SC-Epilogue, Part 6a

Note from Nick: Here we are, the beginning of the end. Part 6 is the final part, and it's a long one, so I'm going to break it into 4 parts. IOW, the usual TERBishness. 😈

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Oct 1996 – Sep 2000

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Christy’s career hadn’t exactly been on hold in Boston, but she hadn’t had the space to create what she really wanted. That had changed when we’d returned to Atlanta in 1996, and especially after she’d taken over the garage.

She ordered supplies first, things that had been too bulky for our apartment, like modeling clay and mold rubber. Then she began looking for businesses and buying equipment she needed for larger projects.

The foundry she’d used before had new owners and weren’t interested in small jobs anymore. She found a new one in Union City, on the other side of Atlanta, an hour away.

“You couldn’t find one closer?” I asked.

“I found several. But I want to work with this one. They specialize in monuments and fine art. They do everything—lost wax, green sand, and centrifugal. They even do vacuum casting. And they can weld sections, so I can create bigger statues.” Translation: Who’s the expert here, you or me?

“Okay,” I said, suitably chastened, “sounds good.”

“Mmm, yes, dear.”

She bought a kiln next and had it delivered, although I couldn’t help but laugh when I came home and found out she’d been trying to find a way to plug it into a regular outlet. Fortunately, the NEMA standards people had put a stop to that little misadventure before it had started.

“What’s so funny?” Christy grumped.

“That won’t work.”

“I know that! The thing’s too big.”

“It’s a 6-50 plug,” I explained, “and that’s a 5-15 receptacle.”

Her glare turned flinty. “Can you think of anything else we can’t plug in ’cause it’s too big?”

I took the hint. “I’ll call an electrician,” I chuckled.

“But I wanna try it now,” she wheedled. “Can’t you do something? Please, please?”

“No, sorry. This needs a fifty-amp circuit. I want a licensed electrician to install it.”

“Maybe he needs to install something else,” she muttered.

“Ha! Don’t worry, Little Bit, I know what kind of plug you need. And we both know it fits. As a matter of fact, I’ll show you after the girls’re in bed.”

The electrician arrived on Monday. He installed a safety disconnect and the new circuit, plus a dedicated outlet for the ventilation system. Christy already had pieces loaded for a test-firing in the morning. I expected to find a happy wife when I returned from work, but I found chaos instead.

Emily and Susie were screaming and chasing each other around the breakfast furniture, which wasn’t in the kitchen anymore. It was in the living room instead. I scooped Susie into my arms and effectively stopped the fight. Then I pried Mr. Ribbit from her grasp and returned him to Emily.

“Much better. Now, where’s Mommy?”

I received a shrug from one child and a silly grin from the other, but Christy and Laurie appeared from the garage a moment later. They each dumped an armload of toys onto the play mats in the breakfast nook. Clearly, I’d missed a memo.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“What’s it look like?” Christy snapped.

“Okay,” I said slowly. “Susie’s play area is moving in here. But… why?”

“The kiln.”

“What about it?”

“It gets hot. Like, twenty-four hundred degrees.”

“What! On the outside?” I actually looked around for the kitchen fire extinguisher.

“No, the inside,” Christy said quickly. “But the outside gets hot too. I almost burned myself. I don’t want Susie anywhere near it.”

I agreed completely, so I sent the girls into the living room with orders to play nice. Then Christy finished moving the toys, while I moved the television and VCR.

“What’re you gonna do with the extra space?” I wondered after we finished. I had visions of parking in the garage again. Silly me.

“Stone.”

“I’m sorry. Did you say…?”

“Stone,” she repeated. “You’ll see.”

She already had marble dust and resin to cast it, but she went looking for a place to buy natural stone. I came home a week later and had to park behind pallets in the driveway. She’d bought a ton of the stuff—a literal ton, two thousand pounds—and she wanted it moved into the garage.

The smaller blocks weighed seventy or eighty pounds, while the medium-sized ones were about two hundred. I couldn’t even move the largest block, which probably weighed five hundred pounds. I did the math and realized that a chunk of marble for a life-sized statue would weigh five or six tons.

“You can’t move those by hand,” I said.

“No, of course not.”

“Then… what’re you going to do?”

“Buy a forklift.”

“Uh… maybe let’s talk about this first?” I said. “Besides, the garage isn’t big enough for a forklift.”

“Okay, then a pallet jack. Or some kind of hoist.”

I blinked. “A what?”

“Paul, dear…”

“Got it. You’re the expert.”

She went to the local auto parts store and ordered a two-ton engine hoist. The guys behind the counter, bless their hearts, tried to sell her a dinky chain hoist instead. They couldn’t understand why an “itty-bitty lady” needed that much lifting power.

“What’d you do?” I asked when she told me.

“Told them I needed it to lift my itty-bitty gold card.”

“Ha!”

“It worked. They sold me the hoist. Stupid men,” she added in a huff.

She also started buying power tools. She had a full set of hand tools already, hammers, chisels, and rasps, but she needed things like an angle-grinder and a hammer drill. When she added diamond blades and carbide-tipped bits, they’d carve through even the hardest stone.

The power tools ran on house current, so I was a little confused when I heard a strange noise coming from the garage one weekend. I went to investigate and found Christy playing with an air nozzle and hose attached to a new eighty-gallon industrial air compressor. She’d learned her lesson with the kiln, and she’d paid for delivery and installation this time.

“What’s it for?” I half-shouted over the racket.

“My new hammer.”

“Of course.”

“Oh, and a water-fed polisher.”

“Do I even wanna ask how much it cost?”

“The polisher?”

“No, the whole setup.”

“Probably not.”

She wasn’t done yet. The new tools required a lot more safety gear, although I was a hundred percent in favor of that, no matter the cost. She wore a thick jumpsuit and leather gloves to protect herself from flying chips when she was carving. The gloves had padded palms to absorb vibrations and were fingerless so she could feel her work. She also wore safety goggles, hearing protection, and a fairly serious respirator.

For my part, I paid the bills and let her buy whatever she wanted (well, except the forklift). After all, she’d spent three years in a tiny apartment with no studio, and she’d done it mostly without complaint. I figured I owed her. That meant several eye-popping credit card bills and the occasional bounced check, but I could live with it.

Happy wife, happy life, right?

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Christy started working in earnest after the older girls returned to school in January 1997. She’d been creating things for several months already, but they were little statues or models of things she’d sketched in Boston. Most of them were flexing creative muscles she hadn’t used in a while.

Still, she’d finished nearly a dozen pieces, and she began selling them in local galleries. She only sold one or two a month, but it didn’t matter. She was making the kind of art she wanted, and that was enough.

Her first big break came in April, about a month after Erin’s wedding. A gallery in Midtown called and asked her to bring in some of her work. One of the owners, Lance, was also an interior decorator, and he thought her pieces would be perfect for several of his clients.

He sold the first batch in less than a week, and his partner immediately recognized an opportunity. Fred asked Christy to bring in some of her larger pieces, which found new homes almost immediately.

“Oh my gosh, Paul, they want me to start casting limited editions. And I can take commissions for larger work. Lance knows, like, everyone. Lenox Square wants a Degas-style ballerina in bronze, and a law firm downtown wants a stylized version of Lady Justice. Only, I don’t know how much to charge.”

Fred offered to be her agent. I thought it was a good idea but wanted to meet him first.

“Why?” Christy protested. “Don’t you trust me?”

“Of course, but I don’t know this Fred guy. Or Lance. What if they’re ripping you off?”

“Oh, all right.”

Lance was about what I expected: a trendy guy with an art history degree and a talent for design. (These days, we’ve been friends for years, and he’s the only person I’ve ever met whose house is perfectly decorated. I literally wouldn’t change a thing about it. He’s also the only person besides Christy whose opinion I trust completely. If he tells me something doesn’t look right, I change it, end of discussion. But I’m getting ahead of myself.)

Fred was a bit of a surprise when I met him. I’d expected a boring business type or an art nerd who understood numbers, but he was athletic and well-built, a former college football player. He had common sense and a degree in finance. Even better, he was charming and earnest, and he agreed completely when I said I wanted to review his contract before Christy signed.

I took it home and pored over it without spotting any major red flags. Still, I wasn’t an attorney, so I faxed it to Erin.

“It’s fine,” she said the next day. “I ran it past a friend in Miami who’s an entertainment attorney. It’s a basic artist-agent agreement.”

“See? I told you,” Christy said.

“Let’s call Sara,” I said, “just to be sure.”

“Why’re you being so paranoid?”

“I just don’t want you to get burned.”

“Is this about you-know-who?”

“Scumbag. Yeah, I guess it is. Sorry. Still, I wanna call Sara and ask her.”

“Ugh. Fine.”

“It’s also a good excuse to catch up,” I said hopefully.

“I suppose.”

✧ ✧ ✧

Sara called back and said that the contract was fine, so we met Lance and Fred for dinner.

“I’m looking forward to working with you,” he said to Christy after she signed. “You’re incredibly talented.”

“Thank you.”

“And you have great potential.”

She beamed.

“So, let’s talk about what you’re working on…”

Her next big break came about six months later, in December 1997. We’d spent Thanksgiving in San Diego and then flown up to San Francisco on Sunday. Then Christy and Sara spent three days touring galleries, meeting owners, and talking to other artists.

The girls and I had fun being tourists. We rode the cable cars and explored Chinatown. We visited Fisherman’s Wharf and Golden Gate Park. And then we snacked and shopped our way through the Mission District.

My calves were sore from three days of hiking and pushing Susie’s stroller up the hills, but the girls had loved every minute. They were so worn out by the last evening that they went to bed immediately after their baths. Even Emily crawled under the covers and fell asleep without a fuss. Their mother, on the other hand, was full of energy.

“Do you think it’d be okay if we go up to the bar?”

“Let’s make sure they’re good and asleep first,” I said.

They were, so we left Christy’s cell phone on the nightstand with a note. Laurie knew how to call my cell phone if she needed us. Then we took the elevator up to the nineteenth floor.

The restaurant was practically empty, and we chose a table by the window. We enjoyed the spectacular view of the city skyline until a server arrived to take our order, a vodka martini for me and a double bourbon for my chirpy wife.

“Oh my gosh, this is the first drink I’ve had all day.” She drained the glass and then sat back with a sigh. “Much better.” She took a couple of deep breaths and relaxed as her metabolism did its thing.

I caught the server’s eye.

“Can we get a menu, please? And another bourbon. Maybe on the rocks?” I suggested.

“I don’t care,” Christy said, “as long as it’s alcohol.”

“Just a single this time,” I said to the server, “and two glasses of water, please.”

We ordered a couple of appetizers when she returned with our drinks.

“You know me so well,” Christy said.

“Mmm. So, tell me about your day.”

“Oh my gosh, this place is amazing. Sara was right. Today was the best day of all. So many galleries to choose from! I think I need an agent here too. Or maybe Los Angeles.”

“What about Fred?”

“He’s the one who suggested it.” Christy took a drink and nodded toward the city. “He doesn’t know the market out here, so he can’t advise me.”

We’d become good friends with Fred and Lance since Christy had started working with them, and I wasn’t surprised that Fred was looking out for her best interests. He treated her like a kid sister, even though he was actually a couple of years younger than us.

“Makes sense,” I agreed. “And what’s this about LA?”

“Oh my gosh, I met the most amazing couple! Didn’t I tell you? No, I suppose not. I only met them today. He’s full Japanese and she’s half. Well, she’s actually American, but you know what I mean. Her mother’s Japanese.” She drained her bourbon and signaled the waitress for another.

Our food arrived at the same time as her new drink, and Christy began devouring slices of ahi tuna.

“This is amazing,” she said between bites. “I didn’t realize how hungry I was.”

I cut a piece of the baked brie.

“Anyway, where was I? Oh, right! Toshiro and May. Her name’s actually Mei, but she goes by May.”

I couldn’t hear the difference, but it was obvious to Christy.

“They own a small gallery here, but they have two big ones in LA.” She paused for a moment to replay the conversation in her head. “One’s in the Arts District and the other’s in Torrance. I don’t know LA very well, but—”

“It’s down south, by Redondo Beach. Oddly enough, I know exactly where it is.”

“Oh? How?”

“John Sepulveda.”

“Gina’s husband?”

“Uh-huh. His family’s from there. Palos Verdes. And there’s a city there that was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, Junior.”

Christy’s brow furrowed. “Why do I know that name?”

“Well, Olmsted Senior designed Central Park and a bunch of other things, including the gardens and grounds at Biltmore.”

“Oh, wow.”

“Junior wasn’t as famous, but he laid out the city of Palos Verdes Estates. He and another guy used deed restrictions to— Never mind. It’s urban planning stuff. And not very nice.”

“Why not?”

“They used deed restrictions to keep out non-whites.”

“Oh my gosh! Seriously? When? Recently?”

“No. Starting in the twenties, until the Supreme Court outlawed it in ’48. Anyway, Toshiro and May own a gallery in Torrance…?”

“Uh-huh! There are tons of Japanese there. Real Japanese, I mean, not Japanese-Americans. Honda’s headquarters is there, and they…”

She talked through another drink and a second order of tuna tataki. Toshiro and May wanted to bring her to LA to meet some of their Japanese clients, and they wanted to include her in a gallery show to introduce her to the art community in LA.

“They couldn’t believe I speak Japanese,” she finished. “I was a little rusty, though, ’cause I don’t have anyone to talk to.” She eyed me mock-balefully.

“Hey, don’t look at me! I barely speak American. No habla Japanese.”

“That’s Spanish.”

“So you speak Spanish now too?”

“I can’t help it! Only, not really. Just enough to talk to the nice people at the Mexican restaurant when I pick up takeout.”

“Why’m I not surprised?”

“So sue me. You know how I am.” The ice clinked in the bottom of her glass, and she gestured to the server. “Stop interrupting,” she said to me. “May has a bunch of ideas for the kind of things their clients will like. She’s an artist too, a painter. She thinks…”

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Christy built a dedicated following in Atlanta and Los Angeles, with a smaller but passionate group in San Francisco. Her style was the same across all her work, but her creative inspiration varied. Her Atlanta clients liked more traditional sculpture, anything from Renaissance to modern themes. The LA crowd wanted Asian- and Japanese-inspired pieces, and they favored animals as much as humans. The San Francisco people wanted a bit of everything, from amusing to erotic.

Case in point, Christy created one piece called Janus & Janet. Renée was visiting at the time, and we posed together, back to back. Christy seamlessly blended our bodies into one. She cast the final statue in bronze, about three feet tall, a nude woman from one side and a nude man from the other. The effect was surreal, and a San Francisco collector bought it sight unseen, based on the description alone. He liked it so much when he actually received it that he ordered a half-dozen replicas to give as Christmas gifts.

The different markets all had their exceptions, but the general rule applied. Christy privately described them as “good, better, best.” The Atlanta people were a steady source of income, the LA people were the happy middle ground, and the San Francisco people allowed her the freedom to do whatever she wanted. May and Fred coordinated and kept her busy with commissions and limited editions.

Christy’s career really kicked into high gear when we moved into our new house in 1999, and especially after Susie started preschool in the fall. Christy finally had enough room to work on several projects at once. Her 3,000-square-foot workshop had a kiln, a small furnace, and the forklift she’d always wanted. The semidetached studio even doubled as a gallery for finished work.

Fred suggested to Christy that she might hire a full-time apprentice, and they brought Gabby onboard to help with the larger pieces and the demand for limited editions. Business was so good that in 2000 they hired two more people, a welder turned artist named Peregrin and an MFA student named Winter. Between them, they took over the production of smaller pieces and replicas.

I was just as busy with my own career. Paul+Hughes Design beat Trip’s most optimistic projections for 1998 and 1999, and he announced at our September board meeting that the company was worth thirty million. Six months later, in April 2000, we moved into our new global headquarters. We had more than a hundred employees and plenty of room to grow.

The Lake Lanier development was moving forward as well. We weren’t raking in the dough, yet, but the golf course was under construction, and the country club had started advertising for members. We’d sold about a quarter of the lots in the subdivision, and most of the buyers had opted for a Paul Hughes home. I had to deal with a few who wanted nouveau-riche monstrosities, but I focused on the dream clients instead, the ones who wanted Architectural Digest instead of National Enquirer.

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In many ways our lives were perfect for several years, starting in about 1997. Christy’s career and mine were both thriving, and the girls were doing well in school. Laurie joined a competitive swim team, Emily began ballet, and Susie started regular dance classes.

We went on family vacations in the spring, to resorts in Florida and the Caribbean. We spent a week at the Pines each summer. We went skiing in the winter, to places like Vail and Deer Valley. Christy and I partied with friends and took vacations by ourselves, to France, Hawaii, and Japan.

Things looked fine from the outside, but cracks had begun to appear in the foundation. The problems started with money.

Christy spent more as her artwork sold more. She went on shopping sprees at Nordstrom and Neiman Marcus. She bought dresses and shoes, purses and jewelry, and pretty things for the girls. Some months the credit card bills were so big that I had to pay them down over time instead of all at once.

Part of me couldn’t really blame her, especially since she thought she was spending her own money. But her art cost money to create, which she never considered. Many months she spent more than she made, and we argued about it constantly. The arguments turned into actual fights whenever she bounced a check or maxed out a credit card. She always apologized and promised to do better, but she never did.

She started drinking more, too. We usually finished a bottle of wine with dinner, but one bottle became two over time. Two turned into three when we started opening another after the girls went to bed. Eventually, Christy switched to whiskey after dinner instead of wine.

For a long time, I told myself that she was getting drunker at night because her metabolism was slowing down. And I didn’t complain because I enjoyed it—she was usually horny when she’d been drinking, and women didn’t suffer from whiskey dick.

Then I began to suspect that she wasn’t just drinking in the evenings. Sometimes I’d come home from work and she’d already have a bottle of wine open. Other times she had a glass of something stronger. She always claimed she’d just poured it, and her metabolism was high enough that I couldn’t be sure. She might’ve started five minutes ago or five hours.

I probably could’ve lived with the spending and drinking, but she neglected the girls sometimes too. Once again, it was little things at first. She’d get busy on a project and be late to pick them up from school. Or she’d forget their backpacks for swimming and dance class, and the girls would be late because they’d had to return home to get them. I heard about it at bedtime, but I always made excuses for her.

A couple of times she even forgot to pick them up after school, and I received a phone call from the office. I told myself it was because she was working and had lost track of time. She’d done that as long as I’d known her. And she had an annoying habit of taking her studio phone off the hook and ignoring her cell phone when she was working, so the school was forced to call me instead.

All of this happened over several years, and it started long before we moved into the new house. Christy didn’t start spending and drinking all of a sudden, just like my work and travel demands didn’t double overnight. The girls suffered from both, although I didn’t realize until it was almost too late.

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