Carry the One Read Online Free PDF Page B

and “marketplace,” which until now they’d only used in reference to their father, a painter whose presence in the marketplace of art was fairly large. He encouraged Alice’s aspirations until she started being taken seriously. Now he was subtly dismissive. Horace saw every other painter as a threat, now even (or maybe especially) Alice.
    “Finish,” Gabe said from the floor, but didn’t look up. Then, he found he was mistaken, that something wasn’t quite finished, and so he just kept painting.
    “Man.” Alice hunkered down behind him. He had painted, from memory, his backyard and, in the corner, Carmen’s garden-in-progress. It was all there, wobbly and from about four different perspectives, but there. The beat-up garage, a doghouse left behind by the previous owners, a trellis draped in clematis, his father asleep in the hammock. It wasn’t really a child’s painting.
    “All here,” he said. Each of his fingers was dabbed with its own color. He was a tidy little guy.
    “Yeah, well, this is—” Alice didn’t say it was incredible, that at twoand a half he should only be up to green and brown trees, round yellow sun, stick-figure humans. He hated being told he was too young to do things. “Next time we’re moving you up to a brush.” He wore a striped jersey tucked into the elastic waist of his pants. His bottom was padded out with trainer pants. Despite being an artistic genius, he was not yet 100 percent potty trained. His hair fell over his eyes as he painted. He looked like a kid from an earlier era, or a smaller place, heading into the rougher neighborhood of real life.
    Maude came over and added her own flourish of praise. Sometimes Alice got a little rush around all of them being related. Siblings paired off with siblings and now a new generation extending their presence in the universe. Sometimes this seemed so cutting edge, as though they were creating a new, hip version of family. Other times it was as if they were all from the same holler and didn’t get out enough.
    It was a family tree that looked better in the abstract than in real life where, truthfully, Alice found Matt dull and Carmen was wary of Maude. Or rather what Maude turned Alice into. Carmen didn’t think love should be about casting a spell over someone. She thought it should be a more balanced constellation of emotion, about mutual support and prospering. She had made all this clear to Alice, which put a hard brace on further conversation on the subject.
    Alice and Maude fetched Cokes for everyone. Carmen scanned the room. “These are just wonderful paintings, Alice.”
    Alice wished she shared her sister’s assurance. She understood that she was a good painter, but she wanted to make important paintings, and that was loamy ground—importance—difficult to gain footing there. In her better moments, she could get euphoric with the potential for making these paintings that were pushing around inside her, like the ghostly pains in her legs through the nights of her adolescence when she was doing the last of her growing.
    In an interview that hadn’t yet taken place, Alice would say her work was most influenced by Gerhard Richter, Lucian Freud, and Balthus.She wanted to paint humans in ways that set up a disturbance between the painting and the viewer, ways that disrupted the conventional notions of portraiture. Her current subjects were women wrestlers from the forties and fifties. She painted them as they were in their heyday, drawing from posters and photos of their matches. She also painted them now, from life, in their various retirements. These were amazing women, having made themselves up out of spit and bravado. A few months back she had a small show in a storefront gallery—the first of these portraits—and it nearly sold out. Alice attributed the small success of these paintings to their subjects as much as to her rendering of them.
    “Oh, did we miss some—” Carmen started toward the canvases propped on