Renoir rose from a high-back wicker chair into St. Cloud’s view, his dark hair closely cropped, a narrow slice of mustache tracing his upper lip, imbuing him with the theatrical air of a vigorous but old-fashioned movie matinee idol. In the heat of the room Renoir seemed cool. He went to all the windows, fussed the curtains until the light stopped its brilliant bounce and settled evenly through gauzy material, cloaking the woman’s body with an even golden glow.
“That’s better, Renoir. Sit, you’ll interrupt the light. Don’t want any shadows falling across such a splendid piece of female business. Can’t afford distractions at my age. There’s no more muscle between my legs to rise and point with anticipation. But my mind doesn’t know that, thinks there is a muscle hardening in pursuit of carnal action. A lifetime of habit has tricked my mind into believing I am still the man I used to be. Sit sit sit. You’re blocking the light.”
Renoir looked at the woman and shook his handsome head with an air of disbelief. He ran a finger across the close cut of his mustache and sniffed the air distractedly, as if dismissing a waiter who uncorked a bottle of bad wine.
“Renoir! Sit down! You’ll ruin the light on her ass!”
“Light is a precious commodity.” Renoir spoke with a sigh as he slithered down into the wicker chair. “There’s more light at night if you know how to look. Goya’s dogs knew that.”
“What do you know about Goya that I haven’t taught you? What do you know about black dogs? The truth of female flesh is something which utterly escapes you. You have no palette to paint their light.”
“I know you can’t see a thing without your glasses. Not only is the muscle between your legs soft, you can’t even make out what stands before you. Instead you’re rhapsodizing about shapes and distant memories, barking dogs in the Prado, and a nineteenth century Impressionist with green grocer sensibilities. Let the poor woman put her clothes back on.”
“Haaaaaaraaaaph! Twelve things you know absolutely nothing about. The first two are art and women.”
“What are your first two? Compassion and tolerance?”
“When you drift to the bottom of art history books and become a significant footnote as I’ve become, the world develops compassion for you, tolerates your every whim.”
“What is your whim?”
“To have her pull her shorts down and spank her lovely apple to a real Renoir red. To expose true female color. To show you why Renoir got it wrong and how I got it right. The world will know I got it right. I won’t be an art history footnote forever. When least expected I’ll float to the top of every chapter on twentieth century art. So much then for the fruit vendors of the world and your schoolboy interpretations of what is real and what is not.”
“Just like me, I suppose? Is that what you’re trying to say? You did it right, but it came out wrong. That why you named me after Renoir?”
“You aren’t as foolish as that mustache makes you out to be. But then how did I know how it was going to turn out? A man sends his sperm up a woman’s womb like an ambassador making some kind of a deal. Never know what’s going to walk out nine months later. A president or a jackass.”
“Get on with it. Pull her shorts down and spank her apple bottom. That’s what you keep insisting I come up here to see, isn’t it?”
“You’re being cruel, taking advantage of a strong man in a weak hour. You know … I … can’t.”
“What? Can’t get an erection? Can’t get out of bed? Can’t shine the apple?”
“Angelica! Take the rest off!” The large head rolled toward the woman, the glazed eyes pleading.
“Even my high heels? You told me never to take these off.”
“No. No. Leave those on. Everything else goes. Turn your back to me. I want the surprise of light on you. I love that shadow traveling across your shoulderblade. The play of false light. Mystery makes the woman, illusion seduces the man.”
Angelica moved her body in a single fluid motion, unassuming as a woman stepping from a bath, an improbable Aphrodite rising from a quivering sea of light in high heels. The octopus tattoo on her right breast spread its tentacles as she exhaled a slight breath. She had a clear view of St. Cloud’s face peering from behind the door.
“Is the light where you want it now?” Angelica spoke the words straight to St. Cloud.
“Yes yes. Perfect.” The words wheezed from the bed behind her. “Straight light. Pure illusion. Bring on the barking dogs.” The voice slowed, rasping final encouragement. “Now take those shorts off.”
There was not the slightest possibility even the most worn coin could be slipped between Angelica’s tight white shorts and the smooth skin of her thighs. Yet she managed to cock her hips in a provocative angle which loosened the material until it slipped from her body to the floor, simply as a snake discards its skin. She stepped out of the shorts, her only adornment the black spike-heeled shoes which threw her glistening calves into a taut tilt. Angelica’s hands glided up, fingers locking behind her neck as she spread her folded arms to form fleshy wings. Sunlight shafting along the tops of her arms struck the short blondish hairs, creating an unmistakable stir between St. Cloud’s legs. As Angelica’s eyes met his St. Cloud slid through an alcoholic haze, back to a time that seemed close but was at least two years ago, when he was still a happily married cheating husband. St. Cloud slid through the troubled waters of his memory to the day he had taken Angelica out in his small skiff to check for customers in his stone crab traps. Angelica liked to watch him pull the wood slatted boxes up on seaweed-encrusted ropes from the sandy flats. He was fascinated by her fascination that the crabs chased into his traps after cans of cat food punched with holes. Crabcats, Angelica called them, horrified when St. Cloud severed their powerful snapping claws at the upper joint with steel cutters. With a toss overboard, and a final splash, St. Cloud bid the crabs adios until next season. He cracked his catch of bright orange claws. They feasted on sweet meat and cool wine, floating aimlessly in the harbor among the wakes of charter fishing boats, Sunday yachtsmen, and cigarette-boat speed demons affecting superior airs of drug smugglers as they roared past with defiant raised beercan salutes at pedestrian boats in their way. Angelica wanted to see the submarine pens. They were easy enough to show her. St. Cloud guided the skiff past Mallory Dock, in among the long fingers of concrete piers at the edge of the Navy base, where submarines once nested while being refitted during the First World War. P-T boats replaced the submarines during the Second World War, and now an improbable new fleet was anchored. Hundreds of abandoned boats bobbed in the wake of St. Cloud’s skiff chugging by, crafts of every size and description, from single engine thirty-foot pleasure cruisers to sixty-foot Hatteras convertibles crowned with once gleaming stainless steel tuna towers. Two years before all had made the 180-mile passage to Mariel Bay in Cuba and returned loaded with the crowded catch Castro flushed from his jails and insane asylums. Mixed among these thousands were true political refugees, relatives and friends of those on American shores who had paid boat owners high dollar in a desperate time to ferry loved ones to the land of the free and the brave. The boat owners were repaid by the U.S. government’s impounding their vessels, leaving freedom’s flotilla to idle, list and rot, while their final consequence was unraveled through the courts. The government could not decide if the boat owners were heroic patriots or greedy opportunists. St. Cloud idled his skiff down to a slow drift. Ahead was a massive concrete bulkhead lined with an even more impressive array of captured craft. NO TRESPASSING ORDER OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT was stenciled in red paint across hulls of an armada of marijuana tonnage and vast cocaine cargoes. Some vessels had the girth of small battleships, their steel hulks streaking rust into still water as St. Cloud’s skiff glided by impounded dreams of enterprise and the great American hustle. Angelica was beside him, sweet crab and wine on her breath. She laughingly pulled her thin T-shirt over her head, exposing shoulders and breasts to a sun piercing the calm of a deserted afternoon. St. Cloud sensed they were
drifting from their time into a modern-day pirate ghost town. He was startled by a voice from one of the impounded boats. A husky male voice, its sound detached from any discernible source. Its unmistakable intent rolling steadily across still water. St. Cloud tried to determine if the originator of the words was hidden on the hulking ship with Matto Grasso Trader proclaimed on its bow. He saw no one. The voice came again. Its unmistakable target was Angelica. She boldly stepped to the bow of the skiff, a bare-breasted masthead. Her gaze cast across water, hunting the voice. She sought the source of the floating disembodied sounds. The echoed intentions of the words were challenged by an expression of recognition in Angelica’s widening eyes. Her naked back arched. Her gaze across water intensified its pursuit, primal hunter alert to sense of prey. The guttural male words became a challenging scent. Angelica’s eyes ferreted the source of the voice’s lustful intentions, determined to extinguish it, take its flaming wick and snuff it between quick press of thumb and forefinger, drive the male desire back upon itself in a fury of female reciprocity.
In the glittering bedroom light Angelica’s breasts held the naked thrust of challenge St. Cloud witnessed years before in the submarine pen. It was an unsettling recognition of sexual origins, when civilizations were controlled by women. Watching Angelica turn slowly in the room, totally exposed within a circle of men, St. Cloud groped for meaning through the alcoholic swamp of his steaming brain. Maybe it was man’s desire never to let woman rise again. Keep her under heel and thumb. Never allow Pandora to release the awesome power from the box. Keep a tight leash around her neck. Jerk her whenever she strays. There was so much about being a man St. Cloud mistrusted. Angelica would sell her body to buy shoes for her small daughter, or for a gram of coke. Hers was a world of honest barter in a dishonest world. She knew the value of her goods and wasn’t about to sell short. But that was too simple. St. Cloud knew it went beyond that, to the detached voice Angelica hunted years before with wild eyes across water. To the primal strength of her sexuality. The voice of naked male intent, coming across water as a penetrating threat that distant day, had been reduced by Angelica to the cry of a helpless boy, drowning, begging salvation. The hunter’s glint in Angelica’s eyes was the same now as on that day, as she watched in her imagination the frail white body of the helpless boy go under for the third time before she reached out, ensnaring the hair, pulling the victim from watery fate with forthright passion, kissing cold lips, breathing life into another misguided soul. Angelica was a different kind of woman, demanding a different kind of man. St. Cloud hadn’t added up the differences yet, nor did he know if he understood them all, but he had utmost respect for the strength of their source. For this reason he had every intention of surviving the future.
“Have you had your fill of apples?” Renoir slipped from the wicker chair and walked to the open windows, turning his back to the sea beyond, and focused his attention on Angelica. “And you, honey, why don’t you get dressed and call it a day?”
“Don’t dare tell Angelica what to do!” The voice wheezed from the bed. “I haven’t finished with her!”
“You never started.” Renoir turned with an air of disdainful resignation, his gaze going far from the room, through the windows to the thin blue horizon beyond.
“There’s a lot to be learned here, Renoir. Not only about art, but about life, sex. Look at this beauty. Don’t turn your back on her. What are you afraid of? Afraid you’ll get your precious weeny between her buns and never be able to get out? She doesn’t want your weeny. What good is a man without a weeny? No good to her, you foolish boy. No good at all. You don’t understand the first thing about a woman like this. Angelica wants to be equal with you, exchange a kiss, a bow, a handshake, a fuck. It’s all in the exchange. That’s what women are about. That’s what they think when you’re fucking them. No great mystery. They don’t think of stealing your weeny. They think of the exchange, and that has no face, no photo finish. It is a rush of reality. Gives birth to us all. Women understand that, they—”
“Why don’t you ask Angelica what she feels?”
“I don’t have to ask her anything. I know what women think about me. They teach me in history of women’s art. College after college they hold me up as the enemy. Because I know their secret they stalk me through seminars, eviscerate my virility, study the fetid male entrails. They want to nail my old coonskin hide to the wall, a trophy of the vanquished. The silly witches want to paint themselves. Think they can do it better. It’s a great lie. Women will never understand themselves the way men can. I know their game. They want the public to remember me as crazy, because if you remember the artist as crazy, rather than the art as inspired, then it’s bad art. My paintings still sell, but not because I have the conviction of raw vision. Forget that. It’s because I’m a cultural artifact. A fossil to be studied under a microscope for his anachronistic way of dealing with the gloriously mundane texture of female flesh, its less than transcendent contours, its fettered truths. I’ve become infamous for a carnality of the intellect. But you want to know the truth, my unfettered confession? I just wanted to fuck them all. I succeeded at that, and in doing so fucked myself. Here’s my dark secret, spoken before I go to the grave. Even though I’m considered the most renowned painter of this century whose subject was the female, at heart I thought myself a fraud. Should have become a homophile and painted women from the inside out. Look at Michelangelo’s Libyan Soul on the ceiling of the Vatican. That silkpants did it better than anyone in the last two thousand years and the next five thousand to come and all he did was put tits on men.”
Renoir stepped back from the window and turned to face the room, blocking the full force of the light. “Are you finished? You’ve given every interviewer the past twenty years this ‘I’m really the better painter because the others are gay’ speech. Why don’t you get back to what we were really talking about? Go ahead and ask Angelica. What are you afraid of?”
“I’ll ask Angelica …” The wheezing voice whistled to a nervous stop, then coughed. “Ask her anything I want.”
“Ask her.”
“What?”
“What she feels.”
“Angelica …” The voice regained its wheezing whistle. “What do you fe … fee … feeeel?”
“Bored.”
“Haaaraaaaaph!” The voice sputtered with delight. “Angelica, you’re a beauty!”
“These high heels are killing me.”
Renoir slunk back into the wicker chair. “Go ahead, Angelica, tell him what you think. This is your chance, take it.”
Angelica raised one leg behind her, reached around to knead a knotted calf muscle. Perched on one leg she resembled a magnificent heron puzzling the surface of shallow water for a fish of truth. “I’m the kind of girl who won’t take yes for an answer.”
“That’s my kind of girl!” The voice chortled with so much pleasure it lost control to a fit of coughing.
“What about you, St. Cloud? Am I your kind of girl?” Angelica lowered a finely tapered leg at a provocative tilt.
“St. Cloud!” The voice stopped its fit of coughing. “Where is he? Now, there’s a man who knows it takes a fool to love like a fool.” The voice took an accusative poke at Renoir. “Not like you. Not like you at all. Where is my friend?”
Renoir pulled himself up in the wicker chair with a derisive snort. “He’s right behind the door watching your tawdry little peep show. He’s been there the whole time. I told you you couldn’t see a thing without your glasses. Why must you keep this charade up?”
“Bring St. Cloud in! I must talk to him about Goya’s barking dogs, about false light, about the art of misunderstanding women, about the lies we lead. This man knows. Knows the pain of it. No one else does. No one else is romantic fool enough to care. People don’t even feel anymore, so how can they care? St. Cloud? You there?”
St. Cloud pushed the bedroom door completely open, stepping into a sultry closeness perfumed with female perspiration. The whooze of
booze coursing through his blood put a slight totter in his step. He liked to think he had the gait of an off-duty tap dancer walking uphill, or at least the uneven wobble of a barstool romeo forced to prowl the flat-top world of sobriety. He hobbled to the head of the bed and took the old man’s hand between his. The hand was frail, its skin traveled by thickened black veins threatening to burst. St. Cloud caressed the hand. He admired the indomitable spirit of this man, his vitality of desire, the flame of lust refusing to be extinguished by a degenerating body. Long before St. Cloud met the man he had experienced the lustful spirit of his paintings. Even those paintings reproduced in the garish colors of popular magazines possessed the luminescent presence of virile visitation, as if a veil had been swiftly withdrawn from the commonplace, not merely to illuminate or to trick, simply to stab at the heart of unrequited love. The trembling hands that St. Cloud now soothed once wielded paintbrushes and voluptuous bodies with bold confident strokes. But this man began life as the least probable candidate to finesse a vision from the gods, to ascend beyond his living peers into a realm measured by the yardstick of immortality. He was from Key West, his maternal forefather the Wrecker James Fredrick Isaac, whose last name was given him as a first. Isaac’s forebear’s penchant for moving houses across seas and ships from the ocean floor pointed the way for him to do the impossible, create a painted universe on twelve-foot by twelve-foot squares of canvas. This Isaac was not born with the noble bearing of his swashbuckling ancestor, nor did he possess a profile to be stamped on coins of the realm. No. This Isaac existed as if God were truly a giant up in the heavens, making men and women in his reflected image, busily banging out a race of all things handsome and beautiful. Then one day, out of boredom with such production-line perfection, God lifted his massive hand, formed a fist, banged it down smartly on one of the handsome heads, slamming the man’s six-foot frame down to five feet, broadening shoulders to exaggerated proportions, pushing the face in on itself, creating folds of flesh resembling a bulldog, thick lips condemned to a perpetual pout, heavy jowls swinging off the broad triple chin, almost obscuring an abbreviated neck no higher than a tin can flattened by a speeding car. This new man’s entire appearance was so devoid of classical balance it signified a defiant aesthetic, a perfection of imperfection. The brown eyes of this creation peered from beneath lidded folds of flesh, cried out for affection with the eager-to-please expression of a dog expecting the gift of a juicy bone to fall from heaven’s dining-room tabletop. Having outfitted this new man with an alert and inquisitive animal nature, God in heaven was pleased, sent him to walk head and shoulders beneath lesser mortals of more common abnormalities. It was in his art that Isaac transcended all others. Those who saw Isaac’s art knew he had been touched by God. Only Isaac had a good-humored inkling of just how hard God had touched him. Isaac exuded the irrepressible spirit of a creature happy to be alive. Isaac counted himself lucky he had not been crushed to something less than an ant in the moment of his creation.
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