Everything Happens Today Read online

  “Your parents allow you to stay at home by yourself, Lucy?”

  “My sister was supposed to come down from college, but she got stuck or something at the last minute, but I’m okay by myself.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that but I’m glad you’re here. Leslie works too hard, he never has anyone his own age around to keep him company.”

  “I’m only here for the grub.”

  “Did you hear what she said? You can sit a little closer if you like, Lucy.”

  “Thanks. I’ll do that.”

  Wes took the top plate and laid down a shallow coating of sauce, upon which he placed a ragged bed of wilted bok choy to underlie the ration of sweetbread and mushrooms. At its side went a dollop of potato, which received a finishing drizzle of sauce. Wes thought it a reasonably professional presentation, in the context of lowered expectations, something that might perhaps be offered by an early loser on “Top Chef.” He handed it on to Nora, who solemnly married it with a knife and fork rolled up in a linen napkin and sat it gingerly upon the breakfast tray that she had previously positioned on their mother’s lap. It was the only such tray in the house—the rest of them would have to balance their plates on their knees. Nora proceeded to cut half their mother’s portion into bite-size parcels while Wes repeated the plating exercise for Lucy, and handed it to her where she had stretched out beside his mother on the bed.

  “Do you want me to hold the fork for you, mommy?”

  “I think I can manage tonight.”

  “I think this needs the right wine, don’t you? Would it be okay if we had a glass of wine, Marion?”

  “I think one glass wouldn’t do any harm, darling.”

  “I’ll get it. Pause the tv.”

  Wes served Nora, who had claimed her mother’s old wheelchair from the corner where it had sat unused these many months. He ran down the two flights of stairs to the garden floor, where his father kept the wine in a hallway closet. Wes didn’t know a lot about wine; of the three dozen or so bottles most seemed like generic French table wines, but because many still had their price stickers he was able to select a Brunello that was at least five times as expensive as the rest. In his father’s office across the narrow passageway The Band was playing “Up on Cripple Creek” at low volume; light shone through the crack below the closed door, but there was no way to know if his father was in there or not. Wes grabbed a corkscrew and took the stairs two by two to his mother’s bedroom.

  Nora had abandoned the wheelchair and was sitting on the bed with Lucy and his mother, who were doubled over with laughter. Bobby was apparently coming to the end of a typically breathless, elaborate shaggy dog story.

  “Bobby paid for that cheese, Bobby waited for that cheese, Bobby suffered for that cheese, and Bobby wants that cheese NOW!”

  Wes uncorked the bottle and filled three tumblers, reserving a thimbleful for Nora, which he handed to the girls on the bed, who toasted one another raucously. Nora drained her tumbler in one gulp and held it out brazenly for a refill, but Wes ignored her and grabbed the remote.

  “We don’t have to watch Bob tonight, Leslie, if you’d rather talk.”

  “Oh no, please Marion! Can’t we watch one show?”

  “That’s fine with me, darling.”

  They settled down, adjusting their pillows and their clothing, and Wes resumed the program.

  A plate of food had been set aside for Wes at the foot of the bed. Wes had forgotten to warm the plates, and the sauce had formed an unattractive skin across the bottom of his, which he dragged with the tine of his fork to the side, where it looked like a tiny pup tent collapsed by a strong wind. He brought his plate up to his nose—it did not smell of urine, the way sautéed kidneys did; nor of mild fish, as had his one and only taste of brains, rolled in egg and breadcrumbs and fried golden to resemble chicken nuggets as a prank at a Halloween party; nor yet of a stable, like tripe. It smelled unquestionably of rich, fertile soil, a good smell to Wes though he recognized that most people might find it a little ripe.

  By now, Bob Ross was well into his painting. Wes recognized it immediately as an episode he had seen several times, one in which, before the start of the show, Bob had already covered most of the canvas in a very dark green, almost black paint with a white hole in the middle. Eventually, the hole would come to be seen as a distant clearing in a dark wood, with light streaming in from the upper right and a path meandering through the dark part of the woods towards the light. The prevailing color was lavender, and the feeling Bob seemed to want to evoke was one of quietude and serenity, like a romantic poem, as if the viewer were strolling deep in thought through a dim, pristine forest, when he was suddenly struck by a vision, or inspiration, or whatever. Bob never, ever talked about God, but Wes suspected that he was deeply pious, with an animist strain. This painting, for instance, Wes thought evoked a journey through danger towards salvation, or the experience of someone who has died and is following the light. The metaphor could only go so far, of course, because Bob would be finished with this painting in twenty-five minutes and move on to the next with barely a backward glance, but in his present mood Wes was feeling especially affable towards Bob and ready to parse his oeuvre in the most generous possible spirit of equanimity. Far better to be watching Bob Ross in the bosom of his family, howsoever fucked up, than upstairs in his bed trying to milk Tolstoy for pearls of wisdom about misguided love.

  “This is a super painting for a young friend because it looks like something right out of a fairytale. You can add any kind of characters that you want to.”

  “I’ve seen this one.”

  “We’ve all seen this one.”

  Wes set his plate on the carpet and cut himself a heavy forkful of sweetbread, upon which he piled slices of mushroom. There was the briefest wave of nausea as he slotted it into his mouth and began to chew meditatively, but that was probably less to do with the aroma—which he had to admit was a little insistent—than with the size of the portion. Wes had read somewhere that the sense of taste was informed as much by the chemistry of scent as by the response of the buds on the tongue, and he made a deliberate effort to continue to breathe through his nostrils as he chewed. The sweetbread, he found, really did taste the way it looked and smelled—like a mouthful of liver mixed with a fistful of very rich loam or peat, but in a not altogether unpleasant way. There was a slight problem with the mouth-feel—somewhere between a boiled pudding and a ripe banana—but it was offset by the fattiness and mellow seasoning of the sauce. All in all he was inclined to believe that the sweetbread was quite palatable in its own way, and that no matter what you might say about it, at least it tasted better than it smelled.

  “Isn’t it fantastic that you can take a brush this big and make something that looks so delicate. And you can—you really can.”

  “I can, Bob! I really can!”

  “Quiet. Can’t you see he’s in the zone?”

  Wes glanced over his shoulder toward the bed, where Nora had insinuated herself between his mother and Lucy and was snuggled down in the crook of Lucy’s elbow, her cheek resting lightly on her elbow. All of them were transfixed by Bob Ross’s patter, and none had made much of a dent in her sweetbreads. Wes wondered what Delia would make of this scene—the sweetbread, the tv dinner, Bob Ross. In fact, Wes barely needed to think to know that she would hate everything about it. Delia, of course, was a vegetarian, so it went without saying that she would disapprove of the sweetbread. As he had heard her do often enough, she would lecture him about the wrongness of eating other animals, the cruelty of industrial farms and butchery, the bad karma accrued by consuming flesh, which was all fair and good, as far as Wes was concerned. But she would also feel the need to prove that she was broadminded because she was not a dogmatic vegan, she ate eggs and dairy products so long as they were produced humanely, as if Wes needed cajoling by someone he could “identify” with, as if he were unable to understand her arguments without being spoken down to. It was not so much what she sa
id, because it all made a certain amount of sense, but the way in which she said it—that calm, authoritarian tone, the imperturbable patience, the steady gaze from her lofty perch, the implied condescension. In addition to all this, as if it weren’t enough, Wes had the feeling that Delia would find something especially objectionable about sweetbreads, as opposed to “regular” meat, as if it were in a kind of hyper-fleshly category of its own. Delia probably wouldn’t say any of these things, because she was quite political, but it would be hard to enjoy one’s meal with Delia around, knowing what she was thinking.

  “People will never believe you can paint this much detail using a big ol’ crazy brush like this, but you can. You can do anything as long as you believe you can do it. It helps mentally, when you decide you’re going to paint a picture, paint it mentally several times and get the strokes sort of worked out in your mind. Know what you want before you start, but do it mentally.”

  Lucy said: “Can we put it on pause a minute? I have a question.” Wes paused the show. Lucy sat up and collected her thoughts for a moment while the others waited upon her expectantly. She cleared her throat.

  “What the heck do you think he’s getting at?”

  “I don’t follow you, Lucy.”

  “I mean, what makes Bob Ross tick? What’s he trying to tell us, being the way he is? Who is Bob Ross?”

  “Bob Ross is a runaway munchkin, obviously. Anybody knows that.”

  “What do you think he is?”

  “I can’t make him out at all. Sometimes I think it’s all just an act—I mean, he made millions of dollars doing this, didn’t he?—but then I think there’s something else behind it, something dark, maybe even scary.”

  “You know, he spent years in the Air Force, and he always said that when he left the military he never wanted to yell at anybody ever again.”

  “So it’s like a trauma? Like if he ever raised his voice again he would wake up this sleeping monster inside of him? So he spends his whole life whispering?”

  “Maybe. My dad thinks he was a major scam artist, that he knew he was selling trash to suckers because he was so good at it, but I don’t think that’s it at all. I think he was totally sincere about his art and really believed in it, not just because he thought it was beautiful but because it was his gift to the world, like medicine. Something bad happened to him, and he was able to cure himself, and he wanted to share it. He didn’t give a shit if real artists laughed at him because he knew he could help people. Does that make sense?”

  Lucy was staring at him very intently, and Wes could not quite read the look in her eye, as if she were preparing some clever, sarcastic comeback. But then he saw the color rise in her cheeks, and it must have been a lot of color because she was already quite tan and the lighting was so poor in his mother’s bedroom, and he knew then that she was thinking something really nice and warm about him, and he blushed in return, which she saw. And Nora was watching the whole thing with a look of such shock that it was clear she had grasped exactly what was going on. Lucy just shook her head and smiled.

  “What do you think, Marion? Was Bob Ross a genius?”

  Wes could tell that his mother had not quite been able to follow the conversation, that she was beginning to fade, as in some ways this had been quite an eventful day for her. She smiled, turning to each of them in turn with a shrug of the shoulders and a look of forlorn wistfulness, as if she were on the deck of a ship that was pulling away from the dock. But then she frowned, a frown of concentration, of remembering something that had bothered her long ago and that she’d meant to resolve but had put out of mind until just now.

  “Bob Ross is the unknown. The unknowable.”

  “Cool.”

  Wes turned the show back on.

  “I got a letter from somebody a while back, and they said ‘Bob, everything in your world seems to be happy.’ That’s for sure. That’s why I paint. It’s because I can create the kind of world that I want, and I can make this world as happy as I want it. Shoot, if you want bad stuff, watch the news. This is a tranquil world here. We don’t allow bad stuff in our paintings.”

  Bob had almost finished his painting. Wes had misremembered it—it was not a path meandering down the center of the canvas towards the clearing but a babbling brook. Bob Ross almost always had water in his paintings to show off his facility with reflections and ripples, which he was able to convey with startling realism with just one or two strokes of the brush or the edge of his paint knife. Bob’s paintings were remarkable for their empty stillness—no animals grazing or hunting, and the clouds themselves always seemed to be suspended at a moment of dying wind, as if the earth were holding its breath and pausing to pose for the artist—so the water component was needed to give the scene a sense of movement and sound. Very occasionally, a painting might include an old cabin with sagging roof and darkened windows, but it always felt abandoned or, at the very most, lightly inhabited by woodsmen who spent days away in the wilderness. In any case, there were no people in Bob’s pictures, and impossible to imagine that the world had such things as paved roads, power lines, contrails, four-by-fours or cities. That was part of what made him and his work so ineffably sad.

  Wes glanced down at his plate and was surprised to find that he had eaten almost everything, other than a few remnants of potato and greens. He couldn’t remember eating any but the first mouthful. Nora, who was normally an adventurous eater, had made a game attempt, but the sweetbread had defeated her and more than three quarters of it remained on her plate. Her potatoes, on the other hand, were all gone. She caught Wes’s eye and pointed with one hand to the emptiness where the potato had been, and mimed rubbing her tummy with the other. “Bobby like,” she mouthed wordlessly, and returned her attention to the television.

  “Now then, you have to start making some big decisions. Just sort of let your imagination go. Think if you were a tree where you’d like to live. This tree, he lives right here at the side of the brook. He has one of the prettiest views. He looks out over this brook and watches everything happen. This is your tree, so you make it any way that you want, any way that you want. In your world, you can have anything, anything.”

  Something had just happened, and now Wes thought he knew what it was. He had always imagined that if he could persuade Delia to look deep into this eyes, she would see herself in them the way he saw her, and that she would understand that she was being seen in a way that no one had ever seen her, and loved in a way that no one had ever loved her. He had been convinced of it, but what he had failed to grasp was how hard it is to persuade someone to look into your eyes with the confidence and patience to see what you wanted them to see. It wasn’t the love that was difficult; it was the communication of love. It was the willingness of the other to be loved and to look for the love. And what had just happened to Wes was that he had looked into Lucy’s eyes precisely the way he had always hoped Delia would look into his, and there had been a message waiting for him there. Its meaning had been far from obvious, its intention less explicit than what he had had in store for Delia, but it was clearly a message that was addressed to him alone. And it would also be a mirror of some sort, or a portrait, a painting of himself. That much he had been able to tell; he just hadn’t been able to recognize himself in it in any way.

  What exactly did she see when she looked at him? What if it were Wes instead of Lucy, stumbling upon a family scene like this one? He recalled a book or a movie, without remembering what it was, in which the dying hero floats disembodied over the battlefield where he has been mortally wounded, and looks down with infinite and equal compassion and understanding on the slayers and the slain alike. Wes imagined himself doing the same thing here, in this sickroom. What would he see? A frail, dying woman, half-crazed with suffering and ill-served by the indifference, confusion and horror of her children and absent husband; a perfect, beautiful little girl, born to be generous, kind and loving, but already firmly on the path towards a lifetime of myopic stumbling towards thin
gs that, from a distance, look like love but turn out to be anything but; a boy, angry and resentful, self-involved and self-pitying, a fly caught and struggling in a spider’s web, a villain and a spy, a perennial shopper in the flea market of second-hand ideas and emotions, dressed in everyone’s cast-offs yet with no style of his own, morose with offended vanity but covetous and envious of all and everything. If he were Delia or Lucy, what would he make of such a boy? If he were James, or Nora, or Mrs. Fielding, could he even like such a boy? Could he, like the dying soldier, ever summon up compassion and understanding for such a boy?

  “And just remember, we don’t make mistakes here. There are no mistakes, only happy little accidents.”

  Lucy slid off the bed and settled on the floor beside him, holding her finger to her lips and nodding towards Nora and his mother, entwined in sleep on the bed behind them. She pressed her shoulder against his and wrapped one hand around his bicep, but she kept her eyes firmly glued to the television, where Bob Ross was getting ready to sign his painting and call it a day. Whatever the message she had for him, she was going to hold it in store for a new day.

  “This little piece of canvas is your world and on here you can do anything that your heart desires. You can create any illusion that you want here. You can find peace and tranquility here, or you can make big storms. It just depends on what your mood is that day. Painting is just a way of capturing a second of time and mood, and putting it on canvas. And maybe a hundred years from now somebody will look at your painting and know that you had a fantastic day, and that on this day you truly did experience the joy of painting. God bless.”