Thus, a work of art became a fetish, mused Althea, and not just for the artist. "It is the spectator that art really mirrors": what wisdom there was in Oscar Wilde's remark was valid in spite of an owner's false occupation of his object. A casual viewer with perspicacious eye might see more than an owner. Still, she thought, day in and day out living with something, one absorbs it in fragments and sometimes forgets to see it, and then one day finds oneself looking at it again with all the ardor of novelty.
Where would all her art end up? Did Althea wish her images to be familiar to the minds of many? Many was a crowd with dispensable flanks: there were the many now and the many to come, when she wouldn't be around. An absurd part of her cared more about what didn't exist, and then rationalized that concern by allowing it a nexus with her private aims. If she wasn't appreciated "now," she would be "then," but how was she to be considered in the first place if she wasn't seen?
Althea instinctively tried to hide this aspect of herself. She knew that most people would consider these worries and anxieties quixotic, believing that she ought to be concerned with improving the roof over her head, the food on her table, and her clothes. Even when she was a child she had wanted to be an artist. Though the years had inevitably altered her, she wouldn't let them change her single-mindedness and her essential seriousness that she had learned to keep to herself, because she didn't want to be ridiculed or humored by people who didn't understand what her life was about. She wanted her paintings to be admired, even loved, but she wasn't sure she wanted to submit her art to the scrutiny necessary to provoke such compelling reactions.
On some days Althea believed in herself more than on others, and there were times when she didn't give credence to herself at all. Then it was death to lift a brush, degradation even to examine an unfinished painting. Her mind felt like paper put through a shredder, her life in as many pieces as the money she had to scatter to sustain it.
Gradually her confidence would come back. An imperious girl found the lesson of her maturity in the acquisition of patience. Althea had to wait until the light burst forth on her. It suited her style to be a loner, but she also knew that if what she was working on didn't live up to her hopes, then she had wasted her time. Nevertheless she had to be fair to herself; she had to allow for occasions, opportunities.
She glanced from the scroll. Leaning against the wall where she'd left them the night before were her four unfinished paintings, still wrapped up for travel. Without inspecting them, she shut them away in the large walk-in closet that served as her storeroom. She wasn't yet ready to submit what she'd done to a New York light even when dimmed to a pewter gleam by a blurring rain.
She never felt her paintings were complete if they didn't look right from a multiplicity of perspectives. She had to get her paintings to contain them. Somehow she had developed her own way of progressing, and she had persevered at it. Each time she touched her brush down, she made a contact. One stroke told her what would come next, though sometimes she'd stand so long with her arm poised that it ached. Still, she'd had ideas, and their light had grown.
As her life entered September, Althea foresaw how she would be dulled and drawn out on the rack of wage-earning days, how she would be humbled by acknowledgements of the services she would be obliged to render and of what the world deemed them worth. Working alone at the expendable fringe, Althea had learned how to be useful by teaching art to children.
At least the work was more debilitating than depressing; and there was a positive pleasure in the warmth of the attention she found she could attract. She was moved by a throat-catching beauty in certain children, and she had the satisfaction of well performed service in addition to a paycheck. Yet, though there were agreeable moments in her employment, Althea longed to receive more angelic visitations. She wanted the bliss of complete absorption, the humming feeling in her head, the leap that let her rise to a higher plane where, momentarily, she was almost impervious to minor misfortunes, impecunious periods in her life.
Still, school hadn't started and she wasn't teaching yet. Because she felt afraid to work on her paintings, she knew that she couldn't afford to let herself mope around her apartment. She'd only feel worse. In her spattered sneakers and her yellow slicker, she ventured out in the rain again.
The bus let her off in front of the Metropolitan Museum. She ran up the steps and passed under the banners, removing her wet slicker in the blast of warm air at the entrance. People milled in the spacious hall or sat on the circular benches around majestic arrangements of late summer flowers. Althea felt her pulse quicken with anticipation. Of all the choices open to her under the museum's many sprawling roofs, she went in search of beauty to the rooms of Classical Art.
A statue in Pentelic marble about thirty inches tall of a mourning woman, one hand striking her breast and the other flung behind her head, her idealized features abandoned to sorrow, attracted Althea's attention in a display of similar, funereal pieces. Althea thought the figure must be a fragment, for she discerned the suggestion of a man's hand over the woman's marble knee.
Did she want her paintings to end in the celestial stillness, the immutability, the embrace of a museum? She felt comfortable—indeed, almost at home—in the high-ceilinged galleries of this museum, with its floors of planked wood that sounded so hollowly under her step; and if the thought of leaving a couple of items to a catalogue of thousands didn't daunt her, then perhaps she deserved to have something survive.
Naturally, she would have liked to have been sought after, or have been part of a group of supportive artists that got together for drinks, tough criticism, exhibition gossip, and keep-your-chin-up talk on rainy days. She would have liked a mentor to keep her moving, but things didn't seem to be turning out that way.
Perhaps the very concept of a collection was ludicrous; one only had to walk the streets of Manhattan to see what got thrown out in the trash for the wrecker to devour. As yet Althea had no income from her art, but neither was she accustomed to giving her paintings away. Surely it was not the idea of a museum that she worked for, but what was it? Could it be that she needed to paint to feel alive?
Perhaps it was childish after all that she still enjoyed the daubing, the mucking about making pigments with all the equipment for color spread around her. The equivalent of finger paints and mud pies still engrossed her, paint smears across her face, reeking of turpentine. She reminded herself that here was an activity that had entranced her all her life, and that was play before it was work. And just as surely as time could modify the tints of a painting and public taste lend an additional contour to what people saw; so, indeed, there was no telling how Althea would be thought of.
For a long time she studied the statue of the woman, whose beautiful features were worn with time. Afterwards she left the museum without looking at anything else, wanting to keep the memory of what she had seen clearly in her mind.
The rain had stopped. From the top of the museum steps she watched a flock of pigeons waddling over the brick pavement in front of the fountain. Their folded-back wings looked like mottled marbled paper. In a burst they flew up together, creating a black-and-white herringbone pattern against the sky, which made Althea think of other, equally abrupt transformations. As she returned home, she imagined running into Paul by chance in the neighborhood. She planned what she would say to him if they met. As she passed by his building on the way to her own, she peered up to where his penthouse perched at its top, but the set-back was too great for her to see it. There were a lot of people on the street, but Paul was not among them.
During the first days of her readjustment to city life, Althea half-dialed Paul's digits a dozen times and then cowardly hung up. She wanted to be the one who was called. Yet all her hopes were to no avail. While she conjured him enough, she couldn't manage to encounter him. Although she couldn't help but fabricate heart-rushing meetings, she never was to storm Paul's bastion.
Althea was ever quick to make assumptions, and it soothed her s
elf-esteem to put the fact that Paul dropped out of her life as suddenly as he had flown in to the reappearance of Bryce. An instinctive caution told her it was best not to inquire. It seemed to her that, since the initial invitation had been her doing, the next action must come from Paul.
At first she didn't realize how long she would have to wait for it; or perhaps she wouldn't have had the strength to will herself to the practice of such patience. Each time she passed Paul's address, her nerves grew faint, and a paradoxical pain kept her love alive: after all, in order to feel the loss she had to have been happy.
As the weeks went by without bringing her Paul, she felt their deprivation most acutely, in bed, in her bath, or climbing four flights of stairs to a New York City classroom, her fingers already flinching in anticipation of holding sticks of powdery chalk and breathing chalk dust.
Chapter 8
On September and October Sunday mornings in Mississippi, Bryce heard church bells reverberating with the call to worship, and then the air was given over again to the rustling of leaves and grasses. Thickets of trees invited a man who as a boy had romped among the pines. Bryce sometimes went for a walk in the woods while the rest of his family spent their Sabbath day sitting in services.
For if, as he maintained, devotion was an attitude, then an organ's grandest chords were no more a connection to the sound of prayer inside a person than was a more rustic music: rippling brooks or whippoorwills twittering, for example, could be more peaceful presences than the peal of bells or a keyboard's chorus. The youthful Bryce had despised the rural retreats sponsored by his family's church. He couldn't interest himself in a group pursuit that wanted to weave the enclosure of itself around the complex questions; to Bryce it was too much like netting water with a sieve. Even then he ambled off by himself; even then meaning seemed to come mostly in private to a somewhat troublesome boy who, although he certainly knew how to sulk, at least liked to be active if he didn't enjoy games, and was apt to shinny up a tree trunk on a moment's impulse. He had no inkling then of how illness would fell him, and if he had, would anything have really changed? An avowal of agnosticism couldn't keep a stricken adolescent from wondering if his condition was not a judgment, but against what, and why? His universe had never felt firm; now it crumpled, and he tasted the ash against the slick velvet insides of his mouth.
It wasn't often that Bryce wondered what would have become of that solitary but outspoken tree-climbing boy had he stayed healthy. More than old adages reminded him there was little use in conjuring what might have been, but was not. Was he ever a bouncing baby boy? In Meridian, he inspected family documents, letters written in faded inks and family photographs. In a brown vinyl album titled "Keepsakes" and embellished with the picture of a rose, he turned crumbling, cream-colored pages mounted with black-and-white photographs, musing over the images of himself. The dark-eyed child he saw was good-looking enough, though now a stranger.
Bryce noticed his deepening curiosity with some surprise. It was natural enough that a trip home should turn a person towards his past, but such backward reflection was not a characteristic he had expected to acquire. Perhaps he was simple after all and ought not to feel so superior, for it was almost with a greed that he sat on the floor, taking his childhood out of boxes that had stayed up on a closet shelf for so long untouched by anyone else that it seemed as if the things inside had all the while been waiting confidently in their dark for him to return to them.
It was hard enough for a man to inspect his early promise if it hadn't been realized, but there were satisfactions to be had in the retrieval of memories Bryce thought he'd irrevocably spent or lost. A faded diagram of a treasure hunt he had once composed seemed more substantial when he held the slip of paper in his hand. He'd done the job so well then that no one found the prize, and in the end he had had to pass on transparent hints to a younger cousin. Had his intrigue been spoiled because no one could follow it, or was it perfect in that it wasn't discovered? Only now did Bryce come to these ponderings, meditating on his intricate if boyishly ingenious plan as if it were the project for a philosophy class, or else as if the real clues had been unsuspectingly included by him then for him now. With old papers and junk spread out on the floor around his cross-legged form, Bryce felt the early entanglements entwining him again.
Was his past to trap him after all, was there no use in having grown older? The ties that bound and confused him in his boyhood had been twisted in a singular direction a few years later, and his subsequent development had been contorted when it should have been shooting straight upward.
Gradually he had come to recognize and then to classify the reactions of others to his illness. At times he let these hurt him. Yet, in his deep contemplations of his tragedy he was freed. When he was suspended as from a knife tip over the abyss in the midst of his nights, he was liberated from resented relationships. It was like a fairy tale that tells how an unworthy wish is ironically granted. Startled out of sleep, in a sudden sweat, he recognized the whole shape of his life beside him; he beheld the dreaded other, that shadow of the self; he saw how he would fall, and constantly fall; and the frigid brilliance of his insight briefly lit up the darkness into which he was plummeting; then his accelerations dropped him further. Motionless in bed he experienced vertigo. In free fall, in a vacuum, he touched a being whose substance was not his, and yet his fingertips knew the contours of certain features as if he had laid his hands over his own face. Like a vision glimpsed through water, as close and distant as sleep, his own life turned before him, and the motion was graceful, for he hadn't always been crippled. Tenderly he reached to what lay near him, to what both was and was not himself, while he and it were flung as rapidly and irresistibly as twinned stars through space.
However Bryce was persuaded by his night-time visitations, he kept his conclusions to himself and didn't let them stop him from shrewd daytime appraisals. The healthy boy was now almost mythically beyond him, but the stricken, hopeless adolescent still claimed the mature man. If the adult couldn't redeem his youth, he had learned that, though it was understandable, it was also malicious to wish to antagonize those who meant well when they wanted to sympathize by feeling sorry for him.
To make oneself invisible to the world at large, one only needs a place. A middle-class man daydreamed his notions of grandeur; still, Bryce's modest efforts had yielded most comfortable results, and many an able-bodied person had less vantage on a city than he. He had carved out his niche up where he could see the crowd, but it couldn't crush him. First he had made a home for himself, and then he'd manned it.
Bryce furnished the setting and Paul the action. Having a dancer underneath the arches might not make them more solid, but it gave them a lift. With Paul around, Bryce encountered space differently, not only his own space or outer space but a mutual space where two men met, and if unequally, the disparity this time didn't seem to matter. For the lucky part, the true and cherished part, was that there was this thing between them, a real, invisible thing that Bryce felt as far as his Meridian remove. All his recollections of youthful sentiments and plagues, all his reconnections to his still-questioning past didn't quell it.
Now that he was old enough to feel the distance, Bryce had come to greet a hometown that still proffered his childhood in the guise of recent events. He soon fell to puzzling out his reactions in order to see the old, odd context beside the newer, even odder one. Though he was to have more distress than joy this time in Mississippi, his life in Manhattan had made a breach in him, a remove like the contradictory spaces of glass. It wasn't that Bryce wasn't deeply touched by the reunion with his family; it was that he felt the contacts at once on separate selves which split the pain that he might bear it better.
It was the nature of his illness to reveal itself by an assortment of symptoms that came and went separately. His nerves, as it was explained to Bryce, were laid bare. Confusing apprehensions of reality as intense as drug-induced psychedelic states went hand-in-glove with the body's
debility. His clinical presentations, from the prickling of his skin to lapses of vision, conformed to the usual range of symptoms shared by other victims of multiple sclerosis. He also had enjoyed such remissions as to almost lead him to hope he would be well again. Alternating fits of despair and euphoria were the poles of a shameful intimacy that had transformed his life and could end it.
Although his doctors tried to make him comfortable, Bryce felt they ignored him in their affair with his disease. They did not trouble themselves too much in wondering to what extent his character claimed and molded the subsequent course of his illness through his body.
There were mornings when Bryce awoke with the unreasonable aura of hope that something had happened while he slept and he was cured, but his first conscious movements changed this to depression, and how best to get through the day then? Sometimes he wondered if it would not have been preferable if his symptoms were delusions, and he were mad. Yet he had not been feeling particularly bad before he left Manhattan to find, surprisingly, in Meridian, himself standing beside the bed this time.
Bryce had seen his shadow, cast by lamplight, fall across his uncle's face at that first meeting. Through the cool sheet he had lightly touched his uncle's shoulder. In reaction, Bill's eyes had fluttered open, pale and blue, disclosing a crystalline astonishment, like the blankness of a new baby's eyes first beholding the world—a look lasting only a moment before registering recognition of the nephew. Or had Bryce imagined that instant of indifference, so completely had Bill's attention turned it away, as it took hold of Bryce?
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