“The truth is that Maria seemed to come from nowhere, bursting into the art world in the East, perhaps ten years ago. She had been recently widowed, a young woman of quiet attractiveness and a really amazing ability with watercolors. A gallery in New York began showing her work, and then there was a review, and then another, and in a few months everyone needed to buy a Maria Merriam. They were simple watercolors of flowers—who would have thought it?”
Erika considered her desk top, her nails. “Then she vanished a few years ago. Completely dropped out of sight. There were rumors of travel, marriage, dramatic artistic sulks. But the art world forgets. Maria was not the first glorious moth to flit in and flit out again. It was, I think, troubling to some of us. But”—Erika gestured with an open hand, what could one do?
“And then several months ago I was astounded and delighted to see her here, in this office, with new work. I was delighted enough to welcome her, and to avoid asking awkward questions. She came, as far as I know, out of nowhere.”
Erika watched them both, studying the effect of her story.
“So you don’t know anything about her, really?” asked Bell.
“I’ve just told you a good deal. I know that it is what you already knew.” She looked away, and seemed to listen for something far in the distance. “I don’t like mysteries,” said Erika. “I detest them. Let everyone tell all their secrets, all at once, and how bored we would be once we heard them. Then we could sweep them off into the dustbins and start our lives all over again.”
Sarah used her most soothing voice. “If it’s something shameful, of course, Mr. Bell wouldn’t dream of writing about it.”
“Of course not,” said Erika, with the most careful of smiles. “Of course he wouldn’t. And the truth is nothing shameful. Besides, nothing really is shameful, after all. No sins exist any more. There is no real embarrassment these days. Unless, of course, the truth is very painful, or there is some real reason to keep silent.”
Erika rose, and adjusted a black venetian blind at the window, quite unnecessarily, Sarah thought. The blinds had been, as they were now, perfectly unruffled.
“This is a difficult moment for me. In a minute or two I have clients—”
“Of course,” said Bell.
Erika hesitated at the window. She lowered her voice. “If only we could tell the truth about people by simply looking at them. But the face is a disguise, isn’t it? A mask.” She turned, and for the first time her face wore a simple, unguarded expression. “I don’t believe you are here because of the book you are writing.”
“Biographies are my profession,” said Bell.
“I can’t say any more than I have. Even the slightest possibility of danger to Maria or to this gallery—”
“What possible danger could there be?” asked Bell.
He was listening to the words, Sarah realized, but he was not hearing what was being said. And her own first impression of Erika had been accurate. She was more than anxious.
She was afraid.
Sarah touched Bell’s arm to silence him. “There’s a threat,” she said, meeting Erika’s eyes, “to all of us. Isn’t there?”
Erika’s expression said, for an instant, “I don’t know what you are talking about.”
Then she put her hands flat on the desktop and said, “Then you already have guessed.” She did not speak, listening once again to far off sounds. “I’m not certain,” she said. “I am only using my judgment, my sense of Maria, and her life. If I knew, without any doubt at all, I would call the police, regardless of my own safety. But this is precisely why I am talking with you.”
Bell sat, all attention, but Erika was speaking to Sarah when she said, “The woman the art world knows as Maria Merriam is a very frightened creature named Maria Asquith.”
Sarah could not speak for a while, feeling her soul contract. When she could draw a breath she said, “Please tell us everything.”
25
It’s good, Asquith thought, to be more than alive.
It’s delicious to be more than human. He closed his eyes and drew hard on a cigarette, just as he had years ago between acts, the fellow actors declaiming, the words reaching his ears translated by distance and the heavy drapes into something not heard at all but remembered.
“He’s beginning to guess,” she said.
“As I expected.” He yawned. How delicious this cigarette was. How could half-decayed leaf taste so full of life?
“He’s digging up the grave,” she was saying, “just as you said he would.”
He closed his eyes against the smoke, as he had years ago, listening to Speke read what he had just written. “I am so pleased,” said Asquith. He didn’t bother to tell her that he had watched Speke plunge the spade into the rocky ground, just as he watched so much else that took place here. He lifted his hand to touch her hair and she flinched, and he made a little kissing sound of reassurance because he wanted her to know how well she was playing her part in this finest theater.
“It’s all going the way you wanted, isn’t it?” she asked.
“With your help, my dearest, the play unfolds.”
He had come in from the woods to avoid the heat. From the trees, from the dusty pastoral backstage, he had been able to watch everything.
“You’re not unhappy,” she said, in a tone that was half question.
His poor sister. So afraid of what he might do. “It’s going so well. I’m so proud of you, my little actress. You would make a magnificent Ophelia.”
She did not meet his eyes. “You won’t really hurt anyone, will you?”
Out of love, Asquith thought. Only out of love, the loyal compassion he felt for each one of them, even the man he did not know, the stallion to Sarah Warren’s mare, the journalist. Even he drew a special tide in Asquith’s soul.
He made his voice a purr. “All these months we have worked on this delight, and you still need to ask.”
“You’re changing.”
“From what to what?”
“It’s wonderful, in a way, Timothy. You’re becoming the way you used to be. When you were happy.”
“Oh, happy.” He pressed out the cigarette carefully, and waited while she opened one of the skylights to dilute the smoke. “Yes, I do recall being happy.”
She wiped the ashtray carefully. “I only want to be sure that you won’t go back on your word.”
“No,” he said, luxuriating inwardly with the lie. “Of course not. I won’t hurt any of them.”
“He’s not a bad person, really.” Then she would say no more, because he turned to eye her. The studio had that tang of pine and the florid stains of her art. He felt the walls confine him, closing in. He sat, sipping soup she had stirred up for him on a hot plate, but he missed his little camp beside the spring.
She added, “I know he was unfair to you.”
“Worse than you can imagine,” he breathed. Was he so unfair, though, Asquith wondered. Had Speke really stolen the essence of his life? There was little question that Speke had typed late into the night, paper scattered over the kitchen table, but he had always been happy to stop and listen to one of Asquith’s stories, or to applaud as he improvised an improved version of Turandot. Why did such a lovely opera have to be so dull? Asquith couldn’t recall the details, at this point, but his new version of the opera was an astounding improvement. Speke would listen and laugh approvingly, and then continue into the dawn, his typing two-fingered but powerful, hammer punches that worked the typewriter sideways on the table so it was always about to fall off.
Perhaps, in the cosmic view, it didn’t matter how much of Speke’s work he had inspired. What did it matter how much of Hamlet’s dissemblance was written by Shakespeare and how much by an assistant or a colleague, or even miswritten by the memory of an actor? An actor can improve a line, as Asquith knew, and besides, there is that other factor in the writing, the life of the work itself, the power of the man playing Hamlet for the eighty-second time to ad-lib a quip
more deftly than the poet, even though the half-phrase might be ever forgotten in the joyous white noise of the applause. The work works its way, a tree uttering its leaves.
But Asquith did not find himself quite capable of taking the cosmic view. This was no longer a battle for possession of the plays. That was a swamp without a passage, a Grimpen Mire, death to even hounds. Now he knew only great love for Speke and his household of stalwart cheer. Great love, and another sort of feeling, a dark intention much more powerful than any form of human affection.
“I know he deserves to suffer,” she continued.
“But you’ve come to like him, haven’t you? Go ahead, admit it. Everyone likes Hamilton Speke. Animals, children—the world was made for Speke and his like.”
Her voice was uncertain. “He’s been kind to me.”
“Of course he has.”
Of course Speke was kind, kind as the rain, kind as the rolling summer wind. Such vitality could only be admired. And envied. Envy was the desire to possess amidst a certainty that possession was unlikely. Asquith would, in time, master this estate. He was embarked on a play to catch the sanity of the King. He could not win Speke’s love. He would win his life, his soul. Such theater was starlight itself, or rather the light of those invisible stars, the ones imploded to the point that time itself collapses in their cores.
This little theater past, he would move into the second and third acts, make love to the beautiful, capture the hope of the King of this sunny land and blow it all out, out like the little candle flame it always was.
Such a long shadow they cast, the celebrated, their images coined and emblazoned beside chocolates at the checkout line. The televised semblance, broadcast across a continent, parts its lips and shows its teeth and millions of picture tubes on televisions beyond imagining show teeth, a sea of incisors, a vast, many chambered fly’s eye of manly joy.
Did Lucifer feel the injustice of it all, that eternity carried the children of God and merely washed the breakwaters of others? Did Lucifer regard with an even calm the unfairness of the sky as it rained life on some and half-lives on others? The hawk banks, lifts a cry. The scorpion scuttles.
But Asquith was kind, and even knew himself to be wise. All inside him was night, and no one beyond his sister had ever loved him. He wanted only to let the day see how truly it misjudged the dark. Public preening over one’s future is not the best form of eloquence, and commerce with the unseen millions was not the only grasp on hope.
Hush, gentlemen players. Listen: the crowd in the pit, the rump-fed and the lousy both, fall still. The Actor steps across the boards, mastering the light. The light plays upon him, warms him, but does not go beyond the skin, which itself is merest lubricant and paint.
Within is the dark from which all art proceeds. And this dark loves what it sees, these frail ignorant, these poor citizens of the day.
This is all to be mine, says the Artist. The shadow turns upon the victor, the real shadow, the darkness within, and begins the battle, the endless one, the war it always wins.
26
Speke could not move. Something very bad indeed had happened to the body.
He was unable to do more than stand there in the sun with the sound of the great, dark wings ascending into the sky. The air, the light itself, seemed to flutter, ascending, leaving him in a fallen world.
Something terrible.
He took a step. His chest shrank, ribs squeezing his lungs. Terrible. He would never take another breath again. This was it. His life contracted to a knot. His heart stopped.
He took another step. Then quickly, leaping, stumbling, he nearly fell upon the body, and struggled to keep himself from collapsing over it.
Even when he saw the truth, and comprehended it completely, a part of him clung to the irrational discovery: he’s turned himself into an animal.
The shock made him almost gleeful for an instant. But not quite. It was too horrible. Asquith would do that, wouldn’t he? Turn into a beast? Of course, Speke knew this was madness. And yet, there it was. The body had ebony hooves, and tawny skin—a hide. Dark eyes that were no longer eyes streamed black ants. This transformation played over Speke in a series of heat waves, each wave hotter than the one before it, until he was about to collapse.
But he did not collapse.
Hamilton Speke can handle a shock, he told himself. He looked around at the fluttering poison oak, and the yellow, past-prime Scotch broom, at the scribble of wild thyme.
“Maria!” he rasped.
A deeper breath brought a bellow: “Maria!”
He staggered to the lawn, and called so loudly the poplars seemed to sway with his cry.
Maria slipped from her studio, but did not bother hurrying toward him, until she saw his arms waving.
But there was no time to consider that. “He’s not dead!” he cried. “Not dead!” It was a song, a cry of joy from the bottom of his feet. And it was also a cry of fear, although the fear was irrational. “Not dead! Asquith’s alive!”
For some reason she was pensive. She was more than pensive. She held herself back, not wanting to hear this.
“It’s all a joke!”
“What do you mean?”
He wanted to shake her. “It’s very simple. He’s not dead. The body in the grave isn’t him.”
She put a hand to her breast.
“No, it’s not somebody else. It’s not a person.”
He ran, and when he turned she was following him, but halting along the grass, not running at all. “Hurry! It’s all right! I knew he wasn’t a ghost. I never believed it for a second.”
A large animal, a giant coyote or some other carnivore, crashed through the underbrush.
Maria blinked through the stench, and stood well away, but close enough so she could see the hooves glistening in the sunlight.
Speke gestured. What did I tell you?
A joke, but what sort of a mind would play such a prank? What sort of person was his old friend, after all? There was the slightest pepper of fear in his soul. But for the moment, that didn’t matter. Joy gave him power. Using the shovel, he worked the body back into the grave, welcoming the flies, the smell, welcoming all of it as a gift, the most wonderful gift he had ever been given in his life: the return of his future.
Only as he buried the body, working with more vigor than he had imagined possible, did he become aware that Maria was still standing quietly, one hand to her breast.
“Don’t waste time with that,” she said, so softly he could barely hear her.
“I’ll never waste a moment again in my whole life,” he beamed.
She glanced up, as though she heard something far off, at the house, and once or twice seemed torn, wanting to run, needing to stay.
Speke did the job right, no half-measures. Earth, then stones, then larger rocks, until he had a prize grave, the noble resting place for one of Nature’s creatures. Not that the work made it impossible to think. Far from it. It gave him time to think. To surmise, because what he knew was very simple.
What he concluded was not so simple, and not such an uncomplicated joy, although it did not diminish his sense of overpowering relief. Asquith was alive, and that meant that Asquith had buried the deer. Clever Asquith. What a wily man. You couldn’t trust a man like that, but the truth was that Speke was no longer a murderer.
“The smell,” she said. “Didn’t that discourage you?”
“Discourage me! Hell, yes, it discouraged me. But the coyotes came. God, I love animals.”
Maria looked away.
What could possibly be the matter with her? Why wasn’t she relieved? “So he’s alive,” said Speke. “The best discovery I’ve ever made.” But his voice was losing strength in the face of her downcast eyes.
“Why did you have to look?” she whispered, but Speke could not believe what he was hearing. He took a step closer. “Why did you have to know so much? You couldn’t just let it lie?”
Speke could not speak. Why did I have to rec
over my life, and discover that my old friend was alive?
Then she started, spun as though she heard a step, and Speke himself was nearly sure that he had heard something from the house, or from the garage. A door shutting, perhaps, although acoustics had always been peculiar here at Live Oak. Clara was outside, beating a rug, perhaps.
“You are a good person,” said Maria. “You don’t mean harm.”
Speke could not understand her shaken expression, her reluctance to celebrate. She gripped his arm, and it hurt. “You have to go,” she said. “You can’t stay here.”
Speke gazed into her eyes without comprehension.
“I am beginning to imagine,” said Maria, her voice trembling, “what he’s going to do now.”
27
Sarah sat with Bell in the twilight of a cocktail lounge, considering how little she had known until now.
The eye, her father had taught her, is the easiest thing in the world to deceive. To look out upon the world is to see surface, illusion. “Never,” he had said, “believe what you see.”
Sarah had trusted her eyes. She had believed that what she saw was real. The eye, she thought sadly, stunned, groping her way through her feelings, is fooled by nearly everything: the courtesan, the cheat. Even in total darkness it takes what comes. Wake up, it calls to the bored stone of the skull. Wake up! And it always wins, always wakes the hand, which has wandered as far as it can get, and the soul, which has seen enough. She should never have been deceived by her eye’s innocence, this orb of water, this first to be deceived, this star.
Her father would say, emphatically: don’t believe a thing.
Sarah felt herself wake, as from a trance. “We have to leave,” she said, her voice nearly a whisper.
Ham was one of those rare human beings worth serving. He was one of those people who seem dressed in richer colors. She had been right to spend her days helping such a man. She knew, in her bones, that he needed her now.
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