One Fearful Yellow Eye (7 page)

Her heavy door was Chinese red, and when she pulled it open I saw how accurate Gloria's description of her had been. She was a tall slender golden-blonde, features so coin-cut, so classic and clear, she had an ice-maiden look.

She looked at Andrus' card, front and back, handed it back, and said, "You're not exactly my picture of a banking type, Mr. McGee. Come in, please."

I followed her into a high-ceilinged living room. She wore white canvas coveralls, too big for her, man-size, the pant cuffs turned up. She had fashioned a belt out of a red scarf rolled to narrow width, and cinched the baggy garment around the narrowness of her waist. She had appraised me with blue-gray eyes which told me nothing, merely looked at me and made a record and filed it under McGee. Minimum makeup, no jewelry of any kind. She had that rare
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and contradictory look of being both slender and substantial, a look which I suspect comes from a certain breadth of shoulder, fruitful width of pelvic structure. Though the coveralls were spotted with stains of paint old and new, she looked groomed and immaculate.

She turned and leaned against a table edge, crossed her ankles, crossed her arms under her breasts and said, "So?"

Personal chemistries have not yet been isolated and analyzed by the physiologists. Here was a specimen in her twenty-five-year-old prime, in full bloom. Certainly the female of my species, beyond question. She had walked with a promising curl of power in the haunch. Her arms were crossed under a hammocked roundness of breast, and her mouth was of an understated sensuality in shape and dimension.

But we were saying no to each other without any words. In my out-sized, wind-weathered, semibattered, loose-jointed way I seem to got the right responses for my full and fair share of the fair ones, but I could not see any signs of impact, or experience any. Maybe Old Mother Nature sets up some kind of overriding counterirritant when the genetics are a bad match. I knew this could be a heady package for somebody, but not for the McGee. I had caught the smiling eye of the girl at the corner of Huron for a half-second, and it had been a resounding yes, both ways. A conditional yes. Yes, if it wasn't too late for us by the time we met. Yes, but I'm sorry it can't be.

I wondered about the No which Heidi Geis Trumbill and I were saying to each other. I know when you can hear that large No: when they are too wrapped up in exactly the right guy to even be aware you are alive, when they are one of the cool voyagers from the Isle of Lesbos, and when they are seriously thinking of killing you. I could not fit Heidi into any Pattern.

"Sometimes," I said, "the banking types get some help from non-banking types."

"Let me say I think they need it. Talk about impartial. Hah! It's perfectly obvious John Andrus has let that sweet demure elfin little bitch sell him down the river. Any slight suggestion that she might not be a hundred and ten per cent perfection, and he gets furious."

"Kind of a strange marriage, I guess."

Suddenly she approved of me. "Do take off your coat, Mr. McGee. Care for a drink?"

As she went and fixed herself a beaker of dry sherry and some gin over ice far me, I wandered over and looked through a wide arched doorway into her studio. It had a lot of tall windows for good north light, and it was painted a good off-white. It had at least the look of a working artist's studio-work tables, easels, bouquets of worn-out brushes in old paint pots, new work on easels and on the walls, deep painting racks, scabs of paint on the floor, stacks of paintings leaning against the walls.

She came up and handed me my drink and stood beside me looking into the studio. "Please don't ask me to explain my work."

She had a rare talent for irritating me. So I said, "I doubt if you could, Mrs. Trumbill."

With a cold smile as she turned toward me, she said, "And what is that supposed to mean?"

"Sorry, I don't think you know what you're doing."

"My dear man, abstract expressionism has been around so long that it..."

"That it gets imitated too much. You've got some color sense. You go too far in setting up weird composition. But that doesn't mean you are setting problems or trying to solve them. It's glib stuff, Heidi. It hasn't got any bones. It hasn't got any symbol values, any underlying feeling of weight or inevitability. It's just sort of shock-pretty, and you certainly get some satisfaction out of doing it, but just don't start taking it or yourself too seriously."

Fury drained the color out of her face. She went striding away, whirled so quickly she slopped some of her sherry onto the living-room rug. "Just who the hell are you? My work sells! I've been in damned good juried shows. I've had some fantastic reviews."

"I'm just a guy who buys a painting once in a while."

"Then what could you possibly know about it? You jackasses learn a couple of stock words and voila! you're a critic yet."

"There's nothing wrong with decoration, Heidi."

"You will call me Mrs. Trumbill if you don't mind."

"I mind, Heidi. Your stuff will melt right into the wall after a week. Nobody will see it. That's no disgrace. It's decorative, but it ain't art."

"Get out of here!"

"You can call me Trav, or Travis."

There was a piece of paper on a table beside a lamp. I saw a pencil on the coffee table. I took the blank paper over and put it beside the pencil. "Just make me a sketch of that lamp and the window beyond it, girl, and I'll go quietly."

"Oh, you mean draw you a cow that looks like a cow?" she said with a poisonous and knowing smile.

"Go ahead. Funny, but everybody I can think of right off the top of the head could sure God draw a fat realistic cow if they ever happened to want to. Hans Hoffman, Kline, Marca-Relli, Guston, Solomon, Rivers, Picasso, Kandinsky Motherwell, Pollock. And you know it, baby. If you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen. You dabblers bug me. You want the applause without all the thousands of hours of labor learning how to draw, how to make brush strokes, learning all the thing's that give painting some bite and bones even when you don't use any part of it. Go ahead, draw the lamp. Quick sketch. Prove I'm a jackass."

She trotted over, flounced down, took the pencil and made some quick lines, then stuck her tongue tip out of the corner of her mouth and drew a more careful line, then she got up and threw the pencil at the paper. It went bouncing under a chair.

"Shit!" she said. "So I fake it. Everybody does. And I get away with it."

"Suddenly I think I like you a little better, Mrs. Trumbill."

Her smile was wan and strained. "I'm underwhelmed, Mr. McGee. People don't talk to me like that often."

"Drenches out the glands, they say."

She studied me. "I suppose it's an approach, actually. You get nasty to a girl and it shocks her so she gets hung up. Nice try."

I gave her my most amiable grin. "Miss Pussycat, I have the feeling if some jolly experimental giant crammed us both buck naked into a one-man sleeping bag, we'd apologize to each other, get back to back, and try to get a little sleep."

"And that too is an absolutely transparent pass, damn you."

"Try me. You turn on my lights not at all, Miss Heidi."

"I damned well could if I should ever develop a taste for huge dull muscular men, but I'm afraid I put all that behind me when I reached sixteen. Can't we please finish whatever it is you came for and break this off?"

"Pleasure. We're checking out Gloria Doyle Geis very carefully."

"It's about time, wouldn't you say?"

"I know you made some suggestions to Andrus." She sat on the couch again.

"But he won't really see what a cheap little adventurer she is. I think I've figured it all out. Of course there isn't anything on her record. I think she had an accomplice. They worked out some kind of a story about something she was supposed to have done, and then the accomplice blackmailed all that money out of my poor sick confused father. She had him on drugs, you know. I think that could be proved in court. Now all she has to do is just sit tight and pretend she doesn't know a thing. Believe me, that money is hidden in some safe place and when the fuss dies down, she and her unwashed friend will disappear with it."

"Makes sense, I guess."

"You know it does. My God, he denied his own children, his flesh and blood, by leaving that grubby little waitress a whole half of his money anyway. But oh no, that wasn't enough for her.

There's no limit to the greed of that kind of person."

"Pretty tough to prove that was the way he was cheated."

"You people should track down all her old boyfriends, and you can tell just by looking at her that there are plenty of them and they weren't very carefully selected either. Did you know she knew Daddy was dying when she married him? What kind of a person would be so eager to marry a dying man who was pretty well-off? Ask yourself that."

"I guess she didn't get a very warm welcome from the family when he brought her back here from Florida."

"You can say we made it very clear to her how we felt." She shook her head, slowly. "And to think that Roger and I used to think what a shame it would be if Stanyard's husband died and Daddy made an honest woman of her. But we would certainly have settled for Stanyard a dozen times over rather than darling Gloria."

"Stanyard?"

"Chief OR nurse of neurosurgery at Methodist Hospital where Daddy did most of his operations. Her husband was hurt about the same time Mommy passed away. It was a fishing accident and they resuscitated him, but he'd been out too long and because of no oxygen going to the brain, there was a lot of damage. I guess he's sort of half in a coma. He's in an institution near Elgin. He sort of wanders around, I understand, and he can say a few words, and he seems glad to see her in a vague way. They had a little boy and he drowned when the boat was swamped. Stanyard has some kind of a thing about getting an annulment or a divorce. She was at the funeral. I hadn't seen her in years and years. I don't know when she and Daddy started having a thing. Probably not a very long time after Mommy died. I'm not censuring them, you understand. Two lonely people with the same interests. She's still fairly attractive-as nurse types go. And they did make a big effort to be discreet, at least. But the summer I was twelve, one evening after dark she drove him home because his car was being fixed, and I looked through the hedge and saw them kissing. You know how kids are. It made me feel quite ill and wretched and confused. I told Roger and he said to keep my mouth shut. He said he'd known it for a year at least. I guess it really must have shaken her up when he married that Doyle person. Poor thing.

When he had to go off on trips to do special operations he'd arrange to have Stanyard go along as her nurse. She was-is-very good, I guess. I mean nobody would question his wanting her right there for tricky operations. But I guess it was... quite a handy arrangement for them."

I said nothing. She realized how patronizing she had sounded. She colored slightly. "I'm not really a prude, Mr. McGee. When it's your own father... somehow it's more tawdry. You expect more. Mommy was such an absolute angel. I guess I should realize that Daddy was a man, with a man's... requirements. But it seems like such an insult to my mother's memory, the affair with Stanyard and then marrying the Doyle person. I guess that because a man is famous in his field, it doesn't mean he can't be foolish and gullible about women. Of course, I didn't exactly make one of the world's best marriages."

"Better luck next time."

Her smile was cold. "No need for a next time, thank you."

At that moment the red door swung open and a young man came hurrying in, saying, "Really, it's too much! Darling, that wretched Kirstarian is absolutely intent on ruining the entire exhibition, and I just..."

He stopped and stared at me, eyebrows arching in surprise. "Well, excuse me! I didn't know anyone was..."

"Mark," she said wearily, "you've promised and promised not to come charging in here. If you ever do it again, I'm going to make you give me that downstairs key back."

"I was just terribly excited, Heidi. This is really a crisis! Wait until you hear! But shouldn't you introduce us?"

"Mr.Travis McGee. Mark Avanyan. Mark and I run a little gallery on East Scott Street."

"The Tempo East," he said. He wore a shaggy green turtleneck and skinny jeans in an almost white denim. He had the build of a good welterweight in peak condition. His hair was a half-inch length of dense black pelt that began about an inch and a half above his dark heavy brows. He smiled approvingly at me. "It's so marvelous to see somebody who looks really outdoors." He sat on a bright blue hassock and tucked his sneakers under him and scowled and said,

"Kirstarian is absolutely adamant, darling. He brought in a new piece and he says it goes in the show or there won't be any show. And I can't endure it. It is absolutely ghastly."

He turned to me and explained, "Kirstarian calls his latest work Stappenings. For static happenings. He makes these marvelous life-size wire armatures of people and objects and wraps them with muslin and then sprays them with some sort of hardener. They have tremendous presence, they really do. And I have been working myself into exhaustion since dawn, practically, making the most effective arrangements, and then he comes in with his... impossible thing."

"What is it, dear?" she asked.

"It's two large dogs-uh-copulating like mad. They are sort of vaguely dogs, you know. Kirstarian just stands there, saying it is one of the statements he wishes to make in this show, and he is not going to let anyone censor his work. And there are those fat white terrible beasts, and it is the only thing people are going to look at, and it seems like some sort of terrible vulgar joke he's trying to play on us. Actually, he hates me. I'm just becoming aware of it. Heidi, darling, we're not ready to show something like that. I mean you could say that Chicago isn't ready. And the preview is tomorrow. And we've publicized it. Darling, you have to do something."