by Karen Moline
“It’s okay.”
“No, it isn’t. It was really thoughtless. If I’m going to ask any questions, I should ask them of Nick, besides, I usually want people to talk when I work. It relaxes them.”
I nod in agreement. I wish she would stop being so nice. So perceptive.
“But I wanted to talk to you, anyway,” she says, “to thank you.”
“Thank me for what?”
“For being here because I asked you. It must be hard to sit there and have to see all this.” She clasps her hands together, the diamond catching the light in a sudden spurt of clarity. “I might not look like it, but I am very aware of your presence, and the weird thing is I like it, you watching us. I was worried at first—not about you, about me, and all the rules I impose upon myself to make me be able to work. But it was really selfish to need you because I was afraid—” She stops, and I see her blush.
“You don’t have to tell me this,” I say.
“Yes I do. It’s the least I owe you, making you sit here.”
She can’t imagine how easy it is for me to sit and watch, how I do it all the time.
“It’s not just Nick,” she says, moving over to examine the hyacinths. “It’s me, painting, and feeding off that energy, yours and Nick’s. I know what can happen during these sessions, how much you want to connect into that unconscious state where you’re doing, you’re creating, but totally unaware of your being. It’s like watching two people fall in love. It’s happening to them, not you, you can be happy for them, sure, but you feel this energy all around you and you’re not ever going to be part of it. It can make you terribly self-conscious and terribly lonely.”
I want to sit down, I want to go away, I want her to keep talking to me as if I really mattered.
“It’s like that at rehearsals sometimes,” I force myself to say, “when the actors use each other to make things happen. Or at least to try and stay in the reality of the moment.”
She smiles, relieved. “I knew you’d understand. And I am glad you’re here. I hope you believe me.”
Nick steps out into the room, his hair damp and curling, and I am spared having to answer.
SHE IS painting now, she is loquacious, animated, teasing Nick, their easy flirtation flying, keeping him awake.
“Okay, let me ask you a question,” she says.
“Sure.”
“What really happened?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, how you two met.” She looks over at me. For half a second I panic, again, wondering how she could possibly know, but her face is shining only with simple curiosity. She’d told me she would ask questions of Nick, but I didn’t think she would ask this one so soon.
Nick shifts position, turning his head away.
“Don’t move,” she says.
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Why not?”
He looks at her, steady. “Because it’s done with.”
“That bad?”
He shakes his head, drooping. “Don’t ask me.”
“It’s all right if you can’t talk about it.”
He smiles sadly. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Well, it does matter.” Her embarrassment pleases him. He has played this unexpectedly touching scene perfectly. “Still, I’m glad I asked, because I want you to not move a muscle. You’ve got just the look on your face I want.”
He nods imperceptibly. For Nick, posing is a snap. He can sit, unruffled, sit as I am accustomed to, motionless and inscrutable. He knows Olivia’s thoughts are focused on him, his life, what really happened, she is wondering what was so horrible, what secrets is he hiding, and he sits, so still, his expression far away and giving every impression of being tinged with the pain of recollection although his thoughts consist of nothing but tearing off her clothes and tumbling her to the floor, pinning her, plunging into her, making her say his name over and over and over again.
I am the one who remembers.
I WILL say only this: We were young, too young, way too young to have been on our own as long as we had. I first met Nick in Dallas. He’d hitched there from Pittsburgh, and all I needed was one look at his face to know he’d fled from whatever house was meant to shelter him for the same reason I’d left mine, and we became brothers, closer, even, because we were young and strong and streetwise, and we pumped gas to appear legit and we turned tricks if we had to and we learned quickly where the real money was. I headed the gang and I had all the girls because I wasn’t tempted by a quick high, no, I knew what kind of price you’d pay if you let yourself lose control. There were fights, constantly, we lived for the sweet quick thrilling rush, we lived for the cover of darkness because we were young and strong and indomitably good-looking, but this one last fight was different, nothing like a cop show on TV or West Side Story, there were too many others, attacking wildly for what they perceived as honor: an adolescent’s delusion.
We were outnumbered, and we lost. Nick was like a madman, but we could not beat them back. My face was slashed and then there was some hideous burning pain bringing me to my knees, and all I could see through the blood and my screaming was Nick, down, for an awful instant I thought he was dead, curled next to two other inert dark bodies frozen in the death grip he’d given them. My pain disappeared when the raging surge of adrenaline uncoiled my fists and I stabbed wildly at the others still on their feet with the Swiss Army knife Nick had pinched for me, useful, he’d said sarcastically, to clean my nails. I kept on stabbing, blindly, plunging the small silver blade into the boy who’d slashed me, and because I could not see I stabbed two other dim figures, shocked by the gaping wounds on my face, who tried to intervene. I could not have known they were cops, working undercover, poor lucky fools, their lives saved only by the blood that fogged my eyes.
Nick was not so badly hurt, after all, and he hauled me out of there, threw me in the basement, and found a Chinese doctor who for the requisite baksheesh glued my face back together. Such perfect blank clarity illuminated his features as he examined me, the depth of the injuries rendering them temporarily numb, that I remembered only the color flooding from the face of one of the boys now dead in a heap, the ruddy flush of superiority dissolving into a pale shadow, a prematurely triumphal sneer locked permanently on his lips, and not the grim determination of the Chinaman who stanched the flow of blood that soaked through the filthy mattress, dripping from the bedsprings onto the cement floor below it.
We hid for weeks in the basement. Nick nursed me as I licked my wounds, incoherent with pain; buying food, forcing me to eat, bringing news, finally loading me into a car in the middle of the night and driving for hours, slowly and carefully because he was too young for a license and too poor to own the car we had stolen and repainted months ago. On and on he drove, stopping only for food and fuel and a few hours’ rest in the shadows of the semis in the truck stops, their hulking girth aligned in perfect rows like giant black wombats, fitfully dreaming the dreams of the unloved, driving until he could drive no more because the highway ended at the sea.
After that journey our relationship shifted. Rival brothers, leader and follower, reversing quietly, subtly, to master and his savagely scarred majordomo.
I could not forget that he had saved me, and he knew I would never say what he had done with his knife, like a madman.
It was easier this way. I did not want to need anymore; I sought only the simple demands of being needed, and some tangible purpose. Nick was pleased with my quiet acknowledgment of this new reality. I had healed slowly, and badly. Moving any muscles of my face was excruciating. Nor could I bear to feel the weight of eyes upon me in my mute agony.
Nick made me get up, get out, and face life, because there were things that wanted doing, mindless at first, and then increasingly involved. My face had changed, obviously, not with the scars but with what lay behind it.
It was as blank as I could make it, as impenetrable as the Chinaman’s, the same empty gaze. Rage and fear and nearness to death had molded it. People shunned it; I smelled of it. It made me very useful later on, when Nick’s fame threatened to become a nuisance. Only Nick had no fear of my blankness, or my temper. It was buried, buried deep, buried with the agony I had already endured.
From then on he always called me the Major. Who I’d been and what I’d once allowed myself to dream of was slashed away with the straight, once eye-turning angles of my face, and was now meaningless, no more substantial than a ghost. Nick knew I preferred the simplicity of his commands to the pain of the irredeemable. Don’t ask questions. I will do what you say, I will make myself indispensable. Just don’t ask me to feel.
And so I did whatever he said, annoying sometimes, or stupid, but never complicated. I did what he wanted and then he could do what he wanted, it was so easy, and as his fame swelled like the silk of a hot-air balloon it became too easy to slip into nastiness, because no one ever said no. Once Nick felt secure in the patterns that had quickly shifted into habits, he was clever enough to admit that his increasingly twisted desires could never be so facilely indulged without my help. Especially when I watched. He always wanted it more if I could watch.
For the small satisfaction of knowing that Nick needs me more than I need him, although he will never admit it, I am grateful, and silently acquiescent.
There is no question of my leaving, of where I might go and what I might do. For any other person, mine is not a desirable presence. Nor have I any real skills except as an organizer or a bodyguard. What binds us is that vivid knowledge of the other, what we have seen each other do in abject despair, and what we vowed, silently, never to reveal to another living soul. We are so used to existing in this symbiotic stasis that we have grown complacent, denying the rage percolating beneath the surface of our world like the viscous brew in a witch’s caldron.
We belong together, brothers in blood, partners in complicity. Family. He who is and he who watches. He who exploits and he who aids and abets, writing the scenes Nick performs in daily life, the procurer, linked together by the curses of fate and the raised pale skin of unhealable scars.
This is why he’ll never tell.
“NICK, WILL you do something for me?” Olivia says, breaking what had been a companionable silence, Nick sitting, slightly hunched, quietly smoking one of the two cigarettes Olivia has grudgingly allowed him, because the smoke makes her sick. It is two weeks later. He is reading his script, memorizing lines, and I am reading Bulfinch’s Mythology, because she talked of it. Chopin is playing, Olivier’s fingers weightless sprites on the keyboard. Outside it is raining, we hear it strumming on the skylight.
He looks at her, his eyes alight.
“Will you take off your shirt?”
Only momentarily stupefied by such a plain request, for no one ever need ask him to strip, Nick rallies, bringing his wrists together in an almost prayerlike gesture, loosening his cufflinks, which fall with a soft clink on the floor, reaching to unbutton his crisp white shirt, slowly, his fingers caressing the buttons as if they were a lover’s breasts, then pushing it back off his shoulders to drop in a heap.
His eyes do not leave Olivia’s. She is staring back at him, at his muscled splendor.
“Is this okay?” he asks.
“Yes, thank you. I just need to see your shoulders for a minute.”
“You’re blushing.”
“I am not.”
“But you are.” He smiles. “I like it. It’s sweet. Women don’t usually blush when they see me.”
“What do they do?”
“They’re so busy being with the legend they don’t even bother to look.”
Olivia puts down her brush. Her face softens. “I hadn’t thought about it that way,” she says slowly. “Of course, I haven’t much thought of it at all.”
“Why should you?”
“Well, because it’s you, it’s about you, who you are, how you feel, what’s in your face. That’s what I am determined to capture. And it’s driving me crazy.” She wipes her hand across her forehead.
Her eyes have not strayed from his.
“Crazy,” he says.
“Yes, crazy,” she mutters. “Absolutely stark raving looney tunes.”
“Absolutely.”
They are staring at each other. Nick’s raw male-ness is overpowering, filling this studio, flooding its white walls, puddling between the canvases, pooling at her feet. His gaze will not leave her, leave her be, he is again looking at her like she is lunch, yet he is softer, kinder, because he is here, near her, in her space, and she knows he will stand, posing however she asks, stand motionless, the music in his ears, her eyes flicking over him, looking, searching for the chink she will not find, not here, not yet, because he is too polished at posing.
I cannot read her face, but her cheeks are red, flaming, alizarin crimson.
They cannot take their eyes off each other. This time she is really looking. Something in her is gentling, less wary, and Nick feels it, grabs it though he hasn’t moved a muscle, kisses it, sweet, buries his head in it, cradling it close.
There is no way she could ever know that he has never been like this before, with any woman, so pliant, acquiescent, so willing to please, so eager to wait.
He sits, waiting, and watching.
It is an impressive performance.
He is acting like me. Except I will never possess his charm, his beauty, the ease with which he can simply be, his palpable charisma a hot hovering specter floating effortlessly to Olivia, capturing her, snatching away her will to fight him, carrying her away, carrying her up into the flat that awaits them.
WE COME, a final time, the portrait is finished, it was finished the week before, Annette told us, but Olivia wants us there, in the studio, she wants to be there when Nick sees it, she wants to see his face, she wants to be sure.
“Why did you want me here to see it?” Nick asks her when we are inside, there in the whiteness, light streaming in, clean, welcoming, a safe haven. By habit, we have assumed our places, Nick lounging against the pillar, me near the hyacinths. The ones I last saw have bloomed, and shriveled, and others, lilac and pink, have taken their place.
Olivia finds it hard to meet his eyes.
“You wanted to see me,” Nick says. “Tell me it’s true, I know it is.”
“I wanted to see you when you saw it,” she says, finally. “Sometimes it’s so hard to let go. Especially this.”
He stands there, a looming tangible presence, breathing in, waiting, she knows he is waiting, he will keep waiting, she feels helpless in the wake of it, lost, wandering in the maze she has painted, needing to be found, begging for it, yet dreading the moment when she must confront the man who has chased her into it, locked the door behind them, and thrown away the key.
She is flicking a brush idly, her breasts rising and falling, her nerves straining. I wonder how many bristles there are in a brush. I’ve never tried counting.
Nick comes over to her, slowly, and looks at the painting, at himself revealed, a man with a beast’s face, his face, his features so beautiful and so hurt, beckoning, the torturous hiding curves of the maze twisting behind him in lush, verdant greenery, neatly clipped hedges surrounding this chiseled monster of unassailable strength and sorrow, all the contradictions of his character, the spirit of darkness and the light of hope combined, undone only by the ball of string slowly unspooling, disappearing into the grass beneath his feet.
Olivia watches him, frozen, helpless. Nick is looking at himself as a man, so sexual and yet so innocent, as a naked creature yearning for whatever crumbs of love are strewn at his feet. He blinks, as if disbelieving, then laughs, and I realize I have been holding my breath.
“Is that me? Is that how you see me?” he asks, finally, when his laughter f
ades. “Is that how I really look?”
Olivia can only nod. Her heart is thumping so loud she can barely hear him.
I see them see each other. I wonder for the briefest of seconds if it could have been me, but I push the thought away. There is no point in such speculation. Instead, I will marvel at the thoroughness of her skill, like luggage being X-rayed in the airport: The machine sees what is packed away, revealing every little thing in stark clarity, all hidden secrets, no matter how careful the wrappings binding them tight.
“You did this,” Nick says, “you did this for me. It’s impossible. An animal, but he has a heart.” He turns to her, tears standing in his eyes that he quickly blinks away, tears in hers. “You found my heart. You made me live.”
I can’t remember the last time I saw tears in his eyes.
His arms are around her, crushing her, crushing her lips before she can move, or try to protest. “Please,” he says, “please,” kissing her so she cannot answer.
She pulls away. “I can’t,” she says, her voice shaky, one tear trickling down her cheek. She rubs it away. “I can’t be with you that way. Don’t ask me to do that.”
“I won’t,” Nick says, looking again at his face, painted, vibrantly enigmatic, his eyes hooded, violet shadows, following the gaze of the viewer, the secret sharer, waiting, in a maze, then back at Olivia, prolonging this rare moment of unblemished happiness.
“You’ll call me, when you want to, and we’ll celebrate. That’s the least I can do for you. Please let me. It would give me great pleasure.”
He smiles at her, grateful beyond expression, unable to articulate why the painted beauty of his beastliness has brought him, in an instantaneous rush, such profound, simple satisfaction.
I know why. She has seen through him to his heart of darkness, somehow penetrating his facade to link up with his spirit in a swift rush of terrifying exhilaration. Here, before him, she has conjured Nick as he could have been, as the boy he was never allowed to be wishes he could be seen, had fate not left him to be jerked awake by nightmares populated by lurking creatures, prowling and hungry, dreams that sent me down the hill into the after-hours clubs, where even though my face was known and feared the women were willing, leaping into the backseat of the black car, tying on the blindfold, eagerly succumbing to the desperate desires of the man who awaited their submission.