Fast Start, Fast Finish

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  “I command a view of my neighbors’ houses,” Charlie said, “but I’m getting used to it.”

  “Is this a north light?”

  “More or less,” he said. “The best I could get in this house. Well, won’t you both sit down?”

  “Thank you.” They both sat, in two of the sling chairs, and Stanley Bronson pushed his chair close beside Rita Melnick’s and whispered something in her ear. She nodded gravely.

  “Can I get you something? Shall I see if I can rustle up a few Cokes?” He wished he hadn’t used the expression “rustle up.”

  “Oh, no, thank you, Mr. Lord,” Rita Melnick said.

  “Well,” he said, taking a chair opposite them, “Carla’s explained to me about your column—a very interesting idea, I’d say. And I said I’d be glad to talk to you about myself, even though”—and he smiled slightly—“I sometimes think a painter shouldn’t talk, he should paint.”

  “In our column,” Rita Melnick said, opening a spiral notebook on her lap and extracting a pencil from behind one ear, “we try to delve deeply into our parents’ attitudes, beliefs, and values. We want to explore their views on home, community, the world, and life in general.” She looked at him and her eyes were somewhat blurred behind the glasses.

  “Well, that’s a large order,” he said. “But I’ll try to help.”

  “We have some questions to ask you,” she said, and she jabbed Stanley Bronson in the arm with her elbow.

  “Shoot,” Charlie said.

  Stanley Bronson produced a sheet of folded paper from his shirt pocket and handed it to Rita Melnick, who unfolded it, flattened it on the opposite page of her notebook, adjusted her glasses, and in the changed voice of a person reading, said, “Mr. Lord, who do you consider to be the greatest artist of all time?”

  “Myself,” he said, thinking it would make one or both of them laugh, but when they didn’t he added quickly, “No, seriously, that’s an enormous—an impossible question, really. There have been so many great ones. Certain ones have been the greatest at certain things. Rembrandt, for light and shadow. Michelangelo, for the human form. Leonardo—for what I’d guess you’d call grandeur of concept.”

  “Would you mind talking a little slower, Mr. Lord?” Rita Melnick said, bent over her pad.

  “Oh, sure. Sorry,” he said.

  “Mr. Lord,” she said, turning to the other sheet of paper again, “what is your advice to the striving artist?”

  He closed his eyes briefly. “My advice to the striving artist is—well, it’s strive. Yes. Work. The best you can do. Keep heading for the top. ‘Why ask for the moon? We have the stars,’” he said. “That’s a line from an old Bette Davis movie—long before your time. And I know it sounds corny—do you people still use that word, corny? But I mean it. Let the astronauts have the poor old moon. Shoot for the stars—the ones they’ll never reach. I mean that in terms of ambition, of work, of never being satisfied with what you do. That’s the only way you can achieve any kind of—success.”

  “Where were you born?”

  It was a bit of a jump, from the stars to where he was born. “Boston, Massachusetts,” he said.

  “Age?”

  “Thirty … nine.”

  “Brothers and sisters?”

  “One sister. Deceased.”

  “Education?”

  “Public schools of Massachusetts. Boston University. Art major.”

  “Married? Obviously—Stanley, why did you put that question in!” she said somewhat crossly. “Children?”

  “All in your high school—Harold, Maggie, and Carla.”

  “Father’s occupation?”

  He hesitated. “Prospector,” he said finally with another smile. “A prospector for gold and other precious minerals. He once was a schoolteacher, before he went in search of the rare minerals of the world.”

  “Living or deceased?”

  “Both parents deceased.”

  Stanley Bronson jogged her arm again and whispered something else in her ear. “Oh,” she said. “Excuse me. ‘Married’ was supposed to mean ‘Wife’s name.’”

  “I am married to the former Nancy Aylesbury,” and he spelled it for her.

  “Hm … hm … hm … obviously … obviously … obviously again,” she said, going down through a list of questions the obvious answers of which he couldn’t imagine. Then she said, “Political affiliation? Answer optional.”

  “I’m a Democrat; I’m not afraid to say it.”

  “What do you think of the pop artists and the op artists?”

  “I’d rather not criticize the work of other painters,” he said. “Let the critics do that. In general I say—yes, I’m all for them. They’re trying to do something different and new. I’m for anyone who’s trying to do something different and new.”

  “Do you think the United States will achieve a peaceful working relationship with Russia within our lifetime?”

  Their questionnaire, it seemed to him, could have stood a little organization. “I hope so,” he said. “Within my lifetime, I certainly hope so. Within your lifetime, I hope so even more.”

  “How do you get your inspirations?”

  “Oh,” he said, “from—from almost anywhere, Miss Melnick. I prefer to think of them as ideas, but they come from anywhere. From a piece of chocolate candy someone’s—”

  “From a piece of candy?”

  “Yes.” He smiled. “Or from your ponytail, Miss Melnick.”

  She looked almost alarmed.

  “I mean from little things,” he said gently. “Little things I see.”

  She wrote this down and said, “Mr. Lord, how do you stand on the fluoridation issue in our town?”

  “Miss Melnick, I haven’t lived here long enough to know that there was a fluoridation issue, but—I have nothing against fluoridation. I’m for it, in fact. It’s good for children’s teeth.”

  “Mr. Lord, we’re asking each of our parents in this series to tell us what they think life is about.”

  “Oh, my gosh,” he said. “What kind of answers have you been getting from the others? Life is a game. Even if you lose—no, I don’t mean that. Life is about—oh, listen, Miss Melnick! Life is about whatever you want to make it be about. Life is about everything! Listen, when I was your age—”

  “Yes?”

  “When I was your age,” he said more quietly, “I used to think about what life was about, trying to pin it down. But as you get older you’ll see that you can’t pin down a thing as big as everything.”

  “Mr. Lord, we’re asking each of our parents in the series to please state his philosophy of life.”

  He shut his eyes once more. “My philosophy of life is—” He tried to form words in his head, words that made sentences, sentences that made thoughts. He suddenly remembered, The fucking you get isn’t worth the fucking you get. “Well,” he said, “let me say—let me say I believe in the human spirit. But I also believe in hard work. And in honesty—integrity. I don’t believe in compromising. But I also say, don’t be afraid to listen to advice. But when you seek advice, make sure you seek the advice of the angels, Miss Melnick, not the fools.” He was speaking to them in huge, windy platitudes, he knew. “But this isn’t what you asked me, is it? I’m not giving you my philosophy—I’m just giving you advice. No, my philosophy of life is—just stay alive! That’s it,” he said happily. “Stay alive!” He waited for her to finish writing.

  “I’m up to ‘My philosophy of life is—’” she said.

  He smiled at her, feeling all at once spent and sad. “My philosophy of life is stay alive,” he said.

  “Is that one of your new paintings, Mr. Lord?” Rita Melnick said, pointing to the easel.

  “Yes …”

  “May we see it?”

  “Of course,” he said and rose quickly. He lifted the reversed canvas and showed it to them. “That’s it. That’s the way a picture starts. With absolutely nothing. That’s the great moment of truth you face, my girl. The first
of many, I might add.”

  The two stood up simultaneously now to go. “Well, thank you, Mr. Lord,” Rita Melnick said. “Your daughter Carla tells us you’re going to have a show soon at the world-famous Myra Mirisch Gallery.”

  “Is it world-famous?” he said. “Look, I’d rather you didn’t put that in. That announcement is—very premature. There are many details to be worked out. So don’t put that in your story.”

  “Well, it’s certainly been a most interesting interview, Mr. Lord,” Rita Melnick said.

  “And it has for me too,” he said. “Very interesting.”

  He shook the hands they offered.

  A few minutes after they had gone, Carla—who obviously had been hovering nearby, possibly even eavesdropping—rushed into his room. “Well, Daddy, how was it?” she demanded eagerly.

  “Exhausting,” he said. “I mean it.”

  “What did you think of Rita Melnick?”

  “That’s certainly a very on-the-ball young lady,” he said. “Her assistant, Mr. Whatsisname, didn’t have much to say, though.”

  “Yecchhht!” said Carla, making an unpleasant face. “That Stanley Bronson! Isn’t he just absolutely barfy?”

  But of course the queer thing was that so many of the questions that little girl had asked him reminded him of things that he and Cathy used to talk about when they were that age. Lying on the summer beach at Nahant, drawing abstractions with their fingers in the sand, making so many plans, they had talked about What Life Was About. And the answers hadn’t seemed like platitudes then because what they had spent their days searching for were mottoes. “We need mottoes to live by,” they had said. “Mottoes, mottoes, mottoes,” Cathy would say, her long fingers scratching in the sand as though the mottoes lived there, like crabs. They had talked a lot about platitudes, though. Platitudes were for other people.

  “A duck-billed platitude,” Cathy would say.

  A motto was something different. A motto was a badge, something you wore and flaunted and kept polished. It was something to remind you that you were special, different.

  “I’ve decided today that platitudes are good for you,” Cathy said once, throwing her length across the sand. “Platitudes are dull, insipid things. But they’re good to keep around the house because they remind you that there are dull, insipid things. We should paint them on our walls, I think, the way the Pennsylvania Dutch farmers paint hex designs on their barns. So those dull, insipid things won’t ever come buzzing around us. Yes, how’s that for a motto? Platitudes are good for you.”

  That may have been the last time any of them had discussed platitudes. Because, in the way she always had, Cathy had managed to have the last word on the subject, to cap it off neatly in a phrase, to sum it up, to put it to rest.

  But when he and Cathy discussed what life was about between themselves the subject had a different emphasis because of the odd, simple fact of their twinship. He and Cathy were different; they would always be. “I’m really rather glad we aren’t the one-egg kind,” she used to say. “I don’t like the idea of being split down the middle.”

  “Sounds painful,” he said.

  “I’m sure it’s agony,” she said. “Besides, the only one-egg twins I’ve ever known were a pair of awfully stupid girls. I’m sure it must be true—that when you have that kind they’re only half as bright. And two eggs seems so much more—orderly, somehow. So neat.”

  As a boy he had had a habit of collecting twos of things. Pairs of commemorative stamps. Pairs of birds’ eggs. Pairs of buffalo-head nickels. “One to keep and one to trade,” he used to explain to his mother, but he never traded the other of the pair. It was years later that Cathy told him she had once had the same secret habit.

  “We’re one out of eighty-six,” she used to say. “That’s the ratio, you know. We’re one-point-fifteen percent of the human population. It makes me feel like one of the chosen, doesn’t it you?”

  “We are the chosen.”

  And another time she said, “Just think—you and I spent a longer time side by side in that place than most two people spend together in a lifetime. No two people are ever so close for so long again. That has to make a difference.” It did make a difference.

  She used to claim that she could remember being an egg in “that place.” “It was all very dark, and rather blurry—but not pitch dark. And I was completely aware of everything that was going on, weren’t you? Don’t you remember? I couldn’t see much, but I could hear everything. Mother and Father used to quarrel a bit then, but not as much as they did later on. I used to take sides. Once she called him ‘a dreamer,’ and I thought, Well, what’s wrong with being a dreamer? Aren’t we all? I wasn’t a bit jealous when they made love.” They were lying on the beach alone, waiting for their friends to join them. “Don’t you remember any of this, Charlie?”

  He had laughed at her.

  “Think hard and you will. Push your mind way, way back and you’ll remember. I remember it all so well.”

  “It’s hopeless, I can’t.”

  “I was certainly very aware of you those days,” she said. “I mean, there you were—always. You and I used to quarrel too, sometimes, but not as much as we might have, considering.”

  “What did we quarrel about?” he asked her.

  “Don’t you remember? Oh, we didn’t quarrel about things, because there weren’t any things to quarrel about. We quarreled about ideas, interpretations.…”

  “Did we quarrel in words?”

  “Not in words. In language,” she said mysteriously.

  He laughed at her again.

  “I’m being completely serious,” she said. “I remember one quarrel in particular—”

  “What was that about?”

  She paused, looking away from him. “Never mind. If you don’t remember, never mind.”

  “But if I was part of it, don’t I have a right to know, Cathy? Tell me.”

  “Of course it was rather corny of Mother to give us names beginning with the same letter,” she said, changing the subject. “That was a corny thing for her to do.”

  “Come on. Tell me what our quarrel was about,” he insisted.

  “Oh,” she said in a changed voice, “it was about being born.”

  “What about it?”

  “You were always so eager to be born. I wasn’t. I was terrified of being born, but you just laughed at me.”

  And, of course, he was laughing at her now. Suddenly she jumped up and ran away from him across the beach. He called to her, then jumped up also and ran after her. She had long legs and was a fast runner—they were at the age when she had shot up in height and was taller than he—and he had run a long way down the curving beach and was panting and out of breath when he finally caught up to her, grabbed her shoulder, and spun her around. There were tears in her eyes, and he gasped, “What’s wrong? What did I say wrong, Cathy?”

  “You always laugh at me!” she said. “But it’s true. I never wanted to be born!”

  Though some of their friends used to insist that there was, there was not very much psychic communication between them. Some friends claimed that he and Cathy communicated telepathically over long distances, but he could remember only a few, very small instances. Once, for instance, had been after they had formed the partnership and were working in Los Angeles. It was in what Nancy still referred to as “the margarine period,” when they had been living in a small furnished apartment off Sepulveda Boulevard. One night, when he had been struggling over a layout on the kitchen table, while Nancy had tried to fix dinner around him, Cathy had telephoned him. “Don’t worry about the Simmons ad,” she said.

  “How did you know that was what I was working out?” he asked her.

  “Oh, I just had a hunch you were. Anyway, don’t worry about it. Simmons is flying to Seattle in the morning, so we’re off the hook for another week.”

  But, at the same time, it was true that their thoughts often meshed perfectly, that they could anticipate each othe
r’s reactions intuitively, and that each knew exactly what the other would say or do in most situations—particularly when it came to their famous running dialogues, the little pranks they used to play.

  Once, when he was going to lunch with her at the Hollywood Brown Derby, Cathy had preceded him through the bar into the dining room while he checked his hat. A woman at the bar had seized Charlie’s sleeve and said in an excited, breathless whisper, “Is that Maureen O’Hara?”

  Charlie had looked quickly at Cathy’s retreating back and said, “My golly! I think you’re right! Let’s go get her autograph!”

  “Oh, I hate to bother her! But she’s just about my favorite star!”

  “Mine too! Come on! All she can do is say no.” So he and the woman from the bar had hurried after Cathy.

  “Oh, dear Miss O’Hara!” the woman said, catching up to her at the table.

  Cathy had turned and given the woman her most dazzling smile. “Yes?” she said.

  “Oh,” the woman said, suddenly confused. “You’re not Miss O’Hara. I’m sorry—I thought—”

  “But I am Miss O’Hara,” Cathy said.

  “No—she’s older than you. No—”

  “I’m Sally O’Hara, from Akron. And you look familiar to me too,” Cathy said. “We must have met somewhere. Was it—”

  “No,” the woman said shakily. “No …”

  “My gosh!” Charlie said. “I knew a Sally O’Hara from Akron! Is it—you’re not—”

  “Why it’s—it’s George Morris!” Cathy had cried. She had flung her arms around him and kissed him. “George!” She beamed at him. “I haven’t seen you since that summer at the lake. Is this your pretty wife, George?”

  “No,” he said, looking at the woman. “I thought this was a friend of yours, Sally.”

  “George, darling?” Cathy said, “Can you have lunch with me?”

  “I’d love it, Sally—that is, if”—he looked at the woman again—“I’m not interrupting something.”

  “Why don’t you both join me?” Cathy suggested.

  “No,” the woman said, “no …” And she turned and made her way very uncertainly back to the bar.