under his breath. “I need help,” he called, at the sound of her footsteps.
He was wrestling with his painting, which had jumped off the living room wall and lodged itself face down across the couch and coffee table. Of course. They had hung the artwork poorly. Claudia had known this even as they put it up three years earlier; perhaps it was antipathy for the unwieldy thing that had kept her mouth shut when Jeremy was fumbling with molly bolts. Claudia had always thought that the handyman gene was innate in men until she met her husband, in whose hands a hammer and nails were as useless as a mascara wand and eyelash curler. Her own skills were by no means expert—gleaned from afternoons working in her father’s hardware stores, mostly—but somehow they’d struck an unspoken bargain that in this marriage she would be the fix-it girl while he took care of bills and cooking. Except for that painting. When it came to hanging that painting, she’d let him take the lead, and he’d botched it.
As she watched, Jeremy staggered backward under the weight of it and looked balefully at her. “Am I entertaining you?”
“Absolutely. Fantastic show. I give it two thumbs up.” But she ran forward and grabbed the other edge, and together they righted the picture and lifted it back onto its nail. The enormous portrait—the only notable possession that Jeremy had brought to their marriage—was a violent field of greens, slashes of paint in hues of puce and fern and kelly, and in the very center a splintering male torso, naked and disembodied, rendered in pulsating shades of scarlet. The piece was entitled Beautiful Boy, and the naked Boy was Jeremy himself: Jeremy’s ex-girlfriend, Aoki, an artist of repute in New York, had painted it at the height of Jeremy’s success as the lead singer for the (now-defunct) indie rock darlings This Invisible Spot. When she first met Jeremy, the fact that he had been a high-profile artist’s favorite subject had given Claudia a kind of thrill—as if the glamour might rub off on her by sheer proximity—but her enthusiasm for the portrait quickly wore thin. She found herself comparing herself, unfavorably, to the notorious ex-girlfriend; she spent late nights Googling the names Jeremy and Aoki and agonizing over the fawning Village Voice profiles and eventually had to place herself on a permanent Aoki blackout, both for her own sanity and the good of their burgeoning relationship. Since their wedding, Aoki’s name had rarely come up, and Claudia had managed, through impressive self-restraint, to immediately discard any magazine or newspaper that threatened to mention her, thereby erasing the woman’s existence from her life entirely. Except for that painting. She remained plagued by its existence—not just its artistic merits (she’d never much liked abstract art) or that, at eight feet across and six feet high, it completely dominated their living room, but also, secretly, by the fact that it was physical proof of the elusive and possibly more exciting life that Jeremy had led before he met Claudia. Troubling evidence that he might, once, have been just as happy without her.
Even the adjacent wall of family photographs that they had selected and framed and hung as a kind of counterbalance to the presence of Aoki were completely dwarfed beside that painting. A fading snapshot of Claudia’s parents back in Wisconsin, positioned in front of a smoking barbecue packed with grill-hatched wieners. A Sears studio portrait of her older sister’s kids, unnaturally posed with teddy bears that did not belong to them. An otherworldly black-and-white photograph of Jeremy’s mother, Jillian, her face stretched thin and luminescent over slashing cheekbones—the most haunting of a set of pictures that Jillian’s photographer boyfriend had taken after her cancer diagnosis, a photo series Jillian had casually referred to as “the last sitting.”
The biggest photograph, the one right in the middle, was their wedding portrait, the one with Claudia—her freckles masked by makeup and her brown curls for once tamed into something shiny and smooth (she had paid $200 for that privilege and never managed to replicate it)—giggling so hard she’s slipping sideways in Jeremy’s arms. In the photo, she looks like she’s about to explode out of her white lace dress, her broad shoulders offended by the delicate fabric she has bound them in. Next to her, Jeremy has a sly, secretive grin, most likely due to having just poked Claudia in the side to make her laugh. He is wearing an eye-popping