"She's an American original, even down to leaving the price tag on the canvas and painting right over it."
"That's her statement that materialism ultimately pervades all artistic endeavors." She smiled, perhaps playing me like a sport fish that had a barbed hook in its mouth. I liked what the smile did to her face. I hadn't known many smiles. Loverboy leaped from the dark waters like a trout on a line but I reeled him back into the Bone House.
"So, what do you see in this thing? I mean, between the lines, of course," I said. I was enjoying playing the critic, even if I didn't own a black turtleneck or rakishly cocked beret, or even a blog for that matter. I had stewed in my own soiled juices too long, wearing isolation as insulation. I had been on a few dates since I'd been in Shady Valley, and had a few casual acquaintances sprinkled among the bookstore regulars whom I sometimes joined for lunch. But not enough contact to feel connected to the human race. Going to the movies or library or art shows were my sole escapes from my own unpleasant company.
But you know what they say: wherever you go, there you are. And there they are.
Just being close enough to smell the faint soap on her skin was as invigorating as standing under a silver waterfall. Sally’s bubble-gum breath, Hope Hill’s hair, Virginia’s leather jacket, Mother’s bourbon, all the feminine scents I’d come to know where subsumed by this new Bethness. I tried to think of mindless banter, to dredge up thoughts from some pool of wit, anything to keep the music of her voice filling my ears. Or maybe it was Loverboy, now jittering in my chest like a slam dancer on amphetamines.
Her voice played on. "See how these stick figures cower in insignificance against the sweeping vista of nature? That portrays the futility of human endeavor as well as the artist's own realization of the futility of her own work. The artist's failings are displayed proudly, almost flagrantly, yet not without a certain humility."
"Ah, self-flagellation is flaunting the obvious. And these color schemes that look like they were lifted from the interior of a 1950's diner?" I asked.
"Reality as fabrication, an artificially colored environment, nature as plastic plants and wax fruit."
"Did the artist tell you all of this?"
She hugged her notebook to the attractive curve of her chest and looked from the painting to me. "I'm working on a Masters in Art Theory. I can do this kind of stuff in my sleep."
With thoughts like that, who could ever sleep? "So you take this stuff seriously."
"Everybody's a critic. Most do it for free, but I'm going to do it for a living. Or else teach paste-eating first graders how to cut construction paper."
"Are you an artist yourself?"
"I've done my time, a few miles of charcoal scrawls and a dozen pounds of zinc-plate etching, but you know the saying about 'Those who can't, teach'?" She smiled again, forming cute lines at the corners of her mouth. Real lines, not Xandria's invisible ones. "What about you?"
"Me? An artist?"
My art was casting myself in misery as if it were bronze. Looking in the mirror as a self-portrait of the artist as satire, the artist as mud-eyed madman, the artist as inside joke. My life's work was a study in flesh, its cravings and pains, splashed in crimson on the canvas of the past. My masterpiece to date was a Father-carving, done in material so much more unforgiving of error than granite or wood.
"No, I'm no artist. Just another unpaid critic, I guess."
"So, do you want to meet the artist?"
"The mind behind the masterpiece? Certainly."
"The mouth behind the mind is now in the house."
The artist and her entourage entered through the gallery's double doors. The artist was a tall umber-skinned woman with a wide forehead and dark, piercing eyes. Her hair was corn-rowed tightly against her head, and a half-dozen earrings jutted from her left ear. She wore white coveralls, the better to show the multicolored stains that proclaimed her an artist: watery turquoises, weak lavenders, and poignant grays. She walked with an air of regal arrogance, an African empress.
At her sides, crowding her like cryptic bookends, were two teenaged twin boys dressed entirely in black. They both were gaunt and wore too much makeup. The one on the left had a bright red scarf tightened around his scrawny neck and his eye shadow made him look like a malnourished raccoon. The right bookend had a bad complexion that was threatening to erupt under his mask of whiteface. I could almost hear their bones rattle as they walked.
"Hi, Beth," the artist said, stepping toward us. The twins hung in the shadows, as if the spotlights over the paintings might turn them to dust. Xandria didn't seem overjoyed to see either Beth or me. She acted as if she was rarely overjoyed about anything. "Come to the show, I see."
"I said I would. Looks like you've got an audience," Beth said, nodding at the people at the other end of the gallery. "And groupies," she added, lowering her voice and glancing toward the twins.
"Them boys don't know much about grouping. Most of their action is with each other," Xandria said. "And who are you, white boy?"
"I'm Richard," I said, extending my hand. She looked at it as if it were a drop of blood. Beth looked away, back at the painting, the hideous "Landscape, Inner View."
"You a critic?" Xandria asked.
"No, just an art admirer."
"Well, what you think?"
"The truth?"
"Hey, man, this ain't no wine-and-cheese affair here. I hang these pieces of shit on the wall and put whatever ridiculous price on 'em that I feel like at the time. Last year, some blue-haired bitch from Charlotte came up for an exhibit, and the next thing I knew I was a 'discovery,' what she called in the newspaper 'a contemporary genius, a master of Zulu urban angst.' Before that, I was just a painter, now I got to have attitude. I got to be a nigger. I got to be an oppressed bitch. Plus I got to put up with your cookie-dunkin’ horseshit, too?"
Beth was laughing behind her hand.
"Hey, girl. Is this here your friend?" Xandria said, pointing at me.
She shrugged. "I just met him myself. He really likes your work."
I was caught off guard, but Mister Milktoast worked the pulleys and wires so that I nodded in response.
"Well, get in line, home fry, and ketchup. You're going to write me up nice in that paper of yours, ain't you, Beth? Say I cussed and shit?"
"Yeah. Richard's helping me. He's already given me some fresh insight. What was it you were saying, Richard? Something about 'an American original'? And something about pretension?" Just hearing Beth say my name was a sweet note, even with the sarcasm.
"Oh, Lord, do I got pretension?" Xandria drew back in mock horror. She dropped her street accent, which apparently had belonged to a stage character—something to which I could relate. "Put that in the paper, Beth. Your supercilious friend just might get you an 'A' if you listen to him. Now, pardon moi, because I see some suits down there at the other end who look like trust-fund liberals who just can't go home without 'a street-wise rendering by an African-American visionary.' Politically correct guilt keeps me in mineral spirits and Chardonnay and Virginia Slims."
"Xandria, you're nuts," Beth said.
"'Nuts' sells, girl. And Richard—it's a real pleasure to meet you. And you're in the game. Maybe I'll get you to write the little placards for my next show. And I might even lay off the asshole artist persona next time.” She shrugged. “Maybe not. Ciao, mon amie."
Xandria brought her hand up near her chin and fluttered a wave of good-bye. Then she adjusted her "artist's face," stuck out her lower lip and narrowed her eyes, and slouched over to meet the adoring masses. Her bookends followed ten feet behind, as if searching for crumbs she might drop.
Beth put away her notebook. "I could say some bullshit about life imitating art, but that's been done to death. I suppose this is where I say 'So long, it was nice to meet you.'"
"And we turn and walk away, and maybe you look back and maybe you don't,” I said. “And maybe we run into each other somewhere along the line, at the next great art show. Mayb
e one of us will be a nude model."
She looked at me, her face clear and wide and fearless. "You talk crazy. Like you’re writing a book. And maybe you'll remember my name."
"Beth."
"Except maybe we never meet again, and someday you'll take your wife and kids to the park, and you'll look out over the landscape, inner view, or maybe up at a cloud and see some invisible lines. Then you'll remember me, maybe even see my face in your mind, the features fuzzy and out of place, in the wrong proportions but close enough. And you'll think to yourself, 'I wonder whatever happened to what’s-her-name.'"
"Beth." I laughed, strange music in my head.
"Or maybe you go on the rest of your life and never think of me again."
"Or maybe I do think of you. Or maybe we don’t meet until the next life or two."
The crowd at the end of the gallery may as well have been a thousand miles away. I felt as if I were on an island with no one else but Beth. I don't know why I felt so comfortable with her. Maybe it was Mister Milktoast oozing his harmless charm. Or maybe it was that black thing that flickered sometimes in my head like a serpent's tongue. Maybe somebody in the Bone House kitchen was playing with the chemicals again.
"I don't play 'what if.' Would you like to join me for a cup of coffee?" she asked.
My heart froze and my breath stalled in my lungs. The Bone House shook with the jumping of my inmates. No, this wasn't Virginia or Sally Bakken or Mother. Did every woman have to measure up or down to such stained ideals? Did every woman have to be either an angel bitch or virgin whore or a way to get a dollar’s worth of candy or make the bedsprings squeak? And this was just an afternoon cup of coffee, not a commingling of souls or a remake of “Romeo and Juliet” or another chapter in my autobiography.
"Sure," I said, flashing a smile that felt so brittle I thought my face might break. I wondered who would wear my boots into this new territory. More importantly, who would wear my face?
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
We talked away the September afternoon, drinking organic Sumatran at a round concrete table outside the Student Union. The surrounding brick buildings housed enough knowledge to ensure no second-guessing or doubts. Leaves skittered and scratched across the concrete patio, whisked by the autumn wind into piles that served as mass graves. The wind also carried Styrofoam cups and half-finished homework assignments across the university compound, where the worn grass had given way to mud. The black bones of tree branches lay on the ground, broken by the frosty nights.
Beth's cheeks were pinked by the wind. She put her hat in her lap to keep it from flying away. Strands of her golden-brown hair kept blowing across her face, and she brushed them back with an impatient hand. She told me of her family back in Philadelphia, how she had come to the mountains as an escape, to get away from the crime and traffic and the press of skyscrapers and the crush of crowds.
"But I'm worried that my career as a critic will force me back to the city," she said.
"If you want to study fish, you have to go underwater. If you want to study artists, you have to go underground," I said. Of course, all my exposure to art came from books or the occasional small show. But I was good at pretending, and a little generosity never killed anyone.
"Where the wild things are. That's where it's happening. But it's the critics who make the art, not vice versa. We're like the remoras who hook themselves onto the shark and suck until we're fatter than what we're feeding on."
A wisp of steam rose from her cup, curled in on itself for a moment, then climbed the wind and disappeared.
"You don't have a very optimistic view of your future career."
"I inflate illusions. I play the art game, but I play to win."
I had to hold my nearly empty cup to keep it from blowing away. Classes were changing, and students swarmed from the brick buildings like disturbed ants from an overturned log, except ants didn’t carry books. Beth stood up and took a final gulp of her coffee.
"I have a class. Nice talking to you, Richard. See you around, huh? For real."
"What if?"
"If I don't?"
She threw her backpack over her shoulder, her body swimming with grace at the movement. I swallowed the stone in my throat that must have been my heart. Not that I knew what a heart felt like, but I’d eaten many stones.
"Say, have you read Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word?" I asked, trying to steal another moment of her attention, one more gaze from those jeweled eyes. In retrospect, maybe it was all Bookworm’s doing. All he had was words.
"No, but I've heard of it."
"It's a must read for critics, even amateurs like me. You can borrow my copy if you'd like."
She smiled, flashing the neat, white fencerows of her teeth. "Does that mean I have to give you my phone number?"
"I suppose so. Though, again, my intentions are purely honorable."
"Boring. Remember, no 'what ifs.'"
“Okay, how about this one? You know how a preying mantis eats the head off the male after mating?”
Her eyes narrowed. Cute. “Yeah?”
“What happens when she masturbates?”
“Hmm. Wakes up to find she’s slept with Franz Kafka?”
Good enough. She’d passed the audition.
She gave me her number and I watched her walk away until I could only see the top of her hat, held down by one slim hand, the brim flapping in the wind. Then she disappeared into the crowd.
Mister Milktoast approved.
"She has a nice hat, for a female," he said, from his fussily neat closet in the Bone House. "I don't think she'll hurt you. Not like Sally and those others."
“You never can tell, though,” I thought, in answer. By then, I was usually smart enough to keep my mouth shut when talking to the voices in my head.
"Ah, but better to have loved and lost than to lose without getting a game piece." Mister Milktoast was fond of his distorted little aphorisms, but he would have failed miserably as a romance columnist.
"It's not love, only a chance meeting."
"Don't give me that. I can feel your heart pounding like a rain of frogs on a tin roof. It's my heart, too, remember?"
"I can fool myself, but I can never fool you, can I?"
"To thine own selves be true."
"Now just who the hell would that be, Mister M? Me? You? Or them?"
I sat on the cold concrete bench under the deep blue sky, looking at the feathery fibers of clouds inch-worming toward the east. The smell of dried leaves, soil that would stay damp until spring, and smoke coiling from a distant chimney assaulted my nose. The sharp sound of heels on the sidewalk surrounded me, accompanied by scraps of conversation that melded into hubbub. A cross-town bus honked its horn. My fingers rubbed the pebbled surface of the Styrofoam cup, my face felt the kiss of wind, my mouth held the rich oily taste of coffee. In a world of sense, I was nonsense.
I was thinking about never being alone with my thoughts.
"No man is an I-land, but maybe a me-land," Mister Milktoast chimed in.
"No, but do I have to be a whole fucking archipelago?"
"Yo, Roachtit, what are you bitching about now?" Loverboy had risen from his lusty dreams and walked down the Bone House stairs. He must have smelled meat, gotten a whiff of clean female skin, or maybe he dug the hat, too. "You finally bringing home some bacon? About time. My nuts are the size of onion rolls."
Mister Milktoast answered for me. "Now, Loverboy, there's more to a woman than her physical gifts."
"Oh, yeah, Fuckwheat? You can diddle yourself till the cows come home, talk about that emotional crap until you vomit, and that's fine for you. But, me, I got needs. And let me tell you something."
"Yes, my lascivious brother?"
"When I'm doing the synchronized snakedance, you can bet your sweet-boy ass you'll be watching."
Mister Milktoast made no answer. Loverboy retreated into the dark, triumphant.
"Love is a bed of roses, my friend, and you'll always suffer the
pricks," Mister Milktoast said, then he, too, slipped off into the dark rooms of my mind, leaving me on the concrete bench, the cold flowing into me and filling me until I was as hard and fragile as an ice sculpture.
I awoke each morning during those next few weeks with Beth's name on my lips, trying to follow her back into my dissolving dreams, sure she had been in them. When I eventually mustered enough nerve to call her, she seemed pleased to hear from me. I was afraid she had been humoring me, tossing scraps of her attention to me the way a grudging retiree tosses breadcrumbs to a starving pigeon or a girl does when she thinks you might have a hunky friend she can meet later.
We talked daily after that, of art and its pretensions, of the weather, of bad novels, of the concrete ant-farm of Manhattan, and, when all else failed, of feminine politics. Bookworm came in handy then, popping up to talk about the latest browse in the Paper Paradise. I didn’t know him enough to trust his motives, but he sure knew how to pontificate. And he wasn’t even that boring.
Beth and I started going out together, sharing lunch or a walk or sometimes only time. She was easygoing and open, eager to share her work and her life and her dreams. I was a good listener. With all those voices in my head, I’d had lots of practice. I knew when to nod and when to shut up, which I’d learned was about all you needed to know in order to satisfy a woman’s desire for constant attention. Life imitates imitation.
For the first time since Virginia's death, I was goofy with attraction. I had been afraid that we each got only one shot at love in our lives, and I had destroyed mine through Loverboy's callousness. But now my heart was reawakening, my chest expanding with the helium of desire, blood puffing with St. Valentine’s poison.
On our fifth real date, after watching Hitchcock's “Strangers On a Train” at the campus theater, Beth wanted to come to my house for drinks. She was impressed that I owned a house. I suppose she was used to having a romantic rendezvous interrupted by the proverbial unwashed roommate, and I knew how that felt, though I lived alone. Since she didn't have a car, I drove her to my house, pulling into the driveway under the smoky skein of stars that made up the Milky Way.
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