Snowfield

Lenny knew that the M train would ruin her life. She’d made a point to wake up ten minutes earlier — an extra ten minutes to get down her eight-floor walkup and make it past the turnstile, where she was harangued by MTA workers for skipping the line. Lenny liked efficiency: she counted station stops; the scuffling of feet across the terrazzo tile; the number of times people’s oily hands touched the poles, all cold and chrome. She skipped lines. She skimped on change. She kept earbuds in and pouted, her face as blank as a donut, so no one would itch to start a conversation. There was a deliberate, necessary art to maintaining time in the city; Lenny felt she needed to invent more of it. And yet the train was always late.

Time was the thing that took her to Harper Gallery, where an art school classmate named Daisy was hosting a gallery show the next night. Professionally, Lenny hawked cheap and heady perfume samples to tourists at the Gibbons Hill Department Store, but today she spent her day off staking out the gallery in order to find the best exit door. 20 minutes was a science to these shows: long enough so you can say hello and show that you care about the oversized nude portraits of your friend’s friend’s roommate; short enough so that you don’t have to have a meaningful conversation with anyone in particular.

She didn’t like Daisy’s art nowadays but felt the need to go. They’d been freshman-year roommates, her and Daisy, the most interesting girl she’d ever met; they traded clothes, childhood notebooks, the occasional boyfriend. Daisy, with reddish hair and a nose like a Swiss horn, was always the more prescient artistic voice. Her work was tangy and deep. She'd sit in her and Lenny’s dorm room, pointing to pages in elementary school artbooks. Once, she’d gotten drunk, flipped a book open, and looked at a young Lenny’s painting of a field of glittery blue-white snow, poxed with sprouts of lavender.

“See?” Daisy said, slamming a wine cooler on her desk. “This is what you should be turning in to class."

Lenny graduated art school in bizarre abeyance; she was good enough to eke out a cum laude, bad enough to have zero job prospects after leaving. Professors didn’t remember her when she asked for reference letters. While Daisy and her other friends were getting awards and residencies and yo-yo-ing from Tribeca to London every six months, Lenny spent a year back at her parent’s little, damp house in New Jersey, where her mother weighed her food on a digital scale and kept asking why she wasn’t married yet. Getting the perfume job saved her from a different, more precise hell; she also knew it was just as depressing. Going to these gallery shows, however ostentatious, reminded her of who she really was — and reminded her friends that she was still alive, even if she was living an unremarkable life. She’d let Daisy keep her art supplies; there was no point in holding onto them.

Daisy won $20,000 from a benefactor when she came home from grad school. That’s what she began every Instagram post with: “My benefactor took me out to lunch today,” “My benefactor and I are going to Italy.” Lenny, like Daisy’s online army of fans, had always wondered if the benefactor was a lover, or a professor, or a rich family member; Lenny also knew that Daisy loved spinning a mystery. When she introduced pieces in their senior year art class, Daisy would refuse to explain her work, smiling thin and wide, a pink slice across her pale face. At night, eating Chinese food alone in her fishbowl apartment, her heat shut off by her super, Lenny often wondered if she had $20,000 and a mysterious benefactor and a way to buy into the system, maybe she, too, could have the life she wanted. She listened to the sad gurgle of her radiator turning back on and watched the numbers in her bank account wane.

Harper Gallery was a cold, square-tiled building, tinted blue and orange by the morning sky, with dirty walls and metal pipes jutting out of the ceiling like fingers. Perhaps it’d been a factory some seventy-years earlier, a place for making things, but now it was a reticent shell. Lenny had barely entered the gallery, fixing her baseball cap and tying her hair up at the nape of her neck, before a twiggy gallery guide had clicked her heels in front of her.

“Hi there,” the girl said, purring. The name card read FRANCES in cursive. Her voice was high and clear like silver bells. Lenny thought she smelled like Dior Diorissimo.

Frances spoke again. “Have you visited with us here at Harper before? What’s your name? How are you?”

Lenny thought about how many minutes inane questions would take away from her day. “Yes, I have. It’s Lenny. And I’m fine, thank you.”

“We’re just starting a tour group right this way if you’d like to join us,” Frances said.

Lenny spotted the horde grazing at the gallery’s edge; visitors with red cheeks, in soft down jackets and fanny packs draped over their shoulders, roaming the boundary and scratching their heads. They’d probably gotten Harper confused with the Met and were wondering why they couldn’t find a van Gogh anywhere. She knew she’d double over in pain having to slow herself down for the group.

“I’d prefer to walk alone, thank you,” she said, taking a gallery guide from Frances’ frosty, lithe hand, and made her way down the first hall.

She could’ve been a Frances, with the pencil skirt and the faux-European accent. That was the joke, back in school, about the art girls who weren’t good enough to do art full time: they worked in the galleries. She’d interviewed at the Oates, and the Malcolm Park Museum, and at Letts Studio; she didn’t have enough experience for the first two, which she didn’t lose any sleep over. But she remembered the man with the receding hairline and the thick, eggy torso at Letts, who made her walk in a circle in Manolo Blahniks and introduce pieces of art on the walls as part of her job interview. Later, as her ankles ached, he made her sit down in his office.

“You count the numbers of steps you take under your breath,” he said. “I don’t want to sugarcoat anything for you — but you’re not it. You don’t smile enough. You’d be better off making art than introducing it.”

The humiliation bled into everything she did for weeks. She remembered going to work, peddling cologne samples out from under glass to middle-aged women with matching paisley-print handbags, then crying in the pitch-black supply closet. She’d scrolled on her phone; Daisy, a flash of orange light on her screen, posted a video to her millions of followers called “How to Get a Job After Art School.” Lenny considered watching it, but then locked her phone and clocked out ten minutes early so she could catch the train. It didn’t matter, though; it had been late.

As she made her way around the gallery corner, she peeked at the group, defenseless as ducks, who were waltzing with Frances through Daisy’s collection; it had become part of the official tour that day. Huge, gold-tinged collages of flowers and foil lined the walls. Lenny thought it was too opulent, too self-indulgent, too unlike Daisy’s usual work; in fact, she remembered a time in class in which she herself had submitted a metallic flower piece and was told by a professor that it was too flashy. Lenny was unsure if Daisy had remembered it or not — but how could she? Daisy must’ve remembered simply the idea of Lenny, like everybody else. Not the actual person; not the actual art. Frances’s voice rang around the corner.

“This is one of Ms. Mitchell’s mixed-media works,” Frances said, pointing to a thick leather notebook propped up behind glass. “It’s called Snowfield.”

Lenny found herself creeping up on the group’s edge. The glass surrounding the notebook was blurry, thanks to the gallery’s heat, but she knew what the object was; she felt the sense memory of unwrapping dime-store paper to a small, black leather notebook some 13-odd years ago, on Christmas Day. The illegible handwriting was her own; the snowfield with lavender her own; everything was her own. She remembered the glide of her tiny hand across the paper; the smile and shame she felt showing something so juvenile to Daisy, an unreasonable reminder of youth and insouciance, who had marked the corner of the page with spilled wine. Lenny’s throat gave way to a torrid sickness, like a hot pan bubbling over. Her arms shook. She walked around the glass box to find the name Lenora stamped in small gold lettering across the front.

“Mitchell found this child’s art journal in an alleyway, and decided to turn this stunning page into a stand-alone piece,” Frances said to a Greek chorus of wow’s and interesting’s. “It plays into the rest of this collection, Lost and Found: Daisy Mitchell’s World. Before we move on, is there anything anyone wants to say about this piece?”

Lenny was deflated, rendered into a child in an alleyway, puny and terrified, and she knew then and there that she needed to escape. She’d forgotten why she was at Harper in the first place — to find an escape route. Where were the exits? Where did she stuff her gallery guide? Was it in her bag? On the far west wall hung two hundred $100 bills across a white, desolate landscape; the final piece in Daisy’s collection. Lenny’s stomach stretched itself as taut as a taffy pull. Could she catch a train right now? Her ankles began to give out, her neck knotting, her eyes blearing, her hair falling out of its tidy bun — and yet, like an invisible apparatus was controlling her body, she unthinkingly raised her hand.

Frosty Frances gave a smile. “Yes — Lenny, is it?”

“Yes,” she said, sniffing wetly and straightening her spine. Her breath returned to an almost-normal rhythm. “I think it could also be about the things time takes from us. Or maybe the things we give time to that we shouldn’t have. Or the things we miss, the things we could’ve done. Or had. I don’t know. That might not make any sense.”

“No,” Frances said, “That’s a very astute observation.”

Frances had begun to explain the technicals of the piece, but Lenny wasn’t listening. She looked back at the notebook and felt water dot the apples of her cheeks; all she wanted to do was touch it, the feel of cool leather under her clammy palms. But yet she felt an odd serenity — not for Daisy or Frances but for herself, for steadying her ankles, for not thinking about ability or coherence or punctuality. For knowing what to say and saying it, without money, without a benefactor, without glass. When she thought of the field of snow or the metallic flowers or even tripping in the Manolo Blahniks, she didn’t feel regret, nor did she feel entirely at ease; it was a kind of painful fondness.

She didn’t know how long she’d been staring at the notebook, but by the time she left the gallery, it was getting dark. She shoved her hands in her pockets and opened the door for a tourist. No waste waiting for the train; she’d hail a cab, even though it’d drain her pocket money. As she whistled, she felt her body awash in pleasant orange streetlight, her cheeks pink and puffy from tears and wind chill and sudden warmth. She let the light move quietly over her neck, and then her arms, reaching out into the street as if her body was a piece of art ready to be studied, displayed, believed.