The eldest rose, and with her help the younger woman got to her feet. As they left the creek, the women changed. Silver-green hair turned gold, then brown; white limbs darkened, kissed by sun, red blood beating under the skin. One wore a white dress. The other’s was red; then she changed her mind and was dressed in jeans. They crossed the road and followed the trail that led them through the dry wash bed, the youngest limping as she walked.
The lights went on in the old Foxxe house. Johnny Foxxe’s sisters had come home.
❋ Davis Cooper ❋
Redwater Road
Tucson, Arizona
The Riddley Wallace Gallery
New York City
August 18, 1948
Dear Riddley,
I can assure you that you are wrong—Anna has not found another gallery. When we send the paintings out they will go only to you and to Veirdas in Mexico City, as always. But I must tell you that it is difficult, right now, for me to persuade her to part with them. The new work is quite … personal; and as such, it seems to be difficult for Anna to let the pictures go. After we sent the last crate off, I found her in the studio sobbing. Be patient, old boy. Artists are a sensitive breed and Anna, as you know, is strong-willed as well. She is in a highly nervous state now, and I don’t want to push her too far.
The review you sent was interesting in many respects—who is this Richard St. Johns? We don’t recognize the name. His ideas on the nature of the Surrealist movement are like a fresh wind in a room grown stale, but when it comes to Anna’s work that gust of wind turns to mere hot air. The man is so busy explicating his theories that he has forgotten to look at the paintings.
I know for a fact that Anna has never seen those pieces by Max Ernst; she has never attempted to copy his style; she has never been romantically involved with the man, as Mr. St. Johns implies. (Leonora Carrington was a more formative influence and a better painter besides.) St. Johns disassembles Anna’s paintings like so many jigsaw puzzle pieces—but this new work is not a game or intellectual exercise to its maker, I can assure you. Anna left Theories and Surrealist Manifestos behind in Mexico City. The work has changed. She is painting this land. She is obsessed with it. She is rooted in Arizona now as deeply, as firmly as any tenacious desert tree drawing sustenance from the hard, dry soil. When she told you her muse walks in these hills, she spoke the truth, more than you can know. She will not leave. She will not come east for the next show opening either. You must be content with the paintings, old boy. I’ll see that she sends them. Be patient.
Yours as ever,
Davis Cooper
Chapter Five ❋
Stone, not skin, a face of ivory tattooed
by time, by paint, the
horns rising above his brow, the
steam rising with every step.
—The Wood Wife, Davis Cooper
Maggie turned the stereo up loud to cover the banging on the roof. The music of Josquin des Pres filled the house with the sound of medieval instruments. Nigel used to say Josquin’s music made him believe in the existence of angels. This was an early Estampie recording, and it was still one of her favorites.
She hummed along with harp and viol as she divided stacks of Davis’s papers into Letters, Memos, Bills, Lists, Notes/Poems/Old, Notes/Poems/New. Stacks that had simply grown larger and no less overwhelming over the last two weeks. She paused, holding a phone bill in her hand dated March 1981. This music took her back as many years, when Estampie was still a loose group of musicians moonlighting from their more profitable gigs, gathering to practice in the kitchen of her Amsterdam flat.
She put down the papers suddenly, wondering what on earth she was doing here, on this mountain, in this dry, hard land? She wanted to be sitting in that little cafe at the corner of their old street, with a cup of strong coffee and a glass of cognac, canal boats bobbing gently in the water, tall punked-out Dutch students passing by, and Nigel across the table enthusing about some early-music instrument maker he’d just found.
The phone rang, interrupting these thoughts. Nigel always knew when she was thinking of him. She picked up the receiver and said “Good morning Nigel,” and he didn’t seem startled by the greeting. “How’s New York?”
“I don’t know. I’m in a hotel room,” he said. “All right, don’t be mad, but I just happened to be talking to Jennifer at HarperCollins this morning, and so I mentioned what you were up to. She’s interested, babe. We’re talking six figures here. They’re into biography now in New York, and she thinks a book on Davis Cooper could really sell. It’s the mystery of it, Cooper’s death, and that old business with Naverra.”
“Nigel, slow down,” Maggie interrupted, feeling swept away by his strong current again. “And don’t call me babe. It’s Nicole who’s babe. Call me that again and I’ll break your face.”
He sighed. “You’re mad.”
“Damn straight, I am. I asked you not to talk to Jennifer.”
“You’ve got to strike while the fire is hot, Mags. You know New York. They might not be into biography six months from now.”
“That’s iron, Nigel.”
“What?”
“Strike while the iron’s hot. Never mind. I don’t know why we’re having this conversation. I’m not ready to talk to a publisher.”
“Oh.” Nigel paused. “Well, I’m afraid Jennifer’s going to call you today. No, no, don’t hang up on me, Puck. Look, I’m trying to help.”
“I know, Nigel,” she said, exasperated, tossing her sweet vision of Amsterdam cafes right out the kitchen window. She’d been forgetting the reality of life with Nigel. After enthusing about the instrument maker he would have proceeded to convince her she needed to give him a thousand bucks to buy a crumhorn or something. And then dashed off to meet his latest lover.
“Look,” she said, “I know you mean well, but I’m still finding my feet here. And I’d like to do it without interference.” For once in my life, she added silently. “So why don’t you call Jennifer back and tell her I’ll call when I’m ready.”
“All right,” he said in that contrite voice that always won her back again. “So how is it going? It must be strange living in a dead man’s house.”
“You know how it’s going. You’ve called every day since I got here—nothing’s changed. Though I’ll tell you, it’s interesting. Davis Cooper’s life is like a jigsaw puzzle that you know probably has a fabulous picture on it—only too many of the pieces are missing. I’m just hoping if I keep at this long enough, I’ll be able to fit together the pieces that are left.”
“How long is long enough?” he said. “You’ve been away, what, two weeks now? How long are you going to be on that mountain?”
“I’ve no idea. But Nige, I meant it. I’m not coming back to L.A. You’ve got a life with Nicole now.”
There was silence on the other end. Then he said, “Damn. You are mad. You never bring Nicole into it unless you’re really pissed off at me.”
“Oh, no worse than usual,” she said with a smile. “So cheer up. You’ve got a concert to do.”
It was half an hour later by the time she got off the phone with her ex-husband. The banging overhead had stopped, and Fox was sitting on her porch.
She stood in the doorway. “Do you always make it a habit to listen to phone conversations?”
He shrugged. “I can hear you just as well from the roof. What do you want me to do, go home whenever the phone rings? Or just pretend that I can’t hear?”
She stepped onto the porch and sat beside him on the steps. “Sorry, it’s my husband I’m irritated with. I shouldn’t take it out on you.”
“Husband?”
“Ex-husband I mean.”
“Not so very ex from the sound of it.”
“Not so ex as I’d like. No, I don’t mean that. Nigel’s a good pal. He just wants to run everybody else’s life except his own. And that he hires managers for.”
“What is he, some kind of bigshot then?”
“Hm
mm. Nigel Vanderlin. He’s—”
“Estampie.”
“That’s the one.” Maggie squinted at the sun slanting through the cottonwoods. “Look,” she said, “there he is.”
The skinny coyote trotted up the wash. It stopped to stare at them rakishly, then it leapt the other bank.
Fox said, “John and Lillian lost Cody, did you hear? Not long after we saw her. She got out of the pen, and she hasn’t come back. I reckon she will—their ranch is her turf and she can’t get far on that leg. But we should keep an eye out for her. I don’t want that poacher turning up and finishing off the job.”
Maggie nodded, thinking about Cody and wondering how long she would last in the wild. She was glad that this one had managed to survive, despite the loss of his eye. She watched until he disappeared in the brush on the other side of the wash. “Look, he’s going in the direction of your mother’s old house,” she said.
“He’s going to check out who’s in there. My sisters are here. Angela and Isabella. They turned up again last night.”
“Turned up? You weren’t expecting them, then.”
He shrugged. “I never know when they’ll be back. That’s just the way they are. They’re dancers, with a flamenco troupe, and they spend most of their time on the road. Which is just as well, as that house isn’t really fit for habitation. One of these days Mama’s going to have to let me fix it up.”
“Your sisters are flamenco dancers?”
“That’s right. With a small local troupe. Believe me, you never heard of it. It’s not the big league, like your ex-husband. Or you, for that matter. Or Cooper. None of us kids ever really wanted fame. Which Cooper never understood.”
Maggie looked at him curiously. “Well, fame or no fame, I have to say it’s a surprising crew you’ve got here in the canyon. Dancers. Artists. Wildlife experts. My ex assured me Tucson would be boring.”
Fox leaned back against a porch post, shading himself from the midday sun. “In a place this remote, you’re not going to find your average nine-to-five commuter types, are you? Dora is the only one who has to commute downtown to a job.”
“How long have she and Juan lived here?”
He scratched his chin, thinking. “A couple of years now. Cooper met Dora down at the gallery. Have you been to Book Arts yet? They carry small press poetry editions, so it was one of the old man’s favorite haunts. Cooper really hit it off with Dora, and who wouldn’t when she’s such a sweetheart? She and Juan lived in the Barrio then, and Dora was homesick for the East Coast. She liked the mountain though; maybe because she’d lived in mountains back in Vermont. So Cooper decided he’d sell them the stable. It was just a ruin before.”
“What about Tomás? What’s his story?” Maggie asked him then, with feigned casualness. She’d had another of those dreams last night. She couldn’t quite stop thinking of the man. Fox grinned at her, and she added, “I know. I’m sounding like a journalist again.”
“Tomás,” said Fox. “Well, Cooper met him some years ago at an AA meeting. Did you know Cooper tried to stop drinking for a while? Tomás stayed clean and Cooper went back to the bottle, but they stayed friends all the same—and then Tomás moved into the upper cabin. The cabins were empty when I was growing up. I don’t think Cooper ever used them before.”
“According to his letters, he and Anna used to put their houseguests in the cabins. A lot of their European friends came to visit when they first moved here from Mexico City. All kinds of people have been in those cabins: Anaïs Nin, Dalí, Pablo Casals…”
Fox squinted against the sunlight as he turned his head to look at her. “Houseguests? Cooper? I thought they’d always been reclusive-—Cooper and Anna both.”
Maggie shook her head. “Not at first. Cooper was a real gregarious guy in his youth, a dashing-young-man-about-town type. It was Anna who started turning their friends away after a couple of years in Arizona.”
“When she went crazy,” Fox said flatly, looking away again in the direction of the wash. The skinny coyote was back now, tracking something in the sandy soil.
Maggie asked, “Is that what Cooper told you?”
Fox frowned. “Cooper didn’t talk about Anna. Not to us kids. But that’s the impression I got from things other people said, that she went crazy, right? And then they had to lock her up.”
Maggie shifted uncomfortably on the wooden step. “I don’t know if she was crazy exactly. She had some kind of nervous breakdown, certainly. At which point her parents stepped in, and took her back to Mexico. She wasn’t locked up though. She went to a convent—not taking the veil or anything, but living there in retreat from the world. She died a year later—officially of pneumonia, but there has always been speculation that she killed herself.” Maggie looked at Fox curiously. “You haven’t heard any of this before?”
“The way I heard it, she got very depressed, and then she committed suicide. No one ever really said why. Did Cooper tell you this, or are you finding it in his papers?”
“Neither. I did a profile of Maisie Tippetts years ago for Harper’s. She’d been part of that circle of Europeans who fled to Mexico during World War II. Maisie had met Cooper in a detention camp in France—you didn’t know about that either? That he’d been held by the Nazis?”
Fox shook his head emphatically. “No. In fact, he told me his asthma problems kept him out of the war.”
“Well it kept him out of the army at any rate, but he was living in Paris when the Germans came. Hitler was going after the Surrealists, and Cooper was very tight with that crowd. Maisie and Cooper were fortunate—an organization called the Emergency Rescue Committee got them and a number of other artists out of the camps and then out of the country, just in time. Some of their friends weren’t so lucky, and didn’t survive.
“Talking to Maisie was when I first had the idea of writing a biography of Cooper,” Maggie told Fox. “She and Cooper had stayed friends after the war, and she’d also been very close to Anna. She told me about Anna’s breakdown. I don’t know what precipitated it, and I never had the nerve to ask Cooper about it. But there’s nothing I’m finding now that contradicts the basic facts of what Maisie told me.”
Fox groaned and put his head in his hands. In the wash, the coyote pounced suddenly, and then sprang backwards into the air. He held a small rodent in his mouth, which he devoured in one great gulp.
“Are you all right?”
“Ummm,” Fox said. “It’s just my head is reeling. You think you know someone, and then you turn around one day and everything you thought you knew is wrong. Or not wrong, exactly, but it’s all got this color on it, blue, instead of yellow or pink. And so it all looks completely different.”
“That’s how I felt driving up this mountain,” she said, commiserating. He raised his head and looked at her. “Well, I’ve studied Davis Cooper as an English, poet. Born and raised in the West Country. So when I read his poems, I see English woods, I see the moor, and hedgerows, and walls of stone. And then I drive up here,” she waved her hand at the dry land around them, “and I realize that these are the woods that he’s been talking about all along. These hills. This sky. Now I’m reading a whole different set of poems when I look at Cooper’s work.” She frowned and sighed heavily. “The other ones, the ones I thought I knew, were just in my head.”
“That bothers you, does it?” He narrowed his eyes. “I don’t get it. What does it matter whose head those images came from? ‘Poetry is a conversation not a monologue,’ ” Fox quoted Cooper in a passable English accent. “A writer can only put the words on paper; the vision has to come from the reader, right? It’s language, not paint, not film. That’s the beauty of it to me. Why do your woods, or your Wood Wife, have to look precisely the same as Cooper’s?”
“Well, in terms of Miller’s work on Cooper—”
“We’re not talking literary critique here. We’re talking about poems, words on a page,” Fox said, tapping his knee, “and what those words turn into when they slip inside
your brain.” He tapped his head. “It’s magic; and magic disappears if you try too hard to pin it down.”
“I can’t leave it at that,” Maggie said. “I want to know what Davis was seeing when he wrote those lines—not just what I see when I read them. I want to truly understand the poems.”
“Ah,” he said, stretching his long legs in front of him, “then you have to go to the land of poetry.”
“Goethe,” she said.
“That’s right. I told you my sisters and I grew up on a steady diet of Cooper’s poetry books. Christ, by the time I was ten I could recite Goethe and Wordsworth word for word, yet barely add or subtract. Look, Cooper’s land of poetry was a place in his head, all mixed up of England, France, Mexico, Arizona—it was all part of him, and all part of the poems. I don’t think he ever separated it: In this poem I’m talking about the English woods, in this poem I’m talking about the Rincons. It was like it was all one land for him. In a way he never left England. You’d think, listening to him sometimes, he could walk out his door and be there.”
“That’s what I can’t get my head around. That he could love that and he could love this and the two are so very different. The new poems, the fragments I’ve found so far, are even more confusing. Time and distance is all broken up, the past and the future all jumbled together.”
“Time is a spiral.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know.” He smiled. “I’m just repeating something Cooper used to tell me.”
“ ‘Time is not a river; it flows in two directions,’ ” she recited, from one of the Wood Wife poems. Maggie frowned, trying to remember it. “ ‘Time is the land I wander in, through smoke, through sage. A land carved in stone…’ ” She squinted at the distant peaks. She couldn’t remember how the rest of it went. Then she looked at Fox closely. She said, “There was a critic, back in the fifties, who wrote an essay insisting that all of Cooper’s surrealistic metaphors were actually literal descriptions of the hallucinations of a drunk. You said you thought Cooper was crazy yourself. Did you ever think that … well, that the ‘land of poetry’ was a real place to him? That maybe what he was doing was writing about things he’d seen—or thought he’d seen?”
The Wood Wife Page 11
