“Barbara took me to see Willa Somerset today,” I said. Standing wasn’t easy. I steadied myself against the glass, then took a careful step toward my chair and dropped into it, clutching the hard leather arm.
“Wonderful! Willa is the Nauk’s guardian angel. She’s sharp. She sees things clearly.”
I thought of the old lady’s flickering confusion, her plaintive desire for Alena, her unconscious chewing. I wondered when Bernard had last been to visit her. “Yes. Barbara said. Only, Bernard?”
“What, cara?”
“I’m the curator. Right? I choose the shows.”
Through the phone, I could hear footsteps approach, heels clattering. The squeal of a bus, the slam of a door, a snatch of music from a radio. Out the window I watched the wind ripple the grass, the gray-green waves churning glassily in the afternoon glare. A barely visible airplane droned overhead, a silver flaw in the hazy sky. Why was Bernard still there—wherever there was—when he claimed to love it so much here? “Of course,” he said.
“Good. I just wanted to make sure. I want to be clear about my role.” I opened my mouth again to tell him about McManus, but instead I found myself saying, “It’s all so new, and everything’s so undefined.”
Faintly through the phone came a man’s voice, musical and unfamiliar: “You almost done?”
“We’ll work together, of course,” Bernard said. “Consider, discuss.”
“But ultimately it’s my job?” Out over the water a black cormorant flapped heavily by, flying low over the churning bay. A motorboat drew a seething line of dirty white through the gray-green water. The sky, nearly drained of blue, was the color of skimmed milk.
“Yes,” he said. “Your job.”
15.
I WAS MAKING AN OMELET for dinner when someone knocked on the door. Chris Passoa stood on the step in the cooling air, tall as an August cornstalk, the blue scrub casting bulging shadows across the grass behind him. “I thought I’d see how you were doing,” he said. “I know Bernard has been away.”
“Oh!” I said. “Thanks! I’m doing fine.”
He stood patiently, holding a bottle of wine, his eyes even bluer than I remembered, until it occurred to me to invite him in.
The cramped kitchen smelled of scorching egg even with the windows open. Yesterday’s dishes cluttered the counter and the floor was sticky. “I’m just making dinner,” I said.
“Do you like to cook?”
“Not much. When I was in New York, I lived on takeout.”
He looked without comment at the faded curtains and sagging cabinets. “I spent a summer in New York once, as a bicycle messenger. Makes police work look safe.” In his faded jeans, short-sleeved shirt, and close-cropped hair, he looked almost like someone I might have known if I’d stayed in Wisconsin, but there was a brighter edge to him: an expansive tang of sea and salt half concealed by his loose-limbed way of moving, the way a plainclothes cop might, under certain circumstances, half conceal his gun. He was Bernard’s age, but he didn’t look it. Barbara had mentioned that he was divorced, that his wife had run off with a contractor to Florida years before, taking the kids. Had he ended up in a fading suburban ranch with empty bedrooms haunted by the past? Or had he moved somewhere else, to a white-painted condo with a little deck overlooking the bay, or a weathered barn in a salt meadow with the bed in a loft? I couldn’t guess. He was relaxed, alert, opaque. He gave off a faint mineral scent, astringent and clean.
“Did you like New York?” I asked.
“It served its purpose. It confirmed that I’m not a city person.” He handed me the wine.
What did he want from me? Was the chilled bottle a courtesy, a pretext, a cue? Was he just being neighborly? Whatever his motive, I wasn’t sorry to see him: a human face in my lonely cottage under the dune. “Should I open it?”
“Why not?”
The sun slanted in through the west-facing window. I moved self-consciously around the room, finding glasses and a corkscrew, folding over the omelet. I held the pan up. “Hungry?” I didn’t expect him to accept, but he did. I got out a second plate, beige with a brick-red border. The one already on the table was yellow with a design of poppies. Both of them were ugly, though the yellow one seemed to be trying not to be, while the other didn’t seem to care. Which was worse?
We touched glasses. “To the Nauk,” Chris Passoa said. “What’s the new show going to be?”
“Oh—nothing’s settled yet.”
Out the window, the sky was a sentimental abstract, pink and orange and reddish gold. Chris Passoa ate his omelet. His benign, quizzical gaze settled over me. His big wristwatch caught the sun and sent a disk of light fluttering around the room, while his long legs bumped the underside of the table. “You have an idea, don’t you?” he said.
Despite myself I felt, at his words, a spark of pleasure. A glow. “Yes. I have an idea.”
“Does it involve dead things?”
I thought of McManus’s dismembered bodies, his bereft orphaned ears and smooth lonely limbs, separated from their familiar sockets. I looked at Chris Passoa—his clean, whole, wholesome self. “No,” I said. I sipped my wine. “No dissections. No dead fish.”
“Living things? People or, I don’t know, sheep? Bats? Beetles in jars, maybe?”
“Ah,” I said, “you’re a traditionalist.”
“I like paintings. I like Gauguin and Salvador Dalí. And that guy who painted the diner at night.”
“Edward Hopper.”
“Him.”
“I like them too,” I said.
He cut what was left of his omelet into thirds, rearranged them on the plate. “I guess people don’t paint like that anymore.” His eyes, watching me, were like patches of noon sky. I understood that this was a question.
“Some people do. But you have to remember, part of what makes those artists great is that what they were doing seemed new and strange to people in their time—a hundred years ago! Just as strange as some of the things people are doing today seem to you.”
“As strange as a lot of dead fish nailed to the wall?”
“I heard they made beautiful patterns.”
“They stank,” he said. “Literally stank.” He stabbed the pieces and finished his omelet in three quick bites, gulping like a pelican.
“Maybe part of the idea of the installation was the contrast—the tension—between the beauty of the form and the ugliness of the smell.”
He thought about that. He seemed to think with every part of himself, waiting for new ideas to light up his mind. “Can I ask a stupid question?”
“Go ahead.”
“It seems like art these days is mostly about ideas. Is that right? Not about things?”
“That’s not a stupid question,” I said. “You’ll have to try harder.” The golden coolness of the wine slipped through me as I thought about how to answer him. “Art has always had ideas,” I said. “It’s always been about something. It’s not always clear, of course—even to the artist—what those ideas are. But think about it. Take the cave paintings in France from fifteen thousand years ago. They weren’t about decorating cave walls. They were about the idea of hunting—about effectuating a buffalo. Helping the gods to provide one. Or the early Renaissance paintings of the Madonna that made Jesus look like a real baby for the first time. They’re not in any absolute way an improvement on the flat pictures that came before, but they’re about the idea that the Son of God is truly, actually human. And Gauguin—isn’t painting an orange horse partly about the idea of color in painting—how color can evoke reality without mimicking it?”
The blue of his eyes edged slowly toward gray as he concentrated. “That’s still different from fish on a wall,” he said. “Isn’t it? Or a canvas with nothing but a couple of a words? Or a big pile of candy?”
“Yes,” I agreed. “It is different. But it�
�s more useful to focus on the ways they’re all the same.”
“Which is how?”
“They all engage your visual sense in a new and powerful way. They all provoke you to feel something.” I listened to my words fall slowly through the room, rippling outward. I believed them to a point, but it wasn’t so simple either. You couldn’t nail art down like a fish to a wall.
“And what if I feel nothing?”
“Then maybe the artist has failed,” I said carefully. “Or maybe the failure is yours.”
His eyes edged grayer. “How do you know which it is?”
“Sometimes you don’t.”
“But isn’t that important?” He sounded frustrated for the first time. “Shouldn’t you be able to tell the difference?”
“That’s why you need to see a lot of art,” I said. “Look and think and talk to other people and look some more. You get better at it.”
“The pile of candies,” he said. “Bernard has those in his living room.”
“Félix Gonzáles-Torres. That work is about AIDS, among other things. About depletion and loss, and about consumption. It involves you pretty directly, right? You eat a candy, you deplete the work, you take it literally into yourself.”
He shook his head. “I hear your words,” he said. “But they’re just words to me.”
I thought about getting up, clearing the table, signaling that it was time for him to go. Instead I poured more wine into the glasses. “How long have you known Bernard?” I asked.
“Since we were kids. They summered here, his family, and we lived across the road. In a small house with no view. Like this one.” He grinned, resting both arms squarely on the oilcloth, and for half a moment I thought how strange it was—how arbitrary—that humans had two arms. His watch was plain, heavy, silver, with a black leather band, and his hand was large and calloused. A capable hand. “Bernard and I used to wade around the marsh together. Get wet. Catch frogs. Sometimes we’d paddle around in an old canoe. And then, when he moved here year-round, we were in school together.”
“What was he like? When he was younger.”
“He was always artsy, I guess. He drew, and he sang in the chorus. But basically he just seemed like one of us. Only richer, of course.” His fingers played silent arpeggios on the table, all ten of them, a mute sound track. “He loved the water. Sailing, fishing. He was into archery, which I guess was kind of unusual. He went to tournaments and won medals. He said he wanted to be a professional archer, but that was a joke. He was hardly going to say he wanted to run an art museum, was he? Even if he knew.”
“How about you? Did you always want to be a policeman?”
The sun had moved and the room was growing dark. Chris Passoa stretched his legs across the floor, taking up more and more space in the little room. “I wanted to sail around the world,” he said. “Go to Tahiti. Isn’t that where Gauguin went? Drink coconut milk for a while. Get back on the boat, continue on to New Zealand. Madagascar. Keep going till I fell off the edge of the world! Just imagine it: Alone on the ocean at night. A warm breeze, a million stars. Silence.” The electric pulse of his interest hummed at me through the briny air. In the dusk it was easy to forget how much older he was. And anyway, I liked it that he was older. Seasoned, and clear about what he wanted. Accustomed to himself. “Silence,” he repeated, “and darkness. The world the way it was before electricity. Before outboard motors. Before Jet Skis, machine guns, televisions, tourism. Alone with your thoughts, reliant on your wits and your own two hands. And then, when you got tired, another green island waiting.” In the near dark, his pale hair glowed faintly, the way moon jellies glow in the waves at night.
I leaned across the table. “It wasn’t ever really like that, you know. There was violence, syphilis, hurricanes. People have always longed for Arcadia. But you could only ever get it in art.”
“Not even in art, I’d say,” he said, “these days.”
And then we were kissing, very gently, with the plates disarrayed across the table, the glasses and forks and salt shakers splayed out. I stretched toward him over the Formica like a figurehead on a ship, and I shut my eyes, wanting him to press his mouth hard into mine, to lift me across the table onto his lap. To draw my breast from my blouse like a prize. But he just kept kissing, softly, tirelessly, his lips caressing my open mouth, his breath steady. He tasted familiar—well, like omelet and wine—and I thrust my tongue deeper to see what other flavors lurked in the dark. I touched his face, ran my palm along his cheek, ear, neck, arm, thigh, noting their textures, their particular sizes and shapes. As though a man were merely a collection of parts, each one capable of giving and receiving pleasure without reference or connection to the whole. With my eyes shut I seemed to be sinking through the floor into some dark buoyant space between the house and the dune.
“Open your eyes,” Chris Passoa whispered.
The dim room spun into view. His face looked younger than I remembered, unclouded and innocent.
“You all right?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” I said politely, as though we had just met.
16.
THE NEXT MORNING, up early as usual, I walked out of my little house to find no bright blue dome—no sky at all—but rather wispy swaths of gray-white fog that had settled low and damp over everything. It was like an installation piece I had once seen in which a long room was filled with gauzy scarves and big balls of cotton and heaps of feathers and linen streamers, all in shades of white, with the sounds of fountains splashing and doors squeaking and children calling piped in. Life on Venus, I remember it was called—though I have forgotten the name of the artist—but it could easily have been called Nauquasset Morning with Fog. Standing on the crest of the dune, I couldn’t see the ocean at all, though I could hear it: the low roll of the gathering wave, the tumbling as it spilled itself onto the shore, the heavy water sighing and hissing as it dissipated into the sand.
I walked down to the beach swaddled in fog, breathing in the wet, heavy air, then turned parallel, I hoped, to the shore. The ocean was still mostly hidden, only the lacy foam of the occasional wave reaching, like a tongue, far enough up the sand for me to see. Now and then I heard a voice, but sounds carried oddly, and I was never sure if the person speaking was down on the beach or up on the dune, and the long lamenting note of the foghorn sounded its warning over the invisible world. Once I heard the jangle of dog tags, and an old Labrador trotted out of the white billows and then back into them, paying me no attention at all.
I didn’t see the old man until I was almost on top of him. There, easel set up in the middle of the fog, was the wild-looking painter I had seen before. His white hair floated around his head like the fog itself, a faded bandanna tied tightly around his brow as though it were the only thing keeping his brains from spilling out. His jaw was stubbled a paler gray than his grayish skin, his paint-stained jeans were more hole than denim, and his ropy arms were awash in faded tattoos. He was painting quickly, so intent on what he was doing that he didn’t seem to notice me. He gazed straight ahead into the fog as though—despite the beach and the sea being invisible—he could see the scene he was painting in front of him. The mute otherworldliness of the surroundings and thepainter’s unconsciousness of my presence began to make me feel disembodied, as though I were peering through an invisible mirror. I stepped farther around behind him to get a view of his canvas.
He was painting a jungle scene. Bright garish greens from acid lime to bluish olive pulsed and shimmered in the sinuous forms of leaves, vines, muck, grass, snakes, rivers. There was even a greenish tinge to the skin of the men wearing camouflage in shades of sage and pea, carrying guns—who weaved across the picture plane. And then, in the middle of the canvas, a dark blot: black smoke and red flame and redder blood that dripped and spurted from broken bits of bodies. A hole ripped in the middle of the world. The black and the red flowed into the green, and, on eith
er side of the blot, men screamed, their stained faces painted in incredible detail, miniature portraits of agony. Across the top of the frame, in a margin of lurid sky, ghostly skeletons drifted weightlessly: finely articulated constructions of smoke. Every few moments the painter would look up and stare into the fog, his face a blind mask. Then he would look quickly back at the canvas and make a mark. It wasn’t like watching someone paint out of their imagination. He really seemed to be seeing the scene before him, as though that terrible carnage were happening now—as though he had access to a crack in time, a peephole to a place where men had never stopped dying in the steamy jungle heat.
Suddenly he sensed something behind him. He whirled around. “Get down!” he cried.
“What is it?” I stood frozen in the billowing fog, beyond which, I suddenly half believed, men were crouching with machine guns as bombs hissed from lurid skies.
“Don’t you see?” He gestured frantically into the fog. “It’s a massacre! How did you get here? They’ve been blasting and burning for days!”
Somewhere above us, a gull squawked. The ocean thumped and sighed, steady as breath, and the warm air smelled of decay and salt. “There’s no one here,” I said, struggling to hold this fact steady in my own mind.
He stared at me, his pale eyes laced with red. Then, cautiously, he turned his head, first one way and then the other. Blinking, he seemed for the first time to take in the fog, the quiet, the white empty world. Slowly, he took his hands out of his hair.
“Is it heaven?” he asked tentatively.
“No. It’s just the fog.”
“You’re not an angel, then?”
I smiled. “I’m from the museum.” I pointed back in the direction of the Nauk.
He squinted. “I don’t recognize you,” he said. “You’re not the fat one, and you’re not the thin one, and the other one is . . . gone. Hush, though, don’t tell.”
“I’m new,” I said. The fat one would be Agnes, I supposed, and the thin one would be Sloan, and Alena would be the one who was gone. But what was I not supposed to tell—that Alena was dead? Did he think people didn’t know? “I’ve seen you painting here before,” I said. “It must be hard with the wind and the damp.”
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