And it was to ruin that they came at last. They stopped at its edge, a ragged frontier where the beach turned as black and barren as burned-over soil, baked into a thousand jagged cracks, and the surf grew still, swallowed up by the same ashen surface. Digging their toes in the sand, they stood in the shadow of Bruno Vinnizi’s ruined beach stair and gazed out across the devastation. Vinnizi’s shattered corpse lay among the rocks, arms outflung, one charred hand lifted in mute supplication to the sky. As they stood there, the wind picked up and his outstretched fingers crumbled into dust and blew away, and the sea, where it still washed the shore, retreated down the naked shingles of the world.
* * *
As ruin spread, Cerulean Cliffs retreated. On the second night, Ben stood on the verandah and counted lights like a strand of Christmas bulbs strung along the coastline; in the days that followed they began to wink out. One afternoon, he and Stan hiked inland to the edge of the destruction: half a mile down the gravel driveway, and two more miles after that, along the narrow two-lane state road until it intersected with the expressway. In the distance, a soaring overpass had given way, its support pylons jutting from the earth like broken teeth. The pavement Ben and Lois had driven in upon was cracked and heaved, as if it had endured the ice of a thousand years. Businesses that had been thriving mere days ago had decayed into rubble. The arms of corroding gas pumps snaked across blistered asphalt. The roof of the Bar-B-Cue Diner had buckled, and the shards of its plate glass windows threw back their sooty reflections.
“Abby and I celebrated our fourteenth anniversary there,” Stan said.
“We used to go there every time we came down,” Ben said. “Best barbecue I ever had.”
“It was shitty barbeque, and you know it. The company made it great.”
Laughing, Stan unclipped a flask of bourbon from his belt. He took a long pull and handed it to Ben. The liquor suffused Ben with warmth, and he recalled his first liquor drunk—he’d been with a girl, he couldn’t remember her name, only that she’d held his head as he puked into the toilet at some high school revel. After that, he’d vowed never to drink whiskey again. You had to learn to love your vices.
As they turned and started back, he snorted, thinking of Cecy and her soccer ball and her mysterious games upon the grass.
“What?” Stan said.
“Cecilia.”
“She’s a good kid.”
“The best,” Ben said, taking another swig of whiskey. He handed the flask back to Stan. They passed it back and forth as they walked. The blasted land fell behind them. The day brightened. The sky arced over them, fathomless and blue. Ben took out a cigarette and lit it and blew a stream of smoke into the clear air.
“You ever wish you’d had children?” he asked.
“I have Cecilia.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I had a career.”
“What about Abby?”
“What about her?” Stan said.
“Did she want children?”
Stan was silent for a time.
“Ah, it was my fault,” he said at last.
“What?”
“You know. The whole goddamn mess.” He took a slug of whiskey. “We had a miscarriage once. I never told you. After that—” He shrugged. “She never forgave me you know.”
“For a miscarriage? Stan, she couldn’t have blamed you—”
“Not that. Cecilia, I mean. She could forgive the infidelity. God knows she had in the past. She never forgave me Cecilia.” He looked up. “She always thought that was driving the whole thing: MacKenzie had the child she could never have.”
“And was it?”
“No.” Stan laughed. “It was lust, that’s all. Simple lust.” He shook his head in dismal self-regard. “I envy you, you know. Holding things together the way you have.”
They turned into the driveway. Ben kicked a stone. A wind came down to comb the weeds. Somewhere in the trees a bird burst into song. The faint sound of the ocean came to him. Envy was a blade that cut two ways.
“What about you?” Stan said.
“What about me?”
“Kids?”
Ben finished his cigarette.
“It never crossed my mind,” he lied. “I wish it had.”
They’d reached the house by then. Ben went to his suite and lay down to sleep off the whiskey before the party. When he woke, the sun was red in his window, and Lois was reading in the chair by the side of the bed. They walked out onto the balcony and gazed at the ocean. The dead water had crept closer. He’d lost track of time. It all blurred together, the liquor and the prime and the multi-hued tabs of ecstasy spilled helter-skelter across the butcher block of a financier who’d filled her house with priceless paintings. Her taste had run toward the baroque—Bosch, Goya—and over the course of the party she’d slashed them to ribbons one by one. At dawn she’d walked out onto the lawn, doused herself with gasoline, and set herself on fire.
“Did you know Abby had a miscarriage?” Ben asked.
“Of course, I did,” Lois said, and they stood there in silence until the first faint stars broke out in the dark void where ruin had not yet eaten up the sky.
* * *
The parties were Ben’s solace and his consolation: the photographer whose prints adorned the walls of her house, the painter whose canvases did not, the novelist who’d won a Pulitzer. Ben had met her once before, a lean scarecrow of a woman with a thatch of pink hair and a heart-shaped pinkie ring on her left hand: a brief introduction by a friend of a friend at a Book Expo party. “What are you working on?” he’d asked as she paused. “I subscribe to the tea-kettle theory of art,” she’d responded. “Open the valve and the energy escapes.”
Ben had nodded, taking a long drink of his gin and tonic. He leaned against the wall, trying to pretend he wasn’t alone. He’d come for the free drinks—he always did—but he knew that nothing was ever free; you paid the price in the coin of humiliation. And that reminded him of his fleeting encounter with Veronica Glass, the “humiliation artist,” as he’d called her. He’d seen her flitting through the crowds occasionally, tall and gamine with her cap of blonde hair, but mostly she lingered in corners. If it bothered her to be alone, Ben could not discern it. She observed everything with an air of bemused fascination, the expression of an anthropologist faced with a curious custom she had not seen before.
Once or twice, they’d even talked briefly.
“Hello, again,” he’d said, as he squeezed past her in the scrum around the bar, and briefly he felt her taut body glide against his sagging middle aged one.
Another time, she appeared ghostlike at his side, and handed him a joint. “I’ve had my eye on you,” she said.
“You have?” he said.
“Are you surprised?”
“A little.”
She smiled, remote and amused, the way you’d smile at a child. “Outsiders interest me.”
“What do you mean?”
“In Cerulean Cliffs, you’re either a rich artist, or you’re just plain rich.”
Ben thought of the financier who’d torched herself on her lawn, staggering about in screaming agony until she collapsed and the flames consumed her.
“You don’t seem to be either,” Veronica Glass said.
“I’m a poet,” he said.
“But not a successful one.”
“I make a living. That’s more than most poets can say.”
“But is it a good living? Does anyone know your name?”
“It offers me a certain freedom.”
The freedom to write mediocre verse, he thought.
“Is that enough?” she said, “I mean for you,” and of course it wasn’t. He coveted the trappings of fame: the New Yorker profile, the Oscars on Stan’s mantel, the trophy wives. In the night, as Lois slept at his side, he thought of Stan, stout and hairy, running his thick fingers down MacKenzie’s long body.
He couldn’t say these things to Veronica Glass, couldn’t say th
em to anyone at all if you got to the heart of the matter, so he settled for, “It’s what I have.”
And then the lights blinked twice. Veronica Glass—that was how Ben thought of her—laughed and pinched off the joint. She handed it to him as the novelist announced that there would be an hour of readings—twenty minutes of her novel in progress (so much for the tea-kettle theory, Ben thought), followed by a young woman much admired for her jewel-like short stories, and a poet last of all. The poet, when he took the mic looked the part. He had a head of dark hair that swept back to his collarbones in perfectly sculpted waves, a voice that rang out across the crowd, a National Book Award. He was twenty-seven.
The lights came up.
“Do you envy him?” Veronica Glass asked.
“A little.”
“Poetry makes nothing happen,” she said.
“Does mutilation?”
“Art pour l’art.”
“Art moves me,” he said.
And again she asked, “Is that enough?”
“Tell me,” he said, “where do you get the subjects for your art?”
“They volunteer. I have more volunteers than I can possibly use.” She gave him an appraising look. “Are you interested?”
Before he could answer, he saw Lois across the room.
“Is that your wife?”
“Yes.”
“What does she do?”
“She was an accountant in the unruined age,” he did not say. He did not say that she read good books—books that moved her and said something true about the world—and that she loved him and forgave him his trespasses, which were many, and that that was enough. He merely smiled at her through the thump of music, the crush on the dance floor, the smell of sweat in the air. Veronica Glass lifted a hand to her in some kind of ambiguous greeting, but she was gone before Lois could wend her way to them through the crowd.
“That was Veronica Glass, the mutilation artist,” he said. “You’ve read about her.”
“I know who it was,” she said.
Ben wanted to ask her to dance but they were too old for the bass pounding from the speakers; they’d lost their way. Sometime in the deepest trench of the night, a cry arose from the master bathroom. The music died. They all trooped up to look at the novelist. She was dead in the blood-splashed tub, naked, her arms flung out, slit from wrist to elbow as neatly as a pair of whitened gills. Her sagging breasts seemed deflated somehow, empty of life. Her pale face was at peace.
MacKenzie laughed hysterically, her knuckles to her mouth, her eyes bright with an almost sexual excitement. Cecy began to cry and Lois took her into her arms and hurried her home. Ben lingered as the party wound down. He watched the sun rise with Stan and MacKenzie. Afterward, they looked out over the wretched ruin that had already begun to engulf the writer’s grounds. It crept toward them, turning the soil to ash. Flowers withered to dust. The guesthouse sagged. They descended to the beach and walked home.
Cecy was sleeping. Lois had waited up.
Stan and MacKenzie went off to their bedroom. Ben and Lois heard MacKenzie cry out after a time. They wandered outside and sat on the edge of the verandah, legs dangling. Ben dug out the crumpled joint and lit it, and they looked out over the sea and smoked it together. Ben spoke of Veronica Glass, and Lois held a finger to his lips.
“I don’t want to hear about her, okay?” she said.
They went into their dim bedroom. The sun cast narrow bars of light through the blinds as they made love. When Ben finished he thought of Veronica Glass; when he slept, he dreamed of her.
* * *
He dreamed of her awake and sleeping both. One more party, two, another passing encounter. She didn’t always show up. He asked Stan about her. “She lives six houses down,” Stan said, gesturing. “Crazy bitch.”
“Crazy?”
“The things she does. You call that art?”
The last picture Stan had worked on had been a slasher flick. The usual: a bunch of kids at some summer camp, screwing and smoking dope; a crazed killer; various implements of destruction, the more imaginative the better. The virtuous survived. There would be no Oscars for this formulaic trash, Ben reminded him. And didn’t it trade upon our worst impulses?
“It trades upon imagination,” Stan said. “There’s a difference between special effects and the genuine item.”
He was right, of course, demonstrably so, yet—
Maybe not, Ben thought. Maybe special effects were worse. People thrilled to the mayhem on screen; they identified with the killers, turned them into folk heroes. No one thrilled to the work of Veronica Glass. Horror and fascination, sure—how could you do such things to a human being, and why? What had she said? “I have more volunteers than I could possibly use.” And worse yet: “Are you interested?”
And he was. The whole phenomenon interested him.
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” Keats had said.
Was there some terrible beauty here? Or worse yet, some terrible truth?
Or maybe Veronica had been right. How had she put it? Art pour l’art.
Art for art’s sake.
Perhaps it was these questions that led Ben to stray down the beach one day toward her house. Perhaps it was the woman herself—that blonde hair, those high cheekbones. Perhaps it was chance. (It was not chance.) Yet that’s what he told himself as he mounted the stair to her house—a house like every other house along the cliff side: gray-stained shingles and acres of windows that threw back the afternoon light, blinding him, and suddenly he didn’t know what he was doing there, what was his intent?
Ben started to turn away—might have done so had a voice not hailed him from the verandah. “The poet takes courage,” she called, and now he saw her, leaning toward him, elbows on the railing. “Come up.”
He crossed the lawn, climbed a set of winding stairs. She had turned to greet him, her back to the railing, clad in a sheer white dress. She held a clear glass with a lime wedge floating among the ice, and she laughed when she saw him. She brushed her lips first against one cheek and then another; they were moist and cool from the drink.
“So we meet by daylight, Ben Devine.”
“How did you know my name?”
“It’s no great mystery, is it? You’re a guest of Stan Miles—and MacKenzie, of course. Dear, poor MacKenzie, and that lost child of hers. Who doesn’t know you, those of us who remain, a weed sprung up among the roses?”
“Is that how you think of me, a weed?”
“Is that how you think of yourself?”
How was he to answer that question? How indeed did he perceive himself among the glittering multitude of Cerulean Cliffs? Stan had said they would fit right in—he and Lois—but did they? Ben had his doubts.
He opted for silence.
If Veronica—and when had that shift occurred exactly, when had she come to be Veronica in his mind?—expected an answer she did not say. Nor did she ask him if he wanted a drink. She simply put one together for him at a bar tucked discreetly into the shadows. He brought it to his lips: the tickle of tonic, the woodsy bite of juniper and lime. At first he thought that she didn’t care about his response to her question, but then—
“Do you think the poet that read the other night—the one with the beautiful hair—was any better than you are?”
“He has the National Book Award to prove it.”
“Is that the measure of success?”
“So it would seem. Here in Cerulean Cliffs anyway.”
“What do you believe, Ben?”
“What’s an artist without an audience?”
“I have an audience. They mostly despise me, but they can’t look away. I have a raft of awards. Does that make me an artist?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what you are.”
“And yet you’re drawn to me.”
“Am I?”
“You show up at my home without invitation.”
“It was you who spoke to me first.”
Ben t
urned and rested his elbows on the railing. He finished his drink and studied the horizon. Ruin had crept still closer, ashen and gray, enveloping the sea. For some reason, tears sprang to his eyes. For the first time in months, he found himself wanting to write, to set down lines in tribute to the lost world—yet even this aspiration exceeded his meager talent, and he grieved that, too: that the poems in his mind slipped through his fingers like rain. He grieved the hollowness at the heart of the enterprise. Nothing lasted. Not marble, nor the gilded monuments of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme. Except that the rhyme too came to ruin in the end.
Veronica handed him another drink.
“It won’t be much longer now, will it?” she said.
“No.”
“What spectacular suicide have you devised?”
“None. I suppose I’ll see it through.”
“Perhaps suicide too is an art.”
“That’s the premise of your work, isn’t it?”
“Art pour l’art.”
“Do you believe that?”
“I don’t know. I suppose there is truth in what I do. The truth of ruin and death.”
“You sound like Vinnizi.”
“Is that what he told you? Poor Vinnizi. He was a fool. He made films about gunfights and car chases, that’s all. The most artistic thing he ever did was hurl himself over that cliff.” She paused. “Have you seen my work?”
“Photographs.”
“Then you have not seen it.”
“I’m not sure I want to.”
Yet he did. In some secret chamber of his heart he yearned for nothing more, and when she turned away from him and started into the house, Ben followed, all too aware of the lines of her body beneath her dress. She turned to smile at him.
The door swung shut at his back. The air smelled of lavender. A whisper of air conditioning caressed his skin. The floor plan was open, airy, the sparse furniture upholstered in white leather, and he was struck suddenly by the similarity to Stan’s house—the similarity to all the ruined houses he had fled in the light of dawn. Only here and there stood white pedestals, and on the pedestals—Ben felt his stomach clench—Veronica Glass’s art. A woman’s arm, severed at the shoulder and bent at the elbow, segmented into thin discs laid in order, an inch between, as though the wounds had never been inflicted, the hand alone still whole, palm up, like Vinnizi’s, in supplication. The flesh had been preserved somehow, encased in a thin clear coat of silicone; he could see the white bone, the pinkish muscle, the neatly sundered nexus of artery and vein. A detail from the New Yorker profile came to him: how she strapped her subjects down and worked her way up to the final amputation, sans anesthesia, applying the first thin layer of silicone at every cut to keep the volunteer from bleeding out. A collaboration, she called her work, and the horror of it came to him afresh: in the leg flayed and tacked open from hip to toe to reveal the long muscles within; the severed penis, quartered from head to scrotum, and pinned back like a terrible flower; and, dear God, the ultimate volunteer, the shaven head mounted on a waist-high pedestal, a once-handsome man, lips sewn shut with heavy black cord, small spikes driven into his eyes.
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