It was Teresa. “I’m coming over.”
Margaret reassured her.
“You don’t realize that he is really a textbook case,” said Teresa. “It’s not drinking, and it’s not temper.”
Margaret insisted that Curtis was going to be all right.
“You’ve been the picture of patience,” said Teresa.
Margaret heard a strange sound, a noise that wrenched her vitals, because she knew exactly what it had to be.
She let the phone drop. She was wrong, she tried to reassure herself. She had to be mistaken.
He had gone into the studio for a moment and brought out a knife. It was an ugly, paint-crusted blade he had used for everything from sharpening pencils to applying paint to canvas when brush and pallet knife seemed somehow pallid alternatives.
The multicolored steel was in Curtis’ hand, ripping through the canvas of one of his most brilliant paintings. What van Gogh could do with a field of wheat, Curtis did with the energy and color, the sweep and vitality, of lanes of freeway. A painting like this transformed the mundane landscape into a place of passion.
The blade was sharp. It tore through the glistening artwork, the line dangling in shreds. It was hard to force the blade through the canvas. The old knife was something primitive, something shamanistic and brutal, weapon as primal art. She almost thought—wanted to hope—that was what it was for an instant. He was doing something impromptu and sudden, something good.
But the feeling in her stomach told her the truth. She had her arms around him, but he was muscular and seemed rooted where he stood. She fought for the blade, but he tossed her away with a single chop of his arm.
The canvas was white, slashed through.
12
He could have explained to her if he’d wanted to, but he didn’t feel like talking.
This old knife was having trouble. It was stained and ugly, although it did have a decent edge to it. He had a whet stone and an oil cloth and kept the blade keen.
“Please stop it,” she was saying. He had started back to work again. He really loved this old knife, but he had to face it: it didn’t cut canvas like this worth shit.
If he did not destroy the painting, they would just come and take it.
The cop from the press liaison office said that the man was going to be charged with something, not to worry, go home and take it easy. That man had been there with a mission. He had been working for someone. The deal was: get Curtis to act crazy so we can sue him and sell his paintings to the highest bidder.
So we can burn them.
It was brilliant the way the world worked. You had to be careful. Margaret, for all of her intelligence and all of her goodness, didn’t understand that. She didn’t understand that what you made, you could unmake. So he was cutting these really pretty good oils, strong paintings, but they were his. It was okay.
Her eyes were wild. She was actually afraid. That stopped him. He didn’t want to frighten her. He didn’t want to do anything but have her calm down and let him finish cutting up this stuff so then he could carry it out to the garden and have a good fire. Then he could take a shower and go to bed. It had been a horrible evening. It was starting to be a horrible night. My God, couldn’t he just take care of a little personal business for awhile? Cut up his own work and throw it away and then go to bed. Couldn’t he do that?
You painted something and it evolved into a thing that wasn’t yours. He painted in his head, now, started with a blank space and filled it with juicy pigment, in his mind. The only work he had done in an age was in pencil, putting her image on paper. She fascinated him.
He turned again and showed her the knife, like: I’m busy here, can’t you see that? And she backed away, with her eyes all big and practically sticking out of her head. She put her hand to her throat.
Jesus, she was such a sweet girl. What, twenty-eight? That’s right—they had her birthday about a month ago. No, two weeks. She had brunette hair that was streaming down her shoulders, and she had that dark-eyed look that made him think of early movies. She looked like a silent movie heroine, all pale and big-eyed. In silent movies if you didn’t overact you were not really coming out of the projector and onto the screen.
“You think I’m going to cut you with the knife,” he said, making his voice sound nice.
“Don’t cut up those pictures, Curtis, please,” she said, trying to hang onto him.
“They are mine,” he said.
“They’re beautiful!”
They were, in their way. That was a part of the problem—it made them all the more valuable. It was a matter of logic. He tried to explain. “Sooner or later someone will get a lien on my property. Teresa can’t work miracles. It will happen, and I won’t let my paintings fall into the hands of people like that. He wasn’t there by accident.”
“You aren’t right, Curtis, you don’t have any judgment.”
Now this made him just a little bit angry. Just a little bit pissed off. Because he was an experienced artist, and a professional. And he knew what was real.
Somebody told him that Monet had once owed money to the French government. The tax collectors were closing in. He destroyed over one hundred of his paintings.
“Look,” Curtis said, really forcing himself to sound calm. He impressed himself. He sounded wonderfully calm, completely in control. “Look,” he said again. “I told you I was sorry.”
“Please stop it, Curtis.”
“I’m sorry about the restaurant. I’m not sorry about this. This is okay. I’m rational. Relax.”
His friends said she was just a wispy, soft girl, a woman from the Central Valley. Just another of those earnest, beautiful women you can pick up every day on the way home, six pack in one hand, woman under the other arm, your daily minimum requirement set for another night. They might be smart and they might have talent of their own but they are lightweights. Pretty. Soft-voiced. A dove.
But he’d taken her to Reno, and they’d stood there in the Chapel of the Chimes and the minister was even nice about it, shaking his hand and saying the old, dumb, serious things and the art world had not been amazed so much as amused. Curtis Newns had gone and married one. Why? Why go to all the extra trouble?
But they were wrong. Not gloriously wrong. They had a point. She was quiet. She looked good in tight pants. She had one of those figures you associate with angels, pink-nippled and innocent but with that other-worldly ability to shock. Margaret was complicated, and it was Curtis himself who was the human cartoon, the caricature, the man you could just put a label on and know all there was to know: Curtis Newns, whose signature on a canvas was money in the bank. Curtis Newns, world’s oldest enfant terrible.
He loved her. There were some basic truths. He had skin, he had hair, he had bones, and he loved Margaret.
He got the paintings cut up, all three, and stomped the frames, and it was a pretty good job. You really couldn’t tell what the paintings were supposed to be anymore. He rolled up the flapping canvas. A good night’s work.
“It’s all right,” he said. “I’m done.” It was a lie. He planned to go into the bedroom and finish the job.
“I won’t let you touch the paintings in the bedroom.”
He showed his teeth. Showing a woman his teeth was usually a pretty good method to get them to shut up for a second or so.
“I won’t let you hurt them,” she said, her back against the bedroom door.
He liked the way she put it: hurt them. To her the paintings were alive. They were alive to him, too, but in the way that cattle is alive to the rancher. It walks, breathes, and dies.
He was going to take each work and slash it, and then take it down to the freeway, 101 south of Van Ness, and let the wheels finish the job, the endless traffic, the trucks and the cars, the rolling stock of the entire country.
He had painted many pictures of freeways, the search for happiness transformed into a blitz of color and speed. Hockney had said Curtis was the “Turner of traffic.” Cu
rtis enjoyed depicting the freeways at dawn, the russet lanes already filling with the points of light that implied destinations, responsibilities, dreams.
Some people envision themselves diving into rivers. Curtis dreamed of plunging into eight lanes.
He wanted it all back. After years of having people following him, eagerly awaiting his next painting, he would like to roll it all up and lose it.
Where had she learned this kind of courage? Margaret wasn’t afraid of much. Look at her, now. She was going to do something terrible if he tore up any more art.
He used his Jack-the-Ripper-speaking-very-sweetly tone. “Let me into the bedroom.”
She didn’t move. “You’re going to sit down in the living room where I can keep my eyes on you.”
He gave her one of the looks that scared the shit out of women if you turned it on them on a first date, made them wet their pants and go dumb. Avedon said Kodak wouldn’t print looks that bad.
And she gave him a bad look back. It was pretty impressive. The girl was still there, looking back.
And he laughed.
They both were laughing. Her laugh was a little brittle, a little hysterical, but it was a laugh. It was funny, this ongoing battle that had just now culminated in a staring contest and then it was just too much and they had to laugh. She thought it was all okay.
He could hurt now. Really hurt her.
Because she was trusting, had her arms around him. And he still had the knife.
This thought made him wrench away from her. He threw the knife, hard. It struck a doorjamb, and trembled there, splitting the wood.
It was himself he didn’t understand. It was his own mind he didn’t know any more.
“I’m going to go sit down,” he said.
“That’s right.” She was leading him by the hand, guiding him, trusting him. “Sit down here,” she said gently, with a caring tone in her voice.
All he could think was: don’t let me.
Don’t let me hurt her.
A knock sounded at the door at the same instant the doorbell jangled. Someone heavy-handed was there. There were steps on the hardwood, and softer ones on the carpet.
I’m trapped, he thought.
Have to get out of here.
Teresa Madison stood beside the coffee table, a tall woman, refined in appearance, her black hair with a single splash of white. She was regal. She looked like the Statue of Liberty come to life to kick some legal butt. There was a security guard behind her, looking over her shoulder.
“I don’t know how you put up with it,” Teresa was telling Margaret.
“I don’t know what’s he’s going to do,” said Margaret, her voice broken.
Jesus, maybe Teresa was in league with the bad guys somehow. You can’t tell with lawyers. Maybe Margaret was too. Look at this: he was surrounded.
Trapped.
If you’re really surrounded, there’s only one way out. Even Custer carried a derringer so he wouldn’t be taken alive. The phrase had a nice ring: only one way out.
Taken alive. You don’t want that to happen. Fifteen floors ought to about do the job. Let them see what kind of art they could get out of him after that.
He stood, and then he stopped himself. He couldn’t understand the look in their eyes. Teresa was a friend, wasn’t she? And Margaret—he trusted her, didn’t he?
He put his hands to his eyes. His hands were trembling.
He just wanted a few moments alone so he could rethink a couple of things.
He knew he was right. He knew he made sense. But there was just a little bit of doubt. Just a little.
He was afraid.
13
It was day three of the death threat.
Another day in the thrill-packed life of Red Patterson. He had to think of it that way, right out of a boyhood television series. He was a fighter for truth, justice, and the American psyche.
There had been another call to a local radio station. A man’s voice, according to what Angie had chirped over the phone: Red Patterson was going to have his brains blown out.
The stage had a cooling system. Nice, cool air blew from a grill in the floor. It was usually very refreshing to stand there and feel glacial air up his pant legs. Today the cooling system was paralyzed. Twice during “right back after this” one of the powder puff experts had to dust his face so he wouldn’t gleam under the lights.
The taping wasn’t going well. Two mathematical geniuses, twins who were joined at the head, turned out to be irritable. When one member of the audience asked how they “managed toilet stuff” the twins replied that they were interested in nonlocality related to the pilot-wave theory, and weren’t interested in talking about going to the bathroom.
Only Patterson’s best efforts saved the show, moving the audience near tears as he asked the kind of questions that would make the irascible twins appear courageous, which, of course, they were. At the end of the show there was applause, genuine, loud. The human spirit was wonderful.
He was on the phone to Loretta Lee as soon as he was in the dressing room. “The twins were awful,” he said.
“I told you they would be,” she said.
“Don’t they realize they’re lucky to be on TV? If people want to know about how they get sucked off they should tell us.”
“The burn victims next week are going to be great,” said Loretta Lee.
“How great?” said Patterson.
“Lots of scar tissue. Survivor guilt. Suicidal depression.”
He sat in the dressing room listening to Loretta tell him about the upcoming guests. No secrets, there was a guarantee on that. These future guests wanted to talk. The taped show played silently on the monitor.
Something wonderful was happening to the world. There were no secrets anymore. Child molesters and rapists had confessed their crimes on his show. If you wanted to kill someone you broadcasted it. And it made sense that some people wanted him dead. There were people who did not admire his work. They had a point. Paul Angevin had said his show would end up a “freak circus,” without the dignity of at least being honest about itself.
He took a slug of Diet Coke. He tossed down the towel he was using to rub his face clean.
Loretta Lee had a wonderful telephone voice, calming, sexy. Patterson watched his image on the monitor. I’m good, he thought. I can’t help it.
Too good to quit.
“They were joined at the head, right?” Loretta Lee was asking.
“At the head. Like two ice cream cones stuck together,” said Patterson.
“It makes you stop and think,” she said.
Patterson said that he guessed it did.
The limo pulled into the large, virtually empty garage, and they waited while the garage door thumped gently shut behind them.
The house in the Marina had always been a tasteful fortress, a clean-lined, rectangular building with few windows and a wall, low profile, and easy to guard.
But he couldn’t find solitude, even now. He paused in the atrium beside a potted palm. He heard the murmur of voices, and the trill of the telephone. His house was, essentially, the muted, dignified campaign headquarters of a man who never lost. It was always like this, but tonight there were more people than usual.
His life was an entrance from one stage to another. He checked his reflection in a hall mirror, and only really registered what he saw after he had stepped away from the looking glass.
He was a handsome man, better looking than ever. He couldn’t help it. He didn’t, in a way, even think it had anything to do with him—not the real him, the actual, sentient being. At the age of forty-seven his hair was just beginning to darken, less the sunset-red of his younger days, an autumn brown untouched by gray.
The name on his birth certificate was Stephen Boyd Patterson. It was not clear why his parents had chosen the first name. He suspected some religious inclination had made his mother anchor her son to the first Christian martyr, the spelling old-fashioned. The middle name was easy to
understand. William Boyd, movies’ Hopalong Cassidy, had once loaned the married couple enough money to satisfy a collection service.
Patterson had a wrinkle above one eyebrow, and his mouth had a determined set to it. Otherwise, he was the virtually the same man, in appearance, who had stepped from a local newspaper column, offering advice on bed-wetting and premature ejaculation, to syndicated radio to television, the man who had turned the talk show format into a forum for what one television critic called the “hyping of American angst.”
What he needed was a neck massage from Loretta Lee. She was downstairs in her office, on the phone, no doubt.
He shook hands, asked if everyone was comfortable, and he knew that, as always, he made that golden impression on people. The living room was populated with CBS security advisers, two plainclothes detectives, and that striking, well-dressed blonde, Angie. She was the representative from the mayor’s office, and was the power here.
He paused at a side mirror. And then he reentered the theater of his life, made sure everyone there had the various diet colas and flavored sparkling waters of their choice, and had Jeff, the man who could make every drink in the book, make him a predictable and hammer-simple martini, with a single olive, straight up.
The cocktail went down fast, and tasted clean, sharp. The attractive young lady from the mayor’s office was at his side. He knew that she was going to run down the list of “everything we can do,” reassure him, confide in him how much she had liked a recent show.
Loretta Lee joked about this kind of thing, but she would be very pissed off if he actually did engage in a little corporeal dalliance with this city official. He was not at all surprised when the mayor’s representative said, “I’ll get rid of these people.”
“They’re here to make sure I don’t drop dead,” he said.
“You won’t.”
Patterson thought that he’d like to be a little more certain about that. “The person who calls the radio station is male, right?”
“We think so.”
“You mean it might be a woman with a very deep voice. Or maybe it’s a transsexual, halfway through hormone therapy—”
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