Everything/Nothing/Someone (eBook)

1.

My mother’s disembodied voice came through the intercom. “Alice. Alice.”

Or maybe it was “Alice! Alice!”

Or maybe it was “Alice? Alice?”

If I couldn’t get to the phone fast enough, she’d hang up and then I couldn’t call her back because she kept her phone on privacy mode. She could reach me, but I couldn’t reach her. I had to go looking for her to find out what she wanted. By the time I found her she didn’t seem to care why she had called me in the first place. Maybe my mother was just a voice in my head. Maybe I was just a figment of her imagination.

She had put her bed in the third-floor pool room, which had a fireplace and views of her lush garden. During the day she was below me, painting in one of her two downstairs studios, and at night she was above me in the pool room with her bottle of white wine and her books. My bedroom was below the pool room, on the second floor. The pool held ninety tons of water and I could feel it all balancing over my head. As I lay in bed at night, I pictured the ceiling giving way. I wondered at the shape that water would take once it was cut loose from its parameters, violently free.

The intercom connected us within the massive house in New York City. Our address was 134 Charles Street, between Greenwich and Washington Streets, in the West Village. We never got the numbers put on the door, so there was just a torn piece of paper with 134 written on it taped to the inside of the glass. It was a seventeen-thousand-square-foot, three-story building with a concrete facade, large windows, and steel doors. The building used to be a factory for manufacturing train parts back in the days when trains ran along the west side of the island.

On the ground floor was an office and a gigantic studio, which led, via a spiral staircase, to an even bigger basement studio, where my mother painted every day from 6 a.m. until 7 p.m., with a two-hour nap in the middle of the day. Between the office and the upper studio was a small room where my father lived after my mother kicked him out of her bed and before she kicked him out of the house. It was also where my uncle Roy came to die, where Max hemorrhaged, and Michael wept. It was where people came to lock themselves in and fall apart.

The building had huge windows that let the world see us as we moved through the house. Once, for one of her lavish parties, my mother had the staff light hundreds of votive candles and line them along the windows. In the middle of the party, firemen in full gear stormed into the house thinking it was burning down. A neighbor had misinterpreted the chic flicker of tiny candles as a deadly blaze, or perhaps they had seen something in us, identified a threat, that we couldn’t see ourselves.

On the second floor was my bedroom; a second room, which I called “my study”; Nanny’s room; the library with a fireplace and rolling ladders that extended to the ceiling for access to the walls of books; the kitchen where Katy the cook prepared our meals; and the living room with another fireplace and a wall of windows that looked out onto a garden. Nanny was Eileen Denys Maynard, who went by Denys but was only ever called Nanny. She existed to everyone like a paper doll Mary Poppins, two-dimensional, her life beginning and ending as the British governess paid to raise me. To me, she was a mother, but one who could be fired and disappear at any moment.

The garden on the second floor had fruit trees and a koi pond and a spiral staircase covered in roses that ascended to another garden with a grape arbor and apple trees. My mother liked to be surrounded by things that were growing because she always felt she was killing things, that if she touched something, it would die. There was a tool shed, like on a farm—I’d never been to a farm but I imagined that’s what a farm was like—but right on top of the building in the middle of Manhattan. I liked to go in there and smell the fecund fustiness of the shed. The bags of fertilizer, rusting tools, and drying twigs created a tranquilizing fog that curled itself between me and the city below. Our world had all the disparate components of the world from which we were disconnected—steel and trees, fire and water, soil and decomposition.

There were no locks on the doors inside the house. The doors were just sheets of opaque glass in steel frames. Not even the bathroom doors had locks. Nanny once walked in on me masturbating and said, “Oh dear, I forgot you are a woman now,” and walked out. Nanny once walked in on me cutting myself and cried. No locks meant I couldn’t say, “KEEP OUT!” When I was six, I put a No Smoking sign on my door. It didn’t work. My parents were both chain-smokers and their smoke entered the room before they did, making my eyes water and my throat itch. Only mythic beings could do that—make their presence known inside another person’s body. The boundaries were porous. In this house one could not tell the difference between fantasy and reality, art and object, parent and child. In this house, I couldn’t tell what I was to my mother. In this house, I couldn’t tell if I was my father’s daughter, wife, or mother.

The bathroom attached to my bedroom had two entrances, one from the hallway and one from my room. When my mother had parties and I was in my room, people sometimes didn’t notice the door connecting to my bedroom and didn’t close it, so I could hear them pee. Sometimes I could even see them if the mirrored door reflected into my bedroom. I liked to watch them and I liked the moment when they realized they had been seen. There would be a fat pause as they tried to remember what sounds they had made or what parts of them had been exposed. They would clear their throat before they zipped or yanked up their pants, before fabric fell back over knees. In this house, our most secret selves and our most private moments were meant to be spectated and thought about. The toilet flushed with an intensity that made me jump every time. The taps of the sink and bathtub and shower were marked with C and F, for chaud and froid—the French words for “hot” and “cold.” People unfamiliar with the house often scalded themselves when they washed their hands. The house forced you to move differently. It could be a bewildering, even harmful place if you didn’t know its rules.

It was as if I lived inside my mother’s mind. Everything had been designed especially for her and her alone. The space was built to accommodate the particularities and peculiarities of her gestures and habits. The house had many horizontal surfaces—daybeds, kitchen counters, spacious hearths, hardwood floors on which she could assume her typical recumbent pose: on her side, arm cocked to prop up her head while smoking or reading or talking on the phone. She spread herself out on these domestic plateaus like Manet’s Olympia, and life lived itself around her. She had transformed this place from a factory into a fortress, an irresistible nexus of strangeness, luxury, and niche functionality—the architecture of my mother’s desires. Everything around us had her in it. She designed her own jewelry (a gemologist who rode a unicycle and had worked with the Hope Diamond was her collaborator), the pieces so elaborate that they tested the limits of engineering. She designed her own very uncomfortable furniture. She designed and commissioned our drinking glasses, handblown cylinders so light you could hardly tell there was anything in your hand. The concept behind them was to create something as close to nothing as possible but still be functional. I hated them because I couldn’t stop breaking them. And I had to use them because they were part of the fundamental routine of my life. Which meant destroying them would also have to be a fundamental routine of my life. Even the most utilitarian aspects of our lives were impossible to negotiate—conceptualized beyond utility, aestheticized beyond the physics of living.

Nothing on the walls of my room was my own, nothing had been selected by me. There were no posters or drawings, only my mother’s art or her friends’ art. Every year my mother redesigned my room as a surprise for my birthday. She hung things up or took them down, added or took away, rearranged and reconfigured until the room was new and unrecognizable. Every year I would identify the changes from a master list and note what had been taken away or added. This new room had new rules, demanded new ways of living. This was the new place I would be doing my homework, the new direction I slept, the new view I had when I opened my eyes, the new me, curated by my mother. I felt the excess of it—the new teddy bear, rocking chair, computer, vanity mirror, canopy bed, and glow-in-thedark constellations stuck to the ceiling in the correct configuration by my mother’s studio assistants. It set me trembling with excitement but also panic, the trepidation of meeting the girl this unfamiliar room belonged to.

Roaming through the house was the purebred Welsh terrier, Charlie of Charles Street, my mother had bought me. She had sent him away to be trained at a fancy pet boarding school, where he was abused, and he returned to us a broken animal with a behavioral repertoire of biting, cowering behind the toilet, and eating his own excrement. I learned quickly that I could not touch or go near him while he ate or he would turn on me, snarling, and try to bite me. I’d encounter him in the hallway shitting on the floor and I’d edge by...