The Great Believers

by Rebecca Makkai

  “I’d say mid-spring of 1919. I was twenty-four, and I felt terribly adult. In Philadelphia, I was considered an old maid.”

  “What happened to Ranko?” Roman said, and Yale wanted to throttle him. Yale did actually want to know, but not until everything else was settled. It slowly came back to him that he’d dreamt about Ranko last night, about Ranko locked away in his castle. Yale was trying to phone him, trying to get him to come out and see Nora before she burned his paintings. The number he’d been dialing, Yale realized, was the number of the Out Loud office.

  “Well,” Nora said, “that was the question. I hadn’t heard a word, not a single letter. I’d find myself hoping he’d died, so it didn’t mean he’d rejected me, and then I’d hope he hated me, if it meant he hadn’t died. Don’t imagine I stayed in love the whole time. I had a few gentleman friends in Philadelphia, though no one I wanted to marry. The boys I’d grown up with had gone off to the war, so I was stuck with—oh gracious, there was a shoe salesman. After all those wild young artists. I was bored out of my mind.”

  Yale started to ask how she began modeling, but he was too slow—the brain fog didn’t help—and she was off again.

  “You have to understand, we didn’t know who was alive or dead. My friends from Colarossi, even professors. And on top of the war, there was the flu! Sometimes you’d get a letter, So-and-so was wounded in action. And later you’d hear he’d died in the hospital camp, and you didn’t know if it was the wounds or the flu. But mostly there was no news at all. You really won’t find too much Modi in there, dear,” she said to Roman. But Roman kept looking. Yale wondered if he was hiding behind the binder, avoiding eye contact.

  “I got back to Paris, and Paris was gone. Not the city, just the—I don’t know if I can explain. The boys were gone, our classmates, or they were missing limbs. There was an architecture student who came back intact, only he’d lost his voice from mustard gas, never said another word. Everyone that spring just wandered. You’d find a friend in a café, and even if you’d hardly known them you’d run and kiss them, and you’d exchange news about who was dead. I don’t know how you could compare it to anything else. I don’t know how you could.”

  Yale had missed a step. “Compare what?”

  “Well, you! Your friends! I don’t know how it’s like anything other than war!”

  Roman froze—Yale could see it in his peripheral vision, Roman’s fingers stopping on the pages—and Yale wanted to assure him he couldn’t have contracted anything from Yale’s hand. Or maybe Roman was worried Nora’s “you” included him.

  Nora said, “That’s why I picked you, why I wanted you to have all this! The instant Fiona told me about you, I knew. I understand Mr. Lindsey’s in charge of the show, but you’re the one who’s going to make sure it’s cared for the right way.”

  This wasn’t true in any official sense, but Yale nodded. “Of course,” he said.

  “Because you’ll understand: It was a ghost town. Some of those boys were dear friends. I’d studied next to them for two years. I’d run around with them, doing all the ridiculous things you do when you’re young. I could tell you their names, but it wouldn’t mean a thing to you. If I told you Picasso died in the war, you’d understand. Poof, there goes Guernica. But I tell you Jacques Weiss died at the Somme, and you don’t know what to miss. It—you know what, it prepared me for being old. All my friends are dying, or they’re dead already, but I’ve been through it before.”

  Yale hadn’t particularly thought of Nora having current friends. Somehow he’d always thought of friends as the people you met early and stayed bonded to forever. Maybe this was why his loneliness was hitting him so hard. He couldn’t imagine going out and selecting a brand-new cohort. How unimaginable that Nora had lived another seven decades, that she’d known the world this long without her first adult friends, her compatriots.

  Nora said, “Every time I’ve gone to a gallery, the rest of my life, I’ve thought about the works that weren’t there. Shadow-paintings, you know, that no one can see but you. But there are all these happy young people around you and you realize no, they’re not bereft. They don’t see the empty spaces.”

  Yale wished Roman weren’t in the room, that he and Nora could sit and cry together. She fixed him with her wet eyes, held his gaze as if she were squeezing it.

  Roman said, “And Ranko wasn’t around?”

  Nora blinked. “Well. No one knew where he was. Some of my friends were still at Colarossi, but I didn’t have money to go back; I’d only saved enough for the trip. I stayed with a Russian girl who’d been a classmate, a terrible influence.

  “There were paid evening classes for the public, and some of the instructors would let us sneak in. I thought I’d skip around town and paint things, but I was at such loose ends. I wanted to paint boys who’d lost arms, but I couldn’t bring myself to. So in the midst of all the chaos, there I sat drawing fruit. The same brainless exercises I’d given those children in Philadelphia.”

  “And you met these artists then?” Yale prompted. “That year, or later?”

  “That summer and that fall.”

  Roman took the notebook from Yale, flipped to the back. “Modigliani returned to Paris in the spring of 1919,” he said. He’d made a timeline in there, color coded and everything. “With Jeanne Hébuterne and their daughter.” Yale could smell Roman’s sweat from here—not a bad scent, but one he’d been up close to yesterday, one that accosted him with its familiarity.

  “Fantastic. Well, and he was dead himself the next January. So that must give you a time frame, no?” She looked pleased with herself. “Modi had studied at Colarossi, and he would come back to strut around. He looked like an opera villain, and he was already famous. Terrible breath, terrible teeth, but when I saw him I was starstruck. He was in the hallway with our instructor, and I found some excuse to ask a question. He was the first to ask me to model.

  “The thing is, I wanted to be a muse. It had to do with my own art, the way it wasn’t expressing the losses I felt. And if I couldn’t paint it all myself, maybe someone could paint my soul. It was a stab at immortality, of course.”

  Yale had a million questions, one of which was whether being a muse involved sex, but what he asked was, “So this was spring? Summer?”

  He tried to imagine someone, sixty years from now, pinning him down on the minute details of his life: Which happened first, the test or the hand job? Who died first, Nico or Terrence? Where did Jonathan Bird live when he got sick? When did Charlie die, exactly? Where were you when you heard? When did Julian die? What about Teddy? Richard Campo? When did you first feel sick? He’d be the world’s luckiest man to stand there at the end of it all, to be the one left, trying to remember. The unluckiest too.

  And then Roman screamed. It was shrill and it came in pieces, a rapid machine-gun scream that didn’t stop. Yale understood as soon as Roman’s legs were off the floor and he was kneeling up on the couch. Debra must have understood, too, because she was down the stairs with a broom already in her hand. “Where’d it go?” she said, and Roman waved his arm in a general way toward the wall, the shelf, the dining room.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I hate mice.” Yale did, too, but Roman’s overreaction was allowing him to underreact, to ask calmly if he could help. As Debra looked around, hit the broom handle against the record shelf to see if anything would scamper out, Roman said, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I didn’t sleep last night.”

  “Just let the poor thing go, dear,” Nora said to Debra.

  But now that Roman said he was fairly certain he’d seen it run behind the hutch in the dining room, Debra enlisted Yale’s help in moving the hutch away from the wall.

  He was dizzy when he stood, the hangover still grabbing at him. He wanted to be home sleeping. Well, somewhere sleeping.

  “Get your fingers under the ledge,” Debra said. The hutch
was tall and enormously heavy, and he couldn’t manage a decent grip.

  He’d read in a magazine that hangovers exacerbated feelings of shame—that you’d feel worst about whatever you did the night before when you were still hung over. He hoped it was true, because the thought of going back to the B&B tonight, of sleeping in the same building as Roman, was bringing a wave of nausea. Or maybe that was the heavy lifting. They walked the hutch a foot forward, one end at a time. There was a lot of dust back there but no mouse, no nest. In the living room, Roman had calmed down; he and Nora were talking in what sounded like normal voices.

  “Just leave it,” Debra said. “I should vacuum.” She redid her ponytail, which had come loose. “I guess it’s good we don’t have the art here. It’s a pigsty.”

  Yale needed a glass of water. He needed the bathroom. He said, “Ha. Yeah, the dust bunnies wouldn’t hurt, but you don’t want mice around two million dollars of art.”

  Debra’s hands stopped in her hair. “Excuse me?”

  He was so out of it, so distracted, that he thought he’d offended her by bringing up the very mouse she’d been chasing.

  She said, “Did you say two million dollars?”

  “Oh. I just—” He tried to say something about that simply being the amount Chuck Donovan had brought up, but he couldn’t think fast enough to form a coherent sentence, besides which he had no excuse for lying to her. He said, “Yeah, more or less.”

  Debra’s face grew so red, so pinched, that he thought she might spit at him. She whispered, which was worse than if she’d shouted. “I was on your side. For like half a minute, you had me on your fucking side.”

  “We are on the same side,” Yale said, ridiculously.

  “I defended you to my dad. Does she know? Does my grandmother know how much she gave away? I thought we were talking about hundreds of thousands. That was bad enough. You lied to me.”

  There was a slick side of Yale that sometimes emerged, magic and unbidden, in tricky professional moments, and he waited for it now, hoped something placating would come out of his mouth.

  “You need to leave,” she said. “This house belongs to my father. I was willing to keep this visit from him, but you’re going now.” She folded her arms across her stomach, a gray X of sweater.

  “Sure,” Yale said, although his voice barely came out.

  Nora and Roman didn’t seem to have heard a thing. “We were talking about those poor astronauts,” Nora said when Yale came back to the doorway.

  “They’re going to leave,” Debra said, “and let you rest.”

  “Oh! But they’ll come back tomorrow?”

  “You have the doctor tomorrow.” Debra was already holding their coats. “They’re going back to Chicago.”

  Yale didn’t look at Debra. He wanted to swear, to yell at himself, to hit his head against the wall. He said, “We’ll get right back up here.”

  He couldn’t imagine that was true. But they’d work something out, maybe just phone conversations.

  Nora stood and slowly joined them near the front door. She said, “I fear I haven’t gotten it across at all. If only we had a time machine, I could take you on the most wonderful tour!”

  Yale said, as he fumbled with his coat buttons, “I was just thinking about time travel on the way here.”

  She laughed. “Time travel is so easy! It’s devastatingly easy! All you have to do is live long enough!”

  Roman stopped with his arm halfway down his sleeve.

  “Listen,” she said. “When I was born, the streets weren’t paved.”

  Yale was still thinking about that when Roman said, “But Ranko. We never heard the end.”

  Debra opened the door, let the freezing air in. “He showed back up, and his hand didn’t work right, and he killed himself,” she said. “That’s the end of the story.”

  Yale and Roman said “Oh” at the same time, Roman an octave higher.

  Nora said, “Right in front of me, I’m afraid.”

  Debra opened her mouth, and before she could make things worse, before she could announce what an enormous mistake Yale had made, he walked out the door, made sure Roman was following.

  * * *

  —

  Outside Milwaukee, Roman turned off the radio and said, “It’s great that he killed himself.”

  “Are you being sarcastic?”

  “It’s a better story this way! And the better the story, the more likely Bill is to include his stuff. If it’s just some random guy, then they’re just cow sketches. But if it’s her love, and he killed himself, then it’s, like, the main story of the collection. When we go back, we’ll get the details! Do you think he shot himself? He must’ve, right?”

  Yale’s stomach was a mess, and he needed to put his head down and sleep. He didn’t want to break it to Roman that he’d quite possibly never get the end of the Ranko Novak story, at least not firsthand.

  Roman said, “Did you know that when Jules Pascin slit his wrists, he wrote a message for his mistress with his blood?”

  “How romantic.”

  A minute later Roman said, in a quieter voice, “You know that’s not—last night—that’s not the kind of thing I do.”

  “Okay.” Yale kept his eyes on the road, tried to act completely neutral.

  “God, I’m so messed up.”

  “I don’t think that’s true.” He tried to remember why he’d let it happen, who had initiated it all. The heavy stickiness of that room was still with him, but none of it made sense anymore.

  Roman’s face was turned completely away. What good could he even be to this kid? It was January 29, three days past the circled spot on his calendar, and he was heading back to the city, to real life, with everything he still owned in the back of a rental car he’d have to return before dinner. He had a few dates jotted down for Bill, but no scoop on any artists besides Ranko Novak. And he might have just burned their one bridge to Nora. He had no idea where he was spending the night. Roman might have needed a role model, but it sure as hell shouldn’t be Yale.

  He said, “If you don’t mind, I’m going to turn the radio up.”

  2015

  Starting when Claire was eight, she would come in on Saturdays to help Fiona in the resale shop. Fiona had just been made manager, and she still needed to spend twice as long as she would in subsequent years with the balance sheets, the payroll, the ancient and temperamental computer. She’d pick Claire up from ballet and head back to work as the store was closing. Claire would wander, dusting and straightening. She’d come and tell Fiona if a bulb was burnt out, and Fiona would give her a notepad and tell her to write down which one.

  Or sometimes it was Claire and a friend, some girl who thrilled at the prospect of walking around an empty store as the streetlights came on outside, pretending to be trapped in an old mansion.

  The store was chic and sparse and curated, two floors of artfully arranged living rooms and dining rooms and closets. Sometimes Fiona would ask Claire to straighten up the ladies’ shoes, and Fiona would emerge from the office an hour later to find the high heels sorted by color into rainbow stripes. Just as often, she’d find Claire sitting on one of the couches, staring into the middle distance, not having done a thing Fiona had asked. It didn’t matter much—she’d really just been inventing tasks—but this, Claire’s teachers said, was what she did at school too: Sometimes she’d do her work and sometimes she’d stonewall them, just sit silently drawing trees, impervious to threats of lost recess.

  Once, that year, there was a tremendous snowstorm, and Sophia, the friend they’d brought back to the store from ballet, worried she wouldn’t be able to get home. Or at least she and Claire enjoyed pretending to worry. “You can sleep on the stripy bed upstairs,” Claire said, “and I’ll sleep on Soft-more.” Soft-more was her name for a particular leather couch that had been in the store for more than a
year. Sophia said, “We’ll have to change into new clothes in the morning. We’ll have to pick outfits.”

  Sophia lived only six blocks away, though, and at seven o’clock Fiona called Mrs. Nguyen and said she’d be happy to walk her home. She told the girls it was time to go. Sophia whined a bit but Claire was silent. It wasn’t till they’d dropped Sophia at her door and were back on Clark that Claire sank to the snowy sidewalk and shouted, “I hate you!” Not crying, just seething in a little ball, angry and red.

  The affair Fiona had started with Dan from yoga was, right then, at its most confusing point. Dan would email her every day on his lunch hour, and on days when he didn’t—as he hadn’t today—she’d invent all kinds of scenarios wherein he’d suddenly reconciled with the wife he was divorcing, or had abruptly, in the middle of the morning, grown sick of Fiona. She was convinced that she loved him, that she’d never loved anyone more, but then when she did see him, when he managed to slip away from the home he still shared with his ex and their kids, meet her at a hotel or at the store—where, lights off, they’d make love on top of a blanket on that same couch Claire adored—she’d remember that he wasn’t all that special. A brown-haired guy with nice eyes, average intelligence. He could have been in an insurance commercial. That winter, though, he had her in a permanent haze, and when Claire dropped to the sidewalk, Fiona could only stare at her.

  If they’d been home, she might have called Claire out for her language. But here, an upset Claire could decide to take off into the street or onto a city bus. Fiona stood a long time between Claire and the road. The few people who passed smiled sympathetically. The wind hurled snow in everyone’s face.