“And what do you try to make when you paint?” the young woman asked me. She was not tilting her head in a certain way, but I noticed it.
“I’d be happy to make a cow, “I said.
She smiled, verged on a sound.
“I’ll tell you what I want to paint. I want to make a painting and have no idea what it is, but know that it’s a painting. Does that make sense to you?”
“Maybe if you said it in French.”
“I doubt that would help.”
“You’re noticing the way I walk,” she said.
I hadn’t, but I nodded anyway.
“It’s the walk I save for old men.”
“You practice it?” I asked.
“It comes naturally.”
“I believe you.”
“I too am a painter. I make watercolors.”
“I don’t have that kind of control. Too much thinking up front.”
Since she’d mentioned her walk I could not fail to pay attention to it. She bounced and wore her youth aggressively. She was beautiful. Her face didn’t matter. Her body didn’t matter. Anyone walking like that had to be beautiful. Every turn, every stop, every start was choreographed and yet completely free, improvised. She was jazz and I could have hated her for it, but I did not.
“Voulez-vous vous joindre à moi pour le café?”
“Alors formelle,” she said.
“I’m sorry, my French isn’t good enough to give you tu easily.”
“Your French is cute.”
“I get a headache trying to speak French,” I told her. “Especially listening. I don’t hear the language well.”
“Pity,” she said.
The word pity had never meant so much and perhaps so little as it did from her lips at that moment. The word itself, the two sounds of it, more so than the meaning, were not locatable. The word was there all right, but there like an electron is there.
“Yes, I will take coffee with you,” she said. “I will practice my English. And you can practice whatever it is you are trying to speak.”
“My name is Kevin.”
She shook my hand. “Victoire.”
Against my better judgment, which is to say that I was exercising no judgment at all, she and I walked from the Jardin du Luxembourg north on rue Bonaparte. We said nothing until we reached the fountain at Saint-Sulpice.
“Are you studying art?” I asked.
“Yes, at the École des Beaux-Arts.”
“Impressive.”
“Yes, it is,” she said and leaned against the low wall of the fountain. It was midafternoon on a mild but windy December day. Mist from the fountain floated in the air. I looked at the statues of lions.
“Let’s have that coffee,” I said.
She nodded and we walked over to the Café Mairie and sat outside under a heat lamp where the waiter gave me a knowing look that was either approving or disapproving, I could not tell, but either was equally troubling.
“The waiter thinks you’re young enough to be my daughter,” I said.
“Then he thinks too much,” Victoire said.
“At any rate, it’s polite of you to sit and talk me.”
“And you said you didn’t know how to flirt.”
“I’m forty-six years old, married with two children, and happy with my life.”
“Yet here you are.”
“Yet here I am,” I repeated.
“I know your work,” she said. “I’ve seen some paintings in magazines. I liked them.”
“Photographs of paintings are deceptive. You might not like them in person.”
“Perhaps.”
Coffee went on as one might have expected. Victoire told me about her watercolors, gently stroked my ego by talking about my own work, did so with the perfect, perhaps French, amount of constraint and then we parted with an agreement to meet for lunch two days later. We managed to end before I stupidly complimented her appearance. It dawned on me, as I wandered north along the busy rue de Rennes on my way to my hotel, that I could have said something like “You’re quite lovely.” I was at once proud of myself for not thinking to make such a vacuous assertion and dismayed, perhaps embarrassed, that I considered it even after the fact.
That night my wife called from Bordeaux. Linda told me she was enjoying her friend, but not so much Bordeaux. I told her about my coffee with the twenty-two-year-old.
“That’s wonderful,” she said. “I’m glad you got out. It’s good to meet people.”
“We sat at the Café Mairie.”
“Was she beautiful?”
It pained me to have to consider what might be an appropriate response, so I did what I always did, out of a lack of imagination, lack of a gauge of political delicacy, lack of a decent memory, I told the truth. “Yes, she was.”
“That’s wonderful.”
I nodded, though on the phone.
“I’m having lunch with her on Friday.”
“Just so long as you’re not late meeting my train.”
“Montparnasse?”
“Oui, quatre heures.” And with that Linda had exhausted her French and ended our conversation. “Good night,” she said.
“Night.”
That illusions are a physical fact is difficult to reconcile with the knowledge that reality is anything but real. All that I will tell you is true, but I have no idea what true is. I come by my ignorance honestly, perception beginning and ending at the same neurological point in space. I can tell you that I was still innocent when I hung up the phone that night, and yet I was not.
1979
If only I had had the excuse of misunderstanding why I was there, perhaps then some of the guilt would not exist, perhaps then I would not have blamed myself to this day, perhaps then I would not long for a piece of me that died that day. But my friend had come to me, depressed, fearful, lost, and he had asked for my help. I offered it willingly, if not completely innocently or selflessly. That was thirty years ago. It was May 1979. It might be tempting to suggest that this episode of my life here presented is some kind of playing out of a redemption story, and I do mean that in the most vulgar Christian sense, but that is just so much bullshit.
Richard came to me with a needlessly long story about his brother. Though Tad was older than Richard, Richard comfortably referred to him most of the time as Fup; the fuckup. Richard said it was commonly understood, but seldom acknowledged by his family. Fup had been in and out of detention, prison, abusive relationships, and an assortment of drug rehab programs. Tad had shot himself not once, but twice with the same habitually noncleaned pistol on different occasions. Tad was his mother’s favorite, a fact Richard read as fair enough given his brother’s difficulties, failures, and bad luck. Fup ought to have something, if not common sense or a modicum of good fortune. As it was reported to me, Richard’s mother had not heard from Tad in seven months and upon calling his last known number she was told that he was last headed for El Salvador. She did not think to ask why he was headed there, but was alarmed nonetheless. This alarm was of course well placed and of course affected badly the youngest child, a bipolar, anorexic German-language major still living at home, to the point that she was suicidal and this of course led Richard to believe that he had to do something, namely, find Tad. He asked me to go with him. Richard is my friend.
We were both twenty-four and probably, technically, insane or at least not in our right minds. Richard and I were both in our third year of graduate school at Penn, he in the middle of his dissertation on Beowulf, I in the middle of pretending I could pretend to be a painter, sharing a small, run-down house on Baltimore Avenue. It was a rough neighborhood in which I felt safe enough, though the house was set far too close to the busy street, because the house looked like shit, a hovel, and because it was therefore obvious that we had nothing worth stealing. Richard claimed to feel secure because I was black, not that he believed I could or would protect him, but because everyone else in the neighborhood was black and he felt that by mere ass
ociation he was more accepted. I told him to shut up.
“I don’t really understand,” I said. We were sitting in our nearfurnitureless living room on the bench in the bay window, watching some firemen attempt to stay clear of a crack addict from central casting who was swinging a shovel, guarding a wheel barrow of something that was on fire. “Just how do you know Tad’s in El Salvador?”
“His friends told my mother he was going there. Then I called the State Department,” Richard said.
“And they just up and told you he was there?” The sweeping red light from the fire truck was giving me a headache.
“No, they said, ‘Who are you and why do you want to know?’”
“Pretty much an admission.”
“Pretty much.”
“So what do you want to do?” I asked.
“He must have run into some kind of trouble. Maybe he’s in a jail cell and needs a lawyer. Maybe he’s in a hospital and can’t remember his name. Who knows? I need to go down there and see if I can find him. My mother and sister will go crazy. Crazier. Will you go with me?”
“El Salvador,” I said. “That’s far away. Man, just how hot do you suppose it is down there?”
“Low nineties. I checked.”
“That’s doesn’t sound so bad,” I said. It didn’t take a genius to see this was not a good proposition, but it did take an idiot to not see it. “Okay, I’ll go, but I don’t like it. Wouldn’t you rather be working on your dissertation?”
“This is more important. This is my brother. Here’s your ticket.” He handed me a Pan Am ticket jacket. “We change planes in Miami.”
I looked at the ticket. I liked the Pan Am logo, the blue and the white. “And just what would you have done if I had said no?”
“Never occurred to me.”
I always wondered, even as a child, and, from all reports, I was not an overly bright one, if there is a difference between good sense and common sense. Nous. I assume that common sense is not the sort of thing that requires specialized knowledge whereas good sense might. My father contended that common sense has nothing to do with good sense, just as common fashion has nothing to do with taste. One might have the common sense necessary to see a painting as a waste or abuse of pigments, linseed oil, and linen, but not have the good sense to buy it. It was clear to me as I packed a bag that I was practicing neither.
Ilopango Airport was small and acutely busy, looking more like a large bowling alley than anything else. Soldiers, in their olive drab uniforms and camouflage caps, paraded with some swagger back and forth in front of the area where the bags were not mechanically conveyed, but tossed from carts into the middle of the room. We grabbed our bags and walked through the entry point essentially unchecked, but extremely noticed. Our lack of Spanish seemed to annoy people less than I had imagined it would. I sensed certainly that we were filthy Americans and that our age and appearance suggested that we might have been there for a rather limited range of reasons or ventures, but, possibly for that latter reason, we buzzed through customs with merely a nod and still-zipped duffels. As I passed the point, as my passport was stamped with only a fleeting, but no less reproving, glance, I had the feeling that I had been there before, that I would be there again, not in that country, but passing unregistered, however noted, through a station that was memorable, perhaps profound, yet immaterial, but not completely nugatory. Back then, in my more sincere, naive, or wet-behind-the-ears artistic self, I might have chosen the word unavailing, the important part being that I would not have cared if I was right or wrong.
Outside, while we waited for a taxi, several kids danced to a blaring tape of the Village People singing “In the Navy.”
“That’s just wrong,” Richard said.
I was sad that I sort of liked it.
The tune was still in my head when the taxi let us out in front of the American Embassy. Annoying as it was, I almost sang the song aloud as I looked across the huge traffic roundabout at a grand fountain. The embassy itself, though large, was not so grand, looking like a rectangular layer cake more than anything else. We showed our passports to a refrigerator-shaped marine who was no more moved by or interested in us than the customs agents had been. He waved us into the compound. Richard told the man at the desk why we were there, that we were looking for his brother, that nothing had been heard from him in months, that the fear was that he might have been arrested and left to rot in a jail or dungeon someplace. It was my opinion that Richard was talking too much, but I didn’t interrupt.
We sat for just over an hour before another man came out to us. I thought he looked alarmingly similar to the first man. He was tall, nearly handsome, blond, and he wore an air of dismissal that wafted in front of him like so much cologne. He sat in a chair across from us in the waiting area. Richard repeated his speech about why we were there, but this time he added a bit about the hospital before mentioning that he worried his brother was festering in a cell somewhere.
“And just what might your brother have been arrested for?”
“I don’t know if he’s been arrested,” Richard stammered. “I only offer that as a possibility. We haven’t heard from him in so long. He could, as I said, just as well be in a hospital.”
“But you did say jail. Why did you think he’d be in jail? Has your brother ever been arrested?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“In Baltimore. And Philadelphia.”
“Boston,” I added.
“And yes, Boston,” Richard said. “But I don’t see what this has to do with anything.”
“I see. What was he arrested for?”
Richard let out a long breath and leaned back in his chair. “A couple of times for possession of drugs and once for discharging a firearm.”
“What is your brother’s name?”
“Tad Scott.”
The man leaned forward the way one does when one is about to leave. “I don’t see that there is much I can do to help you.”
“You can’t call around?” Richard asked. “Just check jails and hospitals, something like that?”
“If he was looking for his seventeen-year-old sister who was down here with a Christian youth group from Massachusetts, the niece of a congressman, could you make a few calls then?” I asked.
“Yes, then I could and I probably would make a few calls. I might even give a flying fuck.” He looked me in the eye. “Good day, gentlemen.”
We watched the man shut the door behind him. “What do you think?” Richard asked.
“I think he’s smarter than he looks.”
“About my brother.”
“I think he’s dumber than he looks.”
Seated not far from us, having gone not completely unnoticed, but unnoticed enough, until he cleared his throat, was a short, thick man in a Hawaiian shirt. “I couldn’t help but overhear,” he said with a pronounced Southern accent. “I happen to know somebody who might just be willing able to help you boys out.” He handed Richard a yellow slip of paper that had been torn from a pad. He was rather obvious about looking around while he talked to us.
“Is this a phone number?” Richard asked.
“Yeah, this guy might be able to help you out right nicely. He’s American, lives just outside the city.”
“What is he, a private detective or something?”
“No, he’s a condottiero.”
“A what?”
“A soldier,” I said.
Richard looked at me.
“I’ve seen them in paintings,” I said.
“So, he’s a mercenary,” Richard said.
“Such an ugly word. Anyway, call him, maybe he can offer some assistance, get you to your brother.”
“Do you sit here all day waiting for people like us?” I asked.
“Yes.” He went back to reading his magazine.
“What’s in this for you?” I asked.
“A public service,” he said. “I get mine, don’t you worry. Capitalism is alive and
well.”
Richard shoved the paper into his pocket and started for the door, but I didn’t move. I was fixated on the man in the Hawaiian shirt.
“Come on,” Richard said. “What are you looking at?”
I tried to see the cover of the magazine the man was reading. It was an issue of Sports Illustrated and I could see Reggie Jackson on the cover in an Oakland A’s uniform.
“What is it?” Richard asked, pulling me away.
“That magazine is ten years old? He’s sitting in here reading a ten-year-old sports magazine.”
“How do you know it’s ten years old?”
“Because that was the last time I gave a flying fuck about baseball. The guy’s crazy.”
“Let’s get out of here,” Richard said.
I couldn’t let it go. I felt strangely irritated. “Hey, you know Reggie Jackson plays with the Yankees now.”
Hawaiian shirt looked up, gave me an uninhabited smile, turned the page, and went on reading.
Outside the building a sturdy, red-faced crisp marine informed us that if our business was done we’d have to leave the grounds. We did. If first hours can be considered discouraging, then these were and Richard, more than I, was ready to head straight back to the airport and go home. Though it was ninety degrees and very humid, exactly what we had left in Philadelphia, I found even the weather exotic and I recognized my slipping, if not into adventurousness, then into a state of vacation. The colors were different, more vibrant, whether it was true or not, rich in blues, more cerulean than the blues at home, and yellows, closer to mustard. I was as well taken by the stares we attracted and even then I was embarrassed by both my regard of and my attraction to this attention.
So Much Blue Page 2
