American Appetites (40 page)

As if reading Ian's mind, Meika interrupted a story Vaughn was telling about one of his eccentric millionaire clients and said, “You've heard, Ian, of course, about Denis and Roberta?”

“What about them?” Ian asked.

“Roberta isn't simply out in Seattle visiting her sister,” Meika said. “I mean, she
is
, but it's really the start of a trial separation.”

“A separation?”

“I thought perhaps you knew.”

“A legal separation?”

“You and the Grinnells have always been so close. You, and Glynnis, and the Grinnells.”

“I didn't know,” Ian said. His heart knocked against his ribs. “No one told me.”

Ian thought, I should leave, and go at once to Denis's.

He thought, I can telephone Roberta; I will find out her number from him.

But he did not leave; and the subject of the Grinnells, so abruptly taken up, was abruptly dismissed; for Meika had questions to ask of Ian, how legal matters were proceeding . . . whether Nick Ottinger was the hotshot people claimed . . . whether “that young woman” (Meika fastidiously shrank from pronouncing Sigrid Hunt's name) had yet been contacted, and whether, if she returned for the trial, she would be a witness for the prosecution or for the defense. Ian shrugged and said he didn't know. He did not seriously believe that Sigrid Hunt, were she to return, would testify for the prosecution, except, perhaps, as a hostile witness, but he saw no reason to tell Meika Cassity this.

“Or is she dead, do you think?” Meika asked, looking rather too levelly at Ian. Her eyes, of no distinct color, a mild pewter-gray, sparkled with a febrile sort of innocence in the firelight.

Ian said stiffly, “I don't know.”

“Ah, of course! You don't know, how
could
you know!”

Ian said nothing; Vaughn murmured, “
Well!
” as if in vehement agreement; for a moment no one spoke. Meika, who had tossed her cigarette into the fire, reached absentmindedly for Ian's, burning in an onyx ashtray close by, and said, contemplatively, “There was a side to Glynnis very few of us knew, a jealous, fearful, vulnerable side. . . . That Glynnis of all people could feel jealousy, even envy, of others—of other women, I mean—endeared her to me. It made her, you know, so much more human. It made her so much less perfect.”

“Perfect?” Ian said. “Glynnis was not perfect.”

He laughed, not bitterly, he hoped, and surely not ironically, and reached for his drink. “Hardly more than I am perfect, in fact,” he said.

“Ah,” said Meika, smiling her sweet-sly smile, narrowing her eyes to slits as if she were suppressing laughter, “but you
are
.”

And she reached out to give his hand a surprisingly hard squeeze, as if to reassure him.

She said, “If you and . . . your young woman friend . . . were close, I mean simply close, as friends . . . I don't blame you for not wanting to talk about her; our private lives must remain private. Some of the factual information printed in the papers, let alone the ‘anonymous' opinions, have been grotesquely inaccurate, in a way insulting to us all. And, damn it, there is no recourse; no way for us to collectively sue, for instance, the
New York Post
for criminal libel. Aren't they bastards, though! All of them! Someone was saying, the other evening, Once the trial begins, it will be like a circus around here. . . . All of Hazelton is being scrutinized. And Glynnis was always so
proud
.” She paused, breathing rather hard. “You are our dear friend, Ian, and we love you—I speak for both Vaughn and myself, don't I, Vaughn?—and we loved Glynnis, of course, and it is all so, so . . .”—for a painful moment it seemed to Ian that Meika's composure might break, her carefully made-up face crease like a baby's—“so unanticipated.”

Vaughn leaned across Ian and touched Meika lightly on the knee. “Meika? Dear?”

Meika said, ignoring him, “Like that terrible play . . .
Lear
, I think . . . in which some perfectly nice old bawdy man is blinded, his eyes gouged out onstage while you sit staring, unable to believe you are seeing what you
see
. And yet . . . there it is.” She had begun to tremble; a light in her eyes flared up, whether in grief or anger Ian could not have said. “I know I've had too much to drink,” she went on hurriedly, appealing to Ian, as if Vaughn were not present and regarding her with husbandly concern, “but I identify . . . so helplessly, and so strangely . . . with you, and with Glynnis. At first I must have been as stunned by the—you know—the event, the accident, the death, as everyone else; then, it seems, I entered into a period of . . . suspension, you might call it. But now, lately, I suppose it has to do with the holiday season and all the parties we'd have been going to, and giving, together, and Glynnis would have had one of her dinners I'm sure . . . and probably an open house . . . she had one on Boxing Day, the last three or four years; I'm sure she meant to continue it. And we would have had you here, of course; I never did reciprocate that lovely birthday party of yours. . . . We were so happy then, weren't we! Vaughn was saying just the other night, It doesn't feel like Christmas this year; something is missing.”

Ian swallowed hard and said, embarrassed, “I'm grateful for your sympathy, Meika. I—”

“I think of her more now than I did while she was alive. I mean, more obsessively. We were never close, I mean not in the way she and Roberta were close, but, since her death, I mean, since it happened . . . the accident . . . since then I seem to be thinking of her more often; and of you.”

There was a brief, pained silence. Then Vaughn, his heavy face rubescent in the firelight, reached out again, to take hold of Meika's thin hand, and said, “We really should talk of other things, dear. We don't want to upset Ian, do we?”

“Are you upset, Ian?” Meika asked, nudging him coquettishly with her shoulder.

Ian said, “I'm fine.”

“He says he's fine,” Meika said curtly. “Perhaps you should let us alone, dear.”

It was nearly midnight. Ian got to his feet, not very steadily, with the intention of going home; but both Meika and Vaughn expressed surprise, and disappointment, and insisted that he join them in a final drink, a nightcap—“It's the holiday season, after all.” So, against his better judgment, Ian found himself accepting another drink: a liqueur glass of wickedly powerful Armagnac.

He said, “You are both extraordinarily kind.”

Meika said, smiling, “We are both extraordinarily fond of you.”

They talked for a brief while of Ian's class at the Short North Rehabilitation Center, of which neither Meika nor Vaughn had heard, though they knew from mutual friends that Ian was involved in some sort of volunteer effort. “Teaching adult illiterates to read?” Meika said, narrowing her eyes in disapproval, “
You?
It's too absurd.”

Vaughn said, frowning, “A white man of your sort, with, you know, your particular background, and manner . . . it seems to me a naïve and dangerous enterprise. Some evening when you go to get into your car—”

Ian said, annoyed, “It isn't that bad at all, really. It isn't bad at
all
, really. The parking lot is well lit and perfectly safe.”

“What of your students, aren't they mainly black? Drug addicts, and alcoholics, and parolees—”

“They are black,” Ian said, less forcefully than he would have wished, “but they are perfectly fine people. Decent, good, serious, reliable.”

“Have they made any progress?” Meika asked.

“Progress?”

“In learning to read.”

“Yes, of course . . . some progress.”

“Ah, well!
Dei gratia!
” Vaughn murmured, with an expulsion of breath: signaling, perhaps, that the subject was to be dropped. He rubbed his hands together briskly and said, “I have an idea. Why don't we go upstairs to my studio for a minute? I can show Ian my secret portfolio; and you too, Meika, since you haven't seen the latest additions. These past few weeks—”

“I'm perfectly content right here,” Meika said lazily. “Though I would like another brandy, please. And where are my cigarettes?”

“My dream project, I call it: an experiment of many decades,” Vaughn told Ian, with a shy sort of excitement. “I've shown it to very few people . . . mainly Meika. And one of my teachers, a very long time ago. The man has been dead for twenty years.”

He poured Meika more brandy and refilled Ian's glass as well and though Ian supposed he should go home he heard himself responding enthusiastically to the invitation. Yes of course he would like to visit Vaughn's studio. He had not been up there, he said, in a number of years.

So they all went upstairs, by way of a spiral staircase, and Vaughn switched on lights, saying, “It's an experiment of a kind, an exploration of the poetics of pure space, done in the interstices, so to speak, of my ‘real' work: the heartrending real work that pays the real bills. Unless the dream work is real and the other is false. Who can tell!”

Meika, out of breath from the climb, leaned playfully against Ian as if she were faint, and yawned like a child, and, her mood having shifted, complained of the mess in the studio—like the interior of a madman's skull, she said—and that smell: such stale, stuffy air, with a strong undercurrent of cigar. “There is a draft from the skylight and it's freezing in here,” she said irritably, “yet, paradoxically, it
smells
. How is that possible?”

Vaughn, opening a large portfolio, said, hurt, “I never smoke while I work.”

“Then the odor is you,” Meika said cruelly, nudging Ian as if inviting him to share the joke. “The unmistakable odor of Vaughn Cassity's soul.”

Without meaning to do so, Ian laughed; he was light-headed from the spiral climb and, yes, there was a curious smell in the studio, an air of something dry, scurfy, indefinable. He had not remembered that Vaughn's studio was quite so large, or so cluttered. Against one wall there was an enormous filing cabinet, most of whose drawers were, to varying degrees, pulled out; there were several worktables and two desks; several full-scale drawing boards, each with work on it, projects
in medias res;
hundreds, perhaps thousands of sketches, drawings, blueprints, designs, photographs; dozens of small models of buildings, residential and commercial. . . . Vaughn was turning pages with care, tall stiff sheets of parchmentlike paper, murmuring excitedly under his breath. “Here, Ian, this will give you an idea of the project; step over here,” he said. Half-moon reading glasses, low on his nose, gave him an owlish elderly look. “Meika?”

In the fluorescent light, chill, lunar, Meika looked like a mannequin: unnervingly pale and without expression, her eyes bracketed by shadow. She draped her arms across her husband's and Ian's shoulders as Vaughn led them through his “poetics of space,” a magnum opus of some thousand pages, still in progress, of course, a work entirely visual in concept yet, here and there, amplified by words; but the words, at least to Ian's confused eye, were of no language he knew: rather like hieroglyphics. Buildings . . . landscapes . . . cities . . . “temporal dimensions” . . . “spatial hypotheses”: the drawings were architectural in execution yet fantastical in conception, elaborate—indeed, dizzyingly elaborate—composed of numberless fine filose lines, like a spider's web. Ian tried to concentrate, tried very hard, thinking, as vaughn led them through this altogether mad yet beautiful and surely original curiosity, that
this
was the man's soul: and must be honored.

As if not quite knowing what she did, Meika was leaning heavily on Ian's shoulder, breathing warmly against his ear. She began to stroke, knead, caress, his upper arm; drew the tips of her fingers lightly across the nape of his neck; even as, so very happily, Vaughn explained his project's gestation thirty-nine years before—“More of a visitation, really”—and his sense of what it portended, what its significance might one day be in terms of architectural theory and in the history of architecture itself. He did not know, he said, whether he should begin publishing it piecemeal or wait until it was completed. The problem of course was that he did not know
when
it would be completed, or
if
. “A posthumous celebrity would be a melancholy thing,” he said slowly, in so neutral a tone that Ian thought he must be joking, and laughed; as Meika did, fairly dissolving in a spasm of giggles. She pinched her husband's ruddy cheek and said, “A posthumous celebrity is better than no celebrity, isn't it? Just as
nouveau riche
, like us, is a fucking lot better than no
riche
. Isn't it!”

Ian, disturbed by Meika's provocative behavior, which he did not quite know how to decode, eased away from her, his breath short and his senses flooded, the very hairs at the nape of his neck stirring as, unmistakably now, with a playful boldness, she caressed him on the neck and ran her hand slowly down his back, to the small of his back and his buttocks, then drew it, yet more slowly and caressingly, up to his neck again, and to his head: all the while looking, with a schoolgirl's mock attentiveness, at the extraordinary drawings Vaughn was showing them.

Vaughn said, as if talking to himself yet with apparent reference to Ian, “More and more, this past year—since last spring, I mean—I seem to be concentrating on the Poetics. My imagination seems naturally to swerve in this direction. Almost, though I shouldn't say so, I wish the San Diego commission would go to someone else. Those massive public structures are so . . . external. They seem to weigh so much, pull so heavily on the soul. Ah, here: can you see, Ian? This is a subterranean city, a sort of metropolis not of the future but of the past, the classical past—Athens, note; and a bit of Pompeii; and—”

Ian was by this time so enormously excited, so sexually, it very nearly seemed angrily, aroused, he could not attend to Vaughn's words at all but stepped frankly away from Meika and looked at her as if to say, Stop. And so, as if chastised, Meika did stop: her mouth blood-swollen and pouty, her eyes sleepily narrowed. She said, in a voice that startled, it was so calm, so measured, so presumably sober, “Vaughn, I'm going to bed; you and Ian can continue but I'm going to bed; please don't keep Ian too long; you know how you are, when professional men get talking together,” turning to leave, waving a hostess's warm kiss in Ian's direction, mouthing “Good night” and “Love you!” and disappearing down the spiral staircase. Ian stared after her for a full minute or more, sick and giddy with desire, his brain so besieged he could not think at all.