Forgetfulness (12 page)

Be quiet, Thomas. Be good.

Stop laughing. People are watching.

That was only last month. Thomas had no idea what to do with her clothes. He knew it was not right to throw them away as if they were garbage. No doubt there was some established French custom and when he had the time he would ask Ghislaine or Monsieur Bardèche. No doubt a charity existed for the efficient distribution of the used clothes of dead Frenchwomen, all but the shoes. Shoes, like underwear, were nontransferable. Finally he turned his back on her clothes closet, at a loss.

Now he inspected Florette's dresser top, crowded with her cosmetics, her photographs, and the elephants. Thomas decided to remove an elephant a day, saving the silver elephant with the maharajah in the howdah for last. The elephants would be happy out of sight in the cedar chest in her sewing room. He looked at each of them in turn, memento mori. One of the elephants from Kenya would be the first to go, a crudely carved, utterly forgettable animal from an African country he did not care for. He remembered it had been a long-ago gift from Bernhard, who had said he loved Kenya with all his heart. Thomas put the Kenyan elephant in his pocket. Chore one.

Well done, he said aloud.

That wasn't too difficult, was it?

Thomas went to Florette's knitting room, opened the cedar chest,
and dropped the elephant inside, where it fell noiselessly on her blue Brittany sweater, the one she believed was too heavy for indoor wear. He heard her voice now, complaining about the dense weave and the buttons on the shoulders. The elephant had fallen tusks-up, surely a signal of Florette's dissatisfaction. Florette thought the sweater suitable for seafarers, not inhabitants of the interior. The sweater was not comme il faut and so it was consigned to the cedar chest until she met a mariner who would appreciate it. So it was obvious that the elephant had no place in the cedar chest and a Brittany sweater was not a suitable bed. He reached into the chest and retrieved the elephant and again put it in his pocket, stepping back to survey the room. He had an idea he would commandeer it for this very place, his new studio. He took the elephant from his pocket and placed it on the windowsill.

Thomas visualized the easel and paintbox in front of the window, north light the color and vivacity of lead. Elephant gray, he thought. Unlike most painters, he did not care for north light. He thought it came from growing up in Wisconsin. The room was much smaller than he was used to. The ceiling was low. The room smelled of damp wool. The windows were small-paned and dusty, as if they were unaccustomed to being seen through. Naturally Florette's presence was palpable. When Thomas looked through the windows he could see St. John Granger's farmhouse and the modest backyard orchard where the graves were, the stone markers barely visible in the falling snow. The house looked abandoned and he hoped that Ghislaine had not let it go cold; but he knew at once that she had. There were no lights anywhere and no smoke from the chimney. The graves were as forlorn as graves anywhere.

Thomas trudged downstairs to his studio, gathered up his paintbox and easel with the half-finished portrait of Monsieur Bardèche, and set them up in the knitting room. He placed the portrait on the easel and moved back three steps until his shoulders were against the wall, knowing at once that the room was too small for artwork. Cozy would be the word for it. He tried to remember the French for "cozy" but could not. Florette liked it well enough but knitting was a
cozy activity. What it shared with artwork was solitude and a scrupulous attention to detail. That, and patience. Probably patience more than the others.

This room won't do, he said aloud.

Even old Bardèche looked uncomfortable in it.

The light's wrong, not elephant gray but penitentiary gray. LaBarre gray.

He picked up Florette's sewing basket and put it beside the easy chair and sat in the chair. He looked at the book she had been reading, one of her accounts of contemporary scandal. This one was about Onassis, his houses, his yacht, his airlines and oil tankers, his strange friendships, his many enemies, his distant children, his footloose women and the financial arrangements he made with them. What would it mean to have an airline at your disposal? A private island with a cadre of servants in situ? Permanent suites in half a dozen hotels? What would it mean to have your own intelligence service reporting on your enemies and your friends, too, to ensure that they remained friends? Florette was fascinated by the means of accumulation and disposal of millions, and by the conspicuous lack of remorse. The lack of embarrassment when sordid details of your private life became public. Conscience was not included in the tycoon's repertoire of personal qualities because it would indicate a failure of nerve, and then they would be on you like a school of piranhas. Well, Florette remarked one day, perhaps tycoons were remorseful after their own fashion. Those would be private moments, never shared; and no doubt there was an element of self-pity, so much mythmaking, so misunderstood. So few could comprehend the responsibilities and hazards of great wealth.

Have you ever considered what it would mean to you to have a great deal of money, Thomas? And he had told her truthfully that no, he never had. He had never considered the consequences of being born blind, either, or being beautifully coordinated like an Olympic athlete. He had known a few very rich people and they did not seem to him to live easily, worried as they were that someone might take their money away. One of them had commissioned a
portrait but seemed to want the portrait to contain certain inalienable qualities, and now that he thought of it, one of the qualities was lack of conscience, implied in the don t-fuck-with-me expression of the subject's mouth, though the tycoon preferred habit-of-command. And you? he had asked Florette. She had, she said, when she discovered her ambition of becoming a couturier with a shop in Place Vendôme. Jewels from Cartier, a car and driver, an Old Master in the living room and a Fabergé egg in her bedroom and frequent journeys to New York and London. But such an ambition was not realistic for her so she was not ruined when it failed to materialize. Hers was only a girlish dream inspired by a photo essay in
Paris-Match.
She was disappointed of course, but only a little. She had an agreeable life in St. Michel du Valcabrère even though it was out of the way, a mere vestibule in the great house of France. In St. Michel they were undisturbed and able to fashion a life according to their own lights. In that way they had been fortunate.

Yes, he said. They certainly had been.

But they were no longer young and needed an occasional tonic, such as a trip to New York City, the Statue of Liberty and Saks on Fifth Avenue. Also, she wanted to inspect the place where the twin towers were. She wanted to see it with her own eyes. She wanted most of all to attend a musical on Broadway and take a hansom cab through Central Park at midnight. Onassis had often been in New York, not that he ever seemed to enjoy it much. I want you to read the Onassis book, she said, and tell me what you think. Whether he had a life worth living. Yes, he had some good times, who wouldn't with all that money? But the end was not good, not good at all, because no one loved him. Instead, he was feared. You wouldn't wish such a fate on anyone unless you thought he had it coming.

Thomas sat in her overstuffed chair and read two hundred pages, falling asleep somewhere in the Aegean. It was dusk when he awakened with a start. At first he did not know where he was. The room was chilly and unfamiliar. He had a cramp in his thigh, the muscles twitching and needling. He waited until the cramp eased, the odor of wool in his nostrils, then rose and hobbled downstairs to pour a
glass of wine, staring out the window at the blowing snow, skidding over the fields, drifting against the garage, a scene not out of place in Siberia. Thomas finished one glass of wine and poured another, thinking now about dinner and what there might be to accompany the remains of last night's roast chicken. The fridge was bare except for eggs and the leftover cheese and terrine and heels of stale bread from Florette's wake, the odds and ends of a confusing afternoon. Nothing looked appetizing and he wondered if Onassis had ever found himself alone in the early evening staring into a desiccated fridge. Not likely. Onassis would never have such a problem. Onassis would shout for a servant to fetch the caviar and toast. Fetch the champagne. Fetch the musicians. Fetch the girl. Now get lost.

That was the first full day of Thomas's new life.

Toward nightfall on the twenty-fifth of November Thomas stood at the kitchen counter reading the American newspaper, now two days old, not that it mattered in the Siberian scheme of things. He had been away from America for so long that he read the facts as if they were fiction, tall tales from the new world, blank columns of type side by side like a regiment of infantry, disciplined infantry, trained not to venture into no man's land. He always began with the facts, weather reports from distant cities—raining in Cincinnati, torrid in Riyadh—and moved from there to the Dow Jones Industrial Average, activity on the Paris bourse and the Hang Seng and the Tokyo exchange, and the fluctuations of the dollar vis-à-vis the euro and the yen. Facts anchored the world. He had never seen a basketball game in his life but always consulted the standings of the NBA, the won-lost column, the percentages, and the games-behind, and only then returned to page one and the unstable milieu of reporters' narratives where he had to guess at the life behind the news. What he saw often was the world of his youth, the vast expanse of the Midwest, proper names and place names inspiring buried memories, the strange mnemonics of interior cities: Chicago, Indianapolis, St. Louis. He thought of these reports as light from distant campfires. Thomas always looked for news of Wisconsin but rarely found any.
Instead he found column after column of government news from Washington, a vigilant capital ever alert for evidence of provocation from other, more sinister capitals in faraway regions of which little was known. These were tales of unrest. The tone of the reports suggested an America exclusive of other nations, a remote empire on a fabulous continent that worshiped a benevolent god and fortified itself in order to remain apart, a garrison state exempt from natural law and under the special protection of a watchful providence. Yet there was fear in everyday life. Fear itself was healthy, quite normal, for terrorists could strike any time, any place.

And of the other regions, news reports suggested Conrad's trackless interiors, unknown and unknowable, murderous as a matter of course. Travelers lost their wits when they ventured there, something medieval about their way of life, an urge to turn the clock back and a refusal to accept, even to contemplate, the modern world. Things happened in the torpor of the third world. Nothing worked and everything was cheap. Women, liquor, governments, life itself. Fatalism came with the heat. Whatever compass you brought with you was boxed. You knew that you didn't belong there, at least in your present capacity, whatever it was. All you could count on was a valid passport, a wallet full of greenbacks, and a return ticket home. The irrational became rational. Hard to convince an outsider of the appalling facts of daily life, the furnace-heat, blinding sun all day long, the windless afternoons, the insects, the animals, the heaviness of the night, the bad dreams, the sweat, the surveillance. The fear-no, certainty—that the true rhythm of life went on elsewhere and that you were in a fundamental sense quite irrelevant. You begin by washing three times a day in order to keep clean, a specific against disease. Then the regimen slips to twice a day, then once, and finally every few days until you notice the crud between your toes and elsewhere on your vulnerable body, and meanwhile you're trying to negotiate with the government or simply gather routine information and you hurry the groundwork because you can't wait to get out of the heat, back where you belong, and you screw it up because you forget the most basic procedures, procedures you've followed for a
lifetime. You fall into a kind of swoon, deracinated, preoccupied by the past, places you've been, people you've loved, and wonder what it was that has brought you to this point.

That was what Thomas gleaned from the journalism in the American newspaper.

All things considered, he preferred the weather reports, the NBA standings, and the traders statistics on the various bourses.

Thomas turned back to the newspaper, reading the report from Guantá;namo, a detailed discussion of the methods of torture, what was justified and what wasn't under the codes of the Geneva Convention. He was brought up short by a photograph on the following page, a private ceremony marking the anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the surviving brother and surviving daughter alone at the president's grave at Arlington, their heads bent in prayer. Thomas stared at the photograph a long time, remembering Kennedy as a young man, a golden prince of a man, a young Tannhäuser; and then the biographies and memoirs came and he was no longer golden nor much of a prince but a man pursuing Venus fully as recklessly as many other men but without the redemption promised the penitent Tannhäuser. Perhaps Kennedy would have repented, too, but there was no time. No doubt he was undone by Washington's torpor, where the irrational so quickly became rational.

Thomas was in his New York studio when the news came. He was sketching a girl who had offered to model for an afternoon. The telephone rang and rang but they did not answer, believing they were safest alone; instead, the model called her mother to make sure that she was all right and that their neighborhood in Baltimore was secure. He stayed with the model, Karen, that night and the next night and the night after, watching television with the sound off. The pictures told the story. He made a hundred sketches, and when he wasn't drawing he and Karen made love. In the sketches he tried to see her fresh each time and tried to bring something of the moment to it. He had to come to terms with November 22, to bring the wreckage of the day into her face and figure. He could not pretend it
was some other day, an ordinary day in November, overcast, the weather cool. At night he decided to use the bare expanse of the south wall of the studio and began a portrait in oil, Karen lying sprawled in the tangled sheets, a troubled spirit even in sleep, her arms set at unnatural angles. She seemed to be in motion, her face resembling the sleek crest and pointed red beak of a bird, her eyes hooded. Her hands clawed the bedsheets. When she woke, Karen was abashed and not entirely pleased. She did not recognize herself, though the bed was familiar enough. She thought it was another girl. She turned her back on it and flounced into the kitchen to make coffee and when she returned she was in tears.