Striking Back

by Mark Nykanen

  And the next two hours proved her right. By the time she rode her last wave all the way to shore, she’d been tubed six times and eaten only once. Probably picked up a big bruise on her left thigh from that one, but it was worth it. Totally.

  She squeezed out her hair and wiped her face as Hark—he hadn’t objected and she suspected she wasn’t the first person to give him such an obvious nickname—trudged out of the surf with his own mop falling down over his brow. Cute, she decided. Very cute.

  He pushed it out of his face and said, “Can I interest you in a little brunch?”

  “Sure,” though a glance at her watch told her she’d have to be on the road in an hour if she wanted to shower at home. She’d brought a knapsack with a change of clothes and toiletries in case the surf session ran really late and she was forced to use one of the public showers. “Just let me rinse off over there.”

  The cold steel showers rose totemically from a concrete circle.

  “Bring your stuff over to my place. You can shower there.”

  “But I still want to rinse off before I get in the car.”

  He pointed to an expansive Cape Cod style home with grayed shingles and white trim four houses down the beach, and said “You’re not going to need your car.”

  She remembered the reference to a beach house in that piece in the Times, but had pictured a more humble abode, certainly not a house this substantial. Bigger than Mommsa’s. Forensic psychiatry probably paid well, but this wasn’t a home even those fees could afford. This was investment banking—mergers and acquisitions.

  “Really?” Sounding more impressed than she wanted to let on.

  “Grab your knapsack. Your board, too. I wouldn’t leave it lying around or it’ll get ripped-off.”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t.” At times her Mommsa might act like a fool, but she hadn’t raised one.

  Hark’s house had an inviting, ocean-facing porch. After resting her board on the sand and starting up the stairs, she noticed a white wicker table and chairs to the right of the front door. The seats had tropical print cushions, and as she stepped up on to the landing she saw that the table’s glass top had already been set with papaya colored placemats and cloth napkins that complemented the South Seas motif.

  Not bad for a straight guy’s eye, she thought, and confident, too, that I’d take him up on his offer, a conclusion further reinforced when he carried out a platter of sliced mango, pineapple, and star fruit. He hadn’t whipped that together in the last thirty seconds.

  She helped herself to a bite of the whimsically shaped star fruit as he paused at the door.

  “Are you a coffee or a tea person?” he asked.

  “Right now coffee would be great.”

  “You want to shower while I brew it up?”

  “Love to.”

  “Grab some fruit to tide you over. The bathroom’s the third door on the right once you head down the main hall.” He walked back inside.

  Another quick bite and she followed him into the house.

  What a place. The tall entryway had eucalyptus floors trimmed with six-inch slate along the length of the mahogany baseboards. Thanks to Mommsa, Gwyn knew her woods. Fifteen feet on, the living room rose to a vaulted ceiling, and a glass-faced fireplace nestled in a gray carpeted, sunken sitting area crowded with lots of big colorful silk pillows.

  But the sculpture in the far corner really seized her attention. Non-representational, vertical, at least eight feet tall. She saw right away that it was as much about surface and light as it was about shape and materials, all the elements playing off one another. It contained four prongs, each possessing a distinct and striking angularity. Masculine in this regard, almost post-modern in its self-consciously priapic concerns; but its base was all about curves and smoothness, mass beneath its most forgiven compromise: height.

  He’d collected paintings, too. She passed two of them in the hallway. The first was a watercolor of the ocean, and while tastefully executed it held no excitement for her. But the second made her pause: an impressive oil of a naked woman from behind, her haunches slim and smooth, her dark hair flowing to her shoulder blades.

  A moment after entering the bathroom, Gwyn saw a photograph of the same woman in a black enamel frame festooned with paper leis. How did she know that this face belonged to the woman in the painting, whose only identifiable features were those glimpsed from behind? She recognized her instinctively, as you would a sibling. But what struck her most was that this woman had to be his late wife, the victim of the “tragic accident.” Hark couldn’t have been thoughtless enough to leave a photo of a current squeeze sitting around, right? Could it be his sister? Gwyn didn’t consider that likely, because the woman had dark hair.

  Like Gwyn, she also had green eyes and a straight, even WASPish nose (if you were to be unkind, and with regard to her own appearance, Gwyn sometimes was). The similarities didn’t end there.

  Her lips were full, and they both had teeth as straight and white as any you’d see in a Hollywood still. Her cheekbones were high, and as she studied them, Gwyn’s hands rose to her own in self-conscious recognition. The woman in the photo was a real beauty, a word Gwyn would never have applied to herself, but she could not avoid thinking it as she gazed at the professionally photographed face.

  Finally, she spotted a notable difference. The woman was in her mid-twenties, giving Gwyn more than a decade on her. She moved to the mirror, reminding herself of the demands the sun had made of her skin: the light lines in the corners of her eyes and on her brow.

  Though her resemblance to the woman appeared striking, it wasn’t freakish. More to the point, it offered an explanation for Hark’s attraction to her. She looked like a woman he’d loved and then lost to tragedy.

  As she stepped into the steamy shower, her tummy tightened. It took her a second to realize why. He might have inherited a lot of money when his wife died. Profiting from death always gave Gwyn pause.

  You’re projecting. Don’t go seeing guilt everywhere.

  She soaped and shampooed, and with the steam still rising, another explanation occurred to her. He could have come from money himself. She’d find a way to ask him, she told herself. Intake time. You know how to do an interview.

  Gwyn joined him on the porch where Hark was pouring coffee. She helped herself to a croissant and fruit. “Nice pieces in there. Who did the sculpture?”

  “Nancy Evers.”

  She swallowed quickly. “Ah, that’s who it is.” While the name had bubbled around in her memory, it had never quite percolated up to the clear bulb of her brain.

  “You know about her?” Hark rested the French press.

  “I caught her show at MOCA last year.”

  “An art aficionado?”

  “Aficionada.”

  “I stand corrected.”

  She laughed.

  “Are you an artist as well?” he asked.

  “I dabble.”

  “You do?” Now he sounded genuinely pleased. “Sculpture?”

  “Oh, no. I paint.”

  “So . . . ” he leaned back and paused, as if unsure how to ask, “. . . what kind of subject matter do you paint?”

  “Good question. I guess I’d call it a mix of figurative and abstract art, but I’m not even sure what I do is art. Let me put it this way, nothing’s left my humble little studio yet.”

  “The self-effacing artist. And why is that?”

  “The probing psychiatrist. And why is that?”

  They both laughed this time.

  “Don’t,” she warned with a smile.

  Hark threw up his hands in surrender. “I promise.”

  “So you’re a serious collector?”

  “I think the term’s kind of pretentious, but I guess it applies a little. I particularly like sculpture, but I have limited space for it here . . . ”

  Not so limited.

  “. . . and a limited budget.”

  Not so limited.

  “How’d you get starte
d?”

  “My father was an artist. One of the original hippies. And he moved us over to ‘Swinging London,’” Hark used his fork to make the quote marks, “in the mid-sixties. I was three when we went over, and eleven when we came back to the States. I went through the whole sixties thing over there. The Beatles, Stones, Carnaby Street. Dad dropping LSD and swirling silk scarves around the house. All kinds of famous people were always stopping by. I met a bunch of them. He had a fondness—I guess you could call it that—for models.”

  “Mom must have loved that.”

  He shook his head. “They should have charged admission like every other zoo. But I met some interesting people. Timothy Leary came by. So did Keith Richards and Mick Jagger. George Harrison arrived in a chauffeur-driven Bentley once.”

  “Maybe to see all those models.”

  “My father, too. He was very charismatic and knew how to make a house the place where everyone wanted to hang out and be seen. Musicians, models, mystics, you name it. You look a bit like the young Jane Birkin. Did you know that? She used to come by a lot.”

  Gwyn placed her empty plate aside. “The name rings a bell, but I can’t place her.”

  “It’s a serious compliment, believe me. A model who was huge in the sixties. She’s done films since. Her face was everywhere for a while.”

  “Then she must have looked like the woman in the photograph in the bathroom.”

  His affect flattened so quickly it was as if an air valve had been opened in his face. “Right . . . right. I forgot about that being in there. Yes . . . ” his voice fading too.

  She wanted to ask who the woman was, but he looked devastated. “So your father was an artist?”

  “That’s right,” he rallied, “but he was no Warhol or Jasper Johns. He struggled and never really made it. He’d have a show, drink lots of wine and smoke some hash at the opening, move a few paintings, and then he’d struggle to make a few more bucks . . . ”

  So much for that explanation.

  “. . . Not much of a father, either. Gave me a hit of acid when I was eleven. I could have done without that, thank you.”

  “Sounds a little whacked.”

  “Yeah, a little?” He shook his head. “How about yours?”

  “My father?”

  “Mm-hmmm.”

  “That’s a dissertation. Another time. But it sounds like your father gave you the collecting bug anyway.”

  “He did do that. I’ve got some great pieces upstairs in my bedroom. Want to see them.”

  She burst out laughing. “Don’t you know that artists have been using that line since Lascaux? ‘Hey, come into my cave and check out the stags I just painted.’”

  “It’s not a line, I swear. It just happens to be where I have room for a couple of amazing pieces.”

  “In zee cave I paint zee bulls, too,” she said in a terrible French accent. “Very boooo-teefel.” She almost doubled-over.

  He sat back and stared at her, not nearly as amused as she.

  “I’m sorry,” she said through the last of her laughter, “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. Come on, let’s go take a look.”

  To her great relief he rose and led the way upstairs. Once in his spacious bedroom, it took her a second, then another to fully register what he wanted her to see: one of Mommsa’s masks from her Closing/Opening the Void series.

  Her first impulse was to tell him, but a second snapped puppyishly at its heels and demanded that she feign ignorance. “You must like her work,” Gwyn said.

  “You know her too?”

  Gwyn confined herself to a nod.

  “What do you think of this?”

  What do I think of this? Good question.

  Mommsa’s piece employed a masquerade ball theme right out of the court of Louis XIV, but what she’d done to undercut—metaphorically and literally, given her medium of wood—the perceived gaiety of the form, was to insert an eye into the left socket only, an eye that not incidentally looked gripped by the deepest existential terror. How she achieved the glassy look with wood and acrylic paint was a marvel of skill and perversity that Gwyn willingly, even proudly, granted her; but what appeared profoundly chilling in this mask and the others in the series wasn’t confined to the endless angst of that eye. It also arose from the emptiness of the right socket.

  Most viewers wouldn’t have given the empty socket thought one, had Mommsa followed the conventions of the form, but by utilizing a single eye she’d not only upset the expectation of symmetry—and its soothing effects—she’d raised disturbing questions provoked by the title itself. What, in other words, was the void? The horrifying world witnessed by the anguished eye in all its unbidden fear, or the blind insentience of the empty socket, the literal “Void?” And what was really open here, and what was closed? And how, in this macabre context, do you define either? Art in America had loved this series, and Mommsa’s prices had risen accordingly.

  She decided to answer his question about what she thought of the piece by asking him why he’d bought it. “What moved you?”

  “The singularity of its vision.”

  He laughed, punning on the lone eye, and when she got his joke a nanosecond later, she did, too, even harder.

  “Seriously?” he said. “I loved the way Appleton . . . ”

  Mommsa’s married name from her last husband, the dead one. It had horrified Gwyn that she’d never changed it back to her maiden name, but Mommsa had thought that would seem suspicious under the circumstances: jettisoning the man’s name after he died so . . . suddenly.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “could you repeat that? I was off somewhere else.”

  “I could tell. It was the same look I saw at the end of my talk the other day. I was saying that I love the way she takes such an unforgiving material like wood and manages to make it look as fragile as paper or fabric.”

  “What about the eye?”

  “That’s something, isn’t it? How can you not admire a sculptor willing to be that weird . . . ”

  I’m not sure it’s a conscious decision.

  “. . . to take an incredibly pretty mask and then subvert the entire agenda by reminding you that an eye’s missing, and that a void always lies behind the world of appearances.”

  “And the eye that’s there—”

  “Is really scary.”

  “Perfect for the author of the Violence Index.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far, but what do you think of it?”

  “It’s hard for me to have any real distance on her work, because Joanna Appleton is my mother.”

  His mouth fell open and he said absolutely nothing until a, “No shit,” slipped out. Followed by, “Do I get to meet her?”

  “It might be rushing things.”

  “You’re right. Sorry. It’s just that I’d love to actually meet the woman who did this mask.”

  Take some Paxil first.

  She never did see the second piece he’d planned to show her before they walked back down to the porch. Mommsa, once again, had upstaged everyone around her.

  Hark was full of questions about her, which Gwyn fended off in a friendly fashion.

  “You’re protecting her, aren’t you?”

  “Probably.” She always had and always would.

  They walked back across the sand to her car. The beach was packed now, and so were the waves. Cheers greeted a rider who handled a powerful twelve foot face with skill, and Hark said they’d have been cheering for her if they’d shown up earlier.

  She smiled and strapped down her board, declining to tell him that she’d heard the crowd plenty during her glory days.

  He watched as she stowed her knapsack in the rear of the CR-V. When she closed the hatch, he took her hand.

  This was not unexpected, and hardly unwelcome. She loved the feel of his fingers gently stroking hers. It sent the most delightfully warm pulse right down to her belly, like they’d been sitting in the sun, though it was only starting to break through the cloud l
ayer.

  He drew her hand up to his chest, cupped it there, but he was nervous. She just now sensed it, pleased that his smooth self-confidence at Latimore Hall had found its limits looking into her eyes. “May I?”

  She replied with her lips.

  As she drove away humming to herself, Mommsa rang. “Could you come here in a hurry? I’ve got two detectives and they want to talk to me. They’re very nice, but I’m not sure what—”

  “Don’t talk to them, Mommsa. Don’t say a word.”

  “Are you sure? They seem very nice.”

  She heard Mommsa whisper something off the phone. Did she actually say, “She thinks I shouldn’t be talking to you?”

  “Mommsa, are they in the house?”

  “Well, yes dear, we were just sitting down to some coffee, and a wonderful coffee cake I picked up yesterday at—”

  “Mommsa,” Gwyn almost screamed, “stop serving them coffee cake. This isn’t a party. Get them out of there right away. I mean it. Have you called George?” Her lawyer. Based in L.A. but he had a weekend home near Santa Barbara.

  “Oh, I hate to bother him on a Saturday. And don’t yell at me, dear.”

  “Bother him. That’s why you pay him six-hundred dollars an hour.”

  “Are you sure? I hate to pay him if I don’t have to.”

  Gwyn pounded the dash in frustration. “Yes I’m sure. Tell those detectives to get out right now.” But she’d lost the connection, and didn’t know exactly when she’d been cut off. She called back and got a busy signal.

  A minute later, as she merged onto the hectic 405, she tried again. Still busy.

  Mommsa, she thought bitterly, the hostess with the mostest . . . to lose.

  And not the only one.

  She sought to quell these strong emotions by turning on the radio, which rewarded her with two traffic reports and an absurdly jubilant ad for McD’s, followed quickly by a bulletin revealing the grisly murder of Charles Simmonds. “Boxcar” Chuck, as she’d thought of him in the group.

  “Police say Simmonds,” the announcer went on, “was bludgeoned to death with a blood-smeared skateboard, which was found, along with the victim’s body, in a dumpster behind his house.”