ONE
New York, New York
“WOULD YOU TELL ME, PLEASE, WHICH WAY I OUGHT TO GO FROM HERE?”
“THAT DEPENDS A GOOD DEAL ON WHERE YOU WANT TO GET TO,” SAID THE CAT.
—Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Specks of dust slow-danced in the sunlight streaming through the tall southern windows. Above the old man’s head, they tumbled and collided, equal parts chaos and choreography, at once permanent and fleeting. Some moved earthward, but just as many climbed heavenward with no visible means of propulsion. Why don’t the laws of gravity apply to them? Alice wondered.
She could hear New York humming and honking beyond her professor’s studio, and although she felt reasonably certain that the city was in fact actually there, she had often suspected that another city, very close but obscured by some deficit in her perception, also existed. In that Other World, she could not be judged or derided for being clever or dull because the rules—like the law of gravity currently disproving itself before her very eyes—did not apply. In that place, there simply were no rules. How she longed to go there sometimes.
Professor Stoklinsky looked up and smiled with his eyes, all wild hair and wisdom. She braced herself for him to speak. But he said nothing and returned his attention to her work.
She dreaded this, his scrutiny. He expected so much of her. He treated her as if she were special, and if there was one thing Alice was certain about at the ripe old age of nineteen-almost-twenty, it was that she was not exceptional. She knew this because she had been born into a family of unequivocally exceptional people.
Her mother had been a rising star at the BalletMet in Columbus, Ohio, until she fell through an unsecured trapdoor in the stage floor during a rehearsal of The Nutcracker and shattered thirty-nine of the fifty-two bones in her feet. During her long recuperation, she began to study law and was now managing partner in a prosperous legal firm on Wall Street. Her father, a celebrated ophthalmologist, spent all his spare time in India restoring sight to those who could neither access nor afford proper care. Her older brother followed her father into medicine, had been a Rhodes Scholar, and was currently specializing in renal surgery at the Mayo Clinic. Her younger sister had recently distinguished herself in her freshman year at Harvard by winning the Jacob Wendell Scholarship Prize. Each member of her family effortlessly excelled at most things they did.
Alice, on the other hand, did not. She did not have a grand passion for anything in particular, although it was her habit to carefully observe the hue, saturation, and intensity of color in just about any object that she came across. Her earliest memory was of hiding in her mother’s voluminous walk-in closet, arranging the clothes according to their proper place on the visible spectrum. She had begun with the blouses. Purple blouses, violet, blue, green, lime, yellow, cream, orange, red, burgundy. She put the white blouses between the yellow and cream ones, even though, strictly speaking, white was not part of the spectrum. Her mother had been charmed initially, but when Alice repeated the exercise with her siblings’ wardrobes, she had her tested to see if she was autistic.
At fourteen, Alice lied about her age and secured a part-time job in a clothing boutique, three shops down from the corner of Eighty-third and Madison. Nadine, the owner of the eponymously named boutique, soon recognized Alice’s flair with color, as did her customers, who would always solicit Alice’s counsel before making purchases. Nadine even took Alice on a buying trip to the Say Yes to Life, Love, and Style Fashion Week in Chicago. Alice liked being good at something. As her confidence grew, so did her circle of friends.
In her final year of high school, Alice plucked up the courage to ask her new best friend, Manuela, home for dinner. After she had left, her mother observed that Manuela had thick ankles. It was her sole comment about the evening. The next day in the canteen, Manuela performed a highly entertaining monologue about how their feisty friend Alice turned into a mouse at home. Alice rolled her eyes and laughed along, but her cheeks burned bright.
At a cocktail party to celebrate her brother’s return from Oxford, a colleague of her mother’s mentioned he had seen Alice walking into a shop on Madison Avenue. Alice was on the verge of explaining that she had been working there for almost four years when her mother interjected, telling him that Alice was applying to volunteer as a guide at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is why she was on the Upper East Side. This was a fabrication—Alice and her mother had discussed the possibility of it once, briefly—but that was all. Alice was about to protest when a steely matriarchal glance silenced her. She nodded impassively, choking on the sudden and certain realization that she was actually a slight embarrassment; that in comparison to the daily activities of the rest of her family, what she was doing was trivial, that therefore she was trivial, that she was letting the side down. It all arrived in one brief but devastating epiphany.
When she handed in her notice a few days later, Nadine pressed Alice to her impressive bosom and cried. Alice had a distant memory of being hugged like this as a child, but she could not place where or when. She finished her final year of school with mediocre grades and did not attend her prom despite having sourced eight yards of Yves Klein blue shot silk fabric for a dress.
On a brief visit home, Alice’s father noticed that she was somewhat withdrawn and mentioned this to her mother, who responded by arranging a blind date for their daughter with a young man from her firm who had just been promoted to junior partner. Daniel was ten years older than Alice, a clever litigator with the remnants of a childhood stutter. He had disconcertingly long eyelashes and would have been darkly handsome if not for his unusually large ears. If he’s prepared to forgive my red hair, Alice thought, I’m prepared to overlook the ears.
Alice’s mother was uncommonly pleased by the match, and Alice could see that Daniel’s affection had not only redeemed but elevated her. Basking in the sunshine of her mother’s newly dawned approval, Alice realized how cold she had felt without it and was enormously grateful to Daniel as a consequence. When the time came for Alice to embark upon a course of tertiary study, it was Daniel who gently encouraged her to set aside her plans for a degree in fashion design at IED Milan and instead pursue a course at the Parsons School in New York City where they might still see each other every day. Unfortunately, Alice was so nervous that she botched her entrance interview and did not receive the offer of a place. Daniel wanted to sue, but Alice, not wanting to make a fuss, quickly enrolled in a fine arts course at a local college that specialized in 3-D modeling and printing, the principles of which she thought she might later apply to the design and manufacture of clothing.
And so it was, two years later, that Alice had left the warm bed of the loft she shared with Daniel and found herself standing in front of Professor Felix Stoklinsky with her stomach flipping. Once again, the old man looked up from her work. This time, his look demanded some kind of response.
She had submitted three shoe box–sized maquettes as her major work for her second-year sculpture class. With the professor’s approval, they would become much larger bronze pieces during her third and final year of study. The first maquette, of a young couple intertwined, suddenly looked like the rip-off of Rodin’s The Kiss that it actually was. Alice steadied herself. Now was not the time to panic. She had rehearsed this with Daniel. It was his big idea in the first place. She’d had no clue what to submit as her major work until he had browsed her previous year’s efforts and helped her write a list of pros and cons for each piece. Having chosen three figurative sculptures, the next trick, Daniel explained, was to find some concept, some overarching idea, to connect them.
Alice cleared her throat and swept her hand in front of the Rodin maquette, feeling for all the world like a sales model on the Shopping Channel. “Bliss. The first stage. Two people meet. Fall for each other. It’s … bliss,” she said.
The professor did not appear to respond. She moved on to the second maquette: two middle-aged lovers, their arms wrapped around each other but their faces turned away, blank. Alice suddenly wondered what on earth had possessed her to suggest this awkwardly realized piece. But she stuck to the plan.
“Doubt. The middle stage,” she said. “Euphoria wears off. They have to work at making it work. Jealousy, boredom, disappointments … fill them with doubt.”
The professor nodded. A smile flickered across his face. Clamping both hands behind her back, Alice moved on to the third statue—an old man, his face contorted with pain, held the lifeless body of a woman. Michelangelo’s The Pietà with a role swap and postmodern twist. It suddenly seemed so lame. She suppressed her horror and plowed on.
“Loss. The final stage,” she said. “One person always loses the other.”
“Always?” the professor inquired.
“Always,” she said. Either they find another person, or they leave, or one of them … dies.”
“So this is your thesis?” he said. “That love ends badly?”
Alice’s stomach appeared to be planning an exit strategy via her mouth. She pursed her lips and nodded.
The professor looked into her pale gray eyes. They were all lovely at this age, but this one was particularly so. She reminded him of a marble-eyed Venus, not quite present, not yet vividly alive the way most of her rambunctious classmates were. Years of experience told him there were fires flickering in her unexplored depths, but he worried that she would never go exploring because there would never be a need; hers was the kind of beauty that opened doors, that would allow her to skim lightly across the top of life for as long as it suited her.
“What are you doing for the vacation?” he suddenly asked.
“I’m … sorry…?”
“What are you doing? Where are you going?”
“I … I don’t know.”
“I want you to go somewhere different. And I want you to do something…” The old man grabbed her hands from behind her back. For a beat he held them in his grasp then flung them high above her head. “Something voosh!”
He was smiling kindly at her, but she felt tears sting her eyes. She had disappointed him, too. Well, she was sick of it. She was sick of disappointing people. She was sick of being an idiot. Suddenly Alice knew exactly what she should do and right there and then determined to do it.
In that moment, she believed that the inspiration to go abroad was completely hers. She had no conception that forces greater than her were calling her to Rome—that she had, in fact, been summoned to the eternal city. By me.
Copyright © 2017 by Mark Lamprell
