The temperature warmed up the next day and by noon the roads were open. I was disappointed because I’d hoped that Nathan would have to stay another night.
“I really have to go, Rupert. I’m expected.”
“You could call,” I said.
“He doesn’t have a phone.”
“Must be a very important friend to have you driving through a snowstorm.”
Nathan smiled and nodded. “Yes, Rupert, a very important friend.”
He got into his car. I was wearing the sweater again, I think in defiance, because I—unfairly, no doubt—felt Nathan was abandoning me.
He started the engine and backed the car around, then shouted out the window, “I almost forgot. Neftali is visiting in a month. She wants to see you.”
A few days after Nathan’s visit, I was surprised by the appearance of the Bavarian milkmaid’s father on my doorstep. It was a Saturday morning and I was still in my pajama pants, with the sweater because the house was cold.
“Good morning, Mr. Wetzel,” I said.
“Rupert,” He sniffed. His cheeks were chapped and he seemed upset. “I’m looking for Veronica.”
“Maybe she’s out with the cows,” I said.
“You know she’s not.”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw his daughter scuttle out of sight behind the barn. She must have gone out the back door. “Coffee?” I offered.
“No, thank you.” He looked me in the eye. “What kind of man are you, Rupert Brigg?”
I had an idea, but it was too early to face this.
“I want to like you. In a way, you’ve helped people out. You’ve bought their junk, and don’t argue with me, Veronica’s told me. It’s not always art and antiques. But what’s Veronica ever done to you?”
I stayed quiet.
“How many times have you been married?”
I knew that one. “Twice.”
“And how old are you?”
I knew that too. “Thirty-one.”
“Veronica’s nineteen.”
I might have shuddered, although I was aware of her age.
“She’s going to make someone a good wife. You’re not that man and she doesn’t know it.”
After Wetzel left, I poured myself a drink and lay down on the couch. The phone rang later. I knew it was Veronica, because it rang at one of the times of Wetzel’s regular cow-related activities. But I didn’t answer it. I was under the impression that I should leave Vermont. I felt like a poison on the landscape, but the thought of returning to New York scared me. The thought of moving anywhere—motion itself—seemed impossible.
I had been happy in Scotland with Olivia and I believed that I had made her life better, helped her out, kept her final months more like living and less like rehearsal for whatever was to follow. But I’d been carrying around a lot of guilt ever since she died and hadn’t been able to talk about it with anyone. Because it was a horrible truth and I felt somehow responsible. Olivia, in the end, had killed herself. Her final moments hadn’t been a benevolent fog of last-life confusion but rather an anxiety of figuring out how to administer a lethal dose of morphine. The doctors had questioned me about it, but I hadn’t known what she’d been thinking. And wasn’t it selfish to think it was all about me anyway? She’d lived in pain for two years. The chances of her leaving the hospital with anyone but the undertaker were very slim. She’d been enjoying a few of life’s pleasures but was losing that ability. Why wouldn’t she kill herself?
Vermont was a complete failure. I felt as if the last four months had been some sort of out-of body experience, a story that someone was telling me over drinks, definitely not my life. What I had wanted was to fall apart in an amazing way, like Hester—all bones and gloom and scratchy suits—whose grieving I admired. I’d wanted to destroy myself so all would be forgiven and I could live a quiet life with some dignity. But no. Here I was, fucking the juicy Veronica from next door, who cooked for me and did my laundry, giggled in bed, and only occasionally smelled like cheese. I remembered Olivia sitting in her favorite chair, her nose wrinkled, the paper collapsing in front of her, disbelief—I must have said something stupid, but I can’t remember what it was. I thought of my little son waiting for me, waiting—red sweater, ball, runny nose, smile—and I began to crave pain. The thought of that kind of obvious physical grieving made sense, seemed almost capable of comfort. I knew why, in the Bible, grief-stricken people flogged themselves and tore their clothes and shaved their heads, but I also knew that I would do none of these things. Vermont had not healed me but had laid me bare. And here I was left with myself, which amplified my own presence to a disheartening degree.
Later, when the bottle was done and I came to in the dark house, I could hear Veronica tapping on the windows, calling “Rupert, Rupert,” in a projected whisper, but I just pulled the couch cushion over my head and prayed that she would go home.
I spent the next few days cataloging the various things I’d accumulated in the barn, doing the things I had avoided, liking checking all the hallmarks on the figurines to see if they were worth anything. There was a truly ghastly ceramic lion the size of a terrier, tongue sticking out, in good condition. The lion was a Sheffield, 1860s, some coronation piece. I decided to send it to Hester. She liked the big pieces. I put a card inside that said, I’m sorry. Then I took that card out and wrote another, Because you collect these, which also seemed stupid. I thought of Greetings from Vermont, but that seemed to encourage optimism, although I doubted she had any left. Something about greetings had always sounded sexual to me. Finally, on my good stationery, I wrote her a letter saying that I had been finding pieces of good quality and, although I had acted badly, perhaps she would not mind entering into some sort of business arrangement. At least now, if she rebuffed me, I could approach someone else with the items.
I drove up past Manchester to attend an estate sale and bought a couple of good paintings that I would take with me next time I went to New York. These had a few condition issues—some flaking and, on one, a sooty grime that had to be cigar smoke—but I felt that once cleaned up the paintings would fetch a good price. I bought an armoire, French, and a wooden plate that was unassuming but, if it was really a frontier piece, would be valuable. I made arrangements to have the armoire delivered and left. On the drive home I thought it might be fun to have Neftali and Nathan visit me. After all, there was room. And if I was inviting them, I might try Clive. Maybe Nikos had some available time. And if I was doing all that, I really should call Amanda, because I didn’t have a good reason to exclude her. I pictured some sort of memorial for Olivia and a woman from the village hired to cook.
After some difficulty, I placed a call to Clive in London. I’d only spoken to him once, when I first moved to Vermont. Clive had written a few times but, as predicted, I hadn’t answered the letters. One was fourteen pages long and seemed to have been written when Clive was very drunk. The last eight or so pages were all about someone named Barry, a titled Irishman—were there titled Irishmen?—who had broken his heart or something else, but I couldn’t make it out and after trying a few times wasn’t sure I wanted to. The phone rang, a vague yoo-hooing into another dimension, but no one picked up. I tried again. This time a woman answered, which was disconcerting. I was inordinately pleased that she spoke English, in London, but I still had trouble understanding.
“He’s gone back,” she said. She said this several times before I got it, and then, to her delight, I rang off.
I went back to Clive’s last letter. After all the Barry-centric drunken scrawl, there were a couple of lines in Clive’s easy handwriting: I’m transferring to the American office. I hate London. Hate it. I hope you’ve cheered up. Clear your couch.
But I’d heard nothing from him. I suppose a couch in Vermont just wasn’t that appealing.
I tried Nathan next, but there was no answer. I wasn’t sure if I really wanted Amanda there, but with her social life she’d probably have other plans anyway. I found her numb
er tucked into the pages of my address book. She had scrawled it on the back of a ferry ticket while we were still on Aspros, and I hadn’t entered the number because I wasn’t sure how long I’d need it. I made the call. The phone rang a couple of times, and then a man answered.
“Hello?”
It was Clive.
“Clive,” I said.
“Rupert!”
“How long have you been back?”
“Just a few days. How did you know I was here?”
“I didn’t.”
“You were calling Amanda?” Clive was surprised. “Why?”
We talked for an hour. Amanda’s apartment was in Chelsea in a dilapidated building that she and Jack had lived in together, which they had sublet while in Hydra. She was looking to move. She had draped sheets over many of Jack’s sculptures, and this Clive attributed to grief. Amanda had been drinking a lot and Clive, in a whisper even though he was alone, predicted that at this rate she would not age well. “And she doesn’t seem that happy. Maybe it’s the guy she’s dating.”
“Who is it?”
“It’s kind of hush-hush. He’s engaged to someone else.”
“You know what?” I said. “I really don’t care.”
“But you know him, from college.”
“I do?”
“His name is Kiplinger, Kiplinger Sand.”
Later that week, at around 4 A.M., the phone rang. I had lost people, so I never let the phone ring at night. Although Uncle William was in good health, I still worried about his heart, that fantastic Brigg ticker, which unfortunately had a history of blowing up without warning. But it wasn’t anything connected to Uncle William.
“Rupert,” said the voice, “I am waking you up. But you have also woken me up a few times, yes?”
It was Nikos. “My God,” I said. “How are you?”
“I have been late to tell you that I am sorry because of Olivia,” he said. His English had stiffened up over the last few months.
“Don’t feel bad, Nikos,” I said. “She’s still dead.”
“Yes,” said Nikos. We were quiet for a moment. “I have to tell you that I am getting married.”
“Really? Really? Well, congratulations,” I said. “That’s amazing.”
“Why is it amazing? You know I have a fiancée.”
We talked for a while about Kostas, Neftali’s visit, the date of the wedding, and Amanda, whom he hadn’t forgotten. I asked him if he’d given Tomas any kind of help, and that’s where the rot about Amanda was evident. “There are words for him in Greek,” said Nikos, laughing softly, “and I’m sure in English, but I don’t know them.”
I had an idea. “Nikos, why don’t I come for a last hurrah, before you get married? We can travel a bit. Do a few islands.”
There was silence, and I was worried I’d offended him.
“I’m not trying to avoid your wedding. I just thought—”
“Shut up, Rupert,” he said. He’d been planning in his head. “That will be fantastic.”
I wanted Nikos to join us in Vermont, but a visit was out of the question. He was hard at work. Nikos was quite an adult over the phone. He was calling from the office, and when he interrupted our conversation to yell at someone who had clearly angered him, he sounded exactly like Kostas.
“End of May,” said Nikos. “We go for a week, then you can be in Athens for a week, meet my fiancée, see your friend Steve Kelly.”
We hung up. I gazed out the window, where the first gray light of morning was coldly projected across the fields. No one stirred there, nothing, but then I saw a fox, trotting at a quick pace. He stopped, turned, and I think he might have looked straight at me. He continued on with a great sense of purpose, but I doubted he knew where he was going.
Nathan called me at about 9 A.M. to say that he and Neftali were going to hit the road, which meant, if they stopped for lunch, they would arrive sometime in the late afternoon. Clive was riding with Amanda, and who knew when they would show up? The woman from the village arrived at around ten and began cleaning. There were four bedrooms upstairs, and I wasn’t quite sure who should stay where. Two rooms had double beds, and two rooms had twins. I had the woman make up all the beds and was in the process of raiding the barn for some large serving dishes when I saw Veronica walking purposefully up the hill.
We hadn’t spoken since her father’s visit, but she had made her presence known. Once, in the middle of the night, I’d woken up to hear a car revving and guttering on my lawn and some drunken laughter. I’d looked out the window to see Veronica and some towheaded thug standing at a distance. The thug had his arm around her and they were drinking from a bottle. I felt a bit responsible. I had a sneaking suspicion that before her involvement with me, Veronica might not have been cruising around with drunken thugs, that my “liberating” of Veronica might have left her with no sense of right and wrong. Not that I believed in right and wrong. But seeing Veronica there, sticky-faced in her poorly fitting pencil skirt, I felt that having removed her bourgeois prudishness, I should have at least left her with a sense of the advantageous and the appalling, a knowledge of bella figura. The boy she was with was wearing a leather jacket, poorly fitting, that was probably purchased at a pawnshop. I was just about to return to bed when he turned his back and dropped his pants, his white buttocks glowing in the moonlight.
After this episode, there was a cow-time ringing of the phone, but I now felt completely vindicated. Veronica owed me an apology. If I didn’t let her deliver it, she would continue to owe it, and that seemed advantageous.
But here she was walking up the hill and, even though I wanted to run into the barn and lock the door, I knew I was going to have to speak to her.
“Hello, Veronica,” I said, when she was closer. “Does your father know you’re here?”
“I may not be as old as you,” she said, “but I sure as hell don’t have to listen to him anymore.”
We stared at each other. “I have to get some things out of the barn,” I said.
She followed me in. Veronica usually talked and talked, but now she had adopted an almost predatory silence. I found a platter and flipped it over to see if it was worth anything. Veronica’s eyes narrowed and she threw up her chin.
“I saw you watching us the other night,” she said.
“I had to look,” I said. “I thought someone might be lynching me. Your boyfriend is quite a free spirit.”
“He’s not my boyfriend,” she said. “He’s really young. I like my men older.” She came over and wrapped her arms around me, pinning my arms to my sides. I was holding a platter, heavy and valuable provided I didn’t drop it. I looked down at Veronica’s yellow hair. Her head came up to my breastbone. “Come on, Rupert. It’s not like we haven’t done it before.”
I was not prepared for this. Something in her voice frightened me.
“What we had was good,” I said. “Now it’s over.”
She let go of me and stepped back. “Why?” she asked. She pondered this and then smiled. “Is it for my own good?” Her voice was childish and thick with accent, which had the surprising effect of making her sound witty.
“Maybe.”
“Or maybe it’s for your own good, because who knows what my redneck father is capable of?”
“It just doesn’t seem like a good idea anymore,” I said.
“You liked me when I didn’t know anything,” she said.
“That’s not true,” I said.
For a moment I thought she might cry.
“You’re a beautiful girl, Veronica,” I said. “You’re going to make someone a wonderful wife.”
Veronica was by the doors. She held my gaze in a way she never had and said, “Who wants to be someone’s wife?”
Nathan and Neftali arrived at five. We went for a walk, avoiding the neighboring dairy, even though Neftali wanted to see it. I showed them my barn. Nathan volunteered to take my new canvases back to New York and drop them off at the restorers, and I was carryin
g them up the hill when Amanda and Clive arrived. It was about 60 degrees, but they were riding in a convertible with the top down. The car was baby blue, very flashy, and I knew it had to be Kiplinger’s. There was a lot of ooing and ahing about my house, about how thin I had become—I only knew how to cook steak, so I’d been living on steak and cheese—about how wonderful it was to get together. Neftali started to cry about Olivia at one point, and everyone joined in, and then I decided that we needed to start drinking vigorously as soon as possible.
We had roast lamb for dinner, plain but very fresh. I wondered if the lamb had come from close by, then thought about lambs, then forced the thought from my mind. I was supposed to drive the woman back to the village after she did the dinner dishes, but I was too drunk so Nathan took her. I was thinking clearly, but I couldn’t walk straight; it was all the red wine. There was a piano in the living room and Clive, to my surprise, started playing it. We sang some show tunes, but Clive didn’t know that many. He did, however, know every Christmas carol, religious and secular, so we sang our way through those. The fire was merry in the grate and the wine would not run out. After the Christmas carols, we sang “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” and “Jerusalem.” I was the only one who knew all the words to “Jerusalem.” I finished loudly, and punctuated this by draining my glass and slamming it on the piano. The others were respectfully awed.
Later that evening, I found myself holding Amanda’s hand.
Nathan asked, “Are you still seeing the Bavarian milkmaid?”
And I told him that I wasn’t.
Amanda was wearing knee-high boots and a short skirt. I found myself studying her legs and then pulling to consciousness. I looked over at Clive, thinking he would be passing some sort of judgment, but he had a drunken, sloppy look to him. I also realized that Nathan and Neftali were no longer there. Amanda and Clive were gossiping about some New York person I didn’t know, and she was laughing with those big clean teeth. I had decided that I had to sleep with her because I had to sleep with someone and she was the obvious choice. The wine must have lost its hold a little. It was now 2 A.M. and I had been drinking steadily since six, but it was possible that I had forgotten to keep drinking or had lost the energy to refill my glass. I was going to get more wine, but those words from Macbeth flashed across my mind, “It provokes the desire but weakens the performance,” so I remained in my seat. Clive saw my hand on Amanda’s thigh and wisely chose to go to bed.
Forgery Page 24