Belly Up Read online

  I KEPT THE PORTRAITS in a large cardboard box in the hallway closet that housed the vacuum cleaner and other supplies that I couldn’t dream of Ray ever wanting. Still, he found them. He brought them out one night after dinner. He said, Franny, what are these? Where did they come from? He said, Franny, these are beautiful. Did you paint these? You have a gift, you must keep on with them, and we must get you all the supplies that you need. I never, in my deepest dreams thought that my paintings were about anything other than a misunderstanding, me, as a person, being somewhat defect and not really being able to understand people unless I tried especially hard. That is all the paintings were supposed to be, a tool for helping me better process the world that was around me. And here Ray was, telling me they were beautiful! That they were worth something! That I owed it to myself and others to keep on! Ray started telling people, friends of ours, about my paintings at dinner parties. One of the neighbors suggested that we turn the backyard shed into a studio, and Ray was enthralled. He came and met George down at the Safeway, and him and George got along so well, and Ray even hired George to do some yard work for us and invited him over for dinner, and all of a sudden the idea that I had ever been scared or ashamed of the work I was doing, the notion that I had been doing something covert and wrong, became absurd. People began to know this about me, they began to know that I made paintings, and then, all of the sudden, people introduced me as a painter and it was what I was. One of Ray’s bosses came over for dinner and asked to see some of my paintings, and I brought out one of the frozen food aisle portraits where I had painted a box of frozen peas against a red wash and written underneath WOMAN IN FUR COAT AND SANDALS in cursive script. Ray’s boss said it was fabulous, he loved it, is there any way he could pay me for it? Take it with him and hang it in his home? I said, absolutely not, it was a gift, he could have it, but the boss would have none of it and assured me and Ray he would pay one way or another, and he did, later that fall, when in November Ray got a corporate bonus of $1,000 that came in on his paycheck labeled FOR THE PAINTER. And so, in this way, I began to make things and people talked about me this way, as a person who made things, as a person who painted, and I liked that this was the way that I was known in our small, close-knit group of friends because it gave me a pass of some kind, where now it was all of a sudden more acceptable for me to be less likable, because I had other qualities that people seemed to think were of interest and were worth having around.

  WHEN RAY FIRST TOLD ME in our living room that the paintings were good, I did not believe him. How could I believe him? I was horrified that he had found them and suspected him of making fun of me, or trying to control me in some way that I could not understand. I was very cold to him and I started to cry and said, you just leave me here all day all alone, you musn’t be angry at me, please don’t yell at me. Ray had never yelled at me. And I realized, later, that I was yelling at myself, that everything I feared Ray would say was something I had already said to myself in my head.

  I WAS A GOOD MOTHER, although I did do things other mothers we knew didn’t do, mostly just benign things like taking Adrien on long walks alone, walking him down our hill and across our suburb to somewhat deserted parts of our city, like the shipyard, where we watched people and things come and go. If he was sleeping, I’d push his stroller down our hill and across many roads until I reached the overpass where, if you turned left, there would be rows of warehouses. There was a summer, the summer when Adrien turned four, when we went to the warehouses frequently. It was the summer I mostly wore a blue sundress I made for myself and a large straw hat, and Adrien wore the same purple and green block print jumper every day. Adrien and I, we’d just sit and watch the men loading and unloading bags of rice and tiles and textiles all day long, until around three-thirty, when we would begin to walk home and I would ask him questions about the scenery as we walked. Adrien, I would say, what do you see? And, at first, of course, he only said the usual things, like, I see clouds and a tree. So then I asked him to say what he saw beyond the things he saw, like, for instance, our hill we lived on. I would ask, Adrien, what’s behind our hill? And he would say wonderful things, like, a village of talking rabbits where the king rabbit has just been killed OR a beach where everyone’s bathing suit is made out of goldfish. Once, on one of our long walks, I asked him, Adrien, what is behind that tree? And he said, a man, a very dirty man that has stuffed animals and sleeps in the grass, but he is hiding. And there was a real man that I had not seen, which was very scary, and was maybe one of the only times where I have ever been instinctually worried about how, if something were to happen to Adrien, other people would think of me. They would say, that woman, that Fran, that woman. She got her son butchered by the warehouses, that woman. She practically gave him to the murderer, offered Adrien, her small defenseless son up for slaughter, that’s what she did. That was the thing with motherhood that caught me off-guard. I am not the type of person to really care what anyone thinks of me, but I found myself caring, very much against my will, what people thought of me as a mother. I wanted to be a good mother. I wanted people to believe I was a good mother, because I love my son very much, and, although I have always doubted my capability to do and be many things, I have always been quite sure that I knew how to properly love someone, and the idea that I might be bad at loving my son was very scary to me then, and it is, still, one of the great invisible monsters of my life that I have tried to battle, but it has always been unclear in this battle whether there ever was a battle and, if there was, whether or not I won.

  WHEN ADRIEN BECAME AN ADULT, maybe two or three years after he graduated from college, it became obvious to me that he believed his father was perfect, which was of great annoyance to me. Ray was not perfect. I was frequently tempted to explain to Adrien all of his father’s flaws. I wanted to tell him, you know, he may seem open-minded in some ways, but don’t be fooled! The things Ray would say! You would be horrified. Here, just let me give you a list of the things I hate about my husband: his complacency. If the world suddenly turned bright blue, he would not be fazed; he would be accepting, which is completely unreasonable. He wouldn’t know why it was blue, and he wouldn’t care, or he would care, but only if someone told him to care, like me, like if I said, Ray! The blueness is killing the planet! Then he would say, well shoot, Fran, let’s do something about it. But he would never come to that conclusion all the way on his own, so you’d have to kind of help him there, which really, after many years, makes you wonder, it makes you wonder what it would take to make him realize on his own that something was wrong. Like when Adrien was seventeen and drunk-drove his car into a tree and then walked the rest of the way home and Ray said, let’s talk about it in the morning, maybe this can all be explained. No! There was nothing to explain except for what happened, a plain fact that Ray understood but could not fully, in its repercussions and possible causes, comprehend. Adrien could have killed someone, could have killed himself, but all Ray could see was that Adrien was hurt, upset, drunk. Whereas I, in that moment on our front stoop, on the welcome mat of our sagging handmade home, all I could see was a corpse, Adrien dead, an alternate history that had been so close to happening that it drove me mad. People should be driven mad, temporarily, when they see things like that, their son in a near-miss state. Sanity, Ray’s level-headed gait, was completely intolerable. Which brings me to another one of Ray’s flaws: his complete inability to condemn someone, even privately. I realize that the world we live in makes us, at times, have to interact with people that are less than savory, people who have different beliefs, different value systems, maybe even value systems that you know, critically, most definitely harm other people, like high-frequency traders, like oil corporation executives, like women with big diamonds hooked to their palms, what I am saying is that I realize that situations may arise in which one would have to fraternize with such company but when you get home and into the bedroom and you are free of the constraints for which politeness calls, you should be able to sa
y to your husband, that man was awful. And your husband should say, yes, despicable, quite. Not Ray! My God, he gave the benefit of the doubt to everyone. A terrible mistake, by all accounts, a mistake that caused me to endure many unpleasant dinner guests. Eventually, with these people, Ray would slowly come around and admit they were terrible, but it took such a long time and then I was always left feeling awful, like I had forced badness on this person’s reputation, even though this person had brought about the badness all on their own. I told Ray this a million times, I said, look, here is the thing with people, you can tell if you have a really bad egg very quickly. There are many cues by which you can discern said bad egg. And very rarely, only very rarely, are those first-five-minute bad egg impulses not confirmed. It is kind of like feeling humidity, I told him, it’s just in the air and you feel it on your skin. But Ray never listened to this advice. He accused me of keeping mental judgment boxes where, once I decided someone was a bad egg, I put a transcript of every condemnable thing they ever said. This accusation was not true, I just remember when people say offensive things. Everyone does this, I explained to him, except, obviously, for you, who are so morally tone-deaf that I wouldn’t be surprised if you gave Lucifer a Nobel Prize. If he was in a good mood, Ray ignored everything I said and told bad slapstick jokes on repeat until I laughed or walked away and cooled off and resigned myself to living with someone who was morally deaf. If he was in a bad mood or tired, he just let me talk at him, talk him into the ground until there was nothing left of him. And he said nothing or, if he was very tired, he said, Fran, I am sure you are right. The only thing Ray never admitted I was right about was when I told him I wanted to leave him. He said Fran, you are wrong, how can I show you you are wrong. He kept saying, look at how much I love you, look at it. It was very difficult for me to look. Adrien was in high school and I was painting on larger canvases and questioning my medium, and there Ray was, stagnant, same as he always was, and I doubted him. I doubted his sincerity, but most of all I doubted his capacity to give any part of himself to me which, the longer I thought about our marriage, was what I really wanted. I wanted to have a part of him that no one else had. Ray always talked me down when I threatened to leave him, most often by physical force, the physical act of him holding me while I cried. He said, I love you, Franny, I’m just not the same as you which is why you can’t see it, I can’t do feelings like you, and our feelings don’t look the same which is why mine are hard for you see, but they are there, Franny, you’re really the only thing that ever mattered to me, you know it, I want you to know it, what can I do to make you see?

  THERE WERE THINGS that made me feel very close to Ray and other things that made me feel so far from him, like we were animals of different species and the fact that we cohabitated, let alone mated, was completely bizarre. It didn’t seem that way at first, of course. At first we were just kids living in the city, making money as best we could away from our parents, living in small, cramped shared apartments and watching movie matinees until we were crazy enough to pool all of our resources and buy a small plot of land fifteen miles south of town. Back then, when we found each other, it was like we were the only two people in the world, the only two people at the party, the only two people in the building, the only two people in the whole damned city, it was incredible, a feeling I suppose many people have had, but it still felt very unreal and, well, I guess I was young (I was only twenty-one), but that feeling was enough and filled everything, every space of our lives and all the cupboards and all the food we put in our mouths. There was a closeness then, but it was different from the intimacy of me trying to leave, and there was no trace yet of the bizarre, any inkling that I would ever look at him and think, how on earth have we ever been able to communicate about anything, let alone anything of importance, like our home and our life and our son.

  I BEGAN TO SUSPECT THAT Ray handled me like he handled discovering my paintings, like I was just one constant discovery, a never-ending box of surprises that, when discovered, was just a new turn in the road to be taken without blinking at high speed. Which, although it sounds glamorous, was actually not a good feeling. It made me feel like my husband could be in love with anyone, like if I hired a double and put someone completely different in my place, he wouldn’t even suspect that it wasn’t me. He would just think, here is the newest Fran! And continue on with the meal. The only time I could ever be sure Ray knew who I was was when we were making love. He always knew exactly what I wanted, and the older we got the more I could not remember if it had always been this way, or if he had just learned my body so well, refined the act of making love to me to such a fine-tuned skill, that he was able to play my body with such unhindered dexterity. And I wondered, also, if this was the way it was with all couples that put in the hours of twenty years, if it always got to a point where, physically, pleasure became easy, the only uncomplicated thing you could count on, a set of simple, uncomplex actions, or combination of actions that, without fail, yielded great temporary joy. His body, Ray’s body, was what was the realest to me. It was his body, not his mind, that I felt I was able to know in a way I will never know anything else. The body, after all, is an object that takes up physical space that one can touch and see and explore and remember and it changes, yes, but only slightly, and the changes usually make sense, as in, they can be seen as a logical progression, like how Ray’s hair turned from dark to white, like how the skin on his ass was firm and, later, like mine, had elements of paper, but the body makes sense in that way, whereas the mind, Ray’s mind, was unknowable, and the changes even more opaque. When we had sex, I knew I was coupling with some combination of Ray’s mind and his body, but mostly I just liked thinking of us as two bodies. It was simpler that way and easier for me to understand.

  THREE YEARS BEFORE RAY DIED, he retired. My father had died the year before and left us some unexpected property and cash, and by then we owned our house free and clear. So we didn’t have much money, but we knew we had enough where we wouldn’t run out and even a little left over so that we could take a trip once a year to a place we had read about or had just, simply, always wanted to go. Ray was most interested in the national parks, staying domestic, doing long car rides to the center of the country where we could see the great mountains and bison and rainbow trout fish. I told him that the idea of driving to Wyoming was pathetically American and that I just didn’t know if I could stand it, even though, the truth was, I liked the mountains and I liked hiking and I was, in fact, very American, and the thought of seeing strange, archaic animals roam on vast plains didn’t seem all that bad. We can drive when we are old and eighty! I said. Let’s go on a plane! Alright, Ray said, we can go on a plane. So we agreed to save the trip to Yellowstone for later, and that summer we went to Tuscany for a month where we rented a small stone cottage on the edge of a vineyard that was once used to store barrels of wine. And the summer after that, we did the Odysseus cruise, and the summer after that we went to Sydney, and then Ray was dead and so he never saw Saddle Mountain or Republic Peak or the Needle or any of the other geological formations that he had read so much about in that small book he owned titled The Mountains of Our National Parks.

  ONE NIGHT WHEN I WAS alone in the duplex, I watched a movie about dams, and how they were killing all the fish, and how if you wanted to see a steelhead trout, you had better come quick before they were all gone. And I thought, Ray would have loved these dumb fish, he would have talked about them with the neighbors, and known everything about them, and known where they were on the Snake River, and where they were spawning, and this movie, this would have been the catalyst if we had watched it together, this would have been the last straw, that was it! We were driving to Yellowstone for the fish and you know, you know, I would have loved it, although I might have pretended to go reluctantly just for Ray’s sake, to get him to smile extra and let me pick the music for the car and so I could put my head on his lap while he drove us all the way out into the middle of our country and then home.<
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  EVEN THOUGH I DOWNSIZED when I moved to the duplex, I still had lots of room, so I made a pottery studio in the basement and set up my painting studio upstairs. Potting was new to me but I felt I needed something new, and the idea of creating something functional, something three-dimensional that one could put sugar or flowers in, was satisfying. I made large thrown bowls with ombré glazes and rustic white square plates on which, when the couples came over for dinner, I served fruit and cheese. At one of my duplex dinner parties, one of the husbands from one of the couples said, you know, Franny, have you ever thought about doing an artist residency? It’s a great way to travel, and you’d be with other people and your paintings are so gorgeous, you could have time to paint, and they are usually in beautiful places, and I bet you’d have fun. The husband who had said this was not one I particularly liked, but I had a certain respect for him, so I looked into it. One of the first residencies I found that was of interest to me was the National Park Residency Program and, sure enough, there were cabins in Yellowstone where you could live for the summer and paint and, to my surprise, the program accepted me and I went. So, in the summer of 1989, I packed my paints and some good, practical, outdoors outfits and I drove to Wyoming. The whole drive there I couldn’t help thinking of the fish from the movie, frantically swimming back upstream until they hit a dam. That was what I was sure I was going to hit when I got there, some giant concrete wall that wouldn’t let me in. On top of the dam I saw Ray weeping, his tears hurtling over the barrier, mixing with the rest of the river, crashing overhead faster and faster, crushing the fish, crushing me trying to get into the park. It’s not that I prevented Ray from coming to Yellowstone, that I said, oh no, I won’t do it, this is not something I want to do, I just didn’t do it with him in time, there hadn’t been enough time, I hadn’t known that there wouldn’t be more time. And so when I went, when I drove into the park and rolled down my window at the ranger’s checkpoint and showed them my resident artist’s pass I just felt this deep, deep sense of sadness that I think came from being faced with the fact that there were times when I could have done things to give Ray happiness that I deliberately did not do. And so Yellowstone became a kind of symbol in my mind for everything Ray had wanted that I had not given him: another child, a kind word about his mother, an evening in which I did not chastise some of the people with whom he worked, an evening in which I told him, Ray, I love you hopelessly, you have become a part of me, and now I feel as though I’ll never be alone. But doing these things, saying these things, was not, is not, how I would ever really do things, so perhaps if I had done them, given myself up to them, Ray would have recognized their out of character nature and made me stop.