Mile Zero (19 page)

“Have you had your fill of apples?” Renoir slipped from the wicker chair and walked to the open windows, turning his back to the sea beyond, and focused his attention on Angelica. “And you, honey, why don’t you get dressed and call it a day?”

“Don’t dare tell Angelica what to do!” The voice wheezed from the bed. “I haven’t finished with her!”

“You never started.” Renoir turned with an air of disdainful resignation, his gaze going far from the room, through the windows to the thin blue horizon beyond.

“There’s a lot to be learned here, Renoir. Not only about art, but about life, sex. Look at this beauty. Don’t turn your back on her. What are you afraid of? Afraid you’ll get your precious weeny between her buns and never be able to get out? She doesn’t want your weeny. What good is a man without a weeny? No good to her, you foolish boy. No good at all. You don’t understand the first thing about a woman like this. Angelica wants to be equal with you, exchange a kiss, a bow, a handshake, a fuck. It’s all in the exchange. That’s what women are about. That’s what they think when you’re fucking them. No great mystery. They don’t think of stealing your weeny. They think of the exchange, and that has no face, no photo finish. It is a rush of reality. Gives birth to us all. Women understand that, they—”

“Why don’t you ask Angelica what she feels?”

“I don’t have to ask her anything. I know what women think about me. They teach me in history of women’s art. College after college they hold me up as the enemy. Because I know their secret they stalk me through seminars, eviscerate my virility, study the fetid male entrails. They want to nail my old coonskin hide to the wall, a trophy of the vanquished. The silly witches want to paint themselves. Think they can do it better. It’s a great lie. Women will never understand themselves the way men can. I know their game. They want the public to remember me as crazy, because if you remember the artist as crazy, rather than the art as inspired, then it’s bad art. My paintings still sell, but not because I have the conviction of raw vision. Forget that. It’s because I’m a cultural artifact. A fossil to be studied under a microscope for his anachronistic way of dealing with the gloriously mundane texture of female flesh, its less than transcendent contours, its fettered truths. I’ve become infamous for a carnality of the intellect. But you want to know the truth, my unfettered confession? I just wanted to fuck them all. I succeeded at that, and in doing so fucked myself. Here’s my dark secret, spoken before I go to the grave. Even though I’m considered the most renowned painter of this century whose subject was the female, at heart I thought myself a fraud. Should have become a homophile and painted women from the inside out. Look at Michelangelo’s
Libyan Soul
on the ceiling of the Vatican. That silkpants did it better than anyone in the last two thousand years and the next five thousand to come and all he did was put tits on men.”

Renoir stepped back from the window and turned to face the room,
blocking the full force of the light. “Are you finished? You’ve given every interviewer the past twenty years this ‘I’m really the better painter because the others are gay’ speech. Why don’t you get back to what we were really talking about? Go ahead and ask Angelica. What are you afraid of?”

“I’ll ask Angelica …” The wheezing voice whistled to a nervous stop, then coughed. “Ask her anything I want.”

“Ask her.”

“What?”

“What she feels.”

“Angelica …” The voice regained its wheezing whistle. “What do you fe … fee … feeeel?”

“Bored.”

“Haaaraaaaaph!” The voice sputtered with delight. “Angelica, you’re a beauty!”

“These high heels are killing me.”

Renoir slunk back into the wicker chair. “Go ahead, Angelica, tell him what you think. This is your chance, take it.”

Angelica raised one leg behind her, reached around to knead a knotted calf muscle. Perched on one leg she resembled a magnificent heron puzzling the surface of shallow water for a fish of truth. “I’m the kind of girl who won’t take yes for an answer.”

“That’s my kind of girl!” The voice chortled with so much pleasure it lost control to a fit of coughing.

“What about you, St. Cloud? Am I your kind of girl?” Angelica lowered a finely tapered leg at a provocative tilt.

“St. Cloud!” The voice stopped its fit of coughing. “Where is he? Now, there’s a man who knows it takes a fool to love like a fool.” The voice took an accusative poke at Renoir. “Not like you. Not like you at all. Where is my friend?”

Renoir pulled himself up in the wicker chair with a derisive snort. “He’s right behind the door watching your tawdry little peep show. He’s been there the whole time. I told you you couldn’t see a thing without your glasses. Why must you keep this charade up?”

“Bring St. Cloud in! I must talk to him about Goya’s barking dogs, about false light, about the art of misunderstanding women, about the lies we lead. This man knows. Knows the pain of it. No one else does. No one else is romantic fool enough to care. People don’t even feel anymore, so how can they care? St. Cloud? You there?”

St. Cloud pushed the bedroom door completely open, stepping
into a sultry closeness perfumed with female perspiration. The whooze of booze coursing through his blood put a slight totter in his step. He liked to think he had the gait of an off-duty tap dancer walking uphill, or at least the uneven wobble of a barstool romeo forced to prowl the flat-top world of sobriety. He hobbled to the head of the bed and took the old man’s hand between his. The hand was frail, its skin traveled by thickened black veins threatening to burst. St. Cloud caressed the hand. He admired the indomitable spirit of this man, his vitality of desire, the flame of lust refusing to be extinguished by a degenerating body. Long before St. Cloud met the man he had experienced the lustful spirit of his paintings. Even those paintings reproduced in the garish colors of popular magazines possessed the luminescent presence of virile visitation, as if a veil had been swiftly withdrawn from the commonplace, not merely to illuminate or to trick, simply to stab at the heart of unrequited love. The trembling hands that St. Cloud now soothed once wielded paintbrushes and voluptuous bodies with bold confident strokes. But this man began life as the least probable candidate to finesse a vision from the gods, to ascend beyond his living peers into a realm measured by the yardstick of immortality. He was from Key West, his maternal forefather the Wrecker James Fredrick Isaac, whose last name was given him as a first. Isaac’s forebear’s penchant for moving houses across seas and ships from the ocean floor pointed the way for him to do the impossible, create a painted universe on twelve-foot by twelve-foot squares of canvas. This Isaac was not born with the noble bearing of his swashbuckling ancestor, nor did he possess a profile to be stamped on coins of the realm. No. This Isaac existed as if God were truly a giant up in the heavens, making men and women in his reflected image, busily banging out a race of all things handsome and beautiful. Then one day, out of boredom with such production-line perfection, God lifted his massive hand, formed a fist, banged it down smartly on one of the handsome heads, slamming the man’s six-foot frame down to five feet, broadening shoulders to exaggerated proportions, pushing the face in on itself, creating folds of flesh resembling a bulldog, thick lips condemned to a perpetual pout, heavy jowls swinging off the broad triple chin, almost obscuring an abbreviated neck no higher than a tin can flattened by a speeding car. This new man’s entire appearance was so devoid of classical balance it signified a defiant aesthetic, a perfection of imperfection. The brown eyes of this creation peered from beneath lidded folds of flesh, cried out for
affection with the eager-to-please expression of a dog expecting the gift of a juicy bone to fall from heaven’s dining-room tabletop. Having outfitted this new man with an alert and inquisitive animal nature, God in heaven was pleased, sent him to walk head and shoulders beneath lesser mortals of more common abnormalities. It was in his art that Isaac transcended all others. Those who saw Isaac’s art knew he had been touched by God. Only Isaac had a good-humored inkling of just how hard God had touched him. Isaac exuded the irrepressible spirit of a creature happy to be alive. Isaac counted himself lucky he had not been crushed to something less than an ant in the moment of his creation.

“You haven’t answered Angelica’s question, St. Cloud.” Renoir stretched his legs before him in the wicker chair, folded his hands across his stomach, a pencil-thin Buddha contemplating the ironic answer to all life. “Is she your kind of girl?”

St. Cloud never noticed Angelica had a small blue squid tattooed on the inside of her left ankle, or maybe he had forgotten, it all seemed so long ago, urgent voices across tranquil sea of alcohol. He spoke softly so as not to sink in the tranquil sea. “Angelica’s not the kind of girl you can take home to your wife.”

“You did!” Angelica’s words rode in on sudden uncontrollable laughter. “Sometimes I took
you
home to your wife.”

“That was the beginning of the end.” St. Cloud felt himself starting to sink.

Angelica stopped laughing. “For her the end of the beginning.”

St. Cloud was definitely submerged, he heard his words glub to the surface, weak with exasperation, a plea for a secure handhold to save him from this mess. “Nothing’s forever, not even eternal love.”

A defiant grin crossed Angelica’s face. “Listen, after you’ve had an orgasm it’s time to get off the stage. Every ham knows that.”

“He isn’t afraid of these things.” Isaac wheezed. “St. Cloud knows how to make a sandwich with what God gave him. The issue here is that some men mate in captivity, some don’t. In a moment of weakness I mated in captivity once. Look at the result.” Isaac rolled his watery eyes toward Renoir, then thought better of it. “You can only hit a donkey between the eyes with a board so many times before it stops seeing stars in its eyes. Wake up, St. Cloud. I’ve tried to tell you so many times. Fall in love with a town, not a woman. When you get tired of a town you can always leave it. A town doesn’t expect you to
call and ask when you are coming back, it doesn’t expect flowers, and it doesn’t shed a tear for your self-pity.”

“Check the bulge in his pants.” Renoir folded one long leg casually over the other. “St. Cloud is capable of falling in love with Main Street, he’s lucky he can walk down any street without tripping over his third leg. If you put a skirt on every telephone pole in town he would have them pregnant by sundown. Fall in love with a town? What kind of advice is that?”

“Advice you wouldn’t understand.” Isaac tried to push his shrunken body higher on the throne of oversized pillows. “St. Cloud thinks with his pecker, he’s always corkscrewing his life around in a cockeyed direction, that’s why he’s never out of trouble. By the time he knows where he is his pecker has come and gone two days before. St. Cloud is more of an endangered species than the precious Florida panther.”

“Pity the poor panther.” Renoir winked at Angelica.

“I think I’m in love.” The words squeezed out of St. Cloud’s alcoholic swamp. He could not believe he was making a public confession of passion. “Really in love. Only way out is a bullet or a fast train.”

“No trains through here since the hurricane of ’thirty-five blew out Flagler’s Overseas Railroad. The bullet is your only choice, at least it will save the panthers.” Renoir leaned back in the wicker chair and fixed St. Cloud with a salacious wink. “Who’s the lucky boy you’re in love with?”

“What was that?” Isaac pushed higher on the pillows. “My hearing is going faster than my eyesight. What did St. Cloud say?”

“He said,” Renoir shoved out of the wicker chair, “he thinks he’s in love. He’s excited from watching Angelica’s modeling act.”

“Honey …” Angelica shifted her weight from one high heel to another. “You’re just jealous. Remember, getting the candy out of the wrapper doesn’t always mean you can eat it.”

“It’s not Angelica.” St. Cloud wanted to set the record straight, though there was no denying Angelica was gorgeous, in or out of the right light. She would be gorgeous in a black room with all the exits sealed. “It’s not you, Angelica. It’s the girl who works in Evelyn’s bird shop.”

“Oh brother!” Renoir collapsed back into the wicker chair. “It isn’t bad enough you’re raping the environment. Now it’s
hey little high-school girl where you goin’.”

“She’s twenty years old.”

“Some difference.” Renoir uncrossed his legs. “So it’s Heartbreak Hotel time.”

“Cut it out, Renoir.” Angelica tapped the toe of her right high heel impatiently, a naked schoolmarm about to lecture. “This could be serious. This could be a major league mistake. We’ve got to make sure he makes it. He’s obviously in pain and wants to share. He’s very generous. He’s fuck struck. Tell us about it, honey.”

“Hold on.” Isaac sputtered and coughed. “St. Cloud, hand me my breatholator. Steady it for me.” Isaac clutched St. Cloud’s guiding hand, placed trembling lips to the plastic mouthpiece. He inhaled with a fervent rasping as his dim eyes roved over the shape of Angelica standing at the foot of the bed. He slipped wet lips from the breatholator, revitalized. “Look at this girl!” Isaac rubbed the thick black veins of his frail hands in glee, smiling with uninhibited pleasure. “St. Cloud, this is the girl for you! The softer they are the harder they come. She’s the truest Christian on this godforsaken rock, all she has to do is walk down the street to have every man in her wake bumping into the wall as he follows along like a starved hound in search of a butcher shop. Even now she can make me rise. Not really, since they took those big arteries out of my legs, which I made Renoir promise not to let them do before I went in for the operation. I said I’d rather be dead than no longer be able to rise to the occasion. Since the operation I really can’t get it to move let alone rise. But I’m at my best with it every morning, because my brain remembers the blood swelling to attention between my legs for seventy-two years. My brain wakes up with a hard-on. The mornings I have Angelica here I’m like a man with an amputated leg who can feel his toes twitch. I’m telling you, Angelica is solid gold right down to her soul. You’ve been mooning over this girl in the bird shop for two months now. That’s going to end badly. No matter how pretty they are, the boredom of a young woman finally catches up with you. You have to train them. Then what do you do with them? It’s like training a seal. Endearing at first, but who wants to walk around with a pocketful of sardines for the rest of his life? Forget the Georgia peach. You’re better off with Angelica. She’s the kind of woman who won’t take yes for an answer. Angelica is truth in packaging. Christ, what a package. Look at it! A whore in tart’s clothing. You can pay her or marry her. What difference does it make? If all it cost you is money you are coming out ahead of the game. Angelica is like a once-in-a-lifetime
bright diamond thrown into a ring of ignorant thieves. Pick it up, boy! Pick it up! Don’t disappoint an old man.” Isaac’s liquid gaze drifted from St. Cloud to Angelica, then poked around at shadows in the room, finally lighting on Renoir, who was turned to the window feigning interest in a large freighter rounding toward the Gulf on the thin blue horizon. “I keep hoping, you know, even at this late date, maybe watching Angelica, Renoir will feel what I can’t. I named him Renoir after the monumental painter of female flesh of all time until I came along. The real Renoir was an appreciator, a man with an eye for the knowing. I name my kid after him and what do I get? Look at him, would you? Dressed in that crisp white tropical suit you’d think he was going to run downstairs and set the table for Easter dinner. He looks like a maître d’ at the Last Supper.”