by Paul Monette
At the farthest reach of the deck, she climbed a flight of white stone steps that angled up to the roof. At the top, the whole expanse was planted in ivy, so as to cool the house beneath—or at least Wright’s half of it was. From the head of the stairs, a pebble path wound its circuitous way across the ivy field to the roof’s far edge, where a kind of square stone shrine was perched above the canyon. This was where Jasper had lived. It used to be Jacob Willis’s office—before that, Abner’s—but Vivien always felt, as she walked the lush and well-kept ground that hovered above the surrounding hills like a flying carpet, that Wright had wanted a temple.
To a person approaching it up the path, it looked like a solid block of stone—a cube maybe fifteen feet on a side. The figures carved on the outer walls depicted, in the Mayan style, a flight of water birds on a pattern of scalloped waves. It looked like the winter view down the canyon, when flocks of northern birds were blanketed all across the water. Some few were frozen in stone up here, like fossils. As she came up close, she put out a finger and touched the outstretched wing of a crane. She hadn’t been here in a long long time. It grew to be out of bounds between them, very early on. But the stonework friezed on the walls was in her blood. The Mayan birds still peopled the dreams she sometimes had, of places so wild they couldn’t be owned.
She came around the corner, closer to the door. It wasn’t going to be easy. She tried to focus on nothing but this, that the water had to be started up for Jasper’s sake. There was sure to be death still hanging about inside—in his clothes, in his drawers, in the odds and ends of his everyday life. It was one thing, she knew, to look down on the redwood tub from the balcony off her room, for there it was just the dying that mocked and rang in the empty yard. Up here it was everything Jasper ever kept, and one of his quirks was souvenirs.
As she reached for the handle, she put her mind on the water’s course and blocked the treehouse clutter that lay all about the room. The water was piped from deep in the house. It bubbled up into a shallow, half-moon pool in the room beyond. The farthest point of the moon cantilevered out through a plate-glass window. From there, it spilled a stream that fell and splashed in a second pool—down below in the garden, just outside the dining room. It flowed and played like mountain water. It pulsed all through, like the house’s blood.
So do it, she thought. Go in.
“No!” bellowed Artie, fierce and grim from the other side of the door. She froze with the handle turned a quarter turn. “If you touch that stuff, I swear I’ll kill you.”
She released the handle slowly, clicking the door back into place. Then she hugged the wall and crept along to the edge of the roof. Since the big plate window in Jasper’s room faced west—flush with the drop to the garden below—she couldn’t see in or be seen. But the voices came to her clearly, filtering out the hole where the stream had dried. She gazed down blankly the length of the canyon, letting it all come out.
“You do that, baby,” Carl replied with huge contempt. “Why don’t you see if the cops would like it? Maybe you don’t realize—they got questions you can’t answer. All I’m doing is getting rid of stuff that’s nobody’s business.”
“Business I don’t give a shit about,” said Artie coldly. “Just don’t mess with the past.”
“You planning an exhibition?”
“Half of it’s mine. Leave it alone.”
“But Artie, honey, it’s over.”
Fast. It went very fast. She couldn’t imagine what anyone thought. It was all too raw.
“Oh, Carl,” said Artie, “you think I don’t know. But I do.”
“And what might that be, Artie? You’re real smart. I always said so.”
A split second’s pause, like a beat in timing. Then Artie, bitterly: “He was going to fire you. He told me so. That’s what was over—you and him.”
And the silence fell so thick and fast, she thought at first they must have blocked the window. Was that all they had to say? Had they both turned back to the drawer they were rifling, the argument safely behind them? She couldn’t remember them hating each other out loud like this before. It was part of the ancient contract, somehow. No disagreements. No dirty laundry. No twisted arms or assigning of blame. Perhaps they always waited till they were alone, but how had she managed, eight years running, not to overhear a word?
“Go ahead,” said Carl at last, very icy and under control.
“That’s all.”
“It is like hell. What exactly did Jasper say?”
“Just what I said. Once this picture was out, he was breaking contract.”
Curiously, she had no fear of being caught. She convinced herself she could have walked right in, except she didn’t like to break their train of thought. No more would Carl have butted in on her and Artie. As she stood on the brink and listened, she seemed to go out of her way to protest that it wasn’t really spying. She knew these men. They were what she had instead of a family. They might be saying things that she should know—things they had tried to protect her from, in case she couldn’t take it. But she could. If either one had suddenly thrown the door wide, she would have remained quite calm and said: “What’s this about the contract?” Indicating that any problem to do with Jasper took them all in, all three at once. She was included as much as they, by the nature of the survivorship they shared. The last thing on her mind was that they’d gone behind her back.
The room beyond the wall had grown so quiet, she knew it was time to go. Otherwise, she would try to guess their movements. Overhearing what she couldn’t help but hear in the very air around her compromised her not at all. But now she was craning forward—trying to ascertain if it was papers being shuffled, or something more substantial. Wondering once again how Jasper could have died in a redwood tub, since they made him sick to his stomach.
“Carl?” asked Artie gently, and Vivien knew he was standing still and staring down at his shoes. It was Carl doing all the rustling. “Can’t you tell me why?”
“Why didn’t you ask him?”
“I did. He wouldn’t say. I guess it was no one thing, huh?”
“Like fraud, you mean? No, it wasn’t as simple as that. You know,” he said, with a sudden throb of broken feeling, “he was like a brother to me.”
Vivien heard him start to cry, except it wasn’t exactly tears. He seemed to be trying to cry out. But nothing came. It was as if he’d lost his voice from the strain of saying “brother.” The door flew open. She turned from the edge of the roof to face him, ready to say she was sorry. Corrupt as she’d always believed him to be, she had no other choice but to go with the living. She saw the situation clearly. It simply wouldn’t be fair, to try to prove the contract null and void by reason of Jasper’s final whim. Carl was a bastard, all right, but she had to admit that he’d earned his twenty percent. And he didn’t have to profess a lot of brotherhood to get it. She took a step forward to tell him so. To say she was on his side, no matter how much she hated him.
But he strode out of Jasper’s room and didn’t wait to hear it. He took no notice of her at all, though she stood just a few feet off to his right. He lurched away along the pebble path. The moment’s glimpse she had of his face showed all the pain of the thing he’d said. It was strange, how willing she was to take his part. It must have sprung from his having been abandoned. She knew that Jasper said things at the end of a shoot that he later regretted. She was sorry for Carl in the very way she was sorry for herself—that she’d talked to Jasper just before and heard no clue at all.
With a knock and a gurgle, the water went on in the room beside her. Oh yes, she thought with a pang, to think she had failed to reach the switches first. She took a couple of steps to the open door, uncertain how best to announce herself. She peered inside with a tentative smile, prepared to pass it all off as a joke. Artie was sitting where she would have been—on the low, tiled wall of the half-moon pool, trailing a hand in the ripple of water. He looked out onto the canyon, his back to her and to Jasper�
�s pack-rat jumble of things.
“I beat you to it,” he said quite mildly, not even turning his head.
How did he know she was there? She thought: Will we keep on reading each other’s mind—even now, with Jasper dead? He must have heard the door go click, when she started in and stopped. In which case, he also knew she’d overheard them going at it.
“It’s harder for him than us,” he said.
“You think so?” Vivien asked as she came inside. The drawers in the old oak rolltop desk were closed. The papers and fan mags stacked on the shelves behind were undisturbed, or at least put back. There were cowboy hats in three different shades, hanging on hooks in the wall. A big green highway sign from Sweetwater, Kansas, was propped on the floor. In a tall gray milk can, stuck like pencils, were a hockey stick and a pearl-topped cane. It was all just props, from a hundred scenes. She let it all be and turned to the window. She stood not a foot from Artie and stared, like him, at the miles of view. She said: “I’ve been acting on the theory that we all feel about the same.”
“Except Carl doesn’t really go in for feelings, does he?”
“Well, he doesn’t with me. But I gather it got pretty heated with Jasper.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Artie vaguely. “Not that I ever heard.”
What was this? He was acting as if she hadn’t had a ringside seat throughout. Or more than that—as if it hadn’t even happened. He seemed to imply there were things that were best forgotten. It struck her again what a curious widow she was, to have to share the loss in equal parts with the other two. Outside of the extra contract she and Jasper had signed and sealed to satisfy the state, she knew she had no special claim to having lost the most. So why shouldn’t Artie improve the truth—pretending things had never changed—since who would it help, to break it all up this late in the game? She didn’t blame him a bit. In his place, she would have done the same.
“I guess you’re right,” she said. “I don’t suppose I’ve ever heard Carl overcome with emotion.”
So the lie was agreed to. Nothing at all had taken place. She supposed she would never hear it spoken of again. She watched out the window quietly, fixing her eyes on the tip of the moon, where the water lipped over and fell. Just at the verge, the current had a thickness to it, swelling up like a bud about to flower. The moment was smooth as glass.
“Why do you always carry that book around?”
“Do I?”
“Since the funeral you have. You taking a correspondence course?”
“Not quite. I’m having a kind of debate. I guess you’d call this my side.”
“It’s that guy Cannon, right?” They hadn’t said a word yet about Monday afternoon. Greg was not one of the things between them. Not till now, anyway. “Let me tell you something, Viv. He’s a yo-yo. You’re the biggest fish he ever caught. He’s gonna rip you off.”
“Don’t be so protective,” Vivien said with a little laugh she meant to end the matter. “All I’m trying to do is—I don’t know—get out of myself for a while. Maybe do a little heavy thinking.”
“Why him? He’s a philosopher, is he?”
“Near enough,” she replied with a shrug. “He’s a writer who’s given up books. I suppose he’s gone beyond them.”
“Well, he’s also a star-struck faggot,” Artie said in a cautionary way. “Remember that, will you?”
They looked each other in the eye. One on one, they had no suspicions and no desires. They had always brought out each other’s best side. For a moment, though, they looked like childhood pals about to go off to college a thousand miles apart. They did not seem to know how far afield they’d gone from the safety of their former guilelessness. The sound of water played in their ears, and they had the high ground covered. No one else could approach unspied. The one lie wasn’t so much. They could see they were quite all right.
“Should we go through Jasper’s things?” she asked.
“You mean now?”
“Why not? Between the two of us, we ought to be able to figure what to keep and what to throw out.”
She took two steps toward the desk. She crouched and pulled out a drawer at random. It was full of programs—concerts, plays, the circus, one-night runs and road shows. She’d never saved anything much herself. The point of it all escaped her. Just as surely, unlike Greg and his killer plots, she never assumed a force as vivid and particular as evil. She was much more conscious, in human affairs, of the blurred and imprecise. If people killed at all, she thought, they did it in bits and pieces, over a term of years.
“Can’t we leave it the way it is?” he asked. He betrayed no special sentiment, or none she could put a finger on. It sounded as if he simply didn’t have the energy.
“We don’t want to have a museum, do we?”
“More like an attic,” he said.
“Oh, I don’t care,” she retorted, sliding the drawer back in. “Whatever you like. You think there’s anything hidden here?”
“You mean, like an outlaw’s loot?”
“I guess. Or a diary, maybe?”
“Not a chance.”
“He wasn’t much of a romantic, was he?”
“He wasn’t much of anything,” said Artie. “Do you miss him?”
“Not as much as you.”
She turned around and watched him as he wept above the stream. The water was now a couple of inches deep—enough so it lost the look of being mechanized. They were perched at the top of a falls, at the moment where the water pitched and fell into smithereens.
“I thought we weren’t comparing,” Artie remarked in a brokenhearted voice.
“Well,” she said gently, stroking his hair, “I lied.”
By Thursday afternoon, with only two days to go, she had thirty-eight pieces packed, and the balcony end of her bedroom looked like an orchestra set to go on tour. The sketch of a plan was in her head. She would phone the apology in to Felix and Erika Friday night. Then she’d take the barest bones of the luggage and go to LAX and board the next available flight. To Rome, perhaps, or Amsterdam, for starters. In her present mood, the place was less important than the posh of this or that hotel. She imagined a room appointed in country French, with yards of eyelet embroidery fleecing the four-post bed.
She didn’t think of what she was doing as anything quite so Garbo as going into hiding. The European press, so assiduous in pursuit of her, would find her in a minute. But if she stayed here, she’d start to keep out of the way in her own house. She knew now some kind of power struggle was taking place at Steepside. Let the balance settle where it might, she thought, while she was safely far away. She didn’t really care how it ended. Whatever the outcome was, she’d be as strong as ever, no matter if Jasper’s money was all dispersed to the poor and the Roman church. She couldn’t be burned or cheated. The Willis clout went too deep. She could see it was all going to turn on which of those in Jasper’s circle he’d told about his pulling free from Carl. It had gone beyond Artie. Max knew too. At least, she guessed that’s what he was hinting at, the other day on the mission set.
She didn’t want a bit of it. She was totally neutral, like the Swiss.
But then why, if she didn’t care, if she meant to leave it behind and flee, did she skulk about looking for clues? It came on her Thursday night in the middle of dinner. She sat on a stool in front of the double-doored Amana, only a dozen steps from the bank of garages. She was crouching forward into the fridge, a thin little vermeil fork in her hand. She picked at a leftover plate of bass and poached white grapes. There was a pony of Mumm’s uncorked beside it, which she sipped from the bottle like Pepsi. And all of a sudden, she heard the Porsche pull out of its berth. She knew the sound of the 911 from all the other cars they owned. The 911 was Carl.
Yet she seemed unaware of any irony, as she slipped off the stool and made for the kitchen door. Before the noise had quite died away down the drive, she said to herself that maybe Carl and Artie would like a little supper too. She oughtn’t t
o eat up all the fish before they had a bite. The fork was still in her hand, in the eating position, as she walked across the dining room to Carl and Artie’s quarters. The fork to give her an alibi, it seemed. She hummed in a most distracted way as she closed the distance, step by careless step.
She rapped her knuckles on the studded oak door to Carl’s room. Of course there was no answer. She pushed on through. “Carl?” she asked in a stagey way, peering around the door. Dead silence. Then, in a flash, she was all the way in, and her heart was pounding dreadfully. Nobody home, imagine that.
She didn’t suppose she’d been here since she was married, though she’d had occasion to be in Artie’s room across the hall a hundred different times. Abner Willis had done this wing in a kind of Bo-Peep chalet style, with rough-beamed ceiling and leaded diamond windows. The Wagnerian furniture, if she recalled, used to be Cardinal Richelieu’s. The desk where she now sat down, laying her fork on the blotter beside the fountain pen, was grand enough for the signing of treaties.
She raised the manila edge of a folder square in front of her. At the sight of figures in columns, she drew the usual blank. She wasn’t the Horatio Alger sort of heiress, with a longing to fill her father’s shoes and double the family holdings. The up-and-coming types in the banks of Beverly Hills took care of that part for her. All she had to do was lunch three times a year in the penthouse suite with the president. The economics went right by her, the import being that the rich got rich.
She pulled out the drawers one by one, looking down in but not troubling to root around. She could see right off, from the general look of compulsive neatness, that she probably needed a CPA for sidekick, if she meant to clear a proper space to sneak about in.
