Still Life With Bread Crumbs: A Novel Read online

  What Jim Bates had said, his voice rough and trembling, had finally destroyed the wall for her, between two dimensions and three, as though at any moment a white hand would appear at one corner of a photograph to reposition the trophy, to straighten the cross. “People seem to find the cross imagery challenging,” the gallery owner had said, and she had nodded. Now she could tell him: it was meant as a challenge. Keep me alive if you can.

  When she went back into the living room the invitation from her opening and the note she had written had both fallen to the floor, and the dog was sleeping next to the couch with one of Jim Bates’s scarred hands atop his head. She sat in a chair in the dark watching the two of them, and when she was tempted to use her camera she was suddenly ashamed of herself for the very first time.

  THE WHITE CROSS SERIES–THE REVIEWS

  For decades students of photography believed that Rebecca Winter would be remembered for and defined by the Kitchen Counter series. But the White Cross series surpasses the images of domesticity for which she first became known. These photographs, taken together, are her masterwork.

  —ARTnews

  THE WHITE CROSS SERIES–THE PRESENT

  She sold only three of the photographs, two to the Greifers and one to the Russian woman, whose decorator told her it was a good investment. Everyone was surprised. “I’m not concerned,” said Paige Whittington, who sounded as though she truly meant it.

  Neither was Rebecca, because of the phone call from the appraiser, and because of the desk. And because she knew that ARTnews was right.

  (THE WHITE CROSS SERIES–MUCH LATER

  The International Center of Photography is pleased to announce that the estate of Edward and Sylvia Greifer has given the entire White Cross series, the acclaimed series of photographs by Rebecca Winter, to the center’s collection.

  The photographs will tour the United States and Europe during 2018 and will appear in an exhibition in Beijing before becoming a permanent part of the center’s collection.

  Jessica, James, and John Greifer acquired two of the original photographs from other collectors so that the complete set of Ms. Winter’s original prints could be bequeathed to ICP.)

  LASAGNA AT LAST

  Early in June, Jim Bates and Rebecca Winter spent a Sunday morning working in the tree stand, and that evening he showed up at the cottage with a tray of lasagna and a six-pack of beer. “It’s not fancy beer,” he said, as though he had to apologize for it.

  “I’ve always liked beer,” said Rebecca, which happened to be true. When his truck had pulled in she had closed her bedroom door without thinking why she was doing so.

  “This is wonderful lasagna,” she said.

  “Mario’s Ranchero in Bentonville. You been there?”

  “Is there actually a place called Mario’s Ranchero?”

  He nodded with his mouth full, held up a finger, which was his index finger, which meant half a finger actually, took his time, and swallowed. “Not just covering his bets, either. They make good Mexican and great Italian.”

  “And you can just drop by and buy an entire pan of lasagna?”

  “I do their roof.”

  “Ah.”

  “I can’t actually see Buddy being up for any free photography. That’s the owner, Buddy. He’s got pictures everywhere, but they’re pictures of himself with famous people who have eaten at Mario’s. And by famous people I mean the weather girl on Channel 12 and some boxer who won one fight and lost all his other fights. Those kinds of famous people. You could get up on the wall easy.”

  “I may not be their idea of famous.”

  “He offered to put me up there for the roof.”

  “Did he keep the flag up?”

  “What?”

  “The white flag you put up after you’ve fixed a roof. Did he keep it up?”

  Jim Bates got up and got himself another beer, and one for Rebecca. “I only did that for your house,” he said. “For my sister. I put up the white flag to show her that your house was okay. From certain angles she could see your place from her place. Or she used to be able to. Whatever. She used to get strange ideas about people, that they were spying on her, listening to her. She used to look at your place with binoculars, searching for the bad guys. There were always bad guys. I didn’t want her to think you were one of them. So I told her I’d inspected your place and it was clean. I put the flag up so she could see it and know there were no bad guys there.”

  “It kept falling down.”

  “It doesn’t matter now, right?”

  There was one of those long chewing silences, and then they both started to talk, and then they both stopped. Finally he said, “What happened?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I never saw you after that one night.”

  “You never came over.”

  “The hell I didn’t! I plowed you out three times!”

  “You never came in.”

  “You never came out.”

  “I thought you had had second thoughts.” Rebecca could feel her face turning red.

  “Me, too.”

  They were both quiet for a long time, and then Jim Bates said softly, ruefully, “He sold his watch to buy her combs, and she sold her hair to buy a watch chain.”

  Rebecca smiled, and he looked at her with his heart in his eyes, and she looked away. “O. Henry,” she said.

  “My mother made us all read that story in seventh grade. I thought it was so damn sad, but she said it wasn’t. She said it wasn’t really sad at all.”

  He got up and put more wood on the fire, though it was too warm for it, and stopped to look over the mantelpiece. “That’s a really beautiful painting,” he said.

  Rebecca turned in the shaky splintery wooden chair to look at it, as though she hadn’t seen it her whole life long.

  “I’ve always thought so,” she said.

  The woman’s dress was white with a full skirt, the little girl’s white with small pink flowers. They seemed to be sitting on the grass, although there was no background to speak of, really. Both figures were a little indistinct, but Rebecca, even when she was very young, had felt that the mother loved the child and the child loved her back. It had always stood in for something in her own life, although for her own mother the content had not seemed important, only the provenance. “Oh, a Mary Cassatt, but only a small one,” she used to say casually to guests, but she always managed to fit it into the conversation somehow.

  “It’s not a Mary Cassatt,” the appraiser had said sadly. And when he had said it Rebecca had been both shocked, disheartened, and somehow certain that he was right and that she’d known it all along. Of course her mother’s Cassatt was not a Cassatt at all, just something that could pass as a Cassatt, just as “Bebe’s a wonderful pianist” was not true. Bebe was a halfway competent pianist. But that must never be said, or acknowledged, or even thought, as though the thought would leap from the mind to the keyboard and run across it, playing “Chopsticks,” laughing.

  Bebe is a wonderful pianist. She practices constantly, hours a day. She will never stop practicing until she gets it right. Even now.

  “But,” said the appraiser, “I do have some good news.”

  “Remember Pop Pop’s old desk, the one he always worked at at home?” Rebecca told Ben on the phone, sitting at the gas station.

  “The really big boxy one?”

  “The appraiser says it’s worth four hundred thousand dollars.”

  “Holy shit!” Ben said.

  “Exactly.”

  ($548,000, actually, when it sold at auction.)

  “The Mary Cassatt is a fake. It’s probably by an admirer who became an imitator.”

  “Wow. That’s mind-blowing, too. Any chance Pop Pop knew?”

  Rebecca remembered the arguments between her parents, art doing battle with commerce, as so often happens, Bebe resistant, her husband insistent:

  “What sort of people tote up the worth of their own home?”

&nbs
p; “People who want insurance!”

  “Really, it’s so vulgar, some stranger looking at everything. I won’t have it.”

  “It’s got to be done. Sooner or later it’s got to be done!”

  He’d had it done and discovered that the painting was not a Cassatt but had never told her. She’d insisted on not having it done because she suspected it was not a Cassatt and didn’t want to know, didn’t want anyone else to know. Her parents were like an O. Henry story if O. Henry had been more cynical.

  “It’s like that picture of Polly and my mom, like you can really feel that they’re connected,” Jim Bates said, looking closely at the painting.

  “It’s a fake,” Rebecca said.

  “A fake what?”

  “It belonged to my parents. They always insisted it was by a very famous painter and was very valuable. But it’s not by her, and it’s not valuable.”

  “But it’s so beautiful, right? So who cares?”

  People who know about art would care, she thought, and my investment adviser would care. I care, she thought. But that wasn’t true. Because the painting was fake, she could afford to keep it. Because the desk was eighteenth-century American, she could afford to go back to her old life. Except that, walking from the minimalist hotel in which the gallery owner had put her up, in which she had had to call the front desk to identify the workings of the shower, she had begun to feel like her old life was a snow globe, something she’d once loved the look of and then outgrew. Or maybe it outgrew her. Everyone was so young. All the skirts were so short. All the heels were so high. All the eyes were so hungry, so wanting.

  “Three of the photographs have found buyers,” she said.

  “Only three?” he said. “I figured you’d sell them all.”

  “I suspect my new agent thought the same.”

  “I have to say, I really appreciated what you said about not selling them. That’s not what I was getting at when I told you all that stuff, but it was really meaningful that you would make that kind of offer.” He took a deep breath, like he was ready to dive underwater, and then he clamped his hand down over hers on the table, and took a deep breath again. For just a moment, seen with his head down, he looked so young, and then when he looked her in the eye, she could see the wear and tear of life, and sadness. His hand was hard and rough. He was the first man she’d ever been with who had calluses.

  “Sarah says you’re moving to Pittsburgh,” he said.

  “I’m going for a semester, as a visiting professor.”

  “Don’t go to Pittsburgh,” he said.

  “I agreed to go.”

  “Don’t,” he said, and he lifted her hand to his mouth and kissed the end of each finger, and Rebecca honestly thought she might keel over.

  “Can I stay here tonight?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Not on the couch.”

  “Not on the couch,” she said.

  “Ah, man, a second chance,” he said, his fingers grabbing at her hand, turning it over, holding it hard. “Thank you.” And he raised his eyes to the ceiling, to the crawl space, to the roof, and said it again: “Thank you.”

  A SECOND CHANCE

  In the morning she woke up to the smell of bacon frying in the next room. The dog had gone to stand at the stove, alternately looking up hopefully and licking grease from the worn vinyl floor.

  “No way, pal,” Rebecca heard Jim Bates say from the other room.

  “This is insane,” she thought, and then to make it more real she said it aloud. It was no more compelling said than thought.

  “There’s breakfast out here,” said Jim Bates, standing over her, his wet hair almost transparent on his forehead.

  “It’s early,” she said and pulled back the covers while he pulled off his T-shirt.

  “That bad dog has probably eaten the bacon,” she said.

  “There’s more where that came from,” he said.

  But that was later.

  LATER

  Tad got a job at the restaurant in New York City where all the waiters sang opera. It turned out that he hadn’t forgotten his early training. When he sang the Pagliacci aria dressed in full clown regalia he would weep unself-consciously, and some of the older women would clasp their hands and hold them over their hearts. His tips were enormous.

  He lived in a small, very neat apartment on the first floor of a building in Brooklyn with a nasty Burmese cat who sang along as he did, and he kept an herb garden that he shared with his neighbors, who also loved the balloon animals he created for their children’s parties. He had even fixed up a young woman living down the block with one of the cooks at the restaurant.

  He often thought that he should have moved to New York City years before, and when he went to visit his aunt and his mother he always brought Rebecca either a bottle of olive oil or one of balsamic vinegar. His mother resented Rebecca’s influence on her son deeply, mistakenly believing that she had spent months convincing Tad to move to New York. “She tore this family apart,” Tad’s mother said sometimes. Her sister, Tad’s aunt, considered her confrontation with Rebecca in Walmart one of the bravest acts of her life, although Rebecca still didn’t know what that had been all about.

  Kevin Ashby was found dead, crushed beneath a big tree. There was a chain saw near his body, and it was the common belief at Ralph’s that he was trying to cut down the tree for firewood—someone else’s tree, someone always interjected, to sell the firewood at some inflated price—and didn’t know what the hell he was doing. In a halfhearted way the state police investigated, but it was just the kind of accident that happened from time to time, like a lightning strike or an ATV crash.

  Sarah cried uncontrollably for months, but only in the kitchen because Jim Bates told her kindly that it was going to really hurt her business if she did it in front of the customers.

  “I can’t say I’m sorry,” he told Rebecca after they went to the funeral, which was poorly attended. “The guy was pond scum. I remember one night he tried to steal the money from the strongbox at her shop.”

  “Are you certain it was him?”

  “The cops caught him. He said he left some stuff inside, which you know is bull because he never went into the place except occasionally to take a couple of rolls or whatever. He messed up the security code, couldn’t remember the last two digits. And the security code was Sarah’s birthday. So. There you go.”

  A year after Kevin Ashby’s death Sarah adopted a baby girl from Guatemala, whom she named Alice after Alice in Wonderland, and who she took to the family practice clinic on the same cul-de-sac as the vet’s office. The nurse practitioner who examined Alice was a man named, of all things, Jim. He sometimes wore a T-shirt that said, IF YOU THINK A MALE NURSE IS FUNNY, WAIT UNTIL YOU SEE MY TETANUS SHOT. But he didn’t wear it to work because he was afraid it would frighten the children old enough to read and to need a tetanus shot. He was wearing it when he came in to buy miniquiche at Tea for Two, where also he took a quick look at a rash Alice had developed in the creases of her little elbows, which he said was nothing.

  “What a nice man,” said Rebecca, who had been there having coffee with the editor who was publishing her book of dog photographs.

  “He’s so not my type,” Sarah replied, and it was all Rebecca could do not to say two things:

  • Jim Bates was so not Rebecca’s type, which was more or less the same thing as Sarah’s type, which was

  • bad news.

  Nevertheless Sarah began dating Jim, who everyone called the other Jim, about which he was good-humored since he liked the original Jim, who had taught him how to hunt. Or, as the other Jim liked to say, he was dating Sarah and Alice. Sarah still said he wasn’t her type, but she sang all the time in the kitchen while she cooked. “You make me feel like a natural woman,” she would bellow.

  “She has a terrible voice,” Jim Bates said.

  “Leave her be,” Rebecca said.

  Dorothea liked visiting town so much that she bought a
little place about ten minutes away, with a big brick fireplace in the living room and what would turn out to be a failing septic system. A month after she got back from Venice—“if I never see murky water again, it will be too soon,” she told Jim Bates when he asked how it was—she and Rebecca went to dinner together at Mario’s Ranchero because Jim was playing baseball with the volunteer fire department.

  “That damn poster is on the wall,” Dorothea said.

  Rebecca shrugged. “They make a great lasagna.”

  “You look fantastic. Have you had work done?”

  “No.”

  “It’s that man.”

  “It is.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Old enough,” Rebecca said.

  “It’s the sex.”

  “I’m happy.”

  “It’s about time,” Dorothea said. “How the hell did you wind up with this guy?”

  “I don’t know,” Rebecca said, her mouth full of guacamole. She thought for a moment. “And I don’t care.”

  “What the hell has happened to you?”

  “I don’t know. And I don’t care.”

  “I’m jealous,” Dorothea said.

  Afterward Dorothea would say that that was the beginning of her determination to buy a house nearby. That, and Mario’s empanadas.

  Rebecca’s mother had a stroke and could play with only one hand. It seemed to make no difference. The nurses’ aides at the home said she would live to be a hundred. They were right.

  Ben made a small indie film that won a festival prize. Rebecca was terribly worried that he and Maddie would move to Los Angeles.

  “No way,” Maddie said at the book party for Rebecca’s book of dog photographs. “How could you think so little of me?”

  The book was called An Accidental Dog. The book party was at the animal shelter at 125th Street. “God save me from dog books,” the editor of The New York Times Book Review told Rebecca. “But a dog book by Rebecca Winter? That’s something else entirely.”