Skyscape

by Michael Cadnum

  She felt herself lose something, further faith in him, in the way reality was ordered.

  “But surely you need time to rest.” It occurred to Margaret that a man who traveled all the time might be running from something.

  “I’m going back to my own life. And Margaret, if you are wise, you will stay where you are.”

  “You can’t abandon everything like this.”

  “You mean: I can’t abandon you. Stay here, Margaret. Here you have a certain amount of power. You can call friends, reporters. You can even call a radio station and threaten to shoot someone. But out there.…” He gave her a smile. “Don’t go to Owl Springs.”

  There was a folder of papers from an art restorer, pages describing in centimeters the rips in the canvas, and advising further consultation with experts in distant places, but assessing the damage as being, “well within the bounds of what can be made to resemble the pre-damaged state.” As though to mock what they would seek to mend, the paintings were reproduced in black and white, the cuts in the paints marked with paste-on arrows, like the exhibits of the victim’s clothing in old crime magazines.

  There was the cage, and the starling, asleep under his nighttime hood of blue drapery. Mrs. Wye was especially fond of the bird, arriving daily with a piece of something new to see if its taste for food could be further expanded—cinnamon toast, strudel, spartan sheaves of millet, rinds of gouda. The bird so far had refused none of Mrs. Wye’s gifts.

  Bruno was gone, departed with a crisp kiss and a suave farewell, the sterling courtesy he would have shown to someone he loathed.

  This, she told herself, was her life, this wicker holder in which she kept her colored pencils, this Rolodex of phone numbers, this pile of books, unopened jiffy bags of gifts, samples, catalogs, this apartment of hers that she no longer wanted, not without Curtis.

  She did not really fall asleep. She slipped into something like a trance, however, very late in the night, because when the phone rang it startled her, more than awakened her—made her stay where she was for a few heartbeats, wondering what on earth that insistent sound could be.

  It was a voice she recognized immediately. “I hope I didn’t wake you.”

  “No, I wasn’t really sleeping. I wasn’t able to.”

  “I understand you want to spend some time with us,” said the voice.

  “That’s exactly what I want,” said Margaret, feeling herself stir to increasing wakefulness, feeling herself rise to something like happiness.

  “Pack light clothes, shorts, a swimsuit,” said Red Patterson. “I think the time has come for you to visit us in the desert.”

  PART THREE

  SKYSCAPE

  34

  Loretta Lee stood at the foot of the stairs. There was no sun where she stood, and no sound.

  She was worried. She was probably worried because that was her specialty, the one thing she was really good at, but there it was and she couldn’t deny it.

  She had always been lucky. This was what she told herself all the time. She had grown up in a landscape of shopping malls and duplexes. In the Southern California neighborhoods where Loretta Lee had learned to smoke cigarettes and drink tequila, a person wasn’t really supposed to look at anything. You noticed the clothing styles in magazines, faces and bodies on television. No one bothered with the scenery. There were big rivers, empty and paved with cement.

  She had been happy enough growing up, but it was a happiness that, in retrospect, was cut off from passion. There were hot afternoons, spent watching television while the lawn sprinkler outside made its steady whisper. There were prayer-silent foggy mornings, walking the way to school in a world no wider than a kitchen. Loretta Lee and her mother had a favorite restaurant, a smorgasbord behind the Mesa theater where they both liked the meatballs and the strangely sweet gravy.

  But it was a life that settled steadily around her, like fine fragmenting ash that drifted down out of the sky during a brushfire. Patterson had awakened her. She reminded herself how much she owed Patterson as she stood there in the silence.

  The doctor had just left the house, going out to the hangar as he often did in the early morning. She told herself that there was nothing to prevent her from going up to the studio, up to the room where Patterson and Curtis did their work.

  Go ahead. Tap on the door. Ask Curtis if there’s anything you can get for him.

  She even took a step up the stairs before she asked herself what she thought she was doing. She had always trusted Patterson, even though she prompted him, coaxed him. He needed her, and that knowledge made her feel more alive than she ever had in those vague, wasted days in L.A.

  But she took yet another step, climbing the stairs. If Patterson asked, she would say that she was just making sure Curtis had everything he wanted. She had a fantasy conversation with Patterson, explaining that she felt that it was a part of her job to make sure that—.

  The fantasy faltered. Taking up psychiatry, are you? Patterson would say. Think you know how to help Curtis better than I do? he would ask with a smile, one of those bad smiles, the kind that chilled her.

  Patterson needed her. Sometimes he frightened her—he was so sure of himself. No human being could be that sure. People made mistakes.

  Her girlhood had been spent telling herself that she could manage. Her father was a clear memory, but a simplistic one, muscular, healthy, cutting the crabgrass with a power mower. He vanished early on, before she was in kindergarten. Her mother was a buyer for a local department store, specializing in notions and yardage, pretty, in a thoughtful, introspective way. Someone had to make sure the lawn was raked and watered, light bulbs replaced when they burned out, kleenex brought to her mother’s side when something on television made her cry.

  Her mother made grocery lists, Loretta Lee did the shopping. Her mother made a list of books to bring her in the hospital, and Loretta Lee went to the library. Her mother left lists behind at her death, and Loretta Lee added her own little check beside each disposal of furniture, each donation, each table lamp carried away at the yard sale.

  Loretta Lee had done what she could, and she missed her mother. She had grown up to be the sort of young woman who was impressed by very little.

  Loretta Lee had ambition in her late teens and early twenties, suffered from ambition, had it like a disease. Her agent was always quick to answer her calls, but he was quick at everything, eating, talking. Sex with him was like something out of a National Geographic special, lightning copulation, instantaneous ejaculation—bug sex. He was one of the many people she knew who saw life as a matter of getting as much as possible in the shortest amount of time.

  Sometimes she woke at night aching with envy. Other people had careers—she had a series of trashy poses she worked hard to get. By the time she saw herself on the cover of soap opera magazines, it was too late. She was depressed the way some people were obese. It was a hard problem to lose.

  Patterson’s office had been just off Santa Monica Boulevard, a building full of pricey financial consultants and title companies. A girlfriend, a fellow-actress who suffered migraines, had urged Loretta Lee to visit. “This guy is all you need,” she had said.

  One visit and Loretta Lee realized that no one had ever listened to her before. When she spoke the doctor understood her. He would lean forward, his eyes bright and caring, and she would feel herself unfold, change, open into a new, more loving person.

  It had been a long time since she had found herself awake at night, too empty inside to sleep, too empty to get up. But lately she stared into the dark at night, worried. Red was changing. There was something about him that shook her. Maybe she was being ungrateful and foolish, standing on the stairs as though she knew what she was doing. She had to be wrong. Whatever Curtis and Patterson were up to, it had nothing to do with her.

  She wasn’t even surprised when she heard his step behind her, in the hall. Patterson was like this—he sensed things.

  “You’re up early again,” said Pa
tterson.

  “I have trouble sleeping,” she said, truthfully.

  “That’s the easiest problem in the world to fix,” he said.

  She knew that sometimes Red didn’t have time for her. This was not because he had stopped caring for her, she knew. It was because he had so much else on his mind. “I’ll be all right,” she said, descending the stairs.

  “You aren’t worried, are you?” he asked.

  “Like you used to tell me—just a little faith.”

  “That’s all it takes,” said Patterson, stroking her hair, looking into her eyes. Then he took a handful of her hair, very gently, and kissed her.

  “You aren’t going up there, are you?” he asked.

  “No,” she breathed.

  No, of course not. She wouldn’t dream of it.

  At first there was life in the room. “Since you won’t paint, I will,” and there was the sound of turpentine splashing, a brush stirring. And the smell, the bright, biochemical charge that Patterson loved.

  Curtis climbed. He worked his way upward, onto his feet. It was sudden. Patterson looked on. Curtis stood before the canvas, his healing injuries throbbing. He lifted his right hand and touched the canvas with a forefinger. It made a pleasing, gentle pop, a raindrop falling onto a sheet of paper.

  Patterson parted the curtains, and let a steel probe of light fall into the room. He opened the curtains wide, and day was all over the room.

  Curtis groaned as he bent over. He picked up the cardboard box, and tilted it. White tubes of paint scattered at his feet.

  “If you need another shot I’ll fix you one,” said Patterson.

  Curtis Newns was holding a tube of paint, unscrewing the cap. Curtis had the knife in his hand, the legendary blade he sometimes used in applying paint. There was the sound of paint being squeezed, gently, deliberately, onto the supple steel.

  Then he stood before the canvas and saw the work his hands had done. Patterson knew what Curtis must be experiencing now. Curtis saw the white sky of the canvas as an enemy that had become an ally. It was the only ally he had left.

  He did nothing, standing there as though unable to decide what to do next. He opened his hands and closed them, and let them drop to his sides.

  “You don’t believe in me, do you?” said Patterson in a tone of wonder.

  Later Patterson would wonder if Curtis had ever lifted his hand to the canvas at all. Each day was like the one before it. It was a routine now. The doctor wheeled Curtis in the stainless steel chair to the place where the canvas was waiting.

  Down in the heat there were nice, slate-gray plants and Patterson would look down at them and think how wonderful it was that everything was just the way he had dreamed it would be.

  “Tell me if you want anything,” said Patterson.

  That’s how it was—silence, and an all but empty canvas. They shared day after day like this. No doubt Curtis wanted a television, but Patterson thought this would not be a good idea; it would be a potential distraction. The doctor did not want anything to take Curtis’s mind off what the doctor began to think of as the White Hole, although, naturally, it was a rectangle of cloth, waiting as canvas always did, winning in the end even when you smeared it with color.

  After days of what Patterson considered defensive introjection, he changed tactics. Patterson closed the shutters, saying Curtis could look at the garden only if he began to paint. He said Curtis could even go outside if he began to paint a little bit, and the doctor gave him shots of head-clearing stimulants, drugs that Patterson knew made Curtis feel really wonderful, but did nothing to make him paint.

  “I started to collect things when I realized that it was the best I could do,” said the doctor. “I bought art, began to build my collection of aircraft. Some people love vintage cars, but cars seemed like such earthbound contraptions to me. I envied the artist. But I knew I could never be one.”

  Curtis was silent.

  “I understood at last why people wanted to appear on my show. It wasn’t so they could be healed. That was a part of it, but only a small part.”

  Curtis would not talk anymore.

  “Sachs says that the impulse to creation was the search for companions in guilt,” said Patterson, measuring the huge canvas with his eyes. “He was an important writer on psychoanalytic issues, and his phrase stayed with me. The view is built on the theory that creativity springs from the conflict between a man’s longing for women and his dread of them. One chooses to paint as a refuge from the vagina. Out of a fear of that little cleft, that little entrance into the dark.”

  Curtis was stubborn, Patterson knew, but he was listening.

  “Companions in guilt,” said the doctor, speaking more to himself than to Curtis. “The viewer of the painting shares in the artist’s plot against the void.” The doctor sighed, picking up a brush, testing the pliant hairs against his fingertips. The brush left the slightest film of oil on the ball of his thumb and the doctor sniffed it as Curtis looked on.

  “I used to think that I was like a god,” said the doctor. “That I sat in the place of something divine when I was working with my patients. I believed that there was something not only sacred about sharing their secrets, but something more than human about my own role in their lives. But then when I discovered how dramatically television worked to cure my clients, I felt both exaulted and humbled. It wasn’t my own powers doing the healing anymore, it was something else, the power of public confession, perhaps.”

  Curtis listened but he did not speak.

  “Faith,” the doctor continued. “The faith we have in appearing in millions of replicated images. I gained greater power, and lost faith in myself as a physician at the same time. I want that faith back, Curtis. You can help me.”

  The artist was supreme in his silence. In the old days Patterson would have terminated the session. “I understand,” said the doctor. “The act of painting has become dangerous, hasn’t it?”

  One evening after he wheeled Curtis back into his bedchamber, Patterson turned with the key in his hand. “Don’t tell yourself for a moment that what you need is Margaret,” he said. “Margaret was an adversary, someone trying to turn you into an ordinary man.”

  He stood at the door to the bedchamber and looked at Curtis, swept with love for the artist. “Soon there won’t be a Curtis Newns or a Red Patterson. There will be only the painting.”

  Later, in the hall, Patterson stopped outside Loretta Lee’s bedroom. She was in there talking, like someone talking on the telephone, but the tone wasn’t right. There was something confessional about the tone, secretive. He listened, but could not make out what she was saying.

  Patterson dismissed this, and it was only later, as he undressed in his own bedroom, that Patterson recognized what was happening. He usually draped his clothes casually over a chair as he got ready for bed, but this time he folded them carefully, thinking. He should have been aware of this before, but he had been oblivious to the obvious danger.

  Loretta Lee was keeping secrets.

  35

  “Someone with Good Morning America was on the line,” said Loretta Lee, “wanting to get footage of Margaret and Curtis hugging and kissing when she shows up. I chewed them out so bad they actually apologized.”

  “I’ll get his ass fired, whoever it was,” said Patterson, in a bored tone.

  “It was a her.”

  “You faxed everybody and God that statement already, right?” said Patterson. “The one about Margaret joining her husband for a nice long visit, the need for the continuing therapeutic solitude.…”

  “And the continuing quiet essential and curative. Sure. And everybody figures that you owe Margaret reassurance, and she’ll get it and maybe have like a second honeymoon out here, with you helping them with the rough parts.”

  “Sounds kind of fun, doesn’t it?”

  “I don’t see why you have to bring her all the way out here, Red, not really.” She did have the sense to hesitate, unsure whether she sh
ould pursue the subject.

  He did not encourage her.

  She kept talking. “At least, her visit could be short. She could just fly in the way Bruno Kraft did, take a look, and leave, right?”

  They were outside in the night, sitting beside the pool, sipping spearmint tea. The pool lights were pretty, Patterson thought, the ripples illuminated from within. You had to give those early Southern California designers credit. They had a good idea of how moguls and starlets ought to live. A person who could afford it could live in a California that was just as glamorous as it was supposed to be.

  The surface of the pool was blemished by a small upwelling where the water from the filter surfaced. It was hours after Bruno’s call from Margaret’s apartment. Kraft’s cultivated delivery, like the voice-over in an ad for expensive cars, had described Margaret’s threats as though they were of mere interest. The press were already aware that by this time tomorrow night Margaret would be listening to the purling waters of Owl Springs.

  “You didn’t like Margaret?” said Patterson, examining his fingernails in the shivering light from the pool.

  “I look forward to seeing her again,” said Loretta Lee. She sounded okay, but something bothered her.

  Maybe she hadn’t been such a good actress after all, thought Patterson. “There’s no reason,” he said, “for you to feel threatened by Margaret.”

  “Of course there isn’t.”

  “And there’s no reason to feel threatened by me.”

  “Of course not, Red. I wouldn’t feel threatened by you under any circumstance. What a thing to say. I just wonder why you’re letting her visit.”

  “Kindness,” said Patterson.

  Loretta Lee said nothing.

  But having used the word “threat” and “Margaret” in the same brief span of time exposed Patterson’s anxieties, if only to himself.

  “We’ll take good care of Margaret,” said Patterson. “She’s a charming woman. We’ll make her feel that she’s a part of this place. She’ll never want to leave.”