Impossible Views of the World Read online

  PENGUIN PRESS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

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  New York, New York 10014

  penguin.com

  Copyright © 2017 by Lucy Ives

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Ives, Lucy, 1980-author.

  Title: Impossible views of the world / Lucy Ives.

  Description: New York: Penguin Press, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016056760 (print) | LCCN 2017003027 (e-book) | ISBN 9780735221536 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780735221543 (e-book)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Contemporary Women.

  Classification: LCC PS3609.V48 I48 2017 (print) | LCC PS3609.V48 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016056760

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  For my friends

  contents

  title page

  copyright

  dedication

  monday chapter 1

  chapter 2

  chapter 3

  chapter 4

  chapter 5

  chapter 6

  chapter 7

  tuesday chapter 8

  chapter 9

  chapter 10

  chapter 11

  wednesday chapter 12

  chapter 13

  chapter 14

  chapter 15

  chapter 16

  thursday chapter 17

  chapter 18

  chapter 19

  chapter 20

  chapter 21

  friday chapter 22

  chapter 23

  chapter 24

  chapter 25

  saturday chapter 26

  chapter 27

  sunday chapter 28

  monday chapter 29

  appendix: timeline

  a note

  monday

  [ 1 ]

  The day Paul Coral vanished, it snowed.

  It being week one of April, the sky supplied a slush of frozen gobs, pea-size hail.

  I make it sound worse than it was, but in fact it was shitty. Emergency signage diverted me from the ground-floor staff entry up the museum’s palatial front steps, for once not because of the perennial construction, but on account of a strike by security guards. It was a Monday, and this was the Central Museum’s way of keeping costs down with whichever firm was temping. Limited permeability, etc. Probably unrelated, but no one had thought to put out any salt.

  The guards had a fierce and litigious union. Their strike was of the French variety and likely to meet with results. They had stayed pointedly home, but other dissenters were present. A couple of diehards swaddled in tarps still protested WANSEE’s plans for the Nevada aquifer. At week five, their foam board was deteriorating, but the gist was the shame of privatizing a natural good. I hiked by with a nod.

  WANSEE was a Belgian corporation poised, if my Facebook feed was not entirely alarmist, to control a significant portion of the planet’s groundwater. WANSEE was also supplying CeMArt with vital special exhibitions funding, a fact that would probably have kept me up at night had I not long ago abandoned all hope of an oligarch-free cultural landscape. As matters stood, I was indifferent to sleep, though for more personal reasons.

  Above billowed a claret banner three stories high advertising the newest show bolstered by the Belgians’ largesse, “Land of the Limner,” with WANSEE’S sponsorship tagged in nice italics along the bottom. Stabilizing poles clanked like mad.

  I breached the neoclassical façade and had my totes searched. I wore my museum ID at my collar for optimum motility, re: hands, burdens. A scab shined her penlight into my eyes.

  I am not tall. In fact I am short, with highly regular features. I despise makeup, though I wear lipstick, and, to further frustrate my appearance, I smoke.

  The security worker switched her light off and waved me through. I stepped into the cavernous atrium, enjoying the familiar rush of silence that meets Monday’s ears and, more particularly, a whiff of senescent freesia, as stems were methodically plucked from a moribund display by a man in a yellow smock.

  I would have just made my way to the department, but Marco Jensen, who worked the central desk, was already present, stocking pamphlets, from which labor he recused himself in order to wave me vividly over.

  I swerved obediently, arranging my face into a pattern of delight.

  Marco was like, “I want you to remain calm.”

  This was a signal. I did a discreet sweep of as much of the cathedral as possible. Marco appeared to do likewise, for that area which was behind my head. I leaned in.

  Marco was vibrating in place, actually.

  “What?”

  Marco is at least eight years younger than me. He is from Malibu by way of Yale and is very easy to look at. “You know Paul?” Everyone in the museum knows Paul, but this was beside the point. “So, like, apparently”—Marco nudged the words out with care, in the process presenting me with multiple views of his meticulously razed chin—“he’s missing.”

  “What?”

  “Yup. Since late last week. Didn’t show up for a certain meeting and isn’t returning calls. Forget email.”

  “That’s bizarre.”

  Marco smoothed back an errant slice of hair. “I take it you haven’t heard from him?”

  “Hey,” I was saying, “I have to run.” I paused. “I feel like we should really talk, I mean, that’s so intense.”

  “Completely.” Marco was nonplussed.

  “OK,” I said. “Ciao.”

  —

  I HAVE MODES OF BEING that are less than elegant, and I have frequently used these to my advantage. On this particular morning, I assumed the demeanor of a roach on its way back to its nest through a lighted kitchen. By this I mean I kept my head down and shot up the main stairs, affecting I could perceive nothing that was not placed directly in front of my face.

  You cannot help respecting a person who looks busy as fuck; at least, as long as you don’t talk to them, you can’t help respecting them. Being as extremely—relatively speaking, I mean, to most adults—petite as I am, I have found that others need little persuading that they either cannot see me or that I am not worth the effort.

  At any rate, I did not encounter anyone before I gained the department’s rear door, which is built into the wall paneling of one of the minor European galleries and looks more like another decorative aspect of the molding than it does actual ingress.

  Paul Coral was almost a friend. Except I couldn’t quite say that. He had worked at the museum for something like thirty years as the registrar of American Objects, and we had recently become kind of cordial or trusting or what have you. The odd thing about him, I should say, was that in all his time at CeMArt he seemed not to have done anything, by which I mean that it was extremely difficult to ascertain what exactly it was that he did. Most of his work, or the work that would have fallen to him by dint of his title, was accomplish
ed by a parade of part-time minions and interns, with whom I had the dubious privilege of interacting by email. Paul’s level of awareness of the work they did was difficult to gauge. He floated in and (mostly) out of his office, appearing to spend the lion’s share of his working hours meditatively wandering the visible storage gallery and period rooms. One had the sense that he spent a great deal of purposeless time in the museum’s American sector. Perhaps he even slept there. I wondered, not very charitably, if anyone had checked the Dutch box-bed.

  Anyway, I was feeling unnerved that I had lately begun to cultivate a modestly trusting relationship with this now “missing” person as I made my way to the study room, up the ramp that was at one point added to connect two poorly aligned but proximate floors, an error produced in hasty renovation, and then up the spiral stair, an improvement, legend has it, requested by a 1950s department head who resented any member of his staff’s having to leave the warren in order to move between levels. I am currently unique among my colleagues in American Objects in that I am unable to slam my forehead against the upper treads, lacking requisite height.

  It was now 8:05. This was a full seven minutes later than it should have been, for not only am I unfailingly punctual, I really do not like to make a big deal out of it, since I feel that this is not very comely in someone who holds what is for all intents and purposes an entry-level position, despite her doctorate, but this is simply the way things are at present, until the boomers disperse and perish, etc. I like to be early, is what I am saying.

  The lights in the study room were on. I thought an expletive.

  “And there she is!” My arrival was heralded by a senior colleague, Bonnie Mangold, herself atypically on time. Bonnie was, in addition, the current “Miss Jean Brodie” of my existence, as my mother would have put it. I cringed, advanced.

  —

  I HAVE, AS PEOPLE TEND to do, known my mother all my life. However, my supposedly loving rapport with this parent rather too closely resembles my working relationship with Bonnie, in that it demands Herculean affective labor and produces Sisyphean rewards.

  My mother’s maiden name, which is also the name that she uses to conduct her day-to-day business, is Carolyn Wedgewood Basset. Her marriage to my father (who is deeply Polish and whose Philadelphian origins linger) is ongoing. I have his last name, Krakus, along with, what is less to be celebrated, his face.

  I say this not because my father’s face is so bad, but because my mother’s face happens to be so unrelentingly good. She was born in the late 1940s but the face is still going strong. There is almost nothing about her that you can separate from the face. Its great success is also hers.

  I have seen pictures of her when she was in her early twenties, when she and my father first met, which seems, at any rate, like the historical moment at which the life of Caro, as she is commonly known to colleagues and other acquaintances (such as next of kin), begins. In these vintage images she is a fawn, a human Bambi. She is carrying a lunch tray in one splendid candid snap, and as she turns to the light both her eyes and mouth drop open. The face is heart shaped, the perfect mouth outlined in some lighter-than-natural mod lipstick, the eyes like two drawings of eyes and eyelashes, the balance between dark and milky white disturbing, exquisite. The corners of several accidentally bared teeth shine like Chiclets.

  As a child, reared in the neurotic northern reaches of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, I stared into an array of pictures like this one. These tokens of my mother’s power were carelessly archived in a folder in a drawer, along with old invitations, postcards, pieces of wire and ribbon, washers, orphaned keys, and miscellaneous receipts related to maintenance of the household, which endeavor seemed to hinge mainly on furniture repair, dry cleaning of formal attire, and photo processing.

  My mother has not assiduously memorialized her astonishing youth. She is not so vain. At least, she isn’t so vain in a predictable way, as someone with a face of this kind could probably be forgiven for being. My mother is a practitioner of a stealth vanity. And this means that she cultivates not herself but her environs. And these environs are understood to reflect, unfailingly and unceasingly, upon her.

  Caro has been helped in her endeavor to create a loyal and unilaterally responsive local system and/or moatlike domestic economy by a certain commercial concern, by means of which she has related to, and profited from, the exterior world. This is her print dealership. It is named Basset’s. It exists as a very taupe WordPress site as well as a narrow storefront on Madison near 79th Street, which also means that it is five minutes from my current place of employ. There is little I can do about this.

  Basset’s deals in late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century prints and drawings, mostly northern European and Japanese. It has limited stock in: photographs, anything American, the twentieth century. Caro excuses Jasper Johns for some reason. Caro also walks to work. This is one of her stipulations. She travels four times a year. Her shoes are Ferragamo but her shirtdresses Calvin Klein. She represents a mix of mutually inimical social philosophies whose ongoing roiling estuarial encounters are fairly well misted over by pretensions to aristocracy. Neither “Wedgewood” nor “Basset” is, as you may have already guessed, her real name. Far, far beneath, there once breathed someone named Mary Carol Lynch. As far as I can tell, no one currently living has ever met her.

  “Mary” was the product of a single mother who was herself the product of a single mother. They lived near the naval base that makes up a significant part of San Diego. The difficulties of dating in the midst of unusual family circumstances in the decades after the Second World War led to alcoholism, anorexia, and psychopathy in my grandmother, if I have correctly interpreted Caro’s koanlike sketches. Caro was therefore mostly raised by her grandmother, a chubby German mystic who had quickly survived her own much older husband, a minister. This grandmother, I have it fairly certainly even from limited photographic evidence, possessed the same preternaturally symmetrical facial features, eyes like velvet under glass, as Caro. My (thin, drunk, crazed) grandmother was merely interesting. At some point, in order to survive, my grandmother became her employer’s mistress. Things were volatile, violent, and, again, from what I am able to ascertain, absurd.

  Caro decamped and did not look back. She made no attempt to please. She had studied econ in college but, having learned of the existence of something called the history of art, somewhat haphazardly applied to Columbia for her master’s and was, beginner’s luck, accepted. She would have stayed the course for a doctorate had not, as she maintains, her dissertation advisor appropriated her topic (on the meaning of some of Degas’s preparatory sketches) for his own hastily published article and eventual career-clinching book. Frowning upon theft and sloppy patriarchy, Caro determined to go into business for herself.

  The corresponding name had a nearly simultaneous genesis: Caro was attempting to access some rare folio, perhaps in a halfhearted attempt to wreak intellectual revenge on the advisor, and had handed over her university ID and was slowly repeating her name to a male library employee, who was both caught in a challenging phone conversation and, as Caro puts it, “manically digging” through a stack of card-catalog drawers, one of which he managed to overturn on his desk, while (as I imagine) attempting to stare lasciviously at her. When her permission slip came back, the preoccupied librarian had erroneously recorded the borrowing party as one “Carolyn Wood Basset.” Caro did not know what this appellation meant, but instead of hanging around for the folio, she added a “wedge” and called it a day. A few weeks later through a sensitive mutual acquaintance, a poet and vocalist named Arthur Garfunkel, whose corny advances Caro had neatly converted into friendship, she met my father.

  Everything has been fine since. Caro had me accidentally a little late in life and treats me as a potentially pleasant extension of the juggernaut that she is. She does not know what to do about my face, which is squished if not totally unpleasant, sort of like the face of an affable cartoon pig. She does not know what
to do with my mind, which is effective and undiscerning and very fast and sometimes given to drift. I am not so much like her.

  When I was younger, there were a couple of different games it seemed to interest Caro to play. Of these, Caro’s favorite was a kind of counterfeit adoption scenario. Caro would encourage me to befriend a certain attractive, poised girl who would be available to me by way of school. When this girl would come over to our house for some doll-related activity Caro would intervene, would speak to her, engage her. As time went on, Caro’s interest would seem to deepen. I would see her alone with the girl, as I stood at some distance. I would look at Caro’s smooth face, where inevitably there reigned an expression of magnificent satisfaction. As Caro came closer to me, usually to explain how the shared afternoon would now progress, now that she held the reins, her initial look of satisfaction would be replaced by a new enthusiasm, a desire to inform me of her own accomplishment. Look how easy. Look, Caro seemed to say, how easily I love.

  [ 2 ]

  In the study room, there were two people. There was of course my greeter and benefactor, Bonnie Mangold, illustrious departmental chair, celebrated by art historians on three continents. She was dressed, as usual, in layers and did not look angry. She looked, if anything, amused. She yawned and patted her mouth.

  Bonnie had a habit of standing with her prosthetic left hand cradled in the nook of her right arm, by which I mean, with the hand tucked into the interior of her bent elbow. She gestured like a smoker with the right arm, tapping the tips of her fingers together for emphasis. She was imperious and overweight.

  “Stella, honey,” she said, because she is informal on all occasions, linguistically at least, “go have a look at the coffee.”