Mr. Apology

by Campbell Armstrong

  Harrison ducked once more as a parrot passed overhead. A dangerous place to be, he thought. You risk life and limb in Levy’s house. He moved towards the fireplace, staring out into the yard. A faint mist permeated the afternoon, softening the light. He liked the quality of the light, the way it made the shrubbery outside appear to float in midair.

  “Let’s go outside,” Levy said. He opened the glass doors and Harrison followed him out into the yard. A cold afternoon, the smack of dark winter in the air. He shivered a little and rubbed his arms. He watched as Levy took out a pipe, which he lit and puffed on in silence for a few minutes.

  “You haven’t been around much, stranger,” Levy said. He took the pipe from his mouth, stared into the bowl as if he were searching for something elusive. “Don’t tell me. I think I know. Pressures of work. Affairs of the heart. Right?”

  “Right,” Harrison said.

  “And how is Madeleine?”

  Harrison leaned against the fountain. Moss grew against the grey stone. “She’s fine.”

  “I’m glad to hear that.” Levy knocked his pipe against the sole of his shoe and the air was filled with sparks. “I’ve always thought you needed a good woman, Harry. I’ve always thought you needed someone who could give you a sense of direction.”

  Harrison smiled. He stared across the yard. Several sculptures lay against the rear wall. Levy had done them when they’d been students together at New Paltz. They were derivative, influenced by the work of Constantin Brancusi—round, smooth, almost featureless faces. Ghosts from the past, a touch of warm nostalgia. Many long nights had been spent with Levy discussing what constituted art. So much past babble and all of it so very earnest. Levy had long ago given up sculpting even though he retained an interest in what was happening in the world of art. He had inherited a vast sum of money on the death of his father and with it a series of commercial concerns. A factory that made paper goods—plates and napkins and funny hats for parties. A number of commercial office buildings in Manhattan. A printing company in Paterson, New Jersey. And this town house, where he lived alone except for his parrots and his old sculpture. For a moment, Harrison wondered what it would be like to be as rich as Reuben Levy, but it was like trying to get a fix on infinity. He couldn’t grasp it.

  “How’s the old world of commerce treating you, Rube?”

  Levy adjusted his beret. “It’s a game, Harry. I always think of it like that. I spend hours talking with accountants, lawyers, tax advisers, investment people. I nod my head and pretend I know what the hell they’re talking about. They might as well be talking in Swedish.” Levy paused. “And they all look alike, that’s the weird thing. They all have the same faces, the same glasses, the same three-piece suits. They all wear the same cologne. I suspect it’s Brut. They’re all cleanshaven. And I get this feeling they all drive something sensible like Volvos.” Levy looked up at the house a moment. “It’s a game. I play it without really understanding it. What the hell, Harry. The money just seems to keep rolling in. Do you think I should feel guilty?”

  “Why?”

  Rube Levy shrugged. “Sometimes I think I should. But I never do. It’s very convenient to have piles of money. You can sleep at night without worrying. And I like having this house. I like that best of all.”

  “Do you go to meetings wearing that beret?” Harrison asked.

  “Why not? It keeps my head warm.”

  “You should learn to play the accordion. You could sit down with your accountants and lawyers and play them a couple of choruses of “Les Chevaliers de la Table Ronde” or something like that.”

  “I like the idea. I just don’t happen to know that tune, though.”

  Levy was silent for a while. He stuck the pipe back inside his pocket and looked at Harrison, as if he were trying to decide some question inside his head. Then he said, “I wish you’d come by more often, Harry. I miss you. I keep meeting new acquaintances, but never what you’d call friends. And friends are all you’ve really got when you come to the end of the day.”

  “You’re getting sentimental in your old age, Rube.”

  “You can talk. I wish you could see the look on your face whenever we mention Madeleine.”

  “Is it so goddamn obvious?”

  “Transparent as hell, friend.”

  Transparent, Harrison thought. Exactly what had Madeleine done to him anyhow? His life had seemed a shapeless drift, a random tide of some kind, before she’d come into it. He’d worked, slept, breathed, gone through the assorted motions of existence—but the motions might have been shadows thrown on a wall, nothing of any great substance.

  “Did you hear about your grant?” Levy asked.

  “I’ve got a meeting with the committee later.”

  “Are you optimistic?”

  Harrison shrugged. How could he say? He was apprehensive, uneasy, but not optimistic.

  “I wish you’d let me help, Harry.”

  “I don’t want to go through that again.”

  Levy smiled. “I fancy myself as a patron of the arts. I think that role really suits me. Just imagine how good you’d make me feel if you accepted my offer of financial support. You’re depriving me, Harry. You’re tampering with my joy, pal.”

  “I hate to do that to you, Rube. It’s just …”

  “Just what?”

  “I’d like to do this thing alone. If I’m going to get any money for Apology, I’d like it to be on account of the merits of the project.” Did that come off as sounding tightassed? Pompous? He hadn’t meant it like that. He spread his hands and looked at them. “Rube, you’ve been kind to me in the past. You’ve bought canvases of mine I’m sure you didn’t really like—”

  “Nonsense. I love them. I don’t understand them but that doesn’t matter these days.” Levy scratched his face and looked thoughtful. “You’re beginning to remind me of Gary Cooper in The Fountainhead, Harry. You know? He’s all pride and righteous solitude and determined to do things his own way or not at all.”

  “Give me a break, Rube. I appreciate the offer of money. I really do. But I’d like to get the bread out of the grants committee, not from you.”

  “Ah, the artist. God spare me from the artist. Anyway, how is the project coming along?”

  “Better than I ever expected. Faster than I’d hoped. Some of the tapes are mind-blowing, Rube. You wouldn’t believe it. Rapists. Pimps. Muggers. I get a lot of calls from gays. I’ve got guys with all kinds of weird secrets. Incest. I’ve got people threatening to kill other people. It’s like there’s a whole horror show out there and it’s just lying under the surface and you only have to scratch that surface for everything to break through.” He stopped. You’re talking too fast, Harry. You’re getting too excited. But ever since the calls had started to come in they’d come in a flood that was beyond anything he could ever have predicted. And from the point of view of response Apology was a total success.

  “Shit forms a crust, Harry. You’ve just stood on that crust, that’s all.”

  Harrison smiled. “I like your imagery, Rube.”

  “I was always good at turning the appropriate phrase,” Levy said, reaching out and letting one hand rest lightly on Harrison’s shoulder. “How do you see this whole thing, Harry? A kind of spiritual opinion poll?”

  “If you like.”

  Now Levy was poking him in the chest. “In your place, my friend, I would remain as detached from these taped confessions as you can. I would stay objective. Disinterested, that’s the word. Don’t let them get under your skin. A little aloofness never did any permanent damage, after all.”

  “That’s terrific in principle. It’s hard to be detached. Some of those messages are so touching. You get drawn into them.”

  “A good artist doesn’t become his subject, Harry. And other such platitudes. Remember. You heard it here first. Okay?” Levy turned and moved towards the house. “I still think you should let me give you some money. You’re completely ignoring my sensitivities, pal.” Levy p
aused a moment, then looked at Harrison. “Of course, it might turn out to be a bad investment for me anyhow.”

  “Like how?”

  “You’re notorious for leaving projects unfinished, Harry. You’re well known, shall we say, for being carried along on a tidal enthusiasm that somehow never carries you quite as far as the beach. I remember a certain sculpture you were very involved in not so long ago—indeed, it was going to be a series of creations on the theme of victims of our great society, right? You talked it up a storm at the time, didn’t you?”

  Harrison nodded. Okay, sometimes the fires went out. Sometimes you realized your ideas were never going to be matched by reality. Could you help it when enthusiasm just dripped away? “I finished one of them.”

  “Ah, but you were talking ten, a dozen. I remember that. And before that, old friend, you had plans for certain works that incorporated concepts borrowed from bubble-gum machines and pinballs. There were to be small flashing lights and the spectator would put in a quarter and if he didn’t manage to navigate a moving light along the correct channels and through the exact mazes the machine would administer a small electric shock—”

  “I lost interest, Rube. That’s all. You know how damned hard it is at times to keep your interest afloat when your head’s crowded with other ideas.”

  “Maybe the same thing will happen with Apology,” Levy said. “Maybe you’ll wake up one day and the old coals won’t be glowing quite so brightly.”

  “I don’t think so, Rube,” Harrison said. He recognized that Levy was right—too many past projects had gone under, been abandoned, allowed to just drift away. There were unfinished canvases and half-built machines and various sculptures that had never gone beyond the stage of the drawing board. Crowds of ideas, whole urgent congregations of new notions—he couldn’t possibly get around to them all. But he knew Apology was different; he knew it was going to hold his interest and enthusiasm. Apology was going to be the project that opened all the right doors for him.

  Levy was walking back towards the house. Harrison followed him.

  The afternoon had turned very cold and there was a slight wind shuffling through the dead leaves in the yard. Levy shut the glass doors. The parrots were still frantically scouring the air. A lamp had been overturned, a newspaper eaten to shreds, and there were scattered turds on the rug and sofa. Harrison thought the sound of the wings suggested the noise of a surreal soft helicopter. A thing made out of stuffed satin. Levy sat on the arm of a sofa. One of the birds came and settled on his shoulder and nibbled the hair on the back of his neck.

  “I’ve got buildings,” he said to the parrot. “I’ve got a factory turning out paper party favors twenty-four hours a day. I’ve got a printing press rolling like crazy out in Paterson. But will my oldest friend, my stubborn old pal, allow me to donate a plug nickel to his project? Nooooo.”

  Harrison felt one of the birds land on his head; claws pressed into his scalp. “Is this thing going to crap on me?”

  “You’ve heard the expression ‘free as a bird,’ Harry? It crappeth where the wind bloweth. But you’ve given me a great idea. Little paper diapers for parrots. I must talk to my people about it.”

  Harrison reached up to take the parrot on his hand, but it squawked and fluttered away.

  “A question, Harry,” Levy said. He raised one finger in the air in the manner of a man determining the direction of the wind. “How many people know about Mr. Apology?”

  “You. Madeleine. The people on the grants committee. Oh, yeah, and a friend of Maddy’s who’s a journalist.”

  “A scribbler?”

  “She might be interested in doing an article on the project.”

  Levy frowned. He said, “The less people who know, the better. Maybe too many know already.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Harry, the streets are filled with the casualties of war, poor people who can’t hack the emotional brutalities of everyday life. Loners. Subversives. People who masturbate on subway platforms. Guys you just know are building elaborate bombs in their cellars. Sweet little old men with grenades in their coat pockets. It wouldn’t be wise to connect with any of them.”

  A tone of warning, of concern. Harrison smiled. “Nobody’s going to find out who Apology is, Rube.”

  “I hope not,” Levy said. He got up from the arm of the sofa and looked at Harrison; he was no longer frowning. “You can’t be too careful, as Hitler is reputed to have told Goering as he descended into his bunker. You can’t be too careful at all.” Levy put his arm loosely around Harrison’s shoulder. “What you need, before you see the gentlemen of the grants committee, is a glass of good scotch to settle your apprehensions, Harry. And I have the perfect remedy in a bottle of Glenlivet. This way.”

  Harrison followed his friend out of the parrot room and into a long narrow room that was Levy’s study—chrome chairs, an unvarnished desk, great leaping ferns that linked floor to ceiling. Apprehensions. Maybe he should just go to his meeting with the committee in the frame of mind Madeleine had suggested. Something positive, something upbeat. Like he was doing them a favor by begging for their money. So why did he suddenly feel like the new kid in town on his first day at a strange school?

  He watched Levy pour two small shots from a bottle.

  “Good fortune, Harry,” Levy said.

  “I’ll drink to that.”

  4.

  “This knife,” George was saying, “is considered by aficionados to be quite the finest knife ever made. Swiss army. But then the Swiss do so many things well. I’ve often wondered how they manage to get holes into their cheese. Do you think they employ people with pointed sticks, Bryant?”

  Bryant Berger sat up in the bed and swung his legs over the side, clutching his skull with a hand. Headache, a bone-dry mouth, a raging sense of panic that wouldn’t be stilled. He hadn’t gone home last night, hadn’t gone to the gallery today, hadn’t called Angela—dear God, there were times when everything seemed, like a fragile construction of dominoes, to be tilting dangerously to one side. He shut his eyes a moment. Pain flashed inside his head. A small fire flaring. What was George muttering about? Swiss army knives. Swiss cheese. All at once he perceived his own hungover brain to have as many airholes as Swiss cheese. He opened his eyes and looked at George, who was standing naked at the window. He had one hand on his hip, his back to the room: twelve floors up in the stark Manhattan night. How do I get out of this one? Bryant wondered. What can I say? What preposterous lies are left to me from an armory of excuses that has run precariously empty? Try amnesia, Bryant. You haven’t used that one before. Angela, love, I lost my memory. I don’t know how it happened, but the police picked me up just wandering through Central Park.

  She’d buy that one, wouldn’t she?

  For sure.

  Yesterday. What had happened to yesterday? Too many scattered little memories. Tiny slicks of glass fallen from a broken kaleidoscope. When had we come here to George’s apartment? Too many highballs, too many bars he and George had crawled into. Berger groaned and reached for his shirt, which lay on the floor beside the bed. His body ached. There were bruises on his thighs. George’s harsh lovemaking—he was like some manic gymnast, a contortionist. And you adore it, Bryant. You love every second of it. Ah, but guilt is the currency with which you pay for your pleasures, Bryant. Deep black guilt. And panic, the rising screaming panic of things, the sense of coming inexorably unglued. Humpty Dumpty and All the King’s Men. He stared at George. The body beautiful. Dear George.

  But what was he doing with that knife?

  He gazed at the boy’s firm spine, the faint curve of hip, the tight rounded buttocks. “I think I’m on the edge of death, George.”

  “I understand that as you get older, Bryant, the body takes longer to recover from a hangover.” George turned, still holding the knife, staring at the various blades.

  “You understand correctly.” Berger moaned, gazing at his shirt as if he didn’t understand
the purpose of the garment: It might have been something antique unearthed in an archeological dig. “The brain cannot get essential messages through to the body. Simple things, my dear. Like remembering to breathe in. Like blinking your eyes. A man becomes quite scattered. A hangover that used to last one day now drags into a second, sometimes even a third.” He looked at George. So young. Strong. What could he possibly know about physical decay? And he remembered how he had first met the young man, how casual and simple and natural it had all seemed at the time, a random encounter at a cocktail party in an uptown gallery, a meeting that had made him tremble with the tension of sexual anticipation, as though he were a schoolboy slipping his hand under a young girl’s blouse. They had come to this apartment on that first night. And that should have been the end of it: one insane night, nothing more. Why had it become so tangled? Why had the relationship taken a turn that—when he managed to look at it sensibly—seemed dangerous, a flirtation with fire? And when?

  George moved across the rug and sat on the edge of the bed, lowering one hand to Berger’s thigh. In the other hand, flat in the palm, was the red-handled knife. “Are you getting dressed, Bryant? Running back to Angela so soon?”

  “My life has become a laughable series of excuses. If I could be completely honest with myself, George, I’d come to the sorry conclusion that there’s something pathetic about me. But thank God I don’t have that kind of self-directed ruthlessness.”

  George moved his fingers along Berger’s thigh and curled them lightly just under the testicles. “Excuses, Bryant. You think madame believes your little fibs?”

  Take your hand away, George. Don’t touch me. He felt desperate all at once. He had to get up, get dressed, get the hell out of this place, catch a train, and make up lies. This is the last time, Bryant. You’ll walk away from here and you’ll never see George again and you’ll be very good to Angela and live out a quiet life of total propriety. And the closet door will be well and truly locked.

  “Think how much simpler things would be if you told her the truth, Bryant. You wouldn’t be in such a state now, would you?” George played with all the blades of the knife, opening them out, closing them. Clickclickclick.