The Hare Read online

  Bennett pulled into Jiffy’s Wash n’ Wax, which had just opened for the day. A thin dark-skinned man — Jiffy himself? — was checking the three giant vacuums that squatted together along the far edge of the lot. Bennett drove past these, lined himself up for the wash on the designated track. The car didn’t seem dirty. And yet Rosie sensed urgency, Bennett tapping his fingers on the steering wheel, and not in time to the music.

  When Jiffy came to the window, Bennett slapped a twenty in his palm, “Hey, man, the super wash, please. And if you can really get under it, I’d appreciate it.”

  The tracks pulled the BMW into the flailing octopus arms at the entrance. The rubbery strips slapped and flapped against the car, over the windows and roof and Rosie felt a moment’s intense panic of claustrophobia. She might be entering a horror movie or an episode of The Twilight Zone and something terrible and quick was waiting for her in the dark. A dead, run-over zombie-man perhaps. Jets of water now shot at the car, and soap blubbed over the windscreen. She stayed still and silent, Carly could not be heard, only roaring, whooshing. Bennett lit up a cigarette and the smoke, trapped inside, pricked her eyes. She gripped the seat.

  Why are we here, she wanted to ask him.

  She knew the answer but then she didn’t, didn’t know anything, the drop was precipitous, a ride at the fair without any safety harness. What might there be under the car? If it hadn’t been a carpet. What needed to be washed off? Because if she was going to ask questions, she must be prepared for the answers. About what might have become lodged in the wheels or various joints and axle-whatevers underneath.

  However. However like a foothold, a handhold, a hand up and out, so she gripped fast to the however: many things, other than carpets, might find themselves in the middle of the road at night. A deer, hit by a previous car. A duffle bag someone had accidentally left on top of their car as they’d driven off. Cushions, part of a sofa, a small mattress. Plenty of things were soft, yet not squishy, things with an internal integrity. How accurately her memory retained the sensation.

  She glanced back; the package of Tsarist jewels was no longer there. Possibly, last night hadn’t even happened. She knew the way memory could feel spongy underfoot — a marshy uncertainty.

  Then they were out in the blazing summer morning and she wondered why Bennett had brought her with him, he could have left her at the boathouse as he often did with a pile of Penguin Classics to read and her art materials. Did he want her to know the car was clean, they wouldn’t have to worry about a problem with the police, just, say, if there was one? Or, better: that there was nothing to worry about in the first place, as they’d done nothing wrong?

  “Are you hungry?” he turned onto the Post Road. “I’m starving.”

  Maybe, after all, he just wanted to take her to breakfast and give the car a quick wash on the way there. She put her hand on his large thigh, and he covered it with his, lifted it, kissed her fingertips. She felt the thrill of being chosen.

  Rosie had been five when the clock had stopped and a neighbor collected her from kindergarten. The neighbor would not explain, but drove her to Gran’s house, and she’d walked alone up the cracked cement path toward Gran, who waited at her front door. Gran’s eyes like bruised plums had frightened her, her mouth opened, she said, “You’ll live with me now.” She did not say, There’s been a terrible accident. Your mother and father are dead. Gran did not bend to comfort, but she’d made up the bed, put out a clean towel. Gran could not herself speak the words, so it took Rosie some time to understand her parents were not alive anymore. Even after the funeral, it was a year before she grasped the deadness of death. The full stop with nothing after it. Gran had refused to explain the manner of their dying, other than a car crash. Gran said details were maudlin, satisfying curiosity, and curiosity was a kind of greed. It was as if Rosie’s parents had walked into a tunnel and had never come out, and no one went to look for them, no one even mentioned their names ever again. Yet Rosie stood alone at the hot, roaring entrance, peering into the darkness.

  Her dead parents’ life insurance money had been put aside to pay for her college education. There wasn’t much, she’d have to go to a community college, work nights and weekends. Gran had told her: “Your father wanted you to learn a solid trade and marry a solid man.” Rosie had wondered. Because she had been a small child when her parents died, and it seemed unlikely that they’d started to worry about her career and romantic prospects.

  Parsons School of Design, then, was not what Gran had had in mind. Rosie had known this, and did not tell Gran she was applying. Instead, Gran witnessed her filling out applications for Worcester Poly and UMass. Parsons was a joke, a fantasy, because Rosie knew she’d never get in. The idea of studying art was wildly extravagant, like wearing velvet or hats with tall feathers. Gran wanted Rosie to study nursing or become a teacher. The aptitude test Rosie had taken on Career Day showed ambiguous results: carpenter, architect, sanitation worker. Yet when she put pencil to paper in art class, she understood lines, shading, shape, how to bend them, butter them, stiffen them — the process of taking something from inside her head and making it external was rudimentary. Easy. So much else — the peopled world — was intimidating, sometimes incoherent.

  Was she stupid? Was there something wrong with her brain? The way ideas in math would seem clear and she’d be excited, but then try to apply what she thought she’d learned and find herself in the middle of an equation with absolutely no idea how x might = y. The equation broke apart in her hands like fragile china, and she’d feel panicked and hot and she could smell her own sweat. Or conversations began, someone finally decided to talk to her, and then she’d forget what she was saying, her sentence would halt, dead air

  — Like that. As if whatever she’d begun to say wasn’t important enough, the words themselves had run out of interest with her tongue, dried up, curled up, gone to sleep, run off, who knew where, and people would just turn away thinking she was a weirdo. Sometimes, walking home, she’d realize she had gone past her Gran’s house, several blocks, or she’d turned too early and was in another neighborhood entirely.

  Though there was Chris, a slim, nervous geek. They kissed and did minor sex things, first base, second base, and, from time to time, with a sense more of obligation than lust, he tried for third. They were together because no one else would have them. Each to the other offered a kind of protection, just as wearing a coat on a cold day was better than no coat. The coat of Chris had been warm and comfortable.

  Gran hated New York City — she always used the entire name, New York City. New York City was an affront to her careful living, her fear of color and loud noises and garish behavior, her equal terror of greed and of poverty. New York City was full of vulgar people like Leona Helmsley and Donald Trump as well as criminals, discos, and homosexuals. Gran’s frugality was the post-Depression variety: she put the car in neutral when going downhill to save fuel — even though the area around Lowell was relatively flat.

  Her frugality of love had deeper roots that went generations back on her mother’s side, into the mean soil of Scotland and the mean lives it barely sustained. Life had proved Gran’s distrust of love correct: she’d loved Jim Monroe, and he’d died. She’d loved their son, also Jim Monroe, and he’d first abandoned her for a woman and then died. Gran was not, therefore, going to make the same mistake with her granddaughter.

  Rosie’s art made manifest this frugality: for her Parsons application she’d melted down all the wax crayons she’d ever had — because Gran assiduously kept every single one and they were the sale-price colors no one wanted anyway — and from the resulting vomit-colored blob, carved a tiny, exquisitely accurate sculpture of herself. She’d titled it: “This could be useful one day.” The sophisticates of Parsons could not appreciate Rosie’s complete lack of irony; they thought the piece a brilliant statement on the nihilistic angst of teenagers in suburban Massachusetts, and offered her a full scholarship including a stipend.

 
As a child used to playing by herself in a quiet house with few toys, Rosie had a talent for the make-shift and a skill for replication. Once at Parsons, she had struggled to be bold and grand, she infuriated her teachers who gave her gold leaf and pig’s blood and broken crockery and glue. Sometimes, she felt there was grandness in her — a burning sun of creativity, and if she could reach in under her ribcage she’d find the buttons and undo them one by one, and out would come another girl entirely, who looked and acted more like Cyndi Lauper and she’d create the kind of daring works the school expected by dipping her entire head in buckets of paint and shaking it over canvas. In the meantime, she was a dull girl in the back of the class, studious and intent; she took careful bites of the raucous city, up to the Midtown museums, a walk through Central Park where she might buy a pretzel with mustard, and once, she took the bus all the way to The Cloisters to see the unicorn tapestries.

  There, in the solemn stone hall, she had stared at the breathless animal surrounded by men and their dogs who wanted it for wanting’s sake — not meat or fur. She understood the unicorn as a symbol of purity, but the men didn’t even want to keep it, didn’t want to put it in a cage to marvel at or try to tame, domesticate. No: they killed it with dogs and spears. The hunters were propelled by some dark, unquestioned instinct. Rosie felt the tapestries physically. Her mouth filled with saliva and her blood seemed to move from her head to her stomach. Was this revulsion? She stared at the tapestries for a long time but the feeling didn’t abate; it shifted to her ribs, a dull ache, as if she was winded. The unicorn didn’t really have an expression. Maybe this was the limit of the medium. Or maybe the artist had made a choice to portray supplication, acceptance. The unicorn understood its duty to men.

  She’d met Bennett at the Museum of Modern Art, where she was filling one of the cavernous Sundays other, hipper students spent in bed, recovering from the night before at CBGBs or a party in a Tribeca loft with Keith Haring. The lesbians, two doors down in her dorm, for instance. They smoked a ton of weed. They’d triggered the fire alarm once, and the story went around that one of them had given the firemen head to keep Parsons’ administration from finding out. Rosie liked to believe this was true because those girls were fierce and wielded their sexuality like a mallet. They were bawdy. She wished she had their blood, even a pint of it, even a thimble-full so she could stare down the pervy guy selling The Village Voice on the corner. When she passed he’d make slurping noises. When the lesbians came in his direction, he walked briskly away as if he’d remembered an important appointment.

  MoMA was empty at this hour, just after opening. The museum was familiar to her now, she knew where everyone was, Hopper, Rothko, O’Keeffe. Rosie sometimes felt her solitude in specific places of her body; today it was round and solid in her belly like an old donut. She felt the weight of it pulling her shoulders forward, so she straightened herself up. No one was watching, no one ever watched Rosie, she was not eye-catching, but she wanted the eyes of strangers to pause, to simply acknowledge her breathing existence, and then, maybe, wonder — for the briefest moment — if she was interesting. The feeling of sitting alone in the vast, noisy cafeteria back at high school in Lowell on a day Chris had been sick was always with her; the sitting and wondering which was worse: being alone and the other kids snickering at her aloneness; or being so invisible no one even noticed she was alone.

  Shoulders back again, and out, along the hanger of her collar bone. Gran, at least, had taught her how to stand as a tall girl. She entered the Futurists gallery, Giacometti’s wiry dog and skinny people. She was not convinced by Léger with his Legolike colors and squat structures; he seemed to be trying too hard.

  Perhaps she recognized the fault.

  But Boccioni swept his images across the canvas, she could feel their movement across her face, like a phalanx of ghosts passing through a room, the way the past transitioned into the present and future: the whole concept of time being unrestrained. Once, she’d found the imprint of a bird’s wing in the snow behind Gran’s house — that was the idea, capturing the momentary in a way that didn’t feel stolid, or like imprisonment. It was part of an on-going story outside the picture’s frame. The frame was a restriction, a construct, no different to a camera lens that went “click,” and the very word “capturing” was therefore problematic.

  “You are transfixed,” a man said. “An acolyte.”

  And because she was in the middle of her idea, she was the person who’d chosen to be in MoMA due to her preference for contemporary art over eggs bennie, she spoke without restraint or shame, an entire sentence that even ran on: “He’s doing with time what Picasso and Braque did with space, he’s breaking it apart, de-constructing, he’s saying there is no time, only what we impose.”

  Then she blushed, she could not even look at the man standing next to her, though she could smell him, the sharp astringent of his aftershave, the starch of his shirt. When she did glance, she noted the smidge of shaving cream in his ear and a worn paperback copy of Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus in the pocket of his tweed jacket.

  He was looking at her. “Do you work here?”

  Which was flattering because the most happening people worked at MoMA, one of the lesbians had a summer internship. Rosie parted her lips, words came out. “Time is energy, we can’t contain it.”

  “You agree with Boccioni, then?”

  “I have no basis to disagree. But that’s not the same thing.”

  “No basis?”

  “I’m 18, I’ve lived in Lowell, Massachusetts, all my life.”

  “You have the profile of a silent screen actress.”

  Again, she felt the heat of a blush.

  “But the point of art,” he went on, “is that you can be from Lowell, Massachusetts, and still understand.”

  “No. That’s not the point of art.” Why was she speaking like this? What mechanisms were slipping into place? Perhaps because he was a stranger and it was Sunday and the lesbians were having brunch together in a café on Christopher Street and it was bitterly cold outside. Katya had a tattoo on her arm and May wore Doc Martens, they were acknowledged by other Parsons students as gifted performance artists, they knew Annie Sprinkle and were doing a performance around menstrual blood. The event was being held in an abandoned meat-packing warehouse just off Hudson. Katya had invited Rosie, and May had said, “Squeak,” and Katya had elbowed May, who’d snorted out a laugh. Rosie’d had no idea how to interpret that laugh — laughing at or with? The next day Rosie found a drawing of a mouse on her door, the mouse was spurting blood from its rear end, presumably a period. The blood dripped down to the floor, where there was a ticket to the event. There were bloody fingerprints all over the ticket and the words please cum.

  “The point of art,” Rosie heard herself. “Is that you don’t understand meaning, there’s no ‘meaning’ or ‘understanding’ only fragmentary connection, where your consciousness connects with that of the artist. Because the artist, himself, herself, is working in an intense yet balanced dialectic of inner, personal space and outer experience of culture and society. ‘Understanding’ and ‘meaning’ are static, while art is continually evolving and synthesizing. Even as the paint dries, the work is already becoming something else for the viewer, the painter has already let it go.”

  The man considered, hand on chin. “Did you read that somewhere?”

  “I —” she began, and ended. Ended where she always began. Stupid and dull.

  Yet, miraculously, he waited, and when he realized she had no more words, he made a small, possibly sympathetic smile. She noticed the size of him, six feet, broad, with a lion’s mane of hair. “What I mean,” he said, “is that sounds didactic not visceral. Like something you’ve learned, but not experienced. Art needs to be felt. Don’t you think?” He tapped his heart with his fist.

  Rosie nodded. She thought of the unicorn tapestries.

  “And I wonder,” the man went on. “If we dragged the hot dog vendor on the corner in her
e and showed him any of these paintings what he might have to say.”

  She waited. She hoped he could not see the nervous dampness on her upper lip. The tag in her sweater was scratching the nape of her neck. She’d bought it in a thrift store on Broadway, thinking it was hip. But she suspected the bright blue didn’t suit her, not just the hue but the noise.

  Yet he did not move away, he regarded her, expectantly.

  When she did not answer, he frowned a little: “Should we? Go and get him?”

  “No.” More of a breath than a word, a silly giggle.

  “He’d be completely underwhelmed. Let me tell you. He’d laugh if we told him how much these paintings were worth, were revered, and we’d label him a barbarian, a dolt. A lot of this —” the man swept his arms out, around, and at that moment she focused on the small blot of shaving cream in his ear and she wondered why he was here, alone, on a Sunday morning without a wife, a lover to wipe it away. Was he like her? Pretending not to be lonely? “— makes us feel important because we understand it. But we’re cheating because we’ve been told what it means. In books, by teachers, on the goddam pretentious little blurbs on the wall here.”

  “Not all great art is like that,” she dared.

  Yet: what if she honestly didn’t know the unicorn was a symbol of purity, of Christ. Would she just look at the old-fashioned needlepoint and think, Wow, that was a lot of work?

  He stepped up close to the Boccioni, almost put his nose on the canvas and Rosie saw the security guard shift and attend. “Some. Yes. There are artists who make you feel, even if you can’t label the feeling, even if the feeling is discomfort. De Chirico, Turner. So much of the rest, it’s just, just —” a dismissive wave of his hands “— decoration.”