Skyscape (16 page)

Where's the old Dr. Patterson, the young man who knew exactly what to say?

“I'm afraid, too,” said Patterson.

“Of what?”

“Someone's trying to kill me.”

That was good, thought Patterson. Inject a little reality into the interview. Tell the client that we all have problems. But that wasn't why Patterson had made the statement. Not at all. For a moment Patterson had not been a therapist. He wanted to dispense with all pretense.

Patterson needed Curtis Newns. It was that simple.

There was a long pause. Then, “I thought someone like you would be used to that kind of thing,” said the artist.

“Would you be used to it?”

Curtis considered. “I'm not like you.”

“What sort of person do you think I am?”

“Someone who has gotten used to danger.”

“Someone who doesn't feel fear?”

Newns considered. “Not like a normal person.”

“If I can't feel fear maybe I can't feel other emotions either.”

“Maybe.”

“Feelings like compassion.”

Newns gave a slight smile. He was a remarkably handsome man, a friendly lion. “Possibly.”

There was something a therapist had to determine during the first session. It was integral to the therapist's role in the community, as well as his responsibility to the patient. “Are you afraid that you might hurt yourself?”

There was no answer.

“Are you afraid that you might hurt someone else?”

“I love her.”

Patterson waited, listening to the room, to the vaguest fibrillation of the traffic somewhere far away.

“I'm afraid,” said the artist. “I'm afraid of what I might do.”

Patterson knew all about the power of movies, and television, even that less magnified venue, the stage. People who have been on television carry with them, no matter how slight or colorless their off-screen appearance, a residual glow, a power.

This power was real, and it was earned, no matter how spurious its source. Most men and women setting forth to “tape before a live audience,” as the nearly quaint phrase put it, would look stiff, or wobbly, unsure. They were right to be unsure.

Patterson knew how to ignite his guests and make them, for a moment, as full of hope as he was himself. He knew how to use that moment, the stage fright, the unreal weight of the lights, to capture life. He was not indulging in empty vanity when he told himself that he awakened his guests, as he awakened people far away, people he would never know, to hope.

I've been wasting time sitting here, doubting myself, he thought. The guest scheduled for today, the singer who had been arrested twice for shoplifting, could be artfully rescheduled. Loretta Lee was deft at knitting and reknitting the guest list.

Patterson knew exactly how to help Curtis. This was the day. Let another night fall, and another morning arrive, and who could say when such a chance would come again?

18

I look good, thought Patterson.

The bare light bulbs illuminated his face. Patterson regarded what he saw in the mirror as a navigator might regard a map, a very familiar map, one he didn't even have to look at anymore except as a reassuring habit.

“I can't,” said Curtis.

Patterson turned away from the source of heat and light, his own reflection. It was a few hours after their first meeting. Patterson believed in moving fast. In life, as in flight, speed was all-important. You slow down and you start to sink.

He gave Curtis a smile, stepped over and put his hand on Curtis's shoulder and gave it a squeeze. This was the way a director, with professional cheer, helped an actor shaken out of character by a minor accident—a crashing chandelier, a kicking horse.

They were in Patterson's dressing room. Most guests for the show primped and paced in the green room used only for guests on Patterson's show, their nerves steadied by the presence of soothing assistants. Patterson was happy to share his own dressing room with Curtis. Patterson had stayed with Curtis all afternoon, easing the artist toward the moments that would change his life.

They were only a few minutes away. The two hundred men and women lucky enough to have reserved tickets for today's taping would already be in their seats, hushed, excited. The event had already been delayed, and delayed again.

This was big, thought Patterson. This was bigger than when the U.S. Senator confessed that he was an addict. This was bigger than when that famous singer brought snapshots of the boys he'd molested.

Curtis sat on the desk in the dressing room with his arms folded. He was still wearing the sweater, and his hair was uncombed. Patterson knew how Curtis would look on the screen, intense, quietly tormented, the sort of talking head the camera adored.

Patterson selected a tie. He liked this one—little scribbled flowers, something he'd wear to a wedding. He was excited. “Leave everything to me,” said Patterson.

Patterson had seen hundreds of people like this, maybe thousands. When it came time, they didn't want to step out onto the sea, that tossing water, and walk.

There was a quick, pro forma knock, and the makeup artist showed uncommon sense. She stepped in, took one look at the two of them, and stepped right back out again.

“I realize that in some ways this is exactly what you're afraid of,” said Patterson, using the same resonant, soothing tone he would use on a nervous mare.

Curtis would not meet the doctor's eyes.

“You're afraid of becoming a new man. This is understandable.”

Curtis gazed at the floor. Patterson had a troubling thought: what if Curtis refused to go on? What if he wouldn't leave the dressing room?

But he would, Patterson knew. This always worked. The earth rolled, the sun burst over the horizon. The miracle always came again.

“You know that ninety minutes from now you will be transformed. That's how it is with me. You sit under the lights with me, Curtis, and when you walk away you will be new—changed—ready to live.”

Curtis did not speak, but his eyes were bright, eager to believe. But he couldn't—not yet.

At this point, it didn't matter what words Patterson used. It was all in the tone, the cadence. “You've seen it work,” said Patterson. “You know it works, and you don't really doubt it.”

“You once made a blind man see,” said the artist, his voice quiet.

More than once, Patterson wanted to say. No big deal. Hysterical symptoms were easy to flush down the psychic toilet. “You owe it to Margaret.”

The artist took a deep breath, nodded. But he looked away, into the mirror.

“You're going on, Curtis, because I promised Margaret that I would help you.” I don't know how I do it, marveled Patterson. My voice changes, I feel myself grow taller, and here I am—telling this illustrious man what to do.

Curtis looked away from his reflection and shook his head. “I just can't believe—”

Patterson smiled. “Don't believe. Don't. Just take what happens as a gift.”

“Narcissus will never wake from his faith,” Dr. Penrose had written. “His empty faith in his own image will always both satisfy and fail him.” Patterson knew better. What we wake to is always morning, and if an artist can be shaken into confidence by the stage, the camera, a kiss of public love, then who can say that it is an empty future that lies ahead?

Paul Angevin had called it an evil thing. To share confidence with a doctor or a priest, a lover, a group of friends, that was one thing, Paul had argued. But to play to the voyeuristic hunger of millions—that was not medicine.

Too bad Paul isn't here now, thought Patterson.

They were late. They were going to broadcast live on the East Coast, and local programming in the Bay Area was being interrupted. It had been a while since Patterson had taken such a risk before the Big Audience.

It might not work—but if it were a sure thing, there would be no thrill. There has to be a moment during which Lazarus is still, stone-silent, deaf to the command to come out.

The makeup artist was there again, and Patterson indicated that she could stay. She was a butterfly, her touch sure, professional. A voice called out the dwindling seconds. Curtis did not flinch when he was burnished, just slightly, by the makeup, anointed, sent into that other level of reality, the fiction that illuminates.

It was time.

Curtis gazed out at the glints of color beyond this fierce, blank heave of light.

Feeling paralyzed him. Above, beyond the lights, was a black void and a suggestion of girders, cables. Red Patterson's desk was a polished expanse of oak. The furniture was well-made, not the cheap stuff of many television sets. The carpet in view of the audience was boardroom thick, a luxuriant cobalt blue. Behind the desk there was no carpet at all, just an expanse of black tiles on which Patterson's chair could turn silently on its casters.

All those people, thought Curtis. All those eyes. But he could not concentrate on that virtually invisible audience. The doctor's presence tugged at him. If only there were some way to break through to the doctor. If only there were some way to really show him what it was like to feel this way.

They talked for a long time about Curtis's career, his early success, his travels. There was a break, and Curtis sipped water from a paper cup, and then it was time to talk again. At last the chat twisted, got hard. “What is it you're afraid of?” asked the psychiatrist.

As though fear was something you could trace with a pencil, like the outline of the hand. As though talk could accomplish anything. There had to be a way.

Curtis couldn't talk.

During the breaks Patterson did not take his eyes off Curtis, telling him how wonderful Curtis was doing, how fortunate they all were. And then they were back again, the four cameras out there somewhere, still, hulking shapes that Curtis gradually was able to forget. They didn't matter any more.

What was it like, the famous psychiatrist should be asking, to have a life like yours? People asking him to sign cocktail napkins, women sticking out their bare arms and, from time to time, other parts of their anatomies, for him to draw a “cute little boat like the one in the museum.” This had gotten to be a party tradition. “Cute little boat” referred to the galleon in
Spanish Main
, a pastiche of images he had intended, in his wily twenty-year-old mind, to depict nothing much. But because of the title, people saw one of the squiggles as a “caravel out of a luminous summer,” as one really urpy critic put it. So there it was, even on notecards, the “Spanish Main: Detail” that did, he supposed, look a little like a ship if you wanted it to.

The lights sucked up the air. The glaze of hair on the backs of his hands were irradiated by these lights, pulled upward, the tug of an electric current. Well-designed air conditioning kept Curtis from feeling hot, and Curtis had to admire the lighting, the light used as paint, giving the two men shape and hue.

After awhile the audience was gone, the dim figures of technicians beyond the cameras faded. He felt strangely alone with Red Patterson, but better than alone, the air rich with the attention of unseen companions. Suddenly it was like prayer, but prayer you were sure was being heard. “I can't paint,” Curtis said.

“What happens when you try?”

Curtis liked this man. Patterson had presence, and one thing Curtis knew: the beautiful has life.

“I can't begin to tell you,” Curtis said. And he almost had to laugh at the way the words came out of him. Even prayer falters. There was no way he could communicate with a living soul.

The psychiatrist was sitting there. Curtis was sitting there, and they were both helpless for a moment. It was absurd to think that therapy would help.

Dr. Patterson sat there waiting, his eyes saying: go right ahead.

“I trust you. But,” Curtis continued, “it doesn't do any good to talk. I've never had any faith.…”

“In words.” Patterson completed the thought for him. But maybe that wasn't the way he was going to complete the thought. Maybe he had been going to say: in people. In my feelings.

There had been other therapists, drug counselors, vitamin injections, that were supposed to heal the liver and the neurons both, a brown syrup the body had somehow used up and couldn't self-manufacture.

The famous Dr. Patterson should be asking him what it was like to have a life like that. What it was like to have a life that was all electricity and color up to the age of thirty-five, and then dried up.

What it was like to stop painting, except in your own mind.

He wanted to tell the doctor—show him, let him see with his own eyes—how Margaret had stepped out of the blur of art-opening plastic wine cups and sodden potato chips.

He was sitting too long, spending too much time in silence.

“I can't,” said Curtis. “I can't tell you.”

“What is it you're afraid you might do?”

Oh, yes, that, prime question—the question he really had to answer. A painting was an act, a possible crime, a new life that had not existed before.
Because they want to buy or steal my work as soon as I finish it. Because they want to own me
.

Before he could stop himself, he had said just that. He had said that people were out to take his work away, wrest it from him while it was still fresh, newborn.

“Who are these people?” asked Red Patterson.

If he was dangerous, Curtis recalled, then steps would have to be taken. That was what the doctor had said in London after a blackout, the morning light bright by the time he had awakened curled around a broken bottle on Neal Street. There had been blood on the bottle, old, dried-up and port-black. Curtis had gone to the medical school on Gower Street and they had been delighted to let him talk to one of their brightest, a heavy man with black, pointed eyebrows.

“I pick up a brush, and there isn't any hope in it any more. No joy. No feeling at all. When I squeeze paint onto the knife, I stop.”