Negative Space, page 5
I was wearing the red Mary Janes I’d painted with silver glittery nail polish and dubbed ruby slippers. I refused to take them off, even to go to bed. My mother would wait for me to fall asleep and carefully remove them, leaving them where I could find them quickly in the morning.
I remember looking up and saying something to the adults about what I thought of the art. I probably used words too big for my face, but I was dead serious. I don’t remember exactly what they said in response, but I remember that they found my critique adorable, coming as it did from within a cloud of blonde Shirley Temple curls. They laughed, they might even have insulted me with an “aw,” and spoken to each other about how sweet I was as if I wasn’t standing right there. But I didn’t want to be adorable, I wanted to discuss the art. I scowled at them, an expression I’ve been told my whole life is an exact replica of my father’s scowl—all eyebrows—which I’m sure only endeared them further. Just as I felt my cheeks start to heat up to match the red of my ruby slippers, my father walked up behind me. I heard the thuds of his work boots and saw them come into view, covered in paint—he never dressed up for galleries, though sometimes if it was his own show he’d buy a clean t-shirt from the drug store on the way there.
“What do you think of this one, Lilly?” he asked.
When I told him I liked it, he asked “What do you like about it?” as he always did, probing for what had led me to my conclusions and teaching me to articulate critical thought before I started kindergarten. He was genuinely interested in what I thought, what it was about a piece of art that appealed to my young mind, unadulterated by critics and academics.
I blinked and remembered that I wasn’t five years old, standing with my father; I was an adult, blocking the doorway of Participant. Alan was gesturing to a huge marionette with bloodshot eyes, a square jaw, swinging breasts, and a flaccid penis. “See?” he said. “Yeah,” I nodded.
I took a few steps inside to get out of the way. Looking around, I noticed how many of Lankton’s pieces looked like dolls and puppets and felt certain that my child-critic self would have approved. And they were strange and vulgar—anatomically correct sets of intersex genitals, close-ups of penises leaking period blood, bald, “masculine” faces with heavy make-up and exposed ribs—so my father would have liked them as well.
I wondered if Lankton and my father knew each other, and figured that they probably knew of each other, at least. The bonds formed in those days were strong—even thirty years later, Alan seemed to know everyone in the gallery as we squeezed our way through the packed, narrow space. He introduced me to each person we greeted as “Joe Schactman’s daughter,” getting an unsure look of vague memory from a few people and emphatic exclamations of “Oh my god, seriously?!” from others. One woman, who looked to be in her fifties, with the classic older-artist-lady look of unruly hair and one too many scarves, seemed to choke on the words, saying she remembered when I was born, that she loved my father so much.
“Wow,” she said, starting to recover herself and blinking at my face, clearly seeing him in it, as people so often do. “So, how is Joe Schactman doing?”
I paused and blinked back at her a few times. I’d gotten used to saying “He’s dead” automatically and without much emotion when people asked me about my father in passing conversation, as if I were saying “he’s a sculptor” or “he’s a Taurus.” But this was the first time in the years since his death that I’d actually had to say those words to someone who knew him, informing them for the first time that their old friend was gone.
After a few seconds too long, I answered, “He died. In 2000.” I winced after I said it, not wanting to see the surprise and sadness on her face. She told me she was so sorry, and I excused myself as quickly as I could. The whole thing already felt dreamlike: this crowded, brightly-lit space full of few familiar faces from around the neighborhood, plus a handful of people who knew me because they knew my father but who I’d never seen before, all milling around and between Lankton’s bizarre sculptures. Having to break the news of my father’s death as if it had just happened made the surreality of it all start to feel less curious and more distressing. Suddenly the crowd wasn’t bustling—it was claustrophobic.
A second person asked me how my father was “doing these days,” and I thought I might have a panic attack, my mouth wrenching into a nervous chimp-like grin and my throat constricting. I didn’t know whether or not I’d stayed the polite amount of time, but I found Alan and gave him a quick thank-you-I’ll-be-in-touch hug, and shoved my way outside like I was at a punk show rather than a gallery opening. I breathed in as much of the cold autumn air as I could as I darted between cabs, across Houston Street and toward home.
Dropping out of high school felt like a triumph at first, but it was lonelier than I expected. Most of my friends were still in school, which meant they couldn’t wander the streets with me until sunrise every night. So I did it alone.
Sometimes when I found myself on an empty subway platform late at night with a train barreling through the tunnel, I had to concentrate to keep from stepping in front of it. There was no logical thought, no actual intention; just a sudden, intense desire to casually step in front of a train and die. It scared me. I’d thought that moving back to New York would make me feel better, I’d thought that dropping out of school would make me feel better, I’d thought that drinking my blood-volume in malt liquor and cheap vodka would make me feel better, but nothing did.
I considered reaching out to my mother, once, even though we were barely speaking and I mostly avoided her. I thought about writing to her, like we did in Fort Ord, about how even when I was laughing with my friends, there was a deeper part of me that was just screaming. I thought about telling her how I never slept, how I didn’t want to kill myself but I was afraid I might anyway.
Then she slit her wrists in the middle of the bodega on our corner with the shards from a beer bottle she’d dropped. At the time, and since, all she’s offered by way of explanation is that she just saw the shards on the floor and did it without thinking. I didn’t make the connection at the time that this was an impulse I could relate to; when she told me, I thought it sounded ridiculous.
My mother had been trying to outrun her demons since she was a scared little kid in foster care. Heroin had kept them at bay for a while, but she got clean when I was seven and had never found a replacement buffer. She’d moved in with Tom the same year she left my father, and now she was on her own for essentially the first time in her adulthood, struggling to pay rent in one of the most expensive cities in the world, trying to make a living by selling her clothing designs, with a teenager who screamed at her all the time. She didn’t know how to cope. I don’t blame her now for being overwhelmed, but I did then.
I was used to being in our apartment alone while she stayed over at her new boyfriend Robert’s place two blocks away, and even for a tenday stretch once when they took a trip to Morocco together, but being there alone while my only living parent was on a 72-hour psych hold at Bellevue felt different. I noticed the quiet in a way that I never had before: the water rushing through ancient pipes behind thin drywall, the muffled conversations of neighbors. I sat on the futon couch that also served as her bed when she was home, unsure what I was supposed to do. I tried putting music on but it felt too loud compared to the quiet. I climbed into my loft bed, above the kitchen, and stared at the ceiling a foot away from my face, like a coffin.
I knew then that my mother was no more suited to save me than I was to save her. We were, each of us, alone. A small, hardening part of me knew she was supposed to be able to help me, but ‘supposed to’ didn’t really mean anything.
I remembered the shared journal and how my mother had never been a solid thing I could hold onto. As I lay there in my bed, I looked deep into myself for any little part of me that needed her, and tried to hold my breath until it shriveled and died.
I wondered what would happen to me if she died, and realized there was a good chance I’d be sent to live with her sister Rachel, in Philadelphia. At the idea of being taken away from New York again and sent to live with my aunt who enforced a strict curfew for my cousin and supervised her homework, social time, and nutrition, I panicked. That was what scared me the most about the possibility of my mother killing herself just three years after my father died: that the courts might send me somewhere with rules to follow.
When she was out of the hospital, back home and not talking about what had happened, I told my mother she had to write a will saying that if anything happened to her, Hannah, my godmother who lived a few doors down from us on Ludlow Street, would get guardianship of me. “I’m not moving to Philly,” I said, my voice deep and hoarse with the urgency I was trying to get across, everything I wasn’t saying but hoped she would understand anyway; how if she’d cut just a little deeper with that glass she would have left me completely alone, and she owed it to me to at least sign a piece of paper so I could decide what that aloneness would look like. She let out a small and distant laugh, like she was abstractly aware of the absurdity of her fifteen-year-old daughter making her own emergency guardianship plans. “Ok, I will,” she said. But from the tired, flat tone of her voice, I knew she wouldn’t.
I mentally prepared myself in that moment to wriggle out of the state’s custody if I ever had to, made a quick list of which essentials I would shove into a backpack, and started working up the courage to knock on the door of C-Squat and ask the squatters to let me move into any spare corner of their dilapidated building. I ran through possible scenarios: if I could move quickly enough, I could get out of there with my things and maybe even a few pieces of my father’s art before the bureaucrats even realized they were supposed to do something with me. Or, worst case, I’d be shipped off to Philly where I could sneak out of my aunt’s house in the middle of the night and beg for change downtown until I raised bus fare. However it played out, I prepared to be on my own, understanding that really, I already was.
After the surreal experience at the gallery opening with Alan, I told myself there was no rush, that I could spend the rest of my life learning about my father and I didn’t have to go any faster than I could handle. That moment in the gallery, where everything blurred around me except for the woman who didn’t know my father was gone, had brought my grief even closer the surface, like it was tingling just under the skin of my whole body. I was afraid to bring it out any further, so I tried to keep myself busy with college classes and bar shifts and friends.
But every time I stepped out of my bedroom, the dog masks above the door stared at me. Where before they had watched over me, now they were watching me—waiting, wondering when I was going to come back and finish the conversation we’d started. As months passed, I began to feel the same guilt as when my father had sent me a letter and I knew he was waiting for my response. I couldn’t leave my questioning unfinished.
And while I was shaken by the gallery experience, I also noticed that in the weeks after talking to Alan and starting to put the dog masks into the context of my father’s life, I could see his face in my mind more clearly. I could almost feel him near. It was a feeling I couldn’t resist, even if it meant walking a narrow path high above a dark pit of grief.
So I called up Mark Rounds. Mark was my father’s best friend from art school and his roommate for most of their young adult lives. They had the impenetrable, intoxicating bond of friends who were used to being seen as a pair: Mark and Joe, Joe and Mark. They spoke in coded jokes from their time living together, running a construction company together, converting an abandoned factory into a giant loft and workspace together. They had seemingly endless rituals around the shows they’d watch (Hawaii 5-O) and the scotch they’d drink (Johnnie Walker), and were always talking about the next camping trip, the next road trip, the next big art project.
The review that mentioned the dog masks was from 1984, when I knew my father and Mark were living together in Brooklyn. So when I couldn’t stand the expectant stares of the masks any longer, I took the Bolt bus from New York to Philadelphia to talk to Mark. When I got to his door, he was standing on the front steps, waiting to give me a big hug, enveloping me almost as completely as when I was a little kid.
When I was about two, Mark started dating my mom’s sister Rachel, and became a stepfather to her daughter, my cousin Sabina. With her birth father out of the picture, Mark stayed in Sabina’s life as her father figure, even though his relationship with Rachel was short-lived. So he’s family to me on both sides; my double uncle, my non-religious godfather.
My earliest memory of Mark is from a roof-top barbecue in Brooklyn where he grilled chicken over coal, wrapped me in his giant flannel shirt when the sun went down, and sang along at the top of his lungs to the tinny boombox. I was enamored. When I was little and we would go see his band Mild Thing perform, he always made sure to dedicate a song to me, the only three-year-old in the bar. Later, when my mom and I would visit Rachel and Sabina in Philly, Mark would always come by and take us girls swimming, or to a movie, right when we were starting to go stir crazy with boredom after being in an apartment with our mothers for days on end. And when I first started to take my writing seriously, he took me out for a beer and told me, solemnly, “Be careful getting a job to support your art, because it’s easy for the job to take over and not leave you any time for the art you wanted to support in the first place.” It was a piece of advice that came close to satisfying my constant ache for advice from my father. I tucked it away in my mind, and I return to it still.
“Hey! How are ya?” Mark greeted me at his door, in the distinctive booming voice that made me believe him when I was three and he told me that Johnny Cash’s voice coming from the boombox was his own.
Mark took my backpack and led me into the big open kitchen where a fluffy white cat was eating wet food out of a little ceramic bowl on the counter. He asked how my bus ride had been and grabbed two bottles of beer out of the fridge. As we settled at the long kitchen table, Mark opened one and handed it to me, before opening another for himself.
“So,” I said, trying to sound casual even though starting this conversation felt momentous. “Tell me about when you first met Papa. I know you’ve told me some of these stories before, but…tell me again.”
He chuckled. The way it came out of one side of his mouth, the way he looked down like he was keeping half of the joke to himself: a flash of my father. Mark reminded me of him so much—by association, by shared mannerisms. I felt the weight of the fact that this might be the closest I’d get to a real face-to-face conversation with my father. Big, Johnny-Cash-voiced Mark looked at his hands fidgeting in his lap and exhaled sharply before he started to speak, and I knew he was thinking a version of the same thing—carefully choosing his words, aware of the pressure of speaking for his friend.
“It all started at Tyler School of Art, right here in Philadelphia, back in 1976,” he began, in an exaggerated once upon a time voice. He told me about how he and my father, who he sometimes referred to as “Joe” and sometimes as “your Papa,” bonded over the pool table in the student lounge freshman year of art school, where they’d play during lunch and late at night; a love of biscuits and gravy; and Frank Sinatra’s cover of “Winchester Cathedral.” He said they used to sing it in a British accent, “for some odd reason I don’t quite recall.”
He told me about the classes they liked and didn’t, the people they liked and didn’t, and about the first apartment they shared, sophomore year. He told me about the stuffy still-life paintings Joe was doing when they met, and how he slowly developed his own style when he branched out and explored other mediums. And about how Joe went to a summer program at Yale before his junior year. “That was where he met Cathy,” he said, off-hand, like of course I knew that already.
“Wait, you knew Cathy?” I interrupted.
I remembered whispers of the name Cathy from when I was a kid. Nobody had ever told me anything about her directly, but I’d heard her name spoken like a secret by the adults when they shared stories of the old days. Electric and hushed. Eventually I’d pieced together enough to understand that Cathy was a woman my father had loved before my mother.
As a child, the idea of a parent’s first love, an alternate-storyline love, feels unreal, mythical. Now that I was searching for new ways to understand my father, the idea of his first love was more enthralling than ever. I was fascinated by the idea of Cathy; I wanted to sit down with her and have her tell me long stories about my father in those early days. I wanted every detail of what he looked like and sounded like back then, just entering adulthood, like I was now. I wanted a level of detail about his facial expressions and interests and particularities that only a lover would remember.
But I couldn’t ask Cathy for these stories, because one of the very few things I knew about her was that she died a long time ago. But now, I thought, maybe Mark could bring her to life for me. And then I had another ghost to chase.
“Cathy Wehrli!” Mark responded enthusiastically. “We were all madly in love with her. She was just so friggin’ cool. She was a stunningly attractive girl,” he leaned in to confide, raising an eyebrow and nodding to make sure I got it. “Really, really, monstrously pretty.”
He described her as “beautiful, blonde, rich, and reckless.” Disappearing into a hall closet, he returned with a few photographs, one of Cathy and Joe, in the middle of screen-printing t-shirts. He looked so young in the photo, maybe 22—like we could have been in classes together. Cathy’s back was to the camera and her face turned to the side so I could see less than her full profile, but it was enough to see her soft full lips and upturned nose, her square, Germanic jawline and short, shaggy, blonde hair. A wholesome, classical beauty, with that round quality of both Renaissance art and Middle America.
