Skyscape

by Michael Cadnum

  “Is there some kind of problem here?” asked the broker.

  Curtis took his time. He folded his napkin easily, carelessly, but in no hurry. He stood, and while Curtis was a good six feet, he was not much compared with the broker.

  The broker let his gaze fall upon Margaret. He looked at as much of her as he could see, and when she stood he gave her a smile that said he liked what he beheld. “You having any trouble here?” the broker asked her.

  Men were idiots.

  The headwaiter put out his hands, and parted his lips, looking like a statue dedicated to maintaining calm, good sense, manners.

  Margaret gave what must have been a weary smile, a look the broker misunderstood. What Margaret had meant to communicate was: please go away.

  What the broker read was: I wish fate had brought us together before now.

  Margaret saw what the waiters, what all the dazzled diners, did not: Curtis made the first move, a subtle, definite move as crisp as a white pawn’s opening.

  He stepped on the broker’s foot. He put his shoe on the broker’s and let all his weight press down, until the broker’s eyes narrowed in nasty disbelief, squinted in that universal masculine expression of unintelligent ferocity.

  The broker took a swing. He swept his fist back, and brought it forward. He had done this before in his life, the big ex-jock, and knew how to economize the punch, calculating where the head would be when the head saw the fist on its way.

  Curtis stepped forward, and embraced the broker, the punch ending up nowhere. Curtis began digging his left fist into the broker’s mid-section. It looked like Curtis was thumbing the big man in the ribs, prodding him affectionately.

  But the broker made a windy, coughing bark, and staggered. Curtis stayed with him, walking the man back toward his table, working, now, with both fists. It looked playful, the heel of Curtis’s hand flattening the big man’s nose.

  Blood blossomed, and the broker swung back, missing. Two white-jacketed bouncers were there, and it was going to be over soon. Except that now it did not look playful, not at all.

  Margaret tried to give the broker’s date a reassuring smile, but the woman looked bewildered, hand to her lips. And Curtis was really hurting the man, now. It had nothing to do with the man’s manner, anymore, his conversation or his bearing or his attitude toward women. Margaret understood this much: Curtis wasn’t fighting a human being.

  He was fighting something in Curtis, something he thought was standing in front of him, ducking, bleeding, getting hurt.

  Margaret readied a lie. It was not a complete and total lie. It was an artful fiction, one she knew the waiters would support. The big man had started it—offered unwanted and unrequested attention and had thrown the first punch. After all, being a celebrity these days wasn’t easy.

  Strangers joined in the struggle to separate the two. One of the diners had a police transmitter in his fist. He was one of the senior police bureaucrats Margaret had met over tea at the Museum of Modern Art, something in press liaison. More police were coming as Margaret whispered premature thanks into the ear of the graying cop.

  Curtis was looking around as one of the burliest bouncers put his arm around the artist and said something in a joking tone. Curtis’s eyes took in the scene without seeing very much. He was panting, a half-smile on his lips.

  When Margaret was sure that the episode had spun itself out, that everything was finished, she began to experience a tiny bit of relief.

  The broker touched his fingertips to his mangled nose. He examined the blood. He looked lost in a reverie, a philosophical consideration of clotting factors, of hemoglobin. The big man shook himself, and the bouncer who had his arm dropped it.

  Then, like a man reaching into his hip pocket for a wallet, the broker worked at getting something out of his belt, or his pants, something back there, something snagging and not coming out as easily as it was supposed to.

  It took awhile, but he finally got it out.

  The pistol was black—a dead, carbon black. It made the man’s fist look pale and freckled. The people in the restaurant had stirred, surprised, disturbed, and, Margaret sensed, perhaps even a little pleased at the tussle they had witnessed.

  Now chairs toppled, bodies fell to the floor, there was a general gasp, a cringe throughout the room, as the revolver, dull and chunky with its snub-barrel, searched up, away from the floor, up toward Curtis’s knee, his groin, upward.

  The fist was trembling, the pistol unsteady as the fingers worked to unfasten a safety or a catch, thumb and fingers hesitating as Margaret forgot every promise, every sorrow.

  11

  Her father had known it: the moment is everything.

  The feel of the felt on the bottom of a chess piece, the subtle absence of sound as the piece slides across the chess board.

  She did not know what allowed her to act. Later, she would understand. At that moment she knew only this room, this tableau. Just a step was all it took.

  She put her hand over the pistol, over his fist. She said, in a whisper, “Thank you so much for doing everything you could to help.”

  What an absurd thing to say. She sounded like a demented stewardess, or lethally sarcastic—or both. She had no idea what else to do.

  But then, just that simply, she did.

  His hand was cold. Her heartbeat was so strong she could feel it in her fingers, feel her pulse against the man’s knuckles, against the gun, each heartbeat moving the man’s arm minutely but urgently as his eyes met hers with an expression of anger fading to shock: what am I doing?

  Then the room flung itself into motion. There were hands, faces, voices. Two uniformed police were there, grappling the big man easily and kneeling on him, fastening the handcuffs on him as though they were a well-practiced team, the two cops and the arrested man all a part of a crew of stunt men.

  Margaret found herself sitting, gazing at the unwrinkled white table linen. Someone thrust a glass of water into her hand. It was the police bureaucrat, and he was saying, “Don’t worry about a thing.”

  There was nothing like his painting. She had run across it in the local library as a girl, the big volume of contemporary art, much of it already boring and out of date.

  The Sacramento summers were hot, the sun broken by elms and oaks. The winters were, to a girl, long and ceaselessly wet, the lawns bleached white by frost. The art she could find, needed to find, found herself thinking of the first thing in the morning, always eventually left her dissatisfied.

  But not Curtis Newns. His work did not have “sparkle and magic,” as the notes in the book expressed it. Magic, Margaret knew, was what her own art relied on. Even in high school she had earned awards, savings-and-loan-sponsored art contests, county competitions, harbingers of the success she would be enjoying ten years later. Her drawings had always been, in the phrase of an early catalog, “deft, delightful,” deer rendered in colored pencils, the inevitable grazing horses in watercolor. Magic was charm. Magic pleased. Curtis’s work had something better—it had power.

  The local bookstore had carried books about railroads, paperback mysteries, cookbooks, the books that her neighbors found diverting, helpful. She had ordered the catalog of his “Burn Heaven” show and called up every other day until it arrived. She sent away for posters of his shows, and her father took pains to say that he found Curtis Newns’s work “very interesting,” trying to establish a link with a daughter he knew he had lost.

  But her father had chess, and the articles about chess, the problems he created, over the years of her mother’s increasing bitterness with a husband who was “a hopeless adolescent.” He had chess, and he had fishing. Her mother had called him, with pained affection, “the man who flunked adulthood.”

  Only in the end did Margaret see that her father was not a dreamer at all, that her mother was wrong. But by then the chess tournaments, in which her father would play twenty nervous, brilliant people at a time, and the chess problems he wrote, and the computer firms he co
nsulted with, beating every piece of software anyone sent him, were all in the past.

  On the wall of her bedroom as a high school student she had hung the glossy, bright print of Skyscape. Someone somewhere believes in life, the painting told her, believes in the sun that is traveling toward you across the empty morning. A New Yorker article Margaret clipped and saved said Curtis brought the power of Monet into a “post-industrial feel for the last wilderness, the sky.” Margaret knew this was true, but she also knew what humanity the great painting implied, what faith.

  She had dreamed once that she was lying in bed naked, holding an art book copy of Skyscape to her breasts, the cold resin-slick page on her nipples as she rocked, eyes closed, to peak after peak of pleasure.

  They left The Blond Spike. There were a few photographers, an Eyewitness News van. People wished them good night.

  Curtis said nothing. Margaret drove. It was good to have the driving to make her concentrate. There was a truce between them for awhile. They would be silent because it had all been said before. Because words of any sort reminded both of them of promises, and promises had once again failed.

  I could just say: it’s all right, Curtis. Forget about it. And for awhile it had been all right. Curtis was moody, fiery. She had known that.

  They had moved to this high-security building in Pacific Heights because it was safe. No fans could stalk Curtis to his doorway, no striving fellow-artists could waylay him for a kind word or a loan. The police took special care to watch the politicians and fellow celebrities who lived nearby, and the building had security guards. They were on the fifteenth floor, and the penthouse apartment was so big she felt that she lived in a house perched, somehow, on the edge of a cliff.

  The apartment was decorated with paintings, his own work, things he had done before he met her at one of his openings. She had been just another one of many, she knew, just another smile uttering compliments.

  Then they were home.

  You couldn’t see the beautiful paintings in this light. They were maps of night sky, glints of bad light off the acrylics, the oils. When he was like this she knew he hated light. They sat in the dark.

  Well Margaret, she asked herself like an interviewer, that withered little man from the Chronicle. How did the evening go?

  Exactly as planned. Hey, don’t look surprised. I planned this.

  Our little way of having fun.

  Curtis did not move. She poured him some cherry-flavored Calistoga water, the refrigerator light illuminating the kitchen, the light reaching him where he gazed down, like someone trying to recall something that would change everything.

  She put the glass on one of the coasters her mother had given them for Christmas, enameled copper rings backed with cork. Margaret felt a little sorry for her mother. The woman never knew what to give them, never sure who her daughter was, what she liked, what she loved.

  He left it untouched. The sparkling water made the faintest fizz, a happy sound. If only he could speak. That would begin their lives again. But he didn’t talk. He sat, but it was not the posture of a person at rest. She wondered if she had ever really understood him. Maybe, she thought, she wasn’t the right companion for him. Maybe she had no idea what it was like to be him, to exist inside his body.

  Margaret found the telephone. She pushed the memory button at the top of the row, over the police and the fire department, and the button Curtis never pressed, Bruno’s number in Rome.

  The lawyer’s voice was sleepy, but as soon as she heard Margaret’s “hello,” Teresa asked, “Is anyone hurt?”

  “Well, not hurt. Not the way you mean it.”

  “Good Lord,” said Teresa, and Margaret could hear the woman fumbling for a lighter, snapping it, inhaling. “What happened?”

  Margaret told the story. She told it well, and even made it sound a little bit funny. Another breezy evening with Curtis Newns and his wife, the former Margaret Darcy, the Bay Area’s artistic Fun Couple. “I thought it was okay when it was over. Like it was almost a joke.” She gave a little laugh, inviting Teresa to find this all amusing.

  Teresa did not laugh. “Are you okay now?”

  “I was always okay.”

  “How is he?”

  Margaret glanced at him. Curtis did not move.

  “Calm,” said Margaret.

  “Really—what’s he doing?” She had known Curtis for years, and Margaret was still a relative newcomer, and ten years younger than Curtis.

  “He’s okay.” Meaning: I can’t talk now; he’s sitting right here.

  “They didn’t take him into custody.” It wasn’t a question, more of a statement to be confirmed.

  “They were more concerned that we could drive safely.”

  Curtis was rarely arrested. It was a part of his power—the law did not dislike him any more than women and critics.

  Margaret continued, “I was ready to tell everyone that the other person started it, which was a little true. Or else mention your favorite phrase, ‘mutual combat.’ And the restaurant loves him, they’ll probably put up a plaque.”

  “This man took a concealed weapon to a restaurant?”

  Margaret spoke through her tears, “He collects rents. He had a gun permit.” He wasn’t even a loan broker. He worked for an absentee landlord, renting out apartments in the Mission. And it turned out he wasn’t even a real estate agent. His broker had fired him.

  “You know what I’m going to tell you,” said Teresa.

  “I know exactly, and I know you’re right.”

  Teresa said that now it was time to forget about the police and think about other issues. Maybe it was time to think about Curtis. Maybe it was time to think about her own future. She meant: someday he’ll hurt you.

  And Margaret was listening, but she wasn’t listening with her complete attention. Curtis was on his feet.

  He walked to the sliding glass door, and undid the latch. The door slid with a low, pleasant sound, and then Curtis stepped out onto the balcony.

  She had always been afraid of this. She had hesitated to buy one of these penthouses, fifteen stories up. She herself suffered just the slightest bit of vertigo. Nothing really dramatic—just that spark of anxiety when she approached the edge of a great height and that realization that it would be so easy.

  She had not been afraid for herself. She had been afraid that Curtis would do this: step out, stand there, and then throw one leg over the retaining wall, balance himself.

  And be gone.

  He wasn’t over the railing—not yet. But he was leaning on it, looking out at the bay, the cool night wind streaming along the half-opened drapes, making the pleated fabric billow and float.

  It hit her: she could not trust him. She had never been able to trust him. She could not help him, either. He was beyond her.

  It was as though the love was an extra organ in her body, a gland with ducts and veins. When they drew the symbol of love as a stylized heart maybe they had an idea, after all, maybe it was something like that, secreted somewhere near the liver, or behind the real heart, the one that beat out life. Curtis was a part of her.

  Teresa’s voice was a tiny squawk. Margaret lifted the phone to her ear. “I don’t know what he’s going to do.”

  The telephone cast light, a pale glow from its buttons where they lit up. When Margaret hung up the phone, cutting off whatever Teresa was saying, the room was too dark. She hurried onto the balcony.

  Curtis stared down at the city glow of the clouds reflected in the wrinkled bay. He turned to face her, and put a hand out; a gesture of acceptance, benediction, but also a way of warding her off. She could not see his expression, only a faint gleam from his eyes, but she relaxed inside, knowing—sensing—that he was not going to hurt himself.

  “It’s cold out here,” she said, a way of telling him that she would be happier when he was back inside.

  He nodded. He stepped back into the apartment, and she fastened the door behind the two of them and drew the drapes shut, as th
ough that barrier would make a difference, as though that was all it would take to save his life.

  She fumbled, and found a light.

  She blinked. Curtis sat on the sofa. His head was in his hands.

  She wouldn’t talk to him now. She would wait.

  But the feeling now wasn’t one of being powerless. Her feeling was something else. Now that she knew he wasn’t going to do anything terrible, a new feeling was free to sweep her and she felt herself breathing hard.

  He did not make a sound.

  She said, when she could not keep quiet any longer, “We have to change the way we live.”

  He looked up at her with a tired smile, a smile of such elaborate world-weariness that she wanted to slap it.

  People who didn’t know her very well thought she was nice. She could manage. But she had grown up around nice people, people who lived on elm-lined streets and went to church and followed baseball, and she had sworn away all of that for this.

  For what? This was his first marriage, but at thirty-eight Curtis had worked his way through one relationship after another. More than one of his ex-lovers had moved far away, to New York, London, to avoid risking seeing him again.

  “I want to help you,” she heard herself say, her voice remarkably firm, as though she knew exactly what to do.

  He was laughing, quietly, his shoulders shaking. There were tears in his eyes. Because they both knew that there had been so many therapists in the past, long stays in health resorts in Mexico, vitamin B injections, Jungian analysis, earnest months of drug and booze-free living only to end in the legendary and even publically approved spinouts.

  The phone had been ringing. It was a phone they had bought recently, and it made a peculiar warbling sound Margaret did not at once associate with incoming calls.