Skyscape

by Michael Cadnum

  A dozen questions silenced her, choked her. She was losing him. She kept herself to the easiest, most practical question. “How will you get there?”

  “I’m going over to his house in the Marina. He’ll get me to the airport. He has a jet.” His tone implied that it was all logical.

  The statement sounded so naked: “I want to go with you.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “What is the point?” she asked, in someone else’s voice, the voice of another woman, someone who was still rational.

  He adopted that tone men use when they have made up their minds. It was hard and self-satisfied. “I’ll be there alone. Maybe I’ll see him when he flies down on weekends. I’m going to paint again, Margaret. And I’m going to be away from all this.”

  All what? she thought. Or did she actually ask the question aloud?

  Because he answered it. “All of this fear. It’s safe out there in the desert.”

  There is a way to keep him, she thought. I just have to think more clearly.

  “He promised me,” he continued. “Everything is simpler and quieter there.”

  Curtis would never come back to her. Somehow she knew that.

  “It’s what I need to do,” he said, jamming a T-shirt into the bag. He was always terrible at packing, everything jumbled together. Even now, she wanted to help him, help untangle his socks, help him order his life.

  “Don’t go,” she whispered.

  He didn’t hear, or perhaps he ignored her. His tone was kind, patient, a man explaining the obvious. “Dr. Patterson will fly down every now and then, and we’ll talk, and then when I feel strong enough I’ll come back. Don’t be so sad. I’m doing it for you. You can come down and visit sometimes.”

  She put out a hand, to touch him, remind him that she was here, that she loved him.

  He laughed. He looked so wonderful, she thought—dashing, eyes bright. “Look at how sad you are! This is a wonderful opportunity, for Christ’s sake. You should be thankful to Dr. Patterson. Do you realize what he’s done for me?”

  “You aren’t going.”

  He gave her a look of puzzled amazement, pretending that he hadn’t quite understood her.

  She persisted. “I won’t let you go.”

  She had always had an ability to tell him what he should do, and because he trusted her—and because she had good judgment—he had always followed her advice. But now he zipped up the leather bag. “I’ll be in the studio,” he said, “packing a few things.”

  It didn’t happen so quickly. A person did not change like this. She knew better.

  Teresa’s answering machine responded to the call. Margaret hung up and tried Teresa’s car phone.

  “I’m stuck in the middle of a traffic jam,” said Teresa. “I had to leave for Oakland right after the show.” She drawled something about the “approach to the Bay Bridge,” “jackknifed truck,” deliberately sounding like a traffic report.

  Margaret described Curtis, his mood, his destination.

  “That’s wonderful!” said Teresa.

  “I don’t like it.”

  “It’s been a long time since I earned a fee in court. I help chiropractors set up corporations these days. You don’t need a legal mind for that, you need a secretary. But let’s see if I can state my case for you: he’s going to paint again.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “Don’t be so selfish, Margaret.”

  “There’s something wrong.”

  “You told Curtis to see Red Patterson, right?”

  “I don’t like this.”

  “You’re jealous.”

  Maybe she was. Margaret closed her eyes.

  “I don’t like to be critical,” said Teresa, “but I think you have a tendency to sulk when you don’t get your way.”

  Maybe, thought Margaret. Maybe not.

  “You’re twenty-eight,” said Teresa. “Not so young any more.”

  Teresa was eight or nine years older, but was one of those women who seemed to neither age in any important way, nor to doubt themselves. Even that splash of silver in her hair might well be a hairdresser’s whim, thought Margaret.

  When Margaret did not speak, Teresa continued, “Vanity is a natural weakness. Take a good look at yourself—maybe you’re not enough for Curtis any more.”

  “He loves me,” Margaret said, feeling her voice fade out to a whisper.

  “Why shouldn’t he? You’re still a very attractive woman. But you didn’t really expect Curtis to be happy with you until the next ice age, did you?” There was the sound of a car engine. “I don’t think you want Curtis to paint again. I think you want him all for yourself.”

  “That’s not true,” said Margaret, anger strengthening her voice.

  “Then what are you afraid of?” said Teresa.

  Curtis closed his large black portfolio, and tossed the overnight bag beside it. He picked up the phone and called a cab. Then he stood gazing outward, his hands on his hips.

  “Light like this is what kills you,” he said, looking out at the low clouds blotting the view. “Try to paint this and you’ll end up with nothing.”

  Begging wouldn’t work. A tone of command would not work. Perhaps understatement would succeed. “I wish you would stay,” said Margaret.

  Her mother had told her that she could do whatever she wanted with her life, but she had no business marrying a man like Curtis Newns.

  Her friends had envied her. “You aren’t really,” they had said. Her sister, married to a jovial, lazy man who wrote software, had said, “Why couldn’t you do something normal for a change?”

  Because I’m not normal. I wanted something wonderful from life, and I got it. For two years.

  “If I hadn’t had the miscarriage,” she said, her voice hoarse, “you would stay with me.”

  She had put up a print of Skyscape on the wall. It was a stunning painting, even reduced and given the prosaic, flat finish of paper. She still kept that article from the London Times, the one that said that the painting demonstrated “that the horizon itself becomes human under the touch of a master like Curtis Newns.” This was the same article that escaped the usually tentative confines of British journalistic prose and said that Skyscape was “the most important painting of our time.”

  Curtis saw her folder of articles once and found it amusing, all the clippings she had kept, folded carefully. Some people collected autographs, butterflies.

  He put his arms around her. He told her that he would come back, that he wasn’t walking off the end of the world, that he wasn’t going to vanish.

  And then the security guard called and said a cab was here.

  And Curtis was gone.

  Don’t ever feel sorry for yourself, her father had said. Letting yourself feel self-pity is to give in to a form of intoxication. It is worse than even self-congratulation.

  When you play a gymnasium full of chess opponents, each player keenly alert, sitting at the long, meeting-room tables, fingering their own, familiar chess pieces, you don’t have time to even think, not in any usual sense. You move from player to player, perceive the move they have just made, stretch forth your hand, make a move of your own. Your will doesn’t act. Your ego doesn’t. Your talent does.

  There might be twenty or thirty strangers there, young and eager, and they will all lose, because they don’t have the talent.

  Margaret knew her next move. She picked up the telephone and used the number the famous doctor had given her very early that morning, the number he had said was his private line.

  20

  On the way home in the limo, in the middle of feeling so good, Patterson began to think about the tape, the voice that had sounded like a talking garbage disposal. There was just a little doubt, just a tiny question: didn’t he recognize that voice?

  “That’s what I say in my book,” Patterson was saying to the voice on the phone. He couldn’t remember exactly which book. “You make it public before a huge audience and
it dies. You know who understood this? The Greeks did. No question. You purge it and you go on living. You keep it inside and you’re sick—it’s that simple.”

  “Really impressed,” the assistant producer was saying. “You wouldn’t believe the calls.”

  Yes I would, thought Patterson. He was home safe, feeling good. “People are actually progressing, evolving. They don’t think the way they used to,” he said, aware that this made his reference to Greek tragedies slightly irrelevant. “We don’t have to be like human beings of the past. We’re different.”

  It felt great to be able to preen a little—why not? Still, he was glad when he was off the phone. Jeff, reliable, timely, slipped a martini onto the desk. Patterson smiled his thanks. It had been a wonderful day.

  He was home, in his office, watching as an old movie of his father’s played soundlessly on the television screen. Finding it had been an accident. He had wanted to watch the news, because his publicist had guaranteed this would make CBS national, at the very least. And there on the American Movie Classics Channel was his dad carrying a shotgun, gesturing with the double-barreled weapon, a gun that Patterson himself had fired as a boy in the desert, blasting sun-faded Burgie cans. The old twelve-gauge was now in the Movie-land Wax Museum, beside the unlifelike image of his father.

  The phone rang, his private line. “I just got off the phone with the wife,” said Loretta Lee.

  “She must be pretty happy.”

  “You want to be careful of the wife,” Loretta Lee said.

  “She sounded charming when I talked to her before.”

  “She could have Curtis examined by other doctors if she gets suspicious.”

  “Suspicious of what?”

  “You and I both know that you are running just a little bit of a risk.”

  “What on earth are you talking about?” On the television screen Buck Patterson had just climbed into the saddle.

  “Don’t be mad when I tell you what I think. I think Curtis Newns belongs in a mental hospital.”

  Patterson bristled. “You forget who I am.” This sounded just a little megalomaniacal, so he added, “Besides, now I’m going to start to get real clients.”

  “I wonder if maybe even you might be out of your depth, Red. And when he can’t paint after all you’ve said, you’ll look like a failure. Or maybe that’s not quite the word. Maybe you’ll look really bad, Red.”

  Patterson stirred in his chair. His hand curled around what he imagined was Loretta Lee’s sexy throat. “I’ll talk to her again. What’s her name, Margaret. Convince her everything’s all right.”

  “If she gets the idea that her husband should be in other hands, there might be legal means at her disposal—unless you persuade her.”

  On the screen, Buck Patterson was riding hard, a pace that would kill a horse. “Why don’t you have any faith in me?” said Patterson, making his voice sound happy, at ease with life. “Everything’ll be fine.”

  “I don’t think she’s convinced of that,” said Loretta Lee. “She’s not dumb. She’s thinking what I’m thinking: what are you going to do with your prize, now that he’s in your cage? I want to help you, Red. I’m your friend.”

  “What you are, Loretta, is a former patient, a woman who used to be into fellatio with assistant directors for a shot at a screen test. I know what I’m doing.”

  “If you have to say so, it isn’t true.”

  Patterson laughed, a karate-chop chortle. “You’re quoting me, aren’t you?”

  “Who else? ‘Some statements of belief are weakened by being said out loud, like a man announcing he isn’t lying.’”

  “That’s on one of my tapes—”

  “It’s in your book.”

  “Loretta Lee, you’re smart, and I love you, but sometimes I don’t know.”

  “I’m trying to protect you, Red,” she was saying as he took the receiver away from his ear.

  Patterson put the receiver into its cradle. He was happy, and grateful to Loretta Lee. She was sassy and needed a vacation, that’s all. Red Patterson was a man with an open mind. Everything was great, but he wanted another drink.

  He had better plan some time away from that woman, he thought. She was wonderful, but she lacked a certain sophistication.

  It was early evening, but the carpet cleaners were still not done. The cleaning machine was in the hall just outside the door, a sucking sound, like a wind machine, one of those big canvas belts they rotate off-camera to simulate the noise of a storm.

  Later, he would remember that moment, and remember thinking about his father’s Colt, how it would be easier if the Colt was here in the desk, loaded. Patterson did not own a gun, but he knew how to use one. A firearm was what he needed now. Then there wouldn’t have to be people in the living room, drinking his coffee, and Angie, the woman from the mayor’s office, would not be tapping on the door to the study, stepping over the carpet-cleaning machine as she came toward him.

  Angie was good looking, blonde, willing, thought Patterson. She would do, considering that Loretta Lee was so busy. On the screen, Buck Patterson had just fired about the fifteenth shot in a row from his big Colt.

  His son had the oddest realization. His father’s image on the screen was that of a man years younger than his son was now. Patterson jabbed at the remote with his forefinger and the screen went dead.

  “Leave it on,” said Angie. “I like your dad’s movies.”

  “Somehow, you don’t seem the type,” smiled Patterson, knowing how out of fashion most westerns had become.

  “You look like him,” Angie was saying.

  “Do you know what I need more than anything in the world?” said Buck Patterson’s son. What he needed was another drink. What he needed was for the carpet cleaner to finish and leave. “For a start, I need someone to massage my neck, right here.”

  “What was he like?” asked Angie, stepping behind him, her hands wise, soothing, finding the tendons in his neck.

  “Just like what you see on the screen,” said Patterson.

  What was it like to have Buck Patterson as your old man, a friend would ask Red on the way back from a class in anatomy of the neurosystem or the toxicology of the human brain.

  By the time he had fathered his only son, Buck was already a film veteran, one of those men who are called “ageless” only because their age is hard to guess, not because of any preternatural youthfulness. Buck was described as the poor man’s John Wayne in one of those every-movie-ever-made video books. What was it like to be the son of one of the world’s last cowboys? What was it like to have an actor dad?

  For one thing, it wasn’t an act—not entirely. Buck Patterson was authentically of the West, hated barbed wire, and could ride. He had that trailer out in the high desert near Victorville. He had a crescent divot in his skull where a mare had kicked him during his childhood in a place that was never defined—Arizona or Nevada or perhaps even ordinary rural California before the subdivisions.

  Buck Patterson wore Levis and a romantic, sweeping dust-gray Stetson. He had a string of live-in ladies who made his coffee and shared his bed until the day came for every one of them when they remembered something that was demanding their speedy return. Buck Patterson had a saddle and he had a six gun, a forty-five that was not exactly authentic in the strictest sense, being a Depression-era copy of the real thing. It did shoot after a fashion, although you had to aim well to the right of anything you wanted to blow up, and stand pretty close.

  And during the TV series there was that ranch on Catalina Island, if you could call a stand of cactus and a pair of geldings a ranch. It was a big house, though, and you could watch the water taxi out of San Pedro roll in every day, and the big white ship, too, and the plane that skimmed in and landed on the water near the casino, which by then was a museum of stuffed wild boar and old photographs.

  His dad had never liked to watch himself on television, and on the rare moments when his father saw the tight-lipped marshals he so often portrayed, h
e would swear and turn the channel. And by such actions Red Patterson had learned that his father was not an aging idol, he was a part of a tradition, a phony tradition, but an honorable one. When he heard his father play the clarinet or the piano, or tap dance by himself in the kitchen waiting for the coffee to perk, Red Patterson sensed a tradition of cowboy showbiz that stretched from Annie Oakley and Wild Bill Hickok, people indistinguishable from the real thing because they were the real thing.

  Or real enough. As an adolescent, Red Patterson had always found his father embarrassing. For a man who made millions, the actor was often amazingly short of money. They lived a splashy, casual life, a new car, new clothes, hamburgers for dinner. It was hard to bring friends around to visit a man who liked to play a steel guitar and yodel. But once there was a king snake on the front steps and Red Patterson was about to chop it up with a hoe, the way boys will, thinking, innocently enough, that killing something was the equivalent of popping a balloon. And his dad had plucked the glorious red and black reptile off the concrete and held it writhing and told his son, in a gentle voice, “This snake looks pretty so you can tell it won’t hurt you.”

  And then there was the time when the German-accented actress dropped by the duplex in Studio City. Patterson had been sure the woman had made a mistake. Nobody like that would be interested in his dad. But his father played an improvised suite from Carmen on the piano, and entertained the actress with some Texas swing, and then sang every single song the actress could think of. Buck knew them all, although in retrospect Red figured she must have been slow-pitching his dad, feeding Buck songs she figured he would know.

  It was impressive, though, and when the boy had been sent off to bed with a bourbon-scented kiss from the blonde and a wink from his dad, he could hear them out there, romantically grown-up, their laughter out of another country, not so much in the past, but parallel to the one Buck Patterson’s son was likely to know, a better, smokier, softer-lit world.

  His father had not lived to see his son’s career in full-flower. Buck Patterson had made a western or two in Italy, made a series of ads for “range-rugged, quarter-ton pickups,” which by themselves generated a trickle of unlikely sales in Japan. And then, as easily as a man falling asleep before television, his father had died, beside yet another new female friend in an apartment in Sherman Oaks.