack scowled. “Forever?”

“Not forever – but Taylor’s trying to figure out who she is and what she wants out of life – those are pretty big questions.”

“That’s why she has us.”

I took his hand. “She also has Sally.”

“Sally’s been dead for ten years.”

“She still looms large for Taylor. The other day I went into her room and she was staring at a picture on her laptop. It was a self-portrait Sally had done when she was fourteen. Taylor said, ‘I’ll never be as good as she is,’ then burst into tears.”

“How did you handle it?”

“Badly. I gave her a hug and asked if she wanted to get two spoons and crack a carton of Häagen-Dazs Rocky Road with me.

“Sounds okay to me.”

“It wasn’t. I offered her comfort when she needed the truth.”

“So what is the truth?”

“When Sally made that painting of herself, she was in a sexual relationship with a forty-one-year-old man.”

“I thought you said she was fourteen.”

“I did. The sex started when she was thirteen.”

Zack placed Gawain face down on the bed. “That’s statutory rape,” he said.

“According to Sally it was a fair exchange. The man was an art critic named Izaak Levin. She needed what he could teach her and he needed -”

“To have sex with a prepubescent. Even if she consented, it’s still statutory rape. But the law aside, what kind of prick would engage in sex with a kid?”

“An eminently respectable one – a trusted colleague of Sally’s father. When Desmond Love died, Sally was lost. Desmond wasn’t just Sally’s father; he was her protector. He was an artist himself. Sally was, like Taylor, a prodigy. When Des recognized the talent Sally had, he created the conditions that would make it possible for her to do her best work.”

“So her father was her teacher?”

I shook my head. “According to Sally, anyone could have taught her technique. She seemed to feel that Des’s real gift was that he let her find out who she was as a painter. Des gave her space and he protected her against the people who Sally believed would cut off her air by talking to her about what she was doing. Sally and her mother had never been close. When Des died, Sally’s mother withdrew into her own grief, and Sally was left alone.

“So Izaak took Des Love’s place but extended the role.” Zack’s lip curled with disdain.

“Izaak and Sally went to the States and, to quote Sally, she spent a year seeing the U.S.A. in Izaak’s Chevrolet, fucking and learning about how to make art. By the time she was out of her teens, she was an established artist and Izaak was her agent.”

“He was having sex with her and taking her money.” Zack ran his hand over his head. “In my line of work we call guys like that pimps.”

“Sally didn’t view it that way – at least not consciously – but I’ve seen the self-portrait that affected Taylor so much when she saw it on the Internet. Actually, Izaak showed it to me himself. The painting was in his private collection. It’s the only piece of art Sally ever made that I can’t bear to look at. She painted herself stretched over the hood of Izaak’s convertible – the classic vintage pin-up pose. In the background is one of those no-tell motels that used to be along highways in the sixties. Even at fourteen, Sally was incredibly sensual, but there was so much more to her than that – she was smart and funny and thoughtful. None of that is in the self-portrait.”

“If the painting stinks, why was Taylor so impressed?”

“Because the painting doesn’t stink. Sally used acrylics in those saturated tones you see in old Technicolor movies, and the motel and Izaak’s yellow convertible are so luridly seductive you can almost hear them panting. Sally herself is another story. She’s absolutely lifeless – just a cut-out of a girl lying on the hood of a convertible waiting to be moved from motel to motel to serve a man.”

“Jesus,” Zack said. “And Taylor doesn’t know any of this.”

I shook my head. “No, and I don’t want her to.”

“You might revisit that decision, Jo. The truth has a way of coming out. Look at Delia’s situation. Besides, if Taylor knew the price her mother paid to make that painting, she might realize that the cost is too high.”

“She might,” I said. “Or she might decide that being as good an artist as her mother is worth whatever price she has to pay.”

“Over my dead body,” Zack said.

“Mine too,” I said. “Come on. Let’s have a shower.”

The phone rang just as I was handing Zack his towel. He squinted to see his watch through the steam. “Eight o’clock, straight up. It’ll be Delia.”

I picked up. Delia’s husky adolescent-boy’s voice cracked with urgency. “Jo, I need to talk to Zack.”

“I’ll get him.”

“No. I’m outside your house. Can I come in?”

“Of course.”

I hung up, wrapped a towel around my hair and picked up my robe. “It’s Delia,” I said. “She’s outside, and she sounds tense.”

“So much for starting our day sunny side up,” Zack said.

Zack was right. Delia was not an ideal breakfast companion. She was a person who needed to have every detail under control, and that morning the world was conspiring against her. She’d been forced to drive through snow-clogged streets to deal with a problem whose magnitude and complexity I could only guess at, and for the first time in my memory, she had the wide-eyed gaze of someone whose life has just spun out of control.

No matter the season, Delia limited the colours in her wardrobe to black and white. That morning she was wearing a black ski jacket, a black wool cloche pulled down over her ears, and a black-and-white-striped wool scarf wound many times around her neck. She yanked off her hat, liberating her wiry salt-and-pepper hair. As always, several of Delia’s curls, obeying their own law of kinetic energy, sprang over her forehead. She ignored them, unwound her scarf, and handed it to me.