The Farm
Ionia Plaisance, the Nix family farm, was twenty miles due west of town. The ride to the farm was uneventful, for which Fusco was eternally grateful.
Allison insisted that the nice John Randall, Lionel's real estate mogul friend, ride shotgun while Fusco took the rear seat, next to the three burlap bags full of groceries.
Since John had tricked her in the checkout line at the market and paid for all of the food, she thought it only right to invite him home for dinner.
As they bumped over rutted dirt roads, past pollen-filled meadows and thick clumps of dark trees, Reese was expansive, cordial, smiling. Patient even.
Despite wearing that same uniform of black slacks and white shirt, Reese looked like he fit in here, deep in the country, like he was born to it somehow.
Fusco hardly recognized him.
Reese insisted on carrying two of the bags from the car, leaving Allison to scamper on ahead into the house shouting for her sisters.
It took time for Reese and Fusco to navigate their way through the gang of goats which came running at them as soon as they got out of the car. Fusco thought the six black-and-white animals looked sort of like dogs, only with harder heads, knobbier knees, and the damnedest yellow square-pupil eyes.
By the time the men had lugged their parcels into the kitchen and deposited them on the long pine table, Allison was chattering like an excited squirrel to her sisters about how John just had to stay overnight.
They agreed they could make up the second floor sitting room. Turn it into a spare bedroom in no time flat. It would be no work at all, she told John; they would just love to have him stay.
Allison met no opposition from her sisters who welcomed the arrival of the stranger with a speed that Fusco found unsettling.
He knew Reese could be nice when necessary, he had seen it once or twice: the soft eyes and low voice and gentle touch. But he had never witnessed the full-blown power of his friend's charm until that moment.
Now Reese was flat-out flirty, for fuck's sake.
These girls barely knew him and here they were ready to invite Reese into their home and settle him in for the weekend. Probably offer to screw him by the end of the evening the way things were going.
Fusco felt embarrassed for the whole Nix family really.
Ondine was the youngest, so at just twenty-five she really couldn't be held accountable for her behavior. Beneath her cap of shorn dark hair her fresh face and violet eyes were shiny with excitement.
As she watched Reese from the corner next to the refrigerator, she kept her hands behind her back to hide the grime around her nails. She was a potter, just come back from her studio, so it was normal to have dirty hands. Why feel ashamed of that, Fusco wondered.
Allison's older sisters, Vivienne and Morgan, could have been expected to act with a little more self-control, Fusco felt. They knew better, or at least they should have. Instead they behaved like horny suburban housewives sizing up the new Fed Ex delivery man.
Viv's blue eyes had the sharpness of the professional photographer she was. During this kitchen exchange, she spoke the least of the four women. Usually she contributed a cutting remark or five, but in Reese's presence she held her sharp tongue and just took in the scene.
Fusco watched in amazement as Vivienne passed her hand over her close-cut silver hair not once but three times during the first ten minutes of the conversation.
For Morgan, measuring a new prospect seemed to be SOP. None of the women was exactly shy, Fusco knew, but green-eyed Morgan the painter, with her bright blonde hair trimmed razor close, was like a fierce geyser bubbling with energy and drive now.
Despite the comical specks of paint freckling her nose and cheeks, her focus on Reese scared Fusco.
The father was nowhere in sight.
Which was good, because the way things were moving with this crazy family, Fusco figured Anthony Nix would just go ahead and write Reese into his will as soon as they met.
"Well, don't act like you were born in a barn, Lionel! Show your friend upstairs. Let him take a break and wash up, if he wants to."
How Vivienne had fallen so easily into the role of bossing him around like that was a mystery, but Fusco had learned from day one not to argue with a direct order from her.
He and Allison led Reese up the staircase, which was lined with wooden clipboards hanging from nails. Each clipboard gripped a black and white photograph of hands or feet, sometimes a shoulder or back, never a face.
Vivienne's camera work was simple and fine, with shadows that made the limbs look almost like giant stone sculptures instead of flesh. Fusco could see how Viv won awards for her pictures – they were stunning – but not why some collector would pay a thousand dollars for a single print.
Allison showed Reese the layout of the second floor: the modest square room she and Fusco shared, with its pink drapes and purple bed cover; the hall bathroom with lots of tiny old-fashioned white tiles on the floor and walls.
Fusco wondered how those nineteenth century farmers could have been happy squeezed into space this stingy.
The study, with its tall cases of dusty books and an unused roll-top desk, was divided by a sliding door. Allison closed the door to make the attached reading alcove into a cramped nesting place outfitted with a built-in bed.
Although blue curtains drooped beside them, the shutters on the single window in the alcove were nailed shut. With the partition sealed the little room was almost totally dark. One bare bulb dangled from a cord overhead, its shade long gone.
Her hands fluttering in the air, Allison launched into a fit of apologies as she folded faded blue sheets and a navy blue blanket over the worn mattress.
"I know this isn't as fancy as what you're used to in Manhattan, John. No central air conditioning and all. But I hope you can make yourself comfortable here anyway."
Reese loomed over her, crowding her personal space.
"No worries at all. The overhead fan is fine. I learned a long time ago not to be picky about my accommodations, so I'm pretty flexible. I can fall asleep anywhere.
"And this looks perfect to me, Allison."
He gave her a warm grin and threw in an extra eye twinkle for good measure.
Fusco felt like slugging him.
XXXPOIXXXPOIXXXPOIXXX
The Parlor
On the stairs heading back down, Reese asked: "Where do the rest of your sisters stay, Allison? If you don't mind my asking?"
Reese's manners were always sharp, especially when he was on a case. Exaggerated Fusco would say, but his technique seemed to get the job done. Allison slipped into an easy exchange.
"Oh, they live in their own apartments out back."
She waved her hand toward the blue-ceilinged porch that shaded the kitchen's rear door.
"This place is a compound really. Well, that sounds so grand, doesn't it? Like the Kennedys or something. When all we have really is a jumble of buildings piled up all over the grounds."
Allison's laugh sounded thin and tight, like she was pulling back the covers on some deep secret about her family, even though all she was talking about was the sleeping arrangements.
As the three sank into the lumpy cushions of old arm chairs jumbled in the parlor, Allison explained the set-up of Ionia Plaisance.
The building they were in was the original farm house, built in eighteen hundred and something. Frame structure, white clapboard siding, deep porches on the front and back. Just a large kitchen attached to a small parlor with a fireplace, an upright piano, and a thirty-year old layer of aqua blue paint on the walls. A second space off the kitchen had been a bedroom at some point.
Reese made vague clucking sounds, leaning back in the chair, his legs wide, brow wrinkling to show a sympathy that struck Fusco as totally fake.
Empty noises for sure, but when Reese combined them with his soft blue stare, Fusco could feel the magnetic pull that compelled Allison to keep talking and talking and talking.
"When Daddy bought Ionia Plaisance in 1964 he was looking for a quiet place to launch his new shoe-making business.
"He said that as the son and grandson of cobblers, making shoes was all he knew how to do. So he wanted to see how far he could go with it. Make something of himself with the only skills he had."
But Anthony Nix didn't just want to keep making simple shoes like his peasant ancestors. He hoped to transform his family's humble trade into a high-end business. He wanted a country retreat where he could make shoes and boots for the rich brokers and bankers who would never stoop to speak to him or his immigrant kin if they crossed paths in the streets of Lower Manhattan.
Though Allison had never shared her family's history with him before, it all sounded painfully familiar to Fusco.
He had heard variations on the same story from his own parents and grandparents. He sympathized with Anthony Nix's fierce ambition. And he recognized that everlasting taste of bitterness and residual despair. The feeling that no matter how much you achieve, you are never quite good enough to pass the test.
Under Reese's gentle questioning, Allison warmed to her story. He pulled his fingers lightly over his mouth, tugging a little at the bottom lip and Fusco saw her cheeks turn pink.
With pride she told how her father succeeded in making his name synonymous with luxury leather goods.
To own a pair of custom-made Nix shoes was to tread in the footsteps of the finest, she said.
"If you have that aquamarine Nix box with its golden scallop shell logo in your closet, it means you've made it to the top at last."
She said this almost fiercely, as if defying Reese to challenge her. He nodded, lowering his chin but keeping his eyes on her face as she continued the story.
"And your mother? Where is she?"
His long hands clasped in his lap like he was praying, Reese's voice was so low, Fusco had to lean forward in his chair to catch the questions.
Was he always so tender, so patient with his targets? Or just with the ones he believed were innocent?
"Mommy died seven days after Ondine was born. I don't really remember her all that much; I was only six. But Vivienne remembers a lot more. She says Mommy had long curly blonde hair like mine and deep violet eyes like Ondine and a big laugh like Megan."
Allison sighed then and Fusco wished for all the world that he could take her in his arms, stroke her hair and show her how open his heart was to her in that moment.
He hoped to God Reese wasn't a mind reader.
After a long pause to wipe away a tear trickling down her cheek, Allison went on.
For twenty-five years Anthony had slept in a small room over his shop, accompanied by a succession of mutts he adored. He came to the main house only to eat meals with his daughters and play the piano.
Each of the girls was gifted with her father's fine eye and artistic inclination. Anthony encouraged them to give expression to their creative impulses. He gave them lessons, bought supplies; on several occasions he coerced patrons to buy their art.
Allison's voice hardened as she got to this part of the family story.
Her words got shorter, her sentences wrapped up in such tension and sadness that it took all his will power to stay rooted in his chair. Fusco wanted to flee the parlor now, take a big breath of fresh air, clear his mind of all of this before it overwhelmed him.
He turned his head in Reese's direction to see if his friend was similarly affected, but it was difficult to read the expression on his calm face. Reese nodded to encourage Allison to continue, his eyes shining bright like hers.
She said that each daughter had made one attempt to move out of the family home, to make a clean start and practice her craft in another place.
But each time Antony stifled those plans, sometimes with harsh words or taunts.
In phone calls, letters, email messages, texts, even postings on his own web site he told them how he felt: their work was good but not excellent, competent but not superior. They didn't have the genuine spark of creativity it took to conquer the world the way he did.
"It was like a wish he made over and over again. And I guess he said it so often it came true."
She spat out her words now, the sounds sharp and scary in a way that was new to him. Fusco hoped he never felt that sour anger turned on him.
Anthony Nix had backed his hard terms with inducements. He brought his girls back home with gifts too generous to resist.
Over the years he raised a series of buildings adjacent to his own barn, a separate studio for each daughter.
Each structure in the compound was designed to the specific needs of the artist - dark rooms, kilns, well-lit lofts with double-height ceilings. Each space had all that the women could dream of, everything they could desire in material support and creature comfort.
Luxurious bedroom suites topped off each studio, decorated by their father as detailed expressions of his own taste.
"The rooms looked like what he thought we should be, what we could be if only we just tried harder."
Allison sounded defeated when she admitted this.
"And you? Why didn't you stay here, Allison?"
Reese's voice was barely above a whisper now, his eyes boring into hers.
"John, I don't know why exactly. I just know I have to keep trying. Trying to make a normal life on my own."
And then in the quiet that followed, the two of them seemed to float off to a private island somewhere, sharing some common emotion Fusco could only sense as a vague tremor raising the hair across his neck.
He fidgeted in the chair to remind them both that he was in the parlor too.
As if startled out of a dream then, Allison continued.
"My little workshop in Brooklyn isn't much. Lionel can tell you that. Just a room I rent above my apartment. But it's all I need for now. I can design my jewelry, keep my tools and my materials close to hand, work as long as I want to with no one to tell me how or what to do."
Fusco reached his hand out and squeezed her fingers. He felt he wanted to tell her story for her. Like it was a part of him too, only maybe he could explain it to Reese even better than she could.
"You oughta see the fancy silver thing-a-ma-bobs Allison makes. With all sorts of vines and flowers soldered onto wires. Sometimes there's a tiny fish or a panther stuck under one of the leaves, just peeking out if you look real close."
Fusco put his index fingers close together to show how small the work was.
"I really like the ones she makes with a miniature giraffe curled up sleeping under a mushroom cap."
Allison smiled, bringing him back into her embrace again.
He wanted Reese to appreciate Allison as he did, to feel a little bit of the admiration he felt for her creativity.
"Allison up there at her work bench, what a sight! She's got these bug-eyed goggles covering half her face, a heavy leather apron strapped around her, blue flame shooting out of the soldering iron."
He stopped before telling Reese about the way he had seen fierce determination freezing fine lines around her mouth and darkening her blue eyes, the way her drive made him excited even as it frightened him.
Some times when she was in a frenzy to finish a commission, she worked until three in the morning, got up near noon, took long baths at dusk, sketching in notebooks she kept in a basket by the tub.
He had come across her in the bath like that a few times, her little pale body floating in the soapy water, her eyes vacant and soft.
She looked so beautiful to him then, so sleek, dreamy, and happy.
He didn't want Reese to know everything he felt, to think he was falling in love with Allison, with the way his future could be with her.
But it was sure possible; he felt it in his heart.
It sure was possible.