“How long will your therapy with Dr. Patterson last?” asked another reporter.
Margaret chose to ignore the questions as celebrities learn to do, pretending that she wasn’t hearing them. Someone wished her luck, and Margaret did smile in return. This was a mistake, probably, because it brought the same questions all over again. She made a show of confidence, of being sure that she was doing what anyone in her position would do.
It was clear to Margaret, however, that many people might think her visit unnecessary and unwise. People would understand her motives, but they might think her overanxious, lacking faith in the famous doctor.
It seemed like a long flight to Margaret, the small corporate jet descending at last over the strikingly empty landscape, the wrinkled hillsides, the stark stream-wrinkles, subject matter Georgia O’Keeffe had savored, and, Margaret saw now, had painted because she’d had no choice. This countryside commanded, defeated. Margaret realized how little she knew about desert.
She was so close to Curtis now.
A steward explained that as soon as they landed they would have to take off again. “They don’t want any visitors at all,” said the steward with a smile, as though this was good news.
“That’s very strange, isn’t it,” she said, sipping some cherry-flavored Calistoga water because it was a drink Curtis liked.
“That’s the way it is.” He spoke in a southern accent, and, now that the short flight was nearly over, seemed eager to impart something of himself. The network logo was emblazoned on his jacket pocket, and the man was manicured, polished, tailored, so that the residue of regional accent seemed an affectation.
“It doesn’t strike you as peculiar?”
“Red Patterson can make up the rules. Why not? Listen—he’s got a lot of responsibility on his shoulders. That’s what people don’t realize. An average person couldn’t even begin to understand what goes on in the mind of someone like that. I imagine that if you—well, maybe not you, but me, for sure—were to live twenty-four hours with the kinds of cares and worries Red Patterson has—we’d probably implode under the weight.”
“Do you really think so?”
The steward made a single, silent ha in response: are you kidding?
As they descended, Margaret fumbled half-aware for her seatbelt. They were falling from the sky, in that gliding, controlled way of aircraft, and the desert looked featureless. Where was this famous oasis, this estate she had heard so much about?
“You stick it together like this,” he said, fastening the seatbelt for her. She was so taken with the barren desert, brass-yellow in the afternoon light, that she could not take her eyes away from the view out the window.
“The work that goes on here is for the good of mankind,” said the steward.
Margaret looked into his eyes for a hint of irony, of knowing exaggeration.
Already she felt reassured. The place was real—as though this had been the reason for her fear. How could she have doubted? There were palm trees and a wall, and the large, oval buildings she knew must be airplane hangars. They were on the ground, and Margaret experienced that exhilaration that arrival so often gave her, destination evolving from idea, to hope, to solid, sun-soaked fact, fact with asphalt and concrete and distant, arcing leaves and alluring shadows.
So close to Curtis.
But it was not Curtis who stepped from the shadow of the palm trees and strode toward her.
It was the doctor himself.
There were several fine cracks in the landing strip, and a line of red ants worked their way from one of them. There was a sprinkler running somewhere. From a great distance water touched her.
For a moment she was disappointed, but then she swept herself forward. She embraced the doctor, and he kissed her.
“It’s so wonderful to see you here, Margaret,” he said.
39
His kiss was not a surprise. It was pleasant, brotherly, a light touch. It silenced her.
“You’ll want a tour of the garden,” he said. When she did not respond at once, he added, “Everyone sees the garden first.”
“You make it sound like I have no choice,” she said.
He laughed. “Why would you want a choice?”
Odd, she told herself, that at the very beginning the doctor told her how little freedom she had.
She tried to console herself that Curtis had been secure in a beautiful place.
“You’d be surprised how much time I sit right here in the water,” Patterson said, when they had returned to the side of the pool. “Sometimes I spend so much time in the water I turn into a giant prune.”
Margaret had noticed this tendency in men before, joking cheerfulness as a barrier against what had to be said. She felt that it was awkward to ask, but it was time. “I want to see Curtis.”
He led her to a chair beside the shimmering water. The reflection cast white wrinkles over his shirt front. “You’re going to be enchanted with the new painting,” said the doctor. “I certainly am.”
She felt the sharpest disappointment. Curtis knew that she was here, and he didn’t want to see her.
Patterson must have read the feeling in her eyes. “Curtis loves you,” he said.
This was so exactly what she needed to hear that she could not speak.
“Maybe I doubted that, at first, although I don’t know why. Any man would love you,” he said with a smile. “But as Curtis and I worked it became clear that he really wanted to be with you, and that I was not going to be able to help nearly as much as I had hoped.”
“I want to be with him. That’s all I want.” She meant that this was all she wanted in her life.
It was as if she had not spoken. “And it was obvious to me finally, just in the last day or two, that what we need here is you.”
She allowed herself to make the proper response. “I’m so glad.”
“It’s true that in many ways your marriage was barren.”
She felt tears start. No, she told herself. No tears.
“But I think we all endure a form of imprisonment,” he said, “trapped in our sex, enslaved by our bodies. Don’t you?”
She recovered her poise. “I’m so grateful for everything you’ve done.”
“Can you wait one more night?” he asked. “One more night before seeing Curtis?”
The grill at the bottom of the pool was an ugly, slotted thing, blistered with rust. “It doesn’t seem fair.”
“No, it hardly does. But now with you here in the walls of the estate—I think the painting will thrive.”
The painting. She began to hate it. “I can’t interrupt the painting,” she said, feeling disheartened and hopeful at once. She had a brief and vivid fantasy of running through the halls of the big house, calling out for Curtis. He might be able to see her, even now, from one of the upper windows. To just see him, just for a moment, that was all she wanted.
She had the strongest impression, as she sat there, that the two of them were absolutely alone in the desert. This was hardly likely, she knew, in an estate as elaborate as this. She gazed at the famous countenance before her. Hadn’t he worn makeup before? Now he looked tanned, confident, the man she had seen in so many magazines, so many videos. He looked full of life, a man who had never been troubled by anything.
“I’m so thankful,” she said, feeling childish and powerless as she spoke.
“Once I thought I saw a scorpion there, right where your foot is now. But it was only an empty shell. They moult.”
“I have to wait, don’t I? I don’t have any choice.”
He smiled. He opened his hands, and then closed them, softly, the way he would catch something he did not want to kill.
40
In chess, her father had written, we need more eyes than this common, everyday vision. Even that sublime, additional seat of vision, the third eye, is not enough. We need the many eyes of a spider, to watch what stands before us on the board, and also what does not.
It was cool inside.
“You’ll like your room,” said Patterson. “It’s the biggest bedroom in the house, and my favorite.”
“You must have a large staff here,” Margaret said.
“Not anymore,” he said. “I had to sacrifice them, for the greater solitude.”
Margaret did not want to take another step. How can Curtis stand it here? she wondered. The garden was paradise, but the house was bulky and dead, random corridors, and the odd, dry smell of unused rooms.
It had struck her before how little actual mental telepathy there was in the world. Her father had been dying and she had been at a librarian’s convention in New Orleans, signing copies of one of her books. Even when the desk clerk had handed her the slip with her keys the Urgent—call home had not triggered any particular anxiety, only the annoyance that her mother was interrupting her professional life. Later, she had felt guilt and shock that she’d had so little premonition.
Now she was so close to the man she loved, and she felt no intimation where in the house he might be, or what he might be feeling.
Patterson showed her works of art, views of the desert out large windows, and a screening room like a tiny theater at the end of one corridor, the smell of the room dry, like freshly ironed cotton. He showed her a Picasso, a lovely crayon mother and child. He said that he felt a little guilty about having art all the way out here, where so few people could see it.
Patterson was giving her a tour, but also, perhaps, showing her that the place was too big for her to even think of searching it. The message seemed to be: to search is to lose, to think is to forget. “The story is that Ernest Hemingway and Gary Cooper stood on this balcony and shot the branches off that Joshua tree over there,” he said.
“It still has its branches,” said Margaret.
Patterson laughed, shrugged. “I think it’s missing a few.”
Margaret had always felt, without really examining the belief, that there were two kinds of people. There were ordinary people, who shopped at supermarkets and had favorite television shows, checked books out of the library and bought frozen food.
Then there was the other, much smaller set of people, the people who mattered. Curtis was one of these people, and so was Red Patterson. These people had inner qualities that made them more actual than most people, their lives more colorful, their passions more important. And, because of the respect and even awe people in general felt for such figures, they had an extra dimension that most people did not possess.
Margaret did not think of herself as a nonentity, and by no means thought of herself as drab and lightweight. But compared with the famous artist and this famous psychiatrist she was merely another human being.
There had to be a reason that she had created Earl the Duck, and given him so little character. So when she walked beside Red Patterson and felt afraid, she tried to argue the feeling away. This tightness in her throat, this feeling that the walls were narrowing around her, were sensations that had to be ignored.
The doctor unlocked a door, and let it swing open.
The bedroom had curtains that would have suited an opera house, mauve with tasseled gold braid, a style that did not match the bare, Western decor of the other rooms she had seen.
But it did suit the house in a way, she realized. It was amusing—this was the best room of a brothel. The mirrors were everywhere, antique, age-flecked. She turned her head, and there were Margarets and Red Pattersons, sliced and cast downward into an infinity of chambers.
“No mirrors on the ceiling, though,” said Patterson. Sometimes he seemed to know what she was thinking. “This room is a tribute to vanity, not sex.” He ran his fingers through his hair, appraising his reflection. The glass of the mirrors had yellowed with age, a tint that softened shapes, altering colors gently but in a way that displeased, like smog.
She carried only an overnight bag. It looked out of place when she put it down on the bed, casual and contemporary.
“I’ll leave you here,” he said, and she had the oddest feeling that he expected her to say No, please stay.
“I’d like something to drink,” she said, although she was not thirsty.
She was relieved when there was a knock at the door and a man she had not met stood there with a tray.
So, she thought, there is a staff here after all.
She introduced herself. “Yes, Mrs. Newns, I know who you are,” said the man.
He was a solid-looking individual, of medium height, and he looked at her without a smile. He should have been dressed in something black and white, she thought, something formal. He wore clean, pressed cottons, soft-grays, tans. “We’ve been looking forward to having you at Owl Springs.”
He put the tray on a side table, and stood for a moment looking at the teapot. Although his movements were deft, sure-handed, Margaret could not suppress the thought that he was not used to carrying trays and serving beverages.
“Where is my husband staying?” she asked.
Typical of me, she chided herself. To boldly go where anyone with a brain would shut up.
He did not look at her but moved the teapot minutely. He had blond, curly hair on his hands. He shifted a lid, peered in to look at the sugar cubes, and took long enough, she thought, to count every one.
It was plain the man was not going to answer her question. She tried again, making herself sound offhand. “Just out of curiosity, because it’s been so long.” She did not sound offhand at all; she could not keep the feeling from her voice.
“He’s doing very well,” said the man.
“Does my husband come down for dinner very often?” she said.
“Mr. Newns is very happy here,” he said.
“Is he?”
The man looked at her, and then he laughed, a little, quiet laugh, a laugh that was inhaled rather than exhaled, the laugh of a man who was used to private jokes. Margaret laughed a little, too; she couldn’t help it. It seemed courteous and appropriate, even though she felt she had understood only a part of the punch line.
But then, she realized, there was nothing to laugh about.
“My name is Don Bishop,” the man was saying. “I owe everything to Dr. Patterson.”
“And you would do anything in the world to help him.”
He did not quite meet her eyes. Many men had faces like this, pleasant masks. Such men often found speech unfamiliar, and resented being forced by circumstance to communicate. “You shouldn’t try to disturb Dr. Patterson’s work,” he said.
When he was gone, she tried to tell herself that she did not really feel trapped. She tried to convince herself that she was going to enjoy this insane place. She hurried to the curtains, ready to be amused at her worries.
The windows were blank, dark. They were shuttered, heavy oak boards that, even when she got the sash up and fought the fastenings, would not open. She felt all the breathable air vanish from the room.
The hook free, the wooden coverings stayed as they were, weathered into place, baked solid by sun.
She pounded the barrier with her fists, and then gathered herself and gave the shutters a kick, hard, with the flat of her foot.
They swung free, and she pushed them all the way open, as far as they could go, until the desert was there, open and empty, mirage consuming the horizon.
Escape was possible, if she survived the jump without breaking an ankle on the sharp stones. But then there would be that flat, solid heat to trek through, and she could feel the heat even now, kneading the air. She closed the shutters, hating the way the dry wood met with a quiet sound, bone on bone.
I should just relax, she told herself. I’m getting upset about nothing.
She tiptoed from her room. She had the strangest feeling that this was what Patterson wanted her to do. We’ll put the rat in the maze, and see what it sniffs out. She was down the hall, hurrying, putting her ear to one door after another. She was lost within a minute, confounded by the sameness of the doors, the solemn, beamed ceilings, the silence.
Curtis—I’m he
re.
There was only the silence, and her sense of feeling both helpless and ridiculous. When she found herself standing outside the mirrored room at last she hesitated, wanting to delay her entrance into this chamber, this maze of reflections, each image marked by the figure of a woman looking back, into the tunnel that held her.
They sat beside the pool. It was late, the air cool, scented with the mulch and flowers hidden by the dark.
“There is one aspect of Curtis’s life that I still have to explore,” said Patterson.
“If I can help you.…” said Margaret.
He liked the way she looked. “I need to get to know you, Margaret. It’s necessary, and it will be a pleasure.”
“A mutual pleasure,” she said, sounding more hopeful than sure of herself.
What name will I have for you, thought Patterson. What pet name when I know you well?
Bishop served them a light supper there under the palms, a delicious shrimp curry, very mild, served over rice, and sangria in one of the big hand-thrown pitchers from Guadalajara. Bishop was a decent cook, but his sangria was heavenly, made with lemons from here in the oasis, a delicate citrus that had grown more like a vine than a tree.
“It’s beautiful here,” said Margaret.
“Some people don’t like it,” said Patterson.
“It’s so peaceful.”
“I think that’s what some of the singers and politicians didn’t like. It was too quiet. Too remote.”
“How far away are we?”
“From what?” he asked.
“From help. If anyone should need it.”
“But we wouldn’t really need help, out here.”
She smiled, and he laughed. What an amusing idea, he made his eyes say.
“But,” she said, “if I had an attack of appendicitis or—”
“I was a pretty fair surgeon,” said Patterson. “And could very easily perform an adequate procedure here on the estate.”
“But certainly you’d need—”
“I was joking. Of course I wouldn’t actually perform surgery here.” He rolled his eyes. “I want you to realize how self-contained we are. How complete.”
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