Restoration (31 page)

He eyed me again. “How can I help you?”

“My name is Jack Charbonnet. I was doing some research and I found this address in an old book—”

“So you’re Charbonnet, are you?” Unable to free a hand, he stuck out an elbow and I answered the gesture by giving the bony thing a shake. “Tell me, then,” he went on, “how is Uncle Charlie getting along these days? Still miserable? Still watching the dust collect on all those old paintings?”

My God, I thought, it was Lowenstein. It was Lowenstein who’d shared the cottage with Asmore. “You’re the other one listed in the White Pages,” I said, “the one I spoke to on the telephone? You’re the nephew.”

“Well, the
great-nephew,”
he said. He handed me a couple of bags and extracted keys from a pocket. “Lawrence is the name, but my friends call me Larry, as I expect you to do. Why don’t you come in, Charbonnet? I suppose this is about my uncle.”

“Actually it’s about the artist Levette Asmore.”

“Then it’s about Uncle Charlie.” He shifted a bag from his left to his right hand. “I’ve got some cold Abitas in one of these somewhere. Let’s sit out in the courtyard and see if we can’t kill a few.”

I followed him into a living room that adjoined a small dining area and kitchen. The floors were longleaf pine covered with threadbare rugs. The furnishings, though spare, fit the architectural period of the house, which made them not a day less than two hundred years old. Asmore had once brought his work into these rooms, stacking his burlap and canvas creations on chairs and tables, hanging them, and yet the walls today had not a single painting on them, nor was there a print or a poster. Each wall was a grid of brick and mortar, old posts black with age.

“Tell me,” Lowenstein said, “ever track down that fellow you were looking for?”

“Which fellow was that?”

“Wiltz, I think it was.”

“Wiltz Lowenstein was a law firm. It went out of business many years ago.”

“Oh, so law firms go out of business, too, do they? I thought all they did was proliferate.” He handed me a bottle. “Thanks for the good news.”

He led me past French doors into the shade of a small courtyard. We sat on rusting iron chairs beneath a sweep of banana trees towering fifteen feet high. Except for his mismatched collection of clothes he bore little resemblance to his uncle, although I did wonder if his current mood had some genetic connection. Even as he guzzled beer he was bemoaning how his neighborhood market, once a wonderful place, had become little more than a water supply for tourists. Chief among his complaints was that people stood in line to pay three dollars for a small bottle when, if they only bothered, they could find a faucet against any one of a number of buildings and drink for free. “The world has gone mad,” he said. “Absolutely insane.”

And over water
, I thought.

When he quieted down, I began to speak, glad for the opportunity to settle at least this one issue. “The cottage,” I said, “is it really haunted?”

“I haven’t seen the ghost,” he answered, “but I have encountered the strange and unusual in the old place, most recently last Mardi Gras when a tourist let himself in after I opened a window for the breeze. I went after him with a frying pan. I took a couple of swings, in any case. I went for his head. He might’ve ended up a ghost had my aim been better.” He liked this story. It made him laugh. He swigged his beer. “You didn’t answer me earlier, Charbonnet. How’s Uncle Charlie getting along?”

“Uncle Charlie,” I said. “I might be talking out of school here, Larry… no, I’m sure I am, but your Uncle Charlie seems depressed to me.”

“Yeah? Well, what else is new?”

“He tells me he intends to sell the house. He’s made some poor financial moves and he now finds himself in a hole.”

“He’s not alone in that hole,” Larry Lowenstein said. “Why doesn’t he sell the collection of Newcomb pottery he keeps upstairs, or the Mallard suite in his bedroom, or some of those pictures by his former teachers and friends? He could begin with the Drysdales and the Kinseys. Am I asking the obvious when I wonder how many swamp and courtyard pictures one man honestly needs?”

“Your uncle lived here, didn’t he? With Asmore?”

“Yes, long ago. They were like brothers, nailing chicks left and right, doing everything together. I’ve never explored the story in detail, but I know the basics from conversations with my parents—my late father, mainly. And then there are the visitors who show up asking for a peek inside. Their grandmother was a
Beloved
girl, or they own a painting that looks like an Asmore and hope that someone at this address can authenticate it. Every one of them seems to have another tale to add to the Asmore legend. You can’t imagine how impatient I’ve grown with the whole silly mess. I quit trying to debunk the myth a long time ago.”

“A myth, is it?”

“However you wish to call it, Charbonnet, you end up with the same result. Granted, the guy painted some nice pictures, especially those portraits. But he made them a lot prettier by dying the way he did, and as young he did.”

“I’m not sure I get your point.”

“Let me try it this way: If people believe they need to buy water in a bottle, they will believe anything. Does that explain it?”

I shook my head. “The reason people buy water in a bottle, Larry, is because it’s safe and handy that way. They like art on their walls because they want to look at pretty things. One might argue they also want to be challenged, enlightened and inspired, but I think for most people it’s much simpler than that.”

“You think so, do you?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Ever stop and really look at a painting? There ain’t a whole lot to it. Basically what you have is a sheet of paper or some other material with paint smeared on the surface. That’s all it is. Why are Levette Asmore’s smears so much more valuable than the smears of other talented artists?” He washed back more of the beer, then exhaled a gassy belch before answering his question. “He knew how to market himself, is why. And what’s the best way to market yourself? If you’re an artist it’s to check out young. Look at Van Gogh. He knew it, too, didn’t he?”

“So you’re saying that the secret to success in the arts is to kill yourself?”

“Very well put, Charbonnet. My sentiments exactly.”

I considered leaving at this moment. He was gracious to have invited me in, and the beer was good, but I couldn’t tolerate his ignorance. “I don’t share your opinion, Larry, I’m sorry.”

“Nah, don’t be sorry. And don’t listen to a goddamn word I’m saying. I’m just talking. I’m still pissed for having to wait in line at the market. Maybe Asmore really was a genius, but my thoughts about the man have always been colored by my love for Charlie Lowenstein.
He was with him when he died, you know? Uncle Charlie was with Asmore. He was there on the bridge. He saw him jump.”

I was growing impatient. I let out a long sigh and sat forward on the chair. “I don’t think I believe you. It’s too… I don’t know, implausible.”

“You don’t believe me? Well, you should believe me. Because you can take what I’m telling you to the bank. Uncle Charlie was on that bridge when Asmore killed himself. And it ruined him. Why do you think he never amounted to anything?”

“I don’t know that he didn’t. He has a beautiful historic home, filled with valuable paintings. In the estimation of most people your uncle amounted to quite a lot.”

“Most people? Most people are idiots, Charbonnet.” He laughed in his ugly way and drank again. “You ever have a best friend? You know, somebody in your life you care about more than any other? Somebody you share everything with?”

“Sure.”

“For Uncle Charlie that person was Levette. So let’s pretend for a second you’re Uncle Charlie, and it’s 1941. One day you and your buddy go out for a drive and end up parked at the foot of the big new bridge they’ve put over the river. You start walking up that thing, it rises like a mountain out of the goddamn swamp. You reach the top and you look out and see the river and the land and it puts a lump in your throat, it’s so beautiful. You’re happy. But then you glance over at your friend—you love this person, okay?—and he’s climbed up on the guardrail. ‘Oh, Levette. Get down from there, Levette.’ I mean, what are you going to do? Then before you know it he’s catapulted off the side into the longest swan dive anyone’s ever seen.”

“A swan dive?”

“That’s the story.”

“I don’t see Asmore doing a swan dive.”

“You’re probably right. He probably just jumped, huh? Uncle Charlie never told me any of this, he refuses to talk about it. But I
grew up hearing the story. What made him go crazy? Why is he such a hermit? How come he never shows up at any family get-togethers? You’d ask any one of those questions and that was the answer you got: the story of Levette doing the dive from the bridge.”

“And your uncle saw it all?”

“He saw it. After Pearl Harbor he tried to enlist but the Army wouldn’t have him because he was F-something. In other words, so certifiably nuts that he couldn’t pass the medical. I think about that sometimes. The world is at war, all these thousands and thousands of young people are sacrificing their lives trying to stop Hitler and the Japs, and Uncle Charlie’s here in the French Quarter still hanging his lip over his weird friend. Talk about your priorities being fucked up.” He pointed at me with the bottle. “Something had to happen.”

He excused himself, went back into the house and returned with two more beers. He offered me one and I waved it away, and this seemed to please him. He rubbed a hand over his belly before sitting back down.

“You said something had to happen. Do you mean you think something happened between the two of them that prompted Asmore to kill himself?”

“Yeah, that’s always been my guess. Why else would Uncle Charlie become a hermit the way he did? It’s like he was guilty, he had blood on his hands.”

“How long did he live here in the cottage?”

“All the way up until his mother died and they divided her estate and he got the house. That would’ve been around ’48, ’49. My grandfather got this place and an office building on Canal Street, and that explains how I eventually ended up living here. We always tried to involve Uncle Charlie in family events. My sisters got married and they invited him. He didn’t show. We’d send him invitations to things and he wouldn’t even RSVP. Uncle Charlie was all about Uncle Charlie. He did his own thing. Know what that was, Charbonnet?”

I waited as he brought a beer to his mouth and finished it off. He
belched again. “Uncle Charlie’s thing,” he said, “was always to sit there and wonder why he couldn’t stop his friend from jumping off the bridge.”

She came to the door in her usual jeans, T-shirt and lab coat, hair pulled back and tied with a slip of scarlet ribbon. I’d punched the bell only once, expecting to be met by Joe Butler if anyone at all. I was so surprised to see her there in the trap of iron bars, and not a glowering scarecrow, that my head went blank and I could not think to speak. “It’s you,” I managed to mutter.

“Jean Rhys Goudeau, restoration girl.” She took a step back, pulling the door with her. “And you are?”

“John Francis Charbonnet, Junior, prematurely retired newspaper hack. But you can call me Jack.”

“Nice to meet you, Jack.”

“Pleasure is mine.”

It now was almost six o’clock in the evening, some three hours after I’d left Larry Lowenstein at his cottage in the French Quarter. I’d spent the better part of the afternoon at a tavern on the corner of Saint Charles and Martin Luther King, and just a block away from the Guild’s studio. I’d had more beer while seated at a table watching the streetcars rumble by. Levette Asmore was black, and my landlord had been with him when he died. That said it in a nutshell, and yet I was at a loss as to how to relate this information to Rhys. Asmore’s connection to Lowenstein, a former client of hers, would be stunning but welcome news. Perhaps we could get him to talk. What I wasn’t sure about was how well she would take the revelation that the artist had not been white, as she’d long presumed. Apparently Rhys’s racial identity, which seemed to place her in a subgroup that was neither white nor black, and added to a perception that she was different and apart, a breed unto her own, needed some tweaking. She was blacker than she knew. In the tavern I’d gone from laughing to nearly crying
at the bleary absurdity of it all. Although I was as confused as ever about most things, it was clear to me now that the whole business of classifying a human being by the color of his skin, let alone its tone or degree of color, was a lot of crazy horseshit.

“May I see the painting?” I said.

She bit her lip and studied my face. She was going to send me away, I was certain, but then she added to the day’s load of surprises. “Follow me.”

In the studio upstairs there were four large worktables standing next to each other, spaced a few feet apart, so that there was enough room to walk between them. Each table held a panel, and she’d arranged the panels in their proper order, as they’d hung on the wall at Wheeler. The panel on the second table from the left actually had two pieces of canvas: a large rectangle and the narrow strip that had fallen to the ground and colored me gray with residue. In two of the panels you could see the rectangular-shaped holes cut to accommodate the air-conditioning vents. Because Rhys had spent more time working at the center tables, the center of the mural was well on its way to being cleaned while the edges still remained hidden beneath layers of paint. Imagine a window so densely coated with dust and condensation that you can’t see through it. In the middle of the window, now, wipe clear an area in the shape of a circle, allowing a view.