The Art Lover

by Carole Maso

  “It’s true,” Steven says. “The colors are much less tawdry. And there is more movement.”

  Max nods, standing at the entrance of this womblike place. Holding his arm is a young woman of exceptional beauty. I’m thinking to myself that she must be my mother. In fact I’m sure of it.

  “Christ’s face is baffled, unbearable, serene,” she says. “Believe me, I know.”

  “One of you shall betray me,” He says.

  Hands move to the heart. Hair flies. “Is it I, Lord?” “Is it I?” Palms open. Nostrils flare. Mouths. “Is it I?” There is a terrible space between shapes. A finger points to the sky.

  “After this there will be a kiss,” she whispers.

  I see her lips floating on the black lake.

  One of you shall betray me.

  She shuts her eyes. She seems to be drowsing on Max’s arm. “No, Mother, not tonight,” I say to her, and I nudge Grey awake too. “No sleep yet. No gorgeous, drugged slumber. Not yet. Hold on one more moment.” And Steven is in his pajamas, still climbing one by one each rung of the ladder. “Stay a little.”

  “It takes so long. It goes so slowly,” Mother says.

  “Don’t fall,” I tell Steven. “Don’t worry,” he says. “I won’t.”

  In the daily dream I tell myself he is not sick. He is not going to die. But that’s only some days. Other days he is already in heaven. Some days he speaks to me. Others he is silent, ashes in the ground.

  Sometimes I think I know what the black tulips mean. Other times I have no idea.

  Steven stares at the scene in front of him.

  Max laughs. “The beards are trimmed. The table reset. But perhaps,” he says, getting closer, “most importantly, there is a rearranging of hands. Come, take mine,” he says, and we fit together for a minute, just as we are, in our intricate, quirky jigsaw shapes.

  “One must integrate each fragment once it has been cleaned with the fragments next to it, fitting the pieces together.” Max and I are still holding hands. “See that flake of blue, Caroline?” David says. “It has migrated from where Leonardo originally put it as part of his color for one of the apostles’ robes.” I can’t believe this is David, helpful for once, the person he might have been.

  I stare at the molecule of blue floating across the wall past Steven. I think of a flower seeding itself in another part of the garden. I think of the cells of blood. I think of one breaking away and changing shape.

  David continues. “Just before beginning restoration on Christ’s face we had to stop work because of the humidity level.” He enters another time. “There was so much water. People must have traveled here by the canal that once flowed outside these doors,” he says, like a little boy loving water.

  “A man named Innocenti invented a wall of forced air that now exists between the painting and the viewer,” David tells us.

  “Pure oxygen,” Grey says, revived.

  Steven motions for me to come up the ladder. I climb to him, breathing the perfect air. Max and Mom follow. Then Grey and David. Steven brings his trembling finger to the beautiful lip of Christ. He tentatively begins to remove a bit of overpainting. There’s a possibility we’ll be staring in the end into absolutely nothing, like David says, Max. Like you’ve said all along.

  “His face has not vanished,” Grey says. “I do not think his face has vanished.”

  “Yes, a full recovery is possible,” Steven says. “What we’ll see there most likely is a good man.” He smiles. “But only a man.”

  As for me—I do not know what we’ll see. I am simply grateful to be having such a dream. I’m so high up, standing on the scaffold with Max and Mom, Grey and David. With Steven . . .

  I guess I’m still hoping we might rise. Or maybe, just perhaps, holding hands here through this final fiction, we’ve already risen.

  Jesus, Mary and Alison

  She smells of melon. Of ripe fruit. Alison looks at her and touches her own breasts, just budding. “Mary,” she says. A flourish of hips. “Why are you weeping?”

  “Look to my son,” she says.

  He’s wandering through a field of trillium. He quotes Roethke by heart:

  Snail, snail, glister me forward,

  Bird, soft-sigh me home.

  Worm, be with me.

  This is my hard time.

  “Jesus,” Alison whispers. “What’s wrong?”

  He holds her tightly. He loves her so much it makes him shudder. “This is my commandment: that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no man,” he smiles, “no woman, no child than this, that ye may lay down your life for your friends.”

  Alison nods. “Of course,” she says.

  “Oh, my,” he says. She’s weeping.

  Alison gasps. “Will I ever be beautiful like Mary?” she asks.

  “Alison,” Jesus says, “look at you—your hair the color of nutmeg. Your almond eyes. Your perfect human soul. How beautiful you are right now. Not child and not yet adult, you are at that tender age of becoming.” He smiles, pleased with the phrase he’s made up. He says it again. It sounds good. Maybe, he thinks to himself, I am going to live.

  The Sky at Night

  They are taking out the boat for the first time this season. They push it off its rollers under the dock’s roof, where it has been kept all winter. Alison gets in the boat, Maggie stands at the lake’s edge.

  “You’ll be cold in just your cardigan, Mom.”

  Maggie touches her sweater pocket. “Dear Maggie, I want to come home.” She wishes she could scream. Suddenly she’s afraid of everything.

  “What a clear night,” Alison says evenly.

  It is not a large boat; it is only a rowboat and the smallness of it makes the lake and sky seem vast. It is just the two of them, Maggie and Alison, and as they push off from the shore, Maggie dips her hand into the cold water and swishes it back and forth.

  “It hurts,” she says. “It’s too early to be out.”

  “We won’t stay long, Mom.”

  Alison rows tentatively at first but then finds a rhythm and the boat moves slowly forward on the smooth cool dark.

  It’s making me better, Alison says to herself, in strokes. It’s making me better.

  “I don’t know what to do, Alison,” Maggie whispers. “I’m lost.”

  “Look, Mom,” Alison says, pointing to the sky. “It’s Gemini.”

  “Oh yes, the twins.”

  They are dearly visible tonight, back again for spring.

  “Do you remember the story of Castor and Pollux, Ali?”

  “Tell me again,” Alison says.

  “They were the sons of Leda. Castor’s father was Tyndareus, the king of Sparta. Pollux may have been the son of Zeus, which would have made him immortal. After Castor’s death, Pollux was overwhelmed with grief and wanted to share his immortality with his twin. Finally, Zeus reunited them by placing them together in the heavens.”

  “It’s a beautiful story,” Alison smiled. Alison had never realized before how much she had missed her mother. She had loved spending this last year with her, difficult as it had been. She and her mother building fires, gardening, rowing together in the boat. And she realized only this year that she had been missing her mother her whole life.

  Maggie watched the oars slip into the black water, move back, come around and dip into water again. She thought she saw what van Gogh had described as “a note of intense malachite green, something utterly heartbreaking.”

  She watched the movement of her daughter, her arm extended then bent, her weight forward then back, forward again. She watched her small sneakered feet, lifting up occasionally, her toes remaining stationary and pointed.

  Alison stopped in the center of the lake and looked up into the jeweled sky, that masterpiece. Who made all this? Alison wondered. God made this.

  How much Maggie loved this little girl. How much she loved Candace. How much she missed Henry.

  Maggie looked up at the spiraling sky, the transfigure
d, the throbbing sky.

  “Such a starry night,” she says.

  The spiral in her hand, now a star, now a galaxy.

  “I am a stranger on this earth,” was the psalm van Gogh preached from at age twenty-three. “Hide not thy commandments from me.”

  Maggie latched herself on to one of the spirals and spun with it. “I’m dizzy,” she said. “I feel sick.”

  She did not know if she loved him.

  Alison held her mother’s hand. “Mom, it’s going to be OK.”

  “Do you really think so?”

  “Yes.”

  “Henry, you broke my heart.”

  For a moment Alison imagined him with them in the boat, humming. She put Candace next to him, completing the family.

  Max, come back.

  You were not that old. You were elegant, graying, distinguished, with a slight paunch. I remember. You had many lovers. You were not old.

  Obviously a major malfunction.

  “Sometimes I’m so afraid, Alison.”

  Alison looks up to the Bear in the sky, but she can’t find it. The sky is vast, heartbreakingly beautiful, huge with mystery and longing.

  There is so much pain in the world.

  The question remains how to speak above all the red in your hospital room.

  “There is so much pain in the world,” Alison cries. “Why?”

  An empty spacesuit flies by.

  A man covered with papers and rags trudging through the street.

  Young people dying around every corner.

  You are in your St. Vincent’s pajamas and slippers. Dragging your bag of blood. So thin.

  Why have you forsaken me? Can you hear me? Can anybody hear me at all?

  “Yes,” He says, “I hear you.”

  “Then do something, dear God.”

  “No, Caroline. You do something.”

  We have been faithful to you, and you have broken us in the place of jackals.

  Maggie cries out in the night. She is angry now. She does not hold still and then die. She stands up in the boat and looks up to the sky.

  Did he expect her to just forgive him? How could he have left them?

  “Let’s go further,” Maggie says. “I’ll row now.”

  Maggie rows harder, faster.

  “Are you all right, Mom?”

  “Yes,” she says evenly. “I’m all right now.”

  She stops rowing suddenly, the lake on fire. “I didn’t think they’d be so black. I didn’t think they’d be flying so fast. The field so ripe. The sky so wide.” Maggie begins to shake. “I didn’t think they’d fly this fast. I didn’t think they’d swoop and dive.”

  Everything moving toward us. The whole world moving toward us. She feels the longing for everything in this world. She shrieks and shrieks: “Why these roads? Why these crows?”

  He struggles against the perspective that diminishes an individual object before his eyes, Max says. He loads on the pigment.

  Maggie screams. Feathers everywhere. The birds beating against the boat.

  The wheat so sharp. So beautiful. The sky so dark.

  Van Gogh in a wheat field lifting his brush to forestall collapse. To resist disintegration.

  Van Gogh taking Maggie’s hand now and allowing her through his vision, into the world. The boat rocking. Into the pain of the world. The lake so dark. The sides of the boat peeling. The oars hard in her hands, splintery. The smell of seaweed. The smell of early spring. The sound of water lapping against the boat.

  She gasps now looking at Alison. She takes her hand. It is warm, smooth. It is flesh and blood.

  “Look how beautiful the sky is,” Maggie says. “How it goes on forever. Light and dark intermingled. Together. One world. The sky is enormous, filled with mystery and love.”

  “My dear one,” the mother says, “as a baby you must have thought my sobbing was a song.”

  I nod. “I know that you did the best you could. I believe it: you simply could not go on.”

  “Oui, c’est vrai.”

  Maggie looks at Alison and she begins to cry. She holds her daughter tightly. They rock back and forth, back and forth in this small boat in the middle of the night.

  Actually it is not night, it is more like the few moments right before dawn. The comet they had hoped so much to see now veered into deep space. They thought they could feel it as it moved further and further away, and they held each other tightly, and rocked each other with what seemed a steadier, more predictable rhythm.

  Alison’s heartbeat grew louder and louder. The whole world seemed to pulsate with it. She looked up to the cometless sky. She could barely talk above her own heartbeat. She shuddered. “Do you think,” she said, trembling, looking up to the sky and then into her mother’s eyes, “that He really led them—by a star?”

  The Hieroglyphs of Hope

  Tonight there is Champagne because we are celebrating. Not the first springlike day, but that Steven’s lungs, while not completely clear, are almost clear, that he has been accepted into the Compound S program and also it’s a belated birthday celebration—he turned thirty-three in the hospital several weeks earlier. We are celebrating the fact that he was born and that he got himself out of the hospital with what Max always called his “extraordinary resourcefulness.”

  I get out Max’s cooking equipment: his knives, his presses, his whisks. I am making my friend butterflied leg of lamb. I have marinated it all night in olive oil and rosemary. I am making new potatoes for him, baby carrots.

  He arrives, slightly out of breath, holding tulips. He puts Der Rosenkavalier on the CD player and settles himself in Max’s chair. I look at my friend surrounded by the history of art. He takes a book from the shelf.

  In a copper bowl I swirl together sugar, eggs. I add butter to hot milk, add flour. A soufflé. I take the candied violets from the pantry, break them into small pieces and make a wreath for the top—because it is spring.

  “I’ve never seen these drawings before,” Steven says, from the study.

  “I found them in the closet. Max did them.”

  “They’re really good. It’s your mother, yes?”

  An arm raised, an arm down, no hat, then a fringed hat. The woman smiling. The woman holding a tambourine. The woman turning away.

  “Yes.”

  “I believe the lamb is ready.” It comes perfect to the table. New potatoes, baby carrots. We eat the spring. He praises the braided ring of bread I’ve made. I open the champagne. We drink the stars. I tell him about the spiral galaxies. He reaches for his heart, the small spiral taped to his chest. He talks about all the new treatments there are. He talks about the work he’s got at the lab, his computer pieces.

  “I must show you something.” I get up and from the desk drawer take out a picture. “I found this in Max’s stuff,” I say.

  His hands tremble. Red jumper. Patent leather shoes. Long flowing hair. “You made me so beautiful!”

  He smiles. He pours more champagne. He drinks little. He eats small portions now.

  I do not mean to cry.

  “Do you remember when our breath had shapes?”

  He nods. “Of course.”

  I am so afraid.

  Max hands me three eggs, oeufs à la neige, though it is spring. I pass Steven a perfect oval and he swallows it, another, carefully. The last one. I love you.

  “I saw the figure 5 in gold,” I say.

  He laughs.

  “We’ll need more champagne soon,” he whispers. He makes an elegant turn, reaches slowly for another bottle and opens it.

  “Andromeda is a spiral galaxy that we can see, Steven, but it is so far away that its light has been traveling for 2.2 million years to reach us. M33 too.”

  He senses I need his help. He gives me his mouthful of alphabets: S, AZT, AL 721, HIV. He gives me a smile, a sigh.

  When I close my eyes he is still there. When I look away he is still there.

  As he begins another story I let down my guard a bit more. P
robably he will hurt me more than I can possibly imagine. Certainly we will never be the same again. But it’s OK. He’s well into another story. I listen to the rise and fall of his beautiful, deep voice. I notice the slope of his shoulders, the arc of his arms as he speaks, his brown hands, his handsome face in candlelight. I will not leave his side. I will stay with him through whatever is to come. Of this I am sure. I will love him even more than I do now. He is my brother, and looking at him and knowing all of this, I realize it is as perfect a moment on earth as I can expect.

  I close my eyes and picture the hieroglyphs of hope:

  They are not hard to decipher. They are not really in code. Do not be afraid, my friend. I am with you.

  Giotto approaches Halley’s Comet. I move my hand toward yours across the dinner table.

  It is not nearly over.

  Data Shows Nucleus of Halley’s Comet Blacker Than Coal

  Darmstadt, West Germany, March 14 — Elated scientists at the European Space Agency said today that the spinning Giotto craft that streaked past the heart of Halley’s Comet early this morning revealed the comet’s mysterious nucleus to be extremely dark, rough and irregular, and bigger than had been thought.

  “There’s no question that the true color of the nucleus is black, absolutely black, blacker than coal, almost like velvet,” Horst Keller, an agency scientist, told a crammed news conference called to give preliminary results from the Giotto probe. “It’s very dark, the darkest dark you can imagine.”

  What the Light Looks Like

  Father, it is 9:30 p.m. on the 29th of March and I am standing outside of 154 West Eleventh Street, where you once lived. The light is warm and I wonder what meal you have just finished eating and what book from the huge library you are about to pick up. What the light looks like is your life. You are all alone, wearing your slippers, smoking your pipe.