Beautiful Days Page 22

  How renowned Master has become! How many honors has his art garnered! Major museums have hosted major exhibits. His name is “known”—by the discerning few, if not the multitudes. He has outlived all of his great contemporaries—he has outlived many younger artists, whose names will never be so extolled as his; he is an elderly man revered like a saint. With age his face has only grown more beautiful, and what is aged in his face—discolorations, lines—can be disguised by makeup, that makes of the sallow skin something marmoreal; his somewhat sunken eyes are outlined in black, each lash distinct. His thinning silvery hair is combed elegantly across his high skull. In his black cassock of the finest linen Master is a priest of art—the highest art.

  Master says—But we live for our art. There is no life except our art.

  The interviewer says—Excuse me, sir?—I think I hear something—someone . . .

  (For the interviewer has heard us. He has heard us!)

  But Master says laughingly—No. You are hearing just the wind, our perpetual wind from the mountains.

  (Wind? These are cries, and not the wind. Not possible, these cries are but wind.)

  The interviewer hesitates. The silken-voiced interviewer is at a loss for words, suddenly chilled.

  Master says more forcibly, though still laughingly—This is a remote region of Europe, mon ami. This is not your effete “civilization”—your Piccadilly Circus, Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens. I am very sorry if our melancholy wind that never ceases distracts you and makes you sad!

  Master is so very charming speaking with a mock British accent, no one detects the quaver in Master’s voice that is a sign of incipient rage; but the interviewer exchanges glances with his assistant, and does not pursue this unwelcome line of questioning.

  It is so: Master is a great artist. A great genius. To genius, much is allowed.

  As other interviews have proceeded at le chalet, this interview proceeds without further interruptions: just one hour, but a priceless hour, to be scrupulously edited, and not to be broadcast on the BBC without the approval of Master and Master’s (powerful, Parisian) gallery.

  But the silken-voiced interviewer disappoints Master by declining his invitation to stay for tea, pleading exhaustion. And he and his crew must hurry away in the minivan, to catch a flight back to “effete” London.

  Well! There is some laughter. There are handshakes.

  Master has been placated, maybe. But Master is still irritable, and (as some of us know) still dangerous.

  In the nether regions of the chalet we tell ourselves that the celebrity-interviewer from London heard us, and understood—it is not possible that he did not understand. One need only examine Master’s famous paintings to understand. He will seek help for us, he will save us.

  Such tales we tell ourselves to get through the long days and interminable nights in le grand chalet des âmes perdues.

  WIND ON THE MOORS, wind from the mountains. Perhaps the mountains are not the Alps but the Carpathians.

  It is not so far a distance to come, Daddy! Please.

  It is not too late yet, Daddy. I have not yet been dragged to the lowermost dungeon, where the door is shut upon us, and we are forgotten.

  You have not forgotten me, Daddy. I am your daughter . . .

  In Les beaux jours you will see me for I am waiting for you there. Come to the Museum! Come stand close before Les beaux jours where I await you.

  Help! Help me!—I whisper.

  If I could call out more forcibly I am sure that someone would hear me. A visitor to the Museum, one of the vacant-eyed guards. They would wake from their slumber. They are all good people, I know—at heart, they would help me if they could.

  If you could, Daddy. I know you would help me. Will you? It is not too late.

  I have set aside the little hand-mirror. I have gazed enough at the pretty doll-face. Sometimes I can see—almost see—out of the frame, Daddy—and into the Museum—(I think it must be the Museum: what else could it be?)—in the distance, on the other side in the land of the living—slow-moving figures, faces.

  Daddy, are you one of them? Please say yes.

  If I had my old strength I could crawl out of the frame, Daddy. I would do this myself, and would not need you. I would crawl out of the drawing room, and I would fall to the Museum floor, and I would lie there stunned for just a moment, and maybe someone, one of you, Daddy maybe you, would discover me, and help me.

  Or maybe I would simply regain my breath in the land of the living, and my strength, and manage to stand on my weakened legs, and walk away, leaning against the wall—past rows of paintings in hushed galleries—to the familiar stone steps, where Mother would pull Jenny and me, gripping our hands in hers—and I would make my way to the front entrance of the great Museum, and more steps, and so to Fifth Avenue and the clamor of traffic and life—if I had my old strength—almost . . .

  Daddy? I am waiting. You know, I have loved only you.

  Balthus, Les beaux jours, 1944–45

  Fractal

  1.

  At eleven, the child was into fractals. Naturally then, the mother agreed to drive him to the Fractal Museum in Portland, Maine—“The Singular Museum of Its Kind.”

  One blustery November morning when the mother might have been doing other things, more homey/domestic things (for it was a Saturday), virtually anything she’d have preferred to driving two hours twenty minutes from New Haven, Connecticut, to the Fractal Museum north of Portland, Maine, the (fatally unwitting) mother found herself, in fact, driving the (doomed) child for two hours twenty minutes north on I-95 from New Haven, Connecticut, to the Fractal Museum outside Portland, Maine, which the child had discovered online and had begged the mother to let him visit.

  Well, begged was an extreme word. This delicate child who wanted so little that adults could provide him, usually so absorbed in his architectural drawings, or a science book, or an electronic gadget, and so often (you would not want to acknowledge aloud) withdrawn, wasn’t it a good sign, a healthy sign, an encouraging sign, Oliver had actually made a rare request of the mother: would she drive him to the Fractal Museum in Portland, Maine? Sometime? Please.

  She’d been flattered, he hadn’t asked the father. (Of course, the father would have been too busy.)

  She’d been flattered but she hadn’t wanted to say yes. Oh, why her!

  Yet, being a (good) mother of course she’d said yes.

  For weeks then, after the date had been marked on the calendar, plans began to be made including where even to stop for restrooms along I-95 (for the child was prone to anxieties about toilets, sanitary conditions, access to bottled water, etc.), and these plans the mother and the child shared, and the father looked on, listened, at a little distance, bemused and just slightly envious, or seeming-so.

  And so, this fierce cobalt-blue November sky. Cumulous clouds with puckered cheeks blowing in such gusts, the Toyota SUV at sixty-eight miles per hour quaked and came near to drifting out of its lane.

  “I wish you would talk to me, honey. To keep me company. Always absorbed in that damned iPad of yours.”

  Of course the mother wasn’t jealous of a damned iPad. Not really. Not much.

  Yet to the child, damned was a swear word. Not an extreme swear word like some (which he’d heard in the mean mouths of older and coarser classmates but had not dared enunciate to himself) but yes, damned struck the child’s sensitive ear like fingernails drawn against a blackboard; for if a parent or indeed any elder complained of damned iPad it was anger that was the motive, and an elder’s anger was/is wounding to a sensitive child.

  Neither the mother nor the father of the child would ever have struck him. Not a slap, not a nudge or a shove—never! Not a pinch! If in a blind fury at the child’s taciturnity/stubbornness the father had ever struck Oliver he, the father, would’ve gnawed off the offending hand. He swore!

  They were not that sort of parents. Not that sort of people. Not ever.

  But words too can lash. Wor
ds too can sting.

  Often too, to draw the preoccupied child’s attention to her and away from the iPad in his lap, the mother would do something playful: thrust out her lower lip and blow air briskly upward stirring the fluffy-faded-red-bangs on her forehead, a clownish gesture copied from a grade-school classmate decades ago. The gesture was to make the child who did not readily giggle, giggle.

  For the child was insufficiently childish and this creates a vacuum in a parent-child relationship which a guilty adult may feel the obligation to fill.

  However, the child took no notice of this goofy-silly antic which another child (the mother doesn’t want to think) would’ve found hilarious; instead feeling the rebuke, worse than if the child had sneered at her.

  “Are you even listening, Olly? I’m beginning to wonder—why am I here? Why me?”

  Olly and not Oliver meant that the mother was not scolding, not really. Chiding, teasing. Though there was an edge to the mother’s voice—Why me?

  Which could mean why the mother and not the father; or why either parent, driving north on I-95 in such a ferocity of wind. And perhaps too there was another why, beyond the reach of the mother’s mental grasp.

  That why you must not ask. Nor why you must not ask why.

  In the passenger’s seat beside the mother, safely belted-in, the child had been immersed in an interactive topology game on his iPad for the last thirty miles, yet, uncannily, for the eleven-year-old who was into fractals and had at the age of nine declared his intention of being an architect was at the same time enough aware of his mother’s ranting to call her bluff, and to answer her seriously.

  “‘Why me?’—because there is no one else.”

  Very solemnly the child spoke as if issuing a decree. In his voice which the mother worried was too thin, too soprano for one soon to enter the maelstrom of middle school.

  “What do you mean, ‘no one else’? I don’t understand.”

  “From the beginning of the universe. Determined to be you. It could not be anyone else in the driver’s seat, because it is you.”

  In his solemn methodical way Oliver spoke to the mother as one might speak to a classmate who is having difficulty with a homework assignment. Sweetly patient, not condescending.

  “That doesn’t make sense, Olly. Of course it could be someone else, and I could be somewhere else. Why on earth not?”

  “It isn’t like that, Mom. Because if the person driving this vehicle is you that is all the proof you need that there is no one else it could have been, and there is nowhere else you could be except here. And the same is true for me.”

  “You mean—here with me. Beside me.”

  “Yes.”

  Well. The mother had to concede, that was probably correct. She would certainly not be driving on I-95 on this blustery Saturday morning if not for the child beside her.

  “And I suppose it would have to be 9:27 A.M.? It couldn’t be some other time, earlier or later?”

  “Not if it’s here. Has to be”—with a glance at the countryside through which they were moving, of the hue of bleached chlorophyll, stubs of undergrowth and featureless trees like a papier-mâché stage set—“here.”

  The mother didn’t know whether to laugh at the child’s certainty, or be impressed. Or annoyed. She wondered if Oliver dared confound his math teacher with such paradoxes, or whether it was his math teacher who provided the eleven-year-old with such paradoxes. (For the child, officially in sixth grade at New Haven Day, was allowed to take an advanced math course taught in the high school.)

  “It was of my own free will that I agreed to drive us to Portland, Olly. You forget. I might have said ‘no—too busy.’ And it was an accident more or less that we left when we did, at that precise moment, so that it’s 9:27 A.M. now, when we’re passing the exit for—what is it—‘Biddeford.’”

  Oliver was not persuaded. “Mom, no. There are no ‘accidents.’”

  “You’re being ridiculous—an eleven-year-old who doesn’t believe in free will! Do you really feel as if you’re enclosed in a sort of cobweb, or you’re a puppet on strings, being manipulated? Determined?”

  “What we ‘feel’ doesn’t matter, Mom. A ‘feeling’ is just—nothing.”

  Of course, this was so. The mother knew that this was so. Yet, in her role as mother, she could not let things lie there bleak and forlorn as a pile of twigs.

  “Well, then—‘think.’ Not ‘feel’ but ‘think’—‘reason.’ We can reason that we have free will. It just seems so—obvious . . .” Her voice trailed off, as if that were an argument.

  But the canny eleven-year-old persisted: nothing could be accidental, for all things are determined. If you could wind time backward, tracing things to their causes, you would see—“There’s no chance of something just swerving off on its own.”

  The grim prospect seemed to please Oliver unless—possibly—he was joking? For sometimes Oliver seemed bemused by his mother’s obtuseness.

  Oh, she hoped so! She’d have welcomed the child’s joking, joshing.

  What is a family without good-natured joking, teasing, joshing?

  “D’you know what?—you’re too smart for your own good. There are plenty of ‘accidents’ in life—you’ll see.”

  You yourself are an accident. Were.

  What d’you think of that, smartie?

  (But no. They’d decided no, they would have the baby. That is, they would not not have the baby.)

  (Unexpected/unwanted pregnancy a nightmare before they were married at the very worst time in the father’s life preparing for law exams and not a great time in the mother’s life while her own mother was undergoing chemotherapy but decided not to delete/abort. Deciding yes all right. Yes. We will. We can. Scarcely guessing how the [unexpected/unwanted] pregnancy would turn out: the extraordinary child whom both the mother and the father loved deeply and without whom they could not imagine their lives.)

  Of course, the child would never know. No one except the mother and the father could know this secret and when they cease to exist, the secret will die with them.

  He was a beautiful if fragile child with a chronic asthmatic condition susceptible to pollen, dust, danger, heat, aridity and wind, excitement and agitation. His skin was slightly feverish to the touch; the mother wondered if this was the result of his medication, steroids, which quickened his pulse. She wondered if other children, and most adults, seemed dull to him, slow-paced in their thoughts, predictable and lacking in complexity.

  In her handbag she carried the child’s “rescue inhaler”—as it was called. The child had not required this inhaler in years and could not bear to see it in the mother’s handbag.

  His vision was myopic, often his eyes squinted behind round, wire-rimmed eyeglasses that gave him a scholarly look. His chin seemed to melt away as if lacking sufficient bone. His hair was a fine, fair gingery color, lighter than the mother’s, and his skin was splotched with freckles as with droplets of water tinged with cinnamon, or turmeric—a beautiful smooth skin the mother felt a need to touch, perhaps too frequently, as she felt the need to lightly kiss his temple. Where the child had tolerated such motherly affection when he was younger by the age of eleven he was beginning to stiffen and flinch away.

  Trying to reason with him, for she loved talking seriously with her son, and being taken seriously by him.

  “But we are always somewhere, aren’t we? I mean—if we exist at all . . . Why is any where we find ourselves a where that had to be? Why—had to be? That’s what I don’t understand.”

  Felt as if her tongue was twisted. Not sure what she was trying to say.

  And where are they? Just beyond an exit for Biddeford, Maine?

  Otherwise, nowhere. New England countryside, dense-wooded, mixture of deciduous and evergreen trees, thunderous trailer-trucks rushing past, a here interchangeable with any there.

  Oliver murmured OK, Mom.

  “Am I correct? Or are you just humoring me?”

  Oliver murmur
ed OK, Mom.

  Returning his attention to the damned iPad in his lap that had been there all along, waiting.

  2.

  Offhandedly the child had remarked at the age of nine that he guessed he wanted to be an architect.

  The astonished parents weren’t sure they’d heard correctly. Had their very young son remarked that he wanted to be an architect?

  Exchanging a glance. Really! How—funny!

  Or rather, how impressive. And rare, a child of nine would express such a wish . . .

  There was an air about their singular child of intense curiosity, wonderment, as if he were a fairy caught in a net, his fairy-wings fluttering but not (yet) broken—(so the mother thought, with much tenderness and concern). He’d been a premature baby and had not thrived as an infant; eventually he’d grown, but remained small for his age, and his bones seemed thin, everything about him gossamer-light, provisional. There had been some frightening asthmatic episodes when he’d been a small child but the condition seemed now controlled by medication, or nearly.

  So far as the parents knew Oliver had never met an architect, nor had he heard them talking of architecture. The mother had a degree in art history and had hoped at one time in her life to be an artist but there were no other artistically inclined persons in her family, and no architects. The father was a (Yale) university attorney. For each, the marriage was the first and the child was the only child.

  Vaguely Amanda and Peter wished to have a second child. Possibly, a more ordinary child. For it did not feel quite right, Oliver was such a precious child.

  Since he’d been capable of gripping a Crayola in his (left) hand the child had loved to draw. He’d had little interest in toys, children’s books, but rather adult books, particularly oversized books with photographic plates. Any subject seemed to interest the inquisitive child—ancient Egyptian pyramids, constellations of the night sky, Himalayan mountains, medieval fortifications, twentieth-century “skyscrapers,” Arctic marine life, meteors, bird life, “earliest forms of organic life” . . . Before Oliver could read he was drawn to such books, and to copying from them onto sheets of tissue-thin paper with a fanatic concern for accuracy.