not making art at all?
“Come on, Susan, don’t use the santoku knife to cut tomatoes.”
“What?”
“We have a cheap tomato knife. Use that. I’ve told you, save the good knives for when you really need a good knife.”
Emma went to bed early that night, and Alex and Susan watched
Hell’s Kitchen
in silence. If Alex remembered her odd phone call, questioning him about her painting in the bonus room, he didn’t mention it. Given his mood, Susan saw little point in reminding him.
11.
The next day, Susan made no effort to paint. Once Alex had left for work and Marni had arrived and taken Emma to a 9:30 story time, she walked, with her umbrella open against a damp and drizzly autumn morning, to a Court Street coffee shop called Cafe Pedlar. She ordered a cappuccino and a pretzel roll, settled at a table in a back corner, and contemplated the recent unsettling events.
By now, she had abandoned the idea that Emma or anyone else had snuck into the bonus room and messed around with her work. She had painted the marks
—bites, the bites, the bites
—but could not for the life of her imagine why. Did this strange act of automatic painting represent the emergence of some cache of artistic energy lurking in her subconscious? Was she, in fact, an artist of exceptional brilliance, whose talent lay buried beneath calcified layers of ego and superego?
“No,” she said aloud, and snorted derisively. “Probably not.” A bearded dude in a Bob Dylan T-shirt, sitting with an iPad at the next table, glanced up and scowled. Susan smiled apologetically.
So, what, then? Had a ghost painted the row of red bites? A poltergeist?
She shook her head, sipped her coffee. Susan had never had much use for the supernatural, or even the religious. At her mother’sfuneral, she’d knelt by the open casket, said the required words, thinking the whole time how stupid it all was. This was not her
mother
laid out before her, this was a broken machine, a dead thing, ready to be lowered back into the earth from whence it came.
Susan sighed. Probably she was just a lunatic. She remembered an article from the
Times
magazine section, from a few years ago, about people who do bizarre and unaccountable things in their sleep: punch their spouses, eat raw steak, urinate on the floor. She’d sleepwalked down the stairs in the middle of the night, Friday night, or maybe it was Saturday, added the dots to the painting, and slipped back into bed.
That had to be it.
The other thing that kept playing in her head was a vision of Louis, standing in the newly cleaned bonus room with his hands knotted together anxiously: “This house has always had sort of an
atmosphere
to it. Something. And well, there’s a whole lot of sadness in the place, since Howard died.”
… a whole lot of sadness in the place …
Oh, would you stop it
, Susan told herself. The Bob Dylan guy scowled at her again. Susan smiled very politely, gave him the finger, and got up to leave.
*
On the way home, Susan stopped at Dashing Diva on Smith Street for a manicure, pedicure, and waxing.
“You bite your nails, ah?” said the manicurist, a small Korean woman named Lee with a tall pile of shellacked black hair and a frozen smile.
“What? Oh, years ago.”
Susan had developed the habit in the months after her mother died and cured herself only years later, with a combination of hypnosis and the gross pepper-spray-type stuff parents smear on the nails of their thumb-sucking children. But now Lee’s plastic smile flickered with confusion, and when Susan looked down she saw that her nails were raw and ragged, with red spots at the corners where she had chewed away the skin.
*
That night the family ate in silence. After Emma was in bed, Alex did the dishes, complaining several times about the “bucket of crap” under the sink. Susan had dutifully been tossing vegetable matter under there, periodically running the plastic containers down to the foot of the steps for
“Come on, Susan, don’t use the santoku knife to cut tomatoes.”
“What?”
“We have a cheap tomato knife. Use that. I’ve told you, save the good knives for when you really need a good knife.”
Emma went to bed early that night, and Alex and Susan watched
Hell’s Kitchen
in silence. If Alex remembered her odd phone call, questioning him about her painting in the bonus room, he didn’t mention it. Given his mood, Susan saw little point in reminding him.
11.
The next day, Susan made no effort to paint. Once Alex had left for work and Marni had arrived and taken Emma to a 9:30 story time, she walked, with her umbrella open against a damp and drizzly autumn morning, to a Court Street coffee shop called Cafe Pedlar. She ordered a cappuccino and a pretzel roll, settled at a table in a back corner, and contemplated the recent unsettling events.
By now, she had abandoned the idea that Emma or anyone else had snuck into the bonus room and messed around with her work. She had painted the marks
—bites, the bites, the bites
—but could not for the life of her imagine why. Did this strange act of automatic painting represent the emergence of some cache of artistic energy lurking in her subconscious? Was she, in fact, an artist of exceptional brilliance, whose talent lay buried beneath calcified layers of ego and superego?
“No,” she said aloud, and snorted derisively. “Probably not.” A bearded dude in a Bob Dylan T-shirt, sitting with an iPad at the next table, glanced up and scowled. Susan smiled apologetically.
So, what, then? Had a ghost painted the row of red bites? A poltergeist?
She shook her head, sipped her coffee. Susan had never had much use for the supernatural, or even the religious. At her mother’sfuneral, she’d knelt by the open casket, said the required words, thinking the whole time how stupid it all was. This was not her
mother
laid out before her, this was a broken machine, a dead thing, ready to be lowered back into the earth from whence it came.
Susan sighed. Probably she was just a lunatic. She remembered an article from the
Times
magazine section, from a few years ago, about people who do bizarre and unaccountable things in their sleep: punch their spouses, eat raw steak, urinate on the floor. She’d sleepwalked down the stairs in the middle of the night, Friday night, or maybe it was Saturday, added the dots to the painting, and slipped back into bed.
That had to be it.
The other thing that kept playing in her head was a vision of Louis, standing in the newly cleaned bonus room with his hands knotted together anxiously: “This house has always had sort of an
atmosphere
to it. Something. And well, there’s a whole lot of sadness in the place, since Howard died.”
… a whole lot of sadness in the place …
Oh, would you stop it
, Susan told herself. The Bob Dylan guy scowled at her again. Susan smiled very politely, gave him the finger, and got up to leave.
*
On the way home, Susan stopped at Dashing Diva on Smith Street for a manicure, pedicure, and waxing.
“You bite your nails, ah?” said the manicurist, a small Korean woman named Lee with a tall pile of shellacked black hair and a frozen smile.
“What? Oh, years ago.”
Susan had developed the habit in the months after her mother died and cured herself only years later, with a combination of hypnosis and the gross pepper-spray-type stuff parents smear on the nails of their thumb-sucking children. But now Lee’s plastic smile flickered with confusion, and when Susan looked down she saw that her nails were raw and ragged, with red spots at the corners where she had chewed away the skin.
*
That night the family ate in silence. After Emma was in bed, Alex did the dishes, complaining several times about the “bucket of crap” under the sink. Susan had dutifully been tossing vegetable matter under there, periodically running the plastic containers down to the foot of the steps for
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