La Cabra, VT

Excerpt

Florence Potte was an artist. She never took her ex-husband's name. When Edward was very young, she taught one or maybe two courses at Barnard University, and this remained the focal point of her articulable identity through Edward's adolescence. But for the most part, Florence was a painter. To make a living, she taught odd courses here and there, sometimes elsewhere in the city, sometimes upstate at a community college, sometimes in New Jersey, sometimes at a high school, sometimes evening classes, at one point, even yoga, which was yet to popularize as it would in Edward's twenties. She longed to get another chance at Barnard, but at some point when Edward was too old to innocently inquire about it, he realized that something very unfortunate had happened there, and though it was her proudest accomplishment, it was an honour she would never reclaim. So she painted. And her painting was a total affair. She would paint on massive canvases, so big that she would set them on the floor and lean them against the slanted ceiling, nearly creating a wall between her bed and the kitchen, which was sometimes claustrophobic, but also provided as much privacy as Edward could ever get in that little apartment. 

The layout of Edward and Florence's place was very simple. A staircase wound up to the third floor, where a narrow closet-looking door opened up to another set of stairs that took you to the attic apartment. Walking up those stairs put you smack in the middle of their place, and to the right were two beds, each tucked under the ceiling's slant in a way that made even rolling around in bed a somewhat precarious predicament. To the left of the stairs was the kitchen, not galley style like many New York flats, but just a clumsy square, somehow both too small to work within yet too spastically separated to make any food preparation the slightest bit convenient. In the corner of the kitchen was a tiny bathroom with a standing shower, jutting out into the room so that the kitchen was shaped more like Utah than Colorado. And this whole floor plan was rendered even more inane by the presence of the staircase, running right up the middle, awkwardly separating the sleeping/painting area from the kitchen/bathroom area, creating just a narrow and slightly dangerous hallway between them. Perhaps Edward was able to feel so fondly about this place because of how starkly different it was from his other home, a suite in his father's Catskill getaway in Wawarsing, nestled among places with such captivating names as Kerhonkson and Napanoch, reservoirs Rondout and Ashokan, the forests Vernooy Kill, Witch's Hole, Sundown, Minnewaska Park, Shawagunk Ridge. Edward had the luxury of constantly reliving the allure of these places through the wide eyes and loud mouths of the guests at his father's hotel, most of whom came from the city, though there were two weekends per year when Herbert Leonard would invite rural and mountain folks from elsewhere in the northeast to congregate in Wawarsing for a hunting tournament. Edward loved these weekends. He loved them so much that one year, when he was nine years old, he decided to sneak out into the hunting territories and see what the fuss was all about. Florence had fervently disagreed with Edward's presence at the hotel on these hunting weekends, and had made Herbert swear on his life never to bring guns into Edward's mental landscape, but of course this was impossible, and may have only magnified the boy's curiosity as he pieced together murmurings about the weekend competition. Edward, not quite knowing how to hide or to sneak, dressed himself in his father's mighty black bear coat, which felt to Edward like an invisibility cloak, but looked to most like a black bear. And so Edward was nine years old the first time he took a bullet, though thankfully the hunter that nicked him wasn't too good of a shot. Edward recovered just fine, but from years nine through sixteen, suffice to say he spent more time in Harlem than Wawarsing, which likely romanticized the latter place even more.