I’ve heard so much about you, Kathleen will say. And my father … you knew him, Jean-Marc says …
Heavens! Felicity will laugh. I almost forgot. He’s on his way.
“Jean-Marc!” Felicity cried, jumping up when I came in fresh from the Outremont Baldwin. I am never prepared for her bear hugs. She smelled of something exotic and musky, like forbidden flowers in a rain forest. “I hope you don’t mind?”
“Why would I mind?” She always makes me laugh, she always makes me feel as though the circus has arrived. I had to go into the kitchen. I hadn’t slept for a week, wondering where she was spending her nights. I hadn’t slept since the phone call that was interrupted by the Old Volcano.
“You were wrong about the cottage,” she said. “I went there first. There’ve been vagrants, squatters, frightful mess. Dishes left dirty, a pair of men’s shoes in the bedroom. Everyone says it’s getting worse, some people are selling, they’ve had enough.” She was picking up things from my kitchen counter, putting them down again. “Anyway, no sign of Dolores Marquez. He couldn’t have seen her. He must have been mistaken.”
“So,” I said. My voice sounded casual. Unwavering. “Why has he turned up in Boston again?”
She wandered back into the living room, she couldn’t keep still, she examined the books on the coffee table, took others down from the shelves, put them back again. “Your library is taking over the house,” she said. “You’ve put up more shelves, I see. Soon you’ll have to move out. I see you’re into Dante again.” She flipped through the Inferno, put it down again. “My God, you should just see that mess in the cottage. Must have been teenage boys.” She stopped suddenly in the middle of the room, colliding with a thought.
“So,” I said pointedly, because he’s always there between us, the Old Volcano, and Felicity is such an old pro at changing the subject. “Where is he now?”
She blinked at me, wide-eyed. It took her several seconds to disengage from her thought. “Oh,” she said. “That. I was hoping you’d know. Is he sure he saw her in the orchard?”
“What?”
“You said he saw her. Or thought he saw her.”
“Saw who?”
“Dolores Marquez.” She’s impatient if you can’t read her mind. “That’s what you told me.”
I couldn’t help smiling. I never know if it’s one-track tenacity or brilliant subterfuge. She always makes life seem deliciously absurd.
“Oh Fliss,” I laughed. “Honestly.”
“Do you know where he is?” she persisted.
“Gus Kelly? Haven’t a clue. Haven’t seen him since his visit a week ago, poor drunken bugger. Wish I’d had a chance to tell him the murder was cancelled.”
“That’s not very funny, Jean-Marc.” She took a deep breath. It seemed to be a sigh of relief. “Well then,” she said. “I don’t see that there’s anything more I can do.” She opened a window and leaned out to watch the street. I joined her. Our forearms touched on the sill.
“Where’d you leave your car?” I asked.
“There.” She pointed to a maroon Ford.
“Good grief,” I laughed. “How dull. What happened to the wild blue chariot?”
“Don’t laugh, Jean-Marc. Its brakes had been tampered with, among other things. I’m scared to drive it. I’m scared to drive any one car for too long now. I rented three different ones along the way.”
“Are you serious?”
She ran her fingers through her long hair and her hands were shaking.
“Fliss,” I said carefully. “Are you running away from him?”
“It’s all so crazy,” she said. “There was a Casa del Diablo at the address, but it was a blind alley. A complete dead end.”
“Fliss.”
“What?”
“Don’t evade,” I said. I was seeing the two of them, Felicity and the Old Volcano, standing there with the receiver forgotten between them. “What happened?”
“I had to be careful. I told the waiter Angelo sent me and I had a message for Dolores. There was no reaction, so then I said Dolores Marquez. Nothing. I tried her other names, La Salvadora, La Desconocida. Nothing. I didn’t think I should show the photograph …”
“Dammit!” I shouted. “Stop treating me like a child!” I admit I lost all self-possession. I admit, in retrospect, this was stupid. I know perfectly well Felicity can worry at a single thought for hours. I went storming around the room at full throttle while she followed, chirping and skipping, a distressed mother dove in the wake of a fledgling. She followed me into the kitchen.
“Jean-Marc,” she said. “Is this about Seymour?”
I had to laugh.
“He asks about you,” she sighed. “I wish you could forgive. I wish you’d visit us.”
She never quits trying, Felicity. On the subject of fathers, she’s a hopeless romantic. I stared at her. I do wonder (still) if the extent of her blindness is possible. And also the extent of her obsession. It is really beyond understanding, what she sees in him. “Visit us?” I said. “Are you telling me, are you actually telling me …?” But words failed me.
She turned away. I’d never seen her blush before, not that I can recall. Actually blush. “I couldn’t go back to my own apartment,” she said. “It’s been ransacked.”
“Oh well, naturally,” I said. “Reason enough.”
“One of the reasons.”
“So what are you doing here?” I asked. “Been abandoned already?” I was clutching at straws, I admit it.
I know she showed me the photograph. I remember a grainy surface, an old woman, two children. A part of me must even have listened, heard, absorbed, because afterwards I pulled details back from somewhere. But I know I didn’t consciously take in much at the time. I know I was aware of my anger as of a time bomb, ticking, ticking. I know I wanted to protect myself from twin possibilities: from grovelling, and from committing mayhem.
Mr Piano Tuner to the fore. El Magico, the mathematician, transformer of discord into smooth tones. “I think you’d better leave,” I said coolly. “You know how he hates to be kept waiting. When he snaps his fingers, I’m sure you’ll want to be there.” I can be, when occasion calls, a master of arch savagery. I can dart in with the quip modest, the reply churlish, the reproof valiant.
But I went too far. I have never seen her since. If only …
Ah, your “if ” is the only peacemaker.
When she calls at last from wherever she is, I’ll say simply: “I’m sorry, Fliss. On whatever terms you want, you’re welcome.”
30
Felicity woke in the middle of the night and stepped ashore into Seymour’s Boston studio. Beneath her feet the floorboards were cool as wet sand. She could hear gulls calling from a dream: this way, this way. Behind her, Seymour rocked gently on waves of sleep, the dark lapping at the edges of his sixty-third year, the white sails furled around him, the rigging slack.
In the act of leaving, she turned back to look at him again. He was dreaming energy, even in sleep he never stopped wrestling with age. All his hair was grey now, and soft as down. His body was covered in tightly wound coils of it, a skinsuit of chain mail with only his vulnerable parts exposed. She was tempted back. He was as familiar and as natural and as dear to her as the country of memory. He could not be lost. She laid her cheek against his thigh and breathed in his yeasty smell and nuzzled his prick. It stirred in sleep, and half in sleep he pulled her onto himself. She rode him gently, not wanting to disturb him, but he woke and laughed throatily to find himself moored to her. He slid to the edge of the bed and stood and walked with her growing like a passionflower from his root, her legs locked behind him. He was always defying his age. He paraded her around his studio, showing her off to the canvases old and new.
(Braggart! his son might have said, if he’d been there. Old goat on its hind legs!
Jean-Marc! Felicity might say. This is quite indecent. I had no idea you were such a voyeur.
You should have thought of t
hat, I’ll say, all those nights when I was a boy in the next room.)
“I had to come back,” Seymour said. “I have a whole series in mind and you’re the only possible model. I needed you.” (There were a number of questions his son might have asked. Has your latest nymphet run off with the paintbrush supplier? for example. But his son was not there.) “Not that I ever stopped painting you. You’ve always been there in my blues.”
She rested her head on his shoulder and nibbled at the hollow of his neck.
“It’s time for us both to settle down,” he said, as they rolled on the bed again. “I’ll move all my work back into this studio, and we’ll stay here from now on. What do you say?”
She stroked his hair and smiled and said nothing. She had never really thought of him as absent. She had her own ways of staving off loss and change.
“This Aaron,” he said. “Are you still seeing him?”
“Does it matter?”
“What a question.” He bit her nipples lightly, playfully, warningly. An imprint of possession. “A businessman! And I thought I had taught you discriminating taste. You’d rather be with him than me?”
“Don’t be silly.” She found it hard to understand his jealousy. He must have known why she had left him. (There’s no point in trying to hang on to anyone, Jean-Marc, she once said. The more you try, the worse your chances.) She did not try to articulate this for Seymour. She talked with her hands. Her tongue explained to his flesh.
“Listen,” he growled. He wanted to eat her. “Don’t go whoring after abstractions like your father did. Don’t talk to me about essence and mutability and renunciation. I want to touch and taste and smell. Don’t tell me it’s all the same whether or not you have this. And this. And this.”
“Well?” he demanded, minutes or perhaps hours later, “is anything else like that?”
She smiled. “Nothing else,” she admitted.
“This businessman, this Aaron. You used to spend the whole night with him?”
“No. Never.”
“With anyone else? Ever?”
“Never with anyone else. Only with you.”
“But then you left me,” he said. “It was a cruel thing to do.”
“That was a long time ago. I couldn’t afford to be left.”
“I would never have left you,” he protested.
“Of course you would have. You keep coming back because you never had the chance to leave first.”
“It’s a rotten lie, but maybe it’s true. Anyway, all these years, and I still can’t sleep without wondering where you are. It’s time we both settled down.”
But she knew it was too late. She knew the riptide had her. “It’s the photograph,” she said. “It has a lien on me, it obligates me.”
“It does nothing of the kind!” Seymour fumed. “It’s just your wretched father’s approval you’re chasing. I want you to cease and desist.”
“Do you remember Perugino’s Magdalena?” she asked.
“Perugino,” he sniffed. “The Mantuans bought his soul. He turned decorative after 1500. Dreadful stuff.”
“But the Magdalena was earlier. Do you remember it?”
“Of course I do. Exquisite face.”
“Dolores Marquez is her double,” Felicity said. “Don’t you think you can see the likeness in the little girl?”
He studied the photograph. “You have to stretch your imagination,” he said dryly.
“Is it just me?” she sighed. “Everything’s fantastic, everything’s unreal.”But then, she thought, so are so many things the Associated Press swears are happening. “The aunts think I dreamed the whole thing.”
“Oh your aunts. They are very reliable weathervanes. They know which taboos must not be broken.” He wadded the bedsheet into a microphone and mimicked some recent interviewer: “Could you tell us, Mr Seymour, why your recent canvases appear to be a descent into a gratuitously violent form of post-modern narrative expressionism?”
“I would rather have dreamed it,” Felicity said.
“I don’t think you dreamed it,” he said. “But I do think you’re playing with explosives. These are violent times. I forbid you to have anything more to do with it.”
31
The days clustered like crows and flew away. Seymour, at Felicity’s request, went back to her apartment to get her clothes — the bare necessities. “It’s unbelievable,” he said. “You’d think a herd of elephants had been through it. I insist you come with me so you’ll know the kind of mentality you’re up against.”
“I already know,” she said. Each morning she found a reason for not going back there to look.
“But we have to go back for the paintings,” Seymour said.
“We can do that later. Some other time.”
“And we have to notify the police.”
“But then I’d have to tell them about the border.”
“Whatever side of the fence it’s on,” Seymour said, “it’s a rank weed, violence. You can’t be silent about it.”
“I don’t know,” she said. She was thinking of Hester (If you tell, they only hurt you worse …) and of Dolores Marquez. “I’ll think about it,” she promised.
But the days went by and she saw no more sign of Hunter. She began to wonder if he had crawled out of some dark hole in her imagination. She disconnected the studio phone. (They both hated interruptions.) She went to her office each day, a safe world. She took refuge in history and efficiency, the next exhibition took shape, all its details budded and blossomed according to plan, except that the Perugino stayed in the Pitti Palace in Florence. She still kept up a newspaper file. These recent events in your life, the file told her, are no stranger than the daily electronic chatter of a thousand wire services.
Sometimes she called Jean-Marc, but the conversations were a little strained. There were so many topics to be avoided. Her car, she acknowledged, had been fixed and Seymour had driven it to the studio. It shimmered outside in the street, an impossibly blue reproach. She did not drive anymore.
“And Hunter?” Jean-Marc would ask.
“Oh Hunter.” She would laugh a little, embarrassed, self-deprecating.
Each day she took the subway to Harvard Square and walked to her gallery. She kept her eyes and her thoughts firmly on the Renaissance, a time of astonishing beauty in art and considerable brutality in politics. And civilization had survived it, an encouraging thought.
She flew to New York, she flew to Rome and Florence. She even stopped for a meal in Perugia. It had not changed much, she suspected, since the painter had left for Mantua, lured by rich patrons. Now there was a restaurant or two, a gas station. Otherwise, probably, it was much the same as in 1500. She described Perugia to Jean-Marc, but spoke mainly of paintings: those staying in Italy and those on their way to Boston. It was sad about the late Perugino canvases, she said. But after Mantua, he was fearful of offending — always the kiss of death for an artist.
Every Sunday Felicity took tea with the aunts and discussed the health of their wisteria and other such topics of interest. (Jean-Marc declined to sigh with her over this; he considered the festooning of a garden wall with wisteria, like the tuning of a piano, to be an accomplishment of no small significance.) Seymour was not invited to Beacon Hill. Felicity is going through a phase again, the aunts told each other over scones with jam and Devonshire cream.
At night, Felicity sat hunched in an armchair in the studio while Seymour painted. He worked as though time and paint were running out. He was febrile with energy, he could not sleep for excitement.
Felicity could not sleep for fear of her dreams.
Instead, with eyes open and glazed, she would drift back into the tropics. She staved off visions with details of bougainvillea and frangipani, she summoned up petals and stamens and leaves, the memory of primary colours comforted her. She braided lifelines of jasmine and scarlet flowers. It’s time I went back, she thought.
To Seymour she said: I think I might organize a Gauguin ex
hibition next. She began to daydream the taste of mangoes. I would need to visit Tahiti, she said, for the catalogue notes.
She’s imagining things again, the aunts said. She has dark circles under her eyes. She’s not sleeping well. They clicked their tongues. It’s that dreadful man, they said.
“If not Gauguin and Tahiti,” she said to Seymour, “perhaps Mexico, or somewhere further south. When you think of it, Central and South America have always exerted a pull — El Dorado and so on. Perhaps: ”The Latin-American influence on the European Imagination’. What do you think?”
“I think it’s a congenital disease,” he said. “Your father’s damned hankering after martyrdom. You can’t leave well enough alone.”
“I’ve been hearing bellbirds again lately,” she said. “I used to hear them in the gully behind my grandparents’ house. I expect there are bellbirds south of Mexico. When you think about it, it’s ridiculous that I haven’t been back to the tropics in all these years.”
32
Gus had to move into the adjoining room in the boarding house. Too much moss. It bred in the fur lining of his mouth and escaped when he breathed, propagating itself like an obsession. It grew out of the mouldings and the corners, it trailed pale green tendrils from the window frames. Over the bed a canopy moved like seaweed, the floor was soft as peat moss, the air sharp with rot.
The next room was worse.
He cleared a space in a third and camped there. He was always soaking wet. At night he sweated booze, it rose in a mist to the ceiling growth above him and fell again as gentle rain. His morning dew stank of Johnny Walker.
There was purpose and ritual to every morning. First he would state a proposition. If Therese would simply talk to him on the phone, or if Kathleen or any of his children would talk, then he would stop drinking, he would go to them immediately, he would et cetera et cetera to the greater glory of God and the happiness of his family. He would then dial Marthe’s number; she would hang up rather vehemently; he would drink a little whiskey neat, for comfort and consolation.
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