The Center of the World

by Thomas van Essen

  “You have outdone yourself, sir. You have outdone all of them, past and present. There is nothing like it.” We went on in this vein for some time. Turner drank in the praise as a thirsty man drinks water.

  “I thought, yes, it would more than do. But had my doubts. Not my usual line, you know. Not like any of the others. I thought perhaps I might be mad. See the thing for one thing when in fact it is another. Enthusiasm can lead one astray—it’s hard to trust it. Sometimes right, but sometimes madness. There is a fine line.”

  We both assured him that there was no question that he had succeeded. “Glad it pleases. Would have broken my heart had it not. Or else I’d have thought you were mad. Either one. But as for those jewels: they are there, you know. On the floor beside the dressing table. I tried to think the thing through. Helen. The greatest beauty in the world. Men give her trinkets all the time. But she is Helen, nothing can increase her beauty. Nothing larger than infinity, you know. So I put them in—to please you, my lord—but not in the usual place.”

  Turner drank off his glass of champagne with satisfaction and smiled as Egremont refilled his glass. “Good stuff, this. Thank you, my lord. Those jewels—another joke between us. In Rome I spent many hours in the Gallery Doria where there are a couple of paintings by Caravaggio. One of them the Virgin, the other the Magdalene. Old Caravaggio used the same pretty girl for both. A sly trick, I thought. His Magdalene is sitting on a low stool, wearing a gown of rich brocade with gold stitching. Garb of her trade in Caravaggio’s day, I suppose. But next to her on the floor are all her jewels. Just strewn about, a whole casket full, as a sign of her repentance, you see.

  “So I put Helen’s jewels on the floor too. Not as a sign of repentance, however. Helen never repents. The whole world is in flames, and she the cause. Those jewels are very fine, my lord. No family in England has any finer. But dull compared to Helen herself. It would be like her, don’t you think, to just toss aside a kingdom’s worth of jewels. Great cruelty in great beauty. Not in your case, Mrs. S., but in the idea of it, you know.”

  We chatted on like this for about an hour, until poor Grant came down. He was speechless in his admiration, although he managed to say more that was sensible than either Egremont or I had been able to. He knew that the end was coming. It would be my task to tell him so, not a task I relished, but I managed it when the time came. Helen had already given me the strength I needed.

  . 48 .

  ON THE LEFT-HAND SIDE, near the bottom, I could sometimes make out a sheet of paper. It had blown off Helen’s table, or perhaps she had dropped it there. When I went up close to the canvas it vanished, but when I stepped back it appeared. When I saw it I could not make out the Greek letters, but sometimes I was almost able to understand what she had written. Often this understanding came to me when I was away from the painting, or concentrating on some other part of it. As I was waiting for Susan at the station, I understood that Helen had been writing an appeal to Priam. She told him that she wanted this war to be over. She had seen so much and suffered so much. She could no longer bear the sight of the men out on the plain below, dying and suffering on her account. But then she had heard Paris’s footfall in the corridor, and the sheet of paper lay forgotten on the floor as she prepared for the arrival of her lover.

  A wave of fondness washed over me when I saw Susan step off the train. “You look great,” I said.

  We planted kisses on each other’s cheeks, but then we kissed each other as if we meant it. I think we were both surprised and pleased by that.

  “I like what you’ve done with your hair. I was half afraid you were going to turn into some blond TV-show lawyer. I think I’d let myself forget how pretty you are, gray and all.”

  “And you look good, too,” she said. “You look like you’ve lost a few more pounds, but it might be time to have a piece of cake.”

  “I’ve been too sad to eat,” I said. She smiled and gave me another kiss. I felt that we were falling into the comfortable old rhythms. It was easy to forget how good all that was.

  She only had her briefcase with her, so I saw that she was planning to go back to the city. I was already a little bit sad about that.

  I suggested we go to town for coffee. Susan held down a table while I got two large cappuccinos and a piece of cake to share. She had picked a table in the back of the room, as far as possible from the students pecking earnestly at their laptops.

  We chatted for a few minutes about Susan’s new life in New York. I liked looking at her, my wife of twenty-four years, but I suddenly felt a spike of nausea as the image of Susan in the hotel room in Cleveland rose up in my mind like bile.

  “Tell me,” I said. “Are you having an affair?” I don’t know where I got the courage to ask the question, but I saw the piece of paper that had fallen to the floor of Helen’s chamber as I spoke.

  She paused with her fork halfway to her mouth. As she spoke I focused on the bit of carrot cake that hung there.

  “Don’t you think you have a lot of nerve asking me that question? In case you’ve forgotten: you were the one kissing Ruth Carpenter. It occurred to me that maybe you wanted me to come out here so you could tell me you’d been seeing somebody.”

  “Fair enough,” I said. “But you didn’t answer my question: Are you having, or have you had, an affair?”

  She hesitated for a moment before speaking. “No,” she said. “I am not having an affair. Someone kissed me once and I kissed him back. And it felt good. But I didn’t take the plunge. So now it’s my turn: Are you having an affair?”

  I thought of Helen waiting for me in the bedroom. I thought of Gina and the kiss she gave me at the door of her hotel.

  “No,” I said. “I’ve been tempted, but I haven’t. What you saw was both the beginning and the end of my romantic adventures with Ruth Carpenter.”

  “I wondered if you’d gone to London to meet somebody. And when you came back I thought you had. You seemed sort of shifty and guilty, if you don’t mind my saying so. That’s why I left; I couldn’t stand it. You seem better today.”

  “I know I was acting oddly,” I said. “I was feeling guilty. I met a woman in the cafeteria at the Tate. She was trying to pick me up. She was really pretty. Maybe in her late thirties. We had a nice conversation. It was a beautiful evening, and I walked her to her hotel after the museum closed. When we got there she asked me to come in for a drink. I said no and went back to my hotel by myself.”

  “So why didn’t you go in with her, if she was so nice and pretty?”

  I shrugged. “To be frank, I don’t really know, although, as I’ve thought about it, it’s not clear that she was actually willing. How come we don’t sleep with other people? We’re married; it’s a habit; it’s what we said we wouldn’t do. But it would have been false—a fantasy out of a bad movie. We’re the real deal.”

  I saw the light in her eyes and all the happiness we had shared. I knew what I had to do.

  . 49 .

  THOSE WERE AMONG the sweetest days of my life, even with all the suffering, even though Wyndham and the brats came back. Grant was gone. Turner was gone. We had fewer guests than previously. The house was often quiet. People said that the cause was Egremont’s great age, but he was in love for the first time in his life and had no patience for trivialities. So was I. It was a time bathed in light.

  Egremont had a special cabinet designed to hold what we simply called “the painting.” It was installed in his bedroom. Every morning as the sun rose, I would open the cabinet and we two would lie in the bed, sometimes reading, sometimes chatting, sometimes falling back into delightful slumber. We would take our coffee thus. At length we arose—Egremont went to the fields and I to my occupations around the house.

  Our guests often said to me that Egremont seemed to have aged. In the past, they recalled, he had been out in the fields as soon as the sun rose. It was still remarkable, they said, for a man of his age to get out at all, but they noted that he seemed less active than before.
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  But the fact was that the painting had made him younger and, as he often said, more sensible. I remember one afternoon about a month after Turner had departed. We had gone up to his bedroom and I had opened the cabinet. We spent about an hour looking at the painting, pointing out beauties we had not noticed before. Then Egremont took me. I took my pleasure in him as well, for he had become most kind in this way. His skin was dry and almost transparent. His body hair had all but disappeared. The muscles that had been toned by so many years in the saddle hung upon his bones in loose folds. But bathed in the light from the painting, he was sweetly beautiful to me. And I had never felt so beautiful either. We were like two gods.

  “If this is witchcraft,” he said as we lay exhausted amongst the pillows, “I am happily damned.” He kissed me gently on the forehead. “With one possible exception,” and here he nodded at the painting, “you are the fairest woman that ever lived. But you are her as well, so we need not trouble ourselves with the distinction. The good fortune is mine. To think that at my time of life I have spent the last hour as I have spent it is hardly short of miraculous. When I was young, there was nothing I feared more than the decline of my powers. I remember thinking that men ten years younger than I am now were only toothless idiots, gelded old fools.

  “I cannot describe to you the bitterness that was in my heart, when my old fool failed me. It had done me such good service over the years, always ready to do a man’s work. When I first met you it was still serviceable, but when it failed I was full of wrath and sorrow. I had ceased to be the man I was. I am sorry,” and here he kissed me sweetly again, “that I was cruel in those days, but my rage must find an outlet.”

  We both looked at the painting again. We knew that it could not last. The painting can do much—it has great power, but no art, no matter how exalted, can stop the flow of time. We lived two years in that happy dream; and none of it, not the restoration of Egremont’s vigor or my own sweet pleasure, was sweeter than the kindness he showed me in his final years.

  It was about two years after the painting was completed when Egremont first grew ill. It began innocently enough, with some discomfort in his throat and fits of sneezes, but it soon grew to a fever. His breathing became labored. His mind seemed to wander. We sent up to London for a doctor. After he examined the patient he took me aside and said that I must prepare for the worst. His words almost broke my heart, but I would not believe them. I felt in my heart something I had never felt before. I had come to love this man.

  That was a terrible time. I never left his room for almost three months. With his last bit of strength and lucidity Egremont had forbidden Wyndham to enter on pain of forfeiting his inheritance. The doctors saw how his son disturbed him with his presence and enforced the edict. Wyndham thought I would steal the very bed linens, and he set up his desk outside the room. He wished to be there to provide assistance, he said, but I knew the truth. His idea of assistance was to repeat my commands to the servants so as to make it appear that they came from him, or to question any decision that might result in expense and the diminishment of his inheritance.

  But he was a weak man, and I was stronger than I had ever been. I still cannot understand how such a puny thing could have been fathered by a man like Egremont, but I did not pause then to work out the puzzle. I simply told him what I was going to do and he retreated before my wrath and contempt. I hardly know where I got such force of will. Sometimes, when I looked at the painting, I thought the very gods were giving it to me; sometimes I knew it was simply love that made me strong.

  There is nothing worse than a proud old man in the grip of illness. Egremont was not an easy patient. He used his last bits of strength to rage against his weakness, to fight against the need he had for care. He would allow no one but me to attend him. I bathed him as if he were the child I had never had.

  In the darkest hours of his illness, the great lord of Petworth almost stopped breathing. His chest moved slowly up and down, occasionally he tried to speak, but I could not make out the words, nor even tell if he was waking or dreaming. His eyes were sometimes open, but he gave no sign that he could see. When Dr. Haddon saw him in this state he told me, speaking as if Egremont was no longer in the room, that the end was nigh. Wyndham remained just outside the door; I could almost hear the clink as he counted the money that was to be his.

  When the doctor left I opened the cabinet and sat down beside the bed. I looked at Egremont. He seemed such a poor and mortal shadow of himself. I looked at the painting. I had never felt before that life was so wonderful and that I had been so fortunate. Egremont had been most kind to me. He had taken in a tainted woman and made her into a semblance of a lady. And, in those last years, he had given me his love. I took his thin hand in mine and began to weep. But then I felt a fleeting pressure. His eyes met mine for a moment, and he moved his head ever so slightly and looked at the painting. I cannot tell if he saw it too, but when I turned I saw the fleeting figure of a god beckoning to me and urging me to have faith. For these many years now, I have been trying to see that figure again, but though it has never reappeared to me in all its full vividness, the god still lives in my mind. He was in the upper right corner of the canvas, just above the place where the sky touches the battlefield.

  Upon his recovery Egremont did not remember seeing the vision, but I am convinced that his health began to return when the god called to him from the canvas. It was by no means an easy recovery. For about two weeks I was wrestling with powers much larger than myself for Egremont’s life. It was a lonely struggle, and I hardly know how I, who had been so weak and so selfish for so long, found the strength and the will to persevere.

  The doctors thought I was mad, but the victory was mine. When the London doctor next returned, Egremont beckoned to him and he leaned over the bed. Egremont’s words were clear enough: “How much, sir, did you charge to say that I was dead? Be off with you. If I am to die I shall do so without your assistance; if I live, I shall do so without it as well.”

  From then on his recovery was slow but steady. Spring had come and I was able to throw open the windows and let the air into the sickroom. One day, as we were at our breakfast, Egremont asked me how long it had been since I had gone outside.

  I told him that I had not left his side since he fell ill about three months before. He took my hand and patted it gently. The tears that began to form at the corners of his eyes were the greatest gift I had ever been given.

  “I have been too selfish,” he said. “You must get out and take some air. It will do you good. Besides, I wish to speak to my son. Call him in and leave us.”

  I thanked my lord and did as he had bidden me. At the beginning of his illness I had all the looking glasses taken from the sickroom. When I passed the great glass in the hallway, I saw how I had aged. I had lived so much in the painting that I had come to think that time had stopped. With a shudder I saw that it had not.

  The air was sweet and warm. The smell of earth rose from the grass about me as I walked toward the bench overlooking the pond. Happy as I was to be in the air, it was a struggle to make my way up the hill. I had to stop along the way to rest.

  I pressed my hand to my breast and looked down upon Petworth House, my heart beating as though it would burst. When I thought of the pleasant hours I had passed in this very spot, my tears started to flow. I wondered what had become of young Grant. He had written once from London, but I had never replied. Also, truth be told, I felt that the painting had somehow carried me beyond whatever he might have been to me.

  I sat there for about an hour. Perhaps I dozed a bit. I remember looking at the sky and seeing it as if for the first time. How beautiful is the world, I thought—more beautiful even than the painting, but the painting’s sky gave form and meaning to the air around me, while the water of the sea beyond Helen’s window taught me what water was. I wept again for the wonder and amazement of it all.

  When I returned to the house I saw that Egremont had not been improved by
his son’s visit. But Wyndham was looking down at the floor like a puppy who had been beaten. He wished me good day with a painfully forced courtesy, assuring me that his only desire was to further his father’s wishes and that he knew that Lord Egremont’s wishes and mine were the same. He would endeavor, he went on, to do me any service that he could. I had merely to ask.

  I bowed and thanked him. I had no more trouble from him while his father lived.

  . 50 .

  WE SAT DOWN TOGETHER in our familiar living room. I took her hands in mine. “But I have been unfaithful, in a sense,” I said. “I haven’t slept with anyone else, but I haven’t told you the truth. I feel as if I’ve been unfaithful. I am ready to talk to you about it.”

  I watched the expression that formed on her face. At first she seemed relieved, but then she seemed sad, more for me than for herself.

  “For the last year or so I’ve had this feeling that my father was right, that I’m a loser and a failure. My life has seemed to me like a string of accidents. Even the good parts—our love, the kids, the life we made for ourselves—seemed random and pointless. I was going to die and the fact that I had lived wasn’t going to matter one way or another. My whole life could have happened to someone else.

  “I told you about the girl I met in London. I didn’t sleep with her, but for a long time since I’ve been back, I thought I should have. In my mind I’ve done all sorts of things with her. And it would have been okay because I was convinced that you were sleeping with someone else too. When you went to Cleveland I thought you were with someone, and I was obsessed with ugly visions of you and whoever it was in the airport Marriott.”

  “But I told you,” she said, “that I haven’t.”

  “And I believe you. And I need you to believe me about the girl, too.” I stopped to catch my breath. “Last summer, you know, we were up in the mountains. We were having a pretty good time. You had to go back to the city for some meetings, and I stayed up at the camp to clean out the barn.”