The Art Student's War

by Brad Leithauser

  Increasingly, Ronny reminisced about shared experiences as if they belonged to some misty past. Do you remember that first walk we had in Palmer Park? he might begin, as though Bea could possibly have forgotten—as though it had taken place not months but years ago. Do you remember that unbelievable woman singing “They Didn’t Believe Me” under the Kern’s clock? Do you remember that night, Bea, when you said the moon over the river resembled the face of a Chinese mandarin?

  And—queerer yet—his distancing languor seemed infectious: Bea, too, began feeling as though everything had unfolded ages ago. It was another world—those days when leaves on the trees were still green, when people swam in Lady Lake, when her family felt whole and her aunt and uncle visited weekly.

  How many soldiers’ faces had she drawn since her first, Private Donnelly—that sweet, touching boy who had made her laugh so gaily and whose mobile features, behind the big stiff bandage over his eye, had all but faded from memory? Since then, there’d been too many boys to remember, drifting off like puppets on strings, wherever the War told them to go. And sometimes the War sent the puppets home, damaged, with strings hopelessly tangled …

  Her heart wasn’t in school—in those dutiful landscapes produced for Dr. Ravenscroft. Nor was her heart in her dealings at home, where poor Papa continued working backbreaking hours. Yes, they were prospering on Inquiry Street. The difficulty wasn’t a lack of money but—given the War—a shortage of things to buy. Papa announced one night that the family would have a new car once production started up again, and everybody knew they could depend on his promise: Papa never made a pledge unless he meant to keep it. He brought home a mammoth, gorgeous, all-but-new Philco radio, salvaged from one of his home renovations. And there was the night he came home smelling strongly of beer and said to Bea, as he stood by the kitchen sink eating a dill pickle right out of the jar, “Bia, you know what I made this week?”

  At first she thought what he’d made must have something to do with houses—something he’d constructed. Papa never talked of money in this way.

  “Uh-uh,” Bea said.

  “I made over a hundred dollars this week.”

  “A hundred dollars?” An amazing sum …

  “O’Reilly sold that house we redid on Twelfth Street and I got a bonus. Now not a word to anyone,” Papa said darkly, and pressed into her hand a ten-dollar bill. The windfall should have elated her. Why did she feel downcast instead?

  Nor was her heart in those portraits she drew at Ferry Hospital, because she’d learned she couldn’t afford to bring her heart into that ghost-haunted castle.

  It was a lesson perhaps not fully appreciated when she’d met the soldier who offered her an “indifferent poem” for an “indifferent portrait.” More than she wanted to admit, more than she knew was wise, Henry’s face and voice and darting turns of thought had become a part of her, like the iron and the sugar in her blood. Maybe it was only once a week she rode up Woodward to Pleasant Ridge, but each visit filled her head with words to ponder, images to absorb. Was this what love really was—this finding someone’s every remark worth deliberating over?

  And now Henry was going to leave her.

  And there was nobody—truly nobody—to whom Bea could explain how desolating that prospect was. Certainly not Henry himself, to whom she owed a duty to treat his departure positively. And certainly not Ronny, though Ronny would have listened eagerly—jealously—enough. And not Maggie, who had no tolerance for such talk when her own husband was forty-four hundred miles away, waiting for the Japs to restrike Pearl Harbor.

  And now Henry was leaving—and now Henry was really leaving. Though he still walked stiffly, and though Bea was keenly attuned to the precariousness of his recovery, Henry was leaving in four days. In hasty moments, Henry began stealing kisses. Four days! Though he usually seemed such a frugal young man, he took her to lunch at the Book-Cadillac dining room, and he presented her with a silk scarf from Himelhoch’s, and he bought her an amethyst locket because (in the sort of endearing skewed logic he lived by) the amethyst was his birthstone.

  On their last night together, he took her to meet a friend of his, who lived with his parents in Ferndale, a few blocks from the Vanden Akkers’. The friend, whose name was Mitchell Spence, wasn’t home. In fact, no one was home. It turned out that Mitchell’s mother and father were in Indianapolis. Mitchell had left a key in the milk chute, though.

  They sat in Mitchell’s house, waiting for Mitchell. It was odd waiting in a total stranger’s home, totally alone with Henry. It made Bea uneasy, it made her oddly joyful. Henry suggested they brew up some coffee and she told him she felt peculiar invading a stranger’s kitchen and Henry told her that Mitchell not only wouldn’t mind, he would insist.

  So the two of them wound up sitting in Mitchell’s living room, sipping coffee, under the intent gazes of strangers—the room was chockablock with photographs. “That’s Mitchell,” Henry said, pointing to a tinted photograph, perched on the end table.

  The big round face was a little too large for its frame. This wasn’t a face Bea would have pictured for any friend of Henry’s. Mitchell had an openhearted, plump, friendly face. His hair was combed back in a simple, colossal wave. He looked—truth to tell—not very bright.

  Actually, Mitchell’s face was everywhere. On the mantel, on top of the radio, on the windowsill.

  Bea and Henry sat on the couch, waiting for Mitchell. Henry kissed her and she let him kiss her. This was something she never remembered, except when the actual activity was in progress: the colors were different in Henry’s touch, and in Henry’s kiss. These weren’t those chlorophyll-crazed greens, the detonative reds and yellows and unsoundable blues that Ronny aroused. No, it was a narrower palette of tans and golds and muted oranges—just the colors of Henry’s freckled skin, his green-tinted brown eyes, his rusty hair. Ronny’s hands had a complete little repertoire of tricks or wiles—the suave way they teased and tested her inner palms, the back of her neck, even her earlobes. Ronny’s touch made her feel dizzy and a little frightened, but there was nothing frightening about Henry. There was something so straightforwardly candid in how his hands clenched her hands, his lips pushed up against her lips.

  “They tell me I’ve recovered,” Henry said. “It seems I’m fit for service.”

  “You do seem better, Henry. You look better. Your mother succeeded in fattening you up.”

  “My mother,” Henry said.

  “I remember when I first laid eyes on you. You were a wraith.”

  “And I remember when I first laid eyes on you. You were an angel.”

  “Henry.”

  “Fit for service? Such a simple phrase. But applied to such a complicated reality.”

  “I think you’re very brave.”

  “No. Please. Don’t say that.” Henry looked even more serious than usual. “You see, Bea, I’m very frightened.”

  “I know you are. And I think you’re very brave.”

  The second time around, the tribute found its mark. Henry flushed with pride, and turned to kiss her …

  And then she saw him wince—his back had stabbed him—and Bea, riding forward on a tide of sympathy, leaned forward and kissed Henry hard, harder than they usually kissed, and a bright yellow yolk of light ruptured and ran inside her head. When their lips broke apart, Henry’s breath lofted into her ear.

  The telephone rang.

  “We better not answer it,” Bea said. She suddenly felt very guilty—virtually criminal—just in being here. But Henry said it might be Mitchell and hauled himself to his feet.

  “Hello,” Henry said. “Oh hello. Really? All right. All right. I understand. Okay.” Henry hung up the phone. “That was Mitchell,” he said. “He’s delayed. He won’t be here for an hour and a half or so.”

  “Then we ought to leave, Henry.”

  “I have something I want to say first.” Henry sat down and slowly swung round to face her. “Bea, you know how I feel about you,” he said.

&n
bsp; “I do. Yes. Yes, I do know, Henry.”

  “Then you know I’m in love with you.”

  “Well—”

  “And I can’t express what that does to my thinking, Bea. All my thinking. My house is different because I love you. And my parents. Mathematics is different because I love you. Do you see where this is going?”

  Bea didn’t really, for her head was all in a muddle. And Henry’s body was so tense—she could feel its internal compression as he leaned toward her, into her, vibrant passion suffusing his face: his eyes were afire. Oh my: was he proposing to her? Is that where this was going?

  “And God, too,” Henry said. “God is different because I love you. Do you see what I’m saying? I can have no meaningful theology that doesn’t include you.”

  “Henry, please, kiss me,” Bea said, but that wasn’t at all what she’d intended to say.

  Bea hadn’t been certain she understood everything he’d meant, but as they kissed, again and again, it grew clearer that she took Henry’s measure precisely. And he her. She was a part of his meaningful theology. There were different levels of understanding operating here.

  “Do I have to make the conventional pronouncements?” Henry said. “That I’ve never felt this way before? That I’ve never told anyone I loved her?”

  “No. Because I already know …”

  “This is all so new to me,” Henry said, and—just like that—he placed his hands upon her breasts. “You’re … you understand all this better than I do.”

  “No, Henry,” Bea whispered. “No.”

  They kissed again and though his hands were awkwardly placed—they were still settled on her breasts—the colors in her head not only brightened but swirled, the way melted caramel swirls around an apple, hollowing a place for it, enclosing the red and pink skin in a subsiding bed of pure tawny sweetness …

  “I’m so frightened,” Henry said.

  “Shh,” Bea said.

  “You do know.”

  “Yes. Shh now.”

  “So frightened it’s all going to end before I achieve any clarity.”

  Clarity: the word threw splinters of light Bea’s way, as a cresting wave will, just before its invisible self-supports give way and it goes under. Her mouth was so hungry for his mouth. Kissing him seemed the only way to make him stop talking.

  “I’m so afraid I won’t come back,” Henry said.

  “No, Henry,” Bea said, “no,” she repeated, when all at once, as though the visionary wave had awesomely regathered, only to cascade over her head, she was struck by a revelation more overwhelming than any in her life before. It was true—yes, her second sight confirmed it: Henry wouldn’t come back. Henry would not come back.

  Never again would Henry come back and everything so powerfully present before her at this moment—Henry’s eyes and Henry’s bony hands, Henry’s voice, Henry’s feverish, wonderful, overburdened brain—was going away forever. She would be abandoned; he would leave her, permanently.

  “No, Henry,” Bea half whispered and half cried, “no.”

  “I’m so frightened,” Henry said, and he was shaking with his fear. She held him, pulled him toward her, and their mouths locked even more tightly.

  Then his hands sprung loose, they were all over her body, and Henry’s shaking, or her own shaking, turned into a different type of shaking. “No, Henry,” Bea was saying, but what she was denying or protesting was no longer obvious to anyone. Anyone watching—anyone watching from above—wouldn’t have known what to make of it. His hand was way up her skirt, her whole body arched forward and backward, and forward. “No, Henry,” she said, and everything she did was colored by this horrible, green, glittering metallic certainty: never again, never again after tonight would she enfold poor Henry Vanden Akker in her arms. The brightest mind she’d ever known, maybe … the intensest, certainly … her one dear Dutch Detroit Vincent … this boy would never come back from that jungle that so awed and addled and terrified him. Never. Never.

  Everything in the world that Henry longed for would be brutally ripped away and what else was there to do but yield to his hands’ hunger? She was aware of fumbling, and uncertainty, and more fumbling, and Henry actually cursing, Damn, and pleading, Please, please. And then, Oh dearest God …

  It was supposed to hurt and if it had hurt she might have shown the presence of mind to make him stop—only, it did not hurt at all, it merely demanded a deep and a simple and a complicated set of adjustments. The force of him now was almost more than she could bear—his breath was a rasping ransacking gasp down the long tunnel of one of her ears—and she seized him by the shoulders and cried, “No, Henry!” as everything at once came distinct, as if seen from above, the absolute wrongness of it, and there was a wild, long, quick removing, a sliding free, free into deeper pooled regrets than she could bear, a hot strangled goodbye, and Henry repeatedly shuddering, atop her, and then Henry was still.

  And then Henry was talking again but what Henry might say no longer mattered in the slightest. He was speaking of God, he was showering her with apologies, he was telling her he loved her and explaining something about Calvin College and the incalculable size of the sea, and his parents, and a catastrophic fall, which turned out to be his own fall, on a hillside in the jungle, but nothing counted for anything given the crime scene contemplated by Mitchell’s big and innocent face from its perch on the end table: there was a spatter of loud bright blood on her thigh and on her stomach and on her blouse and—yes—blood on the couch, too. Bea pushed Henry off of her, completely off of her (“I didn’t know,” he kept saying, dimly, “I didn’t know”), and she gathered her clothes inadequately around her and, whimpering and gasping, she scurried into the bathroom, just the way Aunt Grace had dashed toward the changing room when her bathing suit strap snapped at Lady Lake, and Bea shut and locked the door. She was breathing hard, but she was not crying.

  The room’s sharper light made everything all that much more coldly horrifying. What had she done? At the base of her ribs she found a smear of something altogether alien and then a moment later she knew precisely what it was, this shiny clinging white mud: oh, every cell in her body recognized it in all its concentrated cruelty and selfishness and menace.

  Bea removed her blouse, completely removed her blouse, and draped it on the towel rack, and she removed her brassiere too. Her skirt had already fallen to the floor. Henry was speaking from the other side of the door, but she didn’t listen. She lowered the rest of her clothing and let it lie piled at her ankles. Bea still wasn’t crying, though her breath was coming in sobs. She turned on both the hot and cold taps as far as they would go. Into the tumbling upset tumult of the basin she plunged a washcloth, wrung it out, and applied it to her stomach, her ribs, her breasts. She wrung it out and applied it under her arms, over her arms. Wrung it out and, panting harder than ever now, so that her breathing seemed to get in her way as she bent over, she applied it to her trembling private parts. Lastly, with a second washcloth, Bea rinsed her face, dried herself carefully, and one by one put her garments back on. Then she took the first, soiled washcloth and attended to the bloodstain on her blouse.

  When she unlocked the door, Henry was all over her. He was hovering beside her, flailing his hands and talking a mile a minute. Bea all but pushed him away. “Henry,” she said. “Don’t you see? My God, there’s cleaning up to do!”

  “Cleaning up,” Henry said. “Yes, cleaning up,” he echoed. “Of course there’s cleaning up.”

  The phrase seemed to carry great philosophical weight with Henry—he nodded respectfully, as though she’d uttered something terribly profound—but failed to inspire any action. He planted himself beside the end table—beside Mitchell’s grinning stupid face—and observed her silently as Bea applied to the couch the same washcloth she’d taken to her blouse. Fortunately the couch’s plaid pattern hid the stain a bit.

  “How would this look,” Bea said, her voice higher than normal by a couple of notches, “if Mitchell cam
e home now? Look at me. Henry, look at this couch.”

  “I don’t think he will,” Henry said. “There’s still—there’s still quite a bit of time.”

  “Look at me, Henry,” Bea cried in anguish, scrubbing and scrubbing at the plaid couch.

  Then Henry made a funny sudden cackling sound. He started sobbing and, after a minute or two—unexpectedly—Bea began to feel genuinely sorry for him. She sat Henry down on the half of the couch not wet with her scrubbing and she squeezed in beside him. She placed his face at the base of her neck and held him. Perhaps because she was such a crybaby herself, she could never resist comforting a person in tears.

  “It’s okay, Henry,” she said. “Everything’s all right, Henry.” It should have been so strange, and yet the whole business followed its own compelling weird logic: on this night when she’d lost her virginity, it was not she, but her partner, who wound up in tears.

  “What have I done?” Henry cried. “What have I done?”

  “You haven’t done anything. We did. We did it together.”

  “You don’t see how awful I am.”

  “You’re not awful, Henry. Or no awfuller than I am.”

  “It’s so wonderful of you: it’s as if you can’t see it, Bea. My God, you’re wonderful.” Henry raised his head from her neck and, eyes red with tears, peered at her intently. “Under any imaginable scrutiny, you’re wonderful.”

  “Shh,” she said. “Hush now.”

  “Bea,” he said, “what’s the worst color a person could be? What’s the very worst, disgustingest color a human being could be?”

  “Henry, what in God’s name are you talking about?”

  “You’re a painter. What’s the very worst color a human skin could be? In theory. Hypothetically.” An eager excitement returned to his face. “I mean of all the colors in the whole universe—the whole entire spectrum. The worst-colored skin. Turtle green? Cobalt blue? In all your entire imagination, what’s the very worst color any person could be?”