Alive in Shape and Color

by Lawrence Block

  “I saw a lot of David in my late teens. The irony, of course, is that I was far more drawn to his young masculine form than to the generous curves of the young women who were my companions on those visits. I was gay, it seems to me, from birth, but I didn’t let myself know that. At first I denied the impulses. Later, when I learned to act on them—in Front Park, in the men’s room at the Greyhound station—I denied that they meant anything. It was, I assured myself, a stage I was going through.”

  He pursed his lips, shook his head, sighed. “A lengthy stage,” he said, “as I seem still to be going through it. I was aided in my denial by the fact that whatever I did with other young men was just an adjunct to my real life, which was manifestly normal. I went off to a good school, I came home at Christmas and during the summer, and wherever I was I enjoyed the company of women.

  “Lovemaking in those years was usually a rather incomplete affair. Girls made a real effort to remain virginal, at least in a strictly technical sense, if not until marriage then until they were in what we nowadays call a committed relationship. I don’t remember what we called it then, but I suspect it was a somewhat less cumbersome phrase.

  “Still, sometimes one went all the way, and on those occasions I acquitted myself well enough. None of my partners had cause to complain. I could do it, you see, and I enjoyed it, and if it was less thrilling than what I found with male partners, well, chalk it up to the lure of the forbidden. It didn’t have to mean there was anything wrong with me. It didn’t mean I was different in any fundamental way.

  “I led a normal life, Matthew. I would say I was determined to lead a normal life, but it never seemed to require much in the way of determination. During my senior year at college I became engaged to a girl I’d known literally all my life. Our parents were friends and we’d grown up together. I graduated and we were married. I took an advanced degree. My field was art history, as you may remember, and I managed to get an appointment to the faculty of the University of Buffalo. SUNY Buffalo, they call it now, but that was years before it became a part of the state university. It was just plain UB, with most of its student body drawn from the city and environs.

  “We lived at first in an apartment near the campus, but then both sets of parents ponied up and we moved to a small house on Hallam, just about equidistant between the houses each of us had grown up in.

  “It wasn’t far from the statue of David either.”

  He led a normal life, he explained. Fathered two children. Took up golf and joined the country club. He came into some family money, and a textbook he authored brought in royalties that grew more substantial each year. As the years passed, it became increasingly easy to believe that his relations with other men had indeed been a stage, and one he had essentially outgrown.

  “I still felt things,” he said, “but the need to act on them seemed to have passed. I might be struck by the physical appearance of one of my students, say, but I’d never do anything about it, or even seriously consider doing anything about it. I told myself my admiration was aesthetic, a natural response to male beauty. In youth, hormone-driven as one is, I’d confused this with actual sexual desire. Now I could recognize it for the innocent and asexual phenomenon it was.”

  Which was not to say that he’d given up his little adventures entirely.

  “I would be invited somewhere to attend a conference,” he said, “or to give a guest lecture. I’d be in another city where I didn’t know anyone and nobody knew me. And I would have had a few drinks, and I’d feel the urge for some excitement. And I could tell myself that, while a liaison with another woman would be a betrayal of my wife and a violation of my marital vows, the same could hardly be said for some innocent sport with another man. So I’d go to the sort of bar one goes to—they were never hard to find, even in those closeted days, even in provincial cities and college towns. And, once there, it was never hard to find someone.”

  He was silent for a moment, gazing off toward the horizon.

  “Then I walked into a bar in Madison, Wisconsin,” he said, “and there he was.”

  “Robert Paul Naismith.”

  “David,” he said. “That’s who I saw, that’s the youth on whom my eyes fastened the instant I cleared the threshold. I can remember the moment, you see. I can see him now exactly as I saw him then. He was wearing a dark silk shirt and tan trousers and loafers without socks, which no one wore in those days. He was standing at the bar with a drink in his hand, and his physique and the way he stood, the stance, the attitude—he was Michelangelo’s David. More than that, he was my David. He was my ideal, he was the object of a lifelong quest I hadn’t even known I was on, and I drank him in with my eyes and I was lost.”

  “Just like that,” I said.

  “Oh, yes,” he agreed. “Just like that.”

  He was silent, and I wondered if he was waiting for me to prompt him. I decided he was not. He seemed to be choosing to remain in the memory for a moment.

  Then he said, “Quite simply, I had never been in love with anybody. I have come to believe that it is a form of insanity. Not to love, to care deeply for another. That seems to me to be quite sane, and even ennobling. I loved my parents, certainly, and in a somewhat different way I loved my wife.

  “This was categorically different. This was obsessive. This was preoccupation. It was the collector’s passion: I must have this painting, this statue, this postage stamp. I must embrace it, I must own it utterly. It and it alone will complete me. It will change my own nature. It will make me worthwhile.

  “It wasn’t sex, not really. I won’t say sex had nothing to do with it. I was attracted to David as I’d never been attracted to anyone before. But at the same time I felt less driven sexually than I had on occasion in the past. I wanted to possess David. If I could do that, if I could make him entirely mine, it scarcely mattered if I had sex with him.”

  He fell silent, and this time I decided he was waiting to be prompted. I said, “What happened?”

  “I threw my life over,” he said. “On some flimsy pretext or other I stayed on in Madison for a week after the conference ended. Then I flew with David to New York and bought an apartment, the top floor of a brownstone in Turtle Bay. And then I flew back to Buffalo, alone, and told my wife I was leaving her.”

  He lowered his eyes. “I didn’t want to hurt her,” he said, “but of course I hurt her badly and deeply. She was not completely surprised, I don’t believe, to learn there was a man involved. She’d inferred that much about me over the years, and probably saw it as part of the package, the downside of having a husband with an aesthetic sensibility.

  “But she thought I cared for her, and I made it very clear that I did not. She was a woman who had never hurt anyone, and I caused her a good deal of pain, and I regret that and always will. It seems to me a far blacker sin than the one I served time for.

  “Enough. I left her and moved to New York. Of course I resigned my tenured professorship at UB. I had connections throughout the academic world, of course, and a decent if not glorious reputation, so I might have found something at Columbia or NYU. But the scandal I’d created made that less likely, and anyway I no longer gave a damn for teaching. I just wanted to live, and enjoy my life.

  “There was money enough to make that possible. We lived well. Too well, really. Not wisely but too well. Good restaurants every night, fine wines with dinner. Season tickets to the opera and the ballet. Summers in the Pines. Winters in Barbados or Bali. Trips to London and Paris and Rome. And the company, in town or abroad, of other rich queens.”

  “And?”

  “And it went on like that,” he said. He folded his hands in his lap, and a little smile played on his lips. “It went on, and then one day I picked up a knife and killed him. You know that part, Matthew. It’s where you came in.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you don’t know why.”

  “No, that never came out. Or if it did I missed it.”

  He shook his head. “It ne
ver came out. I didn’t offer a defense, and I certainly didn’t provide an explanation. But can you guess?”

  “Why you killed him? I have no idea.”

  “But you must have come to know some of the reasons people have for killing other people? Why don’t you humor an old sinner and try to guess. Prove to me that my motive was not unique after all.”

  “The reasons that come to mind are the obvious ones,” I said, “and that probably rules them out. Let me see. He was leaving you. He was unfaithful to you. He had fallen in love with someone else.”

  “He would never have left,” he said. “He adored the life we led and knew he could never live half so well with someone else. He would never fall in love with anyone else any more than he could have fallen in love with me. David was in love with himself. And of course he was unfaithful, and had been from the beginning, but I had never expected him to be otherwise.”

  “You realized you’d thrown your life away on him,” I said, “and hated him for it.”

  “I had thrown my life away, but I didn’t regret it. I’d been living a lie, and what loss to toss it aside? While jetting off to Paris for a weekend, does one long for the gentle pleasures of a classroom in Buffalo? Some may, for all I know. I never did.”

  I was ready to quit, but he insisted I come up with a few more guesses. They were all off the mark.

  He said, “Give up? All right, I’ll tell you. He changed.”

  “He changed?”

  “When I met him,” he said, “my David was the most beautiful creature I had ever set eyes on, the absolute embodiment of my lifelong ideal. He was slender but muscular, vulnerable yet strong. He was—well, go back to the San Marco piazza and look at the statue. Michelangelo got it just right. That’s what he looked like.”

  “And then what? He got older?”

  He set his jaw. “Everyone gets older,” he said, “except for the ones who die young. It’s unfair, but there’s nothing for it. David didn’t merely age. He coarsened. He thickened. He ate too much and drank too much and stayed up too late and took too many drugs. He put on weight. He got bloated. He grew jowly, and got pouchy under his eyes. His muscles wasted beneath their coating of fat and his flesh sagged.

  “It didn’t happen overnight. But that’s how I experienced it, because the process was well along before I let myself see it. Finally I couldn’t help but see it.

  “I couldn’t bear to look at him. Before I had been unable to take my eyes off him, and now I found myself averting my eyes. I felt betrayed. I fell in love with a Greek god, and before my eyes he turned into a Roman emperor.”

  “And you killed him for that?”

  “I wasn’t trying to kill him.”

  I looked at him.

  “Oh, I suppose I was, really. I’d been drinking, we’d both been drinking, and we’d had an argument, and I was angry. I don’t suppose I was too far gone to know that he’d be dead when I was done, and that I’d have killed him. But that wasn’t the point.”

  “It wasn’t?”

  “He passed out,” he said. “He was lying there, naked, reeking of the wine seeping out of his pores, this great expanse of bloated flesh as white as marble. I suppose I hated him for having thus transformed himself, and I know I hated myself for having been an agent of his transformation. And I decided to do something about it.”

  He shook his head, and sighed deeply. “I went into the kitchen,” he said, “and I came back with a knife. And I thought of the boy I’d seen that first night in Madison, and I thought of Michelangelo. And I tried to be Michelangelo.”

  I must have looked puzzled. He said, “Don’t you remember? I took the knife and cut away the part that wasn’t David.”

  It was a few days later when I recounted all this to Elaine. We were at an outdoor café near the Spanish Steps. “All those years,” I said, “I took it for granted he was trying to destroy his lover. That’s what mutilation generally is, the expression of a desire to annihilate. But he wasn’t trying to disfigure him, he was trying to refigure him.”

  “He was just a few years ahead of his time,” she said. “Now they call it liposuction and charge the earth for it. I’ll tell you one thing. As soon as we get back I’m going straight from the airport to the gym, before all this pasta becomes a permanent part of me. I’m not taking any chances.”

  “I don’t think you’ve got anything to worry about.”

  “No, because if you were going to develop the urge to sculpt, it would have happened by now. I’m a far cry from the innocent young call girl you met at Danny Boy’s table all those years ago.”

  “Not such a far cry. You look as good to me now as you ever did.”

  “You know something? I know you’re lying and I don’t even care.”

  “I’m not, though. You’re a few years older, and you don’t look as fresh and dew-covered, but if anything you’re more beautiful now than you were then. And there’s the fact that age cannot wither you, nor custom stale your infinite variety.”

  “You old bear. Shakespeare?”

  “Antony and Cleopatra.”

  “Infinite variety, huh? I guess David’s variety wasn’t all that infinite. How awful though. How godawful for both of them.”

  “The things people do.”

  “You said it. Well, what do you want to do? We could sit around feeling sorry for two men and the mess they made of their lives, or we could go back to the hotel and do something life-affirming. You tell me.”

  “It’s a tough one,” I said. “How soon do you need my decision?”

  PERMISSIONS

  We gratefully acknowledge all those who gave permission for material to appear in this book. We have made every effort to trace and contact copyright holders. If an error or omission is brought to our notice we will be pleased to remedy the situation in future editions of this book. For further information, please contact the publisher.

  Jill D. Block, “Safety Rules”

  Remember All the Safety Rules by Art Frahm, 1953 (p. 2)

  Oil on canvas, 29.5 × 33.5 in. (74.9 × 85.1 cm.). Private collection/Jill D. Block.

  Lee Child, “Pierre, Lucien, and Me”

  Bouquet of Chrysanthemums by Auguste Renoir, 1881 (p. 20)

  Oil on canvas, 26 × 21 ⅞ in. (66 × 55.6 cm.). The Walter H. and Leonore Annenberg Collection, Bequest of Walter H. Annenberg, 2002.

  Nicholas Christopher, “Girl with a Fan”

  Girl with a Fan by Paul Gauguin, 1902 (p. 30)

  Oil on canvas, 92 × 73 cm. Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany.

  Michael Connelly, “The Third Panel”

  The Garden of Earthly Delights (third panel) by Hieronymous Bosch, ca. 1500–1505 (p. 48)

  Oil and grisaille on wooden panel, Center panel is 7'2 ½ × 6'4 ¾ in. Each wing is 7'2 ½ × 3'2 in. Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain.

  Jeffery Deaver, “A Significant Find”

  The Cave Paintings of Lascaux, discovered 1940 (p. 60)

  Mineral pigments on cave walls. The Axial Gallery in the caves of Lascaux, France.

  Joe R. Lansdale, “Charlie the Barber”

  The Haircut by Norman Rockwell, August 10, 1918 (p. 78)

  Gail Levin, “After Georgia O’Keeffe’s Flower”

  Red Cannas by Georgia O’Keeffe, 1927 (p. 100)

  Oil on canvas, 36 ⅛ × 30 ⅛ in. Courtesy of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas; 1986.11.

  Warren Moore, “Ampurdan”

  The Pharmacist of Ampurdan Seeking Absolutely Nothing by Salvador Dali, 1936 (p. 110)

  Oil and collage on wood, 30 × 52 cm. Copyright © Peter Horree / Alamy Stock Photo.

  David Morrell, “Orange Is for Anguish, Blue for Insanity”

  Cypresses by Vincent van Gogh, 1889 (p. 120)

  Oil on Canvas, 36 ¾ × 29 ⅛ in. (93.4 × 74 cm.). The Met, Rogers Fund, 1949.

  Joyce Carol Oates, “Les Beaux Jours”

  Les beaux jours by Balthus, 1944–1946, (p. 154)

  Oil on ca
nvas, 58 ¼ × 78 ⅜ in. (148 x 199 cm.). Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, gift of the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Foundation, 1966.

  Thomas Pluck, “Truth Comes Out of Her Well to Shame Mankind”

  La Vérité sortant du puits by Jean Léon Gerome, 1896 (p. 176)

  Oil on canvas, 35.8 × 28.3 in. (91 × 72 cm.) Musée d’art et d’archéologie Anne de Beaujeu.

  S.J. Rozan, “The Great Wave”

  Under the Wave off Kanagawa (Kanagawa oki nami ura), also known as the “Great Wave” by Katsushika Hokusai, 1830–32 (p. 198)

  Polychrome woodblock print; ink and color on paper, 10 ⅛ × 14 in. (25.7 x 37.9 cm). H. O. Havemeyer Collection, bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929.

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch, “Thinkers”

  The Thinker by Auguste Rodin, 1880–1881 (p. 208)

  Bronze; overall: 72 × 38 × 55 in. (182.9 × 98.4 × 142.2 cm.) The Cleveland Museum of Art, gift of Ralph King 1917.42.

  Jonathan Santlofer, “Gaslight”

  The Empire of Light by René Magritte, 1953–1954 (p. 236)

  Oil on canvas, 76 × 51 ⅝ in. (195.4 × 131.2 cm.). The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976, © 2017 C. Herscovici / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

  Justin Scott, “Blood in the Sun”

  PH-129 by Clyfford Still, 1949 (p. 258)

  Oil on canvas, 53 × 44½ in (134.6 x 113 cm). Copyright © 2017 Clyfford Still Museum, Denver, CO © City and County of Denver / ARS, NY.

  Sarah Weinman, “The Big Town”

  Nude in the Studio by Lilias Torrance Newton, 1933 (p. 274)

  Oil on canvas, 203.2 × 91.5 cm. Private collection.

  Lawrence Block, “Looking for David”

  David by Michelangelo Buonarroti, ca. 1501–1504 (p. 292)

  One single block of marble from the quarries in Carrara in Tuscany, 5.16 meters tall. The Accademia Gallery, Florence, Italy.

  ALIVE IN SHAPE AND COLOR

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