But Zach couldn’t see it that way. He took her rage personally. He saw their feud as a way to keep Addison close to him. The way a naughty child doesn’t mind what kind of attention he gets, as long as he’s getting it. In this sad, sick way, he loved that Addison smoked the guest cottage. He thought it meant he mattered.
From: Addison Stone /* */>
Date: Jan 29 at 1:29 AM
Subject: further to ZF
To: Lucy Lim /* */>
You know what it is, Lulu?
I never expected that cool-as-a-martini Zach Frat would be so stupid & useless.
I thought he’d go away quietly.
Thought he’d stop thinking about me right when I stopped thinking about him.
At precisely the moment I did.
Which was unrealistic and possibly flat-out dumb and maybe even cruel of me.
I never understood how deep he went with me.
How lost he was without me.
Not until he began all his reindeer games.
Now I hardly remember when or what was good between us.
It’s just cat and mouse. All I’m doing is waiting Wondering, watching my back.
He’ll nail me for arson, maybe. If he finds the fingers that are pointing back to me.
All I can tell you, I hope he doesn’t think this game has any rules.
Because it doesn’t.
Addison and Lincoln at Kolber Gallery, courtesy of Kolber Gallery.
IX.
“I’M BLOOMING, FINALLY.”
ERICKSON MCAVENA: Our lease was up in August. By February, Teddy was spending most of his time on Court Street, and Addison was usually at Lincoln’s place in Soho. So the obvious future was for her and Lincoln to feather their own love nest, and for Teddy to take over Addison’s rent. Addison and Lincoln were stupid for each other those days, besides.
“You remind me of a pair of baby orangutans,” I used to tell them.
Just the way they’d sit on the couch, her legs flung over him, her fingers in his hair, and he’d be nuzzling her neck—this wreck of limbs, like they might start picking mites off each other’s skin or digging their fingers up each other’s noses any minute. They only wanted to breathe each other’s oxygen.
Was I the only person who could feel this dust storm of doom kicking up around her? Addison was giving the world her story of a shiny-eyed artist in the big city. But if you scratched that surface, you had a wild kid zooming around in too many directions. Here was a girl who’d just hired an arsonist. A girl who’d dropped all her spring classes and who wouldn’t even be getting her GED. A girl who never saw what was wrong with stealing—in fact, who felt a kind of Robin Hood ethical rightness in theft.
I liked to think I was good peeps for Addison. But Max Berger, Gil Cheba, even Marie-Claire—this wasn’t always a thoughtful posse. Addison could get confused about the candy-ass image of a person versus the hard truth. She’d made that mistake with Zach. She’d made that mistake with Berger. And now here she was caught up in Cheba’s whole “I’ve been to the edge” British bad-boy thing. What they’d say down South about Addison is she was a girl who could get her head turned too easy.
I kept on her about the five-finger discounts. The Bergdorf prank had made her bold. But the claw-foot bathtub was over the top, even for her.
“You’re dumber than a sack of hammers,” I’d tell her.
“Heists are fun,” she’d answer. “They take my mind off my problems. Whoever is dumb enough to buy that tub is dumb enough to buy it again.”
“Yeah, but this is about you. And one day, you’ll get caught,” I warned, “and there won’t be any Max Berger to do the damage control so that you come off all cute and respectable in Mirror Mirror.”
She wasn’t listening. She never listened.
MARIE-CLAIRE BROYARD: Did you know Addison and Gil dressed up as FedEx workers to steal the tub? Once she had it, she had it hauled the five flights up to the Court Street apartment, then filled it with plantings—forsythia bushes and a mulberry tree. It looked wonderful.
The tub’s still at that old apartment. It’s too heavy to move. Here’s something sentimental—I went into Brooklyn just the other week to see it. Kind of a pilgrimage, to the old apartment where so much of Addison’s spirit is contained. The tub is right where it always was, in front of the living room window and still filled with greens.
“Addison Stone stole that tub,” I told the couple who are renting there now. They just about lost their minds, they thought it was so fabulous.
MAXWELL BERGER: These mind games—Zach Frat destroying Addison’s sketches, Addison burning down his guest cottage in the Hamptons—they might have been selling copies of The New York Post, but they weren’t helping Addison’s career.
I called her. I never make calls, but I called her. I said, “You get your act together. You’re disappearing onto the front page. Commercial is one thing. Flame-out’s another.”
ARLENE FIELDBENDER: Addison and I met for lunch in late January. I took off from teaching especially to come down and see her. By then, she’d dropped all her art classes for that spring semester. I hadn’t given her any push-back when she decided to stop the general curriculum. But the art classes? That was shortsighted to the point of stupidity, and I told her so.
We met at her studio. I saw the finished Doc and some of her studies that would be Exit Roy. And I saw some sketches for her self-portrait. Her portrait work was leaning more deeply to abstraction, and she was working in watercolor. The work was emotional and poignant, though I noticed she was discarding a lot of it. Most of her studies in butcher-block paper, she’d made big slashing black Xs through the faces. She was too quick to edit and negate. Too hard on herself, I thought.
Addison herself was a little off, as well. She was bouncing in too many directions. During lunch at a coffee shop around the corner from her studio, she gushed all about how she was in love with Lincoln Reed. How she couldn’t live without him. How he was everything to her. But then in the next second, she’d flash to anger. Zach had destroyed her studio. Zach was out to get her. She went through an itemization of all that she’d lost.
Her brain then seemed to spiral naturally to the Coulsen article. I admit it was unsettling. Addison was always a mile a minute, but throughout the lunch, she couldn’t seem to stay on point in conversation. I was concerned that she might need more intensive psychiatric help. A reassessment. I came back to Peacedale and told Bill I was a bit worried that Addison was losing her grip on her future. She seemed overly distracted by relationships.