Grant seemed to savor the romance of it, actually, and over time Bianca had divulged a fair amount about Henry—probably more than she should, since Grant sometimes informed visitors that this was a portrait of “Bianca’s former fiancé.” And inevitably added: “His plane went down in the Pacific.” She’d told Grant that Henry hadn’t been her fiancé exactly—rather, her “near fiancé” or “almost fiancé”—but in the passion of her storytelling perhaps she hadn’t been altogether clear.
Saturday morning, after a few false starts, she donned a turquoise silk blouse from Himelhoch’s, a black skirt, and some quite “arty,” vaguely Southwestern Indian turquoise and silver earrings. She was meeting Ronny at the DIA.
What she hadn’t figured on, however, was that old moodiness of Ronny’s: you never knew quite where you stood. Oh, he was gallantry itself from the first moment: “Signorina—surely I can call you that—you’re enough to make me take up painting again.” She’d never known anyone else so debonair. And Ronny looked almost humorously handsome. She’d forgotten how, the last time she’d seen him, she’d detected a fleck of gray at his temples. Now the gray was unmistakable, and made him look not merely handsome but distinguished, too.
But, as soon became evident, there was an edge to his remarks.
“‘A painter is always mixing colors,’” Bianca quoted. “Now who said that?” They were standing in the white courtyard where the controversial Diego Rivera murals spanned the walls high overhead. The murals had never brought Ronny much pleasure.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Professor Manhardt.”
“That old fraud.”
“I think he helped me. He seemed so imposing. I was only eighteen,” Bianca said. “And you were twenty-one.”
“Twenty-one,” Ronny said.
“I took the advice to heart. I was mixing paint in my head when I went to sleep at night.”
“Back when we were going to be painters,” Ronny said.
The words felt cruel. Not inaccurate, perhaps—but cruel. Given how busy the twins kept her, and Grant kept her, and how rarely she actually sat down to work in her studio (where, more and more, Henry’s penetrating portrait carried a look of reproach), Bianca could hardly talk about pursuing art seriously. She might conceivably claim to be working on a still life in copper and silver—old pans and cutlery, all richly tarnished—since the easel was currently standing in a corner of the studio. But how many weeks had it been since she’d actually broken out the paints? She didn’t want to know exactly … Even so, why did Ronny seem to relish fatal pronouncements of this sort? Her life still lay ahead of her. She was sure of that: her life still lay ahead of her.
They looked at Jacopo Bassano’s Madonna and Child, at the incomparable Bellini Madonna and Child, at the Botticelli Resurrected Christ. Ronny spoke, she listened. He’d always known a great deal. And now he knew a great deal more.
They found their way to the astonishing Breughel Wedding Dance, and Bianca said, “How you used to embarrass me with this one! Contemplating it with such composure and sophistication, while all I could see were the outlandish codpieces.”
It wasn’t merely the codpieces. It was the fact that the men were so obviously, exaggeratedly aroused within them.
Bianca went on: “This was all quite shocking to a girl not long out of Eastern High.”
She did not say this flirtatiously—merely, at most, mock flirtatiously—but all the same Ronny’s reply seemed overly earnest. “Last year, I went to Vienna and I finally saw Breughel’s Hunters in the Snow and you know what? It’s a complete mess. And you know what else? It really is amazingly beautiful. I concluded that it’s the most beautiful mess anyone ever made.”
He’d always been a professor, of course, even back in those days when he couldn’t find a single professor worthy of his respect, but the process of embodiment now seemed complete. Once, she’d loved to argue with Ronny Olsson. But there was something unchallengeable in his remarks now. The difference was subtle but enormous: he used to make observations, and now he made pronouncements.
They wandered here and there. Ronny went on making pronouncements. Bianca countered with observations. When they reached the medieval sculpture gallery—medieval art had become his specialty—Ronny was especially informative. Who else but Ronny would point out, as they stared at a crucifix, that its Jesus had been carved from a willow tree? After all, Ronny was the one who, on his first-ever visit to her home, had so impressed Papa by identifying the various woods in Stevie’s pull-toy rooster. If Ronny was an aesthete, he’d always had a very craftsmanlike grasp of how artworks got made. Still, there didn’t seem to be much pleasure today in their wandering. What in the world had happened to those two kids, mad about art, who used to race through this museum like children in Hudson’s twelfth-floor “toy kingdom”?
They wound up eventually in the Kresge Court, sipping cups of tea. “We could get some sandwiches,” Ronny said.
“That sounds convenient,” Bianca said.
“I mentioned Hunters in the Snow—have you seen it?”
“Only in reproductions.”
“You’ve never been to Vienna.”
“No, Ronny, I’ve never been to Vienna.” Her voice came out sharper-edged than she’d intended.
Ronny looked a little hurt and surprised, and Bianca recognized that look: he’d never taken her rare reproaches well.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I just meant—surely now you could afford to make the trip?”
“Ronny, I have two six-year-old boys. I swear, it would be easier to raise wolves or bears or tiger cubs. You know what Chip did the first week of kindergarten? He drilled a hole in a cabinet. With a hand drill, no less. I get a call from his school, Your boy drilled a hole in a cabinet. Drilled a what in a what, I say. And how in the world did Chip get his hands on a hand drill? Well you might ask. But you can be certain, if some janitor leaves a hand drill lying around, Chip’s got ahold of it in one minute. And the next minute he’s drilled a hole in a cabinet. I go off to Vienna? I’d come back and find there’s no house left.”
Though she still had more to say, somewhere in this spirited rebuttal all sense of indignation drained from her. She felt a little sorry for Ronny actually, who was watching her with the forbearance of somebody receiving a merited rebuke. Presumably, Ronny would never have children. It was hard to believe he would marry again—though stranger things had happened. (The thing she had yet to say, and chose now not to say, was that she’d never been inside an airplane and—despite various generous offers from Uncle Dennis—probably never would. It seemed her maiden flight had gone down in the Pacific, many years ago, on an island called Majuro.)
“Do you like teaching?” she asked him.
“Well enough.”
Ronny now lived in Ann Arbor and taught art history at the University. He added: “But I don’t much like the writing.”
“Then why do it?”
“It would smooth the way to tenure.”
As a doctoral student, also at the University, Ronny had raced through his classes in record time, and he’d done brilliantly. But it seemed the completing of a dissertation had been a torturous process.
“It’s peculiar,” Ronny went on. “I can say things, and believe them wholeheartedly, but more and more the moment I put them down on paper, they no longer look defensible. I suppose I prefer speaking to writing. And—though you’ll never believe this, you consider me such a windbag—”
“Ronny, I do not.”
“I often prefer silence to speaking.”
In any case, a silence descended on their little table.
“Getting hungry?” Ronny said.
“If you are. I’ll freshen up first.” She placed her hands on the table, and stood.
Ronny laid a hand upon her hand, urgently: “Bianca, may I ask you something very personal?” Those unpaintable eyes of his held a glitter she hadn’t seen in quite a while.
“Anything you wan
t, Ronny.”
“You aren’t—forgive me for asking. It’s just a wild shot in the dark. Not that you look it or anything. But you aren’t by any chance pregnant, are you?”
Her mouth dropped open. For a second or two, she couldn’t say anything. “Ronald Olsson, how … on … earth did you know? I mean, I don’t even know—know for sure. That is, I’m seeing the doctor on Tuesday.” Bianca sat back down.
“Well—it was the way you moved. The way you got up from the table. As if you were—carrying something delicate?”
“You are—incredible. You do realize that, don’t you, Ronny Olsson? That you are—incredible?” He was grinning, and she went on: “A one-of-a-kind? A nonesuch? A nonpareil?”
He was grinning from ear to ear now—jubilant in a way she hadn’t seen for ages. His face so rarely opened into a full, unqualified smile. “Maybe it’s not so incredible?” he said. “After all, I’ve known you a long time, Bianca.”
But his expression belied his humble words. Oh, he looked exultant. It was possible that not even Grant, on first hearing the news, had exhibited greater pleasure.
“Yes, you have known me a long time, and you know what? You’re still amazing. I’m supposed to be the one with second sight.”
“You know what?” Ronny said, adopting her tone. Suddenly, he was a changed man. “We’re not going to eat around here.”
“We’re not?”
“It isn’t good enough for the likes of us amazing folks. I’m going to drive you downtown to Jason’s. Have you been to Jason’s?” “I haven’t. Grant has. He’s always out lunching with clients.”
“Who?”
“Grant. My husband.”
“Who?”
“Oh never mind. I’ve never known anyone who’s been to Jason’s.”
“It’s actually far more decent than any restaurant named Jason’s has any right to be.”
There was a moment, on first stepping into Ronny’s car (which was a beautiful little foreign sports car, a green convertible), when Bianca’s heart misgave her. It was one thing to meet Ronny at the DIA. That was precisely the sort of thing expected of her as an artist, or at least a former art student: meeting an art professor at the city museum. After all, she wasn’t “one of those wives.” But it was another thing, maybe, to be heading to Jason’s. Bianca wasn’t in the habit of lunching at fancy restaurants with men other than her husband—particularly with extraordinarily good-looking divorced men who drove green convertibles. But in that moment when Ronny actually helped her into the car, whose door opened backward—hinged on what she thought of as the wrong side—and came around and climbed into the driver’s seat, most of her misgivings vanished. This was the most natural thing in the world. The engine started with a tidy, comforting roar. Ronny was driving and she was trying to entertain him, trying to be bright and amusing and complimentary and maybe even insightful.
“Nice green,” she said. “The car.”
“It’s called British racing green.”
“The car’s an MG?”
“An MGTD. It’s a 1950. The year they first got it right.”
“I didn’t know you had such a taste for cars.”
“I have a taste for beauty. As my present company indicates.”
“Oh Ronny, honestly,” Bianca said, and laughed, fully at ease now. She’d always loved this particular verbal game: a kind of competitively complimentary banter.
Jason’s turned out to be not quite what she expected: darker and more masculinely solemn. The maître d’ recognized Ronny, or recognized him as the sort of person he ought to recognize, and within moments they were seated in a plush maroon-colored booth. Ronny, who might well have chosen to sit at a reserved distance across the table, sat catercorner. To any stranger who happened into Jason’s today, the art professor and the housewife might look very much like two people on a date.
“A glass of wine?” Ronny said.
“I’d love a glass of wine.”
“It’s all right?” He glanced down at the nonexistent bulge in her belly.
“If I’m correct, or I suppose I should say if you’re correct, in just a few days I’ll find out I’m with child and it’ll be no more wine for a year or so. And no more cigarettes. Did you know I smoke?”
“I didn’t know you smoke.”
“I do. And before this lunch is over, I shall have smoked at least two and probably three cigarettes. These are my last days of vice, Ronny.”
“I’m told that’s what all the girls say …”
“No, really. And I’ve been terrible all week. Drinking like an absolute fish.”
“No you haven’t,” Ronny said. “Hey, I know fish.”
“How are your parents?”
Bianca instantly regretted the question, which sounded tactless. Ronny didn’t seem to mind, though. “I think it’s been hard for Mother, Bea,” he said. Ronny almost never called her Bea and it sounded peculiarly intimate—just as it had sounded intimate when, back in the days when she’d been Bea, he’d insisted on calling her Bianca.
“What’s hard?”
“Being the world’s most beautiful woman after you’ve hit fifty. Let’s face it. I mean, what are you supposed to do, exactly? Other than preserve yourself? Which is a mug’s game, as old Professor Manhardt might have said. I mean, you can only lose in the end.”
Yes, Mrs. Olsson was in her fifties now. It was hard to picture …
When the waiter came over, Ronny ordered a bottle of wine. Bianca didn’t hear what it was, but she hadn’t a doubt in the world she was going to enjoy it.
“Now tell me about the Middle Ages,” Bianca said.
“I like them,” Ronny said.
“I mean the art.”
“I like it. Not to bring up a painful topic—Vienna—but it occurred to me when I finally went to the Kunsthistorisches: painting was essentially over by the time Breughel got going. He was a sort of last gasp.”
This was still Ronny being professorial, but with all the difference in the world. That old sense of fun had entered in, a collusive diversion in which Bianca’s task was to goad him into broader and broader, wilder and wilder pronouncements. Ronny was going to look at art—all of art, the whole of its history—and redraw its outlines, just the way (he hadn’t been able to resist, even back then) he’d corrected a drawing of hers on the very day they first met.
“And Vermeer? Not a real painter?”
“Hey, I’d hang the View of Delft on my living-room wall. Gladly. But is it so impossible, in the development of any art form, that things go radically, fundamentally awry? Two roads diverge and everybody takes the wrong one?”
“You used to like the Pre-Raphaelites.”
“You know, I think I still do. How can you not like an artistic movement that says, Oops, let’s start over, because one big colossal mistake was made?”
“And Ingres? You always admired Ingres. You taught me how to pronounce his name.”
“Well we can surely agree—can’t we?—that it’s almost cruel to set an Ingres beside a Renoir, say. Or crueler still, beside a Gauguin. I mean, could anyone deny French painting went downhill in the nineteenth century?”
The wine arrived, a white wine. It was from France and—whatever decline the country had been suffering in general—it was delicious.
Ronny said, “But look—I mean really look at a painting by Memling. To say nothing of Rogier van der Weyden, whose Deposition in the Prado has to be the most beautiful painting anybody ever painted. The colors. The brushwork. The proportions, not just large to medium, but medium to small, small to minuscule. The, excuse the expression, grandeur. Isn’t it possible that everything else is a falling off?
“I’m not a religious person,” Ronny went on, “and I don’t suppose you are.”
“I guess not. I suppose the test is what you do with your children, and we do very little. It’s partly not knowing what I would be if I were religious. Mamma’s either Presbyterian or Lutheran, depending whether she�
��s feeling more Scottish or German. Papa’s Catholic, until they tell his sister-in-law Aunt Grace she can’t marry Uncle Dennis, and Mom Ives is Episcopalian, the snootier the better, and—”
Ronny was looking just a little impatient.
“No,” Bianca said. “I don’t suppose I’m religious.”
“Nor am I,” Ronny said, “but I’ve come to the conclusion that the phrase ‘secular painting’ is self-contradictory. Painting’s a holy business, Bianca, or it’s nothing.”
Bianca almost wished he hadn’t spoken this way. The words were a reproach, somehow, to herself, to the dearly beloved (and now defunct) Institute Midwest, even to Donald Doobly, the Negro boy, whose worldly hopes of getting ahead, by way of his art, had been so palpable and so touching.
“But that isn’t so, Ronny.” She wasn’t sure, exactly, what she wanted to say, but she knew it was something her whole soul embraced. “To look at an onion, and see only an onion, and go ahead and paint an onion, no angels hovering in the background, no anything in the background, only the layers on layers of onion—that’s a noble undertaking.”
“That van der Weyden Deposition? There’s not an extraneous detail. Nine figures, and nothing extraneous. I want purity, Bianca.”
The words evoked a distant echo—so faraway that if she hadn’t finished most of her glass of wine she might never have retrieved it: “You know who you sound just like? Like your father, Ronny.”
“My father?”
Ronny’s face registered more than disappointment. He looked unnerved.
“That’s exactly what he said to me. Or almost exactly. That night at the Coral Club. Remember? The night when your mother—when she made that extraordinary speech about courage, and Jews and Negroes, although she didn’t call them Jews and Negroes—”
“I remember. But what are you saying, Bianca?”
“That’s what your father said. ‘I believe in purity.’ Or words very much like them. We’d been dancing.”
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