by John Gardner
He was ecstatic, enthralled—too enthralled to be read to. “An epic!” he said. “Marvelous!” We debated how long it had been since the last one. He told me stories from the Táin Bó Cúailnge, the Ramayana, the Mabinogion. He told me how Punch, as in Punch and Judy, came down from Shiva, the god of destruction—from Indian parish, meaning “five,” the five senses. Around noon a former student came, a girl he’d taught in Paris. She pawed excitedly through his old and new paintings and told him excitedly all about her life. He was radiant, listening. He asked her about people they knew, the divorced and the dead, and we all drank tea, wine, Scotch (I the Scotch). He told her, with a crazily majestic gesture, that I was writing an epic—the first in a thousand years! She was thrilled. “You must hear it!” he said.
She looked alarmed. “How long is it?”
“How long is it, John?”
“Long,” I said.
“Marvelous!” he said. He bent double, clapping. “Marvelous!”
The girl looked excited, quite honestly excited, it seemed to me, but it was midafternoon, there wasn’t time.
“Hear just a little,” he said.
But then someone else came—the American he’d loaned his studio to in Paris. The boy stood grinning, pulling his mustache. John Napper leaped to the door and hugged him, then saw the small, shadowy wife in the doorway behind her husband (she’d been sick, it had made her prettier), and he hugged her, too. They shone like angels. “Pauline!” he called up the stairs, “you’ll never believe this! Come down!” He made them stand out of sight so that when she came she’d be surprised. Pauline threw up her hands, head tilted—gesture from a Chinese dance—and smiled.
I went back the next day, and this time I managed to read to him. He was delighted, painting quickly, thoughtfully, his bare feet long as shovels. He talked, when I finished, about Holman Hunt, how the music of the Beatles was exactly the same; he talked about Picasso, the pompous old ass, how his work reminded him of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Victory Speech. I was tingling with excitement, not all from the Scotch. My gaze wandered over his paintings as I listened. The gloomy, suicidal old ones, the big bright new ones, among them the painting of Lucy just now taking shape on the easel—Lucy among flowers. A chill went through me.
On the wall there was a huge, dark seascape. A transitional work in the Napper career. It had Turner things in it—illusions of movement, sultriness, light seen through cloud, the faintest suggestion of a ship, small in an enormous sea and sky. The ship was in trouble. The universe was churning. Turner, I remembered John’s telling me once, had two different lives, two different wives: He was Captain Something in one of them, a man of the sea; he was Dickens’ model for the character Scrooge, though in fact a secret philanthropist.
In the pretty flowers, the pretty face, my daughter’s eyes were calculating.
He said, that evening, “I love it that the Celtic god of poetry is a pig.” He wrinkled his nose on the word pig and magnificently became one.
“Pigs understand what the wind says,” I said.
He smiled, delighted. “Yes, so they can!” We knew the same old songs. “But that’s not what I love about it. Artists truly are pigs. That’s what I love! When I was young—” He wrinkled his nose again, unspeakably, divinely revolted by his youth. “That’s my chief pleasure in growing old. One can work with fewer and fewer periods of swinishness, rooting and rutting.” He reveled.
I poured more Scotch from the bottle he’d bought. For me he’d bought it. John Napper never drank at all when he was working—and very little at other times. Not even much beer, by Irish standards. I was making up for his sobriety today. (Balance is everything.) I looked at the big picture by the wall, the new painting, Pauline among flowers. It was good, no picture a young man could do. It was full of planes, not the changing depths of perspective but something else. Figure seated against tree on hillside, flowers everywhere; birds, lights, shadows. She gazes—strangely like the seated figure in an Egyptian tomb—toward a valley, a sudden openness, a kind of gasp in space, dark and in some unliteral way mysterious. Everything in the picture, every dart of light, moves, grows, corrupts before your eyes. The figure even breathes: an optical illusion from the paisley of her dress. And at the center of all that joyful movement that shadows away toward not quite joyful—the face hangs perfectly motionless, holy.
“I understand you,” I said, and smiled.
He smiled back, waiting.
Poetically drunk, I understood all sorts of things. He’d gone to the pit, in those Paris paintings, fighting for his life, squeezing the blood from this turnip of a world to hunt out the secret life in it, and there was none there. He’d hounded light—not just visual light— straining every muscle of body and mind to get down to what was real, what was absolute; beauty not as someone else had seen it but beauty he could honestly find himself, and what he’d gotten was a picture of the coal pocket. His wife had seen it too. Her mosaics went dark, as morose as anything of his, and maybe more so. And then, at the edge of self-destruction, John Napper had, I saw, jumped back. He would make up the world from scratch: Let there be light, a splendid garden. He would fabricate treasure maps. And he’d come to believe it. How could he not, seeing how it lighted his sad wife’s eyes? It was majestic! Also nonsense.
I told him all this and he beamed, wicked—a mirror image, it seemed to me, of me. “Exactly! Exactly!”
Pauline called down to us, to ask if I could stay to supper. I told her I was meeting Joan at a restaurant—she’d been working all day on a thing for flutes—and when I looked at my watch I saw I was half an hour late already. I got up, fell down, got up again, the room spinning out like Einstein’s planets, and I hunted for my old black coat. John Napper looked alarmed. “I’ll come with you,” he said. Pauline was at the door. I found my coat and fumbled into it— also my lugubrious old black hat. They talked. “Wait, John!” John Napper called. “We’re coming with you. We insist!” They were glorious with joy. It was the finest idea they’d had in years. Pauline hovered at the door, so tall it was awesome, her hands tentatively reaching in case I should stumble again. She stood with her head tipped, smiling widely, like that figure in those ancient Indian carvings: maiden kicking tree. Fertility symbol. She had fiery wings. John was down on his hands and knees, hunting in the corner for his shoes. He snapped his fingers, got up and went past me. Then they were dressed, Pauline elegant, towering to heaven, John in a black suit, blazing white shirt—neater, more dignified than Edward VII, majestic as Jesus Our Savior returning triumphant.
We went to find a taxi. We talked about Mahler and metaphysics.
When we got to the restaurant, Joan had eaten. She looked beautiful and outraged, red hair falling down her dark blue dress like swirling fire. “You look beautiful!” I said. “Pig!” she said. I winked at John. “Marvelous!” he said, and launched a tale. I got, despite Joan’s frown, a drink. Before long—I’m not sure how it happened—someone picked a fight with me. About Samuel Beckett, if I remember. Joan fled, weeping. Pauline flew out into the street behind her.
And then I was alone with John Napper in a taxi, square black chariot in desperate flight. “Damned ridiculous Welshman!” he said. His hair was like a halo. His nose was the whole Platonic idea of royalty. “Did I win?” I said. My lip was bleeding. “You were marvelous! Marvelous!” John Napper tipped back his head and laughed. I shook my head, hunched up in the darkness as if I were waiting out a mine shaft cave-in. “You’re crazy,” I said affectionately. “Always see the best in everything.”
“But it’s there,” he said, as if it were the most obvious fact in the world. “It’s wonderful to fight it, be blind to it. I admire that! But a man gets old, you know—loses his piggish stubbornness.… Ah, to be young again! Violent!” He looked young, violent.
“You’re crazy,” I said.
“Exactly!” he said. He leaned forward, towering above me in the seat, Chelsea running by like a dream outside the taxi window (Turner ha
d two different lives, two different wives: He was Captain Something in one of them, a man of the sea; he was Dickens’ model for the character Scrooge, though in fact a secret philanthropist).
“Exactly,” he said.
“Exactly!” he whispered, his wide eyes glittering, his smile thrown forward in the darkness like a spear.
Lucy bought the painting for seven pennies. Not American pennies. The darker, more formidable English kind, the kind you lay on dead men’s eyes to prevent their gazing back.
Book Two
TALES
OF QUEEN LOUISA
QUEEN LOUISA
1
Mad Queen Louisa awakened feeling worried and irritable. That was by no means unusual for her. It had been happening since she was a little girl, or, as she sometimes clearly remembered, a lizard. She fanned herself with the fingers of one hand, anxiously searching, as she always did for the first few minutes, for the deeply buried secret of her soul’s unrest. She was not afraid of rape or poverty or death. She’d established these facts beyond a shadow of a doubt many years ago—she’d long since forgotten precisely how, but one cannot keep plowing the same old ground. As for lesser fears, suffice it to say that she’d read all the books in the royal palace—not only those in Slavonic and Latin, but those in German and French as well, and one in English, sometimes reading in her character as queen, sometimes as a huge and sleepy-eyed toad in spectacles—and she’d systematically crossed off all possible causes of distress from anorexy to zygomatic fever. Despite that, she always woke up worried and irritable. Her solution, which was simple and brilliantly effective, once she was awake to remember it, was to find little nothings to attach her deep, vague worry to. The lady-in-waiting seemed peaked, out of sorts; some trouble with her husband? Or the castle’s north wall had moss on it. Do moss roots run deep? Could they loosen the stones?
She opened the curtains of her huge gold bed. (The king always slept alone these days. He said it was the wars. Had he taken some mistress?) Already the chamber was alive with light—the chambermaid always threw the windows wide open at six o’clock. Orderly details make orderly days, Queen Louisa believed. Also, toads like the early morning damp. Every surface, every plane or flange or lozenge of the furniture gleamed, almost sang, with light. The combs and brushes on her dressing table were so bright she had to blink.
Carefully, she slipped her toes into the cold, then her shins and knees. The floor, when she reached it, was deliciously icy. She’d catch her death of pneumonia, she realized, and hurriedly felt left and right for her slippers.
The door flew open, and the chambermaid rushed in. She was supposed to be here when the queen awakened. Queen Louisa felt a catch and thoughtfully narrowed her large and luminous (she knew) eyes. What had the chambermaid been up to? she wondered. The girl looked flushed. She was fourteen, no older. She looked—the queen touched her bosom in alarm—she looked pregnant!
At Queen Louisa’s moan, the child rushed to her and seized her hands.
“Are you ill, your majesty?” On her cheeks, two bright roses. Her eyes were gray.
“I’m well enough,” the queen said very cautiously. Her mind raced over whom it might be. Not the page, certainly. He was fat as a pig and reeked of old cider. She did hope not one of those trumpet players! It couldn’t be one of the knights, of course, because of the wars—unless perhaps one of the wounded ones. Her mind fixed with horrible and vaguely pleasurable fascination on the thought of the chambermaid creeping to the infirmary, slipping into bed with some great gored creature with a six-month beard. She secretly whispered a prayer to protect her from salacious thoughts.
“I just stepped out for a minute, your majesty,” the chambermaid said.
Queen Louisa was sick with worry now. Perhaps it was no one from the castle at all. Perhaps the girl’s father, some peasant from the village.
“Help me with my dressing-gown,” the queen said weakly.
“Of course, your majesty!” She bowed very low and went pale for an instant. A sign of pregnancy if ever there was one! But the queen said nothing. Mad she might be—so everyone maintained, though they did not seem so all right themselves, in her opinion—but she was not a person who poked into other people’s business. A little cry escaped her. The lady-in-waiting who’d been fighting with her husband should be here now too. Was she off with the great dog, the chambermaid’s father? The girl was studying her, alarmed by the cry. Queen Louisa smiled gently, and the girl was reassured. Queen Louisa extended her arms for the golden sleeves.
“Is his majesty at breakfast?” Queen Louisa asked. It was important to keep one’s servants at ease, keep their minds occupied.
“He left in the middle of the night, my lady. The wars, you know.” The child’s voice sounded so apologetic you’d have thought the wars were all her fault.
“Well, no matter, my dear,” Queen Louisa said. “I’m sure we’ll manage.”
“I do hope so, your majesty!”
Queen Louisa froze. There was no mistaking the distress in the voice of her chambermaid. It was something beyond any personal distress. (Mad Queen Louisa had a sense about these things.) She moved toward her gold and ivory mirror, lacing up the front of her dressing gown. Very casually, she said, “Is something wrong, my dear?”
Suddenly, touched off by the tender concern in her majesty’s voice, the chambermaid burst into tears. “Oh, my lady, my lady, how dare I reveal it?”
Queen Louisa frowned, profoundly worried, then hurriedly smiled, for fear she might shake the child’s foundations, and lightly patted the chambermaid’s hand. “Tell me everything,” she said, “and Queen Louisa will fix it.”
The child required no further encouragement. Clinging to her majesty’s hand, she said, “A witch has appeared on the mountain and put all the hermits to flight. The peasants are so frightened they can hardly speak for shuddering. What are we to do? Oh, your majesty, your majesty! The king and his knights are a hundred miles away!”
Queen Louisa sighed but refused to tremble. She put her arm gently around the poor girl and sadly gazed into the mirror. Her great heavy-lidded eyes gazed back at her, and her wide, sad toad’s mouth. The golden dressing-gown clung tightly to her thick, rough, swampgreen torso, though the sleeves were loose and a little too long. “Never mind,” she said. “Queen Louisa will fix it.” And she would. No question. All the same, it was inconsiderate and irrational of the king to leave his kingdom in the hands of a queen who was insane. Fleetingly, she wondered who his mistress might be. Not her own lady-in-waiting, surely! But the moment the thought occurred to her, she was certain she was right. (These hunches of hers were infallible.)—But if so, then his majesty was the chambermaid’s fat peasant father, who was sleeping with the lady-in-waiting because of her troubles with her husband; and the peasant’s child, that is, the king’s, her little chambermaid, could be only—her own lost daughter! Queen Louisa smiled, feeling wildly happy, but said nothing for the moment, biding her time. She felt warm all over, and strangely majestic. She was soon to be a grandmother.
2
“The Court is now in session,” Queen Louisa said.
The judges looked befuddled and a trifle annoyed, which she could well understand. But the facts were simple, and nothing makes a trial run more smoothly than simple facts. It was not, of course, the business of royalty to explain itself to mere judges of the realm. (“Never complain, never explain” was Queen Louisa’s motto.) And the facts were these: that the king and his knights were all far away, except for the knights in the infirmary, and there was no one at home to deal with the troubles but the Royal Court. Therefore Queen Louisa had assembled the Court.
The chief justice looked over the tops of his spectacles, holding his wig away with the backs of the fingers of his hands, partly for the sake of seeing better, partly for the sake of hearing. He looked from the empty defendant’s chair to the empty benches where the various lawyers and their witnesses should be. It was a tense moment, and the chambermai
d glanced in alarm at the queen. The lower justices, one on each side of the chief justice, pretended to study their copious notes and copy them over more legibly, though the queen suspected they had nothing written down in the first place. Queen Louisa could easily forgive them, however. Indeed, she’d have done the same herself. Surely they’d never encountered a case quite like this before.
Timidly, but with a hint of irritation, the chief justice said, “Where is the defendant?”
The lower justices smiled as they always smiled at every question he asked, as if saying to themselves, “Very shrewdly put!” Their smiles emboldened him to ask it again, even letting out a little smile himself: “Your majesty, where is the defendant?”
Queen Louisa smiled too, though she pitied them, really: dependent as children, hopelessly shackled in rules and procedures, wholly unprepared for the rich and strange. In their long white wigs they looked like sheep. In fact, when she saw how they held their pencils— poked between their pointed hooves—she became half-convinced that they were sheep. With the greatest possible dignity—to set a good example for the chambermaid, since a kingdom where the honor of courts is forgotten is a kingdom in trouble, and also because sheep are people, too, whose feelings can be hurt—but mainly because she had a vague suspicion that only by speaking with the greatest possible dignity could she prevent her words from seeming ridiculous, even to a sheep— Queen Louisa said: “You ask me where the defendant is. That, my lord justices”—she paused dramatically—”I leave to the wisdom of this Court.”
They looked at each other, and the chief of the justices paled a little and glanced at the clock. Again he peered down at the empty benches where the defendant, witnesses, and lawyers should be. He cleaned his spectacles. “Your majesty,” he said at last, like a creature completely baffled … but he let his words trail off.
Queen Louisa said nothing, merely patted the chambermaid’s knee to show that all was well. The child, of course, never having been in a court before, had no idea how long these things took. She too kept glancing anxiously at the clock, wringing her hands, and pulling at her kerchief till it was so twisted around one could hardly see her face.
