‘Slow Reveal’ by Melanie Mitzner

By Melanie Mitzner
Special to Lesbian.com

Set in 1990s New York, Slow Reveal paints a portrait of artists who defy the arbiters of culture and challenge social norms. Art, addiction and family dynamics capsize the Kanes when they discover the parallel life of Katharine, film editor, mother, lover and wife.
“A poem is never finished, only abandoned,” wrote Paul Valéry, an outcome echoed in her decade-long affair with Naomi, a lesbian poet. Katharine’s marriage to Jonathan collapses in his struggle with sobriety when he’s ostracized for politicizing art and abandons his career for advertising. Faced with confrontations from her two grown daughters, an installation artist and an aspiring writer, Katharine hangs onto her former life. When unforeseen tragedy strikes, devotion and commitment are not the guardrails that keep their work or relationships on track but rather a form of entrapment.

A captivating story about relevance at the end of the 20th century, the novel questions the voracious demands of contemporary society through a riveting portrayal of turbulent family life, impacted by art shaped by the media and influenced by social and political injustice. Success is redefined by the courage to embark on the artistic process, as risky, messy and unpredictable as building intimacy and trust in love.

Please enjoy the following excerpt.

She reached for her faux motorcycle jacket and felt around for the keys she pocketed. Out on the street, she spotted a pay phone. This time she rejected the notion, pushed it back into the recesses of her mind where desire sought temporary shelter while she tended to the equally pressing need for poetry, hoping to find a good reading somewhere. Food for the soul, she called it, as she searched the Poetry Project for signs of associative life to transcend the banality that consumed her. She wanted to lose herself, her own work having eluded her as of late.

She stepped through the side door of St. Marks where the reading was taking place. The podium was occupied by the radical chic, the radical left no more than a dusty memory in the tomes of Audre Lorde and Allen Ginsberg. Before her stood a cocky kid angling for attention, his elbow planted on the wooden lectern. He cleared his throat then flipped to a page where he began to read about hubris, autobiographical no doubt. She drifted off to the dark well of longing for those snowy nights in East Marion where she paced the floor, reciting her work to Katharine who commented with utter reassurance, convincing her there was a point to it all before she would ravish her on the living room floor as the last of the embers in the fireplace extinguished. Shut out from the rest of their lives, shut down, yet gloriously open to the moment which lingered on endlessly as though the entirety of their existence were encapsulated in a single instant, a fraction of time which normally proceeded uneventfully, unacknowledged and wholly unrecognized.

A woman strode up to the podium, her long, black hair braided down her back. In her hands she held a book with a marker from which she read a poem about suicide. “Last Breath,” written by the one who committed the act, written posthumously, written in spirit, reflecting on the state of grace she had attained in the process. The very idea that someone would come back to tell about it dispelled the notion of the suicide victim. To dead silence the poet closed the book and looked out over the rows of pews. The work had gripped Naomi. How to shake those suffocating words. How to dislodge them. Fresh air, oxygen, that’s what she needed. It was dark outside when she reached the street, unsure in which direction to walk. She crossed Avenue A near First, spotted a phone booth and stopped. In the short space of time she could talk herself out of the urgency, she stepped up to the receiver and slipped in the coins. Before the second ring, she realized what she experienced at the reading, the suspension of disbelief managed in the face of sudden death—Jonathan’s in particular. No reason to believe the cause was anything other than a fatal hemorrhage. A victim of fate and for that matter hers, too.

Katharine answered but at first she didn’t hear Naomi’s voice over the din of traffic. “Who is it?” she asked again.

“Me. I’m out on the street. In the East Village. I went to a reading.”

“Something wrong?”

“I haven’t heard from you. Not that you’re under any obligation to stay in touch but I figured we’d talk. I want to be there for you. Be there in a way that might be … um, you know, beneficial.”

“You sound like a doctor.”

Naomi realized how calculating she was. The way passion shape-changed into need then shape-changed into something more desperate. A false narrative projected onto the object of desire in the form of support. The ego masquerading as something more charitable than it could ever be. One thing she knew for sure. Woman when faced with another woman could not escape the truth. “I wanted to check on you.”
“I’m all right … I guess. I don’t know … ”

Katharine’s reply moved through her uncorrupted by what one or the other really wanted to hear but that didn’t last long. “Okay. I’ll admit it. I needed to hear your voice,” Naomi told her. A long pause followed as if there was a right thing to say, an indication she would open up.
“Look, I have to go.” She was sitting on the floor of the walk-in, surrounded by small paintings on paper. “I’m making an inventory of Jonathan’s work. You know. For his retrospective.”

Why did she have to mention him? Not knowing the details would be just fine. Here she was, trapped by the longing, caught in the net snared while Katharine was back in the closet comforted by a ghost, the part of Jonathan she loved and admired, the legacy he had left behind. Death was a form of black magic. The way it clutched survivors in its grip. Death, art, suicide—all mortal acts that attained a kind of immortality through their recognition by others. Suicide a mortal act but the life immortalized. The dying mortal but the death immortalized. The artist mortal but the art immortalized. This act we called life was the very definition of mortality. Immortalized through every appeal, every retreat, every confession and every surrender.

What arrogance, the very idea that Katharine’s function was to serve her own. As if all relationships served that purpose. Something was seriously wrong with that line of reasoning, passionless and bloody. Naomi didn’t like messes she couldn’t clean up with her deft handling of language. Could this be true, why she viewed their relationship as immortal, as if it could never perish? Or was she busy building a security force she could hide behind, an armed one to keep out all intruders, especially dead ones.
Red wine, she repeated to herself, thinking she could manage that much. She looked at the sign VINS in block letters written across the plate glass window of the liquor store on 2nd Avenue. Racks of French and Italian wines lined the floor-to-ceiling walls. She recalled an unctuous Côte Rôtie they had consumed after cycling thirty-six miles around the fluvial terraces of the Rhone Valley, what seemed like a million summers ago. Two weeks of uninterrupted bliss, riding hard by day against the bleached-out sun, grapes glistening on the vines, that year producing a superior vintage.

Basking in the eerie glow of candelabras in castles en route where they dined in cellars and slept in medieval rooms with stone fireplaces they seldom used. Except for one particularly stormy night, the last one of their trip, when they huddled in front of a roaring fire and Katharine admitted she was missing Jonathan, that she didn’t feel free of him, that he was ingrained in her like a genetic imprint. Naomi couldn’t escape the image of him dropping her off at JFK, slipping a Roland Barthes book in her hands, claiming to be by her side in spirit on those lonely nights ahead, having no clue of the company she would keep, let alone the lover she’d been seeing for the last six-and-a- half years. Devastated by her confession, Naomi hoped she wouldn’t hear the same lamentation recounted over a candlelit dinner, this time at her loft, that is if they were reunited. She was feeling possessive. If she didn’t protect their relationship, no one would. Seduced by love then slaughtered by it. That’s how she envisioned the outcome if she allowed herself to go that far.

In some small way, Katharine was relieved she didn’t succumb to Naomi’s entreaty.

There was no turning back. No way to retrace the steps and do things differently. Jonathan’s death made sure of that, scarred by their aborted rapprochement. A target of abrasion at every turn, the friction in their relationship always surfaced on contact, wore them down. No longer reminiscent of the days without emotional barriers that required vigilance.
She poured herself a gin and tonic and squeezed some lime into the highball glass. One long gulp and the bubbles lodged in her esophagus, the pain excruciating. With Jonathan’s sketch in hand, she surveyed 1,000 Points of Light, lifted from George H.W. Bush’s inaugural address. She remembered her husband’s outrage at the Highway of Death as tens of thousands of Iraqi troops and civilians fled that stretch of road between Basra and Kuwait.

A brutal depiction of destruction and carnage from the first Gulf War, marketed to Americans and censored by the Pentagon. A savage attack sold as pretense to prevent weapons and armor from reaching insurgents.

She recalled the time when Jonathan was working on the installation. Flashing lights in a transparent oil tank revealing split-second images of incinerated vehicles and body parts. No names, no recognizable faces. Nothing identifiable. The dislocation and dissociation of war, a death toll of unimaginable proportions, without a single image in the media. “I need to get those names!” Jonathan had exclaimed on the verge of hysteria, triggered by the horrendous injustice and his fledgling attempts to stay sober in a world gone mad. Five ashtrays were filled with cigarette butts. Candy wrappers and crushed coffee cups littered the studio floor like debris washed up on a beach. It wasn’t until late spring when he actually vacated the place,relic from the ’80s lying dormant all those years he worked at the agency. Before he surrendered the lease, Katharine hoped he would resign from that soul-crushing job that robbed him of his true calling, but no, he simply couldn’t take the risk and she couldn’t deny the possibility that if he did, it might destroy him.

After draining the gin and tonic, she picked up the urn over the mantel and took it over to the window facing the East River. Not once had she unscrewed the stainless cap to look inside. When she managed to lift it off, without spilling the contents, she poured some into her palm. Organs, muscle and tissue vaporized, ashes that once formed a broad torso and narrow hips. The dark brooding face and heart-shaped mouth reduced to gritty fragments. For all she knew, the pile of silt, bone and ash might not be his. No distinguishing features. No evidence the minerals and embers belonged to him.

Edward Albee Fellow and fiction grant recipient, Melanie Mitzner is the author of Slow Reveal, published by Inanna Publications in May, 2022 and selected for Best Women’s Fiction Writers 2022 Debuts. An excerpt was published in Bloom. She’s a finalist in four fiction and screenwriting competitions. Her work appears in Gay & Lesbian Review, Wine Spectator, Vol1Brooklyn, Harrington Lesbian Literary Quarterly, Hamptons, The Groovy Mind blog, Society for Curious Thought and Submerging Artists. As a former journalist for tech, she covered television production/visual effects. https://www.melaniemitzner.com