Being Roy, page 13
“See?” she explained, pivoting and jutting a hip so the stretchy black material tightened over her concave stomach. “With the boots on, it’s practically Amish.” Even if I hadn’t been dying to go to the opening, which I was, I would have signed up anyway. Someone had to keep Immy from ending up in the cloakroom, riding some poor coat check guy like Seabiscuit.
“I’ll be at the gallery, Mr. G. Wouldn’t miss it.”
Mr. Gaines put a finger under my chin and tilted it side to side. His exhale was sweet and sharp, like Dot’s cooking sherry. “You really should come to the sala, you know. It’s not good to work in isolation. You need to air out your ideas, bounce them around, argue over the greats. Consider it extra credit. Something’s working you over, Rob Roy. I can see that. It might be time to stop playing so hard to get. Let yourself get gotten. You’re an artist, for fuck’s sake.” He released my chin with a chuckle and strolled out of the studio. I knew Mr. Gaines had seen right through me to the truth in my self-portrait, which was probably why I made it in the first place. You can’t be forgiven for a sin you’ve never confessed.
ANY DEFENSIVE armor I’d shown up with at Mr. Gaines’s cottage that night, any lame excuse to duck out when the first skunky joint got passed my way, went right out the window when I walked in and saw the image projected on his living room wall. Someone had thought to pin up white poster paper this time, so the image was crisp and vivid. I moved toward it, crouching down beside a statue-still Beatrice, who once again manned the projector. “What’s it called?” I asked, not taking my eyes from the painting of a head and neck, split in half. It was the first time I’d ever spoken to Beatrice, but my driving need to know as much about the painting as possible overrode the awkward absence of an introduction.
One half of the figure was pasty and wan, a man with folded skin, a high forehead, and a receding corona of hair. His sloe-eyed gaze was placid and bovine. The other half was a dusky, aristocratic-looking woman with beribboned ebony hair rolled up and styled on top of her head. Half of her nose flared toward an exotic slash of cheekbone, and her subtly uptilted eye looked back at me with piercing intensity. Her upper lip was tinted by a fine mustache, her eyebrow black and broad as new pavement. Frida. The neck of the figure was rooted in an anatomically correct painting of a heart, golden on a red background with arteries and veins branching out in all directions toward a split sun and moon, a nautilus, and what looked like a thistle.
“It’s called Diego and Frida,” Beatrice said. She too looked mesmerized by the painting, the projection reflected in miniature on the large lenses of her glasses. I dropped out of my uncomfortable crouch and settled onto the floor beside her. Somewhere in the room, I heard Immy’s whinnying laugh and Mr. G.’s basso profundo, but they were just white noise.
“Who’s Diego?”
“Diego Rivera,” Beatrice supplied. “He was a famous Mexican muralist, one of the most celebrated artists of his time. He was also Frida’s husband. Twice.”
“Oh,” I said, feeling a little plummet in the center of my chest. I had assumed that the portrait was a depiction of two sides of the same person, the masculine and feminine—that Kahlo had given her male aspect an actual persona. When I looked at the painting, I saw male and female energy equally rooted in her heart, and equally important to her identity. It was exactly how I might paint my own portrait, I realized, only the masculine face would look a lot more like Oscar. The thought walloped me. My Os. He deserved so much better than someone who didn’t know if she wanted to be with him, or just be him. Beatrice turned to look at me. Her owlish eyes were the color of sea glass.
“You sound disappointed,” she said.
“I just thought it was something else. Like the painting was all her, you know?”
“Well, it kind of is,” Beatrice said, turning back to the painting. “Frida always talked about how Diego was a part of her, sometimes like a lover but also like a child. Check this one out.” Beatrice clicked a button to advance the slides on the projector. The images flew by, each one landing like a kick to the gut: Frida’s head mounted on the body of a stag shot through with arrows, Frida with shorn hair in masculine garb, Frida splayed in a pool of blood on a hospital bed with an umbilicus attached to a floating fetus, and on and on. Beatrice finally paused at a painting of a turbulent sky split into night and day. It hung over a mossy, monumental goddess-like figure, whose single visible breast wept milk. Nestled in her arms was Frida, all in red with her hair flowing loose. In Frida’s arms, naked and sweetly fat with a large third eye staring from the middle of his forehead, was Diego.
“Whoa,” I gasped.
“It has a really long title, but basically it represents everything—the universe, the earth, Mexico, Frida and Diego, all of it. He was everything to her and vice versa, though they both had other lovers. Men and women, in Frida’s case.” I chanced a sideways look at Beatrice, but there was nothing pointed in her tone. It was probably only a matter of time before the situation between Hadley and me hit the grapevine, but it obviously hadn’t made the rounds yet.
“That one’s pretty surreal,” I said, drawing my knees up to my chest. Looking at Frida’s paintings in the presence of someone else made me feel uncomfortable and exposed—like it was something that should be done in private.
“Yeah,” Beatrice agreed, propping her chin on her own updrawn knee. “But she didn’t really see herself as a Surrealist. She always said she just painted what she saw.”
“How do you know so much about her?” I asked, turning more fully to the girl beside me. She turned her shoulder in a little and thumbed through the box of slides in her lap, her body language shouting “Back off!”
“I did a paper on her for a history class. Mr. Gaines loaned me some books.”
I waited for her to say more, but nothing was forthcoming. I turned my attention back to the painting.
“Oh, Lord, the girl has gone and messed with my slides,” Mr. Gaines boomed, towering over us. “Now my cue cards are going to be all mixed up!”
Beatrice tilted her head back to look at him upside down. “Like you ever use cue cards! This one’s better to start with anyway. Start big, end small.”
Mr. Gaines lowered himself to his knees behind us on the carpet, and I could hear the popping of his large joints. “Take one of my classes. Then you get to vote on the slides,” he said, clicking the slide back to Diego and Frida.
“Create an eighth day in the week and maybe I will,” Beatrice huffed. “Girl can’t do every dang thing around here.”
“Woe is me, Desdemona,” Mr. Gaines said with an eye roll in my direction. Desdemona, the much-abused wife of Shakespeare’s Othello, was one of Mr. G.’s favorite pet names when he thought someone was getting a little more “poor me” than a private school girl had a right to. I felt the other girls in the room draw toward the projector in anticipation of Mr. Gaines holding forth on the night’s topic. I wanted to learn more about Frida Kahlo, but more than that, I wanted to be alone with her paintings so I could learn it straight from the artist herself.
“So you’ve met Frida, I see,” Mr. Gaines said, leaning toward me so he could swing his long legs out in front of him. “And what do you think of our Mexican dove?” I looked back up at Diego and Frida, but now all I could see was Oscar and Roy.
“I like her,” I said briskly, not quite ready to have my brain picked so soon after it had been blown out by Kahlo’s raw paintings.
“Nice try, honey,” Mr. Gaines chuckled. “You don’t get to just roll up in here and eat all my brie without making a contribution. Use your words now. What do you like about her?” The room was totally silent now, except for the clink of ice in Mr. G.’s heavy highball glasses. Frida put it all out there, I wanted to say. Even the parts of her that felt wrong or broken. Especially those parts. She didn’t hide, like I did. I didn’t say that, though, because the possibility that I had been hiding, behind my bravado and “fuck you” attitude, was too unexpected and ugly to trot out in a crowd of tipsy schoolgirls. I looked at Diego and Frida again and let myself think out loud.
“Well, her paintings remind me of that thing they say about dreams, you know? How they’re not literal, and how everything and everyone that populates them actually represents different parts of ourselves? How everything we see is just us, projected?”
Mr. Gaines laughed robustly and clapped a hand on my shoulder.
“Oh, honey, that’s not just dreams. That’s life.”
Chapter ELEVEN
THE POPULATION of Winchester Academy sat on folding metal chairs and creaky wooden risers at the back of the school auditorium. For such a ritzy school, the space didn’t look all that different from the one at Benbow High, except there were no heart-linked names carved into the benches or cuss words scrawled in permanent marker across the backs of the metal chairs. Normally, morning meeting happened in the atrium of the library, but it was the third Wednesday of the month, which meant that Winchester’s singing groups would be performing, including the Funky Chickens.
Apart from field hockey practice and a few glimpses at mealtimes, I hadn’t seen much of Hadley. That was normal for the week of a Chickens performance. What wasn’t normal was Hadley not showing up at my dorm room during every free period or right after study hall to hang out until our dorm mother did her last patrol before lights-out. She’d insisted that our kiss was no big deal, but her absences told me otherwise. For my part, I was getting more turned around by the day. Ever since I’d tried to explain myself to Oscar after the hand-holding incident, I’d gotten comfortable with the idea of being someone who hung out closer to the boy end of the gender spectrum. After his initial stutter, Oscar accepted it, and we never really talked about it again after that day on the road. We were just “us”—two people who made sense to each other, if not the world.
My reaction to Hadley turned all of that upside down. Hadley was a girl. A sexy, boisterous, boobalicious girl with smooth cheeks, curvy hips, and reproductive organs that looked like mine. If I could be into her, crave her touch and get all dreamy-eyed thinking about her hand at the back of my neck, what did that make me? I was in a daze. It had only been a few days, but I missed Hadley’s constant company, and I couldn’t stop thinking about her lips and hands on me, as much as I tried not to for Oscar’s sake. When I did see her, always in the company of other people, she was like the freaking Roadrunner, passing through in a blur just long enough to distribute hugs with the force of a falling safe. She still hadn’t looked me in the eye, and I was starting to forget what color hers were.
“Scooch over!” Immy said, bumping my shoulder with her hip. I slid down and made room for her and Bugs, whose pique hadn’t survived five minutes of Immy’s charm offensive after Monday’s charged lunch. Bugs was wearing the exact outfit Immy had on when I came to Winchester for my interview last spring, despite the gusty gray day. Her toothpick legs were ridged with goosebumps under the miniskirt, which came, quite decently, to just above Bugsy’s knees. A huge purple down coat, Bugsy’s only concession to the weather, made her look like a grape Tootsie Pop. I could tell, though, from the way she preened her hair and adjusted the gapey neck of Immy’s favorite T-shirt, that she felt like the most glamorous Tootsie Pop in town.
“What did you do to Norah Trent?” Immy asked, nodding toward the front of the auditorium, where Norah stood with a muscled arm draped over the Student Head of School podium. She was stealing hard looks at me while carrying on an animated conversation with a girl in the first row. There was a particular protocol to seating at morning meetings. Seniors got to be closest to the action, front row center, and the freshman sat right behind them as a reflection of the Winchester tradition that senior girls set an example and look out for the youngest. Sophomores got the nosebleeds, wherever those happened to be depending on the venue. The juniors were just behind the freshmen, which sucked in the one-level library, but rocked on the bleachers, because we could see all of the action on the dusty little stage. You’d think a top-tier prep school could do better by their thespians, but most of Winchester’s alumni dollars went to the sports or riding programs. For some reason, all the alums with money were former jocks with fond memories of their high school glory days as athletes.
“What do you mean ‘what did I do to Norah’?” I asked, having to shout over the ruckus. The faculty members were still filing in along the sides of the hall, though Mr. Rosen, the school’s chipmunk-cheeked librarian, was attempting to bring order by making shushing noises with his perpetually moist lips. The hall’s acoustics were not in his favor.
“She keeps giving you looks,” Immy noted, picking at a pilly fuzzball clinging to the brown tights she wore under a red wool romper that looked like it had been shrunk in the dryer. “Did you piss her off or something?”
I started to make a smartass comment, but seeing that sad, abandoned look in Immy’s eyes during lunch on Monday had taken all the fun out of giving her a hard time about being on Norah’s “it” list. To tell the truth, I’d completely forgotten about Athena’s Guild and Norah’s deadline. I was supposed to get back to her on Monday, and here it was Wednesday.
Oh darn, I thought. Looks like I blew my shot at the big time. Sure, my ego got a little puffed up thinking about being earmarked as a leader. Norah’s whole “backing off of a shot” metaphor definitely roused my competitive spirit, though I’d never actually scored a goal in my life. Still, that was no reason to buy into the whole secret society thing. The clubs were just another way of building a fence to keep a certain kind of person out, and out had always been where I wanted to be. “I kind of blew her off, I guess,” I said, trying to return Norah’s accusing gaze with a bland one of my own so she would know I wasn’t ruffled.
“You what?” Immy screeched. “Roy, do you have any idea how idiotic that is? Norah is in charge of, like, everything at this school!”
“Everything, Roy,” Bugs parroted, shivering under her down coat. “She could get you blacklisted, and then you might as well be invisible. That’s if you’re lucky. Invisible would be getting off easy.”
“Sounds good,” I said absently, craning my neck to see if I could spot Hadley peering out from backstage.
Immy grabbed my shoulders and turned me toward her as Norah banged her gavel for silence. “Listen to me, Roy. You have to make it right. Tell Norah you’re sorry you blew her off, and you want in. If she tapped you and you turn it down, that’s like….” Immy’s eyes darted, scrambling for a metaphor.
“It’s bad, Roy,” Bugs piped in over Immy’s shoulder. “Bad for all of us.”
“What do you mean?” Their freaked-out faces had finally gotten my attention.
“If you were tapped, then you know about a society, and if it was Norah, it’s probably the most exclusive one in the school. A.G., am I right?” I nodded, and Immy gave me a little shake. “I’m not talking some dumb little club with a secret handshake for girls who like sneaking out to the barn at night to read poetry to their horses. It’s elite, and there’s a code of silence that can’t be broken. If you say ‘no,’ then you become someone who knows about it who isn’t a pledge or a member, and the assumption is that you won’t keep it to yourself.”
“Quiet down, people!” Norah boomed, cupping one hand to her mouth to project her voice and banging the gavel on a polished block of walnut.
“So?”
“So,” Immy said, turning to face forward and talking out of the side of her mouth so Norah wouldn’t catch her. “It’s the society head’s responsibility to keep it secret. If there’s a leak, the only way to stop it is to totally discredit the source, and anyone the source might have told—to ruin their reputation and make life at Winchester so miserable for them that they drop out. That’s just how it’s done.”
“And Norah can do it too, Roy,” Bugs whispered behind Immy’s back. “She knows people and she has ways.”
“Uh, don’t you think you two are being a little over the top about this?”
“I know you don’t give a shit about what people think, Roy, but some of us do,” Immy whispered harshly. “Plus, we’re your friends and Norah knows that. Think about it. Who else would you tell?”
Things quieted around us, and Norah started leading everyone through the school prayer. I still hadn’t learned all the words, and reciting a prayer while I was so on edge felt ridiculous anyway. What I wanted to do was walk right up to the front of the auditorium and bean Norah over the head with her gavel. Immy and Bugs seemed convinced that if I didn’t join Athena’s Guild, our lives at Winchester would be over. Bullshit. No way was I going to let some egomaniacal Viking bully me into a corner. Then again, I had more than just myself to think about.
As Norah started in with the announcements, I looked out over the auditorium at the beanies, pins, and pendants on display. Some of the faculty had pins on their sweaters and lapels as well, and I could see the gleam of a familiar pendant or two dangling from the end of filigreed chains. Did the faculty know about the elite societies’ blackballing system, or did they think that every now and again, a student just flipped out and cracked under the academic pressure of college prep at random?
“First up,” Norah said with a flourish toward the stage, “the Nightingales!” Cheers erupted around the auditorium as the a cappella group filed out onto the stage. The junior head was Beatrice Maxwell, who couldn’t have been more different from Lucia, the Nightingale’s senior head. Lucia was a squat, myopic diplomat’s daughter from Bogota with an operatic voice who saved all the best solos for herself. Beatrice was more of a team player, though her rafter-shaking alto stole the stage no matter what part she sang. In preparation for becoming senior head next year, Beatrice had started choosing songs and leading performances, and an excited buzz hummed in the hall. Lucia was a die-hard fan of Winchester’s old standards, but Beatrice’s debut as junior head had been “Only You” by Yaz, and a huge hit. When the altos hummed the first bars of Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes,” the delighted shrieks almost shattered the windows. I knew the song. It was one of Bugsy’s favorites.
