‘Hey, these horseradish meatballs are terrific, Ger! Is there any more of the dip?’
‘Uh … probably. In the kitchen, Talbot. Ask my wife.’ Earlier, Iris Draper had remarked on the dimness of the light in here, the relative brightness of the rooms around, comparing it to some mantic ceremony or other she’d come across in her tourist travels, and though at the time I’d found her chatter about ‘secret chambers’ and ‘illumination mysteries’ naively pedantic, now as I gazed at the candlelit faces of my friends gathered around the table (Alison had been drawn back to the painting by Iris and her husband, and now seemed glowingly mirrored there) – bruised, crumpled, bloodied – it all seemed strangely resonant. ‘What’s the matter with your ear, Talbot?’
‘Hit the goddamn fireplace with it.’
‘Whew! Did you show that mess to Jim?’
‘Yeah, he had to put three stitches in. Hurt like hell. Good excuse to soak up more anaesthetic, though – oh, oh, the old ball-and-chain’s calling. I was supposed to bring her one of those fancy whatchamacallits in the seashells. See ya in a minute.’ I noticed one of Ginger’s kerchiefs on the floor where he’d been standing and stooped to pick it up, also some toothpicks, spoons, a mustard knife, parsley sprigs, and a ripped-up cocktail napkin. The joke on the napkin, when I pieced it together, was of a frightened young suitor, his knees knocking together, asking a towering irate father with fumes rising from his head: ‘May I have your d-d-daughter’s hole in h-handy matrimony, s-sir?’
Someone’s breast was touching my elbow. ‘Hi, Gerry.’
‘Hey, Michelle.’ Her breast burrowed into the crook of my arm as if seeking shelter. ‘You all right?’
‘I think so. Awful, isn’t it?’
‘What happened to the fucking scotch, Ger?’
‘Charley’s got it in the kitchen.’
‘Is he sober enough to be trusted with it?’
‘I don’t know, Noble – but there’s more down there in the cabinet.’
‘Listen.’ He leaned close, dead eye toward us, good one keeping watch. There was something not quite clean about Noble’s breath. ‘Chooch’s wife knows something,’ he whispered, and Michelle backed off a step.
‘Janny? She doesn’t know the time of day.’
Noble shrugged, his lids heavy. ‘Maybe. But she’s been talking to the cops. I think she’s naming names. I’d check it out if I were you.’ He took Ginger’s fallen kerchief from my hand, casually popped his false eyeball into it, and knotted it up.
‘Come on,’ said Tania, taking my hand. Across the room (Michelle ‘oh’ed’ as Noble, squinting, unknotted the kerchief and showed it to be empty), Alison and her husband were moving parallel with us toward the living room, and again we found ourselves exchanging furtive glances. What had she said that night we met? I’d been speaking of the invention of audiences, theater as a ruse, a game against time. ‘Yes,’ she’d said, smiling up at me over the ruffles at her throat (I gave Tania’s hand a little squeeze, as I’d no doubt squeezed my wife’s hand that night at the theater), ‘and that’s why the lives of actors, thought frivolous, are essentially tragic, those of the audience, comic.’
The short policeman, the one called Fred, pushed in from the front room, blocking my view of her. At the table, he picked out three or four forks, held them up (Noble was prying his eyelid open, revealing the false eye back in place, gold backside out: Michelle gasped), chose one and turned to go, but got stopped by Woody, Roger’s law partner. They huddled for a moment, watched closely by Tania’s husband, Howard, standing stockstill against the wall, his broken lenses twinkling, and it looked to me, before I lost sight of them, like Woody gave the cop some money.
‘Who’s that playing darts downstairs?’ Tania asked in the hallway.
‘I don’t know.’ I was still thinking about Noble, his pocked face dark with apprehension: Ros had told me he’d been brutal to her once. Down below, the darts could still be heard striking the board, but the conversation, if any, wasn’t carrying up the stairs. ‘Cyril and Peg maybe.’
Tania considered this, twining the laces of her peasant dress around one finger. Noble had tried to shove the handle of a hairbrush up her bottom, she’d said, apparently as part of yet another amateur magic trick, and when it wouldn’t go, he’d beat her with the other end of it. In the doorway of the living room (‘I’m not a prude, Gerry,’ Ros had declared, ‘but it didn’t even have round edges – what was he so mad about?’), Jim was swabbing Daffie’s elbow with a ball of soaked cotton, Anatole and Patrick watching. Daffie made some remark to Anatole that made him blush, then looked up and winked at me.
‘Curiously,’ Tania said, fluttering her arm in a kind of salute at her nephew as she passed, ‘Peg was just talking about Ros. She said she’d always been a little jealous of her because, in spite of the crazy life Ros led, she was never unhappy, as far as anyone could tell, while Peg, talented, well-educated, orderly, comfortably married to Cyril for over twenty-four years now and never a serious quarrel or a single infidelity, could not truly claim to have been happy a single day of her life. It seemed so unfair, she said, like all the things you get born with and can’t help.’ Tania paused at the foot of the stairs to look back at me, one hand, knobby with heavy jeweled rings, resting on the banister, and I thought of Ros, bouncing goofily down a broad ornate staircase in a play in which she was supposed to be a stately middle-aged matron, descending to receive the news of the death of her husband, whom she herself had poisoned. ‘But then one day Peg saw Ros in a terrible state, all in a frazzle and close to tears, and the cause of it was simply that Ros was trying to learn her lines for a new play, something she always found almost impossible. She said it was a revelation, not about Ros, but about herself: she said she’d never see her own marriage in quite the same way again!’ Tania’s dark eyes crinkled with amusement as she thought about this, her lower lip caught in her bright white teeth, then she said: ‘The wound – it wasn’t made by that knife, you know. It was more like a puncture than a gash …’
‘Yes, that’s how it looked to me, too.’
From the stairs as we climbed them, I could see over Jim and Daffie and their audience into the living room, where Inspector Pardew seemed to be demonstrating something to his two assistants. Ros was out of sight, but her chalked outline, blood-drenched at the heart, was clearly visible, ringed about by the legs of watchers-on. Things still looked pretty smashed up and scattered in there, but from this angle the peculiar thing was the complex arrangement of chalked outlines, which reminded me of the old star charts with their dot-to-dot drawings of the constellations.
On the landing, in front of another of her paintings, Tania paused and raised her spectacles to her nose. ‘Look,’ she said. It was a painting of ‘The Ice Maiden,’ an extraordinary self-portrait in glacial greens and crystalline blues, viewed as though from the surface of an icy mountain lake. The Ice Maiden – Tania – was swimming up toward the viewer, her dramatic highboned face distorted with something between lust and terror, a gold ring deep in the throat of her gaping mouth, her right arm stretched out, sapphire-ringed finger reaching toward the hand of an unseen swimmer, like Adam’s toward God’s in all those European paintings. Behind her – below her – swirling up from the buried city streets of her childhood through a fantastic tapestry of crystal ice: blind frozen images from her other paintings up to then – ‘The Thief of Time,’ ‘The Dead Boy,’ our ‘Susanna,’ the tortured ‘Saint Valentine’ with his bloody erection, the orgiastic couples of ‘Orthodoxy’ and the dancing ‘Unclean Persons,’ ‘The Executioner’s Daughter’ in her pratfall, the pettifogging privy councilors holding a meeting on ‘Gulliver’s Peter,’ plus a number I didn’t know – and one of these, a woman poised in astonishment, had had her face scratched out.
‘My god!’ I cried. ‘Who’s done this—?’
‘It’s what I wanted to show you.’
‘It’s – it’s terrible!’ I touched the scarred area.
‘Gives yo
u a funny feeling, doesn’t it? Like somebody’s made a hole in the world …’
‘But then that girl, I was never sure – it was Ros, wasn’t it?’
Tania nodded. ‘It wasn’t a very good likeness. I did it from memory and from other sketches.’
‘Do I know the painting it’s from?’
‘No, I never finished it.’ She seemed to think about this for a moment, staring at the obliterated face, as though, like the Ice Maiden, being sucked down into it. ‘Did you ever see that play, Bluebeard’s Secret, the one—’
‘Yes, Ros had a bit part. Or nonpart. It was the only reason we went to see it. I … well, I guess I didn’t—’
Tania smiled. ‘I know. All that self-indulgent melodrama, phony symbolism, pompous huffing and puffing about free will and necessity – just a lot of sophomoric mystification for the most part and a few bare bosoms. But I came away from it with an idea for a painting, Gerry – more than an idea: it was like some kind of compulsion, a desperate, almost violent feeling. A painting is like that sometimes. It can start from the most trivial image or idea and suddenly, like those monsters in the movies, transform itself and overwhelm you. That’s what happened to me with “Bluebeard’s Chambers.” I came home with nothing more than the idea of doors, the color blue from the lights they used, and Ros. And yet—’
‘But she hardly—’
‘I know, that was the point. Part of it. I meant to have a lot of doors in my painting, doors of all sizes, some closed, some partly open, some just empty doorframes, no walls, but the various angles of the doors implying a complicated cross-hatching of different planes, and opening onto a great profusion of inconsistent scenes, inconsistent not only in content but also in perspective, dimension, style – in some cases even opening onto other doors, mazes of doors like funhouse mirrors – and the one consistent image was to be Ros. As you see her there.’ As she spoke I could feel the surge of excitement she must have felt as the idea grew in her, filling her out, as though her brain, sixth sense organ, were being erotically massaged. I loved this power she had: to be excited. It was a kind of innocence. ‘Only from all angles, including above and below, sometimes in proportion with the scene around her, sometimes not, sometimes only a portion of her or perhaps strangely distorted in particulars, yet essentially the same basic pose, a being dispossessed of its function. And as she disappeared into her own multiplicity, Bluebeard himself, though not present in the painting except in the color, would hopefully have emerged as the unifying force of the whole.’ She sighed tremulously. ‘But I couldn’t handle it. Too many doors at once, you might say.’ It was like a tide ebbing. Her voice softened. ‘And Ros was not just fidgety – she was almost fluid. Never the exact pose twice – even twice in the same minute. But the colors were good, and eventually they led me to this one, a painting I’d been wanting to try for years.’ She stared now at her own image, beautiful, yet frightening in its intensity. ‘I think now if I tried again … the “Bluebeard,” I mean …’
She didn’t finish, but I felt I knew: she’d try scratching the faces of all the Ros figures, just as it was here. ‘Why not, Tania? Maybe you’re ready for it now.’
She smiled wanly, curling a few strands of her deep black hair around one long pointed fingernail, painted a deep magenta. ‘It’s so late, Gerry …’ In reflex, I glanced at my empty wrist. Below us, people were arguing noisily about what they’d seen or heard before the discovery of Ros’s body, and I heard my own name mentioned. Tania touched my arm. ‘Come on. We’ve come this far, we might as well wash these stains out.’
As we started up, I found myself thinking of that town in Italy again, a staircase, the hotel probably where I took that girl with the bunny-ear pubes – no, wait: some city to the north. Paris. Yes, a walk-up (‘I think of him, you know,’ Tania was saying, she was apparently talking about Bluebeard still, ‘as a man who wished to share all he had with the world … but could not …’), bare bulb on the landing. Over an Algerian restaurant on the Left Bank. Then who was I with? Oddly it seemed like Alison. But later, on the bidet—
‘Sometimes I think art’s so cowardly, Gerry. Shielding us from the truth …’
‘Well … assuming the truth’s worth having …’ We’d had this conversation before. Vic’s daughter Sally Ann slouched against the banister at the top of the stairs, watching us.
‘In other words, scratching that face out was the same thing in the end as painting it in …’
‘No, Tania, the one takes talent, genius, the other—’
‘Ah! But you don’t say which!’
There was a new patch on Sally Ann’s blue jeans, just over the crotch – the first thing I saw, in fact, as we climbed past her – that said ‘SWEET MEAT’ in bright fleshy colors. She was slumped against the rails, body arched, rolling a cigarette. Or maybe a joint. ‘Hey, your father’s looking for you,’ I said, and then, because she was staring so intently at me, I poked my finger in her bare navel and added: ‘Deli Belly.’
She jumped back, dropping her handiwork down the stairs. ‘Oh, Gerry, that’s stupid!’ She slapped at my hand, then pranced on down to the landing.
‘Someone’s got a crush on you, Gerry,’ Tania observed.
‘I always did have more luck with poets than painters,’ I sighed, and stooped to pick up another of Ginger’s kerchiefs on the top stair. In Paris, climbing, I was carrying some books with plain green jackets, a print bought from a stall along the Seine, and I stooped for … for … a coin? a ring? a button maybe, a brass or silver button …
The bathroom door was closed. I started to knock, but Tania with her customary lack of ceremony walked in. ‘Well, that’s pretty,’ she declared, and turned on the ventilator fan. Dickie was in there, cleaning Naomi’s bottom over the toilet. She was straddling the thing, bent over and facing the wall, skirt hiked, elbows resting on the water tank. Dickie looked very unhappy, smoking self-defensively with one hand, dabbing clumsily at her big hindend with the other. His shirtsleeves were rolled up, his plaid jacket hanging on the doorhook. ‘Hey, Ger! Just in time!’ he cried, flinging his butt into the paper-clogged stool. I saw he’d used up all the toilet paper on the roller and a box of tissues besides. ‘You’re the host, you can wipe her goddamn ass!’
‘No, thanks, you’re doing fine,’ I protested, but he was already washing up. Yes, the restaurant smells below, the creaky climb, the bare bulb, the bidet – but cold water. And a smaller fanny, plump but like a little pink pear, softly creased by the bidet lips, not two big melons like this – ah! my wife’s!
‘I’m so embarrassed,’ Naomi said. I was directly behind her, down on my haunches by the linen cupboard, reaching for more toilet paper (these genuflections, these child’s-eye views!), and her voice seemed to be coming out of her high looming behind. ‘I’ve never done anything like this before – you know, poohed at a party. But I was so scared—!’
‘It was what you’d call a moving experience, Nay,’ said Dickie, reaching for a towel. I found Tania’s protein soap down there as well. Only it was in a white box with blue lettering, not a blue box. I noticed a worn wooden handle behind the soap and grabbed it up – an old ice pick! Where had this come from—?! ‘Christ! Even the goddamn towels are covered with shit!’
Dickie came over to get a clean one from the cupboard and I shoved the thing out of sight, covering it up hastily with the nearest cloth to hand. It was uncanny, I hadn’t seen one in years – as best I could remember, the last time was at my grandmother’s house when I was still a boy – it was almost as though …
‘What you need is a bidet in here,’ Tania said, sprinkling soap into the tub and churning the water up with her hands.
‘What—?!’ I gasped. Naomi’s bottom reared above me, seeming to watch me with a suspicious one-eyed stare, pink mouth agape below as though in astonished disbelief.
‘A bidet. It’s what they’re for, you know, washing bottoms.’
‘Yes, sure, but oddly I – I was just thinking about—’
‘Can you beat that,’ said Dickie, tossing the towel over Naomi’s bent back. ‘I always thought they were for cooling the beer in.’ He leaned close to the mirror, scraped at a fleck of blood in front of his golden sideburns. ‘Oh, by the way, Ger, I don’t know if you saw what’s left of the poor bastard on the way up, but Roger’s no longer with us, you know.’
‘Roger—?!’ It was like a series of heavy gates crashing shut, locks closing like meshing gears. I stumbled to my feet.
‘I knew it!’ gasped Tania, clutching her arms with wet hands.
Dickie unzipped his white trousers and tucked his shirttails in, frowning at the bloodstains on his vest. I braced myself on the cupboard shelves. ‘But … but who—?’
He raised his eyebrows at me in the mirror as though to say I already knew. And I did. ‘They used croquet mallets,’ he said with a grimace, zipping up. ‘The grand fucking round, Ger – it was awful.’
‘But did you see it? Couldn’t you do anything about it?’
Dickie, framed in lights, smiled enigmatically. I recalled now the thud of the policemen’s blows, the shrieks, the thrashing about, the sudden stillness: we all knew what they were going to do when they took Roger out of the room. Maybe I’d even been told …
‘Dickie asked them to stop it,’ Naomi said from behind her bottom. ‘But they didn’t pay any attention to him, it was like they couldn’t even hear him, maybe because of the screaming, they were like standing on his head all the time. And we couldn’t stay, I was starting to … to poop again …’
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