Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume Five November-December 2024
Terre Verte, story by Lisa C. Taylor.
Martha’s lying defined her like wacky hats identify the royals. Overrated, she said, or truth is for those who lack imagination. As a child, her lies were typical, telling Mom it was our brother, Harold, who left ink spots on the gold damask sofa. He was adding up numbers or something. Algebra homework. When a stump was all that was left of the blooming dogwood, she blamed it on Donnie Whitcomb. Boy’s turning into a regular juvie. Last week he toilet-papered the Johnson’s new BMW. It wasn’t until we got older that the lies became dangerous.
It never sat well with me. I knew it was only a matter of time before the lies started getting personal. Mostly I tried to stay out of it, mixed burnt sienna and cadmium red light, jaune brilliant with a pencil line of raw umber. In the colors, I saw the break that happens when the sun focuses its single eye, and the ground swells with the beginning of light. Painting was my way out, all the stress soaring past me like a murder of crows.
Light can trick you, make you think that a winter bush is an old man or that the small dots of people who dropped from the towers were pigeons congregating in mid-air. The ones who were holding hands broke the spell. Ash settling all over the city afterwards. You couldn’t breathe, my friend, Bianca told me. She was nearby during 9/11 since she attended The Art Institute of New York City; Rhode Island School of Design for me.
“Do you want the canapés and Moet and Chandon or crudité and Medoc?
My opening at the Brownstone Museum was the result of decades of work. I’d finally arrived at the place most artists dream only of; I’d actually sold enough to make a living. Not famous or a household word by any means but trendy. Still, the Brownstone Museum was a pivotal moment, next to MOMA or Brooklyn Museum of Art, my victory last year. Okay, I haven’t had work at MOMA but I feel like I’m on that trajectory.
“I think canapés and champagne are more elegant. You?”
“Gracious Gourmet does a lovely job, silver trays, hunky wait staff. Trés, trés. Nicole, your ship is pulling up to the docks, unloading more than baubles this time.” My husband, Doug leaned in to kiss me. Twenty-seven years and still there’s electricity. Aged well. The lean types do, Bianca once told me over Cosmos at Bernardo’s Tavern. She was on husband #3, a commercial realtor from Queens. Her Megan was off to Brown, Simone at a boarding school in New England. Our two were in college on opposite coasts, Diane in L.A. and Christopher just outside of Boston. Bianca is the only one who remembers Martha.
“No one will believe you.” Martha had fixed me with that stare, planted her tree-trunk legs firmly, crossed her arms.
“Put it back. I won’t tell anyone,” I had said.
“Can’t. I sold it at Henley’s Pawn Shop. Lot of money. Already spent, Nicole.”
Mom looked at her jewelry nearly every day. Useless stuff, I thought. Emeralds and diamonds, bracelets from the islands, earrings from European vacations where we were left with nannies with names like Maybelle; islanders who earned their living taking care of rich kids while their parents jetted off to Aruba or Switzerland. Twice a year, Mom and Barf-man would get away from “it all”, meaning us. Our real father lived in Poughkeepsie with Myrna and her teenage brat, Sheldon. We saw them maybe once a year.
“Martha, you’ve got to get it back. Mom loves that necklace. She’s going to be looking for it.”
“That’s where you come in, asshole. Why’d you take it? You buying drugs or alcohol? You’d better think of something fast because she’ll be home in a few hours.” Martha smiled at me with her porcelain veneers that cost Mom and Barf-man $4,000 because she’d convinced them that it was Dad’s bad genes that caused her tooth discoloration. The easiest way to get money from Mom was to blame it on Dad. I’d done it myself when I wanted to go to college.
“I got in! You know Dad won’t pay anything. This will show him that we don’t need his money. Please, Mom. I got a small scholarship.”
Barf-man was rolling in money. He never had kids of his own which is a good thing because they would certainly be ugly and mean. Mom told us, marry the first time for love, the second time for money. Sure as hell wasn’t for looks. Couldn’t hold a drink either. The first time she brought him home, they had wine and he lost it all over Mom’s upholstered chair, the one by the new flat-screen she’d bought with the divorce settlement. There’s still a faint odor though she had it professionally cleaned twice. He wanted to pay. No family of his own and he wanted us to like him. I never did though I thanked him at my graduation, sent him birthday and Christmas gifts each year. Small price. Turned out Barf-man got everyone back in the end. He’d put the bulk of his estate in an annuity for Mom that would be turned over to his church upon her death. Yeah, they built an entire parochial school with Barf-man’s money.
“What am I supposed to do now? I’m the one without a husband, remember?” Martha was counting on that inheritance to see her through. All the Botox in the world won’t do much for her in ten or fifteen years.
When I cashed out my savings account, sold the Tiffany watch Mom and Barf-man gave me for high school graduation (bought a knock-off in Times Square for $15.00 so they wouldn’t notice), I had just enough to retrieve that necklace from the pawn shop. I snuck it back into Mom’s jewelry box and moved out two weeks later. For good. Couldn’t be implicated if I wasn’t there. Told Mom I’d found a summer job in Providence. Eventually, I starting waitressing at Bertonelli’s Bistro, answered a Craigslist Ad for a roommate. Doug was my downstairs neighbor in an equally crappy apartment. I thought that was the end of dealing with Martha.
I painted my canvases with swirls of dioxzine purple, tinting white to tone it down, terre verte at the edges. Years after I finished art school and had a series of menial jobs at galleries, art critics began to take notice. Last week, the local paper ran an article about my upcoming show.
Nicole Bentley’s small-scale landscapes have grown up, graduated to ambitious canvases suffused with yearning and foreboding. The harsh yellows and burnt siennas of her early work explode with expressive distortion of murky blues and greens, and an emotional intensity that unsettles as much as it informs. Her solo show at the Brownstone promises to offer collectors a rare opportunity to witness the evolution of an artist in her prime.
I chose a Vera Wang sequined skirt paired with a black lace camisole Doug picked up at some boutique in Greece years ago. I had a matching clutch and pumps I’d bought on sale at Nordstrom’s. When the phone rang, I grabbed it, hoping there wasn’t a catering glitch or one of the many moving parts that can doom an art opening.
“Hey, sis. How’ya doin’?”
“Martha, no time to talk. My opening is in two hours.”
As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I regretted them. How many times had Doug told me not to give Martha any information? He was right. I should have learned my lesson with the necklace and the times she begged money from Mom and Barf-man for her breast implants, and later to pay off credit card debt. She told me that she was being punished for not having kids because Mom and Barf-man took Diane and Christopher to Santorini four years ago.
“I mean, that trip had to cost a few thousand dollars. Why should I have less just because I didn’t want to bring brats into this fucked-up world?”
“It’s not like that, Martha. They were giving the grandchildren an experience. You chose not to have kids. They don’t owe us anything.”
She didn’t attend Barf-man’s funeral, was no help with Mom’s rapid decline. Harold and I auditioned the parade of aides, sold the house, paid off bills we never knew she had racked up.
Why do I bother trying to be rational with Martha? It was like trying to make cadmium red light into a bystander. A flash of cadmium on a canvas is a woman’s mouth, a bloody wound. I’m just the artist, the translator. The paints have an alchemy all their own. When they mix on my palette, they whisper about the underside of clouds, four shades of yellow in a daffodil, a shadow of a towering man standing outside my field of vision. I understand art and nuance. It’s Martha I don’t get. All brash and bluster, she tears up a scene like too much rust in a landscape.
“I’m ironing my dress now. You think I’d miss my little sister’s opening at the Brownstone?”
Well, yes. She missed the births of Diane and Christopher, my hysterectomy, Doug’s layoff, Diane’s cancer scare, and six other art openings.
“Really, it’s not necessary I won’t have time to talk.”
“That’s so like you, Nicole. I try to be nice but you turn it around. You’ve had it easy—husband to support you with your art, grown kids, house in the suburbs. I had to take out a loan when my Camry broke down. I borrowed the dress for tonight.”
“I appreciate it, Martha. I have to go though. As you can imagine, there’s a lot left to do.”
Martha could imagine. It was her one talent, imagining and claiming that imagination as reality. Still, I wasn’t prepared for the shimmering black dress that dipped down to nearly her naval, showcasing those expensive faux breasts, the stilettos, a new face that made her look thirty-five again, complete with swollen lips outlined in vermillion.
When I got the call about the two pen-and-inks gone missing, along with a silver tray and a sequined clutch purse, I knew there was no point in asking. Sometimes it’s best not to ask questions when you don’t want the answers. My response to the press was curt.
“No comment.”
It was Doug who found the note in the guest book.
Terre verte is a fancy way of saying green earth. Look outside, Nicole. Same fucking landscape there always was. You can paint it any way you like but you are still the girl who sold her watch to protect me. Can’t wait for your next opening.
It’s true that the past can come back and bite you in the ass. It’s also true that karma is a tough mother to beat. Martha left little pieces of her trail all over the museum. There were some things that money couldn’t buy though I had to admit her facelift and lip augmentation looked pretty good; good enough to convince the male judge to cut her some slack, buy her time to come up with another plan. There would always be a better fabrication.
Terre verte is a lot more than green earth. It’s the shading that matters. That’s how you know there’s a fox sleeping behind the maple tree, that the iris is about to fold, and that those wisps of clouds are on the verge of opening up and no one will be spared.
© Lisa C Taylor