Julia Pierpont - Among the Ten Thousand Things

Who knows?

If they’d let the pieces stay on view, you might have had a different reaction.

It’s certainly flattering to think so. But I think that probably they were right, in taking them away. People didn’t like them, didn’t want to like them.

For what it’s worth, I thought they were exquisite.

You saw them?

Only in pictures. I was in Ohio for college at the time. They’re in a private collection now?

That’s right.

Well, I wish I had seen them. Actually I wish I’d been in New York then, to see all that.

You mean on nine-eleven?

Is that awful to say?

It’s natural. It was one of those rare important times, fully realized. A day that announced itself as history. That’s exciting. I wish I was there, and I was.

You say you were downtown by the time of the attacks, but you live uptown. How early do you usually begin work?

I stay at the studio overnight some nights.

And your family?

They’re very patient.

Is that of your wife?

That, no. That’s a picture for something I’m working on now.

Do you still work off live models?

Sometimes.

Strangers or people you know?

Doesn’t really matter. To me. Though it might matter to them.

I used to model a little, when I first moved to New York.

—

From the Super 8, he could walk to the minimart, where he bought an off-brand Big Gulp, and back to the bar, where he bought two more whiskeys, neat, and a vodka cranberry for the girl who sat down next to him and who would tell him his ChapStick tasted like piña colada. But that was Later.

In Jamestown, with the overhead off and the front door propped open, it was a dark summer morning indoors. The kids were still in bed. Deb looked into the fridge and decided her iced tea had cooled enough. She’d used the mushroom pitcher Jack had found once at a flea market in town. The ceramic bowl of it was carved with cremini, painted seventies beige and orange and brown. Two clumsy green leaves made up the spout.

She packed two glasses with ice and clutched them stinging cold against her dress and bare arms. Gary was at the great wood table, aiming a screwdriver at parts of a fishing reel and probably straining his eyes. “Whatcha got there?” she asked.

“Oh, I was thinking we might like to go fishing, one of these days. Maybe a birthday trip.”

She sat, peeled the glasses from her skin. “You were always good about that, birthdays.”

“Yours is easy to remember,” he said, though not why.

She thought of the first birthday she’d had with Jack, when he was married and she wasn’t. Her twenty-sixth. How could she have been sad about anything then? Crazy, stupid, tortured girl: She wanted to shake herself. Nothing is so bad, twenty-six. It had seemed bad, when Jack was two weeks with his wife in Cape Cod at some beach she’d never been to, and she was drunk from endless Bloody Marys at the endless birthday brunch her friends had arranged for her. She had chosen brunch over a proper party because Jack’s plane landed that night around eight and he’d promised to make it over.

And had she even thanked them for birthday brunch, her friends? She’d become indifferent to them; they’d become boring to her: Their opinions were not his. She’d liked him immediately, and so much. What do they call it? Enchanted. A victory just to be with him, moments when he wasn’t with anyone else. Why had that meant so much then? The five of them had split the bill without her, even though everyone was a dancer and poor, and Izzy had arranged to be out that night. “But call if you need me,” she’d said, clearly worried that Jack would not come. Deb couldn’t remember thanking them. She wanted to call them all now.

“God, Gar, how’d we get to be so old?”

“Flattering, thank you.”

“It’s just being back around all this stuff. This incredible, ugly pitcher.” Its ugliness had made them laugh the first few times they’d used it. At one point she’d tried making it into a vase, but Jack said it ruined the flowers. “How many summers ago were we all cooking dinner together here? Cutting the ends off snap peas or something.”

“Long time.”

“Being in this house — We’re even in our same seats.”

Gary shrugged. “It’s where I sit.”

“And this is where I sit, and that’s him, where he would,” nodding at the empty end chair between them.

Deb turned twenty-six in her rattling apartment over the subway with all the lights off thinking, Come. Please come. Where are you. Where are you. Whereareyou. Jack made it, just made it, the way he just did a lot of things. It was eleven-something when he rang up from the street. He hadn’t showered since Chatham and brought the beach in with him. Later, after he left in the small early hours — their affair gave her so much new time, blue morning time she used to sleep through — Deb stayed very awake in bed and stared up at the ceiling, dragging the soles of her feet up and down the mattress, feeling the grit of him everywhere. Now she was forty-one, nearly forty-two, and a little thrilled to be away from New York, and from Jack.

She was pressing the nails of her left hand into the dark wood, engraving small arcs in its waxy surface. “Someone should have dropped this pitcher a decade ago.”

“Ugly things don’t break,” Gary said over his gear.

She would always know Gary, regardless of how long they’d been apart. She knew how he took iced tea. With sugar, sunk mostly to the bottom. Gary was a little bit of a place to come back to.

Jack’s head was like a blister of brown liquor simmering under the mile of sun between the Super 8 and his car. He made it, each step a superhuman achievement, past the cardboard box of a campus chapel and the forsaken tennis courts around which the grass would not even grow for heatstroke, to the parking lot, to his ridiculous red convertible, long abandoned by the shade of tree in whose custody he’d left it. And then the car, when he got there, it wouldn’t start.

He sat with the door open, one leg swung out and the other growing slick against the leather interior — shorts were a mixed blessing — and pumped the gas and tried again. He could have taken it as a sign, right, if he were watching his life from somewhere far away, like a character in a book or movie. The sign would have been to go home. Go home, go home. None of this is for you. Only in movies do we heed the warnings of inanimate objects with due reverence. In life Jack ran the heater on high until it started blowing cool air, took the cap off the gas tank, and made his own shade, his back to the sun and his silhouette cast across what parts of the engine seemed important.

He’d woken up alone in his hotel room, on the scratchy-moss carpet, between the enormous, funereal beds. He was on his stomach, with a crick in his neck and some drool pooled around the corner of his mouth that made him want to move never. There had been, what, many drinks. He’d gotten sloppy with that girl. Kissed her in the bar and again outside after her friends had gone home. Made out, like a teenager.

He remembered no name, only that she was studying audiology. Whether it was a joke or not, she did seem to have a thing for ears, whispering into his like to drive him crazy, which it might have if his senses had not been so dull and if all of it were not so thin and so obvious. He was relieved when she didn’t want to go into the Super 8, and it was easy to turn down the invitation to her on-campus double because, while he was lonely, or horny, he was not completely stupid (despite all outward appearances). Plus, also, he had certain practical misgivings (specifically that he was drunk to the point where it might not work).