My nights were less peppered with the bad dreams, but the memory of them haunted me as much as they ever did and did so while I was awake. The recollection of the dreams became a thing and the painting became the place I put the pieces of that thing.
A knock. It was Richard. I knew because he shouted, “It’s me, Richard! Or is it: It is I, Richard! I is probably correct but I’d sound like such a wanker saying it. Of course I sound like a wanker saying wanker.”
I stepped outside and joined him.
“You really are not going to let me ever see that thing, are you?” he said.
“Nope.”
“What’s with all this tubing?” he asked.
“It’s a stable fly suppression apparatus.”
“You’ve got a fly problem?”
“It’s a waste of money is what it is,” I said. “What’s up?”
“Nothing. Just came to check on you.”
“You could have just called.”
He raised one eyebrow and looked at me. I never answered the phone and hardly ever responded to messages, not out of grumpiness or disrespect, but because of a bad memory.
“I’m okay.”
“What about April?”
“Let’s go to the other studio.” We talked as we walked across the property. “I was thinking.”
“Always a bad thing.”
“Why is it okay that I told you? I’ve already broken her secret.”
“Betrayed her secret,” Richard corrected me. “You break a promise. Are you a native speaker?”
“Right. You know what I mean.”
“But she doesn’t know that you told me,” Richard said. “If she knew, she’d be pissed.”
“So, why can’t I tell Linda and Linda won’t tell April that I told her and then Linda would know the way she’s supposed to know?”
We stepped into the studio and I switched on the lights. So many paintings. So much work. So much time.
Richard laughed softly. “How long would that last? April would know that Linda knew as soon as she looked at her. Maybe you should talk to a shrink.”
“What for? I don’t need to explore why I made such a fucked-up promise in the first place. I made it and now I have to deal with it.”
“Linda doesn’t have to know everything. Just throwing that out there. She doesn’t know everything about you.”
“This is different. This is her daughter. Plus, I don’t think I’m helping April all that much. I believe she needs to talk to her mother. I mean, all I do is say okay and whatever you want. Should I have gotten mad and yelled at her?”
“No.”
I moved a couple of small canvases across the room.
“Do you remember Abbey Lincoln?”
“The singer?”
“Yes. We went to hear her when we were in graduate school.”
“I remember. She was in that movie.” I couldn’t come up with the title. “Why do you ask?”
“She died last year. I thought I saw her the other day, but then I realized that it couldn’t be her, because the woman I saw looked like she looked in nineteen seventy-eight. Anyway, she died. She was eighty.”
“Wow. We’re old men. We heard her at the Village Vanguard. I remember that pretty clearly.”
“We should go back there,” Richard said.
“It’s not the same anymore,” I said. “Hearing jazz, I mean. People just sit around like they’re in church, a white church. No offense.”
“None taken.” Richard looked out the window at the house. “Still, live music sounds good, doesn’t it? Maybe you should take April out to hear some live jazz. Father-daughter stuff.”
I looked over at my good friend. “Thanks,” I said.
“There are all these young people playing jazz now. She might like some of them.”
“Hungry?” I asked. “I’m about to go in and start dinner.”
“No, I’m fine.” He paused and looked at me. “You had a crush on Abbey Lincoln.”
“No, you had the crush on Abbey Lincoln.”
“You’re right. Too late now.”
1979
We walked out of the bar and into the street. It had rained while we were inside and everything was wet and shiny. The Bummer pumped up his chest and smiled at some hookers next door.
“I think I’ll take my money now,” the Bummer said.
“You said after you found him,” Richard said.
“We’re almost there. Give me the money.”
Richard gave me an exasperated look.
“I really don’t see any point in arguing with him,” I said. “It’s just money and he’s going to get it anyway.”
The Bummer laughed at me. “Just money,” he repeated. “Rich college boy. Just money.”
Richard reached down and pulled the money from his boot.
“You know, Spanky,” the Bummer said, “that’s the first place the bad people will look for dough on a dead man.” He accepted the money and put it in his jacket pocket without counting.
“So, let’s go,” Richard said.
“First, I’m going to get my knob polished,” the Bummer said. “If I were you I’d do the same thing. We might get wet out there and it’s good to be loose, relaxed. Know what I mean?” With that he walked toward the hookers. “Meet you back here in ten,” he called to us.
“Knob polished,” I said. “Who really says that?”
“He does.”
“What does that even mean? I don’t have a knob on my dick. Do you have a knob on your dick? I hate this guy.”
“So, what do we do?” Richard asked.
“I guess we stand here like the idiots we are until he’s done with his knob polishing.”
I looked up and down the street. Far off there was singing or chanting, then sirens. Some of the students from the bar came out and walked with deliberation toward the commotion.
“This place is a mess,” Richard said. “I just want to get the fuck out of here before everything goes to hell.”
“You got that right.”
A truckload of soldiers drove by us. The scared-looking young men seated in the uncovered back stared at us and we tried to not make eye contact. “Where is that motherfucker?” Richard looked at his watch. “It’s already one thirty. I hate my fucking brother.”
“Me too.”
“What I really want to do right now is get drunk.”
“Me too.”
The Bummer returned, shaking his pant leg, grumbling and half laughing. “How much of an IQ does it take to suck a goddamn cock?” he said.
“You tell me,” I said.
He passed over my remark while managing to cut me a glance. “If you girls don’t mind I thought we’d use the Caddy again.”
“Of course,” Richard said. “Why the fuck not?”
“I’m detecting an attitude,” the Bummer said.
“And he’s also a great reader of people,” Richard said. “We’ll need to get some gas.”
“Already done,” the Bummer said. When Richard gave him a puzzled look, “I’m a professional, boy.”
“Aren’t you going to need your big gun?” I asked.
“I left it with the desk clerk at your hotel,” he said. “He was very accommodating.”
“I’ll bet,” I said.
As we walked back, the street became more active. Small clusters of people, mostly young men, walked quickly or ran in every direction, it seemed. A couple more trucks of soldiers rolled by, each batch of men looking younger and more frightened. A panel van with a public address system passed us, a voice blaring, “Todo adentro por orden del alcalde!”
“What did he say?” I asked Richard.
The Bummer answered, “They want everybody inside. It’s good we’re clearing out of town. Gonna be a party.”
At the hotel Richard went up to the room to use the toilet. I sat in an oversized chair in the lobby, watched while the Bummer retrieved his weapon from the properly scared-to-death desk clerk. He took a
magazine from his jacket, tapped it against the counter, and snapped it into the rifle while staring the clerk in the face. He nodded to the man before turning away. He smiled as he walked back toward me. “Without ammo this thing is just a boat paddle,” he said.
“Okay.”
He sat on the arm of a sofa and looked out the window at the people passing by. “Messy, very messy,” he said. “So, how did your buddy talk you into coming down here?”
It wasn’t that I had no answer for him, but I was startled by the almost normal-sounding question.
“I mean, all the way the fuck down here for his fuckup brother? Really, who does that?”
I looked the Bummer in the eye. “He’s my friend.”
For the briefest second I at least imagined that I saw a flicker of respect for me, but he said, “Fucking dumbshit.”
I shrugged; that was true enough. “Why are you here?”
Richard was just coming down the stairs.
The Bummer was not looking at me when he said, “Because I’m a fucking war criminal. Can’t go back to the States. And I like to kill people, shoot them, anyway.”
“I’m ready,” Richard said.
“Your makeup looks nice,” the Bummer said to Richard.
“Fuck you.”
“Let’s go, girlies. Let’s blow this pop stand before the walls cave in. I’ve always loved that saying. I don’t get it, but I like it. What the fuck is a pop stand? And why would the wall cave in?”
The drive out of town proved to be complicated and difficult. At a couple of intersections we had to detour to avoid crowds in the street. Strangely, fortunately, the soldiers both on foot and in jeeps showed no appreciable interest in us, in our lumbering Cadillac. Regardless, I was more than less terrified, as was Richard. If the Bummer was concerned at all he didn’t show it. Richard was driving at the insistence of the Bummer and so I was in the backseat (where I belonged, our asshole guide having said as much outright). Otherwise I was fairly ignored while the Bummer conducted our circuitous route out of the city. Finally the traffic trimmed, pedestrian and automotive, as we cleared the city center. My fear had worked its way into numbness, the kind that verged on burning pain. I felt surprisingly unalarmed at the sight of a car that had been set afire, perhaps because there were so few people around. Hindsight suggests that I should have been more nervous for this lack. We drove west through the poor and dark and seemingly quiet suburbs. It was well after two in the morning when we drove past the airport. Richard looked at me in the mirror and we shared the same thought, a desire to abandon this and board a plane for anywhere else. The Bummer switched on the radio. The reception was scratchy, faded in and out, and there were only voices, no music, no ads, only excited Salvadoran Spanish, sentences that never seemed to be completed before another speaker began.
“Do you work for the CIA?” I asked the Bummer.
“What is this CIA?” he asked. I could hear him smiling. “You sound like that punk in the bar.”
“No, really,” I said, “is that why you’re here in El Salvador?” In my mind he was certainly a terrorizing, destabilizing devil.
“No, sweetheart, I don’t work for the fucking CIA.”
“Then why are you here?” I asked.
“Everybody’s got to be someplace. Where are you boys from again? Yeah, Philadelphia. Why do you live there? You could be living in Oregon or Miami. You gotta live somewhere.”
Neither Richard nor I said anything to this.
“I used to like this place,” the Bummer said. “The winters here are very nice.”
I laughed out loud.
“What?” the Bummer asked.
“Fuck you,” I said.
Now the Bummer laughed. “Stay on Highway One,” he said to Richard. “One or One West.”
I looked at Richard’s profile. “Are you tired?” I asked him. “Want me to drive for a while?”
“He’s fine,” the Bummer said.
“I’m asking him,” I said.
“Look who found his Y chromosome.”
“I’m okay,” Richard said.
I looked out the window and saw the new moon break through the clouds. We rolled on for a while. The Cadillac was suffering, missing, taking the hills with difficulty. It was just becoming light when the Bummer instructed Richard to turn south off the highway. The road ran down along a ridge between arroyos. The moon ducked into the clouds again and then fog rolled in and it was all very dark. I could see Richard struggling to stay awake.
“Richard, pull over and let me drive,” I said.
Richard look over at the Bummer.
“Pull over,” I repeated.
“He wants to drive, let him drive,” the Bummer said.
Richard stopped the car. I got out on the passenger side, squeezing by the barely leaning forward Bummer, and discovered that in the darkness Richard had pulled over and stopped only feet from a precipitous drop down into a foggy nothing. I walked around the car and met him at the back of the car.
“You might want to stop here,” I said.
“What?”
“Pretty close to a cliff.”
We stood there and urinated.
“You know, this whole thing is not getting even a little bit sweeter,” I said. I sighed in an effort to relax.
“Let’s just get Tad and go home. You think this guy is just fucking with us?”
“Who knows,” I said. “Yes, of course he’s fucking with us, but maybe he’s really taking us to your brother. All I know is that I’m glad to be out of that city.”
“Me too,” Richard said. “At least the airport’s on this side of town. We get Tad and then it’s straight to the airport and we’ll wait there however long it takes.”
“Our bags,” Richard said.
“Fuck our bags.”
The Bummer called from the car, “If you girls are finished kissing, maybe we can go.”
Paris
I woke alone in my hotel room, a room that had become oddly strange, where I wandered to late at night only to sleep. The bed was too soft and left my lower back feeling weak and uncertain. The bedside telephone, an old-fashioned princess, had remained quiet all night; Linda had not called. I had the sad happy feeling of missing my children. It was Will’s practice, at two years old, to come to my bedside just before sunup every day and ask to be let under the covers. It had become automatic for me to lift up the quilt and sheet for him to slide into bed next to me. It was a ritual that I knew would not continue forever and so I was determined to enjoy it for as long as it lasted. This morning, being so far away, I missed it. And I missed doing homework with April, a pretend struggle for her mainly because it bored her. I thought of the snow and of playing in it with them, but I rationalized my being away from them by reason of work, the gallery. Though technically true, the lie stuck in my unconscious throat. However, I was anything but truly sad. I was floating like the stupid old man I was, eager to see my reason for remaining happily in Paris.
Sex with Victoire was intense enough, but not what I might have dreamed of if I had had the forethought to dream such things. I had tried to avoid comparison of the young woman with my wife, found the idea distasteful and in bad form, but I did compare them and only to come to the realization that the comparison didn’t matter, was without substance. Familiarity with Linda had, quite naturally, yielded a routine, but it was and continued to be satisfying, if infrequent, and that was perhaps more my fault more than hers. But sex with Victoire, whereas it was not unsatisfying, was not so electric, however sweet and charmingly clumsy it might have been. It was this truth that made the situation with Victoire that much scarier. I was not there in her bed night after night because I was having unbelievable sex. I was there because I wanted to be with her specifically, because in fact I enjoyed trying to please her. It was all so beautifully, awkwardly, painfully intimate.
“What are you thinking about?” Victoire asked.
We had just sat down on a damp bench in a little park
from which we could look across the Seine at Notre-Dame Cathedral. We had bought a croissant that we now shared. The bread shattered into a rain of crumbs as I broke it in two.
So Much Blue Page 12
