Mr. Bones (12 page)

Mrs. Everest said, “I think I'll have the peekytoe crab salad. You should have the lobster mac and cheese—it's one of Junior's specialities.”

She did not allude to Harry or his mother, but the whole encounter upset me so badly I couldn't eat.

 

There were the men she called “the boys.” Tony was an antiques dealer and a stickler for decorum. “Dickie's such a goddess. She served a raw ahi amuse-bouche without putting out fish knives.” He was a name-dropper—Jackie this, Gloria that—but a reliable friend to Mrs. Everest, and like her, a gossip.

Tony fed her stories. She was in general not a listener, except to malicious tattle, and then she was all ears, smiling in anticipation, her mouth half open like a dog awaiting a treat. It might be something simple. The Callanders, for example. Biff had been in the State Department, and Mrs. Everest liked to say, “He was in the CIA.” She said this with an admiring whisper when they'd been on speaking terms, and when she rejected him she said it as blame, revealing his disgrace—the spy as sneak—taking away his power by stating the fact:
I know his secret.

But Tony had a better piece of gossip. Biff's wife was Peruvian. At one of the dinner parties Tony was seated next to Lara, being charming, asking all the right questions, mentioning how he had gone to Cuzco and loved Machu Picchu, letting Lara talk, refilling her glass, smiling, probably a bit of “Jackie once told me . . .” and the question he asked all couples, pure hostility masked as genial inquiry, “You must tell me how you met.” That had to have come up, because afterward he had a present for Mrs. Everest: “Guess who was a flight attendant before she married James Bond?”

Another of Mrs. Everest's boys was Sanford—Sandy—whom no one liked. Even Tony was afraid, always steering clear of him, and he warned me to be careful of Sandy.

Sandy was small like Mrs. Everest, very thin, rather vain in his choice of shoes (“I have hundreds of pairs”), stylish in his clothes—expensive black suit with black T-shirt—and his skin was a strange color, possibly the result of a tanning salon that over the years had turned him a shade of purple, or maybe he had poor kidney function.

He had a hostile habit of starting sentences, “Don't take this the wrong way,” and then following it with something insulting. In his talk he was much noisier than Tony, and he won the gossip competition. If Tony knew a mild scandal about someone, Sandy knew a disgrace. This disposed Mrs. Everest to Sandy, who was in his sixties but had the look—skinny, pouting, bug-eyed, small—of a bad boy. When I saw him with Mrs. Everest, he put me in mind of Iago, his purply face twisted in telling a story, his hands contorted and shielding his features like a mask of claws. I thought of the expression “motiveless malignancy.” I did a sketch of Sandy, which I titled
I Am Not the Man I Am.

Perhaps there was a motive, and it might have been Iago's motive too. Mrs. Everest was Sandy's only source of income. He was no better at his installations (hand-fired bricks) than anyone else she exhibited, but he was a far more malevolent gossip, and that was something that delighted Mrs. Everest. Like Tony and some of her other boys, he acted as her formal male companion, her walker. Even so, she was outrageously disloyal. After one party she said, “He was at it all night with that young waiter, dropping hairpins.”

Knowing that Sandy would quote me, I was wary when I spoke to him. I made a point of praising Mrs. Everest's taste, her hospitality, her humor, her food. I spoke approvingly of Tony, because in those days Tony was in Mrs. Everest's good graces.

And why was I part of her circle? Perhaps it was my success: other people—important people, Andy Wyeth—cared about my work. And she had something to give, lunches, the dinners, the parties, with us in attendance. We were glad to belong, and then—knowing her better, becoming uncertain, seeing how she cut or dropped people—we were even better behaved.

I said to Izzy, “She's awful, but that's not the worst of it. My fear is that to keep her friendship we'll become just like her.”

 

Even after all my travels I realized that I'd never known anyone like her. On an impulse, just doodling, I roughed out in pencil a sketch of her, with Tony and Sandy and some of the others, a capriccio of faces. But when I added some emphasis in ink, I got scared and tossed it.

Perhaps to purge it of memories, she had gutted her house near the harbor and at great expense redecorated it to display her art collection: Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg, Louis, Olitski, and some installations. Her friends, especially Tony and Sandy and Amadeo, raved about it, praised her for keeping the shell and rebuilding the interior, as a kind of museum, where my work was not welcome.

“That house has great bones,” Tony said.

But with obvious secrecy she never invited anyone into the house. Whenever she was picked up by a car, she met the person in the driveway or stepped outside before the driver knocked. No one was allowed inside. Once, meeting her to give her a lift, I saw her kitchen through the window. A pile of laundry had been stacked, unsorted, on the stove, and her cat was asleep on the kitchen table in the sunshine, the cat's bowl near it. That said everything about Mrs. Everest's eating arrangements.

“I used to be a gourmet cook,” she said. “I gave lavish dinner parties.”

Was this true? No one I knew had ever eaten her food or been to a dinner party she'd given. She only ate in restaurants, presiding over the table. She ordered three courses and picked at them, hardly eating, never finishing. But in those rare moments when she chewed some food, a hidden part of her personality became apparent—a wolfish energy and appetite, her yellow teeth champing, her turned-down mouth working, an alertness the whole time, her gaze widened as though to ward off an intruder. Then she spat. After that, she'd pass a knuckle across the crumbs on her lips, push the plate aside, and say to the waitress, “Take this away.”

She was always offhand with menials, and her brusque manner made them excessively polite.

“Yes, right away, madam. Shall I wrap it up for you?”

“Absolutely not.”

At the end of the meal she would suggest another meal—dinner tomorrow night, lunch the following day, Sunday brunch. She only saw people for meals; she was unavailable at any other time. She went out occasionally, to movies, to see friends, to shop, but was covert about it, and generally huddled inside her grand house, except at mealtimes or gallery openings.

Her friends, especially those shrieking men, praised her sense of style, and yet she only wore the old suede jacket and junk jewelry. No one remarked on how rumpled she looked; on the contrary, her shabbiness was regarded as a sort of defiant fashion.

She had the big-city habit, which was like a vice to me, of going to the movies in the afternoon, even on the sunniest day. Although her house was by the harbor, she never went near the water, did not swim or go sailing.

Speaking of an adulterous woman on the island, she asked me what I thought. I said, “Emma Bovary,” and she corrected me: “No, her name is Alice.” Other instances like this convinced me that she had no education, but her coterie saw this as a virtue. “Dickie dropped out of high school!” This was more praise, but it was clear to me that she was unlettered: all she knew was from talk, from something she'd been told, from anecdote and chat. But she taught me that no one could be more condescending than a high school dropout. Books put her to sleep, print was a soporific to her. She loved big bold paintings of stripes, the oversize archery targets that were in vogue in the sixties, the grotesque photos in tabloids. Anything less bored her. Her gallery reflected this tendency. I remember one show with car crashes and crime scenes, forensic photos, bloody bandages.

 

Sooner than I realized it, because I did not dare to dislike Mrs. Everest, she made me doubt myself. I did not lose faith in my work, yet I felt browbeaten and stupid because of her. Just being with her, a whole lunchtime, say, would turn me into a dope. I'd learned not to contradict her or put in a friendly mitigating word for the woman she disparaged or the man she maligned.

Having listened in silence to Mrs. Everest's venomous remarks, I always felt ashamed after one of these meals, avoiding the front window as I left the restaurant, turning away from the reflection of my face. We were, as I say, summer people. Had I fallen foul of her and been ostracized, we would have had nothing—no parties, no society. Yes, I see that I was cowardly and deluded, but I was fascinated too. Ethical satisfaction is not the same as aesthetic satisfaction, or plain curiosity. I studied her and did sketches, compulsively planning her portrait.

It never occurred to me that, out of my hearing, she might be disparaging me. That was strange: she was disloyal to everyone I knew, yet I believed she would be loyal to my wife and me.

When this thought occurred to me, I saw my naïveté, but of course by then it was too late.

Someone Mrs. Everest had fallen out with—had in fact rejected—said to me one day, “She's an alcoholic, you know,” as though this (if it were true) explained everything.

Perhaps it explained her famished stare, her fuss and obsessiveness, her bleak moods—little eclipses when she darkened and became impossible to please. Perhaps it explained her sweet tooth, which dry drunks are supposed to have, and her conspicuous regard for holding a glass—not drinking it but treating alcohol as if it were a magic potion, forbidden, tempting, poisonous, transformative. In her mood swings, which were frequent, she could turn on a person and, blinking, bare her teeth and deliver a sudden insult.

But a history of alcoholism could not account for the pleasure she took in someone's downfall, her love of bad news. The alcoholics I had known who'd taken the pledge were humbled, always haltingly explaining their weakness, or in a low-grade fever of atonement, constantly treading the tightrope of sobriety.

Not Mrs. Everest. She looked thirsty and pitiless, and on many occasions, clapping her hands like a child on hearing something disgraceful, relentless in her ill will, she was triumphant, reckless, and often wore the delirious expression of a predator, eyes aglow, as though she wanted to feast on her victim—had indeed already weakened the prey and would wait until the poor creature fell flat so that she could straddle the corpse and take a big bite from the haunch.

People do not fail without an element of struggle, but when it happens their failure is often undramatic. Failure comes in stages, like illness, a prolonged weakening, and finally a decline, with a whisper of extinction that is indistinguishable from death. This slowness and delay, the resilience in the human condition, the dying fall rather than the sudden plunge, is the reason I suspect tyrants, impatient for triumph, become murderers; why they carry out pogroms, persecutions, mass starvations; why they promote famine or reduce their enemies to slavery or captivity.

It is not enough to rejoice over the natural death of your enemies; their end must be hastened. Impatience is one of the besetting sins of the tyrant, an effect of blood lust; it is impatience that turns the conventionally cruel leader into a mass murderer.

And in order to be satisfied, Mrs. Everest wanted to have had a hand in it. “I want to kill them with my bare hands,” she'd say, pretending to be joking. And the person must fail completely, be rendered naked, homeless, ruined, exposed, the house burned down, the dog lying dead in the driveway.

Hearing stories of people she'd destroyed, I studied the look on her face—her glittering, slightly drunken eyes, her nostrils flared, her lips apart, her teeth showing, her tongue thickening with hunger. I should have been warned, but Izzy and I remained on her guest list, fascinated, and also fearful. On this island we were isolated in the true sense of the word. One of the stipulations of Mrs. Everest's friendship was that her friends were mine, and her enemies too.

Some people, not many, received financial help from her. They were always wounded, a bit lost, abjectly grateful. Just as she could be cruel to some people who were vulnerable, she could take others under her wing and protect them. That was part of her paradox, that—so hardhearted—she knew how to offer help. She fed stray animals; she gave money to a ranch in Idaho that cared for horses rescued from circuses.

There was a woman who cleaned for her, to whom she'd given a car (not a new car, but serviceable) and paid someone to sort out her taxes; an old feeble gay handyman whose partner had died and who was indigent; an alcoholic chef who was just out of rehab and was trying to put his life back together (“I can start him off with a little restaurant”). They were all lost souls, they were no threat to her, and in truth she could not have been kinder to them; though each of these people served a purpose—the cleaner, the handyman, the chef.

She had no children, so I suppose all her maternal feelings were directed toward abused animals and these sad people who, in their tentative dependent lives, were like children, who also performed chores for her with some ability.

She was entirely self-invented. This is not a simple trick of the ego; it takes work, persuasion, money, boldness, willpower, and imagination. You have to admire it. And so, because of my portraits, my giving these images life, I began to find her of much greater interest, hideously compelling at times, for the way she had made herself, the life and the pretenses she had created, all her fictions.

Just as she could whip around and turn cruel or unfeeling, with “She is hideous” or “Lipstick lesbian,” or might laugh like a witch at someone's bad luck, she could be unexpectedly concerned, sympathetic, even deeply moved at the plight of an unfortunate person, such as one small girl, Selma, the stepdaughter of a Brazilian roofer. The child disappeared from the island. It was not known whether she was with the man's estranged wife. The roofer was evasive and then he too disappeared.