The Art Student's War

by Brad Leithauser

  But could Priscilla possibly be right—did this notion of Edith-the-doctor also threaten her? Edith’s startling announcement certainly had come at an uneasy and ironic time. It was getting pregnant with the twins that had indefinitely postponed Bianca’s pursuit of a B.A., and here she was pregnant again, just as her little sister was announcing plans for medical school. Bianca said, “The best part is, suddenly she’s dropped all objections to the move. She’ll follow my parents. It’s as if she never talked about staying on Inquiry, or moving to Florida.”

  “Having found a future, she feels ready to move on.”

  There was this, too, about Priscilla: her knack for sharp summations. After moseying around with circumlocutions—she often seemed the youngest person Bianca had ever met who might be described as doddering—she would abruptly consolidate everything in a phrase.

  In her movements, too, Priscilla seemed older than her years. Pregnancy had heightened Bianca’s awareness of other women’s bodies, and watching Priscilla set down her teacup and rise from her chair, on her way toward the bathroom, Bianca had a keen sense of her friend’s ungainliness: the stiffness in the slow-shifting, ample hips, the breasts uneasily borne, and more sunken than you’d expect in a woman still in her thirties. Was this what Grant had sensed when he declared that Priscilla wasn’t a “real woman”? And Bianca had asked him, forthrightly, “Are you saying she’s lesbian?” “N-no,” Grant had said. “She’s not really anything.”

  But was it possible to be “not really anything”? What did Grant mean? If he meant that Priscilla appeared not quite at home in her body—then Bianca understood him perfectly. It was hard to describe: this sense some people gave you of living within a body not quite their own. It was like wearing clothes that didn’t fit. On the other hand, in some ways Priscilla seemed more at home with the dark and intricate byways of carnality than Bianca ever would be. She was certainly capable of uttering with aplomb words and phrases Bianca would never dare attempt aloud: fellatio or cunnilingus or masturbatory fantasies.

  “So Edith’s going to cross the bridge after all,” Priscilla declared when she returned from the bathroom.

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Wasn’t it on the Belle Isle Bridge that she broke down and cried and declared she wasn’t moving from Inquiry Street?”

  “That’s right,” Bianca said. “But I’m not sure I follow …”

  “And now she’s going to cross the bridge after all. She’s going to move.”

  “That’s right!”

  But Bianca’s excitement was immediately tempered by misgivings. Wasn’t Priscilla making too much of coincidences? And wasn’t there something a little annoying and self-congratulatory in her delivery? Wasn’t Priscilla often deliberately cloudy and vague—inviting Bianca to play an uncomprehending Watson to Priscilla’s cryptic Holmes?

  Still—there was something trenchant and attractive to the way Priscilla thought. More than anyone else Bianca knew, Priscilla seemed to filter the world through symbols. She was forever telling you, in that cutting way she had when verbosity suddenly found its destination, that the people in front of you were not really the people in front of you: they were stand-ins for other, earlier figures. The houses were different houses, the streets different streets, the bridges different bridges … Everything was always dissolving to reveal a deeper, anterior reality.

  “Any further word from Ronny Olsson?” Priscilla asked.

  “Not since the time I told you about. When I met what I suppose was his partner.”

  “Whose appearance and manner surprised you.”

  “Yes, they did.”

  “You were disappointed he wasn’t more like you?”

  “Like me?”

  “Yes.”

  And what in the world did Priscilla mean by this? “Disappointed?”

  “Yes. He wasn’t dark like you, this young man. And not so good-looking. Isn’t that what you told me?” And Priscilla laughed her little whispery funny-pages laugh: tee-hee-hee.

  “But why should that disappoint me?”

  “And not intense like you.”

  “But why should I want Chris to be like me?”

  “But isn’t it obvious? Isn’t it your hope that Ronny Olsson will forever be searching for you, Bianca, in one form or another?”

  Bianca paused. “Do you mind if I have a cigarette?”

  Other than Priscilla, nobody on earth, not even Maggie, knew she’d resumed smoking.

  “Of course you must suit yourself,” Priscilla said. “I don’t seem to see the ashtray—where did it go?—but you can make do with your saucer. I should add, as a doctor, I cannot recommend cigarettes for anyone in your condition.”

  “This is only temporary,” Bianca said, fishing in her purse for her pack of Tareytons. “But they’re better than the alternative, which seems to be a nervous breakdown. I tell you, in the last week I’ve seen my mother, my husband, and my sister all in tears. Not little tears. Huge rending sobs. And none of these are people who cry. I’m the one who cries. I thought I had the crybaby role all sewed up. Anyway, I’m going to quit smoking just as soon as I get through most of this.”

  Bianca pulled the Tareyton deep into her lungs. These days, it seemed to be the organizing phrase and principle of her life: as soon as I get through … For a while it had been, as soon as I get through Thanksgiving … Then it was, as soon as I get through Christmas … Now it was, as soon as I get past New Year’s, only a few days away. Then it would no doubt be, as soon as I get through the move, scheduled for February first. In the distance, in an unimaginable spring, lay the final and true as soon as I get through: the day when she gave birth to her baby, whom she was now poisoning with another Tareyton. “I really am going to put my life in order.”

  “Let me see … Your mother, sister, husband—all in tears. What about your father?”

  “Oh no, not very likely.”

  “I worry about him,” Priscilla declared matter-of-factly.

  “Do you?”

  Did she? Did Priscilla make time to worry about this man she’d never met?

  “It must be very hard for him.”

  “It is hard. You know what Mamma was crying about? She was saying that everything in her life would have been all right, if only Papa had loved her.”

  “And does he?”

  “Of course he does.”

  “That can’t be easy.”

  “Well, I can tell you one thing. He doesn’t love Aunt Grace. Not the way Mamma’s suggesting.”

  Bianca drew again on her cigarette. “Something very peculiar happened this week and I immediately thought of you. We’ve been sorting things at my parents’, preparing for the move, and I came across an old photograph. My mother and my aunt. Sitting together. In front of two cherry pies. And I suddenly realized it was taken at the lake, Lady Lake, taken by my uncle, in some of the last calm moments before Mamma declared war on her sister. And you know what? They both look so pretty, the two sisters, and Aunt Grace is wearing a new hat, it was a straw hat with a green ribbon. This was the summer of forty-three. Of course the War was raging full blast, and the city was crazy, but the picture is so tranquil. And beautiful. And sweet. It’s another world. The two of them are actually touching each other. I remember it so vividly: Grace laid a hand on Mamma’s arm and Mamma paused and then laid a hand on Grace’s hand. And looking again at the picture it occurred to me that of course Papa loved Grace—the way I love Grace, we all love Grace. But he didn’t love her. It’s as if Mamma could never understand there can be two kinds of love.”

  “Two kinds of love?” Priscilla sounded skeptical. “Somebody else then? For your father?”

  What was Priscilla implying, and why? Bianca again sucked deeply on her cigarette. She said, “What do you mean?”

  “You said it yourself: things have been very hard on your father.”

  “You mean somebody else romantic?”

  “He hasn’t had an easy time …”

  Bianca
exhaled a big cloud of smoke and said, “Somebody else? I don’t think so. But I’m going to tell you a story I’ve never told anyone. I was downtown, this was, I don’t know, quite a few years ago, the twins weren’t born yet. And in the distance I saw this man who resembled my father from behind, only the woman he was walking with wasn’t my mother. She had blonde hair. They were walking into the Book-Cadillac Hotel. I was way across the street, the sidewalks were crowded, and it was difficult to see—it was just this time of year, Christmastime—and the whole thing was absurd. It was a weekday, a workday, why would my father be walking with a blonde woman into the Book-Cadillac?”

  “What did you do?”

  “Well, I went in. To the hotel lobby. Just to make sure. But there was no blonde woman anywhere. And I began to realize just how absurd it was. Everyone’s always teasing me about my imagination getting the best of me.”

  “So you don’t think it was he?”

  “Oh I’m virtually certain it wasn’t. And I’ll tell you why. If my father were heading off to some hotel with some blonde woman, which I consider very unlikely, he would never choose the Book-Cadillac. Fancy places make him nervous, they make him self-conscious about his accent and all the rest, so what’s the chance he’d choose the finest hotel in the city? He’d rather die than step into a place like that and order a room. But it was the man’s walk. Whoever the man was, he walked very much the way my father walks, with a slight limp. My father’s got a plantar wart.”

  There was something perhaps a little too overly knowing in Priscilla’s look—a skepticism unjust toward various members of Bianca’s family, herself included. Bianca retaliated with a sharp question: “And how is Dr. Cuttwell?”

  Priscilla stiffened. Though she referred to him with some frequency, it was clearly her own prerogative to broach the delicate topic, in a tone blending wistfulness with a profound respect for human tragedy. The tone acknowledged, tactfully, the plight of the good doctor, tethered to his wheelchair-bound wife, much as Priscilla’s life was constrained by Michael, her retarded brother. Cruel fate, combined with a stoical subordination to duty, had kept apart two people otherwise meant for each other.

  “I think he is very well.”

  “And Mrs. Cuttwell?”

  “Of course I do not see her. But I hear she is much afflicted.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “The situation is very sad.”

  Nodding her head up and down, Priscilla had a way of offering such pronouncements instructively—as though Bianca couldn’t be trusted to appreciate life’s bitter twists of fate. Priscilla often implied that Bianca might be, if not superficial, at least privileged and callow. Or was this Priscilla’s implication? Alternatively, was Bianca being oversensitive? She certainly wasn’t comfortable sitting here—a pregnant woman smoking a second cigarette in the living room of a therapist who, as this morning had revealed, possibly felt taken advantage of.

  Bianca was harboring her own small insecurities and resentments then, which perhaps goaded her to press the topic of Dr. Oliver Cuttwell: “He must sometimes get pretty low—quite depressed.”

  “I think he’s very strong,” Priscilla said.

  “Or angry—angry at life?”

  “He’s a very gentle man. And I think gentleness is especially wonderful in a man, don’t you? And all too rare? Do you know what he told me? The last time we had lunch? He told me he doesn’t like fireworks. He actively dislikes them. Isn’t that something? This was near the Fourth of July, and he said to me, ‘I’ve never understood why people would choose to celebrate with what sounds like gunfire.’ Don’t you think that’s wise?”

  Oh my. For there was something else here—far more noteworthy than Dr. Cuttwell’s wisdom. “You haven’t had lunch with him since July?” Bianca asked.

  Now it was Priscilla’s turn to appear defensive. “Dr. Cuttwell is a very busy man. His wife has a paralyzing illness. And I am a busy woman. I am my brother’s sole guardian.”

  Bianca took a final triumphant drag on her cigarette. “But you haven’t actually had lunch since July?”

  Priscilla paused. “No,” she said. “Though I expect we will soon. Perhaps right after the holidays.”

  A wild thought struck Bianca. “But you’ve seen him since?”

  Again Priscilla balked. “At least half a dozen times,” she finally replied, and all at once Bianca understood that, whatever the actual details, Priscilla was effectively lying. The number scarcely mattered—it was the nature of the encounters that was a lie. Or call it a pitiful, pregnant delusion. All at once Bianca comprehended how totally onesided was this “affair of the heart.” Had Bianca sometimes been guilty of inflaming her own imagination with visions of an impossible romance? With wild fantasies about the wildly inappropriate Ronny Olsson? Perhaps. But nothing like what Priscilla had done. Oh, Priscilla might, in her knowing and enumerating way, point out the manifold implications of Ronny’s being a ho-mo-sex-u-al, but Ronny and Bianca would marry and have a dozen children, Ronny would trade in his British racing green MGTD for a station wagon, he’d settle down and become his sons’ Scoutmaster and Little League coach long before Dr. Cuttwell swept Priscilla into his wise and compassionate and gentle embrace.

  CHAPTER XXXVI

  She was alone in the house. Would she ever again be alone in this house that in many ways felt more like her real home than her real home did? Her legal address might lie on Middleway, with her husband and children, but today she was back on Inquiry, and though most of the household furnishings were in boxes—Edith had packed up ruthlessly once the frivolity of Christmas lay behind them—the late afternoon light was still the same timeless light of old. Nowhere else on earth did sunlight assume quite this quality. The word beige suggested blandness to most people, but this light contained a good portion of beige, and it was the richest light in the world. The word tawny suggested lushness, and there was a good share of tawniness as well, but in the end it was neither beige nor tawny, there was no term for such a color, and no tube in the world’s paint box could replicate it. She was alone in the house in which she’d grown up and which her family, in less than two weeks’ time, would abandon permanently, and when again would she ever be alone here? The doorbell sounded.

  On the front porch on this cold but bright January afternoon stood a stranger. Bianca peered at him through the glass on the front door. He had long graying hair and was leaning on a cane. Bianca opened the door.

  “Is this the Paradiso residence?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But you—you’re not—Forgive me. This was sort of a spur-of-the-moment decision. I should have telephoned before dropping in. Hey, perhaps I better begin by introducing myself. Sorry. Got off on the wrong foot. Typical. My name is Ira Styne. You see, I remembered the name of your street. Inquiry—who could forget that? Not even me. The number, on the other hand, that was another matter.”

  He spoke very rapidly. He was nervous. Despite the cane and the graying hair, and a somewhat scratchy voice, he actually wasn’t very old—probably not much older than Bianca herself. This was all quite irregular, but she didn’t feel the slightest unease. It was impossible to look into the man’s long, uncertain face, with its brown puppy-dog eyes, and distrust him.

  “You see, I wrote a number of letters to this address,” he went on. “Years ago. I remembered the name, Inquiry Street. But you’re not—you can’t be … I wrote to a little schoolgirl. Edith Paradiso.”

  “That’s my sister.”

  “Then you—you must be Bea.”

  And everything fell into place. “And you’re Ira Styne. She was given your name at school. A soldier to write to. You’re Edith’s soldier pen pal.”

  “That’s right. But I wasn’t much of a pal, sorry to say. I was very bad about writing.”

  “You sent Edith a five-dollar bill. Five hundred pennies in convenient paper form.”

  He looked terrifically embarrassed—and pleased, too, to have his little witticism
remembered. “For her birthday. Yes. I’d missed her birthday and I felt just awful. She’d written me all these amazing letters, and you can’t believe how long and full and mature they were, and you see I hadn’t written back, but I was in a bad way, I’d been wounded actually”—he tapped his cane against his leg—“and that was only the start. Oh my, listen to me, boring you like this, forgive me. The point is … Do I have a point? You might well ask. But I do, at least I think I have a point. The point is, I happened to be in town today, I remembered the name of the street, and I thought maybe it’s time to offer some real thanks. A day of atonement. Better late than never, I thought. Because those letters she wrote, they sure meant a lot to me, even if I was such a deadbeat I couldn’t remember a little girl’s birthday.”

  “Edith isn’t here.”

  He paused, confused, and then relief came to his long face. The distance from his lower lip to the base of his chin was remarkable. This was nobody in need of a chin enhancement. “That’s all right. You can deliver the message. Just tell her an old soldier came by to thank her. Tell her that her letters meant a lot at a time when—when he was in a bad way. Oh shucks, skip all that. But do give her my thanks, won’t you?”

  “Why don’t you come in? She ought to be home soon.”

  “Oh I don’t think I’d better do that. No. Actually, I’m in something of a hurry. You see, I’m heading back to New Jersey. Where I belong. Sad as that may sound. Woe is me. Better to shut up, huh? I’ll shut up. I just wanted to say thanks is all.”

  “She’s at school,” Bianca said. “She should be back soon.”

  “School? She must be in college.”

  “She graduated last June. These are just extra classes. Things related mostly to medicine.”

  “She’s going to be a nurse!” Ira Styne announced triumphantly.