We Fell Apart: A We Were Liars Novel(2)

I ignore her and read some more about Kingsley online. The art magazine articles are filled with phrases like grandly sordid imagination and the enfant terrible of twenty-first-century neoclassicism. The story from Wikipedia is that Cello burst onto the art scene in what was probably his late twenties. (He gives different birth dates to nearly every interviewer.) He never admits to attending art school and first attracted attention with a New York pop-up exhibition in a warehouse space rented for him by an anonymous patron.

His early paintings were considered audacious. They show women (and occasionally men) laughing. Some figures are in baths or showers. Some are watching television or cooking dinner or doing some other mundane activity. None of them wear clothes.

The articles chronicle his rise to fame as a critical darling, but later he became a controversial figure. He started making work with classical literature and fairy tale references. Some people say Kingsley “eroticizes suffering” and others think his work is “juvenile and needlessly violent.”

He never brings journalists to his studio and seems to do all his interviews sitting on park benches in different cities, mostly managing not to reveal much about himself at all. He says he’s American but was raised in Italy by a strict and horrific grandmother. He also says that he grew up in a hardscrabble town in the Midwest.

And that he spent his youth in a Swedish tuberculosis sanatorium.

And that he was raised by queer fishermen in Alaska.

I flip through some of his most famous paintings online. Turbulent seas, burned forests, monsters, nudes, people in contemporary clothing confronting fairy tale creatures, castles crumbling, animals transforming into people. They’re beautiful and disturbing at the same time.

Then I’m looking at a painting of my mother.





4


Persephone Escapes the Underworld shows a castle built of stone.

It is burning.

Doesn’t matter that stone doesn’t burn. It burns anyway.

From the windows at the top, black smoke pours.

The drawbridge is in flames, as well.

Kingsley has painted Isadora Hirschel Klein as Persephone, wife of Hades.

In Greek mythology, Hades was lord of the underworld. But Persephone never wanted to live down there with him. She wanted to breathe a different air.

My mother wears a white slip of

see-through fabric.

We look at her through a

haze of smoke that billows into the foreground.

She doubles over with fatigue, but her face is alight with laughter, as if she’s marveling at her own escape.



* * *



—

The phone rings in my hand and I startle.

My mom very rarely calls me. She lives in Mexico City. “Why are you the mostly naked runaway queen of the underworld?” I bark, without saying hello.

“What did Kingsley want?” she shoots back.

“He invited me to visit. He’s giving me a painting.”

“Giving you a painting? God, they’re worth a ton.”

“I won’t sell it, so it doesn’t matter.”

“Why not? You should definitely sell it.”

“Because it would be the only thing I have in the world from my father. Did you give him my email?”

“I haven’t heard from Kingsley since before you were born.”

“Hm.”

“Really.”

“So how is that painting of you—Persephone—how is that even a thing that exists?” I ask.

“I modeled for him,” she says. “I was in college.”

“It’s a famous piece of art, though. Right? The internet thinks it’s famous.”

“Um-hm.”

“So you just never told me? Or mentioned it in front of me?”

“I didn’t even want you to know he was your father. I don’t like to talk about Kingsley Cello. You know our family is just the two of us.”

I can hardly believe she’s saying “just the two of us” when she lives in Mexico City and I live in LA, but I don’t want to fight with her. She’s already made her choice. “It’s in the Saint Louis Museum of Art,” I say.

“I know. Listen, I don’t think you should visit him. He’s a difficult person. Is he sending you a plane ticket?”

“No. Maybe. I don’t think so.”

“How did he find you?”

“I asked you that. But it’s MatildaAvalonKlein at gmail. He probably just guessed.”

She clucks her tongue. “You’re not some plaything he can just pick up when he decides he’s bored.”

“Please. Will you just tell me?”

“Tell you what?”

“What happened with you and Kingsley.”





5


Isadora was nineteen when she met my father. And he was forty-three. Or maybe he was even older. She isn’t certain.

She was a student at Fordham University in New York. She made money posing for classes at the Cooper Union art school, downtown. Kingsley was a friend of the painting teacher. One evening, he dropped in at the end of class. The students clustered around the famous man, asking questions, eager to bask in his light.

Kingsley didn’t see my mother nude, but he did see fifteen paintings of her around the room in various stages of completion. As she was putting on her coat, he told her he could make a “real painting” of her, if she was willing.