Gray Matter

Her eye fell on a photo of her and Julian at his music summer camp last year in the Berkshires. He had just finished his recital to a standing ovation. They were posed at the piano, she with her arm around his shoulder and smiling proudly, he standing limp and glowering at the camera with one of his pained grimaces. That photo was so much them, she thought: her needy pride, and his refusal to give. Such a pathetic symbiosis. To think what she had sacrificed to get him in that picture—the money and years, the leave of absence—just to be available to guide him, to drive him to his music and art lessons, getting him into one of the best prep schools in the country. And what does she get back at the height of his achievement? A fucking scowl. He had perfected the art of rejection. The ungrateful little prick.

Looking at him frozen in that old-man hunch, she could feel her blood pressure rise. To think what he had put her through to raise him up from the quagmire of mediocrity. To think how she was ruined because of him. King Lear was right: “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is / To have a thankless child! ”

“Julian, I’m talking to you.”

Still nothing.

She took a deep breath. The only thing keeping her from exploding was a voice in her head: He’s your son. He’s your own flesh and blood. Love him for what he is.

But another cut in: Would this still have been my Julian?

The question was unanswerable.

“It’s rather late,” she said, straining to keep her voice neutral.

But Julian still did not respond—not even a stir. That was strange. Ordinarily he would tell her to leave his room. For whatever reasons, he never allowed her to see what he was working on. Even with a vacation school project, he’d lock himself in here, then wrap it up and take it back to school, never once allowing her a peek. That’s the way he was: self-absorbed and totally ungiving.

Only once did he let Vanessa see a work-in-progress. It was a year and a half ago when out of the blue he called her upstairs into his room.

“Well?” he had said in a flat voice, letting her look over his shoulder. Vanessa remembered her surprise at the subject matter: a bowl of fruit on a table by a curtained window. His subject matter back then—and still—had been fantasy superheroes with massive bodies of rippling musculature, swords, gee-whiz weaponry, and disturbing bug- eyed alien heads, all done in garish color. While Vanessa had spurned the subject matter, technically his work was extraordinary, given that it had been done completely in pinpoint dots. So a simple bowl of fruit was a delightful departure. Maybe at last he was moving into his postimpressionist phase, she had thought.

“It’s beautiful,” she had said, tempering her praise so as not to take it away from him. “Is it a class project?”

He flashed her a hurt, truculent look. “Why do you say that?”

“Well, I don’t know, it’s just different from what you usually do. That’s all.”

“You mean, the usual crap.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“It’s your birthday present,” he said in a dead voice.

“Oh, Julian, how sweet of you.” She was taken aback and felt tears rise. “How considerate.”

“You don’t like it.”

“What do you mean? I love it. I love it. I’m telling you, it’s beautiful. Really. And I’m flattered, I’m touched.” And she was. This was the first time in years that he had even remembered her birthday, let alone given her something that he’d created. Last year she had to remind him, and he went out and bought her a key chain.

“Well, I don’t like it,” he said. “It’s stupid.”

“No it’s not.”

“It’s stupid!” And with that he slashed the drawing with his razor knife.

“What are you doing?” she had cried, trying to stop him. But he slashed and slashed the paper until it was hopelessly shredded.

Then without a word he pushed himself from the bench and went downstairs, leaving Vanessa standing over the torn-up picture, crying to herself.

“Do you know what time it is?” She moved deeper into the room. “Two-fifteen.”

Still nothing. Not even a turn of the head to acknowledge her presence. He was pulling his silent treatment on her again. She didn’t need this shit. She didn’t need his sour, precious fucking rejection routine. Not after what she had been through.

“Julian, I’m speaking to you.” She crossed the room.

He was wearing that awful black shirt with the hideous Roaring Skulls picture on the front and their disturbing slogan on the back: LIFE SUCKS scribed in ghetto scrawl, as she called it. God! When the hell was he finally going to grow into his own talent? Here he was an accomplished musician who could play Shostakovich and Lizst, and he went around in heavy-metal shirts emblazoned with unseasoned nihilism. (Thank God Bloomfield had a dress code.) Moreover, his artistic talent was such that he could get into the finest art schools in the nation, and he wasted his hours on testosterone brutes. “It’s time you went to bed.”

He still did not respond, and she felt herself heat up.

You bastard.

“Lights out.”

She marched up to him. Still he did not turn or say anything, but continued stippling away. She glanced at the easel.

At first, she thought it was another of his fantasy characters. But as her eyes adjusted to the figure on the sheet, she felt a shock of recognition. It was a self-portrait, except that Julian’s face looked like that of a snake or lizard. The thing’s head had the same general shape as his own, just as the mouth and eyes were clearly Julian’s. But the features were all somehow stretched into a distinctly reptilian impression. The face was elongated, and there were scales covering its head and body. But it was Julian for sure. It was grotesque, but like all of his works it was precisely crafted.

What struck her was the color—reddish—brown, not black, his usual color.

He took out his mouth guards and laid them on a dish. “It’s a self-portrait,” he said. “Like it? I mean it’s not Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Grande Jatte or anything, but it has a nice likeness, don’t you think, Mother?”

He had said Mother as if he’d spit something up. She was forming a response, when Julian slid back.

Vanessa let out a gasp. Julian’s right hand was a bight red mess of pinpricks from his knuckles up to his elbow. He was stippling the portrait with his own blood.

“What are you doing?” she screamed.

“Ms. Fuller says that I should work in different mediums.” And he took his point and jabbed it into the back of his wrist.

“Stop that!”

But he continued stabbing himself with the point so that beads of blood rose up. He then dipped in the pen tip and began tapping away on the picture.

“I said to stop that!”

But he continued.

“STOP THIS MINUTE!”

Slowly Julian turned his face up toward hers. And in a scraping whisper he said, “I can’t.”

A bright shock froze Vanessa in place.

“Because of what you did to me, Mother.”

“What? What do you mean what I did to you?”

“What you let them do to my head.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“My head, Mother. They did something to my head. My brain.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about or why the hell you’re doing that to yourself. But I want you to stop. Do you understand me, Julian? It’s goddamn sick, and you’re going to give yourself blood poisoning.” It crossed her mind to tell him not to drip on the wall-to-wall carpet she had spent a fortune on.