The Center of the World

by Thomas van Essen

  Turner smiled and tasted the wine again. “I hesitate to think how many greasy scalps he would have had to touch for each sip. But he was a good man, my father. I owe everything to him, God rest his soul.”

  I was astounded at the liberties Turner had just taken with Lord Egremont. I sensed that Egremont himself was taken aback by the frankness of Turner’s speech, but I also saw that he relished Turner’s honesty. A man like Egremont only hears flattery, and it must be a tonic to hear plain speaking.

  “I dare say you are right. There is that in my blood and breeding which makes me what I am and limits, I suppose, my perspective. But you would see things that way: being a painter you always have to trouble yourself about point of view. I don’t. I’m Lord Egremont. I see things as I see them.

  “Enough of this. It is time for bed. Up we go, the three of us. I thank you both for your company and your conversation. But I repeat my point: you should paint it. Good night!”

  . 13 .

  IT WAS RHINEBECK’S NATURE to hide more than he revealed. Since his marriage he had had affairs with perhaps half a dozen women; one of them he had almost loved. His wife, he knew, suspected, but they had never spoken of the matter, just as they had not spoken about her little fling with Mr. Preston in Newport. His business dealings were also conducted on the principle that only those who needed to would be told. Only fools and buffoons said more than necessary.

  But of all of his secrets, none was more important to him than his Turner. He hardly knew why. It was a shocking painting, to be sure, which the world would condemn. But Rhinebeck had stood up to senators and union bullies and he knew he had nothing to fear from ignorant puritans. He was what the world calls a brave man, but he also knew that he was afraid of others, especially his wife, seeing his Turner. He feared somehow that it would give her the key to his soul; once she saw it he would be at her mercy.

  It was all nonsense. He shook his head and lit a new cigar. All the preparations were complete. The ladies would arrive at any minute. He was suspicious of Lottie’s new friend, Mrs. Overstreet. He hadn’t met her, but the suddenness of her warm attachment to his wife and the fact that she worked for an art gallery gave him pause. He had heard rumors over the years of a Turner unlike all others; he himself had been asked ever so casually over brandy and cigars if he had ever heard of such a painting. He wondered if Mrs. Overstreet had heard similar rumors.

  He looked at the Renoir. She annoyed him. There was a time in his life, he knew, when he would have wanted a woman like that, but now he found her unpleasantly pneumatic. She was the sort of woman who would take hours to get dressed, who would feel an obscure and heartfelt hurt as he grew impatient with her comments about the weather and her friend’s dresses. After dinner she would question the waiter gravely about the relative merits of the napoleon and the éclair. Lottie had her faults, but she was much better than that.

  There was a commotion downstairs, signaling that the women had arrived. He greeted his wife with a polite kiss on the cheek. He shook hands with Mrs. Overstreet. The trip from New York had been dreadful; the hotel in Albany a disgrace; the train stopped for ever so long without a word of explanation.

  “But thank goodness for Maria,” Lottie said. “She never lost her nerve; she always knew what to do. She found blankets when there were none to be had. I don’t know what I would have done without her.”

  Rhinebeck thanked Mrs. Overstreet for her assistance. He did not like the look of her. She was pretty, but somehow too pretty; charming, but too charming. A button, or perhaps two, had been negligently fastened and a good deal of her attractive bosom was on display.

  He showed them into the main room and led them out onto the balcony.

  “You have come at just the right time,” Rhinebeck said. “Look out across the lake to the island there.” The three of them stared at the green island and the blue water. Suddenly the island seemed almost on fire with color, the various shades of green more vivid and living than anything either of the women had seen before. They both gasped.

  “Happens every evening when the sun goes down, if the weather is fine,” Rhinebeck explained. Tears formed in his wife’s eyes.

  “I have never seen anything so beautiful. It quite takes one’s breath away. I can see,” she said, “why you intend to keep this all to yourself. It is not kind, but I understand.”

  At supper the conversation was indifferent. The glass eyes of the various creatures that decorated the room sparkled in the firelight.

  “I did not know,” Mrs. Overstreet remarked, “that you were such a huntsman.”

  Rhinebeck shrugged. “I confess to very little of the actual murder. I have a man who sees to these things.”

  “Does not the sight of all these poor creatures on the wall take away your appetite?”

  “No, it doesn’t. Nor does it, I observe, take away yours. My appetite depends on how active I have been and how good the food. Today I had nothing but a piece of cheese and a hunk of bread at midday. I have been active about the place since then and, for my taste at least, the venison is excellent.”

  “But there is something a trifle gruesome, don’t you think, about seeing on the wall the creatures as they looked before they became the meat upon your plate?”

  “Nonsense and humbug. It seems a deal more honest to acknowledge what you are about than not to do so.” Rhinebeck cut his meat and stabbed a piece of it with his fork. He held it up to the ladies. “The last time I saw this fellow was a week ago. Kircum and I had gone out in the early morning while it was still dark. For about an hour we waited by a meadow not too far from here. He came into the clearing, a fine six-pointer, unaware of his fate. He heard me raise my gun. His eyes met mine for half a moment as he tried to make up his mind to run away. But it was too late. I fired, and my aim was true. He staggered for about twenty feet before he fell to the ground.”

  Rhinebeck put the piece of meat in his mouth and chewed it. “He was a beautiful fellow in his life and a tasty morsel in his death. If I think back I can see the spasm that wracked his body as his knees buckled.”

  “Cornelius,” his wife interrupted. “There is no reason to be so horrid.”

  “But that is my point. I keep the animals on my walls, Mrs. Overstreet, to remind me of the truth of the wilderness. We are not in Manhattan. If given half a chance that mountain lion that you see up there would have pounced upon you and enjoyed your delicate flesh as much as you are enjoying that of this deer.”

  Mrs. Overstreet smiled archly and placed a large piece of meat in her mouth. She chewed with obvious pleasure.

  “But surely the canyons of Wall Street are filled with more dangerous creatures than your forest?”

  “There you have me, Mrs. Overstreet. But it is a different kind of danger—your stockjobber will smile as he hands you the pen, while your panther will roar and snarl as he fastens his teeth on your throat. And although I have made my fortune in the company of the first, I prefer the second. It is the honesty I admire. As I grow older I find the truth of things more and more important to me.”

  When they finished dessert Rhinebeck said, “Come now. We will take our coffee upstairs. And although you are women, I will treat you to a glass of port and show you the final mystery of Birch Lodge.”

  He showed them the small door and led the way. “Be careful. These steps are steep. Watch your head as you go through the door. This is my Snuggery.”

  The response of the two ladies was everything that Rhinebeck could have wished for. They gasped with pleasure and wonder. The room was illuminated by a fire in the large fireplace and by two candelabra of deer antlers that hung from the ceiling. The silver reflection of the full moon shimmered on the water; the trees on the opposite shore showed blue-green and almost black.

  Rhinebeck saw the sorrow that was mixed with the wonder in his wife’s face. He hoped that the tears which he could see forming in the corner of her eyes were not the preface to an outburst. But she made an effort, and before she sp
oke again she brought herself under control. Lottie, he reminded himself, had her virtues.

  Rhinebeck settled them down in front of the cabinet that he had built for his Turner. He handed his wife and Mrs. Overstreet each a glass of port.

  “You men,” Mrs. Overstreet said, “are such beasts. It is rare that we ladies are ever offered port, but I have never tasted a beverage as delicious as this. This is what the gods drank when they were still among us.”

  “Yes. It is fine stuff.” Rhinebeck went on to explain the various features of the room. Mrs. Overstreet was most enthusiastic.

  “This room is both cunning and cozy. Your architect is a very brilliant fellow. It is quite wonderful how that narrow mean staircase opens up into this most marvelous and expansive room. The staircase is, I see now, deliberately shoddy; I confess that my heart sank as you led us up. What could this be? I was prepared for something rough-and-tumble and rude. But this is too wonderful. There is a childlike sense of delight in this room that is quite enchanting. I commend you, Mr. Rhinebeck.”

  “And you, Lottie. What do you think?” her husband asked. “You seem less enthusiastic than your charming friend.”

  She paused for a moment before speaking. When he was younger, Rhinebeck found the time she spent gathering her thoughts an affront to their collective mortality, but his Turner had somehow taught him to value the care with which she spoke.

  “It is, as Maria says, a most marvelous room,” she offered at length. “And I see the qualities of play and delight that Maria has mentioned. But there is something sad about it as well. I see that the room has been designed so as to accommodate many of your friends, but I mostly see you here, Cornelius, by yourself. It seems somehow a solitary room.”

  Rhinebeck shrugged. “There is something to what you say. I had the room built to suit my own fancies. But the chief mystery of the place is not yet revealed. I have promised that I would show you, even though you are ladies, all there is to see of Birch Lodge.” He stood up and moved to the cabinet. As he opened the door Rhinebeck felt a moment of unease as he recognized in his gesture the flourish with which Stokes had opened the curtain when he revealed the Turner.

  The two ladies looked at the painting for a moment. “She is naughty, very naughty,” Mrs. Overstreet said. “I understand now why you wish to keep her for your gentleman friends.”

  Rhinebeck turned to his wife. “What do you think of her?”

  Again there was that pause. “Oh, I worry for her. I think she might catch her death of cold.”

  “Should I cover her up again, so that she will be warm?” he replied, returning her smile.

  “No. She is very pleasant to look at. She reminds me of myself during some long August afternoons in the house on Nantucket many years ago. I was a young woman then, more a girl, really, but old enough to plead a headache on certain afternoons when the grown-ups and the younger children were about to embark on some tedious march along the beach. I would be all by myself in that big old house with the warm sea breeze blowing through the open windows. I look back on those afternoons as some of the happiest times of my life. But it was so many years ago now.”

  There was a long silence.

  “I don’t know about you two,” Mrs. Overstreet said, “but I am very tired. The journey was exhausting. Thank you so much for your kind hospitality, Mr. Rhinebeck. If you both do not mind, I will bid you good night.”

  . 14 .

  I CAN LOOK at a calendar and see that I found the painting on the afternoon of Monday, July 7, 2003, and that I drove home on Sunday, July 13, but the days, hours, and moments between the first event and the second are a blur of sensation and feeling. I cannot distinguish what I saw when I was awake and what I dreamt when I was asleep. I am not a romantic character. I am not a person who needs medication. I am a middle-aged American male who works for a small charitable foundation. I read grant applications for a living. My colleagues consider me a steady and reliable worker. But this is my truth.

  I recall being in bed—this was probably the first day after I found the painting—and being overwhelmed by the fear that I had left it propped up against the barn wall. I seemed to see Mossbacher coming back to make a concrete offer for the house. I saw him step through the open barn door and take what was mine. But then I was sitting in front of it on the barn floor before the sun had quite crested the hill. The world was coming into being with the brightening daylight, but I could not tell if the light came from the sky or from Turner’s canvas.

  I saw Helen’s lyre leaning against the corner of her dressing table, the strings still vibrating, as if she had just put it down. There were times during those days when I could hear its beautiful music, although it was so faint that it was more like the idea of music than music itself. It was the saddest music I had ever heard or imagined, the tone as delicate as the mist which rose from the surface of the lake at sunrise. And at the far limits of my perception, fainter than the sound of the still-vibrating lyre, I thought I could detect the sound of Helen’s voice as well. It was difficult to make out, but I knew it was a song of yearning and that I was its object. I stared and stared at the painting, trying vainly to make out the words that were always just beyond my grasp.

  Susan remembers that it was three days after she left that I finally called her. I remember our conversation, but I can’t place it within the chronology of those first days. I know that when I came into the house and saw that the phone was unplugged, I felt angry at the intrusion of the quotidian world into the newly beautiful one.

  She picked up on the first ring. “I’ve been calling and calling. I was so worried I was just about to call the police. I kept seeing you face down in the lake.”

  “I’m sorry. The phone was unplugged and I didn’t realize it. I must have knocked it out when I was vacuuming in the living room.” For a few moments we went back and forth about how worried she was and how inconsiderate it was of me not to have called. She didn’t believe what I said about the vacuum and the phone, and I wished I had thought of something better. I had no choice but to lie. In those days immediately following my discovery of the painting, I hadn’t thought about what I was going to do. My only reality had been Helen. But as I listened to Susan reproach me about not calling, I realized that I could no more tell her about my discovery than Paris could resist Helen.

  “So what have you been doing all this time?” she asked. Although she was right not to trust me, I felt unreasonably offended. Her voice sounded ugly in my ears.

  I told her that cleaning out the barn had taken longer than I’d thought and that I wasn’t quite done. I tried to make her feel sorry for me because I was working so hard on my vacation. I didn’t consider myself a happy person, but I had mostly thought of myself as happily married. It is so much easier to be married than not to be married: having someone to talk to and have children with, the more or less regular sex, the extra income, and the companionship and support through the slog of everyday life. It wasn’t always that way. As I listened to Susan’s voice, I found myself tuning out what she was actually saying and drifting off into a reverie about what it had once been like. We had been passionate young people in our day, and what I had seen in the curve of Helen’s breast and in Helen’s thigh, I had once seen in Susan. But now I saw someone who had put on some weight (although not thirty pounds, as I had) and who had breast-fed two children. There were lines on her forehead and an extra fold of skin beneath her chin that seemed of a piece with the way she complained about my behavior. If I hadn’t looked so unappetizing myself I might have thought I was entitled to someone better.

  That phone call was my entry into the world of duplicity, the beginning of my double life. On the one hand there was my wife and the disappointing world, on the other there was Helen and everything that was possible. I knew, however resentfully, which one was my fate, but I yearned to get back to the other. After I promised not to leave the phone unplugged again, and to call every night before I went to bed, Susan said I love yo
u. I said I loved her too, but the words rang hollow even as I spoke them. As soon as the call was over I went back to the barn.

  As my days at the lake came to an end, the world in which I had to live came into sharper focus. I was able to see that the painting was an object in that world rather than a world itself. It was a piece of canvas in a gilded frame, a thing I had to figure out what to do with. I knew, of course, that if it was a real Turner it was an object of immense value. If I sold it I would be able to tell Mossbacher to take his money and stuff it, to tell the Nassau Foundation thanks very much for twenty-three years of paychecks, but I’m done. I would be able to do pretty much whatever I wanted.

  The painting was mine, and mine alone; I could not bring myself even to think of sharing it with anyone—my wife, perhaps not surprisingly, most of all. I could only think about selling it in the most abstract and theoretical way. I felt that I had found out what life was and that to give up the painting—for no matter how much money—would be to die. After what seemed like endless agonizing, I decided to leave it in the Adirondacks. On Sunday, July 12, I carefully wrapped it up in the old sailcloth and retied the cord. I put it back in the wall where I had found it, and placed the old bedstead and some of the other stuff that I had been planning to sell to antique shops in front of the compartment.

  Leaving the painting behind was as difficult as anything I’d ever done, and it was quite late by the time I left. What with the weekend traffic, it wasn’t until 11:57 by the Volvo’s digital clock that I pulled into the driveway. I had called Susan on the way to tell her that I was going to be late and not to wait up for me, but the lights were still on.

  “Howdy, stranger,” she said as she opened the door. She was wearing the linen nightshirt that I had bought her when we went to Montreal to celebrate our twentieth anniversary. She put her arms around me before I had my bag down. Her lips found mine and I felt her tongue seek mine in the familiar way.