Daylight

by Elizabeth Knox

  They did eventually meet. Eve sought a meeting after she read Hilxen’s article about Jean’s first marriage. He had interviewed Anna Beder, the photographer to whom Jean was married from 1927 to 1936. Their alliance was a famous one—famously difficult and dramatic—and it had been written about often, by art historians and memoirists. What Tom’s article contributed to the discussion was a sensitive interview with Madame Beder talking for the first time about Ares in a tone that was both tender and temperate. She covered familiar material, but her interviewer had helped her rethink. Jean Ares was still a maddening monster of ego and appetite, but, Beder said, at the article’s conclusion: “I’m sure that Eve Moskelute has a different story, and had a different Jean Ares.”

  Eve issued an invitation. She asked Tom to a lunch she gave each year, late September, at the house in Cap de Nice. At their meeting Eve was pleased by Tom’s courtesy, his boyish courtliness. She liked his ardent interest in Ares and in all Ares’s family. He paid attention to everyone and never appeared rushed or rapacious for information. She liked the way he carried plates, handed Jean’s aged sister to her chair, retied a six-year-old grandchild’s sash, and kicked a ball with the boys.

  But, toward the day’s end, his convivial attention to Eve became more of an approach. There were things he thought he should mention. He had read her book. He said they must have a talk, practitioner to practitioner, about the nature of his task. He said, “I welcome an opportunity to discuss our discipline, as well as my subject.” He said things that Eve was sure he believed she wanted to hear—for instance, the airy platitude: “How can we know to write a life?” He clearly thought she needed a sign of his respectful attitude to the compromises and uncertainties of a biographer’s art. Tom’s pose was perhaps meant to be reassuring but was a routine gesture of abdication, of abdicated responsibility. It was like his courtesy: Tom figuratively stood aside for Eve, seeming to say, After you. You knew him. Seeming to say, Informants first.

  Eve was annoyed that Tom had chosen this approach, that he had chosen to coat his real passion for Jean’s work with this sugary plausibility.

  Also at Eve’s lunch was one of Ares and Anna Beder’s grandchildren, a boy of nineteen who regarded his grandfather’s fame as a favor he could call in, and a chip he could cash in, anywhere between Menton and Marseille. The boy was very keen on Tom—an American biographer was just another sign of his grandfather’s specialness, a specialness that Eve knew the boy secretly hoped would someday shine in him, too. Though the boy hoped to profit by Ares and to angle himself to reflect Ares’s radiance, he also hoped to inherit his grandfather’s energy and appetite, to find, as Ares had, a cataract at the back of the cave of his character. The boy was enthusing to Tom, in competent English, about Ares’s work and the sort of soul “from whose deep rose those rainbow monsters.”

  “Ah … but do we want to buy into the myth of the Artist?” Tom said, with mealymouthed snubbing sophistication. He met Eve’s eyes, complicitous.

  A week after the lunch Tom called. He said that he was sorry they had “got off on the wrong foot.” Sorry they had made a poor start.

  “Start of what?” Eve said. Then, “What did you mean by what you said? Were you letting me know that Ares’s biography wasn’t buying into Ares’s myth? Or did you mean—and I think you did mean—that you don’t believe in the specialness of artists? Do you think that it’s only a sorry need we have to suppose that an artist like Ares wasn’t like you and me? Do you suppose that my belief that my husband was special is only a disorder of worship in a secular age?

  “Listen,” Eve said. She told Tom that she was one of those people who had laughed at half of Jean’s paintings. “He liked that. I laughed because his paintings were maddeningly amusing, as well as beautiful. Sometimes I’d watch him work. I’d share his light and read. Or I’d just watch him, awed and appalled. And when he was done—I’d know because he’d clean his fingers—he would turn around to me, with the old turps-covered towel in his hands, and raise his eyebrows to ask me what I thought. I’m thinking of one occasion now. An example. I can remember asking him, ‘Why that expression?’ And he looked at the painting and said, ‘Ah, I see,’ and began to laugh. And I said, ‘That man is going to lose the wrestling match because he’s busy being shocked by the size of his opponent’s feet.’ Then we laughed harder, and sat, laughing, and wiping our eyes.” Eve said to Tom Hilxen that she thought that the life in Jean’s work came out of Jean. That all his canvases were mirrors he’d once looked into and which had taken a print of his positive attention. “His work was special,” Eve said, “and there isn’t any more of it. No more where that came from. Because, gosh”—she slapped her forehead, despite the fact that she was on the phone and the gesture would be lost on Tom—“his work came from him.”

  Tom was quiet, listening.

  “What’s more,” Eve said, “you’re not like me. We can’t indulge in talk about ‘the nature of the task.’ When I wrote about Chambord all I did was move the dust about. You’re interviewing the family of the deceased. We’re the bereaved.”

  “I understand,” Tom said.

  “Good,” Eve said, and hung up on him.

  Later she relented. She didn’t regret what she’d said, only discovered that she’d been wrong about one thing—that in writing about Chambord she’d stirred up more than dust.

  A scant month after the family lunch, Eve took her anonymous eighteenth-century illumination to a picture framer. She and the framer unpacked it together while they discussed how best to mount it. A calling card fell out of the packaging. The card said “Martine Dardo” and carried an address in Genoa and a phone number. Eve put the card in her pocket. Over the next few days she would take it out occasionally and brood upon it. Then she called Martine Dardo. They arranged a meeting. Eve was to visit Martine at her house one evening. The evening arrived, and Eve appeared carrying a basket of chocolate orange sticks from Geoff de Bruges. She found that Martine Dardo wasn’t alone. In Martine’s twilit living room there was a young woman standing at the window, a young woman with butchered brown and blond hair, a big-eyed, jittery young woman who, after a long bewildered moment, Eve was able to recognize as her twin, her sister—her dead sister—Dawn.

  Tom Hilxen conducted his interviews with Eve in the last year of the decade in which she’d lived with Ares. As an interviewer Tom was scrupulous rather than sympathetic. He listened, leaning away from the black radiator of a big tape recorder, as stolid and as imposing as his machine. Tom’s neutral attention imbued each interview with a sense of responsibility. They were doing vital, serious work. If Tom had been more eager, Eve might have felt that they were having a conversation, that she was telling her stories for the benefit of the person present, not just posterity.

  Jean had been a very good listener, avid and responsive, and had trained Eve in intimate conversation. She could talk to Jean for hours and never feel like a broadcaster. Rather, she would feel like a helmsman of a boat on a river, negotiating a current, watching the riverbank and watched by it, traveling somewhere fresh and unexpected on the flow of her husband’s perfectly navigable attention. Talking to Tom—and his machine—exhausted Eve. She felt that she was giving blood (and she knew about that, gave regularly, wrapped up with her lost-and-found twin in a strange and more desperate version of their embraces during the thunderstorms of their childhood).

  Eve talked and relived her marriage. It was like talking to an insurance assessor about what was missing after a theft or fire and discovering just how irreplaceable it all was. She grieved; she filled her wineglass too often and lost her temper with the biographer, who was there, all ears—ears and not much else—assaying every word, sorting the dross of her feelings from the heavier mineral of his subject’s life. Eve cried and insulted Tom, and he was finally moved—apparently moved—because he put his arms around her and soothed her by repeating, over and over, the name of one of Jean’s famous paintings—Drunken Eve.

  Once Eve
had lost her temper with Tom she began to enjoy his company, rather than only submit dutifully to his project. She found she was able to talk about him to Dawn in an amused and disparaging way. To tell “Tom” stories.

  “Tom’s working on reconciling one Ares with another,” Eve told Dawn. “For instance—Anna Beder’s Ares and mine. I spoke to Anna the other day and she said—and this is an old woman’s perspective—that Tom just doesn’t understand how much people can change over a lifetime. But I think Tom knows full well, only Tom thinks Jean shouldn’t have changed—or, enjoying the kind of influence he enjoyed, Jean should have been a better person, or possibly that the only mitigating circumstance of Jean’s criminally great talent should have been an inhuman consistency. Tom frets about it. He’s been in thrall, imaginatively, to Jean for ten years and he feels resentful. You see … Tom loves Jean, but Jean doesn’t love Tom.”

  “So is that why Tom’s having an affair with you?” Dawn said. “His unrequited love for your husband?”

  Eve laughed and said that she hoped Tom’s biography was his love’s consummation and that she and Tom were possibly only caught up in the excitement of a shared project. “But I like Tom, Dawn. And I feel as if he’s the very last gift Jean has given me. I’m grateful for Tom.”

  “Grateful to Jean for Tom,” Dawn said.

  Eve told her sister that her general sense of gratitude to Jean Ares for everything—her life, his world—would probably stay with her forever and would, in time, include all sorts of other things that life brought her.

  “Are you sure you’re not just a fetish to Tom?” Dawn said. “Isn’t that what fucking a great man’s widow is usually about?”

  “But we get on so well,” Eve said, rather weakly—though it was true.

  She and Tom enjoyed each other. She was the first person to read the manuscript of his biography—and had her say before his agent and his commissioning editor. Then the book was in production and he was back and forth between the States and Europe. Eve saw less of him, but they kept up a lively correspondence over the proofs. It was vital, Eve understood, for her to have an intimate relationship in the world, one at least, among all her many friends and acquaintances and Jean’s numerous relations, for her to have someone near to her in the world aboveground. Because Eve, like Persephone, spent half her life in an underworld with Dawn and the two vampires of Dawn’s nest. Tom’s passions all had recognizable social faces. He was ambitious; he fought scholarly battles, had intellectual foes, was exacting, fastidious, and decorous. He wasn’t ever to be found drowsy and fastened mouth-to-mouth with someone by dried blood.

  On each of Tom’s returns to Europe he and Eve would resume their affair. In 1983 the book came out, in several languages, and was widely promoted, so that Eve would encounter it often—its cover and herself as Eve among the Arlesiennes.

  Tom stopped over on an author tour and took Eve to dinner. They went to a restaurant with no view and with a small menu serving only Niçoise cuisine. Eve was pleased to note that Tom had finally absorbed this one of her lessons on how to live in a place of high-volume tourism and passionate local epicurism. She watched him with the waiters and saw that he knew exactly how to behave. She was proud of him.

  Over dessert he asked her whether she thought—honestly—that their relationship had any future.

  Eve was careful. She said that she hoped that, like her, he was happy to go on as they were until things changed. “For instance,” she said, “you find a new subject, or a job that keeps you in America all the time. Or until one of us becomes committed to someone else in a way that means we must end this.” Then Eve asked Tom if there was someone else.

  Tom shook his head. Then he said that he just didn’t see any future in their relationship.

  Eve remained calm. She considered the nine years between their ages. She said she was sorry, she wasn’t very good at thinking about the future. “But you know that.”

  Tom nodded. “Yes. You lost your sister. And Ares was in his seventies.”

  How wonderful it was, Eve thought, to be so succinctly understood.

  “It’s the age difference,” Tom said.

  Eve was thirty-nine; he, thirty-one.

  “You want a family?” Eve said.

  “Well … that,” Tom said, as though it wasn’t that. As though the problem for him was that Eve was fading and depreciating in value. Eve knew that she was still rather beautiful. But she knew exactly how much ground she had lost between twenty-seven and thirty-nine—could see herself at twenty-seven whenever she looked at the lustrous Dawn.

  “I see,” Eve said. Then she told Tom that naturally she wouldn’t hold him. But she’d thought they were having a marvelous time.

  Tom took her hands. He said that he felt very privileged to have known her.

  And Eve, looking around the restaurant, said, with only mild reproach, that she wished he’d waited till they were alone to have this conversation.

  “I suppose it was cowardly of me,” he said.

  “A little.”

  “I didn’t want any dramatics.”

  Tom didn’t want dramatics, but he continued to come and go in Eve’s part of the world, and when he was there he’d call up and visit her and would sit staring at her with mournful expectation.

  In 1984 he was in Arles for several weeks, working on a documentary some American director was making about Ares. Tom told Eve, over the phone, that they’d been filming in the Roman Storehouse when the strangest thing had happened. “A woman appeared. A woman in white. She was watching us from a discreet distance, and I said to Pete that we should get a shot of her—a blurry long shot—and use it for Eve under the Arches. Pete said okay, but that perhaps we should ask first. So I approached her and—Eve—she looked like you. I was walking toward her, and the nearer I got, I kept expecting the illusion to dissipate. For there to be something different. Something amiss. But there wasn’t. This girl—she’s an Italian—she’s a dead ringer. She even has your mouth—like she’s looking for a fight. You know.”

  Tom was so excited by—as he saw it—this gift of coincidence. “So we’re going to use her,” he concluded.

  Eve carried the phone to the limit of its cord. She picked up a cup, a gilt-rimmed teacup with a mustache protector—some old Moskelute thing. She stood in the hallway and threw the cup at Dawn’s door.

  “What was that?” Tom said.

  Eve told him that her grandfather had tossed his teacup at her grandmother. “An incurable snob. German. Her father was Bismarck’s undersecretary. She never let anyone forget it.”

  “Eve. They’re not alive.” Tom was pedantic and not at all playful. It was his turn to astonish her, and she should be listening to his story.

  “No. But,” Eve said.

  Dawn’s door opened and Dawn peered around it, tousled. She yawned and flashed her spines at Eve, then brushed the shards of porcelain with her toes.

  “But,” Eve said to Tom. “There are no coincidences. How can this girl just look like me? You stay away from her.”

  “Jealous?” said Tom, and Eve could hear his smirk.

  “‘You are ambrosia to me,’” Eve quoted. “‘But in my mouth it is you who will become as a god.’”

  Tom said, “What?” Then, “Oh … Chambord again.” He was quiet, thinking.

  Eve looked into her sister’s eyes. Dawn had understood that it was Tom Hilxen on the phone and was smiling and twisting a lock of hair around one finger.

  “So, what you’re trying to say is that you’re the real oil, not some dewy twenty-something look-alike,” Tom said. “Oh, Eve. I have absolutely no intention of sleeping with this girl.”

  “All right,” Eve said, tired.

  “‘Absolutely no dramatics,’” Dawn said, quoting Tom.

  Tom wanted to know if someone was there with Eve.

  “Dawn is with me.”

  A pause. Then, “I see. The family ghosts. Sister, grandma, grandpa.”

  Eve asked Tom if he imagine
d that God loved him so much that He would send him—and this director Pete—a prop made of flesh. Then she said, “Dawn looks like me at twenty-seven.”

  Dawn said, “I’ll give him an ‘age difference.’”

  “Dawn is indignant on my behalf,” Eve said.

  “Oh, Eve,” said Tom. “Is this one of those put-on multiple-personality things? You never struck me as the histrionic type.” He sounded secretly pleased.

  Eve told Tom that he was a fool.

  The next time Eve saw Tom Hilxen he was lying, limp and pale, in Dawn’s bed, his nipples surrounded by wide aureoles of fresh bite wounds.

  Dawn told Eve that she’d quite like to keep Tom. But she didn’t husband him, and Eve had to watch him become gradually breathless, hollow-eyed, and shuffling. When she couldn’t bear to see more—or to have any part in what would happen—Eve went away. She went to Paris to stay with friends.

  Martine told her later what happened.

  Only Ila could “make” Tom. Dawn and Martine were only nestlings, too young to be infectious or to build their own nests. Ila, old, infectious, “a breeder,” was the only one able to decide who would join them.

  Silent Ila had been listening to what was said about Tom Hilxen—and he said no. He listened to Martine’s arguments. She said that Dawn couldn’t just let Tom go, because of the kind of man he was. “He digs and delves and tells people stories,” Martine argued. “He’s practically a vampire already—the way he latched on and fattened himself on Eve’s Jean.”

  “I don’t want him,” Ila said.

  Dawn and Martine badgered Ila so he withdrew to Dardo, to the house—his but in Eve’s name—on the Rue Oscura. He went into hibernation—as Martine and he had lately been teaching themselves to do. “Sleep more; eat less,” Martine said, like a mantra. It was a discipline at which Ila far excelled her. Martine could manage only a fortnight. Ila could hole up in July and not emerge until September.