We Need to Talk

Daedalia: Chapter 4

Daedalia is a serialized novel, with a new chapter released every Monday morning. The story is designed to unfold slowly, the days in between, a space for it to settle into your imagination. Each chapter is a 15–20 minute read/listen. Check out the Table of Contents if you want to jump to a specific chapter. Want something to binge while you wait? Three novels, complete with audio narration are ready for you to dive in.

Previously…

Kelly stayed. What began as a few days on a couch turned into weeks, then months. She drew. He worked. They learned each other’s habits without naming what they were doing or where it might lead.

After six months of Kelly sleeping on his couch, Lefty’s patience, charity, fascination, or whatever it was, started to run out. She wasn’t finding her way, and he became convinced she never would without some kind of push.

The growing tension between them was not just about her overstaying her welcome. Lefty was stalled out. Somehow, he had acclimated to the idea that his life wasn’t going to amount to much, but seeing Kelly’s wasted potential up close everyday was an irritant. This irritation was made worse on weekend afternoons, when he had put off calling home as long as he could and finally spoke to his parents. Their disappointment was tangible in the awkward silences and the way his father would bring up the trophies from his childhood. He had peaked at sixteen, when his blazing fastball clinched the all-state championship. Now he was selling stereos for little more than minimum wage.

On a Sunday in early December, Kelly came home just after he hung up from one of these calls. He was sitting at the card table in the kitchen that served as a dining table, staring at his hands.

“Hey,” she said.

After an uncomfortable silence, he said, “Hey, can you sit down? We need to talk.”

He hadn’t been planning to talk to her, to bring to the surface the conversation they had been avoiding. It was the last thing he wanted to do, but the conversation with his parents had primed him. Kelly pulled the folding chair out and sat down across from him, her hands in her lap, making herself small—even smaller, if that was possible.

“Look, you’ve been crashing here since June, and you know, nothing’s really changed. I don’t want to be an asshole, but…”

“No, you’re right. I’m the asshole,” she said stiffly. “I’ll pack my stuff up and be out of here this afternoon.”

“Hey, come on. That’s not what I said.”

She was pushing away from the table. He rose halfway out of his chair and reached for her shoulders, gently pushing her back into her seat.

“I’m not kicking you out, Kel. I know you’ve got nowhere else to go. I’m just saying something’s gotta give here. You’ve got to work with me, you know? You’ve got so much potential. Your art’s amazing, but you’ve got to, like, do something with it, or you’ve gotta find some way to pay your way.”

She didn’t respond and didn’t look up from her lap, where her hands were knotted together.

“Hey, look, I’m not your dad or your big brother. I didn’t sign up to have this talk with you, but you’re kind of leaving me no choice.”

Silence.

“Kelly, for fuck’s sake. Don’t act like I’m punishing you. I think it’s clear how much I care. Can you say something, please?”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m scared. I don’t know what to do besides draw. It’s all I know how to do.”

He didn’t say anything right away. He needed to get this right. “Maybe. But have you tried? I mean, have you given yourself a chance to try?”

In response, she just shook her head slowly.

“So it’s not that you can’t do anything else. It’s that you don’t want to do anything else. You’re not helpless. Your art’s not holding you hostage.”

“Fuck you, man. What are you, a motivational speaker now?”

“Easy.”

“What? You don’t like your little orphan girl to talk back?”

“There you go again. Poor, helpless little Kelly.”

She rocketed out of the flimsy chair, and it fell backward. Her face was bright red, her mouth a tight line.

“You like me that way,” she said. “I make you feel like a big man, taking care of me with your big job selling stereos—”

He didn’t breathe for a few seconds. He clenched his teeth. With one swift sweep of his hand, the coffee mug that was sitting in front of him crashed into the kitchen cabinet and shattered. Kelly jumped back and stood there blinking, frozen, cornered. He closed his eyes, exhaled heavily, and leaned back in the chair.

She started backing away from him in the direction of the door. She was going to run.

He held his hands up slowly, the universal semaphore for surrender. “I’m sorry,” he said, trying to make his voice gentle. When he finally looked up to meet her eyes, he saw real terror there and felt ashamed. “I didn’t mean to scare you. Look, we’ll figure this out together, okay?”

She didn’t say anything.

“I’ve got to go sell some stereos now, so we can keep this little enterprise going.” He got up and grabbed his keys off the kitchen counter. At the door, he paused and, without turning around, said, “I don’t want you to leave. This isn’t me kicking you out, okay? Just start thinking about a plan. That’s all I’m asking.”

He had been completely distracted at work, replaying his small act of violence. Lefty didn’t know much about Kelly’s childhood, but he knew it was bad. He didn’t expect her to be there when he returned home hours later. He heard music playing through the door as he put his key in the lock, and he felt a twist of emotions. She was safe, and that was good, but she was safe because she was still his responsibility, and that sandbagged any kind of buoyancy he might have felt when he opened the door and saw her.

She was standing in front of one of her drawings, bouncing on the balls of her bare feet, hands clasped behind her back. She had taped it to the wall along with twenty or more other sketches from her various sketch pads in a makeshift gallery around his tiny studio apartment.

When Lefty tells this story, he claims it was this moment that he understood the enormity of Kelly’s genius. He says it was like he had only ever caught glimpses of the raw power of her talent up to that point, like he had been observing it through a keyhole. Seeing the pieces spread out before him, he was speechless.

When she heard the door close, she turned around, and he saw a smile on her face he had never seen before. It transformed her entirely, the way sunlight transforms the sea from impenetrable slate into a shimmering, mythological presence. He dropped his keys and wallet on the table and joined her in front of the drawing. They stood side by side, looking at the piece without saying a word, before he moved slightly, shifting his focus to the next one, and she followed. In this way, they made their way through her intimate, homemade gallery.

The peeling linoleum, the dishes in the sink, the noise from the highway—all disappeared as the bounded rectangles of her pieces expanded and connected, incorporating and assimilating the mundane into the fantastical realm of her imagination.

When he finally did speak, nearly an hour later, after they had looked at the last piece, his words came slow and halting, as though he were struggling to speak in a language he didn’t know.

“I see it. I think I see what you do… now. I didn’t… I couldn’t before… but now, now I do. We have to… we must do something with these. Okay?”

At this point, he paused and looked up to meet her gaze. She nodded, and in that small gesture, a contract was signed—one that would endure beyond what either of them could have ever imagined.

The next day, they went to an art supply store, and Lefty nearly maxed out his only credit card on framing materials. Neither of them knew what they were doing, but they knew the work couldn’t be presented, much less sold, without frames. Frames added legitimacy to things. They gave the rest of the world permission to see what Lefty already saw, what he knew, what he had known since first seeing her cramped sketches in the composition notebook five years earlier in front of the little coffee shop in the hometown they had both fled.

The next Saturday, there was a little art festival over in Venice. Lefty paid the $300 registration fee to rent a little ten-by-ten stall. They arrived early in the morning with twenty-four of her pieces framed and stacked in the trunk of his Corolla. They filled the three walls of the small tent and propped the rest up on the ground. Lefty had fastidiously taped three-by-five cards to the frame of each piece with titles like:

“Untitled #46”
Pen and Ink on Parchment
by K.A. Mudd
$269

The one time he had ever walked through a proper gallery where the pieces sold for thousands of dollars, he was both impressed and disgusted that so many of the artists hadn’t bothered to provide titles for their work. It was aloof, arrogant, and probably genius, or so he thought. To price the pieces, Lefty was pragmatic, using every bit of what he learned in his one semester of business school at UNC Asheville. His formula was something like this: list price = ((artist’s time × $25) − cost of materials) × 2.

By ten, the sidewalk was beginning to fill up with potential art buyers who strolled by as contemplative solos or chatty duets. By midafternoon, the festival was packed with noisy ensembles who slurped slushies and noshed on greasy funnel cakes as they moved amoeba-like in and around the long corridor of stalls. One out of every ten people stopped to look at Kelly’s work. There were polite, close-lipped smiles and nods, but no one lingered and no one pulled out their credit card.

Early that morning, before they left the apartment, Kelly came out of the bathroom wearing a dress. It was a boxy denim thing that might have been totally fine on a middle school girl in a podunk town in North Carolina going to Applebee’s on her first date. It could have been fine on a curvy woman with a big laugh and hair like a shampoo model. On Kelly, it was a hand-me-down sack. Lefty had been encouraging—she was making an effort. This was a big day. But as the day wore on, and he watched her retreat by inches from her post out at the front of the stall in the early morning sun to the very back corner in the shadows of late afternoon, he could see there was no amount of encouragement that would give her what was missing.

She had refused to let him spell her even for five minutes to go visit some of the other stalls, maybe strike up a conversation with another artist. It was her ship, and she needed to be at the helm. He brought her some French fries and a barbecue pork sandwich, but she didn’t touch it. When someone did stop to look at one of her pieces, he watched her lips work silently, trying to conjure words as she fidgeted with her hands. Just as the words were formed and she turned to speak them, the visitor would step back into the flow of strollers, on to the next delight.

The only time all day she did successfully engage was when she yelled at a couple of teenaged boys who insisted that one of the fairy nymphs tangled in a spiderweb of Untitled #8 had weird tits. Scalded, they slunk away with their skateboards, and she returned to the perch of her bar stool after nudging it another inch back.

The only K.A. Mudd original that sold that day moved when the artist left her post to relieve her bladder. Lefty was pacing back and forth in the stall, likely contemplating whether or not the art supply store might allow him to return the frames for a partial refund, when an older woman in a tunic with a jungle print stopped to admire Untitled #16.

“Evening,” Lefty said, smiling. After a beat, he stepped closer and gestured at the piece. “So, what do ya think?”

“I’m not sure yet,” the woman said. She had an affected, melodious way of speaking. “There’s a lot going on here.” She leaned in closer to the drawing and adjusted her glasses so she could observe the detail. “What does it mean?”

“Honestly, I have no idea, really. But I like to think it’s about a journey, this one. A complicated journey, maybe you don’t even know you’re on.”

“Well, I must say it’s exquisite. You’re extremely talented. Would you take $250 for it?”

By the time Kelly made it through the long line at the porta-johns and returned, the woman was long gone, Untitled #16 tucked under her arm. Kelly saw the gap on the wall and assumed the piece was stolen.

“What the hell happened? Where’d it go?”

In response, Lefty held up the check for $250, the amount scrawled in the patron’s looping hand. “Congratulations, Kel. You’re officially a professional artist.”

She held the slip of paper in her trembling hand and stared at it in disbelief for a long time. Finally, she looked up at Lefty, and her words came out in a rush, each subsequent question stepping up in pitch.

“What happened? How did I miss it? What did she say?”

“Well, let’s see. I believe she used the word exquisite,” he said.

“Really? She said that? And then she just bought it?”

“Yeah, that’s exactly how it went.”

“We should celebrate!” she squealed, jumping up to hug him. When he set her feet back on the ground, she added, “And this time, I’m buying.”

He smiled and nodded and turned to start packing up. She floated over to the vacant spot where Untitled #16 used to be and traced her finger lightly around the rectangle of negative space.

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