The Art Student's War (53 page)

“I think you have the most beautiful name of anyone I’ve ever met.”

“Bea Ives?”

Ronny smiled and ignored her. “I didn’t believe it at first. That tall, slim, beautiful girl in Professor Manhardt’s class, who nodded so sensibly when he uttered some pseudo-British twaddle, could she really be called Bianca Paradiso?”

Ronny was returning a compliment, but he didn’t need to. And probably shouldn’t. “Ronny, I think you’ve had too much wine. Or I have.”

“I think
you’ve
had the perfect amount of wine. You’ve got a fine flush.”

“I think I’ve had way too much wine or why would I be feeling as if I wanted to cry?”

“There’s nothing to cry about.”

“Ronny,” she said, “I don’t know what’s the matter with me. Honestly. Listen, please. All this week—a solid week now—I’ve been feeling as though I’m coming unhinged. As though every other moment I’m going to start crying, or bang my head against the wall, or get in the car and not stop till I reach Mexico. You’re smiling but it isn’t the least bit funny. For other people it may not be so worrisome when they find themselves feeling strange and disoriented and impulsive, but they don’t have a mother who often seems halfway to the loony bin. I do. It scares me. And you may remember I spun out of control myself once and wound up treating my aunt and uncle’s home in Cleveland as a private sanitarium. It does something to you. I sometimes think I’m only now beginning to understand what it all did to me. How
burned
I was.”

“You’re just pregnant, Bianca. That’s all it is.”

“Do you know I changed my clothes three times this morning?”

“So? I changed my tie.”

“You know what’s the oddest thing in my life? I don’t know what’s the oddest thing in your life, but you know what’s the oddest thing in my life?”

“Now there’s a good question. What’s the oddest thing in my life?”

“The oddest thing in my life is that I’m the mother of twins who, so far as I can tell, have absorbed nothing, no genetic whatever-it-is, from me. It isn’t merely that the twins look exactly like Grant, though they do—to an extent that actually makes people laugh aloud. Really, I’ve seen it! I’ve seen total strangers point and laugh when Grant and the boys walk down the street in their matching Keds. People call them the Ives triplets. The boys tilt their
heads
the same way Grant does when they tie their shoes, they clear their
throats
the same way, they hold their hands the same way when they
yawn
. I’m telling you, my little boys couldn’t
learn
this stuff. Not to
this
degree of detail. It’s got to be in their blood. But now think about what I’m saying, Ronny: is the way you yawn and walk and clear your throat in your
blood?
And if so, where does that leave you, Ronny? I mean, what are we? What are people?”

Of course there was nobody else in the world with whom Bianca might share a conversation ending with a passionate
What are people?

And Ronny was there for her. He was weighing her every word. “At this point,” he said, “I don’t know what’s in my blood.”

“I don’t mean to sound arrogant, but I think of myself as—well, a vivid presence. And so how can I have two kids who don’t resemble me in the slightest? Not in the slightest … And why does my saying this make me want to cry?”

“I don’t know, honey.” Honey? “It’s just a difficult time.”

They had both had two glasses but there was still wine left in the bottle, which Ronny scrupulously divided.

“I don’t know if this is such a good idea, Olsson,” she said.

“It’s a perfectly swell idea, Paradiso,” he said. “Propitious, even.”

“Ronny,” she said. “You know I slept with Henry Vanden Akker?”

“I know,” Ronny said.

“How did you know?”

“I just knew.”

“But how did you know?”

“I just knew.”

“I never told Grant. I never told anyone—except Maggie.” Only after the sentence was out did Bianca understand that it wasn’t—a realization that made her head spin a little—true. On another restaurant occasion, likewise unsteadied by an Olsson-chosen bottle of wine, she’d made a similar confession. To Ronny’s mother. On that astounding afternoon when Mrs. Olsson had all but offered up her son in marriage.

“You could have told me,” Ronny said.

“I could have?”

“You could have.”

“It was just the one time.”

“Really? I didn’t know that.”

“Yes, just the once, what did you think?” A slight resentment stirred toward the beautiful Ronny Olsson. She let it go.

“It must have been a powerful attraction.”

“Not as much as—” Again, she let it go.

She said, “I was always going to tell Grant. I was. I was going to tell him after we got engaged. I was going to tell him the day of our wedding, I was going to tell him at the hotel, the first night of our honeymoon, but you know what happened?”

“No,” Ronny said.

“Forgive me for telling you this, I can’t believe I’m telling you this, but he’d had way too much champagne, at the reception, and as it happened,
well, I was at the end of my period, you know, and there was a little blood on the sheets, and he was so touchingly
grateful
I’d saved myself—so it was too late to say anything. Ronny Olsson,” she said, “you are the first person ever to hear the intimate details of that story, and if you don’t say something quick, I really
am
going to cry.”

“Let’s go for a drive,” Ronny said.

Bianca hadn’t known it, but this proposal was exactly what she’d longed to hear. “I’d love to go for a drive with you, Ronny,” she said.

They headed west, not the way they would have headed usually, back in the old days. They weren’t so far from Mexicantown and she said, “Remember the night you taught me what a taco was?”

“Sure I remember.”

“There was an old man with an enormous moustache asleep against the wall.”

“The owner.”

“The owner?”

“His daughter was the one waiting on us.”

“I didn’t mention him because I was embarrassed.”

“Embarrassed about what, Bianca?”

“Embarrassed that you’d taken me to such a dive? Maybe? Of course it was thrilling.”

“Señorita, if that’s the worst dive you’ve ever been in …”

Bianca fished a couple of mints out of her purse, fearing she might smell of cigarettes. Ronny turned onto the Boulevard, though this was hardly what she thought of as
the
Boulevard. This was West Grand Boulevard and for her the Boulevard would always be East Grand Boulevard. They turned again and came abruptly—powerfully—to a view of the Ambassador Bridge.

“I’ve always loved the bridge,” Bianca said.

“Of course you have. It’s your earliest memory.”

“My earliest memory?”

“You told me once. Your earliest memory was looking up at the bridge, back when it was being built. You were in Corktown, at your aunt and uncle’s, and you saw a workman silhouetted against the sky.”

And how on earth was it possible she’d almost forgotten this? How on earth, how on earth was it possible for Ronny to remember her earliest memory better than she did? And now she really
would
cry. If something didn’t happen, soon, she must cry, because otherwise her failure was insupportable. She was supposed to have a good memory. (Maggie
said it all the time: “I don’t have to remember anything, because Bianca remembers everything and she’s my memory.”) What was happening?
How on earth
had she nearly forgotten the man on the bridge? And it was at this moment that Ronny said, “Bianca, may I kiss you?”

“I don’t think that’s such a good idea” was what she meant to reply. What in fact she did say was only slightly different—“Do you think that’s such a good idea?”—but sufficiently different for Ronny to interpret her words as an assent. Which he did. He leaned across the car, placed one hand on her shoulder and one on the nape of her neck, and—a shockingly simple matter, accomplished merely by inclining toward her—kissed her deeply.

Given her cigarettes, Bianca was glad suddenly for those two mints, though they did raise the question of whether she’d known the kiss was coming. She knew the kiss, anyway. When his mouth came open, invitingly, her mouth opened. She knew nothing at all, really—except this one most fundamental of all truths: no one had ever kissed her as Ronny kissed her. The kiss went on and on. And those colors were still there. It was amazing. (Oh, it was all about color—colors hatching themselves free of their objects …) Nine years elapse and it turns out the colors are still there—Ronny’s spectrum, and nobody else’s spectrum. Nine years fall away and you might be a teenage girl again, necking in Palmer Park with the handsomest boy in the city!

Their lips came reluctantly, adhesively apart and Bianca thought for a moment—feared for a moment—that the kiss had proved what it meant to prove, and there wouldn’t be another. But its hunger fed a hunger, and Ronny kissed her again, and yet again.

When they finally stopped for breath, she said, “Oh God.”

“Oh God,” Ronny said.

And though she’d spoken not so long ago about her lack of religion, she proclaimed now, with something very like religious fervor, “God bless you, Ronny Olsson.”

“God bless you, Bianca Paradiso.”

“I’m—very surprised,” she said.

“Not half so much as I am,” Ronny said, with a show of a laugh, though it turned into a sort of gasp at the end.

She went a step further. “You saw the colors?” she said.

“I saw the colors.”

“The same ones?”

“The very same, darling.”

Darling?

“You know this is madness,” Bianca said.

“Total madness.”

What could be crazier, three days before you were about to learn you were pregnant, than to go out to lunch with Ronny Olsson and drink half a bottle of wine and ride tipsily around town and then to park before the Ambassador Bridge and wind up necking in a sports car with somebody your husband would call an old fruit?

It wasn’t that Grant wouldn’t forgive her. (He had no choice, given the way he’d once behaved with Maggie.) But he wouldn’t understand—which was no fault of his own, since nobody on earth could ever understand except Ronny and herself. Not even poor Libby, who had once walked down the aisle toward a dream incarnation of a groom at the altar.

It made Bianca very, very uneasy to entertain such comparisons, but there was no possible ignoring how, even if this was only kissing, it was kissing of a different variety than she was used to. With Grant, physical exchanges took place through a code of humor—a warm and often wonderful humor: all the sweet shared silliness of his Irish brogue.
Would the lass be lookin’ for some lovin’?
But there was nothing the least bit funny to Ronny’s kisses. They were beautiful, and they were desperate—and how could Grant understand?

It was knowledge only she and Ronny shared: just how close they had always been to being the perfect couple. All those hours when they used to neck in the park, hips wedded, the press of what she’d first taken for his belt buckle such an insistent presence against her belly … She had aroused him then and this was a condition that went on and on, as they’d kissed and kissed. None of this could be acknowledged back then, not even to each other: the way he’d sometimes stain his trousers with a few drops of leakage, the way she’d come home with what she then called her unders soaked through. The most intimate fluids in their bodies were frantically signaling to each other. They were the truest thing in the world, those luminous fluids, and they understood nothing of the world’s mundane demands: some things couldn’t be said, could hardly be thought …

They were two kids in love with painting, who longed above all to be painters, and the painters within their souls recognized it at a glance: you merely had to strip the clothes away, and body was calling to body, essential form to essential form. And that was why, for all the evidence
that could be mounted to the contrary, she could never take fully seriously Grant’s talk of old fruits. No, there was a level where Ronny
loved
her—and would always love her. Yes, she was his true
darling
.

… There was a level, there was a world … Over the years she’d heard enough from Uncle Dennis about alternative worlds for the notion to fertilize her imagination. There existed worlds nearly as real as our own. And on one such world—some hot rapidly spinning ball in space—she and Ronny must always be together. For they were the two most passionate lovers on that planet.

CHAPTER XXIX

The next stop, the next day, was obvious: over to Priscilla’s, first thing in the morning. Bianca often joked with Grant about how visits to Priscilla’s were trips to the head doctor, but this was no joke: she needed a head doctor.

Priscilla lived alone, in a surprisingly modest ranch house out near Schaeffer and Seven Mile. The first time Bianca had visited, Priscilla said, “It isn’t much, but it suits me fine.” This phrase,
it isn’t much
, turned out to be something of a happy motto for her, if less happy for her guests. “It isn’t much,” she’d say, pushing toward you a platter of hors d’oeuvres consisting of four pimento-stuffed olives and two wizened radishes, “but we’ll make do.” Or: “It isn’t much,” she’d say, having laboriously unearthed a dusty bottle of sherry, less than an inch of liquid sloshing in the bottom, “but I think it will suffice.”

Priscilla’s wonderful parents had died when she was still in her twenties. Her father, only fifty-two, dropped dead one morning of a heart attack while shaving. Her mother, far too dedicated to her husband to carry on without him, soon succumbed to cancer. Priscilla was much older than Bea—thirty-eight. More imposing still, though, were her educational degrees: Mount Holyoke for college, Ann Arbor for medical school. She was a psychiatrist.

Mount Holyoke was one of those distant institutions Bianca had long read about in the
News
. Its graduates belonged to a social class whose engagements and weddings made the society page. But Priscilla wasn’t anything like Bianca’s image of a Mount Holyoke graduate. She was frequently disheveled, as if she belonged in the somewhat run-down neighborhood she called home. Priscilla must have money, surely. Her parents once did: Bianca had seen the magnificent house in Indian Village where Priscilla had grown up.