We Fell Apart: A We Were Liars Novel(3)
She was. She tells me it was because she was broke. But I think she liked the idea of being immortalized, liked being worth this great man’s attention. Her beauty interested a man who famously specialized in beauty.
She went to his studio, which was in a warehouse neighborhood in Brooklyn. Upstairs was a loft apartment where Kingsley lived in haphazard splendor. Isadora had imagined he’d pay her for posing, but money was never discussed. Instead, she moved in with him for three months and shared his bed. She found herself pregnant several days after he told her to pack her things.
Insert angry phone calls, hateful arguments, and the revelation that Kingsley was seeing another woman. He refused to help with the pregnancy or the baby, and before I was even born, Kingsley had disappeared from that Williamsburg loft.
He was impossible to find. Isadora never heard from him again. She sent a birth announcement to his old address.
She moved back home with her parents temporarily, but the Kleins told her she was a stupid, lazy dropout and unfit to be a mother, so Isadora moved out to live with another single mom and share childcare. Soon after that, she met a different artist—a sculptor this time. We moved to Santa Fe to live with him.
Later my mother learned that Kingsley’s painting of her, Persephone Escapes the Underworld, sold for upwards of four million dollars to a private collector who eventually donated it to that museum in St. Louis. It’s now used to advertise their twenty-first-century art collection.
She never made a penny from it.
6
I haven’t explained why I don’t live with my mother anymore. It’s because she’s a muse. Or, you could say, a groupie. That’s her calling.
Yes, she baked cookies and taught me to swim and took me for doctors’ checkups.
She tucked me into bed and drove me to school.
But she doesn’t really like being a mother.
Even at thirty-eight, Isadora looks like a tree nymph—earthy and feral and somewhat magical. She’s petite, with strong features and wild black curls. We look alike, if you describe us only as five foot two with lots of dark hair and big eyes.
But Isadora looks romantic. Creative men who like to feel strong and vital adore her. And she adores them.
She has a remarkable ability to charm people who are more sophisticated or better educated than she is. She never acts meek, never apologizes, and always follows her impulses. To Isadora, all her whims are valid. She puts herself first because no one else ever put her first, when she was young.
I admire her for all that, but my skin crawls at the way she glows in the light of a new man’s validation.
As I grew up, she was a muse (or lover, or companion) to a long series of male artists, of which my father appears to have been the first. He’s the only one I didn’t meet. Until I was three, we lived in a Santa Fe art studio with that sculptor. I slept on a mattress on the floor, surrounded by aloe vera plants.
Then Isadora left the sculptor for a video artist who was documenting people who decorate their cars. We lived with him until she found someone else. And then someone else.
When I was six, Isadora packed two small suitcases and took us to Rome. There, she was the lover of a famous installation artist. We lived with him in a rented villa. I ate spaghetti every night and slept under a canopy.
A few months later, just as I began to understand Italian, the artist abandoned us. Isadora and I woke up one morning to find ourselves alone. Her boyfriend and his entourage had left in the night. No message.
My mother had zero cash, no work permit, and a maxed-out credit card. We lived off what was left in the fridge while the villa’s owner tried to force us to leave. We were there for several weeks. We got down to eating pickles and stale crackers.
We were eventually rescued because Isadora put on her prettiest dress and went to a gallery opening, where she met an aging ceramicist whose work was displayed in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. He was English, and he grandly whisked us off to a thatched-roof cottage he owned in his home country. We lived with him until Isadora attached herself to a singer-songwriter who was big on the folk music circuit.
A year after that, we were living with his rival.
We lived with (let me count them) seven other men, and I had seven other schools or remote-school situations. At some point, Isadora got me a handheld gaming console. And later, an iPhone. Even though I was limited to small screens, games became everything to me—probably the same way books become everything for readers. The games were friends I could rely on. There was escapism in the story worlds, but more important was the feeling of being in a flow—surfing subway cars or running through a temple. The jolt of solving a puzzle. The release of vanquishing enemies. The buzz of being good at something.
Saar Adler was my mother’s second-to-most-recent boyfriend. When we met him, Isadora was thirty-five and I was fifteen. Saar had won an Oscar at age twenty-seven in a supporting part, playing a squirmy, anxiety-ridden gangster in a movie full of dark cinematography and brutal violence. But he hadn’t become a star after that. He isn’t a typically handsome actor. He’s short and kinda hairy, a white guy with five-o’clock shadow and a hangdog look. He ended up playing small roles: criminals and sidekicks, mostly. He got married and later divorced. No kids.
Three years before we met him, Saar got hired last minute on a TV show, substituting for a lead actor who got injured on the second day of filming. When Highly Classified became a hit, Saar found himself at forty with a regular gig. He plays a scrappy criminal turned elite CIA operative, and the job has enabled him to buy a nice car and a two-bedroom bungalow in Venice Beach, California. The bungalow is small, but it’s newly renovated and has a plunge pool.