Mortal Love (24 page)

He scooted his chair around the table to sit beside me. “Red's bringing the painting down from the island tomorrow. He'll be at my place around noon. All you have to do is tell me whether you want to fly out of D.C. or New York. I'll call Learmont, and he'll have the plane waiting and all the paperwork. One of his minions will meet you at the airport. You get on the plane, you get off, you get on again. If you want. Stay in London for a while if you feel like it. Crash at Nick Hayward's place; he's living with his girlfriend now. I'll call and tell him you're coming.”

I sighed, defeated. “Goddamn you, Simon.”

“Great. Thank you, Val. You're a fucking prince.”

He stood, pulled out his wallet, and threw a couple of twenties on the table, then looked at me again. “So what do you want to do? Go back to the city and get your stuff?”

I got up, the table nearly toppling as I brushed against it. “There's nothing there I need,” I said. I felt in my pocket for my wallet and my meds, picked up my stained suede jacket and pulled it on. “I'll fly out of here. Dulles, whatever. I'll crash at your place tonight. Just tell this guy Learmont I want to fly into Gatwick.”

“Gatwick?”

“Yeah.” I trudged across the little outdoor garden. “My bike's in storage there. If I'm going over, I'll get it out on the road again.”

I looked back at my brother, his puffy, triumphant face, and thought of Goldengrove. I walked over to him, took the portfolio, and tossed it onto the ground, the pages falling among decaying blossoms and broken glass.

“Don't wait up for me, Simon,” I said. “I'll get there when Red does.”

As it turned
out, I never saw Red. I didn't stay at Simon's after all, but a hotel not far from Simon's R Street town house. My brother was waiting at the door when I arrived before five.

“You missed him,” said Simon. “He drove all night, got here around two. He ate breakfast and then split. He's got some project he has to finish up this week.” He looked slightly remorseful, but more excited: like a kid who'd waited up all night and missed seeing Santa but had a pile of presents to offset the disappointment. “If you'd stayed here, you would've seen him.”

“Yeah, but if I stayed here, I would have seen you, too.”

Still, I felt bad. It had been a few years since I'd been to Goldengrove to visit Red, and even though we kept in touch by phone, I felt guilty. I stepped inside. “Ah, fuck. Tell him I'll try to get up there later in the summer, okay?”

“You tell him, Val. Christ, you can afford a fucking cell phone. When are you going to stop living like a college student?” He flashed me a cold smile. “Oops—I forgot. You never went to college.”

“Where's the painting, Simon?”

I followed him down the hall. My brother had a nice place, furnished with gleanings from Goldengrove, the best of Radborne's paintings and the English Arts and Crafts furniture our grandfather had collected: Lutyens chairs, Vose tiles pried from the fireplace on Aranbega, an original Morris settle. Simon truly loved all this stuff—the happiest I'd ever seen him was after he scored a Harvey Ellis sideboard at Christie's. The sideboard was in the dining room now, and leaning in front of it was a large, flat wooden carton with dovetailed joints. I recognized Red's hand in the craftsmanship and Red's spidery penmanship on the label:
“FOR DELIVERY TO RUSSELL T. LEARMONT.”

I squatted in front of the crate, examining it. Brass hardware, oiled quartersawn white oak with birch inlays—
it
belonged in a museum. “Did Learmont order this?”

Simon smiled. “No.” He was wearing battered jeans and a threadbare Snakefinger T-shirt, hair uncombed and eyes still heavy-lidded with sleep: a vision of my brother that almost made me like him. “You know Red. You'd have to pay him extra to get him to do a bad job.”

I hefted the crate: heavy, but not so heavy I couldn't carry it. “So what's the deal? You tell him I wanted Gatwick?”

“Yup. That's no problem. You fly out of Dulles; a car's supposed to pick you up in half an hour.” He glanced at his watch. “You want coffee or something to eat?”

“Yeah, sure. Is this thing locked? I'd like to see what it looks like. The painting.”

Simon tossed me a key. “Come in when you're finished.”

I unlocked the crate. It opened like a set of doors onto packed wood shavings. Momentarily the smell dizzied me: I was back in the boathouse, hunched at my drafting table with green light filtering through the windows while Red planed boards behind me. I carefully pulled away the shavings to reveal a long, broad package encased in bubble wrap. I peeled the tape away with care, standing so I could slide the painting free.

It was a single piece of wood, very wide and heavy. Where would he have found it? The tree must have been immense. I set it down and stepped back to look at it.

It was her. The woman in the room at Halloween: the woman in my drawings. She was floating in the air above a distant, wave-swept sea, her arm extended and her fingers barely touching half of a silver goblet. Her hair was defined by a few thick brushstrokes of crimson and ocher, her face worked in white and umber that had been covered with a thin wash of viridian that still shimmered, vein green. Her eyes were wide and staring, jade green, black: she was staring past where the diptych had been broken. She was staring at—

My breath came fast and ragged. I let my fingers trail down the painting, the barely discernible ridges and declivities where the paint thinned and I could feel the wood grain beneath. Invisible, but it was there, it was there. …

“Val? You coming? It's nine.”

I said nothing. For another minute I stood, staring, forcing myself to see nothing but a rectangle of colored wood with two broken hinges dangling from one side. There were people in preindustrial countries who when shown a painted image could not see what it represented: their perception had been honed to recognize patterns in the sky we can't see, but not the
Mona Lisa.

It was just a painting, and it was not mine. It never had been.

“I'll be right there!” I yelled.

Once again I carefully sealed the painting in its bubble wrap, replaced it in the crate, and padded it with the wood shavings. I closed the doors and locked them, pocketed the key. It tinked softly against something, and for a moment my hand closed around the plastic bottle with my meds. I turned and joined my brother in the kitchen.

We didn't talk much. I had a sudden wild thought to beg him not to sell it, or to steal it myself. But that was crazy; I knew that.

We exchanged gossip about people we knew. I asked if he'd heard from Nick Hayward, whom I'd stayed with a few times while working on shows in London.

“Couldn't reach him. But I left a message on his machine. You still have your key?”

I nodded. When I tried changing the subject to Russell Learmont, my brother just shrugged.

“I don't know much more than you do. He's for real, if that's what you mean. He gave me a hundred-thousand-dollar binder for the painting.” I didn't comment on the fact that I seemed to be left out of the loop entirely, except as a go-between. “From what I could find out, he's a legitimate collector of this kind of stuff.”

I sipped my coffee. “Yeah, but what kind of stuff is that? I was thinking about it last night, and it just doesn't make sense. If what you were saying is true, that this guy collects outsider stuff. Radborne is way too conventional for that.”

I didn't mention what I was thinking: that the painting I'd just seen was nothing like Radborne's other work.

“Who gives a fuck?” said Simon. “Learmont buys this painting, it
becomes
outsider art. Or whatever you want to call it. And think about this, Val.” He pulled a stool up to the counter and sat. “After this sale, what happens to everything
else
of Radborne's? What's our portfolio look like then, huh?”

“Simon, nobody is ever going to think Radborne's pictures of Paul Bunyan are outsider art. They were illustrations. I mean, Christ, some of those books are still in print.”

“That's not what I'm talking about—I mean those other paintings, the ones at home.”

“Home.” I finished my coffee and stuck my cup into the sink. “You know, if anyone calls that place ‘home,' it should be Red. You paid him, didn't you? For coming down here?”

Simon shrugged. “I gave him gas and toll money. Hey, don't look at me like that! He lives there for free—we could
rent
that place if it weren't for Red.”

“Rent to who? Jack Torrance? You really are an asshole, Simon.” But I was too distracted to get really pissed off. “Listen, what do you have for cash? I don't want to have to jerk around at the exchange when I get to London.”

“Learmont's taking care of it.”

That was when the doorbell rang, twenty minutes early. I ran a hand through my hair, still damp from the shower, pulled a wadded-up bandanna out of my pocket and tied it around my head.

Simon made a face. “You know, Val, they're gonna take one look at you and call airport security.”

The doorbell rang again. “Coming!” my brother shouted, and hurried out of the room.

I was sorry
Simon didn't give me any cash: I'd have liked to see if a few bills would have bought me any negative feedback on Mr. Learmont. Everyone—the driver, the private security guards, the pilot and copilot and steward aboard the Gulfstream—had nothing but smiles when Russell Learmont's name came up.

“He'll treat you right,” the driver assured me. “I do this run all the time—pick up his friends from Burning Tree. Mr. Learmont knows everyone.”

He smiled. He had beautiful teeth, a Piaget watch, an Armani suit. Red himself would have been impressed by the provisions Learmont had made for his painting—there was enough padding inside that limo to outfit a rubber room. Once the painting was installed, the crate was strapped into a special harness in the rear of the limo. I tossed my knapsack alongside and settled myself in the backseat.

We headed out of town, on through the gray chute of software sprawl that had enveloped the Virginia countryside in the last fifteen years. After a while I asked, “Your employer do this often? Have someone hand-deliver paintings to him?”

The driver nodded. “Oh, sure. A few years ago, he bought an entire building. Some crazy guy in South Dakota, lived in a shack made entirely out of stuff from McDonald's. Styrofoam, a whole wall of little plastic toys of the Hamburglar. Mr. Learmont bought it, had them take it apart. It's stored in a warehouse somewhere now. Guy who built it retired down to Texas.”

I thought of Russell Learmont reconstructing a shack made of Big Mac containers on Aranbega. “That's nice,” I said.

I stared out the window, trying not to let my mind drift back to the painting strapped behind me. It was just dawn on the last day of April, a late spring that year. Cherry trees and apple trees were still hung with clouds of white and pink. There were wild ducks paddling in streams along the highway. The driver, after asking my permission, put on the radio, and the strains of Schubert lieder filled the car. Something—the music, the growing sunlight, the recent memory of the figure in my grandfather's painting—honed the world to a sharp, fine point that for the first time in years began to pierce the pharmaceutical bubble that surrounded me. I felt joy—not mere contentment or the absence of despair, but joy. As we approached Dulles, the driver called in to let them know we were close to arriving, and while he was talking, I let my hand slide into my pocket. The key to Red's crate was there, the key to Nick Hayward's apartment.

And the bottle containing my pills. I felt it in my fist, a little plastic tube containing mineral salts and mood stabilizers, chemical sutures for a tattered neurology. A few inches from my face, the window was cracked open. Warm wind stirred my hair; the scent of apple blossom. I glanced at the driver, still on his cell phone, let my hand rest for a moment against the top of the window.

Then I opened my fingers and let go. There was a flicker of pink and white above the grass on the median, and already it was gone, already it was somewhere far behind me. Already that was the past. I rolled the window down as far as it would go, breathing in exhaust and apple blossom, and waited to arrive.

CHAPTER NINE

The Entombment

F
or minutes after Swinburne's departure, Radborne
waited, listening for sounds of argument in the asylum's corridor. But there was only near silence, the regular heartbeat of the waves. It was not until he heard the distant echo of a clock chiming eleven that he recalled Learmont's command to meet him in his office. He hurried from the room, slipping Swinburne's book in his pocket.

The manor was as empty and desolate as it had been upon his arrival. Apricot-colored light burnished oaken wainscoting; from the apothecary seeped an attar of potassium bromide and vanilla. He made two futile circuits of the main floor, was just about to admit defeat when he recalled the refractory upstairs. He hurried up the steps and then down a corridor, and yes, beside the refractory was a second door.

“Dr. Learmont?” he called hesitantly, then knocked. The door swung open.

“Ah, you are still here!” Dr. Learmont's face was bright with relief. “I was afraid you had fled.”

“No, of course not.” Radborne gave a sharp laugh as Learmont grasped his arm and drew him inside. “I was afraid you might be angry at my meddling—though I did not intend to meddle,” he added quickly; “there seemed to be some altercation, and I was afraid … violence …”

“Well, there might have been. I have advised Ned many times not to arrive here without prior arrangement—he has a bad effect upon the unfortunate lady, as I think you now understand.”

Radborne nodded, turning. His eyes widened. “What
is
this place?”

Everywhere he looked were paintings. Hanging from every inch of wall, heaped upon the floor, suspended from the vaulted ceiling by chains and wires and pulleys. Landscapes and portraits, broken panels of fresco, tiny squares of wood covered with writing in unknown alphabets, maps of undercities and designs for bridges that spanned entire oceans. Labyrinths constructed of spent lucifers and snips of tin, a life-size human figure made of oakum with acorn eyes. A stuffed owl under glass, its avian head replaced with the wax head of a woman wearing a brittle horsehair wig. A book of thumbnail-size stamps, painstakingly drawn and varicolored, a man-size ball of furry twine. There were pages that seemed to have been torn from illuminated manuscripts, but instead of religious figures, displayed monstrous creatures: a woman's face fixed to the whorled body of a kraken or paramecium, dogs that walked upright like men, a beautiful young girl floating above a ruined tower with a flower in her hand.

Only it was not a flower but a man's sexual organ. The tower was not a tower but another woman's head, with gaping holes for eyes and the top of her scalp broken as though it were a neatly sliced egg.

“What … what are they? Who made these?” he asked at last.

“They are mine,” Learmont said. “This is my collection—part of it, the things that I love the best. I am compiling them to buttress some findings I have made over years of research and discovery. One day I shall present them all to my superiors. You will find no common work of your countryman John Rogers here, Mr. Comstock. See!”

Eagerly he led Radborne to a large canvas in a plaster frame ornamented with poppies. It depicted a bespectacled man wearing a beetle's carapace and carrying an umbrella; beneath his foot the diminutive figure of a woman could be seen, her tiny legs kicking. The painting's title was
Ready for the Rain.

“This was given me by the gentleman who painted it. He is like yourself, Mr. Comstock—an illustrator, and a very successful one. Yet melancholia afflicts him so severely that often he cannot be entrusted with his own safety.”

Radborne looked around in disbelief. “Do you mean to say that all of these are by your patients?”

“They are all the work of lunatics. And yes, at one time or another many have been in my care.”

“But they are extraordinary!”

Radborne crossed to examine a pencil drawing framed under glass, an explosive crosshatch of gears and teeth and blade-edged wheels with a lengthy explication of its proposed use.

Radborne shook his head, amazed and appalled. “Is this all part of your research, then? Mr. Swinburne mentioned only that you have been conducting an inquiry into madmen who paint.”

Dr. Learmont went to a desk that was a veritable forest bed of moldering pages. “It is a part of my research, yes, yes it is. …”

He began to rummage through the papers. “Most recently I have been corresponding with other metaphysicians on the subject of monomania. A failure of the will that would appear to be most efficiently treated by moral therapy, yet its sufferers seldom respond to standard measures—galvanism, heliotherapy, iron, and strychnine. You are familiar with Winslow's work?”

He held up a book:
On Softening of the Brain Arising from Anxiety and Undue Mental Exercises and Resulting in Impairment of Mind
.

Radborne nodded. “Yes—Dr. Kingsley gave it to me to read at Garrison.”

“You know, then, that according to Winslow a total if temporary cessation of mental exertion should produce deliverance from mania or melancholia. But in my experience it does not! The will to paint or write or compose seems
somehow related to the anxiety itself.
If the activity is forced to cease altogether, the concomitant melancholy grows even more severe, and may lead to dementia or suicide.”

Learmont bent over his desk. “Now, where is it? Ah, here!”

He picked up a small pine frame. For a moment he stared at it, then crossed to place it carefully into Radborne's hands.

“Ah,” said Radborne. “How interesting.”

Inside the frame was a charcoal drawing on cheap, coarse paper. Half was covered with fragmentary penmanship. The other half showed two butterflies, lifelike and well executed. One had its wings outspread; the other was wingless. Radborne tried to decipher the smudged words. “It's in French—
‘Rêves fatals.'
Fatal dreams, would that be?” He glanced at Learmont. “Who was he? A man who studied insects? It seems quite innocent.”

“His name was Gérard Labrunie, called Gérard de Nerval.”

“I am not familiar with him.”

“No? Perhaps his work is not to the American taste. He died almost forty years ago, having spent most of his life in a Montmartre hospital run by my colleague Dr. Esprit Branch, and then in the asylum run by Branch's son in Passy. His illness was no secret—he suffered from an extreme form of erotomania and eventually took his own life.

“I spent some time with him in Dr. Branch's hospital. Gérard had tried painting earlier, using crushed blossoms and plant stems to make ink and pigment. Later he was given charcoal and pencils and books to write in. Those results were very striking, as you can see from these.”

He indicated a series of drawings grouped together on the wall. All were of women. Or rather, as Radborne saw when he examined them more closely, all were of the same woman. She had large eyes; a smooth, oval face; delicate hands; and long, coiling hair. A pretty face, Radborne thought at first, but as he stared, he began to imagine something disconcerting in her expression: an unnerving intensity, as though she were seeking to burn a hole through a curtained window with her gaze. With a start he recalled the woman on Blackfriars Bridge, and Evienne Upstone.

“Well, he was a fair draftsman,” Radborne said at last.

“He was a raving madman, obsessed with a woman who sang on the stage. But he had many friends and was in the care of physicians who encouraged him to write of his delusions.”

Dr. Learmont picked up a folio-size book bound in blue leather. “Listen: ‘Desiring to make a record of what I have seen, I began to cover the walls of my chamber with a series of frescoes showing what had been revealed to me, and writing within the pages of this notebook the history of what I have learned. One figure was always dominant: that of Aurélia, depicted with the features of a goddess, just as she has always shown herself to me.'

“You see,” said Learmont, setting the book down, “that was
his
muse. She inspired his most vital work. He was very fortunate in having friends who visited him and took pleasure from his creation. Very fortunate.”

“And you made this part of his therapy—to encourage his delusions? It seems very cruel! His illness is not unusual, you know—a number of my inmates shared these sorts of erotic manias and would write about them. But I couldn't publish them in
The Prism.
I believe Dr. Kingsley kept them in his patient files.”

“Nerval's books were
read,
Mr. Comstock. He was a man of genius. His failing was that his visions ultimately maddened him, yet much beauty came of them.”

Dr. Learmont picked up another, smaller volume with an engraved cover and handed it to Radborne. “This is the work of a man even more unhappy than Nerval.”

Radborne looked at the book.

“‘The
farfadets,
or not all demons come from the other world,'” Dr. Learmont translated.

“Farfadets?”

“A close approximation might be ‘goblins.'”

Radborne said nothing. Fluid shapes moved across his eyes, the shadow of a man dancing atop a broken wall, gray figures following him through an alley. He made an involuntary gesture, his hand flicking at the air, looked aside to see Learmont staring at him.

“Yes.” With an effort Radborne laughed. “Well,
I've
seen a few goblins, in the refractory room at Garrison.”

Learmont sighed. “I never treated Monsieur Berbiguier. I wish I had. He spent his life with his
farfadets,
and unhappy company they seem to have been.”

“Are they ever not?”

“Oh, yes! I have known a number of men who would not trade their goblins for any amount of gold. Goblins torment them to paint or draw, and we are all the richer for it.”

“No matter the cost to their families? Their employers?”

“The world does not lack for earnest men, Mr. Comstock. ‘He who has no touch of the muse's madness in his soul, approaches the door believing he will be allowed into the temple by virtue of his Art; but he and his poetry are not admitted: he is nowhere when he enters into rivalry with the madman.' I would not argue with Plato.”

Radborne kept himself from an angry retort. He handed the book back to Learmont. “The woman, then? The one you keep upstairs? What purpose is there in encouraging her in her delusions?”

“She is a gifted painter.”

“So she claimed. It is an elevated form of derangement, I suppose, for a woman.” Radborne hesitated. “She seems to suffer from disappointed affections. Is that correct?”

“It is. She never married and has attached her unreasonable expectations to Burne-Jones. But he is not to be blamed for encouraging her painting.”

Radborne looked at Learmont with distaste. “You did.”

“You think I am remiss in this matter? Yet I believe—I am
certain
—that it is what keeps her from dying of despair. I assure you, Mr. Comstock, I am a benign jailer! Others would have broken her, or killed her outright, in their efforts to keep her imprisoned. But, like you, I have always found her beautiful.”

He stopped. His gaze seemed to turn inward, and his expression grew so anguished that Radborne looked away, embarrassed. “You cannot imagine what it was like to find her—to see such a creature, wandering lost and bewildered in Clerkenwell Green. ‘Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?'—So yes, I give her paints, and pencils, and canvas, and she draws what she remembers of her life before this. It sustains her, Mr. Radborne. It sustains me.”

“I would expect the opposite, that it would have driven her to dissolute living. And ultimately it has brought her here, you cannot deny that.”

The doctor smiled. “‘Driven her to dissolute living'—has painting done so to you?”

“Of course not,” Radborne snapped. “Doesn't her family object?”

“She has none, save a murderous villain who claims to be her husband. She is well quit of him, though of course she will not believe that. She is much better now, I have provided for her from my own estate. In the city she lived for some months at a private home for insane ladies, but Burne-Jones felt that she would benefit from the air in Cornwall, and the solitude. Here …”

He walked over to a small easel that held a watercolor painting. “This is something that Miss Upstone produced for me. I think it extremely interesting.” He turned to Radborne. “Do you?”

Radborne stared at the canvas, frowning. It held nothing but stabs and smudges of color—yellow, green, black, though mostly green—an utter ruin of celadon and dusky gold.

“It looks as though a child got hold of her paints,” he said.

“That's what I thought at first. But see—if you step back from it and stare at this point here.” Dr. Learmont jabbed at the canvas with one long finger. “Do you see? There is a figure there, suspended in the darkness.”

Radborne scowled but stepped backward, fixing his gaze where Dr. Learmont had indicated. He made out nothing but the same slurry of yellow and green against a brackish ground. Then, as though someone had thrust a telescoping glass before his eye, his vision sharpened.

“Oh!” He flashed a startled glance at Learmont. “Yes! I do see. There's a man there—”