A Star for Mrs. Blake (21 page)

“Denver’s a hophead.” Clancy lit a cigarette. “But he’s good. He’s over at Bricktop’s taking snaps of Ellington.”

“Bully for him.”

“You know what it’s like. I had to get the story. Food on the table.” He shrugged.

Reed looked at Hayes in disbelief. His father owned a damn bank. His big baby eyes were pleading innocence. All he needed was a pacifier.

“You bullied that woman to get a story.
‘Grieving mother mourns hero son’
—trashy entertainment for the desperate hordes waiting on bread lines.”

“All’s fair …”

“All’s not fair.”

“You would have done it. In your better days, my friend. Admit it.”

“My better days are ahead, don’t you know?” Reed finished the drink and signaled for another.

Hayes was looking frankly at the mask. “What’s it like?”

“To have your face ripped off by a machine gun?”

“To only look one way. Nobody can tell what you’re thinking.”

Reed leaned close. He wanted Hayes’s full attention.

“It’s a hell of an advantage,” Reed told him.

By the time they left, the streets had been glazed with a night shower, dark-stained and beautiful. They walked together. Hayes had the manuscript under his arm. You could hear the drip from the wet trees hitting the soiled brown paper.

“I thought you trashed it.”

“Changed my mind. Decided to take your advice and send it out again. They said they liked the writing,” Hayes said hopefully.

They went to the entrance of the
métro
. In the well at the bottom of the staircase a student musician was playing folk melodies on a violin. The music echoed sweetly off the tiles. At this late hour there were no other passengers and few coins on his plate. At the top of the steps Reed turned to Hayes and hit him hard on the mouth. He sprawled halfway down. Reed picked him up and threw him the rest of the way. When he stopped at the bottom Reed was already there. He stood him up against the wall and let him have it with both fists. Then he took the manuscript and tore off the string. Hayes staggered toward him like a zombie. One eye was swollen shut.

“My book,” he sobbed, gurgling blood.

“What’s it
worth
, do you think?”

Reed was about to rip up the pages and toss them to the foul wind coming from below like fumes from a cesspool, but changed his mind and gave it back. He left Clancy Hayes clutching his manuscript and climbed the stairs to the wet boulevard.

The violinist kept on with his song.

Reed crossed the river and drifted north along the major avenues, turning corners at random until he found himself in a warren of narrow passageways off boulevard de Clichy. Wet cobblestones gleamed in the glowing signs of illicit hotels. It was three in the morning and the second-story shutters were closed. Occasionally a woman would materialize in the shadows of a doorway, unsmiling. He passed a familiar vestibule of pebbled glass at a bordello where he’d occasionally gone to visit two obedient Russian girls—JoJo and FanFan—who looked exactly alike, small-breasted and slimly built, barely twenty. Not tonight. He was at his best when he was free to walk the streets unnoticed. Paris at night required nothing of him and made no judgments.

He turned back down rue Amsterdam, jammed with horse-drawn engines that were sucking the muck out of sewers with huge snaking hoses. The stink made him gag. His stomach was cramping from too much whiskey, or maybe he’d pulled a muscle while pounding Hayes. At Madeleine he ignored a squad of ragpickers, and the pairs of bicycle police that were zipping around the Tuileries like bats with their black capes and high-pitched whistles. Through the gold-tipped bars of the gate he glimpsed a pair of lovers on a bench. Nothing changes, he observed. He recrossed the Seine and headed toward the Fifth, where bakeries and markets were coming to life; an old geezer was asleep on top of a cart of vegetables he’d just brought in from the countryside.

There’s nothing worse than a writer without a story, Reed reflected morosely. Clancy Hayes
thought
he had a story,
hoped
he’d be one of the big boys someday, but Hayes had no real talent; he was nothing
but an impersonation of a writer, using a false identity to accumulate a pile of bylines, which made anyone who was the real deal want to punch him in the face. What Hayes was grinding out was banal in every way, but
he had stories
and
kept on being hired
, and that’s what burned Reed.

The craving to be back at the paper was like a physical need. Not being there was misery. Someone waiting for your words—even a half-assed editor—that’s what mattered, because then you had a reason to be, to bear witness, which is what a real writer did. And after you’d lived with it and made it yours and wrestled it onto the page and locked it down, there was the victory lap. Defeating the naysayers. Rubbing their noses in it. Prudes, politicians, bankers, liars, mothers, fathers, and thieves. The day Wall Street crashed they’d had an orgy in the newsroom, set fires in wastebaskets and sent cherry bombs down the mail chutes, sex on top of the desks, everyone crazed with all-out perverse self-destructive joy. We can burn it down if we want to! Now, all that power gone and mourned. At best he’d been allowed to be the guy in the basement, shoveling other people’s copy into the furnace in the belly of the beast. He needed a story like grass needs rain.

It was dawn when he reached the high white wall surrounding the three-story white brick house in the Latin Quarter. He unlocked the gate and was greeted by the happy burble of the fountain made by Florence Dean Powell, in which a pair of bronze boy-angels urinated at cross-purposes. He wondered if he would find the usual half dozen passed-out young homosexual males sprawled on the tangerine sofas in the living room. Florence’s boys adored her. She was flamboyant, sarcastic, generous with money and alcohol, and, like them, had defied convention—in her case, by leaving Beacon Hill society and refusing to marry in order to devote herself to making art. Unlike those pompous cubists nobody could understand, Florence Dean Powell was a naturalist anyone who liked garden ornaments could admire.

Tonight the house was quiet and empty except for the tortoiseshell cat who was waiting for Reed on the stair. He picked her up and carried her to the second floor, past Florence’s bedroom and on to his
own, but had to let the cat go when an abdominal seizure made him duck into the hallway bathroom. Every joint in his body ached by the time he staggered to bed. The mattress gave in luxuriously under his weight. The cat was back, nosing under the blanket. If there was any part of him that wasn’t broken, he didn’t know about it.

Two and a half hours later, he was woken by Florence’s accusing voice.

“You should have gotten me up.”

It was a full-on summer morning and the room was saturated with sunlight. Reed knew because a red sea was flooding his inner eyelids. He hoped to keep them closed as long as possible.

“Why?” he managed.

He could hear the creak of a window opening on its crank and the clack of glassware and bottles being collected from around the room, feel warm air on the naked caverns of his face and where sensitive bare gums had receded above the teeth. Florence, who had fashioned his mask, was the only person allowed to see him in this condition.

“You were sick.”

He smelled soap. She had picked up the device where he’d left it on the night table and was scrubbing it in a basin.

“I’m not sick.”

“I heard you. Here.” She tapped him with it. “What happened to your hand?”

His eyes opened. His hand had been resting on his chest. He saw that his second and third fingers were black-and-blue. Come to think of it, they were throbbing like hell. She was standing over him with a tray against her hip on which she had matter-of-factly piled the detritus of his masculine den, including old newspapers and full ashtrays, used napkins, pill bottles, and a hypodermic syringe rolling around on a china saucer.

“Where were you last night?”

“Les Deux Magots.”

“What happened?”

“Don’t worry,” Reed said, fitting the mask in place and the eyepieces
around his ears. “Your reputation for keeping a half-crazed war casualty is intact.”

Florence put the tray aside and sat on down the bed. She wore a sleeveless lilac dress that fell toga-style from the shoulders and gathered into a narrow belt, showing her taut figure and long, well-developed arms. She had strong brows and expressive hooded eyes, which she’d imbued with a dreamy air in an early self-portrait that now hung in her alma mater, the Massachusetts Normal Art School in Boston—a full-figure study in which she imagined herself as a repressed Victorian young lady with raven hair parted in the middle beneath an elaborate hat with a knotted veil, an old-fashioned dress with a bustle, and, in classic manner, holding a muff. In it her long face was tilted with a wistful look, as if asking a question or waiting for a reply, but then Florence had abandoned the romanticism and been honest in showing an unflattering jawline and the trembling lips of a needy sexual being.

Her attitude toward Reed was not unkind as she gently examined his injured hand.

“Let me get some oil of wintergreen.”

“It’s nothing,” he said.

“In that case, can you please get dressed? Harold Gravois is expecting us.”

Her habit of repeating both names was galling. Not just
Harold
. Not
Gravois
. But
Harold Gravois
, as if to keep hammering home that she,
Florence Dean Powell
, was acquainted with a famous painter. Of course, she might have never been invited to the great man’s studio if Monsieur Gravois had not been seated next to Griffin Reed at a dinner party in the home of a bohemian painter in the Marais, and become intensely interested in his war injuries from an artistic point of view.

“I told you, Flo. I have no interest.”

“This is a major artist.”

“Who gives a damn?”

“You inspire him. That’s important.”

“To you.”

Didn’t he owe her? After thirteen surgeries and a year of convalescence in England, Reed had come into her sculptor’s hands gravely disoriented, with the noseless, gaping, inhuman profile of an ape. She had made him back into a man and fallen in love with her creation, taken him into her life, and supported his addictions to alcohol and painkillers, as well as his despondent moods. If she wanted to loan him to a fellow artist, what was the problem?

“Yes, it’s important to me for you to sit for Harold Gravois,” she admitted, “but not for the reason that you think.”

Reed sat up and swung his legs off the bed. “I think,” he said, “it’s so you can brag to your fairy friends. It would raise your status in
café society
,” he said disdainfully.

She followed him across the room. “It’s not for me. It’s for art.”

“Can we skip the platitudes?”

“I mean it, Grif. It would be making art for the cause of peace.”

“Peace? Isn’t that a little grand?”

“The reason Howard Gravois wants to paint your likeness is to make a statement about the pointlessness of war. As a protest.
Un cri du coeur
. Wait—let me finish—it’s not a realistic portrait that he wants, it isn’t you, yourself—”

“Well, that’s a relief.”

“He’s a
surrealist
. He paints in
abstractions
. He only wants to use the shapes and forms of the destruction of the human face. Nobody will recognize you.”

“I won’t do it.”

Florence became infuriated. “Grif! I promised him you’d come.”

“Your mistake, sweetheart.”

“Don’t embarrass me! I am sick of your self-pity,” Florence raged. “You forget—I was there. I was there when they brought you into the studio looking like something not of this world. I was there during the darkest days, before anybody knew what to do with you—as well as a hundred thirty-two other terribly wounded soldiers just like yourself! I gave up my own work making art plus three years of my life to devote my God-given talents to Dr. Blackmore’s clinic, so someone else might have a chance at normal life—”

Once the floodgates opened—and it often took just a nudge—there was no stopping her wounded indignation. Reed tried to escape, trotting quickly down the stairs, past rows of white plaster casts of the faces of former patients Florence and the surgeons had treated. She still insisted on keeping the eerie molds on the wall like trophies. His silent, frozen brethren. Many had been able to return to their families with self-respect and confidence. Many had not lived long and had been buried in their masks. They had been sustained for a while by the artist, ruthlessly honest in her way. If she was dissatisfied, she would smash a piece of sculpture as fearlessly as she had shaped it. Her top-floor studio was lined with buckets of clay shards, a reminder, as if he needed it after all these years, that Florence the creator was also Florence the destroyer.

“—but love means nothing to you, Grif,” she was going on. “You’re incapable of caring about anybody else—”

As they got to the bottom of the steps they heard someone knocking on the front door and saw the maid hurrying to answer it.