Skyscape

by Michael Cadnum

  “In the direction of larva,” said Margaret.

  “As a source of protein for the world’s hungry,” said Webber.

  Instantly Margaret decided that Webber was someone she could like. A strong person who could still enjoy himself. The sort of man who could fire three people in the morning and then make a big contribution to Save the Children and feel fine. He was, perhaps, not a noble person, but he wanted to be. He had that comfortable way of talking, someone who said things just as he had read them or heard them on the news.

  “I act like this because my mother was so nice I knew I couldn’t possibly compete with her,” said Margaret. She took her mother’s hand, surprising even herself. She felt gracious. Her mother dimpled, looking at Margaret with something like happiness.

  “I love your goat,” said Webber.

  “You astonish me,” said Margaret.

  “He has such a smart expression,” Webber said.

  “I’m impressed that you’re so widely read,” Margaret replied, unable to hide her pleasure. Webber was referring to a character Margaret had created for a series of children’s books. Her stories were about a goat detective, Starr of the Yard.

  Webber smiled. “Your goat’s famous. Your mother said something about a TV series.”

  “I’m sure Starr would like you,” said Margaret.

  She wasn’t sure, exactly. She was being polite. It was easy to be polite to Webber. She was fairly certain, however, that none of her characters in any of her books would have been able to stand her mother for half a minute.

  It was enough to make things just a little uncomfortable in a pleasant way. Webber was almost flirting with Margaret.

  So it was hardly a surprise when Andrea said, looking right into Margaret’s eyes, “What have you been painting, Curtis?”

  “I’ve been busy with all kinds of things,” said Curtis.

  If you didn’t know him it sounded like the truth.

  “That’s great,” said Webber.

  Andrea knew how empty the studio was. “What sort of things are you painting now? More oils, or maybe acrylics. Or maybe watercolors, or drawings.”

  “Yep,” said Curtis, so cheerfully noncommittal that they all laughed.

  “I think you’re not painting at all,” said Andrea. “I think you can’t paint with Margaret’s help any more than you could paint without her.”

  Curtis smiled. It was not a nice smile.

  “Listen to me,” said Andrea. “Good heavens! As though I knew what I was talking about.”

  Curtis told her that he didn’t mind.

  “I really look forward to seeing some new work,” said Andrea. “Not that I understand much about art—”

  “I have a print of yours,” said Webber. “One of the few things I kept after the divorce. A really wonderful print I wouldn’t part with for the world.”

  Margaret put her hand over his, and gave him a look she knew he must have understood, a look that expressed thanks and, at the same time, just hinted at a question: what on earth is a decent man like you doing with my mother?

  Except she didn’t just hint at it. She came right out and said it, to her surprise. Webber laughed, and Andrea laughed, too, careful not to crinkle her eyes and give herself more wrinkles, but Curtis did not laugh.

  Margaret felt now that it had been wrong to smash an image of Buddha. Such an image was sacred. It would not be so wrong to smash one of these Italian plates over her mother’s head, although she refrained from doing so.

  “Because it’s true,” said Curtis.

  They were alone. The afternoon was late. Curtis had paced, helped with the dishes, sat at the piano. He had changed out of his broadcloth dress shirt and worsted slacks into jeans and a gray T-shirt. It was what he used to wear when he was painting. He dressed like this often, but it did not mean that he was about to begin work again.

  She wanted only for him to be happy. And she was afraid this was going to end. The way she felt about Curtis had nothing to do with the facile, easy relationships she had enjoyed with men in the past. She felt rooted to Curtis, bound to him. She had wondered, as a girl, what love would be like. She had believed, in a half-considered way, that there would be one person, one man, and she would know when she had found him.

  Now it frightened her. She could please him, but she couldn’t help him—she knew this. And yet, he had allowed her to pretend. She had allowed herself to pretend. Someday he would be happy again.

  Months ago she had begun dropping hints in public, implying that Curtis had stopped going to parties and galleries because he was working on something new. She had allowed herself to believe that the innocent lie would cause Curtis to begin painting again, as though a wish could be so easily fulfilled. She had wanted to help Curtis. Now Margaret wished she had kept silent. She felt the weight of public curiosity, people wondering what Curtis was painting, and when it would be finished.

  Curtis played a tape of some of his music, languid, moody piano, discordant leaps, interludes. Margaret was fond of the pieces, but she understood that they were a replacement for the one thing that really mattered—the art he could no longer create.

  “It doesn’t matter if you paint,” she said, hating the words as she spoke them.

  He punched the tape player and the machine fell silent.

  They were quiet for a moment, and then she said. “Sometimes I wish she really knew what I thought of her.”

  “Don’t.”

  “I can’t help it. She doesn’t know anything about art. You threaten her.”

  “She’s smart,” said Curtis softly.

  There were a dozen things Margaret could have said to that. He was looking at her as she stood there, before the sliding glass door, before the view of the bay.

  “I found it, Curtis. I found the razor. I was getting an eraser—”

  He looked at her, his eyes uncertain, sad. Then he looked away. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

  She had trouble controlling her voice. “I’m afraid.”

  He gave a tired laugh. “I finally gave up, for about the thousandth time. I think about my art on greeting cards and T-shirts, and how people print it on napkins, throw it away. I just can’t paint. I can’t do it.”

  “Please don’t think like that, Curtis—”

  “I was out yesterday, walking, and I passed that shop on Columbus, the one that sells cologne for men, fancy brushes … and my hand fell on the razor. I couldn’t help it.”

  “I took it, Curtis. I put it away.”

  What troubled her now was the way he nodded. “Sometimes I’m afraid, too,” he said after a long pause.

  She formed the question, but she could not ask him what she could do. She was afraid of the answer: nothing.

  He wasn’t facing her, and for a moment she wondered if she had misunderstood him. “Take off your clothes,” he said.

  It didn’t take much of that sort of thing to encourage her. She was out of her linen blouse, and was shrugging out of the brassiere before she realized that with that look in his eyes she would feel so bare, so naked. Almost as naked as the small, unclad feet of a starling.

  She hesitated. Sometimes she realized she did not know Curtis well. Not yet.

  “Go ahead,” he said.

  3

  For the first time in an age he was working, the sound of his pencil on the paper the slight rustle of a thing that was alive, alive and gathering, creating.

  The sunlight was heavy, warming her skin, her body. The light was more than radiance—it nearly had a sound, a throbbing bass chord. Her nakedness was a part of this sound.

  He was her husband and lover, but she felt herself aware of how stripped she was, how bare before his eye.

  Lie down, he had said, on that quilt. Spread it over the pillows.

  They were in the studio. The starling in its cage made its liquid, metallic sounds, enjoying their company. She was aware of her body, the rolling weight of the sunlight on her hips, her shoulders. Don’t do anyth
ing, she told herself. Do nothing to break this spell.

  “We ought to let him go,” Curtis was saying, after a long silence.

  It took a moment for her to follow his thought. It was essential that she say the right thing. “He couldn’t survive,” she responded.

  There was another long silence. He caught her eye and smiled, a look that made a wonderful emotion sweep her, a mix of feelings—gratitude for her good fortune, love for this dark-haired, quiet man who had been so troubled for so long.

  He did not speak for awhile. Then he said, “He might, though.”

  “But that’s the problem,” said Margaret. “He might meet a cat. He might not. We don’t know.”

  The pencil made its sound, intent, cutting through the blank of the page. She was still, kept unmoving by the thought—he’s drawing.

  And he was drawing her.

  She could never get used to the fact. The most famous artist of his time had married her.

  She tingled with this: his eye over her thigh, her pubic islet, her breasts. She was strangely aroused. She felt herself moisten, soften under his gaze.

  She warned herself, like a woman in the presence of barely tame deer: don’t stir.

  “We knew we couldn’t keep him,” Curtis said.

  “We can. As long as we want.”

  He kept plying the pencil. What a deeply pleasing whisper it made, she thought. “It isn’t natural,” said Curtis.

  “Nature isn’t always good,” she said. It wasn’t really an argument. They had said the same words before, and had grown to love the quiet difference of views.

  The starling fluttered its wings, a flash of black in the corner. The bird broke into one of its cries, and Margaret didn’t have to turn her head to know that Mr. Beakman’s bright black eye was seeing her here in this pond of light.

  “You thought he would die,” said Curtis, in a mock chiding tone.

  No, she wanted to say. I knew that if any hand could save this creature it would be yours. She let herself continue the gentle, bantering. “How would I know a bird like that would eat anything we fed it?”

  They had found the starling on the penthouse balcony, its feathers spiky, new. At first, its beak still had that exaggerated clown-mouth look of a nestling. The bird was on the point of starving, and the two of them hand nursed it on bread soaked in milk.

  Weeks later, it was hyperactive, much more athletic than the parakeets of Margaret’s girlhood. Mr. Beakman fought the cage cheerfully, made its warbling shrieks, and cried out with a fragment of song that Margaret knew meant: let me out.

  “Did you hear that?” said Curtis. His pencil stopped.

  It couldn’t be the telephone. She had turned off the ringer, and turned down the volume on the answering machine in the library.

  But it did sound like the telephone—the impulsive electronic trill. Like the telephone, but somehow wrong.

  “I told you!” said Curtis, gleefully. “The bird imitates things.”

  Margaret listened again, with disbelief and delight. “How can it do that?”

  Curtis laughed. “I think I heard Mr. Beakman imitating the garbage disposal the other day.”

  Mr. Beakman repeated the sound of the telephone. Curtis could not stop laughing.

  It was spooky, though, this fellow creature not only sharing their lives but hearing.

  And then Curtis was at her side. He was kissing her, spreading out the quilt so it was a soft countryside, farmland seen from the air.

  She had wondered about this as a girl. Did artists and their models sometimes, alone in the studio, find themselves unable to continue working?

  He made love with the same intent sureness with which he drew. He was in no hurry, knowing her and knowing himself well, knowing that there would be no interruption, no distraction.

  She felt herself open, a book spread to the page on which a flower has been pressed. But this flower was firm-stemmed, moist.

  Long afterward she kept him there, her legs, her arms around him. She rocked very gently, one way, then another. She was a boat, she thought. She was a boat, and Curtis was in the vessel, and he was safe.

  They drowsed. The quilt was handmade, stitched decades ago, and stitched carefully so that the blanket had a pursed, gently furrowed surface that pleased the body, the stroking hand, as well as the eye.

  A few days passed. Curtis was working again. Margaret knew that the world at large would be disappointed to know that he was not painting. Drawings were fine, the magazines would say, but when will he paint another masterpiece? But slowly, quietly, Curtis traced out the shape of Margaret’s body, and she believed that this subtle art was cause for secret celebration.

  There was no more mention of the razor, and the fear that its presence implied. She peeked into the bottom drawer sometimes and there, among her dark blue and coffee brown wool socks, was the luminous slither of the handle.

  One afternoon after Curtis had posed Margaret once again on the blanket, and after they had made love, Margaret felt herself dissolve into a dream. In this dream there was no sense of danger. There were two people in the dream, on a blanket together in a sunny room.

  Curtis startled her awake when he sat up. “We forgot all about Mrs. Wye!” he said.

  Margaret hurried into her clothes. She wondered with some amusement if Mrs. Wye would be able to tell what abandon had just occurred. Surely, thought Margaret, there will be a look in my eye. Anybody with any sense at all will know.

  Mr. Beakman cackled, springing from perch to cage-side to perch. “Don’t tell anybody what you’ve been looking at,” said Margaret.

  Margaret had made raisin bread that morning, and she had promised the woman one floor down that there would be plenty for her. The elderly neighbor had suffered a very minor stroke a few months before, and Curtis often dropped by to see how she was feeling.

  Margaret hurried into the elevator, and then down the corridor making up excuses. She could think of only the happy truth, which Mrs. Wye would be loving and wise enough to accept, if it came to that.

  But the poor woman answered the door with a wide-eyed expression. “Oh, you shouldn’t have bothered,” said Mrs. Wye.

  Margaret’s first impression was that the woman had suffered another stroke, one of those flutterings that diminish and gradually dissolve the very old. “I promised you,” said Margaret. “I used molasses this time.”

  “Oh, please don’t worry about me,” said Mrs. Wye, ringing her skirt in her hands.

  Mrs. Wye was beautiful. She had appeared, under the name Diana Wynn, in a number of movies, usually playing the starring actress’s girlfriend, the hat check girl, the woman at the office who does not land the leading man. There was a photograph on the Steinway of Mrs. Wye smiling at a handsomely intrigued Rex Harrison, and Mrs. Wye had been lucky and wise in her choice of lovers.

  Mrs. Wye was white-haired and elegant. The stroke had made her more like a rare figurine than a woman, something easily broken.

  Margaret’s expression must have communicated mild confusion. “Then you don’t know!” said Mrs. Wye, putting forth a trembling hand.

  Margaret took the hand. “Mrs. Wye—you’re cold!”

  “It’s so terrible,” said Mrs. Wye. “I can’t begin to tell you. I can’t even say the words.”

  “It’s going to be all right—”

  “Poor Margaret, it can’t possibly be all right. My dear, you will have to be strong.”

  Margaret did not understand, but a bad feeling settled over her. This was not something that concerned Mrs. Wye exclusively. Mrs. Wye was trying to warn Margaret to be prepared for a shock.

  Margaret led Mrs. Wye over to the divan. The two women sat beneath a drawing by Curtis, a dancer sketched in pencil, an older drawing Curtis had given Mrs. Wye “to make her well.” Mrs. Wye promised to give it back some day. She could barely afford to insure it.

  “The news was on television,” said Mrs. Wye.

  Reflexively, Margaret glanced at the blank
television in the corner.

  “I was sure you knew,” Mrs. Wye continued.

  Margaret realized that Mrs. Wye was gathering her nerve. “Do tell me what has happened,” said Margaret.

  “It’s so terrible,” said her elderly neighbor, near tears.

  Afterward, Margaret took the elevator one flight up and let herself into the penthouse, moving in a daze.

  In the library the answering machine was alight, its tiny pulsing red light indicating the urgent messages.

  She sat, wondering how she could begin to tell Curtis.

  She switched on the television in the bookcase, hoping that some new, late-breaking bulletin would correct the devastating news.

  Surely there’s been a mistake of some kind. It can’t be true.

  She considered calling Bruno Kraft. He would know.

  She watched the assorted news stories, waiting for the only one that mattered. It’s a mistake, she thought. It’s one of those things that get confused and garbled and you wake up to the truth and everything is okay after all.

  But the news marched a series of disasters, diplomats, weather maps across the screen and then there it was. It was a scene of swirling crowds in a London street, the police holding out their arms, walking people back away from a fire brigade, a gray canvas hose dragged slack across the pavement.

  It was night there, but the blaze of lights made every detail bright—too bright, the black paint on the fence rails gleaming. There was smoke lifting from a window, but it was only a small drift of white, surely not enough smoke to issue from such a disaster.

  But the report was definite. She could not pretend that she misunderstood, or that the news services might have it wrong. There were interviews with various people, including a telephoned commentary by Bruno Kraft. The famous art critic’s voice crackled, accompanied by a still photograph of the well-known feline smile, and the words, “Bruno Kraft, Rome,” as though the somber tone of the voice represented not only one expert’s view but the view of Rome, and, by implication, all of western culture.

  “I can’t imagine a worse loss for the world of art,” he said.

  Terrorists were possible but considered unlikely at this point, the reporter said. An electrical problem “in an adjacent building is one of several possibilities.”