Chapter 8 - The Exhibition
The evening of the biennial opening at the New Mexico Museum of Art was marked by an early winter snowfall that dusted the adobe parapets of the historic building on Palace Avenue with three inches of pristine, powdery white.
The museum’s interior courtyard was packed with more than three hundred patrons, curators, collectors, and artists. The air smelled of wet wool, champagne, and the pine smoke drifting from the corner kiva fireplaces.
Julian Marcus stood near the entrance to the main East Gallery, looking resplendent in an ink-black velvet jacket, holding court with a senior curator from the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum and a reviewer from Art in America.
When Ethan and I walked through the security arches at seven o'clock, the gallery was already humming with the low, reverberant drone of high-culture conversation.
I was wearing a simple, high-necked black wool dress with my hair pinned up using silver vintage bodkins Ruth had sent down from Taos two days earlier. Beside me, Ethan looked tall, grounded, his presence an impenetrable buffer against the curious glances that immediately began darting in our direction.
“They hung it in the focal alcove,” Ethan murmured, leaning down slightly. “Julian didn't bury it.”
He was right.
At the far end of the East Gallery, centered beneath an architectural spotlight that carved it out from the surrounding adobe-toned walls, hung The Millers at Home. Artist Outside the Frame.
And beneath it, arranged in a precise, three-by-three grid on two pedestals flanking the canvas, were the nine panels of the Inventory of Debt.
A crowd of thirty people stood four deep in front of the installation. Nobody was talking. They were doing what the guests at the Eldorado Hotel had failed to do: they were reading the brass plate, looking at the gray figure pressed against the glass, and then leaning in close to study the itemized receipts for tires, appendectomies, and golden aspen leaves.
“Rebecca,” a voice said from behind my left shoulder.
I turned.
It was Megan.
She was standing alone near the doorway to the print room. She was wearing an elegant cream-colored wrap coat, but her hands were trembling around a small leather clutch. Her eyes were red-rimmed, devoid of the practiced, athletic cheerfulness she wore to her tournaments.
“Megan,” I said, keeping my distance.
Ethan stepped back three paces, giving us the illusion of privacy in the crowded room, though his eyes never left my sister’s hands.
“They didn't come,” Megan whispered.
“I didn't expect them to,” I said.
“Dad wanted to,” she said, her voice catching on a dry sob. “He had his coat on. He was standing by the garage door at six o'clock with the keys in his hand. Mom… Mom took the keys away from him. She told him that if he walked into this building tonight, he was giving you permission to destroy the family name in public.”
“The family name?” I shook my head slowly. “Is that what you think this is about, Meg?”
“Look at what people are saying, Rebecca!” She gestured toward the crowd gathered around my paintings. Her voice was cracked, raw with the panic of a twenty-five-year-old whose safe, predictable world was collapsing in real time. “Uncle Robert resigned as general counsel for Dad’s company this morning! He told Dad he wouldn't represent him in the replevin suit! He told Dad that if he went to court over this, he’d testify for you!”
A faint shock registered in my chest, but I didn't let it show. Robert had looked at those panels and recognized the legal and moral catastrophe my father was marching toward.
“And what about you, Megan?” I asked gently. “Why are you here?”
She looked down at her polished boots, her shoulders shaking beneath the cream coat.
“I looked at the mountain picture,” she said, the words barely audible over the murmur of the gallery crowd. “The one we took in October. I went into Dad’s office yesterday while he was at the bank. I stood in front of that huge frame in the lobby. And for the first time in my life… I noticed Buster.”
She looked up at me, tears spilling over her lower lashes, cutting clean tracks through her foundation.
“We put the dog in the picture, Rebecca,” she sobbed, pressing a fist to her mouth. “We remembered to bring Buster’s plaid collar from the laundry room, but nobody… nobody picked up the phone to call you. I was standing right next to Mom when she scheduled the photographer, and I didn't say a word. I just thought about how nice the picture was going to look on my mantelpiece.”
I stood very still. The anger that had sustained me for weeks seemed to evaporate into the warm air of the gallery, leaving behind only an immense, quiet sadness.
“You were twenty-five, Megan,” I said softly. “You weren't seven. You weren't a child who didn't know better.”
“I know,” she whispered. “I know. And every time Dad told that joke… every time he said the hospital gave them the wrong baby… I laughed, Becca. I laughed because it made me feel safe. It made me feel like as long as Dad was laughing at you, he wasn't looking at my grades, or my mistakes, or how much money I was spending on travel team fees. I let you be the buffer.”
She reached out, her fingers hovering in the air between us, wanting to touch my sleeve, wanting to bridge the twenty-one-year chasm with a single gesture of sisterly grief.
I didn't pull away, but I didn't step forward either.
“I’m glad you see it, Megan,” I said, my voice steady, devoid of malice. “I really am. But seeing the wall isn't the same as tearing it down.”
“Can we… can we have coffee?” she pleaded. “Just you and me? Next week? Without Mom? Without Jason?”
I looked at my younger sister—the girl who had received the matching sweaters, the new car, the endless cheers from the sidelines, and who was now standing in a gallery realizing that the price of her privilege was her sister’s exile.
“Not next week, Megan,” I said.
Her face fell, crushed by the refusal. “When?”
May you like
“When you can stand at Dad’s dinner table, in front of Mom and Jason, and tell them what you just told me,” I said. “Until you can say it to them, saying it to me is just another way to make yourself feel better before dessert.”
I turned, took Ethan’s arm, and walked back toward the crowd gathered around the alcove, leaving Megan standing alone in the shadow of the museum archway.
