by John Langan
Naturally, nothing happened. The night was quiet and peaceful. I fell asleep pretty much the second my head hit the pillow, and slept a dreamless six hours, until the sound of Roger packing wakened me. I sat up in bed and he said, "Did I wake you? I'm sorry. I thought we should get an early start." You know, I was so well-rested, so happy at being well-rested, that I bit off the nasty reply at the tip of my tongue, threw back the covers, and went downstairs for breakfast.
It was the same the following night. The drive back from the Cape had been uneventful—Roger drove the entire way, and we rode pretty much in silence. Déjà vu. Roger vibrated with tension. After the relative calm of the last few days, the stress was pouring off him in heavy waves. When I glanced over at him, I was sure I'd see him tapping his hands on the steering wheel, chewing his lip, bobbing his knee, anything to release the energy thrumming along his nerves. Instead, his hands were steady, his mouth closed, his legs calm. I thought about asking him if he were nervous, but I knew he'd offer me some kind of lie like, "Why? There's nothing for me to be nervous about."
Once we turned from 90 to 87, my sensation of Belvedere House returned—had been with me for some time, gradually rising in volume. By the time we were turning off the Thruway for Huguenot, the skin on my arms and legs was rigid, as if Roger had turned the air-conditioner on full-blast. Rather than taking the back way, down Soldier, to the house, Roger drove along Main Street. This took us past the turn-off for the college, past Pete's and Prospero's Books—why am I telling you this? You live there. Up the street from Prospero's, I saw Village Hall and almost jumped. I half-expected a sign of what had occurred there to be visible. I don't know what, a heavy black cloud hanging over the place, something like that.
If the sight of Village Hall startled me, then I'm not sure what reaction you'd expect me to have seeing Belvedere House spread across the windshield—a gasp, or a massive shudder—nausea, even. Although this was the place that was responsible for transforming Roger's curse from empty invective to loaded weapon—or the home of whatever was responsible—the only emotion I felt as Roger pulled the car into the driveway was vague relief. How's that for perverse? Better the devil you know, I guess.
After Roger unloaded the suitcases and carried them up to the bedroom, he vanished upstairs into his office. I contemplated pursuing him, cornering him and resuming my quest to persuade him to lift his curse, but the chances of me succeeding seemed slim at best. Slim—how about nonexistent? I hadn't arrived at any better arguments since our cemetery showdown last night. My most effective line of attack continued to be, If I'm wrong, prove it to me, break the curse, which hadn't been that effective.
Instead of going up after Roger, I left the suitcases where he'd laid them on the bed and went downstairs and back out. We'd left the Cape before ten, and even with a brief stop for lunch, were back in Huguenot by three. I took the car to the post office to pick up our mail. No doubt Roger would sequester himself in his office for the rest of the day and most of the night, besides, making up for lost time. At some point, if he hadn't done so, I'd shuffle through our collection of take-out menus, decide which one sounded most appealing—or least unappealing—and call in an order that I'd probably go pick up myself. Later on, I'd channel-surf for a couple of hours before bed. Later still, no doubt I'd be up following Roger around the house. It doesn't take very long for whatever rut you thought you had escaped to reassert itself, does it?
On impulse, on my way back to Belvedere House, I kept driving, along Founders to Addie and Harlow's. I wasn't sure if they'd be in. I've never been able to remember Addie's schedule at the library, and if she wasn't working, there was a good chance she and Harlow would've gone out. Luck was with me. They were home, and on the pretense of returning the key to the Cape House, I spent the rest of the day with them. When she saw me, Addie said, "You're home early." She didn't argue with me when I said that Roger had been impatient to resume one of his projects—true enough—but she looked concerned all the time we were together. They invited me to join them for dinner—they were planning a trip to a Vietnamese place next to Penrose—and I'm not sure whether they thought it was strange that I accepted. I mean, here I was, back ahead of schedule from a vacation with my husband, agreeing to go out to dinner without him. Addie offered to call and invite Roger. I told her not to bother. He was already engrossed in his work, I said, I'd bring him something from the restaurant.
Unusual or not, they went along with it, and the three of us had a very pleasant meal at the Green House, which was the ground floor of a large house located a couple of blocks over from Penrose. Throughout the ride to and from Poughkeepsie, and the meal itself, Addie wanted to talk about Roger's and my trip, which was a little tricky. She would say things like, "Oh, you went to Marine Salvage? Isn't it great?" and I would force my mouth into a smile and say, "They have so much stuff in there."
The trickiest moment of the evening came when Harlow asked, "And Roger? How was he?" I was in the middle of drinking from the beer I'd ordered, and I almost choked on it. Once I'd brought my coughing fit under control, I said, "Sorry—went down the wrong way. Roger? Roger is—he's coping. There's a lot for him to work through, still; I guess he's doing his best." I'm sure they knew I was lying. My reasons must have seemed mysterious, but they respected whatever was compelling me.
I came home that night tipsy from three bottles of beer and two sizable after-dinner cognacs. I wouldn't say I was drunk—not by the time I said good night to Addie and Harlow and drove the quarter-mile home—but I'm glad I didn't have to drive any further, and I'm glad it was along a quiet street. That would've been just what I needed, my own trip to the Village of Huguenot jail. Maybe I could've made an unholy deal, too.
The alcohol meant that I went straight to bed, and that I stayed there even when the mattress shifted deep in the night as Roger rose to resume his sleepwalking. It also meant that I was greeted the next morning with a stabbing headache and a tongue wrapped in gauze. Roger was already in his office. I heard his footsteps overhead as I was brushing my teeth. I wandered downstairs and put on a fresh pot of strong coffee. The prospect of breakfast made the dinner I'd enjoyed so much the night before threaten to put in a second, less pleasant appearance. Coffee brewed, I filled a large mug with it and stirred in a generous helping of maple syrup. I know it sounds gross, but it's the only hangover cure that's ever worked for me.
If Roger had picked up where he'd left off, then so would I. Fresh cup of maple coffee in hand, I climbed the stairs to the library, detouring to the bathroom for a couple of ibuprofen. Shortly thereafter, I was online, Googling Rudolph de Castries.
There were something like thirteen thousand hits for the guy. The official homepage was at the University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana. I started with that. Whoever designed the site had a flair for the baroque that bordered the outright tacky. The background was this sulfurous yellow, while the name—"Locimancy"—and menu options were deep purple. There was a quotation from de Castries in the same, overripe purple: "All things are alive as we make them live," as well as a black-and-white photo of him. Either the site designer had deliberately reversed the picture's colors, or they'd posted a negative. The photo showed de Castries from about the waist up, seated and apparently talking to someone off-camera. He was wearing an oversized white—which is to say, black jacket over a loose white shirt, but you could tell he was tall and skinny from the way the clothes sagged on him. His hands were surprisingly short, not what you would expect for an artist. The right one was reaching into his jacket pocket; the left was held up—I couldn't tell whether to make a point, or support the cigarette burning in it. His dark hair was long for 1947, the date a subscript gave the picture. There was nothing remarkable about his face. It was young, nose long and bulbous, cheekbones high and flat, eyes dark. There was a kind of merriment in the way the eyes narrowed, the corners of the mouth lifted.
The homepage was bordered by what I took to be stylized roses—also too purple—until I
focused on one and saw it was a hybrid, a cross between a rose and a human skull. Look at it one way, it's a flower; look at it another, it's a skull. Very nice; very subtle.
The remainder of the morning, I spent navigating the website. Tackiness aside, it was fairly complete. I read de Castries's biography. I ran through pictures of him and his associates. I looked at selected examples of his art. I clicked on links to short essays he'd written on painting. I skimmed the single interview he'd given, to an art critic from the Village Voice. As I read, I jotted notes on a legal pad. At some point, I leaned over and switched on the printer. I printed de Castries's most famous painting, Locimancy, as well as the short essays—all of which shared the painting's title, with "#1" or "#2" to distinguish them—and the interview. When I was finished, I went back and printed the biography, too. Satisfied I'd seen everything the site had to offer, I bookmarked it, logged off, and shut down the computer. I closed my eyes, leaned back in the chair, and exhaled.
The cup of maple coffee was long finished, and hadn't done much good anyway, so I left the library for a shower. Standing with the hot water beating on my neck—another headache remedy—I sifted through the dozens of screens still glowing in front of my mind's eye. I didn't know what I was doing—not really—how any of this was supposed to help Roger and me. It was as much about following a hunch—if not pursuing an obsession. I'd suspected Thomas Belvedere was connected to the house's weirdness, and now I'd not only substantiated that suspicion, I had a chance to work out the details of it. Or so I told myself. To be honest—I don't know if you've ever done this, but when you're in the middle of some big project—for you, I guess it would be a story or a novel—have you ever just stopped where you are and started working on something else? You tell yourself it's related, and maybe it is, but it's not what you should be doing. Maybe you need a break—maybe you've hit a wall—maybe it's sheer perversity. I think—I think there was more perversity to what I was doing than there should have been—as much a feeling of "I'll do whatever I want," as anything.
Which meant that I had spent the morning learning about a guy who'd been born in 1930 in San Francisco to a family with a reputation for artists and eccentrics. Rudolph's father and his siblings had been a varied crew. Daddy had been a sculptor who'd had limited success with his original creations before deciding to reinvent himself as an archaeologist so he could sell his knock-offs of famous Medieval pieces more convincingly. He made a killing at it, was even invited to give a lecture on the Cathedral of Chartres to a private gentlemen's club, but was eventually caught by the police after an irate collector discovered he'd been duped. The story had made the front pages of the San Francisco papers, prompting Rudolph's mother to take what money remained in the bank account and flee to a second cousin's in Greenwich Village. If Daddy de Castries hadn't been bad enough, Uncle Theo and Aunt Marguerite had been into magic. Theo had written an unreadable book whose title I can't remember. Mega- something. Apparently, he'd enjoyed playing the part of a sorcerer. As for Aunt Marguerite, she'd become a warlock. Not a witch, she said, witches and warlocks were two completely different things. She was linked to a number of second- and third-tier Hollywood stars, male and female, and was rumored to have consulted with at least one of the city's mayors. If I'd wanted a topic for a novel, some kind of sprawling, multi-generational triple-decker with heavily satiric overtones, I couldn't have asked for a better one. I wasn't planning on novel-writing anytime in the near future, however. Had Uncle Theo or Aunt Marguerite been among the living, I would have considered calling them for advice, but they were long since in their graves—under mysterious circumstances, needless to say.
Shower finished, I toweled myself dry and went to the bedroom in search of clothes. We'd fallen behind in the laundry, lately. I say we, but I mean Roger, since that was one of his duties. After some searching, I located a pair of jeans and an old concert t-shirt that weren't too wrinkled. My headache lingered, though the combination of ibuprofen and hot shower had forced it to retreat to a more tolerable distance. I wandered downstairs to make lunch, which consisted of popping the top on a can of Campbell's Chunky Beef Soup. Over soup and a couple of pieces of only-slightly-stale bread, I tried to organize what I'd learned about Rudolph de Castries himself.
He'd grown up in Greenwich Village, spending time in the company of the artists his mother and her second-cousin associated with. Mommy, it appeared, continued to have a thing for the artists, despite several disastrous relationships. She tended to be drawn to men whose proclivities led in a more or less straight line to jail. Rudolph's schooling had been erratic, complicated by early alcoholism—the result, it seemed, of too many secret drinks snuck him at this or that party. By the time he was thirteen, he was skipping school for days at a time. Within a couple of years, it was weeks at a time, and when he turned sixteen it was good riddance. In a sense, that was as exciting as his life ever got. You could say he struggled with his alcoholism, but it was more a case of him struggling to find the money to buy the next bottle. Even that wasn't much of a drama. Momma de Castries kept him in cash, except for the times they argued and didn't speak to one another for months. Then Rudolph took whatever work was available, most of it menial. No excitement on that front, either. He was a conscientious employee who was able to hold his craving for a drink in check until the end of his shift. When he was twenty-five, he collapsed on his way home from a friend's gallery opening. By the time anyone stopped to see what was wrong with him, he was dead. The autopsy would deliver the verdict: his liver had disintegrated. He was buried in Queens, given a simple headstone that his admirers would replace with a more elaborate monument two decades later. His mother lived to attend that ceremony, which featured readings by a couple of poets and a talk by an art historian from Columbia, but her life wasn't very happy. Apparently, when she died the month after, hit by a city bus, there were witnesses who claimed she'd deliberately stepped out in front of it.
That had been the short, unhappy life of Rudolph de Castries. It had been redeemed by one thing and one thing only, his art. From the time he'd been a child—before he could write, he could draw, and draw well. The artists who attended his mother's parties tended to patronize him at first, until they registered the intensity in his brown eyes, after which most of them left him alone. A few gave him advice, pointers on how to improve his pictures. He drew incessantly, in pencil and crayon. His small bedroom was wallpapered with his latest efforts, which he'd tear down and replace every couple of months. Not many of those drawings have survived—Rudolph threw the ones he'd stripped from his walls out with the trash—but those that have are striking. Some critic or another described them as Hieronymus Bosch's ideas executed by Michelangelo. The pages were packed full of the elaborate imagery you find in Bosch, but it was rendered with the weight, the solidity, you associate with Michelangelo. One of the visitors to the de Castries residence gave Rudolph five dollars for his pick of the drawings. Rudolph used that to buy a basic set of oil paints and a couple of brushes and began to experiment.
Left to his own devices, Rudolph might have become an interesting enough painter—his early work plays with deliberate flatness in a way that manages to evoke Rousseau and still be its own thing. The subject matter was bizarre as ever. No one's sure how or when Rudolph first encountered The Garden of Earthly Delights, but there's no doubting the impression it made on him. From the ages of, say, fifteen to nineteen, as he's running through these different styles like Picasso on fast-forward, Bosch is never far—it's as if he's elaborating that one painting. What Rudolph was doing was sufficiently far outside the mainstream of American painting for there to be no danger of him becoming rich and famous from it. At the same time, it was done with enough talent and originality that he was able to place individual pieces in small shows, and sell one now and again.
I've seen the early paintings—there are a couple hanging in MoMA, and maybe a half-dozen others scattered throughout the Manhattan galleries. I like them even less than Belve
dere's stuff. There's no doubt the man who painted them was gifted—the detail in them is remarkable—but most of them resemble covers to bad science fiction novels—Attack of the Dragonfly People; The Ant-Man vs. The Hummingbird Woman. They feel like technical exercises. It's as if, here was this talent waiting for its subject matter.
Rudolph found that subject matter when he was twenty. That was when a copy of the book his Uncle Theo had written came into his possession. I've tried to track it down, but it's notoriously difficult to lay your hands on. Theo had it privately printed, and only a hundred copies at that, so it's one of those books you read about instead of read. From what I can tell, it's something of a cult classic. I'm surprised no one's tried to reissue it. Anyway, based on what people who've read the book have said, Theo's book has to do with cities. He had this idea that, once a city reaches a certain size, it comes to life. I don't mean metaphorically; I mean, they achieve consciousness. He uses all this bizarre math to show how this happens. Apparently, the size and shape of the buildings play into it. So does where they're placed in relation to one another. After a city becomes aware, it seeks to manifest that consciousness, which Theo claimed it does through a variety of avatars—apparently, he catalogued a dozen different shapes in which a city can express itself, each more bizarre than the last.
