Still Life With Bread Crumbs: A Novel Read online

  This perhaps explained the most recent choice for the award.

  The official public announcement had landed on the Oriental runner in the hall of Rebecca Winter’s apartment just two months shy of her sixtieth birthday, printed on thick silky paper, like the kind used for diplomas. Rebecca had turned it over in her hands before finally opening it. There was no question: a distinguished list. Painters, sculptors, one architect, one Broadway set designer. And at the bottom, her own name: Rebecca Winter, photographer. The first woman to win the Bradley Prize. The youngest ever. That’s what the Times would say in their story.

  To Rebecca, it was now official: she was done. Yesterday’s news. In your heyday, you got attention; in your senescence, prizes. Who said that? Oscar Wilde? Benjamin Franklin? Rebecca had a habit of ascribing her cleverer thoughts to someone else. Just in case there was any confusion about the fact of the matter, she said it aloud, looking at herself in the arched mirror over the red Chinese chest in the foyer: you are officially yesterday’s news.

  She had known it for some time, seen it reflected in the dwindling royalty checks, the infrequent engagements and invitations, the reactions when she introduced herself at parties. The stages in the life of a person who has become publicly known are easy to recognize, from the shock and amazement—“Rebecca Winter? Really? The Rebecca Winter?”—to a faint confusion—“Photography, right? The kitchen stuff? Oh, I love your work!”—to simple incomprehension. Slowly she worked into campus visits a description of her career that would have been unnecessary—unthinkable—twenty years before, when there had been posters, postcards, sold-out shows, honorary degrees, auctions.

  “Everyone’s waiting,” her agent, a woman with the metabolism of a hummingbird and the face of a toucan, had started saying a decade ago. Her name was Tori Grzyjk, so everyone called her TG, except for her competitors, who referred to her as No-Vowel Tori, or NVT. Everyone was afraid of her, but none more so than her own clients, none more so than Rebecca. “Everyone’s waiting to see what you do next.”

  TG was in London the night of the Bradley dinner, “scouting new talent.” Rebecca was old talent, although not as old as most of the talent in the room at the Manhattan Arts Club. She wore her black crepe pants and a black and gold kimono jacket and had her trademark silver bob blown dry professionally. She wore Indian cuff bracelets and enormous onyx earrings. Her date was Dorothea, who had designed the earrings. The Bradley sons looked concerned at cocktails until someone told them that the women were friends, not lovers. “She has turned the impedimenta and minutiae of women’s lives into unforgettable images,” said the elder Bradley son in presenting the prize, struggling with the pronunciation of impedimenta.

  “That’s it?” Dorothea whispered at the sight of the landscape in the gold frame with the engraved plate at the bottom. The Bradley sons had a stockpile of their father’s paintings, and each year one was given to the prize winner. Rebecca had been awarded an inoffensive painting of a red barn with several blots denoting cows in a distant field, the sort of thing that would have found a happy home in the dining room of a country inn. Dorothea’s eyes widened at the sight of the envelope taped to the back.

  “A lousy thousand bucks?” she said afterward in the cab uptown.

  “It is the Bradley,” Rebecca said, tucking the envelope into her bag as her bracelets clanked, trying to maintain her dignity. She couldn’t tell Dorothea that she had never been so glad to see a thousand bucks in her life.

  In her bag, next to the check, was the index card she had seen on her way to the ladies’ room on the Manhattan Arts Club bulletin board. CHARMING COUNTRY COTTAGE FOR RENT, it said in sharp calligraphy. Although her ex-husband had long insisted that charming was synonymous with “too small, with bad drains,” Rebecca did the math the next morning, looking out over the water towers of the west side from her kitchen window, and determined that if she rented out her apartment at the accepted exorbitant New York rate, she could afford the cottage, pay the fees for her mother’s nursing home, manage the premiums for her own health insurance, put something into her retirement account, help with her father’s rent, give a hand to her son, Ben, when he was short, and still put away some money each month for the surprises and emergencies that always seemed to arise. When she was young she’d been able to live on almost nothing; now so many people depended upon her, so many bills appeared each month. Car insurance, life insurance, homeowner’s insurance. And living in the cottage would provide inspiration, she thought. A change of scene always brought inspiration, people said. Everyone was waiting.

  NOT INSPIRING

  “Rebecca Winter,” the woman breathed, her face pinking up the way a baby’s did at birth. It was like a prayer, like a sigh, like old times. “It’s an honor,” she added. She put her hands out to take Rebecca’s. She had the kind of soft hands that are always warm and just a little moist, that look like a baby’s hands, with dimples at the knuckles. She had dimples in her cheeks and chin, too. For a passing moment Rebecca wondered if she had dimples everywhere.

  Then the woman added, “My mother had your poster on our refrigerator,” and ruined it. For a moment Rebecca had been forty. Now she is sixty again. No, she is a hundred. She is a prisoner in the amber of her own past. “The artist formerly known as Rebecca Winter,” her son, Ben, had once said, apropos of something she can’t remember, and when he had seen her face he had hastily added, “A joke, a joke, a really bad joke.”

  She needed to reclaim the basic syntax of her daily existence, upended in this strange little town. Each morning in the city she had done a half hour on the elliptical machine in her building’s gym while watching the news on a flat screen overhead. Here, when she had asked the man at the gas station about a gym he had directed her to what she realized was the local high school. As a substitute she has decided to walk, but there are no sidewalks and the first morning a truck had come around a curve, fast, veering away to avoid sideswiping her, the driver’s middle finger a small stanchion in the rear window as he screeched away in a plume of exhaust fumes. Minutes later a woman with a tight white perm, a halo of hair, had pulled up next to her and rolled down her window. “You need a lift?” she’d asked. If you walked on these roads, everyone thought your car had broken down.

  The dimpled woman had greeted her inside the closest thing to a coffee bar in town. Rebecca was amazed to find even this amid the hair salon (Cut and Perm, $20 on Wednesday, and she’d shuddered), the hardware store, the insurance/travel/accounting agency office, the secondhand furniture place that always seemed closed. The director of the arts program in Wilmington or Asheville, she couldn’t remember which, had made a comment once when he was driving her to a lecture about how all of America looked alike now, but he’d been glaring at a gaudy stretch of Staples, IHOP, Piggly Wiggly, and Home Depot. This part of America looked alike, too, the tired tattered Main Streets where the old bank building had been turned into a restaurant that failed, where the aspirational businesses, the dress shops and bookstores, were doomed before they’d even opened. And yet here stood a place called Tea for Two (Or More), with a cheery little anthropomorphized teapot on the sign, smiling, waving with its handle, breathing steam through its curly spout. Rebecca would have counseled against the parenthetical phrase. Apparently that was the common reaction, since the woman addressed it almost at once, at length. Sarah Ashby, proprietor. That’s what it said at the bottom of the menu.

  “My husband said, well, hell, Sarah, you call it Tea for Two, people are gonna think you can’t have more than two people,” the dimpled woman said, putting a pot, two scones, and a sugar bowl in front of Rebecca. “I still don’t know whether I made the right call. But Kevin’s the kind of guy—that’s my husband, Kevin—Kevin’s the kind of guy who wouldn’t have left it alone. Every day it would have been, you know, don’t come if there are five of you because it’s tea for two. Don’t bring four or you can’t get a seat. Or maybe you can get a seat but you can’t get tea, that kind of thing. And I woul
d have had to say, oh, stop, don’t listen, he’s just kidding, he’s always saying stuff like that. He’s the kind of guy, he gets on something like that, he just doesn’t quit. Like more to love? Every time he talks about me, he says ‘more to love.’ I say, ‘Kevin, I don’t appreciate that,’ and he says, ‘oh, hell, don’t be so sensitive.’ So he would have gone on about Tea for Two forever. I figured adding that at the end was one less thing to think about, right? But I still don’t know whether I made the right call.”

  “Yo, Sarah,” someone said. Rebecca wasn’t sure how long the woman would have gone on talking otherwise. A long time, she suspected. She seemed like one of those women who couldn’t bear to leave a silent space unfilled. She looked like a Botero painting, all big curves, wavy hair, pink skin, round eyes, the kind of woman who must have spent her entire life hearing about how pretty she’d be if only she lost a little weight, which always meant a lot of weight. More to love.

  There were two men at the counter. The younger one turned and looked at Rebecca until the older one elbowed him. They left with a tray of take-out coffee cups and a big bag spotted with grease. Rebecca leafed through the local weekly paper. A senior at the high school had won a 4-H scholarship to the state university. She was posed next to a black-and-white cow, holding a blue ribbon. The cow appeared to be looking at her sideways, fondly. Rebecca had never been really close to a cow. They always seemed a little frightening, like farm machinery with an unpredictable personality. Maybe now was the time.

  Sarah collapsed into the chair opposite her.

  “Another scone? I have cheddar dill in the back. Or some buttermilk, I think.” She leaned in close. “I didn’t have buttermilk so I used yogurt, which in my opinion is better. Better taste, better loft. Texture, you know? But you can’t tell these guys you’re putting yogurt in the scones or they will be down at the Gas-and-Go getting bacon, egg, and cheese on a roll so fast it will spin you around.”

  Rebecca looked at her plate. Both scones were gone—raspberry, maple pumpkin. She could not remember eating them. She could not remember the last time she had eaten.

  The roofer had returned at 8:00 A.M. She had already been up for hours. The roofer had looked as though he had, too, but in a good way: damp fair hair like a cornfield with its comb tracks, T-shirt with a hint of fold marks and the smell of fabric softener, dark green windbreaker with the words BATES ROOFING in gold embroidery. He must have a good wife, Rebecca had thought, picturing a woman folding his T-shirts, smoothing them with her hand, handing him the windbreaker from a hook in the hall. The rented house reeked of smells Rebecca preferred not to parse too closely, and from time to time there was a halfhearted clanking noise from above. She wondered if the raccoon would die of exertion. She hoped so.

  She had heard the staccato drumming of the truck engine climbing the hill and she went out front, where the air was fresh and lovely, grass and flowers and a suggestion of wet soil. Why did the forest out back smell of rot and the sunny front lawn like the signature scent of springtime? A glint of light crossed her face from below, like some mysterious signal, and she raised her hand to shade her eyes, and the roofer raised his to return what he clearly thought was a greeting.

  “I don’t even need to ask,” the roofer had said when he got out of the truck, although she wasn’t sure if he meant the circles under her eyes or the smell from the house.

  “How on earth will you get that creature out of the attic?” she said wearily.

  “First the coon, then the cage,” he said, and from the passenger’s seat of the car he took a long gun.

  “You’re going to shoot it?”

  “Unless you had another idea,” he’d said.

  “When I saw the trap I assumed you would release it.”

  He held the gun by the barrel. It was carved with a hunting scene, a man and a deer, both stiff and unconvincing but made beautiful by the gloss of the wood and the faint blur to the figures and the finish that Rebecca thought meant the gun was old, and well-used. Grandfather, father, son. A family gun.

  “Here’s the thing about raccoons. They’re creatures of habit. If you catch a coon and spray-paint an X on his butt, then let him go, a week later you’ll be catching the same coon. The X on his butt will be laughing at you. So yeah, if you want I can let him go. But unless I drive him to Maine he’ll be back and trying to find a way into your attic. You’ll be starting all over again.”

  Rebecca closed her eyes. “No thank you,” she said.

  “Good decision,” he said, opening the flimsy screen door. “Sometimes I think city people wind up watching too many Disney films. They confuse real animals with cartoon animals.”

  “Can I take a look first?” she asked.

  “At the coon?”

  “I’m a photographer,” she said.

  “Be my guest.”

  She’d climbed the ladder in the narrow hallway, thrust her head and shoulders through the hatch, and rested her elbows on the edge of the filthy attic floor. The cage was wedged into the corner over the kitchen, up against a pile of old screens and a cardboard box. The raccoon looked over its shoulder at her, its pinpoint eyes wild with fear and rage. It did look like a cartoon character, but a cartoon character in one of those avant-garde cartoons young artists were always making and Ben was always praising. Sven, the Possessed Raccoon, it would be called. She thought she heard a hiss. An overhead bulb in the center of the triangular space cast deep shadows. The scent of waste and desperation was too much to take for long. She shot a few fast photographs as the coon hurtled toward her, clinging to the bars of the cage and somersaulting as though he could spin free. He stopped not far from the hatch, and she shot a few more of his pointed face in close-up.

  “He ate the banana,” she said after she came down the ladder.

  “I think that’s a she,” the roofer said. “A male raccoon is pretty mellow. He’d probably be half asleep right now. A female raccoon’ll tear you to pieces if you give her half a chance.”

  He made Rebecca wait outside, although she was not sure why. The cage and the crashing were still, then: boom. Boom. “It’s a pretty big coon,” he said as he carried a bundle of tarp with a bulge at its center out to the truck. “That crawl space is going to need some Lysol.”

  “Can I take a look?” she said again.

  He’d shrugged and put the tarp on the ground, unwrapping it. Its blue plastic was streaked with blood, although not as much as Rebecca had expected. The raccoon’s front paws were surprisingly small, black and shiny, and had fallen into an attitude of prayer that was belied by the picket fence of sharp yellowed teeth just above. The morning light gilded the tips of his fur. Her fur. Rebecca raised the camera again.

  The sound of a nail gun was interspersed with the faintest click of the camera. She’d liked it better when she was young and the camera made more noise. Or maybe it was simply that she’d liked it better when she was young. She knelt next to the coon and the smell almost sent her reeling back. “Don’t get too close,” the roofer called from atop a ladder. “It’s probably got fleas or lice or something.” Rebecca started to itch. She was afraid she would spend the next twelve months itching, stopping only when she was back home on West Seventy-Sixth Street. She could not think too much of her apartment or she would be undone.

  The roofer hoisted a flag on one corner of the roof, a small flag that was a solid field of white. “What’s that for?” she said as the flies, humming, started to land on the coon’s pointed snout.

  “Low-flying airplanes,” he said, in a tone of voice that ended the conversation. She shot the snout and the flies for a few minutes but she could already see that she wouldn’t be happy with the result. She’d been much more willing than some of her colleagues to switch to digital photography, but with film the optimism lasted longer, until the outlines began to emerge beneath the iridescent surface of the liquid in the developing trays. Now she can see instantly when she’s wasting her time. Some of the shots of the raccoon might work, esp
ecially the close-ups of his padded paws.

  “I hear you have a critter in your crawl space,” said Sarah Ashby, bringing over the buttermilk (really yogurt) scones. “Lord, that sounds dirty, doesn’t it? Sorry, I’m one of those people who say the first thing that comes into my head. My husband says there’s hardly a day I don’t say something I shouldn’t. Never mind saying something I shouldn’t to Rebecca Winter. Wait’ll I tell my mom. She will die.”

  Rebecca reached into her big bag and took out a notebook. “Could you direct me to the nearest supermarket?” she asked.

  “Oh gosh, I figured you’d asked Jim Bates all that stuff. He’s the one with the sense of direction, and he knows this area like nobody else. You ask him where to find a blackberry bramble in the middle of nowhere, he’ll get you to it in half an hour. I know, because in July I make blackberry scones from a bramble nobody else knows about, and it’s all because he told me where to find it when I first opened this place. During hunting season there’re guys who follow his truck to see where Jim’s gonna set up because then they know that’s where the deer will be. Hold on, let me wash my hands and we’ll make a list.”

  “Jim?”

  “Bates? The roofer who found the critter in your crawl space?” she said as she sniffed the air and then hurried into the back. “Sorry, caramel rolls,” she cried over her shoulder.