The Art Lover

by Carole Maso

  “I love a red rented car.”

  “I know.”

  We ride with the windows down and the wind blows in our faces like it will on the beach. It feels like we’re already there. In the backseat there’s suntan lotion, towels, magazines, books, an umbrella.

  He talks New York talk to me. He tells me about Max. About the Signs Show he was in that Max curated. “Tell me every single thing,” I beg. He does.

  I tell him about Normal Boy, the Children’s Counselor, the Young Beauty. “Don’t leave anything out,” he says.

  “You just missed the balloon festival, Steven.”

  “Maybe next year,” he says.

  He asks about Grey, “the handsome twin,” he calls him, even though Grey and David are identical. “Oh, Caroline,” he sighs. “Where is your eye?” And besides, he tells me, he likes the moody, brooding type.

  “Sometimes, Steven, I’m afraid Grey will just go to sleep like my mother and never wake up.”

  “I know,” Steven says.

  I’ve got the map on my lap. It’s almost entirely blue. Sometimes I’m so afraid. Even in bright light. “Sometimes, Steven, I’m afraid that will happen to me.”

  “I know,” he says. “You can talk nonstop to me.”

  “We’re nearly there, aren’t we?”

  He nods. “Yes.”

  “Did I tell you about the Inventor?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” he says. He smiles. He knows this is going to be a good one.

  “You mean I never told you about my one incredible night with the Inventor—his two Samoyeds, his beakers, his Water Pik?”

  He laughs out loud. “No!”

  “Have I got a story for you!”

  He tells me next about eating sushi with a stranger. That was yesterday. And we’re up to date.

  We turn a corner and we are there. Suddenly we are at the edge of things. The sea! We gasp. A beautiful expanse of blue.

  “Oh, it feels so good,” he murmurs, our clothes coming off, the beach already toasty warm. “It feels so wonderful,” he says. We know we’re drinking in the last hours of summer. “What a truly great idea, Steven.” I’m holding his hand. He is my friend.

  We sleep in the sun, eat, drink. He sits up now and then. What he sees is sand. Sharks, he thinks, swans. What he sees is everything. A lighthouse, a carousel. Babies in strollers pass by. Kids in water wings. “Cute,” he says. A statement of fact as they pass. “Cute. Cute. Cute. Do you ever think of babies these days, Caroline?”

  What I’m thinking is I’m afraid they’d all fall asleep like Mother, like I’m afraid for Grey, but I keep it from him.

  “How about it, you and me?”

  “Why not, Steven?” I smile. A great day. I am simply sitting in the sunlight whispering his name. I am not thinking about rain.

  I see two dark women sambaing down the beach and point them out. “Looking for Latins in Watch Hill, Rhode Island, Caroline?”

  We decide it’s time to go in the water. We dip ourselves slowly into the blue. I hold his hand. After all, there is no reason to be so afraid. Underwater our bodies are huge. It’s like we have two or three bodies each. Big chests, large hearts. We come up for air, breathless. Enough love to last. It feels so good.

  “You look fantastic.”

  We lie on the beach for hours. We lie on the beach like we’ve got all the time in the world. “Some cheese?” he asks. “Some more champagne?”

  It’s so bright everything looks white. We picture white sharks. White horses galloping furiously. Max, that’s what the light looks like.

  He talks about eating sushi with a beautiful stranger. We think of the thousand ways to make love. The thousand ways to say I love you.

  I think of the child Giotto on the verge of his life, in that one moment before everything is different forever.

  “Let’s walk,” Steven says all of a sudden.

  “Sure,” I say. We walk a long way. “I was hoping to see starfish,” I tell him.

  He shrugs. “There’s still time,” he says.

  Down the beach there’s a crowd of people surrounding something. It turns out to be a small whale beached on the shore. It looks dead to us, but they’re lifting it into the water, trying to help it breathe.

  “He’s no Lazarus,” Steven says and we just stand there and watch.

  Spare us, I think.

  We decide to turn around. It’s getting late. The sun falling, the ocean rising high. There’s a wall of water. We seem small when we walk next to it. Then bigger. Suddenly it seems we might hold it back. For a second we seem that strong, our hands that steady. We feel that way together: sun-drenched, refreshed, touched by light. We think of No-Lazarus. Then No-Lazarus is replaced by the desire for starfish, children in water wings, dangling earrings, cities in sand reaching up for the perfection of sky.

  The sea sprays us. The sea mists us. Steven looks out past me, a young boy intent on sheep, a young man in love with everything. I look into his eyes. What he sees is so much. “Look, Caroline,” he says, and he points to the edge of the blackening sea, astonished.

  Night Fishing

  We caught a lot of fish in the lake, mostly sunnies, which we threw back, but at night we would lay down the line that would sink way to the bottom, the line for the catfish. We would row out to the center of the lake in the boat to the dock. David would take the bait out of the Chinese-food container and put it on the hook on the bobbing dock. Only Grey stayed behind. I had two brothers, one who loved water, and one who loved earth.

  I was a little afraid because in the evening we never knew whether the birds were birds or bats. When we were in the boat at night, my mother always wore a scarf on her head, with swirls on it, and as Dad was rowing toward the center she would lean over and put her hand in the lake and she would make a swirling pattern.

  Then she looked up. “There’s a swan,” she said. “There’s a horse.” And she traced the stars, making pictures in the sky. “And a bear. Everything’s up there. There’s a fish. Two fish. Swimming in opposite directions.”

  “At night you can go fishing in the water and you can go fishing in the sky,” I said.

  That was the last summer of her life. I was six and she was thirty, and the water swirled and the sky swirled.

  The Floating Shape

  She was wearing earrings shaped like fish that dangled and they swam in the air when she moved her head. We were sitting linder a striped parasol. “Parasol,” she whispered. She put on a lot of lotion, even though she sat in the shade. I remember her rubbing it into her legs, her shoulders. I guess she believed the sun to be something that could burn her alive, like my father’s stare. She leaned over and tied the strings of my sunbonnet. I remember her breasts. Her whole body leaning over. Her suit was red with polka dots. “One, two, buckle my shoe,” she sang softly, tying a bow under my chin. “Three, four, shut the door.” She put her knees up and looked out at the water.

  Dad and David walked along the shore. David was pointing at things and dragging his plastic pail of water. Grey sat further back on the beach, digging deeper and deeper into the sand with his blue shovel. All over the beach children were digging passageways and tunnels and making enormous towers of sand that reached endlessly for the perfection of sky. She put on her hat, picked me up and walked to the water. She seemed very tall; it seemed we were very high up. She pressed me close to her and said, “Don’t cry, please, don’t cry.” But they were her tears I felt on my face, not mine. She sat me down next to her and we let the water lap our legs.

  “Swan,” she said. “Can you say ‘swan’?” and she pointed. We watched a little girl pass in an inflatable white bird. Swan.

  We sat there for a long while. She dug into her striped bag and took out a tube of lipstick and put on a bright pink. She blotted her lips on a tissue and showed me the lovely imprint. “Lips,” she smiled and gave me a kiss. Lips. For a moment she held the tissue up to the sun, then let that perfect shape go floating out on the lake
. “Say good-bye,” she said.

  Fall

  The Renovation of St.Vincent’s

  Children pass me on the way to the Greenwich Village School, P.S. 41, my old school. Out my window I can see the tops of their heads: some hats, mostly not. Rasta curls, ponytails, braids, lots of braids, carrot tops. All kinds of barrettes: barrettes with streamers, with liquid goo inside them, barrettes shaped like bears, like stars. The children scream and yell and sing. Some days they seem so loud, I’d like them to disappear forever. Other days I think each little hair on the tops of their heads is precious, each little sprout. If I stand up, I can watch them doing things—trading stickers, charms, weird stuff. A red ET bookbag flies by, a Madonna lunchbox.

  A little boy I once knew passes by, clutching in his hand drawings he’s done of his classmates. A little girl walks with him—silly skirt, knobby knees, dirty blonde braids. “These pictures are so beautiful,” she cries. “They look exactly like everyone.” We are on our way to school, Steven. It’s a long time ago, but I still remember it perfectly. You show me the drawings excitedly. You’ve made me so beautiful! My best friend forever. “Will you marry me?” you ask. “Of course!”

  Lots more kids pass. Dancing kids, sullen kids, kids with mothers, kids with nannies. Kids already at 8 a.m. in some kind of trouble. Studious kids balancing science projects, frogs in formaldehyde, the planets.

  I notice there’s a lot of noise other than the regular kid noise. I look past the kids into the air and notice they’re renovating St. Vincent’s Hospital. Actually they’re building a whole new wing. Max, you would surely complain about this. I don’t seem to mind the noise, though. I imagine this means whole lives will be saved.

  I go outside to see exactly what they’re doing, what they’re tearing down. I try to imagine what will be there when it’s over. I wonder what kinds of machines they’ll roll in, what sophisticated team of doctors. Maybe they could have saved you, Max, right here, twenty feet away, where now I dream they are making room for the most incredible cerebral-hemorrhage detectors, early-warning systems, all kinds of ways to extend your life past sixty-five.

  “What’s going to be there when it’s done?” I ask a woman passing by.

  “The hospital,” she says, “what do you think?”

  “I mean what part of the hospital? The maternity ward or the coronary unit or what?”

  She shrugs. “How do I know?”

  All the children are bumping into me like I’m invisible. “Hey, I was once a brat like you,” I shout to them.

  I see him in a red cap, blue scarf, black sneakers on the first day of school. I see me in a red jumper, white sweater, patent leather shoes.

  A hand touches my shoulder from behind.

  “Steven.”

  “Caroline!”

  “I was just thinking of you!”

  Neither of us is really surprised.

  “Steven,” I say, “I’m dying to talk to you. It’s been so long. So much has happened. Max dead, everything.”

  “I know, I know. I bet you didn’t even hear I went to Italy on a whim. It was glorious!”

  He looks a little strange somehow.

  “Steven, are you OK?”

  “More than OK,” he says. He winks. “I’ve got to run. Doll, I’ve got a date with a handsome doctor.”

  “Anyone I know?”

  He smiles. “I’ll call you.”

  He kisses me and runs off, crossing Seventh Avenue. I watch him get smaller and smaller—a red cap, blue scarf, black sneakers.

  I remember the story you told me, Max, about this spot, the one I’m standing on right now as Steven disappears. Would you tell me that story once more?

  “She was lost. That is, I couldn’t find her. There were some people over at the house. It was late. We were all quite drunk, but not your mother. She rarely drank near the end. Anyway, she had wandered away. At first I thought she had gone up to our room, but when I went to see how she was doing, she wasn’t there. So I went out to look for her. The others were too drunk to notice—they were all too busy doing their Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? maneuvers, or their wild, young painter bohemian Greenwich Village tricks. Why do you keep wanting to hear this story, Caroline? Surely you know it by heart by now?”

  Yes, I do. The night you found her kneeling in the street, staring up at the cement cross, the scrolls, the angel of stone at St. Vincent’s was not the night she died, but almost. It was the last real “event.” The thing we remember when we think of the end of her life. Her legs had turned to stone, her whole torso to stone, right there on the sidewalk of West Eleventh Street.

  She was losing detail. She was disappearing into chaos, dissolving, losing all life. Disappearing. Strange, like those sculptures on the tombs done by, oh, I forget who you said.

  “I am a big man and she was a medium-sized woman, but I could not lift her that night in the street as she gazed up at the concrete cross, whispering prayers. Her body had filled with cement. She was part of the pavement, dear God!

  “It was early fall, and there was a certain crispness in the air, an excitement, everything back alive in the city, the beginning of a new season, the children just on their way back to school. Her legs lightened a little. She was only thirty then, but after the incident outside St. Vincent’s she began to get younger and younger, until she was back in her Catholic school frocks, it seemed, carrying around her little missal. She started feeling afraid. She’d never really felt afraid before. But she was so childlike those last few days. Her little fingers saying the invisible rosary, Jesus Christ.”

  How did you get her up from the Street that night?

  “Caroline, do we have to go through this again?”

  Just once more.

  “I finally got her onto my back. Piggyback. ‘I can’t go on,’ she said. She was too heavy to carry, and I fell with her several times, though it was only a short distance. With her legs of concrete. Her stone shoes. Those pointy pumps dragging along the sidewalk, gouging out the road. ‘Leave me,’ she said. ’I can’t leave you here, Veronica!’”

  “But she walked again after that?”

  “Oh sure.”

  “How many times?”

  “Damn you, Caroline, a few times. I don’t know how many. A few times near the end we went to the Lion’s Head, I remember that. On her better days she moved her arms and legs against her depression. She spoke through it, though it took such an enormous effort. She was, on her best days, exerting some pressure against it. Don’t forget—those were her best days, Caroline.

  “She kept hearing a high-pitched sort of ringing sound in the ears. Neither of us believed in doctors, but we went on my insistence to one after another after another, but the sound never went away. And no one ever found anything wrong. I’m convinced now what she was hearing was her own depression. It had become so acute that it made a sound. I think of it as a sort of humming gray clay. She pushed against it—but only on her best days.

  “The sky opens, Caroline, but only for a minute, only for a glimpse.”

  I am tired of all this death, Max. I open the paper and see Italo Calvino, dead today at sixty-one. This seems monstrously young to me. Mr. Palomar shouldn’t have been his last book. And even James Beard at eighty-six seems young. My God, Max, in the paper I read they’re auctioning off his cooking equipment this week. Grey would think they should bury it all with him. And how do I know that James Beard is not going to need his whisks and copper bowls?

  “He’s not going to need them, Caroline.”

  I’m catching up on all sorts of deaths. Rock Hudson at fifty-nine. What is all this? The candlestick maker, the whole neighborhood dying. And you at sixty-five! And mother at thirty. I have already survived her by three months.

  So much death on my mind this early October. Across the Street a jackhammer in concrete.

  So much death on my mind this early October, the children knocking me over in the opposite direction now, clutching their drawings of the day. He’
s made me so beautiful!

  I know this for sure now—that no amount of renovating could have saved her life. No elaborate psychopharmacology department, no master computer system. No team of doctors. Nothing.

  No PET scan.

  No CAT scan.

  No electroshock.

  The Reluctant Magician

  He walks toward her on a glittering green-blue sea. “I am the tears of my Father,” he says, dragging his net of fish. When he gets close he turns into a bird and lands in her hand. He turns next into a fiddlehead fern.

  “You’re going too fast,” Veronica says. “We’re going to crash. We’ve gone too far. I’m afraid now.” She sees her name engraved on the palm of his hand.

  “Don’t be afraid,” he smiles, giving her a hug. “Who’d have thought I’d come to love you best?”

  She looks up at the moon and sighs. He offers her wine. He makes her a sumptuous meal from his basket of fragments, from a few small fish.

  Miserably, he makes the dead breathe again. He pities Lazarus, who now will have to die twice. Everyone claps. He’s a reluctant magician. He doesn’t like all the attention.

  “Walking on water,” he says. “It’s no big deal. It’s not so hard, really. I’ll show you how I do it—

  “There are these very large, flat rocks at the bottom of the ocean and—”

  “Don’t be silly, Jesus, don’t be ridiculous. We know it’s a miracle! We’re sure of it!” the crowd shouts.

  Veronica too.

  “The people who have walked in darkness have seen a great light,” she cries.

  The Lion’s Head

  Sheridan Square is still here. The statue of General Sheridan, still standing. The Lion’s Head is still here, 59 Christopher Street. I walk down the steps into the bar and watch the legs go by the window.

  “We often went to the Lion’s Head in those days. And the White Horse.”