The Prodigal
Forty-six
WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, I was in the studio trying to make sense of my quarterly sales report and deposit slip from Clarice. I guessed it looked okay, but I had no idea what the heck I’d sold, how much I earned—other than the amount of the deposit—or what I still had available. And this report didn’t even include the showing in Vegas. I was about to shove everything in a drawer when Penny came in to do the Ice Queen books. Her job was a little slower now that we weren’t shipping as much from our online store. Raquethon had exclusive rights to our racquetball clothes. We weren’t doing dying in the studio, either. Melody’s summer line had sold out long ago and she decided the next line wouldn’t be released until May.
“Hey, Tony. How’s it going.”
“Oh, fine, Penny. Thanks. I’m just trying to figure out my finances and the royalty statement. I don’t know how much I make or what’s been sold. I don’t even know if I’ve got art for a show in the spring or if I’m living on borrowed time.”
“Let me see.—Okay.—This is inventory. Clarice hasn’t released the last five Bacchanalia prints yet, so you’ve got a whole suite that hasn’t seen the light of day. You’ve got three of the five suites of all twenty prints that haven’t been sold. The posters and art with Allison are going well, but this only shows her opening in Seattle. The Portland show was the same weekend you were in Las Vegas, so neither of those will show up until the next quarter report.”
Penny proceeded to explain my royalty statement to me, gave me a list of exactly what was in the vault, showed me what was on consignment to various galleries, and even did a recap of my grant for the chapel, even though it wasn’t on the current report. She had a handle on everything.
“Do you keep track of all this on a regular basis?” I asked.
“Well, since there’s less to do at Ice Queen right now, Melody asked me to bring everything current for your partnership so taxes could be filed for each of you. It’s fascinating how you set this relationship up as a business. I’m just filling in for a while.”
“Penny, I feel like I’m out of touch with a lot of this. Can I hire you part-time to be my business manager? I don’t want you to overlap with Clarice, but I need to understand all this stuff on a regular basis. I just want to know what I contribute.”
“Oh, you’re doing fine there. A lot of this is in the work I already do for the partnership. I don’t want to double dip, but if you could see your way clear to approve another hour or two a week, we should be able to educate you on your finances.”
“Thank you, Penny.”
“Just don’t ask me to pose for you. Yet.”
“I don’t know. I’ve thought a few times about doing a portrait of you. Your face is absolutely classic.”
“Yeah, but that’s not all you paint and I’m not quite ready to get naked with you.”
“Don’t worry, Penny. I would never pressure you into doing something like that. I have lots of models.”
“Hey. Don’t write it off. I said ‘yet.’”
It was exciting to finally be painting the frescoes. It wasn’t fast. I was still drawing and writing the stories. Each time I finished a painting, Andy would ask me to tell the story. I was becoming more comfortable with the storytelling. There was a difference between writing a story and walking through the chapel and telling a story. I tried to maintain painting a panel twice a week.
Even though the chapel wasn’t officially finished or dedicated, the Jesuit brothers began holding a kind of evening service there and I could listen to them singing. It wasn’t a mass or anything, so I guess it didn’t matter that the chapel hadn’t been consecrated. It was a kind of meditative song or chant and it made me feel peaceful. I asked Andy about it and he said it was called Taizé and started in France seventy years ago. Not all the people at the services wore clerical collars, and a couple of times even Whitney came in.
Saturday afternoon, Kate and I walked quietly back to the car at the end of a disastrous ‘date’. I’d thought that if I took her to one of her favorite places in the world, she’d relax and remember what great times we’d had there. And she did. Apparently, too well.
We’d laughed and talked, walking hand-in-hand around the nearly deserted zoo. There weren’t many people who thought the zoo was the place to visit in December. We stuck with the indoor exhibits most of the day since that was where most of the animals were anyway.
I told her we’d all missed going to a concert at the zoo this year. The past two years had been such a treat to us.
“I should have sent you the tickets. I didn’t even realize I had them in my bag,” Kate said.
“What?”
“I bought us tickets last fall when they went on sale. July thirtieth—Indigo Girls. I figured we’d all be back from watching you win the World Games and be ready to celebrate. Instead I was… selling myself.” Kate started crying. Shit. This was not why I brought her here.
“Let’s put it behind us, Kate,” I whispered as I held her in my arms.
“I can’t put it behind me. I was so desperate, Tony. When I realized what I’d signed, I tried to charm him out of it. I offered to buy him out of it. The only way… I offered myself.” Kate cried and held herself to me. I was so angry I couldn’t even put my arms around her.
“You told me he forced you.”
“He did. But it was my fault. The first time he kissed me I realized I’d made a mistake. I was so overwhelmed with self-loathing that I froze. He kept going and I started to fight him off. I said, ‘No. I can’t do this.’ He just kept pulling my clothes off. I pushed and scratched, but I couldn’t get away from the constant hammering in my head that this was what I deserved. I deserved to be humiliated and raped. I deserved everything he did. I hated myself. You think I deserved it, too.”
I managed to bring my hands up to Kate’s shoulders and tried to hold her. She pushed herself away from me.
“I understand what Wendy felt when she went back to Rafe. I understand why she felt that way. I understand what a terrible, dirty, self-centered person I am. I wash—douche—every day, but I’ll never be clean again. I lost everything. I’ll never have… never have you back.”
I protested. I tried to reach for her—just to hold her hand again—but my own dark rage blinded me. No matter what her intent had been, she’d been raped. I said all the right words, but I couldn’t get them in the right order. I couldn’t get myself under control. In the end, I drove Kate home and went to the studio.
The canvas was strewn with bodies. Beautiful nude bodies bloodied by the monster that towered over them. I’d nailed a square canvas to a rectangular canvas to make an “L” lying on its side. I’d layered the paint on like plaster, so thick that you couldn’t see the seam.
I could recognize them all amidst the rubble and flames. Melody, her head at an odd angle, eyes wide open but vacant. Lissa, her torn limbs lying beside her broken body, her womb torn open. Wendy, her back flayed. Kate, gripped in the claws of the monster towering over them, terror in her eyes as he devoured her. Bree. Whitney. Allison. Beth. Rio. Amy. And shadows of more behind them. I could name each one. Sonia. Amanda. June. Tonya. Sandra. Erika. Rachel. Every woman I’d ever lusted for, touched, or painted. All broken. All dead. Everything I considered precious in ruin. The Guernica of my soul.
The beast was blind. It was Rage.
The rage bled from me as I stared at what I’d painted. I’d felt it. It burned through me. As I stared, I felt the horror and then the remorse. It was beyond repair. All I could do was tear it down and rebuild. My anger couldn’t focus on Slimy Dick. It overflowed on all that I touched—everything I held dear. My anger had gone beyond an emotion; it was a disease.
I let myself absorb what I’d painted and wrote the story in my mind. Then I held the palette knife like a dagger and ripped through the canvas, scraping the paint and tearing the canvas until nothing on it was recognizable. No face, no body, no theme. I broke the frame, smashed it all together and deposited it in the dumpster.
Not only could I not display this, no one could ever know it existed.
By the time classes let out in mid-December, I had four panels finished. I completed two more before we went to Nebraska on the twenty-first—winter solstice. It was harder to do those last two because Adolfo and Morgan had already left, so I had to work the intonaco coat of thin fine plaster and transfer of the cartoon myself. Almost myself. Kate came to the chapel with me and even though she couldn’t do the plaster, she worked as my assistant and held the cartoon in place while I dusted the perforations with charcoal.
She was quiet—almost servile.
We slowly began to rebuild. We talked quietly. I told her about the darkness that had overcome me and asked for her forgiveness. She suggested that I paint it, so I told her what I’d done in the studio. She talked about sitting in the studio with her portfolio tearing drawings out and ripping them apart. We shared a common emotion different than love, but strong and compelling. In our anger, our horror, our remorse, our shame, we bonded again and built on it. I saw Kate in a new light. I’d always loved her and always would, but now I saw her as human—just as vulnerable as I was to emotion, depression, and turmoil.
Kate’s paintings were coming along and the ceramics studio had begun casting tiles for the fourteen Stations. They weren’t huge, but as simple as Kate’s paintings were at first glance, they were incredibly complex when you looked closely. Kate laid out bits of ceramic tile in the studio and even though she wasn’t going to personally set the tiles in the mosaic, she was intent on proving her concepts. When she had helped me get my drawings transferred so I could start painting, she would leave for the studio and work as long and hard a day as I did.
On the days between my paintings, I went to the studio and helped Kate. She showed me the technique she was using and how the team would glue the tiles to the fiberglass mesh that would in turn be cemented to the wall. They’d had the option of sheetrocking the interior, but the Jesuits wanted the feel of stone.
As I learned how Kate approached her work, I gained a new appreciation for how her mind was organized and how meticulous she was in planning out her drawings. Each mosaic was based on an oil pastel that Kate created. They were beautiful. I couldn’t imagine how she would capture the subtle detail in a mosaic, but her team included a draftsman who used photographs and projections to detail a master print that would guide the ceramic artists. Kate was managing an incredible piece of work and would come out of it owning all the paintings, the print rights, and the plans for reproducing the series elsewhere.
I’d rented a scissor-lift like I’d used on the wall mural, so I didn’t have to paint from a rickety step ladder. I was working inside and even though I kept a hardhat with me all the time, I didn’t put it on unless someone said something about inspection. Six panels completed before Christmas. Only thirty-four more to go.
“We should have waited and all come in on Sunday,” I laughed after I carted our luggage to the guest room in Nebraska. Just the five of us. Jack, of course, was sharing my old room with the boys, though we knew that when Lexi arrived tomorrow the number of people in that room would change.
“Are you kidding? Look at the boys with Grandpa Saul. They practically flew without the plane,” Lissa laughed.
Bree, Sam, and Allison were coming in the next day. Bree promised Allie she’d wait until her Sunday matinee was over to fly out together. I was surprised to hear that Sam was bringing a woman with him as a guest. Mom was worried about sleeping arrangements and didn’t want to assume Sam and his guest would be sleeping together.
“Well, better with Sam than in the guest room,” Melody laughed. “It takes a special sort of person to brave the room-sized bed, Deb.” It was wonderful how relaxed Melody and Lissa were with Mom.
“Um… maybe she and I could toss sleeping bags in the living room,” Kate said quietly.
We all turned toward Kate aghast, but Wendy was in action before any of us could say anything.
“Excuse us, Deb,” Wendy said politely. “We need to talk.” She had hold of Kate’s arm and was taking her up the stairs. Melody and Lissa were right behind.
“Hadn’t you better go up, too?” Mom asked me.
“I don’t know. Sometimes it seems there is no right thing to do.”
“Then do what your heart tells you, Tony.”
I hugged Mom and headed up the stairs.
“There have been plenty of times when people in the big bed didn’t take part in sex,” Wendy was saying. “Me, for example. Just being here doesn’t mean you consent to making love with us, no matter how much we want you—or how much you want to.” Holy shit! Wendy was reading Kate the riot act for saying she wouldn’t be sleeping in the guest room. “It’s time to get your head on straight, Kate. I know what you are feeling better than anyone. You helped me through it. We’re not going to let you turn your back on us anymore.”
“I just feel so…”
“…alone,” supplied Wendy. “Look at us. Don’t we exist?”
Kate struggled. She hadn’t spent a night with us since she’d come home. She’d spent a few nights with Wendy, but they just cuddled and slept. Still, she didn’t have to sleep with us if she didn’t want to.
“Kate, the living room sofa folds out into a bed. If you want, I’ll ask Mom if we can make it up,” I said. “We’d all rather you stayed with us. We promise not to cross into your personal space.”
“As hard as that will be,” Melody said. It was Lissa, though who just moved over and hugged Kate.
“Stay with us, please?” she whispered. Kate nodded her head.
Saturday night in the big bed was uneventful. Everyone cuddled together and went to sleep. Kate was on the outside edge next to Wendy. I was in the middle with Melody and Lissa on the other side. Somehow, I was alone in the bed. Melody and Lissa hugged each other and Wendy had rolled toward Kate, whispering to her late into the night. Long after I had gone to sleep.
Sam, Bree, Allison, and Celia Jordan got in late Sunday night. Sam rented a car, so we didn’t go to the airport. Jack had picked Lexi up at noon. Beth’s folks picked her up from the same flight as Lexi, but by dinner she was with us.
“Sam,” I said when I could get him aside. “Mom is concerned that she doesn’t know the proper sleeping arrangement for you and Celia and she’s too embarrassed to ask. You’re welcome to share a bed if that’s what you’ve agreed to, or we can make up the living room sofa bed. But we need to know what to do.”
“Oh. I didn’t realize I hadn’t made it clear. Bree didn’t tell you? I… we… are living together. We don’t need an extra bed.”
“Thanks, Sam,” I said. “Mom will know how to welcome her now. Is everything okay… you know… with you and Bree and all?”
“Remarkably. I’ve never done all that well since her mother died. I think I’m doing better now. That means Bree is, too.”
“I’m glad to hear that, Sam.”
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