by Paul Monette
8
Peter didn’t know who let it out about his paintings, but now it was too late to go back, so he supposed it didn’t matter. The phone was ringing at ten on Monday when he got to the office. It sounded at first like a hype. For a moment he only waited for it to be over, as if they were selling encyclopedias. Then, when it turned out to be for real, it was like winning a Nobel Prize in the wrong field. They were a gallery in Beverly Hills, and they proposed a show of all his pictures of the ranch for the middle of April. They could do it, they said, any number of ways—but suggested, since he was famous as something else, that they make it a benefit opening night, a percentage to go to a worthy cause of Peter’s choice. That way, he’d come off as a model of humility about his work as a painter, and the benefit publicity would drive up star attendance on the first night and insure a clean sweep of the walls as the days passed. If the stars bought, see, then everyone would want a piece. Did he have a better idea? He laughed out loud—genuinely modest, in this at least, but they didn’t know the difference—and asked for a little time to think. They didn’t like it. Just remember, they said, that we called first.
My God, he thought, and they’re not even dry. And then the second call came within the hour. This one bragged about their branches in New York and Amsterdam, and they promised, sight unseen, to take everything he did from here on in. They’d sign him up for life if they could. He said he was already represented. Who? they said, because we’ll outbid anyone. Peter hung up. Then, while he was talking a client into Roman shades to run twenty-seven feet across a wall of windows, a call came in from a painter’s agent. No, Peter said, but where did the guy find out about the pictures? With an audible shrug he answered back, “I don’t remember. It’s what people were talking about this weekend. What can I tell you?” And by that time Peter could only sit in silence, staring curiously at his trusty heap of fabric samples. Before noon, the Times had him on the phone. Because they were his buddies in the “Home” section, they at least took “no comment” for an answer.
“Are you sick or something?” Rita asked when he picked up the phone and said hello to her about a half hour later.
“I haven’t been bitten by a snake, if that’s what you mean. But I feel a little like Lana Turner on the stool at Schwab’s.”
“Has someone discovered you?”
“The whole western world has discovered me, Rita. Why aren’t you here? It’s afternoon already, and I have to hold your hand.”
“I’ll see you in twenty minutes. I’ll wait right here.”
“But you’re supposed to come here, remember? It’s called a job. Where are you?”
“Right now I’m lying naked on my bed. I’m just about to take a bath.”
“Are you sick or something?”
“Nope. Never better. It’s just I’ve been working my ass off to get something ready. Now hurry.”
“How did you even know I’d be here?”
“I’ve been keeping your calendar clean, Pete. You mustn’t ever forget how sneaky I am. In fact, if I were you, I’d think about it all the way home. It’ll get you all prepared.”
“Does it have to do with my paintings?”
“Your what? You mean Home on the Range? No, of course not. I thought you’d given that up.”
“Me, too. But it seems I might still be needed. I’ll tell you about it when I get there.”
“No, you won’t.”
“Why not? We never talk about me,” he said petulantly, in case she was trying to imply that he was too full of himself.
“You’ll see. There will be only one thing to talk about once you get here. Hurry,” she said again, and rang off.
It was true, he had to admit as he climbed into the pickup, that he’d done the course of his career in painting like a shooting star. First he was, and before he knew it, he wasn’t. The old revolving door trick. Even by the time he’d strewn the half-done things of the ranch all around the bedroom the night of the party, it was all for the hell of it. Now they were stacked in one of the closets, and he’d raised no cry when Hey took away his easel and paints as well, a couple of days later. But he could tell that Rita didn’t understand. She must have come to the conclusion that painting was just a phase he needed to go through, all fanfare and no gumption. In a way, he wanted to believe it himself.
But the fact was, he felt himself go very deep into the paintings only because of his accident. The first of them was crap, the one he abandoned by the fence to go get bitten. So when the second one filled him with power, he figured it was just this: He was better when he painted out of his head. He’d been lousy on location, he reasoned, only because he was cowed by the real thing. But then they got stranger and finer and fuller every day, and something else took over. Even if he was the only one to notice—Rita and Nick scarcely glanced at them, Hey protested they were all the same—Peter knew he was entering a temple. And then on that plateau, where he was expected to coast for a while being great, he realized something. He would only be good after something awful. He whipped up a desert and a sky in his pictures that got across the lightning shock of a rattlesnake’s strike. When the trauma passed, the brush was sluggish in his hand, like a stick poked in soft tar.
He didn’t grieve when the magic fled his fingers, and he knew he’d be able to do it again at the pitch of the next crisis, like a secret tunnel out of a battle. But in between, he could tell, the surface of the canvas would be flat and indecisive, the work mechanical. He refused to rely on peaks and furies and hurricanes because he had an intimation that a certain kind of painter lived impatiently, waiting for the next fire storm. Through all of this, Peter was not deluded. He wasn’t really good. He supposed great painters were possessed by their work, and he was jarred to wake up to himself experiencing even a breath of it. But he found, to his considerable disappointment, that he had a metaphysical distaste for being in the grip of forces—the metaphysical version of being squeamish about the splotches of paint on his hands and clothes. He couldn’t stand the mess. He was even afraid the fire storm painter produced his own apocalypse every now and then, just to get the juices flowing. Peter saw himself empty and only half alive, waiting for the next snakebite as if for a fix. Or not even, waiting but walking naked in the tall dry grass until something terrible took the bait.
Oh, come on, he said to himself, it’s not quite so fancy as that. He’d hoped to turn into a laser beam, and he hadn’t. He wanted his eye aligned with his brush hand like the hairs on a rifle sight, and he wanted the world broken down into planes and colors alone. It was meant to be done with the mind and not the heart, he thought, and that was that. Peter’s two laws in whatever he did were taste and style, which sound as if they amount to the same thing, but for him were like weather and climate, the active and passive faces of the one condition. Certain people criticized his living rooms as too impersonal, and he didn’t care because, as far as he was concerned, certain people were too unroomed. He thought of the move from interiors to art as a way of shedding the emotional turmoil of him and his clients, but otherwise there was no difference except in the degree of concentration, like a bowl of vanilla ice cream as against a tablespoon of extract. Serious painters, he knew, would have been horror-struck by his daring to compare the two, and his reliance on taste and style would have called up to them visions of San Marino matrons who bought blue paintings for blue rooms. But again, Peter didn’t care because he knew what he wanted. And when he found he couldn’t have it—that he was cursed after all with a heart when he painted and hadn’t a thought in his head—he had no choice but to give it up.
But he wasn’t going over all of this while he drove to Bel-Air in the pickup. His mind went into neutral, as it always did in a car. A blip sounded here and there in his radar and sent up an image from the morning just past, but only because his paintings had so taken over the news of the day. In fact, what was there left to say? He hadn’t suffered his way out of painting. He’d only thrown up his hands. Rita and Nic
k had probably thought more about why he’d put away his paints than he had—and, too, they’d probably done the thinking in a car. They both had minds that raced when they were on the road, though Nick’s was more finely tuned to four speeds from years of practice. Rita was a novice at it, and she didn’t so much think as conceive of things whole, which then would hang in her mind in a dazzle, like the setting sun. Peter went blank. He leaned slightly forward over the wheel, and for once he didn’t look like Noel Coward. He’d never gotten used to doing it himself, as if the generations of carriage drivers in Russia had refined the skill of traveling roads right out of him. He made a better passenger. And he didn’t mind that other people did most of his thinking for him. He may not even have noticed.
He certainly wasn’t going to make the moves on art before he talked to Rita and Nick. Though the thing had already snowballed in such a way as to blur where it all got started, it couldn’t have begun anywhere else but at the party. It was clearly the work of his clients, flexing their connections. He thought he’d left the paintings lying about to show that he had a private world they couldn’t invade, but the plan apparently backfired. His decorated women wanted him happy, and his two weeks’ private convalescence had whipped them up to a frenzy. No matter what he’d been doing to pass the time in his confinement—baking cakes or papier-mâché—they would have been on the phone to people who owed them favors. Peter was the one they’d decided to take care of, as if by common consent. He didn’t know if other decorators got the same treatment, since decorators tended for professional reasons to barely be on speaking terms. Perhaps, Peter thought when he couldn’t stand it and felt like running away to be a gypsy, it had most to do with the fate of princes. The very rich had always made their money in shady deals—none more shadily, surely, than the princes in Russia—but the money in LA was still too immediate to have shaken off the dirt, or maybe it only seemed that way in the company of princes. In any case, they couldn’t bear it if they had to watch Peter measure the drapes, and giving him too much money calmed them down. It may have been, too, that they were trying to buy fate off when they coddled Peter. If the Russians hadn’t been able to pay their way out of the slaughter in 1917 with all their assets, then nobody was safe. With Peter, at least they were taking care of one of their own. They’d expect the same themselves when they went into exile.
So Peter could do it if he wanted to. The connections would handle the details of doing it right, and even Peter knew they were talking high finance when they started talking galleries in Beverly Hills and Amsterdam. He and Nick had seen a hundred overnight successes. He’d been one. All you had to do was decide to go with the flow and not once wonder if you were any good. And then you spent the next five years trying to get back some say in the matter. Having done it once, he had to think twice—well, Rita and Nick would—about doing it again. He wouldn’t say he didn’t need the money, in case it might upset the balance of luck, but he’d have to have one good reason besides. And he couldn’t imagine anything worth the favors he’d suddenly owe to whichever of the ladies had set him up. Unless the attendant increase in power turned out to be so great it would leave him sailing over everyone’s head. In that case, he could close up shop and be a prince full-time. Turn out a painting now and then. The fewer the better.
That’s not what you want, Nick and Rita told him when he got that way. Princes, they said, went mad with boredom. He wondered sometimes how they came by their classified information, but he had to believe them. After all, they were the only two people he could be sure of who’d gotten over taking care of him. They didn’t think so, maybe, but Peter knew it in his bones. They would have referred him to all that thinking they did on his behalf, how it came in time to be second nature. It was the very thing Rita hesitated over before she took the job. And Nick would have added the stores he was assigned because Peter refused, the lies he was always telling over the phone to guard Peter’s privacy, the fits of temper he waited out. It was all true. But Peter had done enough thinking to figure them out, too, so it wasn’t a one-way street anymore. He let them fret and give him advice because they needed to, and in the meantime he was playing his instincts, turning the world to his account. Rita and Nick wouldn’t have understood where he was going because thinking had nothing to do with it. It had less to do with putting it into words than their lives did. But they must have felt how he’d begun to fight being driven by work, and as soon as they were ready to, they’d see they weren’t responsible for Peter any longer. Though he might still seem to need all the help he could get, it had come to be an act, to put up a wall between him and the people who wanted a piece of him.
He parked the truck close up to the green MG Nick had given Rita. The card said it was from both of them, and that was fine with him. He didn’t go out of his way to ask questions either. Meanwhile, it was hard for Peter to get too bothered by the pressure of what went on outside, where the clients and the galleries made the rules, now that he and Nick were in phase again. The days they spent together after the snake were all over, of course, but then they knew it couldn’t go on indefinitely. They were back to seeing each other mostly late at night. Time itself had changed. Now it was rife with qualities, the clock replaced by a scale that measured only intensities. It wasn’t just making love, though they turned to that again as if they’d been released from a vow of chastity. The body was all the soul they might get. But even more, they realized that it was possible to come back to the full flood of knowing just who they were. That is, they both understood what they’d come to themselves because they could see so exactly how the other arrived. Peter knew, for instance, what Nick ended up with after he’d abandoned his six-weeks’ love, just as he also knew it was Nick doing the leaving. Then he watched Nick and Rita glance off one another, probably because they’d never met anyone who looked so much like a mirror image—though only Peter appeared to see the likeness. Afterward, he watched them ricochet away to a safe distance. And all the time he was studying Nick, he saw the clearest picture of himself, as if every move Nick made gave him one of his own. Some things didn’t fit, like the green MG, because by his calculations Nick had passed that stage with Rita well over a week ago. But it was still all right with Peter. He didn’t have to know everything. Didn’t want to.
Crook House made no sound when he let himself in, so whatever Rita’s surprise might be, it didn’t require a crowd and didn’t resemble a party. That in itself was a nice surprise. He took the elevator down and would have walked around to the kitchen to see Hey first, but he noticed something funny in the living room. Don’t surprise me in here, he thought. Rita knew it had been the main design of his convalescence, and so she knew it had to be frozen just the way it was for a while. Peter had to brood over it, moving everything an inch or two until he’d got it perfect. When he went up close to the opium beds, he could see it was only a few things dropped on the rug going off into the hall toward Rita’s room. As if somebody clumsy had had his hands full. And the thing that had first caught his eye was only an envelope propped in the cushions on one of the beds, addressed to him. He tore it open.
“Follow your heart,” Rita had written on a plain white card.
He didn’t waste a second on the irony. His eyes darted to the trail of things on the carpet, and then, because they were so strange and dissimilar, he narrowed his look and began at the beginning. First was a pile of coins behind the divan, as if somebody’s pocket had sprung a hole. Gold, he could tell right away as he went down on his hands and knees to look, and probably Roman, but he wasn’t sure. He didn’t touch them, though the note didn’t tell him not to, but just in case she wanted things left the way they were. Besides, he’d already decided that when he was done, he’d bring Rita back and go through it again. He stood up and walked two paces, damned if he was going to crawl the whole way. This time it was a piece of jade worked as a belt buckle, carved with a couple of storks. Next, only a couple of feet further on, a pocket watch in a sterling case. Then
a powder horn which, if you could believe the inscription, once belonged to Wyatt Earp. And at the turn into the hall, more artful than all the rest, a blue enamel cigarette case with a snake going zigzag across it in diamonds.
The House of Fabergé, Peter guessed right off. He stooped to it and without thinking broke his rule and picked it up. Whatever the crazy thing was that Rita was mixed up in, it had so far produced two pieces of Fabergé. Ever since she gave him the picture frame, he couldn’t get it out of his mind that something fishy was going on. He knew how little Fabergé turned up on the open market, and he’d kept the frame to himself, at the back of his desk in the shop, for fear that someone would ask too many questions. The cigarette case in his hand, he knew, had to cost five or six thousand dollars. The other things on the floor weren’t cheap, but this was something else. He slipped it into the pocket of his suede jacket. He couldn’t just leave it on the floor.
Now what was he supposed to do? He called back into the living room, “Rita?” As if she might be watching him through a chink in one of the Japanese screens. But there was no answer. She was probably still in the bathtub. He turned into the hall to go to her room, and because his eyes weren’t yet accustomed to the dark, he didn’t see what was there and banged his knee against something that swiveled around and batted him hard on the hip. He jumped, his hand went out and threw up the light switch, and in the instant before he saw the trail continue all the way to Rita’s room, he thought, “But this is too much.” He meant the joke was over. He knew too well what everything cost, and what’s more, it was Rita who had taught him. Here was a telescope that probably belonged to Galileo, it looked so venerable. All the fittings in brass, cherry inlaid with ivory. And Peter knew there wasn’t an antique store in LA that could handle it without his having seen it. Things like this didn’t get priced. They were already all in museums. For good measure, Rita had draped and tied a string of pearls around the lens like a constellation, and he knew she was gilding the lily willfully, as if to say there was no end to this.
