Five Questions

by Kitty B. Florey

There were perhaps a dozen pieces. Metal on metal. Massive bars of cold rolled steel had been bent, twisted, wrenched into tortured shapes, then welded to sheets of beaten and burnished copper. Most of the works were huge, heavy, earthbound, but somehow delicate too, with spaces where the light could filter through. Even in my dark glasses, I could see that they were also very sensual, with surfaces I longed to touch.

  I paused in front of a piece called Copper on Steel III and studied it. If I could afford to buy one of these works, this would be it. The steel was sinuous and alive against the copper, which was cut into rough shapes that shimmered with the marks of a hundred hammer blows. The metal was hard, unyielding, inorganic stuff, but the piece managed to evoke natural forms: giant leaves, fungi, some mysterious, fugitive animal. Every minute decision that had gone into it showed me Patrick’s hand and his unerring eye. I could imagine him in his goggles, see the sparks from his torch. I could hear the familiar clang of his hammer. I remembered the quote from Tolstoy tacked to the wall back in our Boston days: An artist’s mission must not be to produce a solution to a problem, but to compel us to love life in all its countless and inexhaustible manifestations.

  I suddenly wanted this piece of sculpture more than anything in the world. I had an absurd image of movers trying to maneuver it up the stairs and through the door of my apartment. I began calculating in my head whether I could possibly afford to buy it before I realized with a shock that it wasn’t the sculpture I wanted; it was Patrick. Surrounded by his work, I knew I was crazy to think I would ever get over him. I never would stop wanting him, regretting everything, wishing for the impossible.

  I had to get out of there. I finished my champagne, and turned away from Copper on Steel III, and that was when I saw him.

  He had been in the back office, the room where deals are made, and he emerged with Henry Taggart and an elderly couple. Henry clapped him on the back and said something that made them all laugh.

  My heart stopped and then, rapidly, started up again, raced, knocked hard against my chest. I could hear my pulse in my ears, and I thought I might faint. He was wearing a dark green linen shirt and a gray silk tie. He looked handsome and confident—not awkward and mumbling as he had on television. It was obvious that his new work was being well received, that he had already sold several pieces. I wondered where his wife was. Maybe they’d divorced. But then there would be a girlfriend—wouldn’t there? Of course there was a girlfriend, a lover, maybe many lovers. One of the chic and beautiful women in the room was his, surely. . . .

  I could only think about getting out of there unseen, and yet I couldn’t move. I looked at Patrick, how pleased he seemed, how happy. If he saw me, his face would change: I would see there all the revulsion and resentment that had been simmering for eighteen years. Eighteen years and eleven months. Eighteen years and eleven months and two days. I closed my eyes, opened them again. He was staring at me.

  I stared back. There was nothing else I could do: It was Patrick. A long moment passed. I don’t know what happened to Henry Taggart or to the wealthy art patrons or to the waiter who had been about to pass with a tray of caviar on toast. I saw only Patrick. And after who knows how many seconds had passed, I reached up, as if in a dream, and removed my sunglasses.

  Immediately, incredibly, he smiled. His face lit up. He made his way to my side. He stood near me. He said, “Wynn. It’s you.”

  I touched his arm, the linen sleeve of his shirt. My sunglasses fell to the floor. We embraced. It’s hard to describe this moment. Even now, my eyes blur with tears, remembering it. His arms tight around me, the slight roughness of his cheek against my forehead, the scent of his skin—the years were eclipsed. It was as if I had last seen him that morning.

  He held me; that was all. I said into his shoulder, “Forgive me.” He didn’t answer, he only said my name again, and I realized that he was in tears. I knew people were watching us. This, for sure, was something one noticed: a prominent artist at the opening of a new show, in a prolonged and weepy embrace with some nameless woman.

  We pulled away, finally, and looked at each other. “You came back,” he said.

  “Yes. I came back.”

  There was an awful pause. “Better late than never,” he said, and now I heard bitterness in his voice.

  I didn’t know what to reply. I was desperately conscious of the crowd around us, the need to keep things bland, normal. This was Patrick’s big day: He didn’t need me to mess it up. He just stood looking at me, his face unfathomable, and I finally said something about seeing him on television.

  “Oh God, that awful interview,” he said, recovering. “I’m told I came across like an ape.”

  “I had to see your show.”

  “What do you think?”

  “Your welding has come a long way.”

  That made him laugh. “Is that all?”

  “You know it’s wonderful,” I said. “It’s been a joy just to walk around and look at your work.” I felt tears threaten again. “I’ve missed it.”

  “Jesus, Wynn, it’s so crazy to see you. You’re the last person I expected to walk in that door.”

  Looking into his eyes—that amazing, familiar golden brown, as golden as ever—I gathered my courage. “Patrick,” I said. “I came here to see you, too. To explain. I want to tell you everything.”

  “All right. My God, yes,” he said. “I want to hear it. I want to hear it all.” He laughed. “It’s been—what? So many years. And it seems like a year, or months. You look wonderful.” He touched my neck. “Those beads—”

  Henry Taggart came up to us. “Is that Wynn Tynan?” he said. “Good to see you! It’s been a long time.”

  I shook his hand, and then Suzanne came over and hugged me, and—oh, I don’t know—other people. They came up to us and said things, shook my hand, shook Patrick’s hand. Patrick kept his arm around me; he was obviously distracted, preoccupied. Finally he said, “Look, Henry, Wynn and I have to get out of here, we have to talk,” and Henry exploded, he said, “Are you out of your mind? The Lambertis just came in, and the Van Arsdales! They want to see you, Patrick. Please. Whatever it is, put it on hold for a while. Here’s Elaine now. Come on over here with me. And hug her, for Christ’s sake.”

  Patrick looked at me. We smiled at each other. He fished a handkerchief out of his pocket and gently dabbed at my eyes. He blew his nose with a loud honk. Then he took me around the room with him, and hugged Elaine Van Arsdale and shook hands with her husband, Gaylord. He introduced me, but I remembered them: They were the Brookline doctors who had started buying his work when we were still in art school. He walked them around the room and talked to them about the sculptures. Then he did the same thing with the Lambertis, a young, chic, wealthy, and jet-lagged couple who had flown in from Rome and who spoke little English but who loved his work, were enchanted by Copper on Steel III, and arranged to buy it on the spot. I took a look at the price list: The sum was staggering.

  Patrick did his duty. He worked the room, introducing me as his old friend Wynn Tynan, the painter. People looked blank, said Oh yes, smiled politely. The Van Arsdales said the name sounded familiar. The Lambertis couldn’t care less who I was. They wanted Patrick. They wanted to talk to him, look into his face, stroke his sleeve. “We want this one for the giardino, Patrick. For the rose garden. Against the stone wall.” Patrick said that sounded molto bene, the work was designed to be displayed—come se dice “outside”? Fuori?—and the Lambertis nodded and laughed and hugged him again. The Van Arsdales had already claimed another copper-and-steel piece. And an English actor I recognized who collected Patrick’s work wanted another, one of the huge ones. The Guggenheim had bought something, and a committee from the Spoleto Festival was in town to talk about a commission. Henry rubbed his hands together gleefully and made jokes and kept slapping Patrick on the back. I couldn’t wait to get Patrick to myself, but, incredibly, I was having a great deal of fun. Everyone was. It was a circus, and Patrick was the ringmaster, and t
he air was thick with money and champagne and affection and success and, best of all, a real appreciation for Patrick’s art. The Lambertis stood in front of their acquisition talking rapidly to each other in Italian, unable to stop smiling. The Van Arsdales were serious and awestruck. And finally, after another hour or so, Patrick and I were released.

  Henry embraced us both. “It’s wonderful, wonderful,” he said, his voice choked, as if he knew all about us. But of course it was the opening he was talking about. Eight of the dozen sculptures had already sold. The money involved fascinated me. I couldn’t help calculating Henry’s commission; even considering his lifestyle, it was a tidy sum. And the show would be there for a month. It was a given that everything would find a buyer.

  Patrick and I went to a crowded bar around the corner on Prince Street. As we walked, I could feel his ebullience fading; he didn’t speak, and seemed tired. He gave the headwaiter a twenty to let us have a quiet booth near the back. We sat opposite each other, just looking. He glanced at the wine list and ordered champagne. Then neither of us was able to say a word. The waiter flourished the label, popped the cork, poured, stuck the bottle into a bucket of ice and disappeared.

  Finally, Patrick spoke. “It wrecked me, Wynn, when you left,” he said. “I have to be honest. I hated you.”

  He hated me. I sat immobile, looking down into the beige bubbles in my glass, thinking of Kathleen in her witch costume, looking in the mirror and wishing me dead. “Of course,” I managed to whisper. Then I didn’t trust my voice.

  “I’d gotten out of the habit of unhappiness, thanks to you,” he said. “I didn’t deal with it well. I hated you for a long time.” He paused. “And then I stopped.” I looked up at him. He shook his head. “Don’t say anything yet. Let me tell you. I’ve wanted to tell you this for years.”

  He said that after I left he virtually stopped working. He began sleeping ten, twelve hours a night, and when he woke up he drank. He became reclusive, bad tempered, a trial to his friends. He nearly lost his welding job because he showed up half-drunk one day and didn’t show up at all the next. One night when he was drinking he went through the loft searching out everything that suggested I had ever lived there—a book I’d left behind, a few sketches, a barrette he found in the bathroom, a pair of tights, an old T-shirt—and burned them all in the bathtub. It was a miracle he didn’t set the whole place on fire, he said. Another time he picked up a woman in a bar who looked something like me, brought her back to his place, and instead of making love to her, he got blind drunk and hit her; she hit him back before she walked out—slapped him, hard, across the face, cutting his lip with her ring—and he ended up sobbing and retching and bleeding into the toilet. He started doing a little cocaine, then a lot, and he thought about heroin.

  As he talked, he became increasingly agitated, and I could see how painful it was for him to recall those horrors. I said, “Patrick, I—” and he slammed his palm down suddenly on the table, spilling champagne. “Let me finish, God damn it!” The people in the next booth turned to look at us. Patrick leaned back against the booth, his eyes squeezed shut, rubbing his forehead with his hand. I sat there frozen, thinking of Uncle Austin. After a moment, he said, “I’m sorry.”

  “So am I,” I whispered.

  He paused again, then took a sip of champagne and went on. He said he’d begun walking over the Williamsburg Bridge to Brooklyn at night when the bars closed; he’d wander the dark streets by the river, then walk back. He knew the bridge was dangerous, and he didn’t care: Let them kill me, he thought, but no one ever bothered him. Sometimes he would stare down into the black water, wondering why he didn’t just leap into it, telling himself that next time he would. Or he would buy a gun and blow his head off.

  “I was amazed at how badly I coped. I wasn’t the type.” His smile was grim, inward. “You know me. Single-minded workaholic seething with ambition. I didn’t know I had that other guy in me, that crazed depresso unhinged by grief.”

  He didn’t speak for a moment. He glanced over at the bar where a small, jolly crowd let out a cheer at something happening on TV, and I scrutinized his face: the new furrows in his cheeks, the wrinkles fanning out around his eyes, the threads of gray in his black hair. Yes, he had been marked by the years and what they’d done to him. He turned back to me, and his luminous eyes were suddenly tired, as if what he’d been forced to remember had worn him out. “Or maybe I did,” he said. “Maybe that was the guy I was always afraid of. Do you remember how I used to talk about not trusting happiness? Maybe it’s because I suspected what I was capable of and I didn’t want to find out.”

  I tried to imagine Patrick snorting cocaine, drinking himself nearly to death, thinking about blowing his brains out. It was difficult. In his way, he had been as focused and controlled as my mother; as far as I could recall, he had never even smoked a joint. At most, he might have a couple of beers. I had always been aware that the abandoned boy Uncle Austin had told me about still lived somewhere inside him. He had this little bicycle, and he would ride it into the road. . . . Now I knew just how near the surface that child was.

  “How did it end?” I asked him, as I’d asked his uncle.

  “Art saved me.” He smiled again, faintly. “In the fall, I sold one of my sculptures, and the guy who bought it—our landlord, remember him? Tom Wiest?—he commissioned another one, for the garden of his country place. I couldn’t let him down, he’d always been good to me. He had three or four of my smaller things. But now he wanted a big one—a really major piece. And so I began to work again.”

  He finished the sculpture on time, the first of his pieces inspired by natural forms, he said. Wiest paid him a lot of money for it. And in the late winter, Patrick took off for Mexico, traveling on foot and by bus through the dusty towns in the central plateau where he and I had gone so many years before on our way to Querétaro. Cortazar, Dolores Hidalgo, San Luis de la Paz, Río Verde: Hearing his voice pronounce the names of those places, it all came back to me, the lost golden days when we were young—and my last visit to Mexico, where I sat in a courtyard and knew I had to leave Alec.

  “It was like a reverse pilgrimage, Wynn. I was trying to exorcise you.” He brought almost nothing with him, he said—only a sketch pad and some clothes. He still spoke virtually no Spanish, though by the time he left he had picked up a good deal of it. He quit drinking cold turkey, and he didn’t do any drugs. He walked until he was exhausted. He sat in the sun. He was completely alone there for two months, and during that time, he said, he came to terms with my leaving, and with his feelings for me.

  He was unable to say exactly how this happened, only that the experience of isolation in Mexico was profound. He had never lived so intensely inside his own head, and it had made him see things he hadn’t seen before. He was sure I had been going through a kind of hell that last week before I left, but he had no idea what it was, and he knew I wouldn’t tell him until I was ready. He had never suspected that I wouldn’t tell him at all.

  He said that the words of my note had imprinted themselves on his brain: I’m leaving you because I have to. Please don’t ask me why. The rhythm of those words became part of his consciousness, he said. It was with him before he fell asleep each night, it entered his dreams, it was there waiting when he woke. And gradually he began to grasp the reality of what I had said. I’m leaving you because I have to. He couldn’t comprehend the statement, but he could sense the desperation behind it.

  “I knew that what I had to do was get you out of my mind,” he said. “So I could keep working. There were two things in this world that really mattered to me, Wynn. My sculpture, and you. One was taken from me, so I dedicated myself to the other one. But it took me a while to stop expecting you to come back to me and explain. For a long time I had little fantasies about the doorbell ringing, you being there. And I thought about trying to look you up—I almost called your father one night when I was drinking, I even dialed his number, and then I couldn’t do it. I hung up the
phone. Don’t track me down, was what you’d really meant in that note. And so I didn’t. I couldn’t. You didn’t want me. I didn’t know why, I didn’t know what was going on, but—I wasn’t going to beg you.” A shadow passed over his face. “I was drunk. When I was sober, I knew it couldn’t be as simple as that. But I just didn’t know what to do. So in the end I didn’t do anything.”

  We sat in silence for a minute. I took a sip of champagne. I was afraid to speak. Finally, he sighed and went on. “I was married for a while,” he said. “Not even two years. It was a whim. I realized one day I was lonely and I was sick of it, and so I married an art dealer, someone I met at an opening. A very nice woman. She deserved better. She’s married to someone else now—not an artist. But we parted friends—sort of.” He shrugged. “It was a long time ago.”

  I wanted to tell him that I knew about his marriage, but he said, “Wait. I’m almost done. I want to say one more thing, Wynn, and I’m not sure how to. The odd thing was that even when I finally got it into my head that I would never see you again, even when I got married to Sonia, I knew—well, I don’t know what I knew.” He frowned. “It’s hard to put into words, and if I had told this to anyone they would have said I was a fool, but in some weird kind of way I trusted you. I trusted what had been between us. Somewhere at the back of my mind. Something wouldn’t let you go. I think I always knew you would come back and tell me what happened.” He looked at me again. A hesitant smile spread across his face, slowly, narrowing his eyes, deepening the lines around his mouth. “And here you are. Jesus, Wynn. Here you are.”

  It was as if something broke inside me, something that had been held taut all these years. I had always assumed Patrick hated me—that, like Uncle Austin, he would never forgive me. That was, in a way, what I wanted—what I deserved. And yet, of course, I hadn’t tried to make him hate me, I could never have written I don’t love you any more on my note. Instead, I had written the truth. Still, I had never expected him to keep on caring for me, to trust me. It was like the day Mark told me Kathleen was alive: It was exactly like that. History was revised, darkness was made light, the world was turned right-side up again. Something that had been left on a mountaintop to die had come back to life.