Mr. Bones

by Paul Theroux

  Though we had no friends on the island, I knew a handful of artists. I made the mistake of introducing Mrs. Everest to two of them. Morrie, who was a sculptor, showed her his studio and then said, “I’ve got some more pieces out back.” She said, “I’ve seen enough.” She was offhand with Marsha, an etcher. I asked her what she thought of Marsha’s work. She said, “Lipstick lesbian.” After this, Morrie and Marsha were cooler toward me. I didn’t blame them.

  When she went about wooing me, I was struck with self-conscious fascination, realizing that this little woman, being obvious—but offering attention, grand meals, glittering occasions—was actually succeeding. I saw myself succumbing and wanting more—and getting it; and then I was in her orbit. In ignoring my work, she seemed to imply that she was making an exception in liking me, and that I should be grateful for that. Meals were central to our relationship, food was important, cheese was a theme.

  “What they do, no one has ever done before,” Mrs. Everest said of a husband and wife whose photographs she exhibited. Each was a transvestite. They photographed themselves in costume. “That is the proof they are artists.”

  At this early stage of my knowing Mrs. Everest, I did not examine this remark. It seemed debatable. My paintings had never been done before. Yet I decided that I liked her conviction. I wanted her to say things like this about me. She didn’t, yet my credentials—the ones that mattered to Mrs. Everest—were soon established.

  It happened this way. One weekend in our second year on the island, my wife and I were visited by Andy Wyeth, with Helga Testorf in tow, stopping off on their annual early-summer migration from Pennsylvania to Maine. He flew into our small airport in a private plane. This quickly became news on the island. Where was he staying? What was he doing? Whom was he with? Mrs. Everest had the news early, but it was not until Andy left—he hated socializing—that I revealed to her that he had stayed with us, that I was putting the finishing touches to a portrait of him that I had begun the year before in Port Clyde, Maine. Mrs. Everest only wanted to know about the Helga detail. She said she hated Christina’s World.

  “What about Betsy, his wife?” Mrs. Everest asked.

  “There’s Betsy’s world and Helga’s world, and Andy proceeds from one to the other,” I said. “Think of it as a kind of informal polygamy.”

  This complex shuttling romance bewitched Mrs. Everest, who had the old coquette’s weakness for steamy gossip.

  She wanted to see my painting of him, his lined, deeply tanned face like a landscape, his kindly smile, his luminous eyes. In the foreground, one of his hands was lifted, his delicate fingers crooked in the manner of a painter gripping a brush. He had the leathery look of a sportsman, and although he was in his eighties at the time, he seemed much younger—his smile gave him everything, youth and intelligence and confidence. I posed him standing at a window, his sloping meadow and the harbor just visible beyond.

  “Why didn’t you give a party for him?”

  “He doesn’t go to parties,” I said.

  “Helga was so beautiful in those pictures,” Mrs. Everest said. “She must be really old now. Is she fat?”

  When I said that Helga was lovely Mrs. Everest took it as a rebuke. I mentioned that Andy had a painting with him, of a cataract on a woodland stream, he called The Carry. He had showed it to me, saying, “I fell in,” and he pointed to the place where, as he had stood painting, he’d stumbled into the water. The picture was real to him, the experience a vivid piece of his history; but he had made it, not installed it.

  She wasn’t interested in that, and she frowned at my portrait of Andy, as though concealing her reaction, like a wine snob swilling a sip. They were not the sort of pictures that she would ever exhibit. Yet I had been given face, in the Chinese manner, by this visit by the master of my school of painting. I tried to explain to Mrs. Everest that to me much of Wyeth’s work, especially the later landscapes and coastal scenes, verged on abstract expressionism, or were studies in color. But she wasn’t listening. She cocked her head at my portrait and looked closely, asked more questions about Helga and the Wyeth marriage, and seemed annoyed by my upbeat replies. But this was a turning point for me, my validation, the Wyeth visit.

  Confident of her friendship, I saw more of Mrs. Everest, nearly always in the ritualistic restaurant-going way, and the paradox was always her ordering three courses and seldom eating anything. Junior’s restaurant, where we often met, was a casual place, with excellent food, that was nicknamed “the kitchen” because the old-time islanders gathered there. In the summer, no one made lunch at home, and the islanders were sociable, so it was always lunch at Junior’s.

  A meal in most societies on earth represents a peacemaking gesture. But you have to eat something—anything, a nibble is enough. Mrs. Everest seldom swallowed. I took this to be hostile. A concentrated thought darkened her face, and she used her fork and knife as though she was killing and mutilating the food on her plate, lingering over it, always with her mouth open, seeming to utter a curse. And then at last the slow, disgusted way she ate, masticating it like a gum chewer, not swallowing. She had a habit of spitting food onto her plate, turning her whole meal into dog food. No one mentioned this, perhaps because, like me, they stopped looking. And here is the irony: she once said to me, “I hate watching people eat. And I can’t stand to see them laughing.”

  My wife was off-island for the day. I was sitting with Mrs. Everest, and we were about to order, when I saw at a nearby table a man I had met in England on one of my trips, an American Foreign Service officer, Harry Platt. He’d kept in touch as he’d been moved from one post to another, and over six years or so he’d been to three countries in the Middle East, Turkey the most recent.

  Seeing Harry Platt’s face from far off in our local seafront restaurant made him seem gaudily familiar, like an apparition. He must have felt the same about seeing me, because he smiled broadly and got up. He was with an older woman, who stared but did not rise from her chair.

  “Well met!” The pretentious expression was not pretentious the way he said it, but suited his old-fashioned Ivy League manner. “How great to see you. What brings you to the island?”

  “My wife and I have had a place here for a few years. She’s away at the moment.”

  He explained that he was catching the ferry in the morning, and then he became self-conscious and nodded at the older woman at his table.

  “Will you join us? This is my mother.”

  I glanced at Mrs. Everest, who had been eyeing the other woman, perhaps sizing her up. She said, “Absolutely not.”

  Harry Platt was an experienced diplomat, a charming man in his late fifties. He had been helpful to me, putting me in touch with various people, once helping with a visa, another time explaining a tricky piece of foreign policy. He knew presidents, he had sat with prime ministers. But hearing Mrs. Everest’s rebuff (and his mother had heard too), he became flustered, his face reddening, his eyes frantic, as though he’d been slapped. His mother looked furious and chalky-faced.

  “Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said.

  “We’re leaving at seven,” he said with a desperate smile.

  At that, his mother got up and went to the door, and Harry seemed to lose his balance, actually to topple, as if yielding to the gravitational pull of his mother in her heaving herself out. Harry’s embarrassment made him fumble his farewell, and I saw, just a flicker—the glint in his eyes, the set of his mouth—that he was enraged.

  Mrs. Everest said, “I think I’ll have the peekytoe crab salad. You should have the lobster mac and cheese—it’s one of Junior’s specialities.”

  She did not allude to Harry or his mother, but the whole encounter upset me so badly I couldn’t eat.

  There were the men she called “the boys.” Tony was an antiques dealer and a stickler for decorum. “Dickie’s such a goddess. She served a raw ahi amuse-bouche without putting out fish knives.” He was a name-dropper—Jackie this, Gloria that—but a reliable fri
end to Mrs. Everest, and like her, a gossip.

  Tony fed her stories. She was in general not a listener, except to malicious tattle, and then she was all ears, smiling in anticipation, her mouth half open like a dog awaiting a treat. It might be something simple. The Callanders, for example. Biff had been in the State Department, and Mrs. Everest liked to say, “He was in the CIA.” She said this with an admiring whisper when they’d been on speaking terms, and when she rejected him she said it as blame, revealing his disgrace—the spy as sneak—taking away his power by stating the fact: I know his secret.

  But Tony had a better piece of gossip. Biff’s wife was Peruvian. At one of the dinner parties Tony was seated next to Lara, being charming, asking all the right questions, mentioning how he had gone to Cuzco and loved Machu Picchu, letting Lara talk, refilling her glass, smiling, probably a bit of “Jackie once told me . . .” and the question he asked all couples, pure hostility masked as genial inquiry, “You must tell me how you met.” That had to have come up, because afterward he had a present for Mrs. Everest: “Guess who was a flight attendant before she married James Bond?”

  Another of Mrs. Everest’s boys was Sanford—Sandy—whom no one liked. Even Tony was afraid, always steering clear of him, and he warned me to be careful of Sandy.

  Sandy was small like Mrs. Everest, very thin, rather vain in his choice of shoes (“I have hundreds of pairs”), stylish in his clothes—expensive black suit with black T-shirt—and his skin was a strange color, possibly the result of a tanning salon that over the years had turned him a shade of purple, or maybe he had poor kidney function.

  He had a hostile habit of starting sentences, “Don’t take this the wrong way,” and then following it with something insulting. In his talk he was much noisier than Tony, and he won the gossip competition. If Tony knew a mild scandal about someone, Sandy knew a disgrace. This disposed Mrs. Everest to Sandy, who was in his sixties but had the look—skinny, pouting, bug-eyed, small—of a bad boy. When I saw him with Mrs. Everest, he put me in mind of Iago, his purply face twisted in telling a story, his hands contorted and shielding his features like a mask of claws. I thought of the expression “motiveless malignancy.” I did a sketch of Sandy, which I titled I Am Not the Man I Am.

  Perhaps there was a motive, and it might have been Iago’s motive too. Mrs. Everest was Sandy’s only source of income. He was no better at his installations (hand-fired bricks) than anyone else she exhibited, but he was a far more malevolent gossip, and that was something that delighted Mrs. Everest. Like Tony and some of her other boys, he acted as her formal male companion, her walker. Even so, she was outrageously disloyal. After one party she said, “He was at it all night with that young waiter, dropping hairpins.”

  Knowing that Sandy would quote me, I was wary when I spoke to him. I made a point of praising Mrs. Everest’s taste, her hospitality, her humor, her food. I spoke approvingly of Tony, because in those days Tony was in Mrs. Everest’s good graces.

  And why was I part of her circle? Perhaps it was my success: other people—important people, Andy Wyeth—cared about my work. And she had something to give, lunches, the dinners, the parties, with us in attendance. We were glad to belong, and then—knowing her better, becoming uncertain, seeing how she cut or dropped people—we were even better behaved.

  I said to Izzy, “She’s awful, but that’s not the worst of it. My fear is that to keep her friendship we’ll become just like her.”

  Even after all my travels I realized that I’d never known anyone like her. On an impulse, just doodling, I roughed out in pencil a sketch of her, with Tony and Sandy and some of the others, a capriccio of faces. But when I added some emphasis in ink, I got scared and tossed it.

  Perhaps to purge it of memories, she had gutted her house near the harbor and at great expense redecorated it to display her art collection: Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg, Louis, Olitski, and some installations. Her friends, especially Tony and Sandy and Amadeo, raved about it, praised her for keeping the shell and rebuilding the interior, as a kind of museum, where my work was not welcome.

  “That house has great bones,” Tony said.

  But with obvious secrecy she never invited anyone into the house. Whenever she was picked up by a car, she met the person in the driveway or stepped outside before the driver knocked. No one was allowed inside. Once, meeting her to give her a lift, I saw her kitchen through the window. A pile of laundry had been stacked, unsorted, on the stove, and her cat was asleep on the kitchen table in the sunshine, the cat’s bowl near it. That said everything about Mrs. Everest’s eating arrangements.

  “I used to be a gourmet cook,” she said. “I gave lavish dinner parties.”

  Was this true? No one I knew had ever eaten her food or been to a dinner party she’d given. She only ate in restaurants, presiding over the table. She ordered three courses and picked at them, hardly eating, never finishing. But in those rare moments when she chewed some food, a hidden part of her personality became apparent—a wolfish energy and appetite, her yellow teeth champing, her turned-down mouth working, an alertness the whole time, her gaze widened as though to ward off an intruder. Then she spat. After that, she’d pass a knuckle across the crumbs on her lips, push the plate aside, and say to the waitress, “Take this away.”

  She was always offhand with menials, and her brusque manner made them excessively polite.

  “Yes, right away, madam. Shall I wrap it up for you?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  At the end of the meal she would suggest another meal—dinner tomorrow night, lunch the following day, Sunday brunch. She only saw people for meals; she was unavailable at any other time. She went out occasionally, to movies, to see friends, to shop, but was covert about it, and generally huddled inside her grand house, except at mealtimes or gallery openings.

  Her friends, especially those shrieking men, praised her sense of style, and yet she only wore the old suede jacket and junk jewelry. No one remarked on how rumpled she looked; on the contrary, her shabbiness was regarded as a sort of defiant fashion.

  She had the big-city habit, which was like a vice to me, of going to the movies in the afternoon, even on the sunniest day. Although her house was by the harbor, she never went near the water, did not swim or go sailing.

  Speaking of an adulterous woman on the island, she asked me what I thought. I said, “Emma Bovary,” and she corrected me: “No, her name is Alice.” Other instances like this convinced me that she had no education, but her coterie saw this as a virtue. “Dickie dropped out of high school!” This was more praise, but it was clear to me that she was unlettered: all she knew was from talk, from something she’d been told, from anecdote and chat. But she taught me that no one could be more condescending than a high school dropout. Books put her to sleep, print was a soporific to her. She loved big bold paintings of stripes, the oversize archery targets that were in vogue in the sixties, the grotesque photos in tabloids. Anything less bored her. Her gallery reflected this tendency. I remember one show with car crashes and crime scenes, forensic photos, bloody bandages.

  Sooner than I realized it, because I did not dare to dislike Mrs. Everest, she made me doubt myself. I did not lose faith in my work, yet I felt browbeaten and stupid because of her. Just being with her, a whole lunchtime, say, would turn me into a dope. I’d learned not to contradict her or put in a friendly mitigating word for the woman she disparaged or the man she maligned.

  Having listened in silence to Mrs. Everest’s venomous remarks, I always felt ashamed after one of these meals, avoiding the front window as I left the restaurant, turning away from the reflection of my face. We were, as I say, summer people. Had I fallen foul of her and been ostracized, we would have had nothing—no parties, no society. Yes, I see that I was cowardly and deluded, but I was fascinated too. Ethical satisfaction is not the same as aesthetic satisfaction, or plain curiosity. I studied her and did sketches, compulsively planning her portrait.

  It never occurred to me that, o
ut of my hearing, she might be disparaging me. That was strange: she was disloyal to everyone I knew, yet I believed she would be loyal to my wife and me.

  When this thought occurred to me, I saw my naïveté, but of course by then it was too late.

  Someone Mrs. Everest had fallen out with—had in fact rejected—said to me one day, “She’s an alcoholic, you know,” as though this (if it were true) explained everything.

  Perhaps it explained her famished stare, her fuss and obsessiveness, her bleak moods—little eclipses when she darkened and became impossible to please. Perhaps it explained her sweet tooth, which dry drunks are supposed to have, and her conspicuous regard for holding a glass—not drinking it but treating alcohol as if it were a magic potion, forbidden, tempting, poisonous, transformative. In her mood swings, which were frequent, she could turn on a person and, blinking, bare her teeth and deliver a sudden insult.

  But a history of alcoholism could not account for the pleasure she took in someone’s downfall, her love of bad news. The alcoholics I had known who’d taken the pledge were humbled, always haltingly explaining their weakness, or in a low-grade fever of atonement, constantly treading the tightrope of sobriety.

  Not Mrs. Everest. She looked thirsty and pitiless, and on many occasions, clapping her hands like a child on hearing something disgraceful, relentless in her ill will, she was triumphant, reckless, and often wore the delirious expression of a predator, eyes aglow, as though she wanted to feast on her victim—had indeed already weakened the prey and would wait until the poor creature fell flat so that she could straddle the corpse and take a big bite from the haunch.