Stars and Bars: A Novel

by William Boyd

  “Listen,” he said, “can you get down here?”

  “I don’t know. When?”

  “This weekend. We can stay in a hotel. Then we’ll take a few days and drive around. Charleston, Savannah, somewhere like that”

  There was a pause.

  “OK, maybe I can get down on Friday night.”

  “I’ll meet you at the airport. Atlanta.”

  “No. I don’t know which plane I’ll get. I’ll come straight to the hotel.”

  “Great. Hang on a sec.” He turned to Shanda. “Shanda, what’s the very best hotel in Atlanta?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Hotel. The very best. In Atlanta.”

  “Well … I guess Monopark 5000. But it’s real expensive.”

  It sounded more like a brand of hair conditioner than a hotel, but he would have to take her word for it. He relayed its name to Irene, who said she’d heard of it and the massive complex of shops, plazas, banks and adventure playgrounds out of which the enormous hotel soared.

  “See you there,” he said. “Friday night.” His voice went hoarse. “Bye.” He put the phone down.

  “Was that your wife?” Shanda asked. “I mean your fiancée. Bryant’s mommy?”

  “No.” He thought quickly. “A business associate.” No word of Irene’s trip must reach Bryant’s ears. He asked if he could make some more calls (“seein’ as how Ah’m darned well a-sittin’ by the phone”) and received Shanda’s permission. She went off into the kitchenette to make him some coffee. He called Beeby and told him the good news, gave him a description of the paintings and approximate market prices and said that Gage seemed entirely happy and prepared to sell through Mulholland, Melhuish.

  Beeby’s joy was profound. “We are all in your debt, Henderson. Great news. When are you coming home?”

  Henderson told him of his plans to drive around for a few days, explore the South a little further.

  “Take as long as you like, my dear boy, as long as you like. What about the Dutch paintings?”

  “Very average, as you thought. There is one curiosity.” He described Gage’s dirty picture. “I can’t place the myth. I thought Pruitt might know.”

  “I’ll ask him. Enjoy yourself.”

  Henderson put the phone down. Shanda came back with a cup of coffee. Her love-bite had faded to a brown smudge. Her distended breasts swung unrestrained, it seemed to Henderson, beneath a bright floral-patterned maternity dress. They sat and chatted as best they could for a few minutes. He thought she asked him if he and “Bryant’s mommy” were going to get married in a church. He told her no, and sketched out the arguments in favor of a registry office wedding.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Registry office.”

  “Red just offed his what? His wife?”

  Did they have registry offices in America? “No. A registry office.”

  “Air defense officer? Who? Red?”

  “Fiss. Fiss. Aw-fiss.”

  Shanda lit a cigarette and smiled worriedly at him.

  “You know, it’s still not working,” she said. “Sometimes it’s fine an’ I hear you OK. But other times it just goes. I’m lost.”

  Ten minutes later, Henderson stepped exhausted from the trailer. He walked around the side of the house, belching quietly to himself in an attempt to dislodge the ball of warm air trapped behind his rib cage. He wandered down the cool overgrown alleyways of the back garden feeling slightly more at ease. Apart from his clogged and costive body, his life was beginning to pick up again. He was finally getting on with his job and was reconciled with Irene. The last few days had been an absurd and regrettable hiccup. It was as if in driving south he’d passed into some anarchic and frustrating time zone—like Alice falling down the rabbit hole—but now things were returning to normal.

  He pushed through a screen of laurels to find himself on the banks of a large brackish stream. On the far bank was a dense pine wood. Over to his right was a stone bench, upon which sat Cora.

  “Mr. Dores,” she called. “Come and admire the view.”

  He joined her on the bench. She wore black cotton trousers and a white blouse, and with her short hair looked obscurely Chinese.

  “The view?”

  “My mother planned to construct a vista here. But it never got made.”

  “I see. Shame.” They sat and looked at the pine trees some thirty or forty feet away across the stream.

  “I suppose you think,” she said, “that it’s a rather pretentious idea. A southern lady playing at being a landscape gardener.”

  “Not at all,” he said defensively. He changed the subject. “I was very impressed by your father’s collection.”

  She turned her sunglasses on him. “Is he going to let you sell them?”

  “I hope so.”

  “Do you like Demeter and Iambe?”

  “That’s the one where.…”

  “The girl is holding up her dress. Yes.”

  “What did you call it?”

  “Demeter and Iambe. It’s written on the back of the canvas. I don’t know who the hell they are, though.”

  “I can fill you in on Demeter, I think. Goddess of the harvest. Her daughter, Persephone, was kidnapped by Hades, god of the underworld, one day while she was gathering flowers. Demeter goes wild with grief, permits no harvest for a year. Mankind about to perish, Zeus persuades Hades to release Persephone. Harvests restored. I don’t know where Iambe fits in. One of the rarer Greek myths, I suppose.”

  “I suppoase sowe,” she imitated his accent. Henderson smiled. He could take a joke.

  “Are you married, Mr. Dores?”

  He explained—roughly—the position in regard to Melissa.

  “You divorced her and now you want to remarry? Why?”

  “Well … I think because I now realize that the only time I was truly happy was when I was married to her and, well, I think I can be happy again.” He was a little astounded at his honesty. Having uttered the sentiment he reassessed it in the light of his recent phone call to Irene. Was it true? Yes, he told himself and remarked again on the boundless capacity for self-deception that resides in every human being.

  “So I take it Miss Dubrovnik isn’t your intended.”

  “Who? Oh, no. Why would … what would make you think that she might have been?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just that when I told you she’d phoned you looked so pleased.”

  “She’s a colleague. She, ah, had some important news for me about the paintings. Actually I’m meeting her in Atlanta on Friday. Some problems of dating, provenance, that sort of thing. Seventeenth-century Dutch is not really my area.”

  “What is?”

  “Late nineteenth. I’m what’s known as an Impressionist man.”

  “The Impressionist man,” she said grandly.

  “Yes.” He couldn’t tell why he felt uneasy.

  “I see.”

  “May I ask you something?” he said, emboldened by the friendly turn the conversation had taken.

  “You may.”

  “Why do you wear your sunglasses all the time?” She looked at him. “Because I’m an impressionist man as well, you might say. An impressionist woman.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Because everything looks nicer. The country, the weather, the people. They all look more as they should.”

  Henderson wasn’t quite sure if she were being serious. “You mean as you somehow imagined they would? Ideally speaking.”

  “Let’s say, as I think they should. Without my glasses the world doesn’t look as bright or as richly colored. The people look nastier too.” She puffed at her cigarette, sending small clouds up into the branches of the tree that overhung the bench.

  “Stands to reason,” Henderson said without much conviction.

  “Do you want me to take them off?”

  “Well, I … I mean only if—”

  She took her sunglasses off and turned her face toward him. It seemed an almost p
rofane and indecent gesture, as if she’d suddenly exposed her breasts or, like the girl in the painting, raised her dress. Her eyes seemed small and were brown like beer. English bitter, he thought, how apt. Her face seemed bland and empty. It was impossible to assess—with the removal of such a dominant feature—whether she was pretty or plain. It was like a good friend shaving off a beard he’s worn for ten years. Someone entirely different—unknown—is exposed beneath.

  Henderson felt uncomfortable. A fly buzzed around her face and she flapped it away. The removal of her sunglasses seemed to imply an intimacy between them, as if she were doing something specially for him. He hadn’t asked her to oblige, he reminded himself.

  “I think,” he said with insincere gallantry, “you look much nicer with them off.”

  “Remember I’m seeing you differently too,” she said, scrutinizing him. “I’ve torn away a veil.”

  He smiled edgily. The fly buzzed back, around his head this time. Just then the distant sound of rock music came from the house.

  “You’re not quite so hostile to us Brits, today,” he said.

  She laughed. “Life can get a little boring around here. Don’t blame me if I try to liven it up a little. Create some tension. I like to draw people out, you know. Force them to be themselves.”

  “Well, your blindness was very convincing. Your contempt for the English too.”

  “What about your contempt for us Americans, then?”

  “What contempt? We don’t have any contempt for you. I don’t, certainly.”

  She looked hard at him. “Well, we don’t care, anyway. We know it’s all brought on by envy.”

  He decided not to be drawn out any further.

  “Why are you living here, if you don’t mind my asking? I heard you dropped out of medical school.”

  She replaced her sunglasses. “I was going to be married,” she said in a quiet, solemn voice. “Three days before the ceremony my fiancé was killed in a car crash. I came back home. That was six months ago.”

  “Oh. I’m really sorry.” He felt very sad, all of a sudden. “I didn’t realize …”

  “Actually, that’s not true.”

  “Really.” He felt angry, all of a sudden. What was true in this family?

  “I was at medical school. After a while I just couldn’t see the point. All those illnesses, you know. Not just the big heavy ones; it was the horrible little ones: the ‘syndromes,’ the ‘diseases,’ the ones named after people. Too many of those to cope with.”

  There was a pause.

  “Duane seems to be back,” Henderson said. “Will he have fixed my car or is that too much to hope for?”

  “See you later, Mr. Dores.”

  That afternoon Henderson took Polaroid snapshots of all the paintings. Going around clockwise from the door, he measured each painting, took it off the wall to check the back, made a brief description and noted the title, the signature—if there was one—and the date. Back in New York he would consult the catalogue raisonné of each artist but he felt instinctively that all the paintings were “right.”

  He broke off for dinner. His saliva glands squirted into action when Alma-May entered with a large steaming casserole dish containing what she described as spaghetti bongaleeze. It turned out to be a vegetarian version, however, with various types of nut substituted for the meat. It was reasonably tasty, though, and Henderson ate his modest portion with some enthusiasm—mixed with vague qualms about whether one could actually overdose on vegetable fiber. His bowels seemed to have shut down entirely: the drains were well and truly blocked.

  Pudding turned out to be apple pie, cooked in a roasting tin with inch-thick whole wheat pastry. Alma-May had halved the apples but this was the only concession she had made to fruit preparation. In his portion Henderson found a twig with a few leaves on it. Perhaps Alma-May simply lined her roasting tin with pastry, set it on the ground in the orchard and shook the trees till the fruit fell in.…

  Bryant seemed quite content and after dinner went back upstairs to rejoin Duane and his music. Henderson caught her alone for a moment and asked her if she was enjoying herself.

  “Sure. It’s OK.”

  “You’re absolutely positive you don’t want to go home?”

  “Yes. I’ll stay.”

  “Did you have a good day in Atlanta?”

  “It was all right.”

  “Tell me, what’s Duane like?”

  “He’s OK.”

  He sat and watched television with Gage and Beckman until about eleven o’clock and then went to bed. He undressed and looked at his naked body in the mirror. His belly was as hard and distended as a gourd. He looked at his hairless shanks and collapsing buttocks and was not well pleased with what he saw. He made a half-hearted resolve to exercise. Perhaps he should take up jogging? But then he remembered he did exercise: he zenced. He did a few zencing drills, up on his toes and lunging until his calves ached. Then he climbed into bed.

  He thought for a while about his coming reunion with Irene. It was, he thought, a little uncharacteristic of her to relent so quickly. Perhaps she had missed him? Perhaps, he speculated, she had fallen in love with him? This, however, proved beyond the powers of his imagination.

  He settled down on his rack waiting for the night to pass. From time to time there were ominous rumblings and pingings from his hard bloated stomach. What he needed was some stodge: some cholesterol, carcinogens and red meat. Alma-May’s regime was too harsh: more suited to an animal, some robust herbivore, a camel or a giraffe; some beast with a mouth full of flat grinding molars, and whose idea of a delicacy was to strip the bark from a sapling. His model of late-twentieth-century man just wasn’t designed for such rigors. If he didn’t have some monosodium glutamate within the next twenty-four hours he’d start getting the shakes.

  He heard Duane’s music stop and the night noises were left to themselves. He worried vaguely for a while about the population explosion, the disappearing rain forests and the destruction of the ionosphere by aerosol sprays, and at some point in the small hours consciousness left him.

  chapter eight

  THE next morning Henderson completed his rough catalog and showed it to Gage.

  “All that remains to be settled now, Mr. Gage, are the prices and the date of the auction.” He handed over his estimate of the paintings’ value.

  Reserve Estimate

  Sisley, Le Verger à

  Voisins $500,000 $550,000–$650,000

  Les Toits de

  Marly 500,000 600,000–700,000

  Derain, La

  Bèlandre Verte 300,000 400,000–500,000

  Von Dongen,

  still life 100,000 100,000–150,000

  still life 100,000 125,000–200,000

  Braque, L’Atelier 280,000 350,000–500,000

  Utrillo,

  Montmagny en

  Hiver 200,000 250,000–300,000

  Vuillard, Petit

  Déjeuner 200,000 225,000–300,000

  Intérieur Bleu 150,000 200,000–250,000

  “You’ll see that the reserve column totals two million three hundred and thirty thousand dollars,” he said. “That’s the minimum for which we will allow them to be sold. Needless to say, that price is kept strictly confidential. I’ve based it on current sale-room performance, but, for example, I think Vuillard is grossly undervalued at the moment, but there you are. Anyway, absolutely no problem about meeting the reserve, I’m sure. Lots of them will go much higher as well. The Braque, the Sisleys …”

  “Two million three,” Gage pondered. “Where do you guys make your money?”

  “We charge the buyers a ten percent commission on top of the sale price. We normally charge the seller a rate too, but in this case we are happy to waive it.”

  “Nice business. What about the landscapes?”

  “I don’t think we’re likely to clear more than another, oh, hundred thousand, if we’re lucky.”

  “I see.”

  “Well, it�
��s been a pleasure—”

  “You mean you’re finished?”

  “Well, me personally. There’s the insurance, packing, transportation, catalogs, exhibition and advertising to be taken care of, but that will be in the hands of our very capable staff. If you’re happy with these reserve figures, then there’s nothing more for you to worry about.”

  “Oh.” Gage seemed disgruntled.

  “Is there anything wrong?”

  “I guess I didn’t figure you’d be through so fast.”

  “I am just the valuer and assessor,” Henderson explained. “My job is really quite straightforward. And I have,” he added gently, “been here since Sunday—four days. I’m usually no longer than an afternoon.”

  Gage appeared to be deep in perplexed thought. “I see. I suppose you’ll be going soon.”

  “I thought tomorrow.”

  “Mmm.”

  Henderson left him and went to check on his car. He wondered what was bothering the old man. He had put up with the bizarre household purely because of the importance and magnitude of the sale. Us valuers, he told himself a little smugly, don’t like to linger. Pruitt Halfacre rarely took more than an hour.

  He walked down the front steps. It was another clear hot day. His car had already acquired its coating of dust and its metal sides were hot to the touch. He walked around it and saw with irritation that the wheel still had not been replaced. Bloody Duane, he thought. There was nothing for it. He took off his jacket and rolled up his shirt sleeves. He had last changed the wheel on a car sometime in the 1960’s on a motoring tour of the Loire Valley, but all he could remember of the exercise was some hideous complication with the jack and subsequent acrimonious row with his then girlfriend.

  He walked around to the back to open the boot and noticed that the small flap over the petrol cap was ajar. He looked closer. The cap was loose. He strongly doubted whether any petrol remained in the tank. He opened the boot. The spare tire had gone.

  He made a couple of circuits of the car muttering and nodding to himself with an expression of sardonic wisdom on his face, like a man whose worst suspicions about humankind have just been unequivocally confirmed.