Work Text:
Audrey’s painting a long stripe of yellow on a canvas, watching it butter through the fine-grained white, The Drug In Me Is You up loud as it will go and a cigarette in her mouth though Marcus doesn’t like her to smoke in the studio, studio meaning their apartment, and he doesn’t like Falling In Reverse either, but she figures she makes enough concessions to what he wants from her, like communicating with her mom and not surrendering to the impulse to quit her meds, so what the fuck. It still startles her when his call comes through, like maybe he knows. She drops her cigarette in her paint water and it sizzles.
“Yeah?” she says, when she’s turned the music off and put the phone to her ear.
“Just checking in. You wanna guess where I am?” he adds, before she can get too annoyed about that first part.
“The Moon. A crackhouse. Arkansas.”
Marcus laughs. “You know I wouldn’t be seen dead in Arkansas. Here, lemme give you a hint: I’ve seen five people in turtlenecks. Maybe even one beret.”
“You’re at the gallery?”
“I’m at the gallery. Man, I know I’ve seen these paintings, like, a hundred times but they don’t never get old.”
“They’re gonna get older the longer people go without buying them. You seen any little red stickers yet?”
“Not yet.”
Audrey pinches the bridge of her nose between her fingers. The action leaves a bright red smudge between her two poles of vision, like some warning coming out from the periphery, a thing she can’t quite see. “Fuck. I was hoping, y’know, maybe–”
“There’s still time, right? Anyways, I did talk to Margot and she says there was someone interested. Some guy, asked about the price of Married 3. He didn’t buy it but he seemed interested. Only–”
“Only what?” Five years together, she knows when he doesn’t want to tell her something. In the early days they were just as fucked up as each other and she didn’t tell her mom about him because her mom would disapprove; now it’s all cautious looks and long-suffering Sunday lunches.
“Well, I saw the guy. That shit I was saying about turtlenecks and berets, that is not this guy. He looks like a hillbilly walked straight in from an Arkansas gas station, ‘cept he sounds Texan.”
“You and fucking Arkansas, I swear to God. You’re sure it was Married 3 he wanted? Not something more– I don’t know. One of the Untitleds.”
“Yep. Maybe he likes how fucking weird it is. Apparently Margot’s seen him more than once, like he’s been coming back just to look at it. And he draws it? Well, Margot didn’t see what he’s actually drawing, but he’s drawing something.”
Audrey reaches blindly for a mug and takes a sip, coughs and splutters when she tastes paint and old ash. Fucking cliche. “People are weird, Marc, that’s just the way people are. If he likes the picture–”
“Was that optimism I just heard? My God. Well, he’s been here all week and he’s fixing to show again tomorrow, if Margot can be relied upon. You should come size him up.”
“I don’t wanna–”
“People like making connections, y’know, talking to the face behind the art. Maybe it’d help. Plus he isn’t–”
“He isn’t what?”
Marcus’s voice bleeds into a smile. She can picture it, the smile, the darkening of his brown cheeks into a blush. “I mean, underneath all the redneck shit, the mustache, he’s got– I don’t know. Nice bones.”
“Nice bones? The fuck does that mean?”
“Why don’t you come tomorrow and find out?”
This is the other thing Audrey’s mother didn’t and doesn’t know: that Audrey and Marcus met at a gay bar in the French Quarter, each of them looking for something else but somehow by the grace of tequila ending up with each other. She hasn’t told her mother she’s bisexual and she doubts she ever will. Idly, she’s relieved she won’t ever have to, Marcus’s soft hands being what they are, their names on the lease together being what they are. Another part of her is furious.
Her father, she doesn’t think about telling at all.
#
So the next afternoon finds them catching a streetcar to Julia Street, fingers intertwined. She watches the line of his neck and wonders when, if ever, she’s going to get bored of him now that he’s turned into a boring person. His earring glints in the sunshine and the first time they fucked was after they did coke together, but they don’t do that anymore. They have tender sex in the morning sunshine and she keeps waiting for the ceiling to fall in.
At the gallery, she talks to Margot about dealers and the review that should be coming out next week, though they’d hoped this week, and refreshing the page makes Audrey’s fingers twitch. No new sales since the two at the opening; Margot’s sticker sheet remains stubbornly populated with red. Except for this guy. The one with nice bones.
“What d’ya think?” Audrey says. “Honestly. Like, your actual read on this guy. Is he gonna buy it?”
Margot glances over at Married 3. Twisted, bestial shapes in psychedelic colors — Audrey likes to draw on her experiences with acid — resembling somewhere towards a horse, something else wolfish, an element of vulture feathers, wings, and a feeling sexual about it in some undefined way. Audrey once drew crude pornography in her pink school notebook and the impulse to horrify and disturb has never since quite gone away.
“I don’t know,” Margot says. “He isn’t like anyone else I ever had come in here before.”
Margot’s good at her job; she’s seen a lot. She lost her husband in Katrina and kept the gallery going on her own. She says she gave Audrey a second gallery slot only a year and half after her first because she’s talented, because she’s going places, but really Audrey suspects some strange and off-putting maternal affection and tries to put a stop to it wherever she can. Today Margot’s earrings look alarmingly like cocaine spoons.
Audrey settles into a corner to wait. She takes her sketchbook out and renders Margot — earrings and all — in a loose continuous line, and then Marcus, who’s taken over Margot’s computer to play spider solitaire. A couple people come in, tourists, red-cheeked with sun and cameras hanging around their necks. They glance around curiously and then leave again, which, maybe Margot should have told them the gallery can ship. Nearing four Audrey goes outside for a cigarette, squints in the sun. In two weeks it’s White Linen Night and maybe she’ll sell something then, maybe she won’t. Her mom wants to come down for it, wants to bring Ted. They’ll be all put-together and sophisticated and say charming things to Margot, though Audrey knows her mom doesn’t like Margot, again for reasons she’s pushing away the thought of. Family invariably leads her down a spiral and she’s sick of doing breathing exercises.
Five past four, she spots a six foot shape slinking through the crowd and into the gallery. She drops her second cigarette and follows. Stands in the doorway watching him, the slow deliberation of his walk, the hair tied up at his nape the color of soda bread, and the large black ledger tucked under one long, narrow arm.
Marcus stands up from the desk like he’s gonna come join their conversation, like he was expecting Audrey to have a conversation with this stranger, because she’s so famously good at that, making positive impressions on strangers, but she waves him off with a sharp look because this isn’t a stranger at all.
She doesn’t know what to call him. It was always Mr. Cohle around the dinner table, at the Christmas parties he looked like he didn’t want to come to. Her mom and her dad both woulda whipped her ass for saying anything different, though he never seemed like a Mr. Cohle. Shoulda been Detective Cohle, by rights, only her mom hadn’t liked bringing Marty’s work home that way. And now he’s not a detective and he doesn’t seem like that figure of strange remove, isolation, who’d told her he’d shot someone in a voice like it was costing him something.
She settles on Rust. It comes out weird. But he turns, and she sees what he looks like now, grayer and cooler-toned, requiring a different palette. The mustache does make him look like a guy in a gas station, or a guy on a patchy yellow lawn, but it’s the same bones beneath it, stark and hollowed-out. Nice bones.
“Miss Audrey,” he says. Doesn’t quite tip an imaginary hat.
“What’re you doing here?”
“Heard you had a showing on. I was in the vicinity.”
Fledgling shock and curiosity are giving way to something more familiar, exasperation, anger. She hasn’t heard anything of Rust that isn’t connected to her dad, not ever, Rust- of Rust-and-Marty, excepting that one time her mom was drunk and crying in the bathroom after the divorce. Even now. And even then. They were on the news together and why would Rust be here if not because Marty’s somewhere close behind?
She folds her arms. “They said you were asking about a painting. That one.” She nods to it; even naming it would reveal something, something she’s sure he already knows.
“Wondering if I could afford it.”
“It ain’t for sale.”
He blinks, slow, lethargic, a little baleful. She can feel Margot and Marcus watching them across the empty floor. “Just that one you got a problem with, or is it me?”
“You don’t–” She sets her jaw. “What’ve you been drawing?”
He doesn’t follow her eyes down to his ledger. He doesn’t open it and show her, either. One time when she was small, like, ten, he’d had it with him in the kitchen and she’d tried to take it from the counter, and her dad had snapped at her but Mr. Cohle, Mr. Cohle had gone real quiet and said, you don’t wanna look at that. No one does.
“You asking me to leave?” he says. He smells like cigarettes and it makes her want another.
“Yes,” she returns immediately. Then she runs a hand through her hair and says, “Fuck. Are you gonna be honest with me, if I ask you if my dad sent you?”
“I’m sick of lying to Hart women because they ask me to. Are you asking me to lie?”
She doesn’t defer the name. Hart always sounded better than Holland or, God forbid, Sawyer, which is Ted’s. “No.”
His lips twist. “You know, I don’t think you mean that.”
“Listen, man, whatever the hell you’re doing here–”
“Is there a problem here?” It’s Margot, who didn’t get the memo. She looks between them with narrowed eyes. “Sir, I know we spoke the other day, but if Ms. Hart wants you to leave–”
“I don’t want him to leave,” Audrey snaps, a contradiction in terms. Rust looks vaguely surprised, though it’s probably just the veil of an act. Her dad always used to talk about how fucking persuasive he was, get maudlin about it three beers in, back when Audrey still listened to what he had to say. Guy could get Clinton to admit to screwing Monica Lewinsky, he’s that good. Guy could get anyone he liked begging for absolution at his feet.
Because Rust was the sort of man who made a man like her father use words like absolution, apparently; because every other word about Rust was a curse and yet said with a strange, fond reverence, delivered without respect to his audience. Audrey half suspected he’d have said it to an empty room.
Rust looks like he’s waiting for something. Her, right, he’s waiting for her, only she has no idea what she’s doing. There was a period of time she hated him. Blamed him for everything that went wrong, and there was a lot that went wrong. “You ain’t buying that painting.”
Rust’s eyebrows lift, like he hadn’t expected anything different. He’s got this smartness about him, some smug thing Marty used to bitch about too. Twenty steps ahead like if time’s going forward he’s sitting somewhere around the corner, waiting for it to catch up. She wonders how she’d put that on a canvas.
“Can we–” She gestures out to the street. He’s so much taller than her. An inch or two taller than her dad, which isn’t much but feels like a lot. There was also a brief period in 2001 when Audrey had had idle daydreams about seducing him. Right around the time of 9/11, they were watching the shit on the news and Audrey was alarmed and addicted by crisis in equal measure, and Marty had come back home all stormy-faced, blotchy, muttering to himself the red-blooded American way and behind him, loitering on the doorstep, Rust looked like it had been inevitable as the breaking of surf on the shore with his sleeves rolled up. He looked inevitable too. And it would have made her father so fucking mad.
And Rust has always been intertwined in the fate of their family, just not the way Audrey, fifteen, had imagined it. I don’t regret what I did, her mom had whispered on the edge of the tub, lips stained dark with red wine. That’s the worst part, right? That I don’t regret it, what I did to him?
He tilts his head. Then he nods, sleepy-looking eyes, and succeeds her out without a second backwards glance.
She tells him she wants a beignet; he acquiesces. They find a cafe and she shoves her card at the clerk before he can do anything like pay for her food, though he makes no motion towards his own wallet, though he’s something weird and beyond that, anyway. By some wordless agreement they sit outside and she watches him light up a smoke, pinched lazily between thumb and middle finger. Then he gestures with it. “You treating me as your dad’s messenger, or. What is this?”
She looks into her coffee. Spears a flake of pastry on the pad of her thumb. “How are you doing?”
He doesn’t say anything. When she looks up, there’s a faultline evident in his eyes. “Why?”
“Why? Because–” She waves a hand. “I saw you semi regularly, say, once a month at least, most of my adolescence and then the last time I saw my dad it was because you and him had been in some awful fucking fight with a serial killer, so–”
“Fight,” he repeats. “Marty’d like to call it a fight. Can’t quite get his tongue around it, though, like he knows it’s not the word.”
“You answered my questions when I was a kid.”
“You were a kid,” he says blankly, like that’s all the reason there is. Then he shifts in his chair, inhales another third of the cigarette in one long breath. “I’m doing fine. You don’t gotta ask me that.”
“No? ‘Cause my mom, she–”
He doesn’t flinch, exactly. Just retreats a little further behind the eyes. She tries to soften her voice and doesn’t do a great job at it. Around Rust– she doesn’t know. Around Rust she feels fractious and sixteen again and her father is beating up two guys ‘cause they had the audacity to touch her when she asked them to.
“My mom worries. About both of you, for some reason. You always did come as a fucking pair.”
Unbelievably, Rust smiles. Thin and dry but a smile nonetheless. “We’re doing just fine.”
“Right. Well.” And now she feels awkward about it, about the way he said it, like holding some secret above her head. “What are you doing in New Orleans?”
“Working a case.”
“You’re working again?”
He shrugs. “Some. It’s Marty’s case. Reckon he keeps me around ‘cause it makes him seem more approachable by contrast.”
She snorts. Then she looks back down into her coffee, regrets the snort, regrets the coffee too. It’s nearing five and she’ll be up all night. A bite of her beignet gets sugar all around her mouth and Rust has the decency not to look at her as she dabs at it with a napkin, though maybe he just doesn’t notice, doing that thing where he stares into the middle distance like he’s not really here. “So you’re working, but you’re not working, so you’re spending your afternoons staring at my pieces and drawing them in your ledger to– what. Show my dad?”
She only realizes it as she says it, but that’s what he’s doing. Keeping them as record. Souvenir, like a gift.
She feels distant with something she’d like to believe is anger but really it’s a lot less defined than that. Rust is taking out another cigarette. Concentrating on his fingers, which are shaking a little, like he needs a drink. Or else he didn’t want her to know what she thinks she might know.
“There’s a catalog, y’know,” she adds stupidly, when she can’t think of anything else to say. “Online.”
“It doesn’t have everything.”
They look at each other over the table. Then his eyes skitter away again and she lights her own cigarette. She should have let Marcus come. Second pair of eyes, give her some confidence in what she’s seeing. She didn’t know anything about it back then but now, maybe, now she thinks she can read it in him, not exactly so simple as gaydar but close enough.
That’s Rust, anyway. Her dad’s beyond consideration of that sort, hell, there’s a reason she’s never even considered saying it to him, Dad, I’m not straight, he’d figure it for a joke and then make some crude joke about it of his own, that’s if things went well. That’s if he didn’t slap her again. And bisexuality, well, only more fodder for the varsity fucking slut team bullshit–
My dad doesn’t deserve it, she wants to say. Why my dad? And, that ain’t gonna end well.
“Married 3,” Rust says into the silence between them. The street is busy but it’s hard not to hear him when he speaks, he just has that sort of voice. “Tell me about it.”
She chews her lip. “You don’t wanna know.”
“I’m asking, ain’t I? I ain’t like you Harts, I don’t ask questions with the desire only for one sort of answer.” Everybody does that, she thinks, Hart or not, but he’s already getting out the ledger, opening it on the small, sticky table. Strange. She’d have figured him for precious, averse to contamination. He flicks through the pages and she catches strong black lines, some blue, some red, like he draws with whatever ballpoint he’s got to hand. Lands on a double page spread near the end, her work rendered in vivid line and shade, monochrome but textural, interspersed with people — Margot and Marcus included — and multiple interpretations of Married 3, each one tangled differently, each one differently warped.
She takes in a breath. “Shit. You’re– you’re real good.”
“I’m trying to be better. Marty says I gotta have a hobby that’s not being a miserable asshole all the time. But this–” He taps two long, nicotine-yellowed fingers on the latest study. “I ain’t quite getting it. The skeletal frame, this animal element right here–”
“Are you asking me what it is, or how I did it?”
He sits back. “I can ask you for painting advice if you want me to.”
She’d never expected to see him again, really, though maybe that was stupid, him being tangled up with her dad in some way and her dad being her dad. “Why’d you like it so much? No one else does. I mean– people do, arty people do, I guess, if they’re looking for something in it, but most people find it disturbing.”
“Guess I’m used to disturbing. It resonates. That’s what people want art to do, right? Resonate? Like the act of putting something out creatively has any bearing on anybody else, like they’re asking you to feel responsible for more than just you and your work, which is all that matters, there ain’t nothing beyond that black frame for you, there’s your picture and the dark. Some people require illusions to be comforting, I guess.”
“So it’s an illusion? What I painted?”
“It’s all–” He waves his cigarette. “Point is I ain’t asking for truth from it, your picture, I don’t consider it whatever goddamn window people want it to be, it just caught me and I want to know what you were thinking about when you were painting it.”
“I was thinking about you.”
He only blinks. She hadn’t thought him the sort to fish for a compliment, but maybe he knows it’s not a compliment at all.
“I was thinking about– about how everything got all twisted up and fucked when I was sixteen. My mom and my dad and you.”
They look at each other over the table, over the ledger. He takes a breath and then says, “I didn’t think she’d tell you. Always tried to be adult about things, responsible, whatever that means.”
Edge of the bathtub, Audrey had asked: what happened? What did you do? And her mom had said something about Marty and something about Rust in one breath, always interlinked, and Audrey had watched enough movies, been to enough parties, and seen enough of the looks between them to know what that meant. “She didn’t mean to tell me. She was drinking. I asked. Wanted a reason, whatever, like I was sad about my dad not being in my life anymore. I was so fucking mad at him right then. She coulda said she was crying about anything, literally anything, and I would’ve let it go. Would’ve believed her. But she didn’t, she just told me the truth. A little bit of the truth.” She won’t tell Rust the thing about regret, about lacking regret. She’s not even angry to see him anymore, all that familiar fury draining out of her like water through cracks in cupped hands. She tries not to hurt people anymore. “Sorry.”
“People know too many things. I wish I didn’t know anything about it neither.”
She leans back too, crosses her legs at the knee. He fits strangely in the space. Sunlit street outside a cafe, hair pulled back out of his eyes. It’s about the length of her own. She’s not sure what angles she’d use to paint him, what brushstrokes or lines. “I guess I can’t stop you buying the picture, since it’s of you.”
“Nahhh. I ain’t never owned my own image. Won’t start now.”
“So you don’t want it?”
“Figure Marty might not like me hanging it on the wall if he knew what it was about. Or I guess I could not tell him. Say it’s abstract, some shit. He’d probably like the colors.”
“That– I mean, are you really–”
“I’m here on his behalf, Miss Audrey, not because he wants me to be but because he needs me to be. And I like art.”
It can’t be that simple, she catches herself thinking, only it’s not simple at all. One time Marcus went to a Sunday lunch at Ted’s and her mom’s without her, because she couldn’t get out of bed and lay paralyzed at the thought of the shit they’d be talking about her, Ted and her mom and Macie too, if Macie was around, if no one was there to stop them, so Marcus kissed her on the forehead and said he’d bring back leftovers in tupperware like a real boy and he wouldn’t let them discuss her meds, not even once. When he got back she ate microwaved pot roast for dinner with her feet in his lap and they watched Family Fortunes until he drifted to sleep. Tired from the drive.
“What does that mean?” she says finally, when the silence has stretched on too long. The coffee’s gone staticky in her head atop the cigarette.
He looks at her wryly, maybe amusedly. He was always so serious back then. Now it’s like he took a lesson in irony, maybe read some Foster Wallace. He taps ash off his smoke and uncrosses his own long legs, stands up, tugs at the hem of his button-down shirt. “We’re in town a couple days longer. Now, he’s not gonna ask to see you, ‘cause he’s all mixed up about that and rightly so. But you got his number, if you feel like asking him.”
“I don’t–”
“Sunday. We’re leaving Sunday. Though, hell, we don’t live that far away. Got all the time in the world, if you believe in that sorta thing.”
When he’s gone with his ledger, taking with him a breeze of smoke and ash and some strangely familiar cologne, she sits there a while, tracing a fingertip around the rim of her coffee cup. Ten years ago she’d have smashed something, maybe called him a fucking asshole, deleted her dad’s number out of her phone. Cried, called her mom. Only she can’t call her mom about Rust. Marty, sure, but Rust has been a red zone ever since the bathtub, the bottle of wine. Her mom didn’t finish it, some oaky Italian red, got three quarters through the bottle before forgetting about the dregs so Audrey took it to her room after and drank the rest in one long glug, getting burgundy stains all down her chin. I shouldn’t have told you that, her mom said the next morning, gray and nursing an aspirin. It wasn’t appropriate.
Audrey takes her time going back to the gallery. She detours via the riverfront, looks over the railing into the oil-dull Mississippi in a way that would make her mom concerned about her but hell, that hasn’t been a problem in a while and it would take more than Rust to make it so.
Margot’s already gone when she gets there, the place lit only by the lamplight above her desk, where Marcus is playing spider solitaire on the desktop again. He gives her a broad smile, the kind that tells her he was worried about her. She can still feel the sugar crusting in the corners of her mouth.
“Hey,” she says, preempting him. “You ready to go?”
He shrugs, shuts down the computer without finishing his game. “Margot left me the keys. We getting dinner, or–?”
“We could cook later. I just had a beignet.”
“You did, huh?” He switches off the lamp, casting his face in shadow so she can’t see his narrowed eyes.
His restraint lasts until they’re back in the apartment, air full of turps and pencil shavings, easing the cork from a bottle of wine. White, not red. He puts on one of his jazz rap albums and she feels sophisticated leaning against the counter sipping Californian Chardonnay, feels far removed from Lafayette suburbs and fishnet tights and Rust’s tired, bony face.
And then he says, “So,” rounding the counter to lean with his arm nudging hers. “This guy. You knew him?”
“Marc–”
“C’mon, you gotta give me something here, I’m just about dying of curiosity. You don’t want me to die, do you?”
“God, you’re so fucking dramatic. Jeez. Yeah, I know him. The guy. His name’s Rust.”
“Rust? As in–”
As in corrosion, decay. Rust’s probably heard that one before. “As in Rustin, I think. I don’t know, I only knew him as Mr. Cohle. Detective Cohle.”
“Detective?”
“He was my dad’s partner when he was a cop. He came over for dinner pretty often, came to one or two parties, though he wasn’t very good at them. I’d always catch him trying to sneak away.”
“Damn. Face from the past, huh?” Marcus’s words are carefully chosen. He doesn’t get it yet. Neither, really, does she.
“You remember I told you about– about my parents splitting up when I was sixteen. How fucked it all was.”
“Yeah. Your dad– your dad was cheating on your mom, right? And your mom–”
He stops. It’s not delicate to say out loud. She’d like to collapse the straight line that can be drawn between them, the divorce and her own mental breakdown the following year, like to erase it and say actually she’s not that simple, she’s not that ordinary, but she can’t. This is why she had to tell Marcus about it. “Yeah. My mom cheated on my dad to make him leave.”
Then she lets the silence do the talking; and she sees it in his face, the moment the other shoe drops. “Holy shit.”
“Yep.”
“Your mom and– and that guy? Shit. Are they still in contact? Or was that what he was doing here, trying to–”
“I don’t think it was about my mom at all.” She takes a long swig of her wine. She’s not good at picking out flavors, identifying notes. Ted’s a wine buff and keeps emailing her recommendations. She’s occasionally tempted to write back, did I fucking ask? But she doesn’t, because then there would be something wrong with her. “Any of it. I mean, she– like, I say she cheated, and she did, but that makes it sound so fucking simple.” Her mom on the bathroom tile: I think I made his life even worse. Audrey had had to make a judgment call about the pronoun, a decision of faith. Dad made his own life worse, she’d snapped, and her mom had lifted her head and not corrected her, though they both knew she wasn’t talking about Marty at all. “They had a fight, Rust and my dad, and then Rust quit his job and moved to Alaska and no one ever heard from him again until he came back to solve this old case with my dad like nothing happened between them at all.”
“And your mom figures in this… where?”
“I told you, I don’t think she does. I think–” She looks down into her wine. Thinks of Rust’s careful, elaborate drawings, rendered not for style but for substance, the way he probably drew crime scenes. For someone else to see. “Did you get, um. Did you get gay vibes off him? Rust, I mean?”
Marcus laughs. “You’re not seriously–”
“Come on, Marc, you know you’re better at that than me.”
“But I don’t know this guy. You do.” His smile fades, and he looks closer at her. “Wow. So when you say it’s complicated–”
“So you think he might be?”
“Baby, c’mon, you gotta give me a little more to work with.”
“It’s just– some of the things he said. The way he said them. About– fuck, this is so weird. About my dad.”
“You think–”
“My dad’s not gay.” It comes out rapid, defensive, but if she’s defensive it’s because it’s an idea that goes against her grain, that she could go home (home!) like a child never proscribed from anything, never limited or insulted or shamed, treated like something the same when he’s never understood her so why should he start now? And she’s holding her wine glass too tight and she sets it down before she fractures it into large shards that might cut her palms. This morning she took her meds like a dutiful patient, washed them down with orange juice and water. Her father has never mentioned the 72 hour hold once, though he knows about it, she can see it in his eyes.
“But you think Rust is.”
Unbidden, she remembers Rust’s parting words. Though, hell, we don’t live that far away. We. Like–
“Something like that. He was married once, had a kid. Hell, he fucked my mom, didn’t he? But–”
Maybe he just meant that they lived close by to each other, that they still lived in the vicinity of Lafayette and Lafayette isn’t far, which it isn’t, maybe that’s what he meant. The urge to call her mom is getting louder.
“So what did he want?” Marcus says, voice soft, like coaxing some wild animal. He’s too nice to her some of the time. Most of the time. Only because he used to be bitter and he’s doing better at unlearning it than she is, though he doesn’t have a mom and she does. Somehow unfair. “Coming to the gallery, what was he–”
“They’re in the city for the week. Until Sunday. I think he wants me to see my dad.”
Marcus shakes his head. “Wait, so your dad sent this guy he used to work with who might be gay who also slept with his ex wife to get you to agree to see him? Why doesn’t he just call?”
“I don’t think my dad sent him at all.”
“Are you gonna see him?”
She drains her wine. She doesn’t want to talk about that with Marcus. Marcus with the nice dad and the dead mom, Marcus who holds her hand under the table at Ted and her mom’s house. Marcus who knows frustratingly too much about her. She told him once, early on, I get itchy. I’m a slut. I uphold all the shitty bisexual stereotypes. This probably won’t last and I don’t want you to get hurt when it doesn’t.
He’d said, Maybe we’ll hurt each other. Like it was a challenge. And now they stop at two glasses of wine and pee with the bathroom door open.
“I’ll think about it,” she says.
#
And she does think about it. Thinks about it lying awake that night, thinks about it at work the next day, sits still behind the reception desk where usually she’d be marking out ideas for her next piece. Gets as far as thumbing through her phone contacts before putting it down again, steepling her fingers. Her last text conversation with her dad reads: happy birthday xx from her, at 10:54pm on the day in question, and Thanks, sweetheart! Hope you’re doing all right. Call me if you need anything x from him, at 11:32pm the same night. She’d lain awake looking at it until Marcus had turned over and taken her phone out of her hand, putting it on the nightstand. She’d asked him, You think people can change? And Marcus only said, We did.
Like it’s that fucking easy.
She thinks about it when Margot calls her to tell someone’s bought a piece, not Married 3 and not Rust, and she thinks about it when she calls Marcus to celebrate. She thinks about it on the streetcar home and she thinks about it painting a spiral onto her latest canvas, frowns down at the spiral, hadn’t intended it that way. If she ever gets famous enough to be interviewed, to be asked the question When did you discover art as your passion? she knows her mom wants her to say, At therapy. At fucking art therapy, like painting sunflowers and smiley faces ever helped anyone, like it made the slightest bit of difference. Like the real answer’s not a girly pink notebook filled with things a nine year old shouldn’t know about.
She paints a red line through the spiral. It makes her think of a hatchet buried in her dad’s chest and that’s when she picks up the phone.
“Hello?” he says, on answering. For a second she wonders if he doesn’t have caller ID — she doesn’t even know if he has an iPhone — but then he was always easy on the phone, professional, that clipped Hart Household the constant refrain of her childhood. Doesn’t identify himself because he knows who’s calling, just doesn’t know what to say.
“Uh, hey, Dad.”
“What can I do for you, sweetheart?”
She squeezes her eyes shut. Tastes paint fumes at the roof of her mouth and wonders if she’s somehow gotten high. “Rust said you’re in New Orleans.”
“He did, huh? Well, I am. We are.” She can’t tell if he’s surprised or not, if Rust told him about the whole thing or not. Are they in a hotel? A motel? Staking out a place, bitching at each other over the stickshift?
“I was wondering if– I mean. If you have time.”
She hears him inhale. “Yeah. Yeah, I’d– I’d love to see you. I’d really love that.”
He sounds the way he did in the hospital, breathless, high, a little emotional in a way that was more pathetic than anything else, if she rationalized it to herself, but in the moment she’d let it sweep her into taking his hand. “Okay. Where are you–”
“Anywhere’s good with me. Anytime, too.” Then there’s the thing she’d been afraid of — a voice in the background, low and indistinct, still recognizable for its smoky Texan drawl. Rust’s voice. Her dad comes back to the phone and says, “Okay, maybe not anytime. You around tomorrow evening? That work?”
She’d been intending to curl up on the couch and start The Americans, which Marcus had recorded for them months ago. She’d been intending to let this whole thing wash over and forget she even had a dad at all. “Yeah. Uh– you eat seafood, right?”
“Yup. Do you? Ain’t you a vegetarian or something?”
“Pescetarian.” The silence says he doesn’t know what that means. The silence has her itching to hang up the phone. Instead, she rushes the words out like hurdle-jumping. “Anyway, uh, there’s a good seafood place around the corner from us, casual, you’d– I think you’d like it.”
“Yeah,” he says, voice drawing back into a smile. “Sounds great. Text me the address.”
“Okay. 7? Does 7 work?”
“7’s perfect. Hey, uh, your mom told me you got a nice boyfriend. He can– you can bring him, if you want. I’d like to meet him. If I’m allowed to.”
Maybe there’s the edge of the old bitterness, sarcasm, childish passive aggression he was fond of back then, or maybe she’s reading it in because she expects nothing else. Her boyfriend’s mixed race and she’s got to hope he doesn’t make some stupid comment about it, stupid like all the other things he’s said and might say, stupid the way she’s still thinking about it years and years later. This is and was from the very start a bad idea. But she says, “I’ll see if he wants to come.” Hesitates. The pause draws out; she feels a little ill in the quiet and says, “You can– you can bring Rust along. If you want.”
The smile widens. Beams. “Yeah. Yeah, I just might do that.” And then, further away, “Yeah, fuck you, I ain’t letting you sit like a monk in fucking contemplation in the room all night, hotel’ll bill us for the smoke damage. No, I don’t give a shit that you’ve disabled the smoke alarm.”
When Audrey finally hangs up the phone, she draws circles in the back of her sketchbook and tries not to scream.
#
“Public place,” Marcus says, tangling her fingers through his own on their way down the stairs the next evening. “Deliberate choice?”
“Something like that.” She’s flush with nerves and regrets wearing a jacket, sweat prickling under her arms and at her back, the night air humid and swampy. She’s warned Marcus as best she can. Like, my dad’s an asshole. There’s a reason we don’t really talk. And he’s making an effort now but I don’t know how much–
They arrive first. Find a booth and sit in it, knees knocking into each other, ignoring their laminated menus. Diner-style, it’s a place they come often. They order a beer each and then she worries at a scratch in the sticky formica with her fingertip, says, “This was a bad idea,” just as she spots her dad’s balding head by the entrance and resigns herself to her decisions.
He walks close to Rust, Rust who looks the same as he did two days ago, taller and narrower than her dad and saying something expressionlessly which makes her dad laugh, looking over his shoulder, leading the way. Her dad looks like her dad. Hard to qualify it, really.
Somehow they all greet each other — she thinks she blacks out for that part — and then they’re sitting in a booth, the four of them, like she could ever have seen this coming. Somewhere in there Marty shook Marcus’s hand and didn’t say anything weird, though there’s time enough yet. They order gumbo and jambalaya and crawfish étouffée; Marty asks Rust if he wants a beer and Rust shakes his head. They prop their elbows on the table and look at each other.
Rust seems a creature designed to marinate in awkwardness, like he fucking likes it or something. He makes no effort to break the silence. But Marty — her dad, but somehow it’s easier to think of him as Marty here, face to face over a small sticky table with the buzz of the city just outside — Marty always hated silences, and poked at them with smalltalk wherever he could. So now he says, predictably, “So how’re you kids liking New Orleans, then, huh? Ain’t been back here since before Katrina, I reckon, and it’s changed a lot.”
“Marc’s lived here the whole time,” Audrey says.
Glances over at Marcus, who’s also good at conversation, good at playing the tour guide, good at giving a show. And he smiles and he nods and he gives an account of the city, before and after, and Marty asks the right questions at the right moments and it’s just when Audrey is beginning to relax into the pointlessness of the thing that Rust sits up and says, “Aftermath of death, it inspires you, huh?”
He says it to her, but of course both Marcus and Marty lapse into silence, since Rust’s voice has a way of doing that. Audrey holds his eyes. “Well, Mary Shelley did most of her reading at Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave. Other things, too.”
“That was her mother, right?” Marcus says.
“Yeah. That was her mother.”
Silence again. Audrey opens her mouth to say, What are we doing here, really, I mean what do we stand to gain? but then their food arrives and the silence eases into comfortable, like a betrayal, the way it does when you’re sharing food. She’s tried to paint dinner scenes in the past, twisting up Norman Rockwell to her own abstract, stylized ends, but the right balance of irony always eludes her. They eat and Marty gets them talking again and when Marcus directs a question to Rust — you’re working with Marty, then, at the P.I. firm? — he responds without melodrama.
“Yeah,” he says. “I am. For the foreseeable. I ain’t having my name on the door, it’s all bullshit paperwork and emails from rich old ladies–”
“The rich old ladies do seem to like you. Maybe it’s the mustache,” Marty cuts in, sly grin.
“–which I’m leaving to him, since he enjoys that shit so much.” Finished without a sideways glance, a little lift curling in the corner of Rust’s mouth that betrays– something. She doesn’t know. “Thought I’d be a cop til I died.”
It’s Marty’s face goes a little gray, then. He sticks his shoulder close to Rust’s all through the meal, and when Rust gets up to go smoke outside he looks after him, some long look in his eyes. Marcus leaves for the bathroom and then it’s just the two of them, Marty and Audrey, sticky tables and mouths still burning with spice. He’d been a meat and potatoes man, a pasta man, a meatloaf man, way back when. But maybe that was only because those were what her mom made.
“I’m sorry it’s been so long,” he says.
She begins to pick the label off her beer. “I shoulda called you on your birthday.”
“Nah, I don’t–”
“It’s fucking weird, okay? You apologizing to me. I should’ve called and I’m sorry.”
“That’s weird too,” he mutters. Drains his own beer. “All of this is weird.”
“We didn’t have to do it. It’s only because– because Rust, of all people–”
“I didn’t ask him to.” He looks at her, suddenly intent. “I mean that, I didn’t– I didn’t send him in there like some sorta goddamn spy, or something, I wasn’t checking up on you or anything like that.”
“No. I know.”
“This can be it, if you want. You did it, you can tell your mom you’re a good daughter and I’m still alive and we don’t gotta do it again, if you don’t want to.”
She chews on the inside of her cheek. Kinda wishes she went outside for a cigarette with Rust. “It doesn’t have to be it.”
“You sure?”
He’s Marty, yes, but he’s her father too, her dad who carried her into the house when she fell asleep in the car after a road trip, her dad who slapped her across the face because she let two boys touch her off the side of the highway. He has blond hair like her own, blue eyes she’s seen swimming with drink, with anger, times beyond counting, and everytime she paints in that color it ends up furious, though it goes against all the theories and rules. She doesn’t go to a therapist anymore but if she did–
“Yeah,” she says. “But– I do need to talk to you. After. If we could– y’know, walk around a bit.”
“Sure. Yeah, I– sure. If you’re okay leaving Marcus with Rust, that is. He’ll probably talk to him about death, some shit. The circular inevitability of time.”
“Marc can handle it.”
“Sure he can.” Her dad smiles down at his empty bottle and then Marcus comes back, nudging his knee against Audrey’s, comfort she won’t put off, necessarily, but doesn’t need. Then Rust comes back too in a waft of ash tobacco and Marty heaves a sigh sliding back across the booth to make room, says, “Your dad’s getting old over here. Goddamn back problems, can you believe it? This asshole’s the one got stabbed in the gut and yet I’m the one can’t stand up straight half the time.”
“What happened?”
He shrugs. “Physio says it’s my muscles overcompensating for the, y’know. The hatchet to the chest. Took on too much load too early, he tells me. I can thank you for that, huh?” He looks over at Rust, makes a movement like patting him on the knee. “Practically carried you outta that hospital parking lot.”
She can’t help saying, “Oh my God, I remember that, Mom was so fucking mad.”
“She was?”
“Spitting blood. Only she didn’t feel like she had a right to be angry, so she just complained about it to me. Had to hear about it for weeks.”
“Better you than us,” Rust says, quiet, low.
Marcus leans forward. “You got stabbed in the gut?”
Rust smiles. “I’d show you the scar if it wouldn’t get me accused of not knowing how to behave in polite society by my partner over here.”
“Shit.”
“It’s big, like a crescent. Like someone just took a big pink paintbrush and painted it on.”
“He’s been shot, too. Trust me, this man is a whole mess over here.” Marty waves a hand, grins with teeth. “Get us kicked outta this fine establishment, you would, and they wouldn’t never be able to come back.”
“Nahhh, you’d sweet talk ‘em. Get ‘em to let it slide.”
Marcus’s knee knocks into hers again, this time with intent. Like he’s noticing what she’s also noticing. She pulls away and knots her fingers together, refuses anything but smalltalk until they get the check, lights a cigarette outside with the sense that she’s that girlish thing, a woman about to snap, and in front of her dad no less. She feels Rust’s eyes on her. After the breakdown and the psych hold they tried it, a family dinner, estranged as it was, only because everyone knew the divorce was the reason why and her parents thought they had to play nice. She’d pushed spaghetti around her plate and both her parents drank too much; her dad asked questions somewhere in the vicinity of her head, above and a little to the left, nothing like How are you doing? or What’ve you been up to? because, of course, they all knew. Her mom had developed the habit of locking the knives away and sat, twitchy, in the car outside every therapy appointment. Marty looked angry with nowhere to put it. Marty would’ve fought whoever did this to her, probably fantasized about it, only the person did it was herself. Herself and her parents and maybe a little bit Rust, too. Though really he was a piece in it just the way she was herself.
“I’ll see you back at the apartment?” Marcus says, kissing her on the cheek. She keeps her eyes open, keeps her eyes on Rust and her dad. Rust’s lips twitch up at Marty and then he walks off, open to but not expecting Marcus’s company, already lighting another cigarette.
“Guess I’ll be seeing him at the hotel,” Marty mutters, shaking his head. “Asshole never charges the nice fancy phone I bought him on the business. I’d reckon he’d lost it, only he don’t fucking lose things.”
Audrey walks the other direction without saying anything. Pinches her cigarette between her fingers and remembers it, the therapist telling her, You can’t displace blame onto your father for everything, Audrey, you’re an active participant in your own life and you have to face up to that fact.
She remembers walking out.
“Audrey–”
“Mom wants me to be friends with you. She doesn’t say it, it makes her feel bad, but that’s what she wants. Like in– like you know in Brokeback Mountain, where Ennis keeps on coming over to his ex wife’s house for Thanksgiving dinner and Sunday lunch, even though she’s married again and his kids don’t really like him or– or know him, I guess.”
“That the one with the gay cowboys?”
She hides her face. Hadn’t intended to say that. Is on some level surprised her dad can even say the word. “Yeah.”
“It ain’t never gonna be like that, you know it. Me and Maggie, what happened–”
“With Rust.”
He stops walking. Goes still under the glow of a lamppost. “She told you.”
She can’t read his face, nor his tone. “Yeah. She did. Don’t– don’t blame her or something, she was just– she just needed someone to talk to. I was there.”
“You were sixteen.”
“Yeah, and I knew what sex was already, so–”
He turns away; she catches his profile, which is set and taut with anger. There he is. “Don’t fucking talk like that.”
“Like what? Like– like everything that happened fucking happened, like it’s still there? Because it is. It is still there. It doesn’t– none of that fucking goes away just because you got divorced and spent ten years out of my life and nearly died–”
“I didn’t nearly die,” he says. Gone quiet, and it deflates her own fury. “It wasn’t critical, the hatchet. I didn’t nearly die. That was just Rust.”
“Mom says any injury can be critical. Sepsis from a papercut.”
He rubs his forehead with the back of his thumb. “Yeah. Yeah, she did used to say that.”
“But I mean it. You can’t come back here acting like– like everything in the past is just– like you’ve forgiven Rust and you’ve forgiven Mom and you’ve forgiven me too.”
“Forgiven you?”
“Like you didn’t fucking hate me for growing up.”
“What the fuck do you think I am? You think I’m some– you think I’m irrational like that, that I don’t– I am sorry, Audrey, for everything that happened in 2002. Hell, your whole adolescence, your whole upbringing, I’m sorry for all of it. Rust, he has this thing where being a father, it’s the worst thing you can be, ‘cause you’re– you’re willingly subjecting this innocent person to– to– hell, I don’t know, guy talks like he swallowed a library. I’m sorry for subjecting you to whatever I subjected you to.”
She looks at the ground. “That’s not the– that’s not the point. I’m not asking for some grand gesture of– I don’t care about fatherhood. And what are you even sorry for? Some imaginary thing Rust uses to cope with his own shitty life and you don’t get to do that, your life ain’t shitty like that.”
“Don’t you talk about Rust’s life.”
“You brought him up, Jesus. You brought him here! You said you didn’t send him and I believe you but it’s still you, he wouldn’t be doing it if not for you.”
“I know.” He looks pained. “He does this shit without my say-so, God knows the world’s hammered it over my head enough times that I don’t deserve it–”
“Yeah,” she says spitefully.
“This is why I was staying the fuck away. ‘Cause I don’t never know what to say and I try things, y’know, God, AA, never gets me anywhere. Rust, he’s an asshole but he’s got this decency to him, I never known what to do with it. Think if I tried the Rust school of thought I’d probably kill myself, ‘cause, y’know, I figure you gotta be strong, thinking like that all the time, about death and shit and time never going anywhere and somehow he made it twenty years that way, like there’s just something else to him. Guy who rode with us in the ambulance, he said to me after he can tell who’s gonna make it and who’s not. Something about fight. They were all sure Rust was gonna die and then he didn’t. Guy in the ambulance was wrong. Woke up talking to me– talking to me about the fucking light and the dark, the light winning, just like that. And I’m clinging on to anything I can get my hands on and he’s got nothing, this guy has shit all that’s good in his life and he survives twenty years anyway to wake up and believe in something, so don’t fucking talk about how my life ain’t shitty like his. I know it ain’t. And I keep screwing it up anyway.”
Audrey’s finished her cigarette. She doesn’t light another. Just stands there in the hot dark a little way from the lamplight’s pool, tastes blood in her mouth from where she bit the inside of her cheek. “You and Rust–”
Her dad looks down. “What?”
“Dad.” It comes out like a breath. He looks back up sharply. “Just– be honest with me. Please. You and Rust.”
“Me and Rust,” he repeats. She thinks she’s going to have to ask again. Gonna have to make it explicit, say it in words, and she can’t do that. She has to make him do that. But then he says, “Y’know, I ain’t never seen Brokeback. but it’s fitting, huh?”
“Really?”
“Just never caught it, I guess, wouldna been my thing–“
“I mean–
“Oh. Yeah. Really. Rust is–“ He scrubs a hand over his jaw, heavy, awkward. He was never going to tell her. “Rust is Rust, y’know. It’s complicated but it’s not, not really. Easiest thing ever happened.”
“Easy?” She sees red. Aims for the cruelest thing she can think of: “One of them dies, y’know. In Brokeback. The one who lives in Texas.”
Her dad inhales sharply, audibly. Stays silent a beat, before, “If you got a problem with it–”
She laughs. “If I got a problem with it. Okay.”
“I didn’t– wasn’t intending on telling you. Telling anyone. Rust, he don’t care. Other people do. I do. My old man, what he’d’a said–”
She thinks up other spiteful things. When are you going to cheat on him? When are you going to snap and realize being a queer’s just too much for you? When is he going to leave? But then, like before, there would be something wrong with her. “I don’t– I’m not fucking homophobic or something, I don’t have a problem with it like that. God, I mean, what year are we living in–”
He doesn’t say anything. His hand’s still hovering somewhere near his mouth, like he needs to conceal something.
“I guess I just don’t know what you want me to do with that information.”
“You asked.”
“Yeah, I did, and I think I’d rather not fucking know because– because you were such an asshole, God! You were such a fucking asshole. And you don’t even know what to be sorry for and–” And. And. All the rest.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you after the divorce. How about that? I shoulda– I don’t know. Whatever part all that shit played in– in what happened to you after.”
She thinks of sitting in a bathtub with a bottle of Everclear and a hazy, ill-determined plan. She fell apart in an ugly, adult way, drugs and drink and a rash of acne across her forehead, not like the waif-thin girls who fainted in class and weren’t allowed scissors in their pencil case. They were all learning from each other, from AIM and LiveJournal and America’s Next Top Model, whereas Audrey felt cool and mature in the imitation of her own shitty role models, like she had a monopoly on suffering because she had more of it in her immediate vicinity, like if she could have had an affair and beaten somebody up she would’ve done that too. And all her superiority led her the same place it led all the others: getting her stomach pumped in the ER and evaluated at the end of a 72 hour hold as just alike to all the rest, a spoiled little girl pleading for attention, and she slid into her mom’s car without complaining about it once, that they’d seen her through and out the door, because she wouldn’t go back there and would have told any lie to make certain she’d never be forced to, though she still felt different, still felt like her bones fit at strange angles underneath her skin.
“I didn’t handle it well,” her dad’s saying. “Your mom told me and I got so drunk I could hardly see, thought it would be a good idea to call on Rust, like he could tell me what to do, only Rust wasn’t around no more.”
“Why would Rust–”
“Like you said. Guy’s had a shitty life.”
A car rushes past. They’re standing on the sidewalk and people are walking near them, sweat is sliding down the back of her neck, she had two beers and she’s just very slightly tipsy and they’re having this conversation on the sidewalk. She shakes her head, though she can’t refuse the information, it’s out there thrumming in the air like the bayou mosquitoes.
And she can’t stop Marty from going on: “I didn’t handle it in any way like I shoulda done and I’m sorry. Me and Maggie, spiraling way out from each other, not even thinking about anyone else–”
She covers her face with her hands. She hasn’t cried in years and she’s not very good at it, crying, closest she tends to get is eyes watering in a panic attack, but now there’s a horrid sodden lump in her throat and she needs him to stop talking.
“And, hell, maybe you’re right. Been doing some fucking– self discovery lately. Figure maybe I was so hung up on what you shoulda been doing, y’know, as a woman–” she can tell he wanted to say girl “–only because I was worried about what I shoulda been doing. Being a man. Figure my pop gave me some sorta complex about that, same way I given you whatever I given you.”
“Your goddamn therapist tell you that?”
Her dad has the decency to look disgusted at the idea, like he’s still the same person after all. “I’m just saying–”
“No, I know what you’re saying.” She shakes her head again. The tears don’t fall; she just feels tired, tired and not angry anymore. Maybe she’ll paint about it. Maybe she’ll stop taking her meds and see if anyone notices; maybe she’ll catch a boat going south out the gulf and see where she ends up, Mexico or the Moon. Most likely she’d wind up right back here in this armpit of a state, swatting mosquitoes and watching her father’s jawline jut out in anger just like her own. “That’s something. An apology for something.”
“Reckon so.”
She rolls her eyes. Then feels too casual about it, like she’s forgiving him something he doesn’t deserve. “Rust teach you that? The shit about– complexes of masculinity?”
“Kinda. Some. Worked out some for myself. I don’t– y’know, I don’t get everything from Rust.”
“You just talk about him a lot. Always did, I think.”
“Yeah. Well.” Her dad rubs the back of his neck. And then, because her emotions run on a fucked-up seesaw and she’s missed worrying over his flaws in an exasperated, taken-for-granted way, she feels a surge of fondness. Love. She smiles at him and he says, “Thanks. For, uh, for not being– weird about it. Me and Rust.”
She could tell him. About herself, about Marcus. About how the universe twists around in strange ways, doubles back on itself. The circular inevitability of time. But there was something else Rust said: Got all the time in the world, if you believe in that sorta thing.
So she smiles again. Kisses her father on the cheek, though he doesn’t deserve it, and lets him walk her back to her apartment.
#
It’s October, still hot, when Audrey takes their shitty new secondhand Ford Fiesta out west in the direction of Lafayette with a canvas wrapped up in the backseat. Didn’t trust the trunk. Paramore’s self-titled up loud, what she’s been using all year to console herself about the breakup of MCR, and she doesn’t think about it too much, what she’s doing, though Macie had responded to her text that morning confirming the address with ???? and Are we playing happy families now….!!
Her GPS tells her to come off the highway and she does. Her dad coached her into those first couple streets, back at fifteen with her learner’s permit, hands trembling on the wheel and foot gunning the accelerator too hard and too fast. She hit a trashcan and nearly a tree and he yelled at her, cheeks hot red and veins standing out on his neck, and on the way back she swung sharp enough into the driveway that he knocked his head against the window. Smiled with the revenge of it, like she hadn’t known he’d be a godawful fucking teacher. He paid for her driving lessons after that.
She resents Hate to See Your Heart Break; it accompanies her up the quiet, grassy street and onto a driveway like all the others and she resents that too, the normalcy of the place, the neatly kept lawn. Still. She gets out, leaves the canvas where it is. Ignores the bell and knocks on the door.
Marcus kissed her goodbye in the morning. Said, say hi to Rust for me, in a mockingly sultry tone. Two days ago they had a fight about of all things the dishwasher. They shouted at each other and he went to sleep on the couch, though she didn’t want him to, but halfway through the night she felt him creep back into bed, muttering an apology into her hair.
Her dad’s car isn’t in the driveway, not that she knows what his car looks like, but there’s only Rust’s tired old truck which means her dad isn’t around; she recognizes this just a second before the door opens. Rust leans in the doorframe in a wifebeater and old denim, hair springing out of its scrunchie at the nape of his neck. He doesn’t look surprised to see her and he says, “Miss Audrey. What can I do you for?”
She squints at him in the sunlight overhead. He doesn’t invite her in but she won’t take that personally. She says, “Got something to drop off.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“It ain’t– it ain’t a gift, exactly. Don’t take it like a gift. More like I can’t fucking look at it anymore, it’s making me sick and you seemed to like it, so–”
He lifts his chin. Seems to get what she’s talking about. There’s an ugly slash through the bird on his forearm, pink like a paintbrush, just as he said. “You need help getting it outta the car?”
She nods. They cross to her shitty little car, guide the canvas out between them. Into the house, and on the floor he unwraps it, considers the bright psychedelics of Married 3 with a crookedness to his mouth. Not quite a smile. She says, “If you don’t want it–”
“Didn’t say that.”
“Okay. Well.” She shifts from foot to foot. Tries not to look around the house — their house — tries to keep her eyes on Rust, on the picture, on the things she knows. Still, she catches glimpses. Rust’s ledger open on the table, a stack of books on the floor, an ashtray. Half-empty spirit bottles on the breakfast bar. One of her dad’s old jerseys over the back of the couch, one of his old rodeo pictures framed next to the TV. Well-worn designated seating and when Audrey looks back at Rust, focuses on Rust for some stupid idea of privacy, she notices the little scars in the crease of his left elbow that match the ones she saw on others in the psych ward but never herself, because thankfully she never had the guts to go for a needle though really it was a close-run thing, and she says, looking at them, the scars, “I sold more pictures. Most of them, in fact. White Linen Night. Mom bought one, and I thought–” She shrugs. “I didn’t want this one anymore. So it’s yours.”
He’s kneeling by the canvas, unsticking packing tape from bubblewrap with careful movements that make the scarred tendons in his arms stand to attention. She knows he’s noticed she’s noticed. He doesn’t seem to miss much. He says, “Which one’d she buy?”
“What?”
“Your mom.”
“Uh, Untitled 4.”
He nods like this satisfies him. Stands up and draws the rest of the packaging with him, folds it into a neat pile. “Yeah. Yeah, this’ll do just fine. Won’t tell Marty what it means, of course. What you were thinking about while you were painting it.”
“Probably best not,” she agrees.
“He’s gonna want to pay you for it.”
“I know.”
“Hell, he could put it in the office, claim it tax-deductible. That’d make him happy. Sure loves doing his taxes now he’s self-employed and gets to pretend like the TV’s a business expense.”
“It won’t be expensive.” She tangles her hands together, wants a cigarette but feels impolite just lighting one up in the living room, though that ashtray’s near overflowing. She also wants Rust to say something she can latch onto, empathetic or commiserating, like, I see your pain, I’ve felt it too, but that’s not who Rust is and if it was he wouldn’t be capable of commiserating anyway. She’s got scars on her arms too and they don’t match Rust’s but close enough. “Listen–”
He shakes his head. Folds his arms over his chest. “Whatever you’re looking for, you ain’t gonna find, okay? Nothing ‘cept a couple old men running down their lives til the end of the clock. There ain’t nothing worth looking up to here, there’s change only so far as guilt takes it and no further. Misery’ll do a lot to a person but not everything.”
“I know,” she says. He looks at her hard and she thinks about saying it, forcing him to know, the psych hold and the drugs in the gay bar and everything in between, everything she can’t tell her mom about and everything she has to tell someone about anyway, why not someone who understands? She reconciled with her dad and he used Rust as a lodestone in every vein of argument. Rust who always has the words, Rust who gets in the middle of everything. Feathers in the canvas like the bird on his arm.
“But I can make a pot of coffee and maybe you can teach me some of that color theory shit while we wait for Marty to get home, huh? Won’t be too long, now.”
She looks at his arm again, track scars folded away from view. He looks older with the mustache than he would without it. Wears it like a badge of honor, thing that says, bet you didn’t expect me to last this long, huh? Maybe that’s what it says to him in the mornings in the bathroom mirror. Talk is overrated; that’s why she stopped going to therapy, that and her agency and her dad. She says, “Okay. Sure.”
Sits next to him on the couch to wait and light a cigarette.