The Children(5)

Samantha pressed her hands into prayer position, robot eyes registering sympathy. Then silkily she said, “You keep saying my. My life, my parents. Yet written into your mother’s books alongside you is your brother, Ennis. Edith Sharpe’s only son. He appears in your memoir as a bit of a cipher. A person of few words, always drawing, very private.”

“He did draw a lot,” Guin interjected. She only had to get through one more minute. “As did my father, Llewellyn Sharpe. In the book I talk about that, how he turned to painting following his retirement from the stage.”

Samantha favored her with a subtle nice try look. “Now a celebrated artist in his own right, your brother is as famous for his work as he is for his refusal to talk about your mother. He’s gone so far as to walk out of interviews if her name is mentioned. Why has Ennis Sharpe so thoroughly rejected the Ninth City and their author—his own mother?”

Guin tasted blood. Not because she’d bitten her tongue, but because she was imagining biting Samantha Brice. Right there on her fat apple cheek, the one soft-looking part of her. It would taste like powdered strawberries, and she wouldn’t even scream until the cameras stopped rolling. Guin made a gentle moue, thinking, Don’t lose the plot, motherfucker.

“Families are complicated,” she began. “Artists are famously temperamental. I think my bro—” She swallowed, reset. “I think if you look closely at Ennis Sharpe’s work, you’ll see it is very much in conversation with the Ninth City series. Even if he doesn’t talk about that openly.”

Samantha nodded, head tipped to a calculated angle. Guin had answered well, and still she looked like the cat that got the cream. “Well, after the announcement he made this morning, I think he might be taking that relationship on the record. What are your feelings about your brother’s plans to open an installation about Edith Sharpe, just one week after the release of your memoir?”

“An installation,” Guin repeated, holding on to her smile like a dog gripping a Frisbee, “about Edith Sharpe?”

Samantha’s voice dropped into newscaster cadence. “This morning the artist issued a press release announcing a new show, his first since the troubled closing of The Door Museum early last year. All he has revealed about the show so far is its title, Mother.”

Guin stood. Not on purpose. A burst of shock turned her legs into pistons that drove her from her seat. The thought that rang through her head was made not of words but color. A hazy, lowering red. Hand rising, shaking her head to dispel it, she said, “Stop.”

Her own voice brought her back. She blinked into dead air.

The audience was silent. Even Samantha seemed startled on the sofa below, a pretty little hen wearing too much mascara. Guin must’ve looked like Mr. Fox, hanging over her on hind legs.

She could give this to spooky Samantha Brice: she was a pro. Only the whitening of her fingers showed any tension as she gave a generous, sympathetic laugh. “Oh, please don’t go!” She looked out at the audience, inviting them to laugh with her. “We’d love you to stay a little longer, wouldn’t we?”

The audience went, “Whoo!” Guin sat. Rather, her legs folded. She looked out at the dim sea of faces, their excitement gone sharklike. They’d caught the drifting odor of her fear.

Samantha reached out and curled a hand tenderly around Guin’s bicep. “Like you said, families are complicated. I think a lot of our viewers can relate to that. Tell me.” She leaned in, conspiratorial, as if her guest wasn’t staring slackly into her poreless face. “For those who are just joining us, and those who haven’t yet read your memoir, Ninth City Dreamer, available wherever books are sold. Will you share with us, in a word, what it was like growing up at the legendary Farmhouse?”

Guin felt like a struggling ingenue who’d been fed her line from the wings. She set out smile number whatever-the-fuck, this one meant to evoke the mist over the fruit trees, the golden lights of the Farmhouse kitchen.

She said, “Magical.”





Three

1997–98




Guinevere had no memories of her earliest years. Impressions only: Edith holding her on a subway seat, looking out into the rocking dark. Llewellyn spinning her in a park by a fountain, then tipping her upside down, so the pigeons fell from the bricks like bats. Ennis. Dusted white by afternoon sun, little fingers pushing blueberries into her mouth like she was a slot machine.

This was in New York, when they lived in a Hell’s Kitchen walk-up. Her memories began to map, to knit, in Venice, in the water-lapped rooms of a borrowed palazzo.

The palazzo was no place for children. Its walls molted deadly edibles. The wide shallow steps of its marble stairs were ridged at their edges with ultrafine mosaic, busy as baleen and brutal on shins. Beneath the windows the canal glistered temptingly by, breathing its sea-god odor of sulfur and salt. Best of all was the gondola: beached in a massive hall at water level, its bladed ferro looming with a pi?ata allure.

Guinevere reached for it. She was always reaching for something. Strips of plaster to suck on, sun tossed up in pluckable sequins from the water. Her brother, a captivating being of infinite interest. Her beautiful black-haired mother.

For most of their Italian year Edith Sharpe was twenty-four. Pacing the rooms in bare feet, jeans dragging the dust, hair falling unwashed to the middle of her back. She looked neck up like a sleepless Medici daughter. Neck down like a skater boy.