Agnes Mallory (31 page)

Breakfast took a long time, more than an hour, first juice, then coffee, then the hot bread when it was ready, and coffee again with our feet up on the extra chairs. She talked about the property and the places I should go and explore while she was working, and it was enviable and charming how much she loved the place. Thinking back on it, I realize she didn't mention the Valley of Dead Elms again, but I didn't notice that at the time. She directed me to the Path Through The Pines and Cathedral Ridge and something called the Elf Hollow, and described them excitedly with her black eyebrows hiked up and her hands held open in the space in front of her. I suppose there was a touch of mystic back-to-nature stuff in the way she talked, but I felt I understood it, having been to the Meadow of Wildflowers, and anyway, she was very appealing as she talked, throwing herself back in her chair sometimes as if startled and laughing a lot at her own raptures. I confess, I would have liked to steer her back to this fascinating business about loving me, and even to have shared a comforting groan or two over the impossible situation we were clearly heading for. But her mood would not allow it, and the force of her interests – the force of her in general – was far greater than mine, which I also understood and acknowledged even then in my manly pride.

As we refreshed our second mugs of coffee – and I picked more chunks of corn bread from the pan – she moved from exalting Vermont to dishing New York and its corrupt world of art galleries and theorists. I guess every failed artist sings this tune – that's what I chalked it up to then – but it did sound awful, especially this business about galleries taking fifty per cent of the sale; I was aghast at that. Mainly, in any event, this was her springboard into her own concept of the enterprise at hand. And talking about this – about art, I mean – made her eyes downright hypnotic with excitement. I couldn't keep up with everything she said, but the way she said it – it sure did make me want to lunge across the table and kiss her mad and fuck her silly. All right, that may not have been the response she was going for, but it was mine own, and I'll hold it up to any of the claptrappers who dissect her nowadays and who'd have to run back under their toadstools clutching their various genitals, I swear, if ever she strode back onto the scene. They've never come near understanding her, never guessed the half of it, never touched it, committed as they are to their own notions and careers. She was all over the place, all over history, with huge, sweeping, inflexible ideas – the kind you get when you argue mostly with yourself – and a vision that covered mankind from the creation to the night before last. The Holocaust was a big part of it – the chamber doors of Auschwitz being a sort of modern
Gates of Hell
– and the
Gates of Hell
played their part and the Industrial Revolution and Newton and Darwin and guys like that – Freud; and the Death of Faith, which had to do, so help me, with her Bible theories, and a general picture of humanity as a single organism, going through childhood, maturity and death eventually, and all the while deluded into feeling that the inevitable cycles and developments of each stage were its own creations and within its power. Artists just needed craft and inborn genius –
Craft! Craft!
she said,
Genius! Talent! –
simply to capture nature, and it was nature, not art, that would change in the evolving human mind. That's the Harry version of it anyway. ‘Abstraction,' I remember she said, ‘is the panicky reaction to the materialistic revelation of the human form; the discovery of the real body, without magic, without any bullshit about the soul is what sent us into a panic of abstraction. That's why every new abstract trend is always being described as ‘bold' or ‘daring' or ‘shocking'. To hide the fact that it's all just cowardice and horror really. And the fucking theorists who hold the structure up are just like the Catholic monks except with God taken out of it. The inner systems of speculation outlive their purposes. They just can't stop stuffing their angels onto the heads of pins. That's why I fucking hate New York. It's the new Vatican. It is!'

Well, we all have our lives, I guess, and our ideas, smart and stupid, are just our emotions made to sound like objective truths. That's how I see it now, at least, though at the time I had no thought, no clue, that there was anything desperate in what she said, any last plea to the gods or powers for exactly that sort of courage and realism which she demanded from the unable age but in no way possessed. Oh man! was what I thought as I lifted my coffee to my lips once more, as I watched her across the rim where she gestured and railed, her aspect turned to neon: Oh man, would I like to ball her! God! What she is! What she could have been! Christ, what
I
could have been if I just could've loved her long enough to discover … something, myself, anything.

She tapered off in the end and became watchful. Still pleasant and full of beans, but careful of the light, see, expertly gauging the spread of daylight at the cabin windows. My loneliness seeped back into me as I realized what she was waiting for and that she was going to get up soon and go lock herself into the studio again. I tried to keep her talking, questioned her, diddled her vanity, but eventually she set her mug down with a definitive clump and stood from her chair, stretching.

‘The keys to the truck are hanging up in the kitchen,' she said.

Which was bad enough – because, of course, this call I had to make to Marianne was weighing a ton on me. But when she had unlocked the studio again, and slipped so cautiously inside, and shot the bolt; when the whack and chunk of the mallet and chisel started – to go on, I knew, until the daylight failed – it was worse still. I found that the oppressive sadness of the cabin had been thrice magnified by the sudden absence of her vitality. All that talk, I mean, all that sexy, jazzed-up yammering about art and man's destiny and so forth – and now there I sat alone at the breakfast table with the birds cheeping indifferently in the pines outside and, around me, the big dark wooden room gloating and cavernous. And empty. Empty.

Where was her sculpture, for Christ's sake? All that yammering. All those years of work. Where the hell was her art?

I bumped down the dirt hill in the pickup. Over the metal bridge with the campers waking on the banks far below, and a few kids diving off the boulders to the right. I drove the curling mountain two-lane down into Gaysville. Not much of a town. A few gas stations at the edge of the road, a restaurant, which was closed, a few general stores. I bought myself a
Times
at one of these last and sat in the truck's cab reading it over. Parked on the slope, I was, of the little asphalt strip outside, in the far slot, next to the old-style glassed-in phone booth. The sun shone through the booth, the phone waited expressionless inside, and the blood, in my throat, in my heart, in my whole body, was as heavy as molten stone.

I was there, in the paper, all right. Front page, a one column lead.
Commissioner Vanishes As Inquiry Nears
. A good story. The Feds had slipped them everything. The assessments, the Florida trip, the hookers. Even the connection to Umberman, who was quoted saying he was ‘deeply hurt' that a young man he'd trusted and supported should have shown himself to be blah blah blah. Well, at least Marianne knew the story now. That ought to have made it easier on me. But it took a long time before I kicked my way out of the truck, and walked heavily to the phone.

It was not at all how I'd imagined – and I'd thought I'd imagined it every way it could be. She didn't go noble on me, or hysterical or cold. After the first long trembling silence of relief when she heard my voice, she was the same Marianne whom I knew and lived with: we talked it over as husband and wife would, as if discussing a child's sickness, say, or the loss of a job. Her voice was quiet and measured. She'd been terribly worried about me, she said. Was I all right? Did I have a place to stay? Stuff like that. Charlie was at the park with a sitter, which was a blessing: I didn't have to hear him babbling in the background. Yes, I thought, this can be borne, I can get through this. It was only later, when I was driving back to the cabin, that I saw the big picture of it, that I had to pull over to the roadside for a moment to pound wildly on the steering wheel and spit curses at my own stupidity and ignorance. It was then, finally, that I understood how much she'd looked up to me and respected me, the way women do when they love you, and how I hadn't begun to realize that – wouldn't have believed it if I had – until I'd blown it all. For something. For what? I couldn't remember.

But on the phone, I just concentrated on getting through. I explained to her what I thought would happen. I tried to make it sound as endurable as I could.

‘Where are you now?' she asked me softly.

‘I shouldn't say that,' I told her, fumbling for a reason. ‘The Feds, you know, they might ask you. I don't want you to have to lie. I just need a few more days.'

And then she said: ‘Are you with that girl? The one in Vermont, the one who writes to you?'

‘No, no, of course not,' I said. ‘I just need to be alone and think, that's all.'

So then, when she did start to cry, I figured it was because I was still lying to her, even now, which meant the marriage was pretty well over, which only I had already known.

It was a few seconds before she got her voice again. ‘I'm sorry,' she said.

‘Christ,' I said, clutching my breast in my fist. ‘Christ, don't apologize to me, Marianne.'

‘Well,' she said, after another silence. ‘Come back soon, all right? And don't hurt yourself anymore. We love you.'

I tried to tell her I loved her too, but the stone wouldn't clear my throat.

My hike that morning was not so successful as the first. I was too miserable, for one thing, and I got lost in a particularly scrubby patch of woods for another. I managed to learn the names of a few trees from another of Agnes's handbooks, and then gave it up and worked my way back to the cabin around one o'clock. I ate a couple of cold chicken legs while Agnes hammered away behind her door. And then I drank a beer, which knocked me out on the sofa after last night's sleepless hours.

I was awake before the day started dying in earnest. I lay where I was, listening to the mallet go, my soul like an anvil. When I got up, it was to push back the grinning emptiness of the place a little. The room was beginning to gather shadows in the corners and basically get on my nerves.

I paced the room a while and read the books on the shelf and paced the room again to the chisel's rhythm. I found myself eyeing the bolted studio door every so often and I felt its draw on my curiosity and my yearning. I stepped outside only once – to break that attraction, and to breathe the cooling air beneath the pines and watch the sun setting into the green hills. Then, going back inside, I eventually wandered over to the clapboard wall that separated the main room from her bedroom. I studied the pictures hanging there; I hadn't taken much notice of them before.

It was a little gallery, five pictures in a straight row. Just photographs torn out of books or magazines and sloppily placed behind the glass of cheap snapshot frames. All were of sculpture from different times. I suppose I could identify them now, but I couldn't then. There was some typical Egyptian king or other sitting stiffly on a throne; an absolute gas of a Greek soldier with a neat-o helmet and a face as noble as a god's; a Roman emperor – Vespasian probably – pointing grandly over his dominions; a sexy Michelangelo nude seeming to rouse himself languorously out of the rough marble; and some sort of unpleasant mish-mash of slates or stones arranged out in the desert somewhere. I went over them carefully, to pass the time, feeling there must be some point to the arrangement. Great moments in sculpture, great sculpture on parade – something like that. Which shows you how much I knew about it.

I was surprised by the sound of the bolt thunking home and turned to find Agnes already there. Leaning back against the studio door with both hands behind her. Still and stiff as a statue herself, as if petrified by exhaustion. Her cheeks were heavy again and her complexion sallow. She glared at me – sneered at me almost, I thought, as if to say: who let this idiot into my house?

It didn't matter: I was delighted to see her, and my mood warmed and rose.

‘Hi!' I said.

She snorted. She asked thickly: ‘Like my gallery?'

‘Uh … Yeah, sure.'

She pushed off the door as if to come toward me, but instead she stopped where she was and rubbed her face with both hands, wearily. When she looked up, wincing, she headed past me for the kitchen. She waved the pictures away, going on as if it bored her.

‘Jew killers I've known and loved,' she said.

Puzzled, I examined the pictures again, even scratching the side of my head with a finger. ‘I guess I missed that.'

She was in the kitchen now, out of sight. I heard her uncapping a couple of beers.

‘The Egyptians enslaved us,' she called out. ‘The Greeks laid the groundwork for anti-Semitic theories.'

‘Did they? Man, they were clever.'

‘Their ideal of perfection inspired the Nazis. And the Romans fucking flattened Jerusalem, the Vatican set us on fire for laughs …'

‘And the modern guys bore us to death?' I called back.

She carried in the beers with a tired strut. Handed me a bottle. ‘That's our answer. That inhuman, meaningless crap. Who would look at that shit if you could look at Michelangelo?'

As she knocked back the brew, she fixed such a gaze of intimate rancor on the photographs that I gave up trying to kid her out of it. It was another of her humongous theories and typical that way, but more connected, I suspected from her letters, to these after-work depletions of hers.

‘I don't get it,' I said. ‘You mean, if we want to make good art, we have to be anti-Semitic again?'