Mr. Gwyn (12 page)

Jasper Gwyn paid.

“You don't find envelopes like this anymore,” he said.

“My grandfather made them with a strawberry taste,” she said.

“Seriously?”

“So he said. Lemon and strawberry, people didn't want the lemon ones, who knows why. I remember trying them as a child. They didn't taste like anything. They tasted like glue.”

“You'll take the stationery store,” Jasper Gwyn said then.

“No. I want to sing.”

“Really? Opera?”

“Tangos.”

“Tangos?”

“Tangos.”

“Fantastic.”

“And what do you do?”

“Copyist.”

“Fantastic.”

41

That night Jasper Gwyn re-read the seven square pages that contained, in two columns, the text of the portrait. The idea was to then wrap the pages in the tissue paper and put them in the folder with the tie. At that point the work would be finished.

“How does it seem to you?”

“Really not bad,” answered the woman with the rain scarf.

“Be truthful.”

“I am. You wanted to make a portrait and you did. Frankly I wouldn't have bet a cent.”

“No?”

“No. Write a portrait? What sort of idea is that? But now I've read your seven pages and I know it's an idea that exists. You've found a way of making it into a real object. And I have to admit that you've found a simple and brilliant system. Well done.”

“It's thanks to you, too.”

“What?”

“A long time ago, maybe you don't remember, you told me that if I really had to be a copyist I should at least try to copy people, not numbers, or medical reports.”

“Of course I remember. It's the only time in my life we met.”

“You said that it would suit me very well. Copying people, I mean. You said it with an assurance that had no nuances, as if there were no need even to discuss it.”

“So?”

“I don't think this idea of the portraits would have occurred to me if you hadn't said that phrase. In that way. I'm sincere: I wouldn't
be here without you.”

The woman turned to him and she had the face of an old teacher who hears the doorbell ring and it's that coward from the second row who has come to thank her, the day he graduates. She made a gesture like a caress, looking in the other direction, however.

“You're a good boy,” she said.

They were silent for a while. The woman with the rain scarf took out a big handkerchief and blew her nose. Then she placed a hand on Jasper Gwyn's arm.

“There's one thing I never told you,” she said. “Do you want to hear it?”

“Of course.”

“That day, when you brought me home… I kept thinking of how you didn't want to write books anymore, I couldn't get it out of my mind that it was a damn shame. I wasn't even sure if I had asked you why, or anyway I didn't remember if you had really explained why in the world you no longer wanted anything to do with it. In other words, I felt something was still not right, you understand?”

“Yes.”

“It lasted several days. Then one morning I go as usual to the Indian downstairs and see the cover of a magazine. There was a whole pile of that magazine, just arrived, they had put it under the cheese potato chips. In that issue they had interviewed a writer, so on the cover there was his name and a statement, his name nice and big and this statement in quotation marks. And the statement said: ‘In love we all lie.' I swear. And, note, he was a great writer, I could be wrong but I think he was even a Nobel winner. Also on the cover
was an actress not quite undressed, who promised to tell the whole truth. I don't remember about what stupid thing.”

She was silent for a while, as if she were trying to remember it. But then she said something else.

“It doesn't mean anything, I know, but you moved your hand a few inches and you could grab the cheese potato chips.”

She hesitated a second.

“In love we all lie,” she murmured, shaking her head. Then she shouted the next sentence.

“Well done, Mr. Gwyn!”

She said she had begun to shout right there at the Indian's, with people turning. She had repeated it three or four times.

“Well done, Mr. Gwyn!”

They had thought she was mad.

“But it's happened to me often,” she said. “To be thought mad,” she clarified.

Then Jasper Gwyn said there was no one like her, and asked if she would like to celebrate somewhere together, that night.

“Excuse me?”

“What do you say to having dinner with me?”

“Don't talk nonsense, I'm dead, restaurants hate me.”

“At least a glass.”

“What sort of idea is that?”

“Do it for me.”

“Now it's really time to go.”

She said it in a gentle voice, but firm. She got up, took her purse and her umbrella, which was still wet, and went toward the door. She dragged her feet a little, in that way of hers, so that you could
recognize it from a distance. When she stopped it was because she still had something to say.

“Don't be rude, take those seven pages to Rebecca, and make her read them.”

“You think it's necessary?”

“Of course.”

“What will she say?”

“It's me, she'll say.”

Jasper Gwyn wondered if he would ever see her again and decided that he would, somewhere, but not for many years, and in a different solitude.

42

He was in a new Laundromat that some Pakistanis had opened behind his house when a boy in a jacket and tie approached; he couldn't have been more than twenty.

“Are you Jasper Gwyn?”

“No.”

“Yes, you are,” said the boy, and handed him a cell phone. “It's for you.”

Jasper Gwyn took it, resigned. But also somewhat glad.

“Hey, Tom.”

“You know how many days since I've phoned you, big brother?”

“You tell me.”

“Forty-one.”

“A record.”

“You can say that again. How's the Laundromat?”

“Just opened, you know how it is.”

“No, I don't know, Lottie does the washing.”

They had an open bet, and so after tossing a lot of nonsense back and forth they reached it. It was the question of the portrait.

“Rebecca doesn't cough up anything, so it's up to you to tell, Jasper. I want the details, too.”

“Here in the Laundromat?”

“Why not?”

In fact there was no reason not to talk about it. Apart from that boy in the jacket and tie, perhaps, who remained, stiffly, in the way. Jasper Gwyn gave him a look and he understood. He went out of the Laundromat.

“I did it. It came out well.”

“The portrait?”

“Yes.”

“It came out well in what sense?”

Jasper Gwyn wasn't sure he could explain it. He felt like getting up—maybe if he paced back and forth he could do it.

“I didn't know exactly what it might mean to write a portrait, and now I do. There's a way of doing it that has a meaning. Then maybe it's more successful or less, but it's a thing that exists. It's not only in my head.”

“What the hell kind of trick did you come up with, can you tell me?”

“No trick, it's very simple. But in fact it doesn't occur to you until it occurs to you.”

“Very clear.”

“Come on, someday I'll explain it better.”

“Well, tell me at least one thing.”

“What do you want to know?”

“When do we give that fine studio back to John Septimus Hill and sign a nice contract?”

“Never, I think.”

Tom was silent for a moment, and that wasn't a good sign.

“I found what I was looking for, Tom, it's good news.”

“Not for your agent!”

“I'll never write any more books, Tom, and you're not my agent, you're my friend, and I also think you're the only one, actually.”

“Am I supposed to burst into tears?”

He felt that he was irritated, but he didn't say it maliciously, it was only embarrassment or something like that. Am I supposed to burst into tears?

“Come on, Tom.”

Tom was thinking that this time he couldn't straighten things out.

“And now?” he asked.

“Now what?”

“What happens now, Jasper?”

There was a long silence. Then Jasper Gwyn said something that Tom, however, couldn't understand.

“Speak into the telephone, Jasper!”

“
I don't know exactly
.”

“Ah, I see.”

“I don't know exactly.”

It was true up to a certain point. He had had some ideas, even quite detailed ones. Maybe there were parts missing, but he had,
stamped in his mind, a hypothesis on how to proceed.

“I imagine I'll start making portraits,” he simplified.

“I can't believe it.”

“I'll find clients and make their portraits.”

Tom Bruce Shepperd put the receiver down on the table and backed up his wheelchair. He left his office, turned with surprising skill into the corridor, and went along it until he was in front of the open door of the room where Rebecca worked. What he had to say he shouted, without ceremony.

“Will you tell me what the fuck that man has in mind and what he wants to accomplish, and, above all, why—why he has to invent all that nonsense simply in order not to do what…”

He realized that Rebecca wasn't there.

“Fuck.”

He turned around and went back to his office. He picked up the phone.

“Jasper?”

“I'm here.”

Tom searched for a calm tone of voice and found it.

“I'm not letting you go,” he said.

“I know.”

“Is there something I can do for you?”

“Certainly, but it doesn't come to mind now.”

“Take your time.”

“All right.”

“You know where to find me.”

“You, too.”

“In the Laundromat.”

“For example.”

They were silent for a moment.

“Jasper, do you think people who make portraits have an agent?”

“I don't have the slightest idea.”

“I'll find out.”

But then, for days and weeks, they didn't return to the subject, because they knew that this business of the portraits was distancing them, and so they ended up circling around it, without ever approaching the heart of the matter, fearful that doing so would inevitably drive them further apart, opening them up to a suffering that they didn't want to inherit.

43

A couple of days after that phone call with Tom, Jasper Gwyn met Rebecca—the weather was mild, and it occurred to him to make the date in Regent's Park, on that path where, in a sense, it had begun. He had brought the folder with the seven printed pages. He sat waiting on a bench with which he had a certain familiarity.

They hadn't seen each other since that last light bulb, in the dark. Rebecca arrived, and they had to figure out what point to start over from.

“Sorry to be late. Someone committed suicide on the Underground.”

“Seriously?”

“No, I was late and that's all. I'm sorry.”

She was wearing fishnet stockings. You could barely see them,
under the long skirt. The ankles, and that was all. But they were fishnet. Jasper Gwyn also noticed rather spectacular earrings. She didn't wear things like that when she handed over cell phones in Laundromats.

“Do you like Klarisa Rode?” he asked, pointing to the book that Rebecca was holding.

“Tremendously. It's Tom who told me about her. She must have been an extraordinary woman. You know that none of her books were published while she was alive? She didn't want them to be.”

“Yes, I know.”

“And for at least seventy years nothing more was known about them. They were rediscovered only about ten years ago. Have you read them?”

Jasper Gwyn hesitated a moment.

“No.”

“Too bad. You should.”

“You've read them all?”