Emma Rathbone: Losing It

“Is the wine— Should we bring the wine?… Hi, excuse me!” I said to a teenage guy wearing an apron who had just trotted down the stairs from the roof. “That vase, do you know where it goes?”

He put his hands up helplessly. “I don’t really work in this part,” he said, backing away.

A grim lady in a turtleneck was packing up her exhibit of clay pots. She was sitting on the floor, surrounded by crumpled newspaper. I was supposed to be putting up Viv’s plates, but everything had taken longer than expected and we were running late. I went over to the lady, who was slowly wrapping something in tissue paper. “Is that vase”—I pointed—“is that part of your display?”

“No,” she said. “Mine are examples of traditional Apache wedding—”

“Okay, well, do you know where the manager is?” She just looked at me. “Maybe he can help. I was told you’d have all of your stuff out of here by four.”

She straightened up and said indignantly, “My friend is supposed to be here any minute to help.”

“What about that?” I pointed to a box of decorative antlers. “Is that yours?”

Her eyes narrowed and she was about to say something when I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned around. Elliot. “I can help you move it,” he said. “The vase. We can put it in that back corner, by the radiator.”

He’d come through and gotten me an opening here, his friend’s gallery. When I’d first seen the space, it looked perfect — wooden floors and big windows letting in lots of light, and plenty of blank walls to hang the plates. But I hadn’t realized it would be oppressively hot in the afternoon because the windows were painted shut and the air-conditioning wasn’t working. I was disheveled and sweaty from all the crates we’d brought up the stairs, along with the boxes of wine and wineglasses, some chairs, a few tables, and a cooler. There were lines of chalk on my dress. My makeup was running down my face. There were boxes and newspapers and crumpled things everywhere. Elliot looked at me searchingly. I breathed in quickly. “Okay,” I said. “Let’s just move it.” As we turned to walk in that direction, my knee hit a stool and three wineglasses wobbled, fell, and broke on the floor. I looked around frantically. Everything was dusty and coming apart.

Two hours later, I stood talking to Viv’s friend Karen. “It is,” I said. “It really is important to have good posture.” After we’d moved the vase, I went to the bathroom and washed my makeup off. Then Elliot and I helped the turtleneck lady clean up her stuff quickly, and then we slowly hung Viv’s plates with brass hangers. We put everything out — the wine, the glasses, jars of fresh flowers. The hors d’oeuvres had finally arrived from the catering company. I’d spent most of the money I’d saved that summer on the event. It looked good — not exactly like I had pictured but still nice. But it was too stuffy, and Viv had come too early. She was standing by herself, looking cool and unencumbered, wearing a long ivory skirt and a tunic, a little satin scarf slung over her arm as she held a glass of wine and looked at the display.

“Excuse me,” I said to Karen. Elliot was coming up the stairs. I went up to him. “I want to introduce you,” I said.

“Aunt Viv,” I said, a moment later. She turned around. “This is my friend Elliot. He helped me set this up. This is his friend’s gallery.”

She looked at him, slightly bewildered. His hair was out of the ponytail, flowing down and around his shoulders. He was wearing a purple shirt, like a magician would wear.

“Oh, hello,” she said, in the voice I imagined she used when talking to a salesperson.

We’d been exceedingly polite to each other since the episode in the kitchen. I’d told her at one point that I was going to leave two weeks early, after the show, essentially, and she’d nodded quickly without really looking at me and returned to her book. I could tell she was still angry, but it was almost like she didn’t have the energy for any real vitriol and so was just tiredly indifferent. Even when I told her about the show itself, she’d been polite, but I got the feeling she was humoring me. She’d dismissed me, the whole summer, and was just waiting for it to shove off and be over.

I’d invited everyone I could think of, all her friends, people from her job, Gordon. I’d asked the local newspaper to put a mention of it on their website. I wanted her to walk in and see people admiring her plates and be quietly delighted. Muslin curtains would ripple picturesquely in the breeze. Maybe it would even be better than the original reception would have been. She would feel healed. The afternoon would suture whatever had been ripped between us, and we would both leave feeling sage and replete in our newfound friendship and lessons learned.

But now we stood in a tense circle. Me, Elliot, Diane, Karen, and Viv. No one was drinking. The hors d’oeuvres were untouched. Everyone was glancing around nervously, not sure what the center of this was supposed to be, when what was supposed to be achieved was going to be achieved. The weight of it all was snuffing out any spontaneity or ease. There was a terrible silence until Karen said, “It’s wonderful, Viv, it really is.”

And it really was. I hadn’t arranged the plates into their original groups, because so many of them were missing, but rather put them all together in a sort of patchwork. Some of them had gold trim, some of them had the cursive writing on the bottom, explaining the scene. I felt that whenever I looked at them, I noticed something different. This time, it seemed that they were created with an off-kilter sensibility, as if there was an inherent strangeness to them that made you want to keep looking.

“Thank you,” Viv said. An employee on the lower level of the bookstore erupted into a coughing fit. The door squeaked open, and we all looked in that direction, hoping it would be someone coming in for the show, but it was just a man leaving. I could tell Viv was feeling burdened, because not only had her previous opening been ruined, but now she had to persevere through this tortured gesture where everyone looked at her with fragile smiles.

“Eat!” I said. “Please, everyone, have something to eat. There’s so much food.”

We wandered over to the food table. Elliot put his hand on my shoulder in consolation. Then two strangers came up the stairs — an older couple. The man was tall and stooped and wearing a leather vest. The woman had a pixie face and bright white hair and said, kindly, “Is this the Vivienne Greenfield exhibit?” I could have kissed her.

“Yes!” I said, and motioned around the room. “Welcome.”

They floated over to the plates.

Twenty minutes later I stood talking to a large bald gentleman with thin wire glasses.

“It’s a great organization,” he said. “Once they had a fund-raiser — who could paint a chair in the most creative way! You could sponsor an artist. One person painted it to look like a cow.”

“Cool,” I said, looking around. There were more people now. A few more of Viv’s friends had come. I watched a woman stroke her hair as she talked to Diane. A group from the bookstore had wandered up, probably attracted by the free wine and food, but they were looking at the plates. Viv was talking to Gordon. I’d been really surprised when I’d seen him and had avoided eye contact. Viv gestured with her hand as if she was measuring an inch. He laughed. Maybe their friendship couldn’t be characterized by that one interaction at the restaurant. Maybe the old cells of that night had sloughed off, and a new skin was generating underneath.

“It was on peach schnapps!” said Viv’s friend Diane, a little later.

I was talking to her by one of the windows. She had a red wine mustache. She was telling me about the first time she’d gotten drunk.