Provenance

Sue Mell

Description

A story of hope in ruin. With subtle poignancy and humor, it offers fresh takes on contemporary conflicts, exploring pivotal moments of sorrow, longing, and renewal in the lives of three deeply textured and indelible characters.

Sujets

• Literary
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Madville Publishing
• Date de parution: 19 juillet 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781956440034
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

What people are saying about Provenance:
“In clear-eyed, luminous prose, Sue Mell tells the story of a man submerged in grief and impossible yearnings who digs his way out of the remnants of a former life. D.J. scrutinizes his vanishing options with the startling honesty of a man bewildered by circumstance, adrift in his suddenly unrecognizable existence, but always articulate, always a charmer. In this wise and beautiful novel, everyone falls in love with D.J., including the reader.”
-Megan Staffel, author of The Exit Coach
“Sue Mell’s Provenance is a relatable, intricate novel about later-life reckoning that (like the antiques store it features) offers up plenty of treasures for the reader.”
-Debra Spark, author of Unknown Caller
“Ultimately, this is a book about kindness, compassion, and sacrifice—old-fashioned virtues that, Mell shows us, still hold their value.”
-Peter Turchi, author of Maps of the Imagination
“Sue Mell’s searingly beautiful prose and her truly troubled, truly decent characters make Provenance a gorgeous, unforgettable novel about learning how to value what is most important in life: those we love and those who show us how to be better.”
-Susan Scarf Merrell, author of Shirley: A Novel
“Wisdom of great depth and span marks each page of Sue Mell’s Provenance . The reader intimately experiences the characters making the difficult effort to recognize who they were and who they are, not for the sake of easy absolution, but for the intention of living more authentically.”
-Kevin McIlvoy, author of One Kind Favor
“Sue Mell’s Provenance is a novel of irresistibly messy lives, loves, and legacies that, ironically, reads immaculately. Not a letter, not a paragraph, is out of place in this beautiful, beautiful book.”
-Liam Callanan, author of Paris by the Book
“Packed with exquisite prose, Provenance fills the reader with both admiration and anxiety—until the very end, when the main character, who fizzled away his previous life and has come to live in his divorced sister’s basement, realizes he might need to rethink his purpose.”
-Jane Anne Staw, author of Small: The Little We Need for Happiness
“Long after I read the last page, this book sings in my heart.”
-Olga Zilberbourg, author of Like Water & Other Stories

Copyright © 2022 by Sue Mell
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
FIRST EDITION
Provenance is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, businesses, companies, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Requests for permission to reprint material from this work should be sent to:
Permissions
Madville Publishing
P.O. Box 358
Lake Dallas, TX 75065
Author Photograph: John Bessler
Cover Design: Jacqueline Davis
Cover Art: Sue Mell
ISBN: 978-1-956440-02-7 paperback, 978-1-956440-03-4 ebook
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022932000
For Mary Yntema and Jay Lyons .
Wish you were here for this .
Table of Contents
Prologue
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
Acknowledgments
About the Author
PROLOGUE
There was so much stuff, piles and piles of stuff, and DJ couldn’t let any of it go. Closets and dressers, cabinets and drawers—bookshelves, milk crates, the cedar chest in the hall—all overflowing. A landslide of his jewel-cased CDs, new, used, and traded. Ziggurats of yellow and black Kodak boxes filled with Belinda’s prints and negative sleeves. Commercial work—the weddings and portraits she’d begun to do—and the fine art photography she’d always aspired to.
From where he sat, before the monitor of her outdated computer, DJ looked back at their living room, his gaze settling on the trio of cherished items crowning the white-painted chifforobe. A piece they’d found on the street and dragged up the stone stoop and the steep narrow flight to their second floor apartment, delighting more in the word— Shall I put this in the chifforobe? —than its ultimate functionality. On the far end was a celadon-glazed tea-pot in the shape of a sage-like, long-mustachioed and -bearded Asian man cuddled by a deer whose tenderly curving neck formed the handle, its head happily resting on the wise man’s shoulder. DJ had found it just around the corner at the antiques store on Fourth Avenue, given it to Belinda for their fifth anniversary, along with a set of tiny colored pencils for the traditional wood. The gentle clink of its lid, her soft Oh when she peeled back the silvery tissue paper the clerk had used. Why did some things stick while others so easily faded?
Alongside the teapot rested a paper cigar box Belinda had decoupaged with fishing scenes, black-and-white photos she’d clipped from old National Geographics , then hand-colored to poignant effect. She’d assembled it when a good cigar box was hard to come by, a time before you could order ten or more from Amazon with a single click, which, to her, made everything less special. For him, the convenience, the instant gratification—and perhaps his indolence—outweighed that loss. Completing this tonal collection, high above the fray, was the surf-green shark ukulele their friend Tracy had given him in honor of his fortieth birthday, back when he owned a mere three or four guitars, when Belinda might fault but still enjoy the benefits of his heedless extravagance, long before her body betrayed them.
In an act of impressive follow-through, Belinda had removed the broken-hinged door of the chifforobe, intending the interior shelves as the fresh space for a curated display of their best finds from flea markets and stoop sales, their favorite objets d’art . But the shelves soon filled with stacks of bills and a mishmash of art supplies and guitar pedals, amp cords and unread magazines, film canisters and dirty ashtrays, and whatever else had no place to go. A dust-gathering jumble that blended into the disarray of their lives. Belinda . His wife, his love, his own messy girl.
DJ had lived here, in this Park Slope apartment, for thirty years: one alone, twenty-six with Belinda, and then, bereft, for the last three since she’d died. In his grief, he’d thrown himself into a series of relationships, picking up where old flames and unspoken flirtations had left off. All of them with women who’d known Belinda, everyone missing the past, facing a future of limited options. The romances faltered, but the shambles of his once spacious two-and-a-half-bedroom apartment endured, the tide of objects on a continual rise.
A heap of flattened Amazon boxes had grown shoulder-high, filling the so-called half bedroom, lined with floor to ceiling shelves containing his vast, now inaccessible, collection of records. Pop, rock, and country; alternative, classical, and opera; a group he categorized as oddities. Dogs barking Christmas songs. The Leonard Nimoy discography. DJ’s turntables, tape deck, and CD player unreachable, replaced by his iPad anyway. There were drugs enough still floating around, amber bottles of liquid morphine, even some Dilaudid, were he a person of that kind of courage. But the odds were much greater of him being pinned by collapsing shelves, buried beneath a cascade of books and half-forgotten tchotchkes, than of him making a deliberate exit.
From the stack of guitar cases depressing the already sunken futon love seat, DJ pulled the Martin for which he’d paid a high price, its sound and beauty irresistible. Tomorrow, along with all but one of his guitars—eight other acoustics, two electric, and one twelve-string, plus the banjo Belinda had wanted to learn to play—the Martin would find its own temporary home in Tracy’s recording studio. Do not bring too much crap , his younger sister Connie had stipulated as part of her taking him in, when DJ learned that his building had sold, the management’s letter brief and final, its plain white envelope slipped under his door. The half-finished basement of the two-bedroom house Connie shared with her eleven-year-old daughter was already crowded, she’d said, with stuff from her own, separation-impelled, downsizing.
To Hurley, DJ would take only the vintage Gibson he’d been playing of late, a suitcase and duffel’s worth of clothes, a single yellow Kodak box filled with a mix of mementos and photographs, and the ceramic figurine of a Thai dancer that Belinda had loved. It didn’t so much remind him of her as it felt imbued with her affection for the delicate tilt of the dancer’s head, the way she balanced on one foot, wrists and elbows flexed, the expression on her porcelain face both impish and sweet.
The rest of their belongings would be trucked the hundred miles upstate to a storage unit on the outskirts of Hurley, the small town where he and his sisters had grown up. Tracy was seeing to that too, arranging for a relay of friends to box and bag everything, whether worthy or not—there wasn’t time left for sorting. “I’ll pay for the takeout,” he’d said, though his resources were slim. He’d quit working when Belinda was dying, blown through the money from her insurance with a determined recklessness. What was left of his life? “You handle the rest,” he’d told Tracy. “I don’t want to be there.” To Connie, a social worker and formidable force, he’d simply said, “Okay.”
1
It was not an auspicious beginning. The bus from Port Authority had broken down in Fort Lee. “It’s not my fault,” DJ said, finally reaching Connie by phone. “Is it ever?” she said, making him think about turning around, except where could he go? Shivering in the cold March air, an old-school accordion folder of his essential papers tucked under his arm, he smoked through his open pack and half the new one wondering what it would be like living under his sister’s roof. He should’ve gotten her a housewarming—a house-mooching—present. For anybody else, he’d buy a gag gift from the 7-Eleven in whose parking lot he and his fellow passengers waited,