Girl in Pieces

His name is Felix and he’s Linus and Tanner’s grandfather. Linus leads me around the house, pointing at paintings on the walls, sculptures arranged in corners and in the backyard, a huge expanse that looks out over rolling hills and the horse’s stable. She takes me into a cavernous building flooded with light streaming from the skylights in the ceiling, where various canvases are hung on the walls and cans of paint, buckets of brushes, and industrial-sized containers of turpentine abound. Canvases are stacked three deep against some of the walls. A loftlike space has been constructed at the far end; a table with an old typewriter and a plain chair sit on the upper deck. There’s a wide stairwell leading up to the loft. Beneath it are cluttered, top-heavy bookshelves. A young woman works quietly at a high pine table in the corner of the studio, sorting slides, holding them up to the light and studying them before placing them in different piles. “That’s Devvie,” Linus says. “His assistant. She lives here, too.”

I limp around the studio, touching Felix’s things gently, the pencils, the stray pieces of paper, the jars and tubes, the amazing and voluminous detritus: birds’ feathers, stones of various sizes, old animal bones, wrinkled photographs, postcards with loopy cursive bearing exotic postmarks, a red mask, boxes of matches, heavy cloth-covered art books, jars and crusted tubes of paints, so many paints. One table has a series of watercolors on paper strewn about, slight and gentle washes of purple, conelike flowers. Another table is just books, heaps of them, open to different images of paintings and drawings, five or six Post-it notes pressed to each page with words like Climate of the palette, Echo/Answer, Don’t lie. The floor is layered with old paint; I trip on a pair of battered clogs.

I look again at the canvases on the walls; I want to say they’re sunsets, but they’re not so literal. Something deeper, something inside the body, a feeling? Isn’t it beautiful? Felix said to me. The colors are doing something together, I’m sure of it, I can feel it; playing off each other; some relationship is being described that I can’t put into words, but looking at them excites me, fills me up, blunts the ache. I look at Felix’s art supplies and wish I could do something right now, make something of my own. I remember what Ariel said at the art opening about Tony Padilla’s boat-paint paintings: Colors by themselves can be a story. Ariel’s paintings were a story beneath a surface of dark and light. I smile shyly at Linus.

“Yummy, yes?” She claps her hands, giddy.

—

Felix pokes the meat on the grill like it’s still alive. Smoke froths his glasses and he rubs them on the edge of his shirt. I look at his gnarled fingers, the thickness of his wrists and knuckles. His skin is flecked with the faintest remnants of paint.

We’re gathered around a long wooden table outside. The air is crisp. Tanner has lent me a fleece pullover. Linus is slicing a pungent white cheese and Tanner is carving slices of avocado. Devvie, the assistant, is in the house, fixing drinks and feeding the ancient, limping wolfhound. In the distance, the horse whinnies inside the stable. Strange sounds come from the dark desert beyond us. Whoops and whistles; rustling and bickering.

Felix slaps the glossy meat onto a platter and sets it on the table, flicking his napkin over his lap. He looks at the sky. “Probably one of the last times we’ll be able to be out here like this.” He glances over at me. “December is when we get the snow. It’s the most beautiful month here.”

He looks over his glasses at me and takes a long drink of wine, sighing appreciatively after he swallows.

“This heartbreak,” he says, sitting at the table, placing a napkin on his lap. “And I don’t mean what happened with that young man, because those things, they come and go, it’s one of the painful lessons we learn. I think you are having a different sort of heartbreak. Maybe a kind of heartbreak of being in the world when you don’t know how to be. If that makes any sense?”

He takes another sip of wine. “Everyone has that moment, I think, the moment when something so…momentous happens that it rips your very being into small pieces. And then you have to stop. For a long time, you gather your pieces. And it takes such a very long time, not to fit them back together, but to assemble them in a new way, not necessarily a better way. More, a way you can live with until you know for certain that this piece should go there, and that one there.”

“That’s an awful lot to lay on her, Grandpa,” Tanner says. “She’s just a kid.”

Felix laughs. “Then I’ll shut up. Ignore me. I’m just a blathering old fart.”

I keep my head down. I don’t want to cry at the table in front of these people so I fill my mouth with the salty meat. I slide my fingers under my thighs to keep them from trembling, listen to everyone chatter. I am so empty inside, so ravenous for something that I feel like I could eat for days and not fill myself.

Later, in my single bed in the quiet room, the window cracked open just a little to the luminous sky, the cool air on my face, I do think about momentous. Was my father my first momentous? He was there, and then he wasn’t, and I wasn’t supposed to ask about him or cry, or be anything, really, because my mother was so upset.

Maybe Ellis was a puzzle piece, a big and momentously beautiful one that I knocked out of the puzzle box. I’m not sure what Riley was yet. Maybe he was part of the assembling, too? And I’m still not done?

I’m so unwhole. I don’t know where all the pieces of me are, how to fit them together, how to make them stick. Or if I even can.