Emily Winslow - The Whole World

I’d volunteered to make models for a special exhibit at the Sedgwick: “Creatures of the Burgess Shale.” Apparently the Cambrian period, which was way before dinosaurs, had far weirder creatures than most people know. The students who’d studied these fossils in the seventies had given them hilarious names, like hallucigenia. I love the seventies. I would have looked awesome with Farrah Fawcett hair. I have this friend who’s fat who spends all her weekends at Renaissance Faires because the dresses look good on her. I think if I could be an original Charlie’s Angel on weekends, I’d do it.

It felt good to be making art again, not just talking about it. I was making these outsized abstractions of these creatures that were wacky in the first place. No one knows what color any of these things were, so I was free to really go for it. They needed to be paper pop-outs so kids could make their own spiky hallucigenia, or marrella, which is like a shrimp wearing elaborate headgear, or wiwaxia, which looks like Mercury’s winged helmet. With glue and pom-poms and feathers too. Anything to make the kids like science.

I’ve thought about majoring in science. Not stopping making art, but coming at it from knowing more about life. Because experience is the foundation for art, right? So I’m tempted, and then I think, What’s the point of this school thing at all? Why not be like Gauguin and have an adventure?

That’s the kind of thing I said to Dr. Keene, just to see if I could set him off. It was Day Ten, the rains had stopped, and the police were dredging the Cam. He’d come to take a look at my models, probably just to have something else to think about, and we ended up talking. But he didn’t rise up in defense of formal education and good grades. He just nodded absently. So I told him everything about Nick and me.

He did that thing of freezing his face to not show any reaction. A person only does that if their real reaction is something they’d be embarrassed by, right? He’s known Nick for longer than I have, so maybe it’s happened before. Maybe he knows Nick is a dog. Isn’t that the point of his religion? Knowing we’re messed up, and just accepting that as inevitable? So he acted weary about it, but not surprised. What he said, though, was “I don’t think you should be telling me this.”

“Why?” I said. I said it sharply, because that kind of prissiness about life is just what I’m trying to get away from. “Why not tell you about this? You mean it’s okay for Nick to be this way, just not okay to talk about it? Or it would have been okay, except Nick is gone and his victimhood trumps mine?” We were all imagining Nick bloated and gray from drowning.

“Or do you mean…” I was attacking him at this point, hurling words. “Do you mean that I shouldn’t tell you this because you’re a man and I’m a woman and we shouldn’t talk about S-E-X? Even about other people? Because I didn’t think a biologist would be all squeamish about that; isn’t that what you study all day long?” Which is absolutely true: the drive for sex, and the likelihood of sex and the success of sex, is the whole process of natural selection.

“So, like, isn’t this exactly the point? My traits won’t be carried on to the next generation because it’s not like someone’s going to fuck me. So, like, my belligerence and insecurity are going to die out. And that’s good, right? And good manners and restraint are going to be passed on by people like Polly, and people like you.” I knew he was getting married. To a doctor, a medical doctor.

You have to specify “medical doctor” here because Cambridge is stuffed with the other kind. Yelling “Is there a doctor in the house?” would get you Ph.D. computer scientists and engineers and geomorphologists and historians. It wouldn’t get you anyone practical. It wouldn’t get you anyone who knows how to apply a fucking Band-Aid.

I cried but I didn’t stop working, because I had said I would make the models. I do what I say I’ll do.

“I think it’s a wonder,” he said, sighing, “that any of us get past age twenty at all.”

I stabbed little spiny bits all over hallucigenia. I’d painted them purple.

“Why?” I challenged him. “What happened to you at twenty?” If he was going to be all I-know-what-you’re-going-through, I wanted to make him spell it out.

“That’s the year my brother decided he hates me.”

“Poor you.” Stab, stab, stab. “Was it over some girl?”

“Oh, no. He came to hate me over a woman a few years later. But the first time he hated me was when he joined the University. I was already here. We were in different colleges, different departments. We were completely different-nothing to have rivalry over.”

“So, what?” I pushed.

He shook his head. “That’s just it. There was no event, nothing to blame. He just realized he hates me. I’ve never been able to fix that.”

His forlorn gravity was overwhelming. It wasn’t fair. Everyone felt sorry for Polly, and for Nick, and now I was supposed to pity Dr. Keene for a bad brother. No matter how bad I felt, it was never bad enough to rate. It’s like everyone just says, “No big deal. It could be worse. Wake me when it’s worse.” I never measure up, even in failure.

“Well, I wish my brother hated me. He liked me way too much. He raped me when I was thirteen.” I don’t even have a brother, but I spewed an eruption of tears. “He said I was beautiful. I was so pretty he couldn’t not do it, he said. It went on for, like, a year. Then my father found out and threw Will out. He still writes me letters. If my dad found out, he’d kill Will.” Then I remembered that Will is Polly’s brother. But I couldn’t change it once I’d said it.

I wasn’t really in the floral gallery when the vases broke, like I told Polly. I hadn’t been in the museum at all when it happened. But it had been important to make her understand that moment. I told it to her in a way that would make her understand. I had to make Dr. Keene understand, and if he needed a lie to get it, I’d give it to him.

The whole point of cubism is to capture more than one side or one moment. Cubists tried to get a deeper accuracy than photographic representation by including many moments and many sides at once. It doesn’t look literally, physically real. But it is real. It’s the real that includes more than one moment, more than one viewpoint, more than just the physical. It’s a truer real.

What I say may seem a mess, like a cubist painting, but that’s only because it’s even truer. It’s how I really feel. It’s what what’s happened has done to me. That’s truer than just what literally happened.

I finally got the look. I got it. His mouth opened and his eyes didn’t blink. “I’m so sorry,” he said. He said it with full attention. I feel like there hasn’t been full attention from anyone in Cambridge, even from Nick when I was on my knees.

I leaned forward. I filled his field of vision. I had to keep myself bigger in perspective to him than the fucking rainbow of British building stones.

“I know I shouldn’t let him write to me. I don’t write back. But I do read the letters. He’s my brother, y’know?”

“Perhaps you ought to tell the authorities in your home state-”

“Oh, no, no, it’s not like that. He’s not writing things like that. It’s over. He wants me to know how sorry he is. He writes to say that he’s sorry. He has a girlfriend too. He saw a therapist and he’s got a girlfriend. Everything’s cool.”

“Have you talked to anyone professional?” he asked.

“I talk it out with my friends. That’s good enough for me. Like talking it out with you right now. It’s good. Thanks.” I smiled. He was hooked. I leaned back in my chair. I looked down shyly. Then he ruined it.