“What did he do, Clifford? Tell me what he did.”
“He hurt me.” Sobbing now. “And when I cried, he said, Be a man, Cliffie, you have to know this, and Mommy and Daddy will never teach you, it’s up to me, he said, because you’re my brother and I love you, and I was so mixed up, because he said that, but he was hurting me, and after that time, he did it again and again, in his bed or in my bed or in my parents’ bed, he’d put me in a dress and put lipstick on my mouth, all over my mouth and around it, big, grotesque, red lips, and he’d kiss me and he’d fuck me and he’d say, This is what you’ll do when you get the chance.”
He covered his face and cried, but when he took his hands away, his face had changed. He wasn’t sad now, he wasn’t frightened, he was angry, his face whole, open, strong, his eyes round and clear, sane, his demeanor adult, powerful.
“Then it changed,” he said, strong in his knowledge, “and now he put my mother’s dress on, and makeup, powder and rouge and lipstick, he looked so weird to me, but he said he was doing it so I’d know what to do, so I wouldn’t make a fool of myself when the time came, so I could be a man. That’s what he told me, so I could be a man.”
“How awful for you.”
“Gotta practice, he’d say. Gotta get ready. Gotta do it. That’s what he’d say when I cried—Gotta do it. I was a child. I couldn’t protect myself. I didn’t know how. And there was no one there to do it for me. No one there to rescue me.”
“That’s what we’re doing here, rescuing that child.”
Clifford nodded, his gaze far away. Bertram Kleinman and I waited silently, watching Cliff see something from a long time ago, something only he could see.
“When I was little, before this, four or five, I guess, Peter used to make me alphabet soup, you know, from a can, of course. I still remember it,” he said, his brown eyes glowing. “He’d bring the bowl carefully to the table, one of those flat, wide soup bowls with rims, and some of the soup would slosh up onto the rim of the bowl, and when it went back into the bowl, the letters that had washed up onto the rim would stay there, and he’d say, We need these, we need every letter, because there’s a message in there. Where? I’d say, looking into the bowl of soup. In there, he’d tell me, there’s a message for you in the soup. You just have to find it. And he’d hand me the soup spoon. Do you remember what a soup spoon felt like in your mouth when you were four or five, how huge it was?”
Kleinman must have nodded. Clifford smiled at him.
“That was my brother. Huge. I loved him. And he hurt me.”
“What would you like to say to Peter now?” Kleinman asked.
Clifford sat still. I could almost feel the dizziness of his trying to think of what to say and the question of who you were, of how old you were, as you said your piece.
“He wasn’t all bad,” he said softly, almost inaudibly, his eyes down.
Clifford took a huge breath and let it go. He looked up now, toward the direction from which the hand with the tissues had come.
“I wouldn’t like to say anything to him. I’d like to hurt him.”
“That’s a very disturbing thought. Tell me about that. Tell me what you feel.”
Sullen now, Clifford sat staring, saying nothing, for what seemed like forever, until finally Dr. Kleinman said they’d talk more about it next time and the screen went black with thousands of swirling white dots on it.
In a moment the next session began. Clifford had on a flannel shirt, a deep rust, cream, and teal, his hair looked darker, it looked wet, curls on his brow, the rest smoothed back tight and straight, pulled into a ponytail in the back. He looked stony as he clipped on the microphone.
“I saw him. My brother.”
He exhaled through his nose in disgust.
“And what happened between you?”
“I told him that I remembered what he had done to me.”
“What did he say?” Kleinman’s voice full of emotion now.
“He said I shouldn’t make a big deal out it. You always were like that, Cuffie, is what he said to me. What a pain in the ass you always were. Imagine. He called me a pain in the ass!”
“How awful this must have been for you. How painful.”
“You’re so thin-skinned, he said. I can’t even talk to you. That’s just stuff boys do. You don’t have to make a whole production about it now, do you, it was a million years ago, we were just kids, playing. That’s how boys play, Cuff.”
“And what did you say to him?”
“What kind of boys play that way, Peter? Tell me that.”
“What did he say?”
“He got furious. He got furious. Normal boys play that way, he said. So I said, Yeah? How about your boys? Do your sons play that way? And he jumped up—we were in a fucking restaurant—and I thought he was going to smack me right in the face.”
“What did you do?”
“I kept right on going. Man, I couldn’t stop. He was putting on his jacket, and I was sitting there shouting at him, If it’s so fucking normal, then I guess you wouldn’t mind if everyone knew about it, would you? Like your sons. Or your wife. Or, and then I was laughing at him, the way he used to laugh at me, those nice folks at your school.”
“What happened then?” Tension creeping into Kleinman’s voice.
“He split. Ran out. Stuck me with the bill. You know, I remembered something else, Dr. Kleinman. I remembered that one time when we were kids, after he had started abusing me, I said I’d tell on him, and do you know what he did?”
Silence.
“He said he’d tell everyone I was a little shit-eating sissy. And they’d believe him, not me. And he laughed at me, laughed at his cleverness, at the trap I was in. After that, he used to call me that. In fact, in front of my parents, you know how kids always like to tease each other so that the parents don’t know what’s going on? Well, he just shortened it to SES, shit-eating sissy, then just SSS, and I’d know, SSS, like a snake. He’d whisper it at the table or when we were riding in the car, he threatened me with it, he shut me up with it until I felt so bad and so beaten that I shut away the whole thing, everything he’d done, and later, now, I just felt like a little shit-eating sissy, but I never knew why.”
“Clifford, the word ‘sissy’—”
“Faggot, fairy, queer, homo, you mean that word?” he shouted. “Yes, and let’s not forget sissy. Sissy boy. He called me that, too. That, in fact, was another of his favorites.”
“Do you feel that what your brother did had anything to do with your sexual orientation?”
“No,” he said. “Of course not.”
He sat quietly, his eyes filling, tears spilling out over the rims, not blinking, not catching those tears with a tissue, not wiping them away with his fingers. No, he just sat.
“Of course not,” he whispered. “It had to do with my feeling like a little shit-eating sissy. It had to do with my always feeling inadequate, at fault, ugly, stupid, guilty.”
I thought I heard Kleinman crying, too.
“But my sexual orientation is God-given. Peter didn’t have anything to do with that. No matter what I thought when I was a little boy, Peter is not God.”
I heard Kleinman ask Cliff if he was all right, and then static indicated that the session had ended.
A week later, Clifford needing a shave, Clifford looking as if he hadn’t slept in days:
“I told him blood will tell. I told him that Morton was doing to Lester, his precious Lester, what he had done to me.”
“You told him that over dinner?”
“No, I told him that by painting it.”
Les and mor, for God’s sake. Lester and Morton. Peter’s boys.
That’s why it wasn’t at the show.
Peter had seen it the night that Dennis left the key for him. And after Louis had invited him to the opening, he’d done what any father would do. He’d gone back, to rescue his children.
“After that first confrontation, Clifford, what did you actually say
to Peter?”
“I’ve been painting,” he said. It was on his shirt, and in his hair.
Orange, like the basketball the young boy in the dress was holding.
Peter. In a dress.
So that’s how he would hurt him!
“What do you mean, Cliff?”
“I’ve been painting the truth, painting him the way he really is, the way he should be seen. Oh, he thought he made my life a drag! Wait until he sees what I can do to his life.”
Bitter laughter.
“But you haven’t tried talking to Peter again?”
Silence.
“Maybe in time, Clifford, you’ll be able to. Right now, you need time to deal with your own feelings, with this terrible pain, so that you will be able to let go of it sometime in the future.”
Snort.
“He needs time, too, Clifford. All he can feel now is defensive, but given time, if you tell him again how he made you feel—”
“I told him. I also told him I wanted him to feel how I felt. He’s my brother, isn’t he? So I want to share with him how shame feels, how fear feels, how it would feel to be threatened with exposure and humiliation, all the things that I felt. Thanks to him.”
“You told him about the paintings? What did he say?”
“He laughed at me. Who cares what you paint? Who’ll ever see what you paint? And then he hung up.”
“Listen, Dennis,” I had said late last night when he picked up, half asleep, “there’s something bothering me.”
“What?”
Well, to tell the truth, it was more like wha? It seemed Dennis had finally gotten over his insomnia. I forged ahead anyway.
“It’s about those three missing canvases. Have you thought about them at all?”
“Sure. I figured Louis took them to keep for himself.”
“Why take them off the frames?”
“A lot of people do that, roll the canvas so that it takes less space, you know, store it in a tube. Maybe he didn’t have room for them. I understand his place is really small.”
“But he had one painting at the show that was not for sale. Why hold three out?”
“He has that right. Maybe he didn’t like them. Or maybe he loved them. Maybe they were personal. Who knows?”
“I’d like to.”
“Now? Couldn’t it wait until morning?”
I looked at my watch. It was after two.
“Sorry. I’ll catch you tomorrow. I mean tonight.”
I had wanted to tell him everything I had learned, but it could wait. At least until I was sure.
The catalog listed fifty-three works. I thought that’s what Louis had said, too—or was it Veronica? Yes, she had said there were forty-seven paintings and five pieces of sculpture, and that’s what was listed. Everything accounted for.
Except what had been on those empty stretchers. Two works in addition to les and mor.
I jumped up without bothering to shut off the VCR and went right for the photo albums, taking all three of them back to the desk. I opened the first.
The first album contained pictures of Cliff and Louie on a trip to Rome and Israel; from the looks of the other people occasionally in the photos, it was a gay tour.
The second album was a book of slides of Clifford’s work. I took the loupe out of the middle drawer, took out one of the plastic pages, and, my eye to the lens, held it up to the light to see what was there. On this page, there were photos of up and rising son. Also the basenji sculpture, shot in various stages.
There were some shots of Cliff, in goggles and knee pads, painting, what looked like Saran Wrap around his watch, but it wasn’t possible to be sure without projecting the slide.
The third album was the one I wanted to look at first, family pictures, the ones Bertram Kleinman had been shown, and yes, there was Clifford as a happy little boy, on a tricycle, with a litter of beagle puppies, holding hands with an older boy. A boy who was a little taller than he was and quite a bit stockier, even then. A boy holding a basketball against his hip. A boy whose head had been torn off.
I paged through the album slowly, studying Clifford’s family, his mother and father, looking young and proud with their two sons, one, the younger, with blond curls, the other, the older boy, headless, and on and on, even until adulthood. Near the end of the book, I found Lester and Morton. In fact, I found the picture from which the painting in question had been made. In the photo, the boys stood close together, grinning falsely, clearly having been told to smile for the camera. Normal boys, like normal basenjis, not wanting to do as they were told. Not wanting to have their stupid picture taken when they could be playing war or climbing a tree instead. The painting, as I remember, was another story, a story of lewdness and fear, a story of incest and abuse, a story that said, Do your sons play that way? and Blood will tell.
Peter’s wife, Linda, whom I had spoken to yesterday, was a short, square-looking woman with a round, flattish face, her hair neatly coiffed and sprayed, the hem of her unstylish dress landing primly beneath her knees, her children at her left, the ankles and feet of her husband to her right.
Bertram Kleinman’s voice was coming from the television speakers.
Bert: “You said that to him?”
Cliff, crying: “Yes.”
Bert: “You were able to get angry at him?”
Cliff: “Yes.”
Bert: “This is marvelous, Clifford, a real breakthrough for you. This is what we’ve been working for.”
Cliff: “But it didn’t do any good. He just doesn’t get it. The way he doesn’t get that I’m an artist. Just because I’m his kid brother. I mean, even when I told him I had signed a gallery contract for my first show, well, my first group show, but still, he didn’t get it. He didn’t even congratulate me, Dr. Kleinman.”
“What did he do?”
“He hung up on me. He said ‘Shit,’ and hung up. Do you see what I mean? What good did it do?”
Bert: “Clifford, we’re not talking about changing Peter. Or erasing the past. We don’t have the power to do either of those things. What we’re talking about is you, we’re talking about your ability to express what you feel. And toward that end, this has been a really positive step for you.”
“I guess. I guess you’re right.”
So that was the Cliff and Bert Show.
I shut off the set and walked out of the little red room into the huge, hollow, empty studio in the front of the loft.
The light coming into the windows was from streetlamps, now, and when I walked over to the windows and looked out, I could see that it was raining.
It was raining inside, too. All around me, overhead, in every room, in the closets full of expensive clothes, in the kitchen hung with polished copper-bottomed pots, it was raining sadness. I had seen him now, heard him, felt him, listened as the secret of childhood abuse had bubbled up in therapy, but nothing I or anyone else could do would bring him back to paint in his studio, to wear his expensive clothes, to cook in those copper-bottomed pots, to walk his dog, to love his handsome boyfriend.
All I could do was make it as likely as possible that the person who killed him would be punished. I still had much to do.
32
Dashiell Was Ready
It was after seven and I was starving, so I went poking through the kitchen drawers for what every New Yorker has, menus. While I waited for my miso soup and tekka maki to arrive, I fed the dogs the last of Magritte’s food and set up the slide projector in the studio, where I would be able to look at the slides on those huge, bare white walls.
When the delivery man buzzed, I salivated like Pavlov’s dogs, buzzed him in, and waited hungrily for him to climb the stairs. I had the money ready. My dogs were ready, too. Dashiell was ready to lay down his life for me, or at least place his bulk in front of mine. Magritte, being a basenji, never wanting to be where he was supposed to be, was ready to escape.
I reached for the bag, handed the deliveryman the money, and felt somethi
ng warm and quick brush by my left leg.
The deliveryman headed down.
Magritte headed up.
I figured, what the hell, the dog has a CD. So instead of chasing him up the stairs while my soup got cold, I called him. And he came.
The food was wonderful, and I ate most of it. Ex-dog trainer or not, there was no way I was going to disappoint my companions. Even if my newest law of private investigation is Never put anything into your mouth that was meant for a dog, there’s no law that says you can’t do it the other way around.
I turned on the slide projector, and the first slide appeared on the wall.
Uncle Miltie. The stocky guy in the housedress and cheap wig. His back turned. The cigar burning.
Click.
The second panel. Ash accumulating.
Click.
The third panel. Ash dropping to the carpet.
(Stomach tightens.)
Click.
The fourth and missing panel. Otherwise known as the truth, as rendered by Clifford Cole.
The subject of the work, in a dress, a wig, and the kind of orthopedic stockings my grandmother Sonya wore, had turned around.
He was grinning.
He was wearing lipstick.
Lots of lipstick.
A garish amount, in my opinion. Especially with that outfit.
Genderfuck is done with wit. This portrait was done with malice. Be that as it may, once again we were face-to-face.
I had seen him first at the opening, even though he’d told Dennis he couldn’t be there. He had been so impressed with the price of the basenji sculpture, he had whistled in amazement.
I had seen him next at Westminster, where he had wondered out loud how anyone could tell the basenjis apart. Where he had made dead sure he knew whose harmless bait to exchange for the tainted bait he’d meant for Magritte.
And when he’d heard on the news, no doubt, that a handler had died instead of a dog, that his clever ploy had failed to work, because after all he was not a dog person, didn’t know the practices of the conformation ring, he had come back.
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