“No doubt,” said Margaret, prepared to feel sympathy for the man because he had nearly been shot.
“Red Patterson is going to dedicate himself to Curtis,” said her mother.
Margaret was dazed by this news. “He is?”
Her mother’s voice had an edge. “You should be thankful.”
Margaret tried to consider this.
“It was your idea, Margaret—and it was brilliant. You encouraged Curtis to see Patterson. You knew exactly what you were doing.”
“It was a mistake,” said Margaret. “I didn’t want Curtis on the show.”
“Curtis and Patterson belong together, don’t you think? They’re both out of some different sort of universe than our ordinary one.”
It must have caused her mother some special sensation to express herself so fervently. She had to take out her compact and apply fresh lipstick.
The compact snapped shut with the clean sound that brought Margaret back to her childhood. She had loved her mother so much. “Patterson says that his entire career will be Curtis now,” said Andrea.
After thirty-six hours, everything changed.
Margaret tried to see Curtis more often, but it was futile. Guards shook their heads sympathetically. Nurses smiled and said that she couldn’t, not now. Dr. Patterson had given orders.
“Red Patterson’s taking care of Curtis,” said Dr. Beal. “That’s all I can tell you.”
Her first thought was that she no longer trusted Red Patterson. After all, she told herself, she was Curtis’s wife, and she had the legal authority to decide her husband’s medical fate. But she realized at once how wrong she was. She was being selfishly possessive. Of course Red Patterson would make the right decisions. Of course if anyone could save Curtis it would be the famous doctor.
Dr. Beal must have recognized Margaret’s initial doubt. “Curtis is considered, in a special way, Red Patterson’s patient. You’re lucky. Curtis is lucky.”
“I have to make sure that Curtis is still alive,” said Margaret, feeling chastened.
“Good heavens, you must feel pretty far out of the loop to even worry about such a thing,” said Dr. Beal. “You have to trust us, Margaret. Do you realize what’s happening? Right now, while we’re talking?”
The doctor described the campaign to save Curtis. Surgeons were being flown in from around the country, kayaking expeditions, golf games, routine surgeries in far-off cities, all interrupted by Patterson’s call.
Margaret accepted all of this, while disliking it for a reason she could not quite understand. Not only was the well-known artist in need of help, but the aura of Red Patterson had settled around the hospital.
Dr. Beal had changed. He had always seemed reserved. Now he thought for a moment longer before he made any remark. “Can I be frank with you, Margaret?”
She braced herself for bad news. “Please.”
“Patterson is controversial. Some medical people aren’t exactly wild about him, others admire him a lot. Ordinarily, Patterson would have nothing to say in a case like this—he could offer some advice, but nothing more. Right now Patterson is so important that whatever he says goes. If he wanted to have Curtis moved from this hospital we would have to go along with him. Hospitals are a part of the real world, too. If he says we’re doing a good job, our funding blossoms. If he says we stink—we do. The ordinary surgeons in this case are just that—ordinary surgeons. Patterson can do whatever he wants.”
Margaret recalled the deathwatch for her father, the afternoon outside glorious summer, willows and dry heat. Her mother had maintained a stoicism that caused Margaret to mistrust her, but now Margaret realized that her mother’s manner disguised her own variety of deep feeling.
“You miss father,” said Margaret.
Her mother examined her nails, and laughed sadly. “Do you know what he would do if he were here?” said her mother.
“He would disguise himself as a doctor, go in and see how Curtis was doing, and if he didn’t like what he saw, he would kidnap Curtis, right out of here.”
“He wouldn’t do it, but he would talk about it,” said her mother.
Andrea was right. The chess genius’s active mind had sometimes balked at physical danger, the barking dog, the skunk in the garage. Margaret wondered if, by arguing with her daughter, Andrea kept alive a deep conflict she had enjoyed with her husband, a conflict composed of love and exasperation.
Her mother added, “He would agree with you about Patterson. And he’d be wrong.”
“I am so glad to see you again,” said Bruno Kraft, kissing Margaret on the cheek. He was wearing a gray silk suit, and his dark glasses hid his eyes.
Margaret did not wait for him to ask. “He’s still alive. But they use the phrase ‘in danger.’ Stable, but still.…”
“In danger,” said Bruno thoughtfully, completing Margaret’s sentence.
“He’s going to be fine,” said Margaret’s mother.
Margaret introduced the two to each other, relieved by the simple courtesy of the process, so that when Bruno turned back to her she was able to ask, “What is the press saying?”
Bruno smiled sadly, ironicly, to discount what he was about to say. “Bad news, but I have to confess that I’ve made a career of mistrusting what I’m told.” He folded his dark glasses and slipped them into the breast pocket of his jacket.
“We certainly don’t need any pessimists here,” said Margaret’s mother, smiling slightly to offset her words. Margaret thought her mother’s response less than rational. The presence of the famous critic both impressed and antagonized her, as though now Andrea could not be the wisest figure in the forum.
“I understand that Red Patterson is looking after Curtis’s needs,” said Bruno.
“With Dr. Beal’s permission,” said Margaret.
“And yours, too, of course,” said Bruno.
“I haven’t had the opportunity to meet with Dr. Patterson,” said Margaret.
“That doesn’t sound right,” said Bruno.
Even in this moment of crisis, when Margaret and her mother were bound together by the past, and by the present, Margaret could sense her mother’s impatience with, as her father used to put it, “Everything that sounded like the truth.”
“We certainly have no reason to object,” said Andrea.
Bruno smiled, perhaps slightly uncomfortable at stepping into a script written for mother and daughter. “I have to believe he’ll be all right with such an illustrious physician looking after him.”
Margaret hesitated. “You’re not here just to help Curtis.”
“Of course I am, my dear. And to help you. If there’s anything I can do.”
“You thought he wouldn’t survive,” said Margaret. “You want to know what happened to the drawings.”
Bruno looked at her as though discovering something of interest. “I was curious, it’s true.”
“The drawings are lost.”
He seemed to grow taller. There was a short silence before he spoke. “They can’t be ‘lost.’ I saw what good care you took of them.”
“Curtis took them with him when he left, zipped into his portfolio. Maybe he was going to work on them some more, out in the desert. The drawings are gone.”
Bruno took the dark glasses out of his pocket, like someone who cannot wait to resume a disguise. He did not put them on. His eyes had that glint, that hard look she remembered from before. “They can’t all be gone.”
Margaret looked away. “I’ve had to make some painful decisions about the future.”
“You should go home and get some sleep,” said Bruno.
“If Curtis lives—” The words stopped her. She felt grief stifle her. When she could speak again, she continued, “I have to realize that I haven’t been able to help him. I have to face the truth. The question is: do I love him enough to let him go?”
“You’re tired,” said Bruno.
“I’ve been telling her that for ages,” said her mother. “Poor Margaret.�
��
“Don’t hate me because I let the drawings get lost,” said Margaret.
“Don’t be absurd,” said Bruno. “It would be impossible for me to hate you.” It was true. He wanted to hold this poor creature in his arms.
Although the pictures simply could not be gone. The thought was an outrage.
“I kept Curtis in trust,” said Margaret. “So many other people could have been in my position. Maybe other women would have done a better job.” She looked hard at Bruno. “If I can’t help him—I’ll let him go.”
“I’m so glad,” said her mother. “It’s for the best.”
Bruno gave Margaret’s mother a long glance. Then, to Margaret, he said, “You and I must have a nice, long talk before too long.”
Dr. Beal had such an intense look that Margaret caught her breath, and waited for the news to be the worst possible. Bruno sensed it, too. She felt him stiffen beside her, and her mother stood up.
“You might as well go home and rest,” said Dr. Beal, displaying one of his joyless smiles. “Curtis is out of danger.”
25
It was nearly dawn. Andrea, Margaret, and Bruno shared a taxi, Bruno in the front seat beside the driver’s clipboard.
What a sleepy little town San Francisco was, thought Bruno. The cable car tracks on Powell gleamed, long shiny strips, like scars where a wound has healed. A sole figure hunched along a curb, pausing at a trash bin to extricate a squashed aluminum can. It was too early for pigeons.
The taxi driver was a broad-shouldered woman, her hair gray stubble all over her head. It seemed to Bruno that he remembered a time when women went out of their way to look pretty. He remembered white gloves, cashmere, mock pearls.
“It’s so thoughtful of you to drop me off,” said Andrea Darcy, batting her eyelids at him.
“We certainly wouldn’t want you to come to harm,” said Bruno. He held the taxi door for her, and then sat where she had been sitting, in the back seat beside Margaret.
Bruno was aware that Margaret and her mother were involved in an armed truce. Bruno himself had few relatives left. He had one sister, a woman with florid handwriting, which appeared at Christmas, wishing him well from “Bea, Mike, Pepper and Honey.” The last two were animals, dogs, and inevitably the names of the final pair changed over the years. Mike was a biochemist at the University of Hawaii, and Bea was a high school principal. There were occasional pleasant visits to Honolulu. Bruno liked his sister, and enjoyed playing brother-in-law with Mike, a cordial, squat man addicted to plastic-tipped cigars. When Bruno had realized, long ago, that he would father no children of his own, the entire concept of family began to dim in his estimation.
A taxi can be a pleasant interior, momentarily one’s own enclosed space. Bruno had, more than once, fallen in love in the back seat of a taxi. “You’re doing wonderfully,” said Bruno.
“I have the feeling you’re watching me,” said Margaret. “Through binoculars, from a great distance. To see what sort of stuff I’m made of.”
“You look so tired. We’ll have our little talk some other time.”
“I know what you want,” she said, not unkindly.
“Curtis will survive,” said Bruno, hoping he believed this.
Margaret did not answer.
“I used to read your father’s chess articles,” said Bruno. He was exaggerating; he had never played chess in his life. “He must have been a charming man.”
“My father loved his life, but my mother wanted something more simple, something a lot safer. They had real estate in Sacramento, vacations in Paris. My mother was proud to see her parties mentioned in the society pages, and Dad didn’t mind it. He liked to go barefoot all day in the back garden.”
“Does your mother like Curtis?”
“She’s afraid of him.”
“That’s hard to imagine,” said Bruno, meaning that it was not.
Margaret gave him a smile Bruno found beautiful—calm, accepting. “I know you want to kill me,” said Margaret.
“That’s being a little crude, don’t you think?”
“Right here in the taxi. You wish I were dead.”
Bruno made himself sound coy. “Not exactly.”
“I did the worst thing I could have done. I let some of Curtis’s art get away.”
“The drawings were lovely,” said Bruno. And, he did not add, worth an incredible amount of money. “I should have taken them away with me. Stolen them out from under you. So it’s my fault, too, you see.”
“I’m too tired to lie, Bruno. And I’m so happy that Curtis is officially Out of Danger—” She said the words with a certain snap, so that they appeared as on a sign, in capitals. “You pretend to be above things like anger, but I’m not fooled.”
“I wouldn’t dream of deceiving you.”
“You weren’t just joking about stealing the drawings, were you? You would steal them, and get away with it.” She surprised herself. The combination of exhaustion and joy made her feel cunningly lucid. She could go without sleep forever. It gave her an advantage over Bruno. It was a strange feeling, and a powerful one. “You would be delighted if I vanished and you could have Curtis all to yourself.”
“You’ll feel better after a little sleep.”
“So will you. Let’s have our talk now, Bruno.”
Honesty was a poor foundation on which to build a friendship, Bruno had found. A cheerful pretense was so much more reliable. He was about to say something to that effect, but he saw the look in Margaret’s eye and silenced himself.
Loss came in all sizes, thought Bruno, and all shapes. How did a decent person like Margaret get so tangled up in the machinery of life?
Margaret knew that she should eat something, but she could not.
The waiter brought a plate of hash brown potatoes and two sunnyside-up eggs. Bruno did not begin eating for a moment. He took a taste of his coffee.
“If Patterson can help him—” She opened a hand, and let it fall to the table, a woman surrendering to the inevitable. “It hurts me. But I love Curtis.”
“Let’s stop pretending to be nice, for a moment. I think Patterson is a dangerous man.”
She said, “People believe in him.”
“Do you?”
“You’re afraid that you’ll lose control over Curtis yourself,” said Margaret. “His next painting will be thanks to Red Patterson.”
“At least we’re being cynical now. That’s an improvement. And it agrees with you—you get the sweetest blush in your cheeks when you look at me that way. But it’s not just that. Let’s pretend for a moment that it’s all right if Curtis doesn’t paint anymore, if that’s what’s best for his mental health. After all, the world still has prints of Skyscape, if not the original.”
“Is that what you really think?”
“I’m glad that you’re suspicious, Margaret. I have to tell you something very frank. I want you and Curtis to be happy. But I can’t afford to sacrifice for his mental health, or your happiness.”
“His happiness doesn’t matter.”
“You really should have something to eat,” said Bruno.
“You don’t care what Curtis does, as long as he makes art again, preferably soon.”
“Of course I care.” Bruno broke the yolks carefully with his fork, one after another. “You and I could fight Patterson together, if we decided to. But let’s try to be realistic. It’s unpleasant, I know. But let’s force ourselves. It may be necessary for us to let Curtis go with Red Patterson.”
“Necessary,” she said, making the word sound nasty.
His voice was a purr. “It’s something you already know. You and I both need Curtis to go out into the desert with this wonderful doctor. I need Curtis to paint, and so do you. After all, it doesn’t make your marriage look like a success the way things stand now.”
“Why do I like you, Bruno? You go out of your way to be unpleasant.”
“Have you ever met Red Patterson?” asked Bruno.
“No.�
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“You’re going to let Curtis go off into the desert with a man you don’t even know, aren’t you?”
“He’s the sort of person you feel that you know, you see him so often.” She said this like someone trying to convince herself, and almost succeeding.
“Were you upset when Curtis was on the show?” Bruno asked, “or had you expected it?”
She did not answer him directly. “Red Patterson must have thought it was the right thing to do.”
“Do you think it was?”
“I’ve never seen Curtis as happy as he was at the end of the show, when they were arm-in-arm and all the credits went racing past, so fast you couldn’t really read them.”
“We both need to take a risk or two. I want a new painting. I want a new masterpiece,” said Bruno, correcting himself by emphasizing the last word.
It took an effort for her not to cry. “I know he’ll come back to me.”
He gave her a thoughtful smile. “You don’t know how tired you are, Margaret.” Bruno recognized this sort of fatigue. It was like a drug, liberating as it consumed.
Margaret gazed at the surface of her coffee. It was furred lightly with vapor that did not rise, pooling there on the surface. “I wish I had known Curtis a long time ago. I wish I could somehow magically join him in some wonderful period of his life. Like the months he spent in Hawaii. He talks about it sometimes. I wish I could be there with him.”
Bruno had always assumed that Margaret felt that Curtis the artist was more important than Curtis the man. Now he saw something he should have anticipated more fully, but had not. Margaret wanted to hear about the days when Curtis had finished with school, and with a few early sales in his checking account, was able to enjoy the green hillsides of the Big Island. She wanted to hear about Curtis relaxed, untroubled. She wanted to hear about Curtis being happy.
Margaret was earnest, vulnerable. For a moment Bruno missed the friendly insincerity of Renata San Pablo. “Hilo’s a beautiful town,” said Bruno. Actually, he had passed through it once and found it squat, dull. “It rains a lot, so it’s very lush.”
“I can imagine it,” said Margaret.
Bruno was always forgetting how much people could love each other. He could almost resent her freedom to consider nothing, for the moment, but the thought of Curtis sketching a hibiscus. “I didn’t visit Hilo when Curtis was there,” Bruno said. “I was living in London in those days. Besides, I prefer the Kona side of the island.” Bruno had the impression that Curtis had bought a motorcycle, drank a good deal of beer, and had been glad to leave Hawaii after a month. Curtis had done very little work there.
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