Skyscape

by Michael Cadnum

  The telephone trilled. Loretta Lee spoke into it briefly. She put the phone down and said, “The flight from Rome was six minutes late. They just left L.A.”

  “How do I look?” he asked.

  “You look okay.”

  “I have to look better than okay.”

  “You do.”

  Bruno Kraft was one of those cunning predatory people without morals, Patterson believed. In Kraft’s books, in his televised programs on art history, Patterson had discerned a man of cutting intellect and little feeling, the sort of man who makes an excellent hunter as long as it’s out of season.

  “You want to put on something else,” said Patterson.

  “You told me that an hour ago.”

  Patterson had been forced to invite the famous critic when Loretta Lee told him that Bruno Kraft was about to go public with his “doubts.” Patterson’s intentions were simple: get the man here, and then get him out, quickly. Other, corollary plans lingered in the wings, outside the light and heat, but those could wait.

  The body knew that air could not be so hot. The flesh understood—this could not be real. But it was. The sun was all over them, the real sun, not filtered and buffered, but the naked radiation, rich with both visible and invisible spectra, sunlight that sang off the white stepping stones making a virtually audible hiss, as water dappling the poolside vanished, unpeeling and turning into air.

  The scent of the air was sterile, blank purity soiled here and there by the musk of plant life in the eleven-acre oasis. If you made the mistake of tilting your head back it was there, the white hole in the sky.

  He took a sip of iced tea. The ice chimed prettily. The sunlight off the pool was softened by his sunglasses, aviator-fashion made by hand in Milan.

  Loretta Lee said, “I don’t like what’s happening.”

  “I don’t like it either. I’ll be glad when it’s over. He’s going to be a very unpleasant guest, but I’ve told you how we’ll treat him.” He put a hand to the frame of his glasses. Imagine, he thought, making glasses everyday, week after week. The result was an elegant piece of work, but imagine the monotony.

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  Patterson was amazed, not for the first time, at how inconsiderate Loretta Lee could be. “You have everything you want,” he said.

  “I don’t like what’s happening.”

  Patterson laughed softly. “Everything is going to be different now.”

  “You shouldn’t have sent everyone away.”

  “You like arguing with me, don’t you?”

  When the video crew decamped, all the staff had left with them, the nurse, the extra cook, everyone packed into the plane, waving happily, all of them sure everything was going to be fine because Red Patterson said so.

  “I want you alive and happy, Red.”

  “Things have gotten real simple. It’s something that occurs to a man when he is almost killed.”

  That shut her up, he thought.

  He added, “It’s time to focus.”

  She took a moment to shape her argument. “Look at the pool, for just one example,” said Loretta Lee. “Don’t you remember the time it got a tarantula in it?”

  One of the things he found fascinating about Loretta Lee was the way her mind worked. “It was a dead spider,” said Patterson with quiet exasperation.

  “A dead spider!” said Loretta Lee, as though that proved something incontestable.

  “We don’t need to keep a staff here just so we can fish out a drowned spider, should one appear.”

  “That’s just an example, Red. Things go wrong. This is a big place.”

  The two of them sat in the shade beside the swimming pool. The dense palms and dark green grass gave the stunning impression of oasis. The edge of the pool was tiled with the same extravagant gold mosaic Hearst had used for his castle, except that this tile was unvisited by tourists and rarely so much as photographed. A leaf had fallen from one of the yuccas, a long spine like a stilletto without its hilt.

  Patterson finished the iced tea and put the glass on the small table. The cubes had already melted. He stood and took a moment to get ready for the real heat. He stepped from the shade to the sun, blinking against the press of the light. He retrieved the pool rake from its hiding place.

  He used the long implement to secure the leaf from the bottom of the pool. The leaf spun free, and it took a second or two to balance the spine in the rake, which was really more like an oversized hook. The bottom had been repainted twice in the eight years he had owned Owl Springs. Legend was that Marilyn Monroe had belly flopped in the nude off the sparkling, sandpapery diving board.

  “I might put the cover over the pool,” he said, setting down the rake.

  “And the cooking. You’re not going to see me in the kitchen making pancakes—”

  “You will if I ask you to.”

  There was a long pause. “Sure. If that’s what you need,” she said, softening her voice, and doing that thing with her eyes, making them look both wide and unobservant at the same time.

  They would be here any minute. He didn’t have time for her. “You forget that when we met you were just another stunning beauty exploring that traditional plan B of the actress.”

  “I don’t like this, Red.”

  “I need Bishop, and I need you. That’s all.”

  Loretta Lee couldn’t argue with that. She was quiet, observing him, not simply looking at him, taking him in with a long silence. Patterson let her look. He was right. They would all live a simpler existence. They would be happy.

  She said. “And Curtis. You need him, too.”

  “Yes, I need him.”

  “What’s the matter with you, Red?”

  “I have seen what they used to call the light,” he said, sitting down again, stretching out his legs. You could hardly breathe the air, he thought. Lungs couldn’t take this kind of dryness.

  “I’ve heard you tell people to beware of sudden changes in behavior.” She tried to say this cheerfully, so if he was offended she could pretend it was a bad joke. “That they can be symptoms of mental illness.”

  He wondered over the fact that you could love a woman and be sick of her at the same time.

  “And the policy stays the same,” he said. “Don’t go near Curtis’s suite.”

  Inside, it was so cool the sweat on his arms and legs felt like frost. The chill was refreshing, but it imparted something phony to the taste of the air.

  He padded down one corridor after another. He paused outside Curtis’s suite, selecting the key from his pants pocket.

  He opened the door, and slipped inside. He was about to hurry down the hallway, and into the studio, when he heard it.

  There was no mistaking the sound of the small jet, the Gulfstream V, Bishop himself piloting it, taking a wide approach so the critic could have a good look at what lay below.

  And so Patterson would have plenty of time to hear them and finish the preparations. Bishop was smart. Bishop knew things, and he did not make mistakes.

  Loretta Lee had thrown on something shimmery, dazzling, and she looked perfect, although she appeared too nervous hesitating there in the dining room, like a hostess whose cook had just run off with the maid. Patterson was touched—she bitched about everything, but she was loyal.

  He kissed her. “Give him the impression that I will be down very soon,” said Patterson. “I’m preoccupied and can’t tear myself away. We want Bruno to feel that he is a respected visitor, but that we really don’t have the time to entertain even someone as important as he is.”

  The jet was on the airstrip. The thrust reversers made the compact engine rumble, and once again Patterson told himself that where he really wanted to be was in the air somewhere.

  “I look okay, too, right?” she was asking.

  “Delectable.”

  He waited in the library, the window open so the air-conditioned cool eddied in the heat from outside. He heard Loretta Lee sliding the glass door. He
heard the tiny but distinct scrape of the pool rake as Loretta Lee hung it on the hooks where it belonged.

  The jet whined, and there was the long pause, the long wait, as the man from the outside, the man who could alter everything with a few words, gathered himself to make his final, personal descent into the heat.

  31

  Bruno expected it to be hot. Heat didn’t bother him. But he had not expected it to be like this.

  The executive jet touched the ground, lifted slightly, then settled into a smooth roll. Its engines made that sweet, pleasing whistle of power ebbing. The steps extended to the pavement, but Bruno was still well within the cabin when the heat reached him.

  An attractive woman who introduced herself as Loretta Lee Arno held her hand out to him as he paused under the full force of the afternoon sun. “You can call me Loretta Lee,” she said.

  “Bruno,” he said, offering her his name with a little smile, as though it were a gift. We don’t need last names, he thought. We are just old children, let loose in the tired, dissolute playground of life. “I hadn’t realized it when we spoke, but I do recall you from Hollywood Midnights, I believe it was. It’s your voice—it’s so distinctive.”

  She did not respond to this. “Dr. Patterson is very excited that you’re here,” she said. “He asked me to tell you that he’s trying to do something very difficult just now. He wanted me to ask you to please be patient.”

  “I couldn’t be more willing to cooperate in any way I can.” He made sure that his voice sounded slightly bored, a trick he had learned from English friends of his youth who, pretenders to elegance, spoke in a slow, careless drawl, as though half-asleep.

  But it was all pretense. He was as nervous as he had ever been, but more than anything, at the moment, he was eager to get out of the sun. The Italian summers could be heavy-handed, but this was punishing. Mirage began at one hundred feet away and quaked, mercury-bright, so dazzling that it reflected things almost perfectly, palms, the outline of the villa.

  He was accustomed to the enclaves of the wealthy, the security-burdened Greek islet, the Montecito villa. But this place was different, more handsome and more remote than any place he had ever visited. His shadow pooled under his feet, an ugly shape.

  They walked toward the shade, toward the big iron gates. The fringe of the oasis seemed to retreat before them, tantalizingly.

  The shade, when they reached it at last, was cool. Loretta Lee led him to poolside, where a sparrow was taking a bath in a trickle of water. Bruno wondered if anyone had been swimming here just moments before. The thought was electric—perhaps Curtis himself.

  She vanished for a moment, leaving Bruno in delicious shadow. She returned with Bruno’s drink of choice, iced coffee, on a tray. She sipped a tall drink of her own, something clear and sparkling embellished with a wedge of lime, and they strolled for a moment with their drinks, enjoying the botanical cool.

  Patterson was not to be seen. Bruno began to feel irritated. “What is this very difficult thing that Dr. Patterson is trying to do just now?” he asked.

  “Did you see Dr. Patterson the other day? On TV? They had him sitting here for the video, right under this big aloe.”

  “I heard about it, but I’m afraid I missed it.”

  “You never in your life watched Hollywood Midnights, did you?”

  “Of course I did,” he said, and, to spur the subject in a new direction, Bruno remarked on the beauty of the garden. The plant life included the bright green tines of cycads, and dozens of varieties of cacti. A fountain played somewhere, or perhaps it was the spring itself, the source that gave its name to the acres of green.

  “All your doubts would have been settled if you’d just seen Dr. Patterson explain how well everything’s been going.”

  “I’m sure you’re right.” The coffee tasted good, although already the melting ice was starting to dilute it.

  “The difficult thing Dr. Patterson is doing is this: it has to do with you. He’s with Mr. Newns right now, trying to talk him into seeing you.”

  “I certainly hope he succeeds.” Although, Bruno did not add, I am much more interested in what Curtis has been painting than complimenting him on how well he looks. “Is he recovering from his injuries?” he asked.

  “Mr. Newns loves the solitude,” she said. “He’s a very private person. I hadn’t realized that.”

  “I think that’s the value of art, don’t you?” said Bruno. “Artists bring out of themselves, in solitude, what can become the colors of our lives.” Bruno regarded what he had just said. He liked colors of our lives.

  The house itself was mock-Spanish, with wrought iron grilles over the deep-set windows. The walls were sand-pink, the pastel bleached in places where the sunlight coursed through the dense plant life.

  They returned to poolside and sat, teak furniture creaking under their weight. Loretta Lee was one of those beauties common around the film and television world. She was not the product of education or good taste. Her presence was animal, all energy and good camera angles. You see men and women on the screen and you think: people like that don’t exist.

  “I used to like painting,” she said. “I didn’t try to do it myself—I mean, I used to like art books and museums.”

  “Really?” Bruno was being polite. Given the need he would be polite to Godzilla. But he wanted to get on with this meeting, and he was not prepared to engage in small talk with this healthy female mammal. He was thirsty for more iced coffee, and he wondered if the headache might be about to return. The thought that Patterson was this very moment in conference with Curtis made him eager and edgy. He was so close to the truth.

  “I think Dr. Patterson looks at me and sees someone who has a lot to learn,” she said.

  “He couldn’t possibly think of you as ignorant.”

  “I am, in a way, but I do okay. I take care of everything.”

  This claim of universal husbandry confused Bruno for an instant. Her gaze was too steady, her air of simplicity both genuine and practiced. She was one of those seemingly straightforward people Bruno had always found enigmatic.

  “It must be interesting to work so closely with Dr. Patterson,” said Bruno.

  “If you had to pick one painting in the whole world as the most important, which would you pick?”

  “You mean, if I was forced to pick—at gunpoint?”

  They both laughed at the thought, but then Loretta Lee appeared to be sobered by some thought or memory.

  “I thought that Curtis’s painting of the sky was the finest single work painted by a living artist,” said Bruno. The thought of the painting saddened him for a moment. “Some people would say the painting by Velázquez at the Met, the portrait of Juan de Pareja, is the single most important painting in the world, but the very thought of picking one painting is so indescribably limiting I can hardly stand the idea. Besides, portraits are a category of their own, aren’t they?”

  Bruno’s voice had started out in the tones of a self-guided tour, but his comment had ended with Bruno gazing about himself in disbelief. No one kept him waiting this long.

  “Dr. Patterson will be with you very soon,” she said.

  He must have betrayed his impatience with a twitch, a look in his eye. He didn’t like that. He had learned long ago, bidding at Sotheby’s, waiting for the display carousel to turn and expose a priceless dream: don’t show the slightest anticipation. He had started out placing bids for people who could not be troubled to make their way to New Bond Street themselves. The experience had taught him much of what he knew. “I’m sorry. Please forgive me,” said Bruno. “I could sit here forever, it’s so lovely.”

  Loretta Lee knew better. “We have to cooperate with Dr. Patterson, Bruno. If he wants us to wait—then we wait.”

  How odd it was to have this woman, still years from her first chin-tuck, speaking to him so frankly. Maybe he would find it refreshing, if he got used to it. “Tell me—” He was about to ask: what is the new painting like? But t
hat would loosen a tangle of questions—where is it? When can I see it? He could not keep from asking. He was just about to lean forward and whisper tell me something—anything.

  Loretta Lee stood and flashed a smile across the pool, and Bruno stood to follow her gaze.

  Bruno had hoped to see Curtis. There, across the shimmering surface of the swimming pool, was Red Patterson.

  Patterson was deep-chested, dressed in something vaguely cow-boyish and expensive, open collar shirt, denims, snakeskin boots. His face had the unmistakable, vital glow of a careful tan.

  Patterson embraced Bruno, gave him a hearty, healthy hug, and then held Bruno at arm’s length. “I am so happy to have you here,” he said.

  Bruno had expected to dislike Patterson. He was surprised at his own reaction. He liked Patterson at once, and wanted Patterson to like him in return.

  Patterson was happy. Bruno felt himself relax. This exuberance was so impressive, so capable of rolling away all that lay before it, that it was only as they were about to enter the house that Bruno stopped, and looked back at the palms and cacti around them.

  “I want to see Curtis,” said Bruno.

  But Patterson had already hurried away, into the villa. “Don’t stand around down there. Come on,” said the energetic psychiatrist.

  Bruno felt light-headed. The two of them were striding through the chilly interior of the big house.

  “I know how you feel about this,” said Patterson, leading Bruno up another stairway. The famous man’s boots clumped on the hardwood floors. “So why waste time?”

  This was happening so quickly. “I realize what an intrusion my visit is,” panted Bruno.

  “I’m delighted that you’re here,” said Patterson over his shoulder. “I love your tape on Cézanne—pure brilliance.”

  Bruno was out of breath. The broad dark oak door had to be unlocked, and Patterson held the door open so that Bruno could enter. He was ready to call a greeting, but then his instincts told him that the artist was not in this room, that this room had been abandoned to the merely physical—walls, floor, vaults of light.

  But there was a presence.