Girl in Pieces

After a week, my fog lifts a little bit. I still sleep a lot, and I’m so tired, but walking doesn’t hurt as much, and it doesn’t seem like we’re going anywhere soon, so I start investigating Felix’s house, which is complicated and rambling. From the front, it appears small and square, but once you’re inside, it spreads out in several directions at once, its complex nature hidden by cottonwoods and octopuslike cane chollas. (That’s what the tiny book Linus gives me says they are. I take it with me when I walk outside. It distracts me to do simple things, like put a name to a plant.)

There are several bedrooms, all with plain beds and simple wooden dressers. Patterned wool blankets are folded neatly and placed at the foot of each bed. The main room is enormous, with dark, heavy beams crisscrossing the ceiling, like the bones of a skeleton, which Tanner tells me are called vigas, and there’s an enormous stone fireplace against one wall. Devvie keeps it lit on the cooler nights and it’s there that I like to sit, close to its warmth.

Felix has one room for just books, another with only records and a stereo and a slanted, forlorn piano in the center. The kitchen is at the back of the house, off a deck that looks out into the rolling, dark hills. The stable is down the slope, surrounded by coyote fencing.

The studio, Linus tells me, was built with something called genius grant money many years ago. It adjoins the back of the house, rising barnlike over the hills. At night, the coyotes come out, howling, wandering. Felix points out low-flying hawks to me during the day, their forms swooping over the cottonwoods in dark arcs. They cook together, Linus and Tanner and Felix: large, sumptuous meals of fruits and meats, breads and cheeses, papery spinach salads with walnuts and salty feta cheese.

“You know,” Felix says to me one morning, spooning blueberries onto my plate at breakfast. “I don’t want you to think I’m some old workhorse, slaving away every day at my paints and pictures. Sometimes I don’t do any work at all in my studio! I just sit. Listen to music. Page through my books. Maybe write down something I remember. Maybe write a letter.”

He pours more coffee into his cup. “Sometimes not working can be work, just more gently. It’s important to just be, Charlie, every once in a while.”

My feet keep getting better. The cuts and gouges heal up nicely, though they’re still tender. Tanner takes off my arm bandages and lets me see the new slashes, the new rivers. I feel hesitantly over the fresh lines on my stomach, but I don’t look down.

I didn’t go too deep, he says; I didn’t need stitches. “Let’s think of that as a good thing.” He drops the old bandages in the trash, unfurls a fresh roll of gauze.

One night while Felix is opening another bottle of wine, Linus calls me over to a tiny laptop set up on the kitchen table. It’s been two weeks now and I’ve noticed that Linus disappears with the laptop every night after dinner for an hour. Tanner said she was talking to her kids over Skype.

All I could say was “Oh.” I didn’t even know she had children. Or I guess she must have told me, but I wasn’t listening. Ashamed, I realized I had never really asked Linus anything about her life, or her problems with drinking, because I was so consumed with Riley.

Linus points to the screen. I squint. It’s a newspaper article, with a photo of artwork on a wall. My artwork. Manny and Karen and Hector and Leonard. It’s dated two days after the art show.

Linus raps me on the skull. “Look, dummy. It’s a review of the gallery show. Listen.” She reads from the review, which sounds nice enough, if a little snarky; the writer uses a lot of words I don’t understand; I wonder why they just can’t say if they liked anything or not. I catch some of what Linus is saying: …seemingly caught adrift amid the digi-heavy and Technicolor nostalgia is a series of charcoal portraits…revealingly sympathetic…classical quirk….

“I think they liked your drawings, Charlie!” Linus nudges me in the hip. Her breath is fragrant with honey and green tea. Felix wanders over, waving a finger at Linus. “Click there, click there,” he says. Linus clicks; the screen fills with the faces of Hector and Karen, Leonard with his sorrowful eyes and hopeful mouth.

Felix says simply, “Very nice. Very strong line, my dear.” He removes his glasses. “But you don’t feel it.”

I shake my head, surprised. How can he say I didn’t feel it? I liked all of them and I worked hard. I wish I could answer out loud, but my words are still buried.

“It’s all there, dear. Attention to detail. Beautiful gestural moments.” He looks right in my eyes. “But you don’t love this kind of drawing. Or, at least, have a complicated passion for it. You need one or the other. Ambivalence is not a friend to art.”

Felix pats my cheek. “You have your skill, Charlotte. Now give your skill an emotion.” He wanders back to the wine bottle. “I have a room you can use,” he calls to me. “Devvie will get it ready for you tomorrow.”

Linus nods. “We aren’t going anywhere for a while. True Grit’s closed for God knows how long. Riley stole a hell of a lot of money, you know; people haven’t been paid. Might as well enjoy ourselves.”