“Your house. Your house.” A snarl through the darkness between hall and living room. “Who do you think you are? This is his house, bought with his work that you stole!”
A hint of movement that was Jule standing up. “Those paintings were all he left us—”
“No shit they were all he left us!” Cézanne was breathless, incredulous. “Is that supposed to be a reason?”
“They were all he left me to support you with. What the hell do you think pays for all these fancy schools? These expensive schools that you insist on going to, and that you keep getting yourself kicked out of!”
“Don’t give me that. Don’t you dare give me that. I don’t give a sweet goddamn about what school I go to, and you know it.”
“Or where you live? You want food on your table? A roof over your head?”
“You call waterfront property necessity? You call no fucking job necessity? You sold those paintings out of revenge. At least have the guts to admit it when you know I know!”
“He left us! He walked out the goddamn door without a goddamn word!”
“Oh my god!” It was a cry. “You know he didn’t walk out of any door!”
Silence from the living room. The darkness flashed in time with Cézanne’s heart; traffic and tide boomed through the pulse in her ears. When Jule spoke again, her voice came as almost as great a shock as the first time.
“Cézanne. Oh, my love. Where do you imagine he’s gone?”
“You know.” A whisper. “You know.”
“Sweetheart.” Was Jule’s voice patient, or careful? “Russ loved you so much. But responsibility was so hard for him—”
“Is this still some kind of revenge? Pretending his paintings are nothing but oil and pigment and cloth? How can you, when you know where he has gone?”
“How can you pretend,” Jule flatly replied, “that they are anything else?”
A slow breath in. A long, shaking breath out. “Oh, god, no wonder he left.”
When Jule said nothing more, Cézanne moved to the front door, undid the deadbolt and the chain, stepped out into the sea- and gasoline-smelling air. Paused a moment on the step.
Shut the door on the dark and the silence behind her.
A small house in an exclusive neighborhood, its walls crowded with treasure, as though the owner made a collage of paintings, drawings, etchings, prints. Priceless things guarded by a simple alarm and a dog who whined with pleasure at being let out into the night for a leashless run. The flashlight shone bright with new batteries, dazzling Cézanne’s dark-adapted eye with color and line. Russ’s painting had pride of place on the dining room wall; the glass doors that opened on the living room framed it beautifully, cleverly: the painting itself was a view through an open door.
A rain-washed courtyard of tilted stones—a kitchen yard, old, with a crooked, gap-planked gate onto a garden, rakes and hoes propped leaning on the vine-clad wall. There was a shed stacked with flowerpots, a rusted wheelbarrow tipped up on its wheel. Such details hardly mattered. The real subject was the rain; the painting, a portrait of a rainy day. Luminous with cloud light, the courtyard was a reservoir brimming with color and damp air, the gate that sagged on its broken hinges like an immanent breach of the dam. The whole painting was as urgent as a flood.
Cézanne followed the flashlight beam around the long table to stand at the visual threshold where the true image threatened to dissolve into the equally true mechanism of brush strokes and paint. Through the gaps in the gate she could see the green of the rain-fed garden, and the figure of the gardener stooping among the rows.
“Daddy.” She put her hand on the painted doorjamb, stared through the circle of light until the figure almost seemed to move. “Please.” This time. This time . . .
She pressed her face against the canvas, her tears dampening the painted rain, until the happy dog came and barked to be let back in, and she had to run.
Jule had put the chain bolt back on the door. Cézanne sat wearily on the stoop without trying the bell. Dawn hovered in the misty air, just beginning to dim the streetlights ranked along the seawall. She was too tired to think what came next. She hugged her arms around the knapsack in her lap and tilted her head against the door, watching as mist and damp concrete and ocean water swelled with color and light, and iron railings became black ink strokes against the gray. She remembered the sketch she had made two weeks ago; that memory blurred into the sketch of lake and reeds and arching bridge, the sketch the curator had taken. Poor payment for so much pain.
At the thought—as if, this time, the curator had been waiting for her—memory blurred into vision. Still water, reflected arch making a ring of the bridge, reeds threaded by mist, the open wall of the teahouse a frame like a mockery of her father’s courtyard door. The picture was vivid against the gray of early morning, stunning in its color, no picture at all, but a window on a perfect moment of time—until color, depth, life drained away, were sucked away, leaving thin black lines across a marginless expanse of white . . . until those lines were sucked away as well, stolen by the curator’s hunger as blood might be stolen from her veins—until there was nothing left but white—
She woke confused. She should have been on the hard step, but she lay across something soft and warm. She was not on the hard step, but there was the street before her, the railings with their compliment of seagulls, the restless sea beyond. She was outside, but the air smelled of sandalwood and brewing coffee. Confused, she stirred, and Jule’s arms tightened around her. She lifted her head, and Jule’s tears fell against her cheeks. She blinked and thought of rain.
The curator would be coming for the rest of his payment soon. Cézanne could not bring herself to think about this directly. Guilt and fear got in the way. What had she been doing to Russ all this time? What had she been doing to herself? She did not know, but the memory of white haunted the background of everything she saw. So she hid her mind in her schoolwork, hid her indecision in meaningless activity.
Her art teacher had set the senior class to putting together portfolios to send to universities and art schools, and she did that. She leafed through drawing after drawing, pencil, charcoal, pastel, watercolor, ink, and the teacher would peer over her shoulder and say Those could be a series or I’d like to see another figure drawing to balance the still life’s, as if it mattered. Paper, marked and smudged, sifted through her hands like dead leaves. Only one stopped her, a pen and ink portrait she had made from a memory of Jule. There was something of Russ’s Madonna in it, something of his Eve. You are your father’s daughter, said the curator in her mind. But the portrait was, more than anything, a picture of the woman who had held her daughter on the steps at dawn, the woman no one but Cézanne had ever seen. Before she could hide the sketch, or destroy it, the art teacher saw it, exclaimed over it, took it away to be mounted, and Cézanne could not summon the will to retrieve it. She was braced too hard against action, any action.
And then the afternoon for meeting the curator under the greening trees came and went, and she knew, finally, with sickening clarity, that the not-deciding had been transformed by time into a decision, and that the decision had been the wrong one. She should have met him, though she did not know what the consequences of having stayed away would be.
The drawings were fixed to squares of matting and filed into big, false leather cases labeled with prestigious addresses and stickers that said Do Not Bend. The art teacher made a small ceremony of collecting them, and after the last class several students, Cézanne among them, made a parade of bearers carrying the portfolios to the main administration building where the courier would pick them up. Cézanne stacked her load with the others by the reception desk and would have left except the teacher wanted to talk to her, to infect her with some of the appropriate feelings of anxiety and hope. Cézanne stood sullen as a rock in a stream, all but deafened by the stifling approach of doom. Finally, the courier came. The teacher fussed around him as he loaded the cases into the van, but Cézanne d
id not—could not—take the opportunity to escape, because the courier was the curator. The courier was the curator. She did not understand at first. But when, as he slid the van door shut, he met her eyes and smiled, she remembered the drawing uprooted from her heart and eaten.
And then she remembered the portrait of Jule.
She ran, pointlessly, down the long curving drive to the gates. The van’s tires spat gravel at her at first, but then it pulled ahead, stopping only briefly at the gate before turning onto the road and accelerating away and out of sight. Cézanne stood on the blacktop and panted in the exhaust-tainted air. The spring afternoon was cool enough to chill her through her uniform blazer and stockings. She knew the art teacher would be wondering, perhaps following after to question and soothe. She knew the school security system would be recording her image as she stood helpless in the road under the camera mounted on the wall. Without thinking, she started to walk in the direction the curator’s van had taken.
Jule’s house was still lit, though it was very late by the time Cézanne arrived footsore and cold. No van was parked out front, but there was a Mercedes she did not know, its silver paint hazed by the silver fog that shone in the light from the streetlamps. She could not spy on the house, the curtains were all closed, but she felt that she did not need to. She remembered the curator saying, when he came upon her in the park, that he could have taught her the method by which he had found her. She thought now that she did not need to be taught. She could feel his skulking hunger inside her mother’s house, as though the meal of her drawing had forged a bond between them. She sat on the cold iron railings above the waves, holding her skirt tightly between her knees against the groping fingers of the fog, and waited for him to feel her waiting and come out.
He made her wait only long enough to make her powerlessness clear.
She stayed perched on the railing as the door opened on warm light and two silhouettes, as it closed on one, as the other became a figure crossing the empty street. She stayed as the figure became the curator, dressed in raincoat and cap, gray and cold as the fog. He came to stand beside her, not too near, and rested his hand on the railing.
“You show real promise,” he said.
“I want them back.”
His hand moved on the railing, flicking bits of rust into the sea. “You can always make more. Can’t you?”
“I want them back.” Her voice was almost as soft as his, but brittle as the rusted iron flaking away under his fingers.
“They are hardly of exhibition quality, however. Not yet. You have some growing to do, still.”
“They are mine, and I want them back.” Her voice cracked against his silence. “Give her picture back!”
“Or you will do what?” Flick, flick. The sea swallowed up the sound. “Or should I say, and you will do what? As I recollect it, you still owe me from our last transaction.” Flick. “Still. I might be persuaded to consider this little collection of yours as, shall we say, collateral on payment due.”
She whispered, “I have more of his things. I have his sketchbooks, I have—”
“No. I have taken a great deal of trouble to aid you in your peculiar quest, and this defaulting in payments angers me. You will pay me the interest you owe before I will consider a return to our earlier arrangement. You will have to work to regain my confidence—and your mother’s portrait.”
She had forgotten the cold, but she was shivering. He might just as well have said, To regain your mother. “What do you want?”
He took his hand from the railing and drew an envelope from the inner pocket of his jacket. She hesitated about accepting it, confused, but he held it out to her, white in the fog-shifting darkness, and finally she took it.
As soon as it was in her hand he said, “Don’t test my patience, please. I expect to have the painting by this time next week.”
“Have—?” She held the envelope out as if he might take it back. “I’m not a thief!”
He folded his raincoat closed and tied the belt. “Your mother is quite good company—which is to say, you captured her likeness very well. I would rather have your father’s painting for my permanent collection, but it is up to you.” He turned to cross the street.
“Wait! I’ll do it, I— Give me her picture and I’ll—”
“This time next week,” he said over his shoulder, “or not at all.” He crossed the street, climbed into the Mercedes. Started it with a quiet rumble and drove smoothly away.
Cézanne, shivering on the railing above the sea, raised the envelope to her face and breathed in the mingled scents of musk, sandalwood, and rust.
She went back to the school to collect her gear. She did not speak to Jule. She could not bear to see the curator looking back at her out of her mother’s eyes.
Black midnight, a circle of light. Like a wand, the flashlight conjures out of darkness rich colors, shapes and shades, moments out of time, windows on another world. Or are they only scraps of wood and canvas, layers of oil, acrylic, tempera, ink? Too opaque to let in the light, or to give a view on the world as it is, right now, on the moment that moves always into the future, out of the past. What is real? What the flashlight illuminates? Or what lies in the darkness all around?
Russ’s picture hangs in the midst of a great white expanse of wall, isolated from the rest of the vast room, the vast house. When she catches it full in the flashlight’s beam, it seems to float, a fantastic jewelry ship adrift on a night-time sea. The colors shine so brightly it is as if her light has been answered by another, stronger light within, or behind.
And it is the picture, she knows it is, the picture she has been searching for all along. The knowledge, the certainty, is a bonfire lit beneath her heart. This, this is the painting she must steal to ransom her mother’s soul.
There is a house, a low, rambling farmhouse with plastered walls and a tile roof, crowded by a weedy, exuberant garden. There are trees beyond, with deep shadows beneath leaves bright with wind, and a blue sky sketched with clouds—oddly sketched, as if the painting were not quite finished—and through a window there is just the hint, the suggestion, of a man, a painter standing at an easel, and Cézanne knows, as surely as she knows that tears taste of salt, that the painter is her father, and that the sky is still undone because he is in there now, right now, painting in the clouds.
She steps closer, one step, and another. She speaks his name. And she waits, waits for him to turn, waits for him to open the door and let her in.
Waits, knowing that she cannot wait for long.
ONE OF THE HUNGRY ONES
When Sadie entered the underpass between the Avenue and the park, she found Raz and a couple of his boys hanging out there, at one with the mold-and-urine smell and the insomniac sodium light. Raz, who somehow knew her name.
“Sexy Sadie,” the pimp sang, a line from an old song. “Sex-y Sa-die.”
She fixed her eyes on the tunnel end, where a flight of stairs led to the dusk of grass and autumn trees, and walked, her face stiff with a mask of no-fear.
“Hey, Sadie, are you hungry yet?” one of Raz’s boys whispered at her back. The tunnel magnified his voice, her footsteps, the growl of traffic overhead. “Are you hungry yet?”
“Sex-y Sa-die.”
As much as she hated the tunnel, she loved emerging into the freedom of the park. A dangerous place after dark, people said, haunted by rapists and crazies who treated insanity with alcohol and crack. Night was the time street kids came together to canvass the restaurant diners and movie crowd, and to share their scores in the cold of an abandoned store. Safety in numbers. But Sadie hated the press of dirty bodies, the mumble of drugged voices, the grope of unwanted hands—hated the pack and hated the fear that dragged them all together—so when the whisper had come her way, Mullein’s Park on Friday night, she had determined to come, Raz or no, shadows or no.
Under the trees the air smelled of burning leaves.
It was Rayne who had whispered in her ear. (How did Sadie c
ome to meet them, Rayne and Leo and Tom? They must have spoken to her first, she was too shy, too wary to talk freely to strangers. But she had watched them since her arrival on the Avenue, spent weeks yearning after their cleanliness, their fierce swagger, their mysterious affairs. They were bright as firelit knives, shining as jewels.) Rayne, slip-thin and blond, had sauntered over to Sadie panhandling on the corner and whispered, promise or tease, Mullein’s Park on Friday night, and it was the smell of her, soap and new leather, that had conjured Sadie’s need. Need, not courage. Courage is a flame that requires fuel, and Sadie was too hungry to sustain that kind of fire.
Too hungry for that, not hungry enough for—Sex-y Sa-die—
A breeze scattered frost-dried leaves from the trees. The rustle made a screen for footsteps or voices. Sadie doubled her oversized cardigan around her and started down the gravel path. Mullein’s Park covered a whole block. There were a lot of tall lamps casting pools of light, a lot of trees shedding black skirts of shade. The three could be anywhere, if they were here at all, if Sadie wasn’t too early, or too late, or otherwise entirely wrong. She couldn’t think what she had done to earn this invitation.
Someone was running towards her, dashing from shadow to man back to shadow as he passed through a lighted space. Sadie caught a flash of his face—beard and weathered skin, eyes wet with fear—then he was in the dark and past her, and all there was left of him, all there was left of any human thing in the night, was the stink of aged sweat and the phut-phut of newspaper shoes retreating to the tunnel stairs.
Then a woman laughed. The sound was a bright echo to Sadie’s fear, a spark to warm her hollow gut: relief as the three of them walked towards her into the round of light. Rayne, tall catling with a tuft of pale hair and a silver ring in the curve of her smile. Tom, like his name, big, soft-walking, ruddy and cool of eye. Leo, with wind-tossed straw for hair and the loose-limbed, big-handed grace of an athlete. The warmth in Sadie’s middle grew, tentative, but strong enough to light a smile.
In the Palace of Repose Page 12
