by Paula Guran
“Are you surprised?”
“A little.”
She smiled, remote and amused, the way you’d smile at a child. “Outsiders interest me.”
“What do you mean?”
“In Cerulean Cliffs, you’re either a rich artist, or you’re just plain rich.”
Ben thought of the financier who’d torched herself on her lawn, staggering about in screaming agony until she collapsed and the flames consumed her.
“You don’t seem to be either,” Veronica Glass said.
“I’m a poet,” he said.
“But not a successful one.”
“I make a living. That’s more than most poets can say.”
“But is it a good living? Does anyone know your name?”
“It offers me a certain freedom.”
The freedom to write mediocre verse, he thought.
“Is that enough?” she said, “I mean for you,” and of course it wasn’t. He coveted the trappings of fame: the New Yorker profile, the Oscars on Stan’s mantel, the trophy wives. In the night, as Lois slept at his side, he thought of Stan, stout and hairy, running his thick fingers down MacKenzie’s long body.
He couldn’t say these things to Veronica Glass, couldn’t say them to anyone at all if you got to the heart of the matter, so he settled for, “It’s what I have.”
And then the lights blinked twice. Veronica Glass—that was how Ben thought of her—laughed and pinched off the joint. She handed it to him as the novelist announced that there would be an hour of readings—twenty minutes of her novel in progress (so much for the tea-kettle theory, Ben thought), followed by a young woman much admired for her jewel-like short stories, and a poet last of all. The poet, when he took the mic looked the part. He had a head of dark hair that swept back to his collarbones in perfectly sculpted waves, a voice that rang out across the crowd, a National Book Award. He was twenty-seven.
The lights came up.
“Do you envy him?” Veronica Glass asked.
“A little.”
“Poetry makes nothing happen,” she said.
“Does mutilation?”
“Art pour l’art.”
“Art moves me,” he said.
And again she asked, “Is that enough?”
“Tell me,” he said, “where do you get the subjects for your art?”
“They volunteer. I have more volunteers than I can possibly use.” She gave him an appraising look. “Are you interested?”
Before he could answer, he saw Lois across the room.
“Is that your wife?”
“Yes.”
“What does she do?”
“She was an accountant in the unruined age,” he did not say. He did not say that she read good books—books that moved her and said something true about the world—and that she loved him and forgave him his trespasses, which were many, and that that was enough. He merely smiled at her through the thump of music, the crush on the dance floor, the smell of sweat in the air. Veronica Glass lifted a hand to her in some kind of ambiguous greeting, but she was gone before Lois could wend her way to them through the crowd.
“That was Veronica Glass, the mutilation artist,” he said. “You’ve read about her.”
“I know who it was,” she said.
Ben wanted to ask her to dance but they were too old for the bass pounding from the speakers; they’d lost their way. Sometime in the deepest trench of the night, a cry arose from the master bathroom. The music died. They all trooped up to look at the novelist. She was dead in the blood-splashed tub, naked, her arms flung out, slit from wrist to elbow as neatly as a pair of whitened gills. Her sagging breasts seemed deflated somehow, empty of life. Her pale face was at peace.
MacKenzie laughed hysterically, her knuckles to her mouth, her eyes bright with an almost sexual excitement. Cecy began to cry and Lois took her into her arms and hurried her home. Ben lingered as the party wound down. He watched the sun rise with Stan and MacKenzie. Afterward, they looked out over the wretched ruin that had already begun to engulf the writer’s grounds. It crept toward them, turning the soil to ash. Flowers withered to dust. The guesthouse sagged. They descended to the beach and walked home.
Cecy was sleeping. Lois had waited up.
Stan and MacKenzie went off to their bedroom. Ben and Lois heard MacKenzie cry out after a time. They wandered outside and sat on the edge of the verandah, legs dangling. Ben dug out the crumpled joint and lit it, and they looked out over the sea and smoked it together. Ben spoke of Veronica Glass, and Lois held a finger to his lips.
“I don’t want to hear about her, okay?” she said.
They went into their dim bedroom. The sun cast narrow bars of light through the blinds as they made love. When Ben finished he thought of Veronica Glass; when he slept, he dreamed of her.
He dreamed of her awake and sleeping both. One more party, two, another passing encounter. She didn’t always show up. He asked Stan about her. “She lives six houses down,” Stan said, gesturing. “Crazy bitch.”
“Crazy?”
“The things she does. You call that art?”
The last picture Stan had worked on had been a slasher flick. The usual: a bunch of kids at some summer camp, screwing and smoking dope; a crazed killer; various implements of destruction, the more imaginative the better. The virtuous survived. There would be no Oscars for this formulaic trash, Ben reminded him. And didn’t it trade upon our worst impulses?
“It trades upon imagination,” Stan said. “There’s a difference between special effects and the genuine item.”
He was right, of course, demonstrably so, yet—
Maybe not, Ben thought. Maybe special effects were worse. People thrilled to the mayhem on screen; they identified with the killers, turned them into folk heroes. No one thrilled to the work of Veronica Glass. Horror and fascination, sure—how could you do such things to a human being, and why? What had she said? “I have more volunteers than I could possibly use.” And worse yet: “Are you interested?”
And he was. The whole phenomenon interested him.
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” Keats had said.
Was there some terrible beauty here? Or worse yet, some terrible truth?
Or maybe Veronica had been right. How had she put it? Art pour l’art.
Art for art’s sake.
Perhaps it was these questions that led Ben to stray down the beach one day toward her house. Perhaps it was the woman herself—that blond hair, those high cheekbones. Perhaps it was chance. (It was not chance.) Yet that’s what he told himself as he mounted the stair to her house—a house like every other house along the cliff side: gray-stained shingles and acres of windows that threw back the afternoon light, blinding him, and suddenly he didn’t know what he was doing there, what was his intent?
Ben started to turn away—might have done so had a voice not hailed him from the verandah. “The poet takes courage,” she called, and now he saw her, leaning toward him, elbows on the railing. “Come up.”
He crossed the lawn, climbed a set of winding stairs. She had turned to greet him, her back to the railing, clad in a sheer white dress. She held a clear glass with a lime wedge floating among the ice, and she laughed when she saw him. She brushed her lips first against one cheek and then another; they were moist and cool from the drink.
“So we meet by daylight, Ben Devine.”
“How did you know my name?”
“It’s no great mystery, is it? You’re a guest of Stan Miles—and MacKenzie, of course. Dear, poor MacKenzie, and that lost child of hers. Who doesn’t know you, those of us who remain, a weed sprung up among the roses?”
“Is that how you think of me, a weed?”
“Is that how you think of yourself?”
How was he to answer that question? How indeed did he perceive himself among the glittering multitude of Cerulean Cliffs? Stan had said they would fit right in—he and Lois—but did they? Ben had his doubts.
He opted for silence.
If Veronica—and when had that shift occurred exactly, when had she come to be Veronica in his mind?—expected an answer she did not say. Nor did she ask him if he wanted a drink. She simply put one together for him at a bar tucked discreetly into the shadows. He brought it to his lips: the tickle of tonic, the woodsy bite of juniper and lime. At first he thought that she didn’t care about his response to her question, but then—
“Do you think the poet who read the other night—the one with the beautiful hair—was any better than you are?”
“He has the National Book Award to prove it.”
“Is that the measure of success?”
“So it would seem. Here in Cerulean Cliffs anyway.”
“What do you believe, Ben?”
“What’s an artist without an audience?”
“I have an audience. They mostly despise me, but they can’t look away. I have a raft of awards. Does that make me an artist?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what you are.”
“And yet you’re drawn to me.”
“Am I?”
“You show up at my home without invitation.”
“It was you who spoke to me first.”
Ben turned and rested his elbows on the railing. He finished his drink and studied the horizon. Ruin had crept still closer, ashen and gray, enveloping the sea. For some reason, tears sprang to his eyes. For the first time in months, he found himself wanting to write, to set down lines in tribute to the lost world—yet even this aspiration exceeded his meager talent, and he grieved that, too: that the poems in his mind slipped through his fingers like rain. He grieved the hollowness at the heart of the enterprise. Nothing lasted. Not marble, nor the gilded monuments of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme. Except that the rhyme too came to ruin in the end.
Veronica handed him another drink.
“It won’t be much longer now, will it?” she said.
“No.”
“What spectacular suicide have you devised?”
“None. I suppose I’ll see it through.”
“Perhaps suicide too is an art.”
“That’s the premise of your work, isn’t it?”
“Art pour l’art.”
“Do you believe that?”
“I don’t know. I suppose there is truth in what I do. The truth of ruin and death.”
“You sound like Vinnizi.”
“Is that what he told you? Poor Vinnizi. He was a fool. He made films about gunfights and car chases, that’s all. The most artistic thing he ever did was hurl himself over that cliff.” She paused. “Have you seen my work?”
“Photographs.”
“Then you have not seen it.”
“I’m not sure I want to.”
Yet he did. In some secret chamber of his heart he yearned for nothing more, and when she turned away from him and started into the house, Ben followed, all too aware of the lines of her body beneath her dress. She turned to smile at him.
The door swung shut at his back. The air smelled of lavender. A whisper of air conditioning caressed his skin. The floor plan was open, airy, the sparse furniture upholstered in white leather, and he was struck suddenly by the similarity to Stan’s house—the similarity to all the ruined houses he had fled in the light of dawn. Only here and there stood white pedestals, and on the pedestals—Ben felt his stomach clench—Veronica Glass’s art. A woman’s arm, severed at the shoulder and bent at the elbow, segmented into thin discs laid in order, an inch between, as though the wounds had never been inflicted, the hand alone still whole, palm up, like Vinnizi’s, in supplication. The flesh had been preserved somehow, encased in a thin clear coat of silicone; he could see the white bone, the pinkish muscle, the neatly sundered nexus of artery and vein. A detail from the New Yorker profile came to him: how she strapped her subjects down and worked her way up to the final amputation, sans anesthesia, applying the first thin layer of silicone at every cut to keep the volunteer from bleeding out. A collaboration, she called her work, and the horror of it came to him afresh: in the leg flayed and tacked open from hip to toe to reveal the long muscles within; the severed penis, quartered from head to scrotum, and pinned back like a terrible flower; and, dear God, the ultimate volunteer, the shaven head mounted on a waist-high pedestal, a once-handsome man, lips sewn shut with heavy black cord, small spikes driven into his eyes.
The room seemed suddenly appalling.
Ben flung himself away and staggered outside to the verandah. Downing his drink, he stared out at the sea and the encroaching ruin, and saw for himself the absurdity of Vinnizi’s claim that all along he’d been making films about the end of everything. This was ruin and horror, this the art of final things. Then she touched his shoulder and Ben turned and she pressed her lips to his and dear God, his cock was like a spike he was so hard—
Ben thrust her away and stumbled down the spiral stair to the lawn. When he turned at cliff side to look back, she was still there, standing against the railing, watching him. Her sheer dress blew back in some vagary of the wind, exposing her body so that he could see the weight of her breasts and the dark triangle of her sex. Another jolt of desire convulsed him and once again he turned away. He clambered down the stair to the beach, tore off his clothes and waded into the ocean, but no matter how long he scrubbed himself in the clear water that had not yet succumbed to ruin, he could not wash himself clean.
He told Stan of it; he told Lois.
His cigarette trembled as he described it. He drank off two glasses of Scotch as he spoke and poured another. The bottle chattered against the rim of the glass. He had known the nature of her work, had seen the photos, had read the profile. Yet nothing had prepared him for the way its cold reality shook him. What had Dickinson written? “I like a look of agony because I know it’s true.” And had any poet in his ken written a poem so true as Veronica Glass’s work—so icy that it shivered him, so fiery that it burned? Was this not art, and did not his own work—the work of any poet or novelist, sculptor or composer—pale in comparison?
Ruin closed inexorably upon them. The parties became ever more frenetic. Suicides came in clusters now. One night, flying on heroin and prime, Gabrielle Abbruzzese slit her own throat at the stroke of midnight. The vast house rang with her otherworldly sonic landscapes, and she twirled as she died, her white ball gown blooming around her. Blood sprayed the revelers. Finally she collapsed, one leg folding under her like a broken doll’s. Someone else seized the blade from her still warm hand, and then another, and another until the floor was littered with corpses. Ben and Lois watched from the gallery above. Looking up from the slaughter, Ben locked gazes with Veronica Glass, on the other side of the great circular balcony. She gave him an enigmatic smile and vanished into the crowd. The revel continued until dawn. Dancers twirled among the bloody corpses until ruin withered the privet and shattered the lawn; they made their escape as the land burned black behind them.
So passed the nights. The days passed in a haze of sun and sleep and alcohol. One boozy afternoon, Ben found himself alone with MacKenzie, watching Cecy in the yard. He made MacKenzie a vodka tonic and slumped beside her in her Adirondack chair.
“Have you given up poetry?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said, and he thought of his impulse to set down some record of the dying world in lines, knowing how useless it was, how it too would come to ruin, and no one would survive to read it. He admired her body. She wore a bikini, and he could not help imagining the tan lines as Stan stripped it away and carried her off to bed.
“Why bother?” he said. “Who will survive to read it?”
“Perhaps the value of it is in the doing of the thing itself.”
“Is it? Then why did you give up acting?”
“I was never really an actor,” she said. “I’m not delusional.”
She had been the star of a popular sitcom before her single disastrous attempt to break into film: the fading action star, the failed movie.
“I ne
ver really made it,” she said. “Or if I did, I never was up to the challenge of real acting. I posed for the camera. The money didn’t matter, not as a measure of artistry anyway. I was a poseur.”
“That’s more than I ever achieved. I was a poseur, too.”
MacKenzie looked at him for the first time, really looked at him, and he saw a bright intelligence in her eyes, a self-knowledge that he had not known was there. It had been there all along, of course, but he’d been too blind to see it.
“I never read your poetry,” she said.
“Who did?”
They laughed, and he felt that desire for her quicken within him.
Cecy cried out on the lawn. Her ball had plunged over the cliff. Ben retrieved it. When he returned, MacKenzie had moved to a towel. She lay on her stomach. She had undone the back of her bikini top, and he could see the swell of her breast.
“Why do you let Cecy attend the parties?” he said.
“I’m not a bad parent,” she told him. “Her father—he was a bad parent.”
“But you didn’t answer the question.”
She propped herself on her elbows, and he could see her entire breast in profile, the areola of one brown nipple. She looked at him, and he wrenched his gaze away. He met her eyes.
“I will not hide the truth from her.”
“And in ruin is truth?”
“You know there is.”
She lay back down, and he looked out to the sea, and even that was not eternal. “Do you want another drink?” he said.
“I’m positively parched,” she said. So he made them drinks, and they drank until his face grew not unpleasantly numb and they watched Cecilia in the splendor of the grass.
Stan joined them as the shadows grew long and fell across the yard. Then Lois. The four of them drank in companionable silence through the afternoon. MacKenzie said again, “I’m not a bad parent. She has to face it the same as we do.”
Lois nodded. “Perhaps you’re right.”
At the party that night—a sculptor’s—Ben spoke with Veronica Glass.
“Are you ready yet?” she asked.
“I will never be ready.”
“We’ll see,” she said, and drifted off into the crowd. Afterwards he sought out Lois, and they watched together as the sculptor put a sawed-off shotgun in his mouth and blew out the back of his head. A spray of blood and brain and bone adorned the wall behind him; if you stared at it long enough, you could discern a meaning that was not there.