She picked up one of the shells and tipped the oyster into her mouth. Her eyes closed as she savored the bite of the seawater and the silk of the oyster. She chased it with a sip of the wine.
Following her example, he did the same. The seawater was salty on his tongue, the oysters were vivid and full of a wild verdant spark of flavor, but the texture reminded him of okra imperfectly cooked. Before he could gag, he sipped the wine.
The flavors combined in a sensory explosion, the seawater seemed to electrify, the oyster’s flavor became a muted backdrop, and the wine suddenly became sweet as sugar, with a complexity of fruit and leather notes. His eyes popped open and he stared down at the oysters. “God… damn.”
She laughed merrily. “Lovely boy.”
He looked up guiltily. “Sorry for my language. I just-”
“It’s perfectly okay. So many people I associate with have lost the spark of excitement that is produced when one rubs against the divine. It’s refreshing to see an honest reaction.”
“I’ve never had an oyster,” he admitted.
“How is it that you’ve never had an oyster?” she asked, sipping her wine. “You’ve been to every gallery show in Manhattan, haven’t you?”
“I avoid the food and drink at the shows,” he said. “I know too many disgruntled catering workers.”
She blinked, and burst into gales of laughter, her head back, her hair cascading along her shoulders and the slopes of her breasts like water in a tide pool lapping and retreating. “A wise decision, I’m sure,” she said.
“This is the captain,” Louise announced over the intercom. “We’ve been cleared for takeoff. If you’ll please fasten your seatbelts, we’ll be in the air shortly.”
He noted that even the intercom on a private jet worked differently. Louise’s voice had been clear as if they were next to one another conversing about the weather. The plane jostled them, and began to move smoothly. He looked out the window to his left and decided the view didn’t matter. He looked at Carolyn Delgado, who he found was gazing back at him.
“São Paulo,” he said, more for anything to say than as a conversational enjoinder.
“Yes,” she said. “I felt a need for the oppressive, almost desperate energy of São Paulo. Most of the people who live in Brazil seem to crowd into the cities. You’ll find yourself shoulder-to-shoulder almost constantly. It’s a city I find myself impossible to feel alone in, because I am surrounded by the press of bodies. It’s of a comfort to me, and I find I need comforting just now.”
He nodded and sipped his drink. “I’ve never been,” he said.
“Of course you haven’t. I can see it on you.”
“What does that mean?”
She shrugged. “Nothing in particular. São Paulo leaves an indelible mark on the soul, Mr. Metierra. Like the wind etching stones in a canyon. It reveals the darker, harder minerals inside of us all.”
“It sounds interesting.”
“It’s dreadful. That’s how interesting it is.” She turned to her own window.
“Then why go?”
“I told you already. I don’t want to feel alone.”
Her shoulder and back seemed to radiate the vibration of irritation, or maybe it was the plane as it rolled along the tarmac. The engines wound up and the surge of power pushed him back into the seat. After a short burst, they were in the air, the plane rising from the nose and tilting toward her side. He reached out and steadied the tray of oysters. His drink and her drink were safely in hand. She emitted anger like heat, but she tilted the glass upward and drained it. As they approached apogee she reached out without looking and set the glass on the table. As the base touched the table, the plane levelled out.
As though it knew she wanted to set the glass down, he thought. He let the tray go and watched her. He realized she was watching him in the reflection of the window. She likes reflections, he thought.
“I apologize, Brent. Please forgive my manners. It continues to surprise me. I find myself remembering at the strangest moments.”
“That he’s gone.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yes,” she said. She looked over her shoulder at him. “I didn’t expect it. And now that it’s happened, I can’t get used to it.”
“It was a shock,” he said, more for anything to say than for the conversation. “He didn’t like to drive, I’m told.”
“No, he didn’t. So far as I know, he never even got his license. I’d never seen him behind the wheel of a vehicle. What possessed him to-” she broke off. “It doesn’t matter now, I suppose. It’s over.”
“At least it was quick,” he offered.
She fixed him with a withering glare. “You’re shit trying to comfort someone.”
“I don’t get a lot of practice.”
“No wife or girlfriend?”
“Not even a cat.”
She gave him the barest smile. “Cats are too much like painters,” she said. “They only pay attention when they want or need something. The rest of the time they do exactly what they wish and to hell with the world.”
“Most people are either cat people or dog people,” he said. “But I’m neither. I’m not opposed to animals, I just don’t feel any particular draw. People are much the same to me. So no, no wife.”
“But surely you have family.”
“Oh, somewhere, I guess. We don’t have much use for one another.”
“You don’t sound bitter.”
“No, I don’t. It took a couple years before I stopped sounding bitter. But all the bills are paid off. I don’t owe them anything, they don’t owe me anything. We’re quits.”
“I wonder what that must be like.”
“It’s a pretty good life, if you came from what I came from. It’s a pretty empty life if you didn’t,” he told her.
She crossed her legs and smoothed out the dress. She gave him a flat look. “You think it’s good? Or you think it’s empty?”
“I can see it going either way. Sometimes it’s both.”
She nodded. “I often wonder about people who choose to see the world as black-and-white forever, deciding that, for once and all, this is how they feel about a thing. As though we aren’t different people every day. Even from moment to moment.”
He smiled at her, and she noticed that his face lit up when he smiled. His eyes brightened, the corners crinkled, his lips parted, and his teeth showed. More, his entire body seemed to shift. It felt happier when he smiled. Something subliminal about the way he moved. “Exactly! I don’t know how I’ll feel about asparagus tomorrow, let alone whether I like or hate my parents. And asparagus isn’t complicated. How you can just stop feeling about things is a mystery to me. Picking one feeling to define one thing, forever and ever, amen. It’s lunacy.”
She stared at him, unsettled. It’s a thing that Christoph had said often, when thinking about the nature of emotion, as he had almost constantly. Brent didn’t resemble Christoph. Not in face or body. But his soul, she decided, was of a kind. She had seen him outside the restaurant, waiting patiently for a chance to ask a simple question, and she had been jolted by that recognition. That… connection. She had asked him to lunch because of that bolt of recognition, and his questions had cemented her decision within seconds. Before they’d ordered food, she knew she would be collecting him and dragging him after her, the flotsam caught in the wake of a ship’s passage. She would have to remember to make arrangements with Louise to return him to New York after-
She pressed a button on the panel by her chair. A moment later Louise emerged and refilled their glasses. She smiled at both of them and went back to the cockpit. Brent watched her walk way, and then sipped more of his wine.
They banked to the left a little, and climbed. After the plane levelled out, he asked her, “Have you ever been married? The records are… inconsistent.”
She gave him that wan smile again. “I imagine they are. I did my best to make them so. And no, I’ve never been married. Legally, at any rate.�
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“Why not?”
She noticed he didn’t ask the obvious questions. She appreciated that about him. Her instinct outside the restaurant had been right, not that it mattered. When he walked up next to her as she strode toward the doors of Bellini’s, he hadn’t asked her any obvious questions. The only two questions he asked were ‘Will you stay in the city?’ and ‘May I ask your opinion?’
He could have asked any number of inane asides about her past with Christoph, or the foundation, or even the mystery painting, but instead he focused on her. She wondered if that were a reporter’s trick, or his natural intellect, or empathy, or both. Perhaps, as was the question of emotional flux, it varied.
“The man I loved didn’t believe in marriage,” she told him, sipping her wine.
He picked up another oyster, tipped it into his mouth, and chased it with a sip of wine, shaking his head at the burst of flavors. She watched his lips as he licked them. He said, “How did you feel?”
She cocked her head. “About?”
“About the man you loved not believing in marriage?” he asked. “When you found out he had died, I mean.”
She seemed to receive an electric shock from his question. She gave a tiny start when he said it. She recovered well, saying tartly, “What makes you think that Ossirian was the man I loved?”
He sipped his wine and didn’t respond. She raised her glass, acknowledging the point he had scored. “I felt nothing- about marriage. It wasn’t the kind of thing you lament.”
“You were with him for almost forty years.”
“So were a great many other people,” she pointed out. “He was a very great lover of people. There was room in his heart for everyone.”
“Even Toefler?”
She leaned back and appraised him. “Why would you ask? Surely you know how they felt about one another.”
Her tone seemed to him to imply that he not only did not, that he very much did not know what he thought he knew.
“I know what was in the press. Twenty years of rivalry, jabs, and attacks. They were bitter enemies. Very publicly,” Brent said.
She gave him cool look. “The House of Many Hearts,” she said, “is forged of the same fabric as Ossirian’s and Toefler’s very public relationship.”
He frowned, taking his time with that. “So they weren’t adversaries?”
“My dear, Hans Toefler might have been the truest friend Ossirian ever had in his life. Certainly the best friend an artist could ever want for. Toefler pushed him beyond his tolerances. Drove him to experiment at dizzying, suicidal heights. Hans Toefler forced Ossirian to become Christoph Ossirian at a time when he wasn’t sure how to be Christoph Ossirian,” Carolyn explained.
“I’m not sure I understand? The vitriol and harassment-”
“Dear boy, you’ve never had an arch enemy, have you?”
“No,” he admitted. “Do you think I should?”
She bared her teeth at him, not quite a smile. It was more predatory. “Nothing brings out the hidden depths of your soul so much as an unrelenting, passionate hatred for another. You’ll stoop to any depth, soar to any height, in your effort to defeat them. It is illuminating. You see things of yourself you never would have guessed. Hatred becomes love, anger becomes happiness. Enemies who reveal ourselves to ourselves are no longer enemies. How could they be, when they give you so much of yourself?”
“They were friends?”
“Of a sort,” Carolyn said. “Toefler knew what Ossirian needed, even if Ossirian didn’t. By the time they met, Ossirian was… well, Ossirian. He was already becoming famous, already becoming rich. Every painting he’d exhibited to that time had sold. Everything he touched turned to gold. Every lover he wanted fell at his feet. He had everything in the world. And then he met Toefler.”
“I’ve never felt Toefler’s work has as much emotional depth as Ossirian’s,” Brent confessed. “He seemed to be what you claim Ossirian was. A spoiled-by-success brat. A kind of…”
He broke off. “You’re kidding,” he breathed.
She watched him without speaking.
“He was playing a part?” Metierra asked. “A foil? On purpose?”
She said in a flat voice, “There is no man or woman on this planet who loved and valued and appreciated more than Hans Toefler Ossirian’s work. He feels that Christoph’s work is as important as Rembrandt or Vermeer, and as sublime. But Ossirian didn’t work well when he was content. He needed restlessness, he needed contention, he needed conflict. Emotional upheaval.”
“Did he know what-” Brent broke off, mind racing. “No,” he said softly, as the implication struck him. “He wouldn’t have, would he?”
Delgado’s manicured eyebrow arched.
Brent explained his thoughts. “Ossirian wouldn’t have known what Toefler was doing. Otherwise, it wouldn’t have worked.”
“Very good, Mr. Metierra,” she said with a genuine smile.
“Toefler… must have loved Ossirian.”
“You don’t think it was about the painting?”
Brent frowned. “Not if it was a rivalry. He’d have reveled in the failure of someone so celebrated as Ossirian, perhaps. But if you factor love into the relationship, it seems obvious.”
“Not to everyone,” Delgado said. “In fact, to no one.”
Brent marveled at the simplicity of the realization. “Love,” he mused. “Love makes us want the object of our affection to be the best they can be, to achieve whatever they want, to be what they aspire to. And true love… true love is that unselfish desire of what’s best for someone else, even if it-”
“Even if it isn’t you.”
Brent scowled. “Toefler gave an interview two hours after Ossirian’s body was identified. He was insufferable. He was… he was disgusting. Vulgar. Insulting to the man’s memory.”
“Ossirian would have approved,” Delgado said. “Hans knows that Christoph believed in nothing. He had no thought for what would come after his death. He didn’t believe any part of us lives on. That was one of the reasons Ossirian yielded to temptation so completely; he knew it would not come round again. As for Hans Toefler, anything Hans says is not directed at Christoph. It’s directed at the world that chose to lose him.”
Metierra’s face showed the complex series of realizations as he encapsulated what she had revealed to him. She watched him carefully, but he reached for neither recorder nor paper for notes. He turned and stared out the window, brow furrowed in thought. She finished her wine and then his. He didn’t seem to notice.
He was still looking out the window an hour later as they banked over the gulf. He shook himself, seemed to see the horizon for the first time, and reached for his wine. He discovered it empty. “How long was-”
“An hour,” she said, and leaned over to touch his cheek. “It’s interesting, isn’t it, how perspective and relation change the core of what we know?”
“I had no idea that- I mean, it’s obvious when you have all the pieces. But… did Ossirian really not know?”
She gave him a brilliant Smile. “That is an excellent question.”
“You’re not going to tell me, are you?”
“I am telling you. Just not in simple words or monochrome concepts,” she told him patiently.
“Why?”
She took his second meaning, rather than the first, most obvious one. “Because you seem to really wish to know. You want it for yourself. You’re passionate about it. I enjoy passion. It’s the only emotion that I think is worthwhile.”
“Passion?” he asked. “Not love, or loyalty, or empathy?”
She shook her head so that her hair cascaded around her face. “Never. Passion is why life exists. Passion is why life has meaning. Passion gives rise to those lesser emotions, but they are effect, not cause. If I have a god, it is passion.”
“But-”
“If you do not mind,” Delgado interrupted, “I’d like to take a short nap. The day was tiring and I prefer to be rested for
dinner.”
“Oh,” he said. “Of course. Shall I…” he looked around. “I can move.”
“It’s fine. Silence is all I require. You may read or do whatever amuses you.” With that she reclined her seat, pushed a button, and the cabin grew darker. He could still see well enough to read, but the dimness was more intimate. He took a paperback out of his bag and settled in. He’d been meaning to read it for a while now. He considered jotting notes, but he wasn’t sure yet what he would write. If Toefler had hidden his affection for Ossirian, was it his right to reveal it?
He stared at the pages without seeing them.
Christoph Ossirian had lorded over the art world, a lion amongst the gazelles, for forty-odd years. Ever since his discovery in in São Paulo in 1962-
Brent looked up. He stared thoughtfully at Carolyn Delgado. She was perfectly still, her head back, her eyes closed, her lips pressed together.
Would she tell me, finally, the answers to the questions everyone has? Where he came from? How he got to Brazil? Why he gave away The House of Many Hearts? Certainly he hadn’t needed the money. When his first canvas sold, it cemented his position in the art world as, well, as Ossirian. He was wealthy immediately, on an order few artists ever see, but he never seemed to notice or care. But giving away House seems like overkill.
He put the book away and took out his research notebook. He had carried the thick book for ten years and slowly had amassed a detailed file on Christoph Ossirian. His movements, his work, his ideals. Every press clipping. His comments to reporters. While it was true Ossirian never gave an interview, he could always be counted on to hold forth when the press crowded around. It was close to a thousand pages thick now, bulging, and the front third of the Ossirian journal was still blank. Each of the first fifty pages held only a single line. A question about Christoph Ossirian. The pages were set aside for the answers. The answers which had never come.
Page one’s question. The big question. The most mysterious question. Brent stared at his familiar handwriting, and realized that the reporter that had written it more than a decade ago was a completely different person. He was still struggling to finish his dissertation. Still scraping for a living. He’d managed to worm his way into the Art Institute in Chicago as a volunteer, eventually staying long enough to catch onto the acquisitions department, which had afforded him a meager stipend. In his spare time between tracking the parentage and affirming the pedigree of the Institute’s purchases, donations, and the assorted flotsam that the gravity of such a place emanated, he had studied each of the fourteen Ossirians the Institute’s collection boasted. He’d been breathless at each unveiling. The loops and whorls of Ossirian’s pigments always moved something within him that no other painter ever had. To him, Ossirian was the explanation for the eternal mystery: what is painting for?
So Much Fire and So Many Plans Page 3