Page 39 - WTP Vol. X #2

Heat wrapped her temples in a tight band. “I’d better get back to the house.”
She shut off the barn lights and pushed open its wide door.
Alfred squinted in the high sun of the summer after- noon. “I’m not sure the gallery will want these.”
“That’s not my problem.”
Her left eye twitched. Alfred knew how to play on her fears. Juicy words formed in her mind. She’d lose her New York show. Her standing in contemporary art, slow to come and forever fragile, would weaken. Yes, awful possibilities. Yet Alfred had stood up for her husband’s revolutionary art, his “ugly” work (when other critics had decried it) because Christian was breaking new ground. “Thick black enamel layers, nails and cigarette butts on his canvases—they are necessary for greatness,” he wrote. Why couldn’t Alfred champion her new journey?
Vic raced up the steps and returned with Alfred’s shabby briefcase. “Here.”
“Let’s not leave it like this, Vic. Let’s sweat it out.”
Sweat it out? That meant caving to his will. She would not narrow her artistic vision and deprive herself of honoring her grief.
Vic’s spine stiffened. “You’d better go.”
Alfred leaned in to kiss her cheek, a gesture of affec- tion that she refused. Blotched red marks crept across his nostrils. The man needed everything “right” between them before he could return to his child wife Ellen for praise. If only he’d had the balls to find a better, more mature lover as Vic would—if she ever wanted a relationship again.
Her arm rose in a half-wave.
Alfred eased into his borrowed Disney car like a gan- gly puppet. Vic welcomed the spinning away of the wheels in her driveway.
Inside, Vic unbuttoned her dress and pulled up a bathing suit. It felt like rope over her thighs. Hadn’t a woman artist, a fellow abstractionist in New York, told her a year ago that Alfred didn’t like her work? That he disapproved of her stark shapes and “odd hieroglyphics.” Vic had poo-pooed these words, dismissed them as jealous carping. She felt their bite now. Vic slid on Christian’s high rubber boots,
“Only she mattered at this precise
moment. With a brush, filled with black paint, Vic signed her name on the wall. The letters pointed up to the rafter window that let in the Northern light. She claimed her husband’s favorite corner in the barn as hers.”
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