The Art Student's War (60 page)

This wasn’t the conversation she’d envisioned having with somebody who had just lost his mother. But conversations with Ronny rarely followed predictable lines …

“I hope your father’s doing better,” she said.

“You know what? He isn’t. I’m not sure how strange death is, but mourning? It’s a very strange business. For maybe the first time in my life, I feel quite sorry for him.”

“You always make yourself sound much more hard-hearted than you are.”

“Do I?” Ronny said. “Actually, I think that’s the nicest compliment anyone’s paid me in quite some time.”

She was ravenous—she confessed—and she ordered the lamb chops. To her surprise, Ronny did, too. “Isn’t grief supposed to dull your appetite?” he asked. “That’s not what’s happening to me.” Bianca ordered a glass of milk and Ronny a glass of wine.

“How long had your mother had kidney problems?” Bianca asked.

“You mustn’t believe what you read. It was really drink.”

“Beg pardon?”

“She did have kidney problems, but drink’s what killed her.”

“I’m so sorry to hear that …”

“And you know what? I think her death’s
liberating
in some ways. I’d feel worse about saying this if I didn’t believe my mother would understand completely. She wasn’t always an easy person to have for a mother—she couldn’t stay
out
of anything—but these last few years were difficult in a brand-new way. You know what, Bianca? It ripped me apart to see her drinking the way she did. And the not wanting to go out, because the drinking made her look worn and a little bloated, and sometimes her skin—” He shook his head.

“She had such wonderful skin,” Bianca said. “It took all the light in the room and fed it back to you.”

Then Ronny said something very unexpected: “Good Lord, I adore you.”

“Well—thank you.”

“I wouldn’t have thought to put it as you just did, but that’s exactly how it was with Mother: all the light in the room fed back to you.”

“You’re going to take up painting again,” Bianca said.

“Just as soon as the next world war begins …” Ronny lifted his glass, as if in toast, and sipped his wine.

He put down the glass and again took up the subject of his mother: “It became a vicious circle. Not wanting to go out. And if you’re not going out, you’re home alone, all the more reason to have another drink. I’m telling you, it ripped me apart. And she could see it did. And she didn’t want to do that. Whatever else she wanted, she didn’t want to rip me apart.”

Ronny seemed to be doing quite well, on the whole, but his chin was trembling at the conclusion of this little speech. Bianca launched immediately into a string of reminiscences. The first time she’d laid eyes on Mrs. Olsson, seated in the music room in a cone of light. The evening when Mrs. Olsson made omelets. The wonderfully stylish way she’d introduced an eighteen-year-old girl to Pierre: Bi-an-ca Pa-ra-di-so.

The memories brightened Ronny’s face, and even when the lamb chops arrived Bianca went on chattering. The couple of times when Mrs. Olsson demanded a tour of the art museum … “And she had such funny, caustic observations, about the portraits especially, the subjects
and
the painters. She was so perceptive. And very tart.”

Ronny laughed. “She saw no reason to hold back her opinions.”

Bianca remembered something else. “And one day she asked me a fascinating question about you. Did you inherit your artistic talent from your father? Or from her?”

“And what did you say?”

“I’m not sure I answered. But
she
did. She said it came from her.”

“Did she now?” Ronny laughed heartily. “Good for her.”

“Well, hello.”

A sandy-haired young man was loitering beside their table, evidently an acquaintance of Ronny’s.

Ronny’s reply was surprising, given how faultlessly courteous he usually managed to be: “What are you doing here?”

“We were supposed to meet. Remember?”

Ronny consulted his watch. “Later. After the lawyers.”

The young man shrugged. “I got the time wrong.”

“And not here. At Haggerty’s.”

Another shrug. “I got the place wrong.” He had a round, appealing, wholesome face, and his shrugs were delivered with the accomplished grin of somebody used to disarming suspicion or censure. “Do you mind if I sit down?” The question was directed, unexpectedly, at Bianca.

“No. Of course not.”

Now it was Ronny’s turn to shrug, before duly offering introductions. “I’d like you to meet Bianca Ives. We were art students together some years ago. And this is my friend Chris Abendorfer. Chris works in advertising.”

“I’ve heard of
you,”
Chris Abendorfer said.

“I think I’ve heard of you,” Bianca replied. She wasn’t sure why she said this. It wasn’t true.

“Bianca is going to have a baby next May.”

“And I can’t think of anything more wonderful,” Chris Abendorfer said.

“Chris ought to know. He’s the eleventh of eleven children,” Ronny said.

“Eleventh of eleven!” Bianca said.

“A late arrival. And now Ronny’s criticizing me for arriving early …”

“Your poor mother,” Bianca said.

“Poorer with each child.”

“Are you from around here?” Bianca asked him.

“No. But I
am
flattered. I thought the dazzled look in my eyes gave
me away. Branded me a hopeless hick. I’m a west Minnesota farm boy originally.”

“Not so far from Scarp, North Dakota, actually,” Ronny pointed out. “Mother’s hometown.”

“I’ll have to go out there someday,” Bianca said.

“Why on
earth
would you do that?” And Chris laughed at her, but quite amiably.

“Did you know Mrs. Olsson?” Bianca asked him.

Chris paused thoughtfully, as though this were a complicated question. “Yes-s-s,” he said. He added: “An amazingly beautiful woman.” Then added, nodding at Bianca: “But what could be more beautiful than a beautiful woman who is with child?”

“Beware, Bianca. Beware of silver-tongued farm boys. As I say, this one’s in advertising.”

Ronny offered this warning with a proprietary pride and it was only now, belatedly, that Bianca realized that Chris Abendorfer was Ronny’s special friend, or romantic partner, or lover, or whatever you wanted to call it. Never in a million years would Bianca have put the two of them together. When, now and then, she’d tried to envision Ronny with some man (not a direction where her imagination comfortably ventured), she’d pictured somebody much like Ronny himself: extraordinarily good-looking, of course, but also aristocratic, artistic, a little aloof.

While Chris told a long story about a recent business meeting with a soda-pop manufacturer, Bianca gave him a much sharper inspection. The truth was he wasn’t really good-looking. The best you could say was he was pleasant-looking or agreeable-looking. Or wholesome-looking.

Still, Chris had a way with him—those big brown eyes so guileless, while his talk rolled puckishly along. “My product’s got
sass,”
the soda-pop manufacturer had kept repeating. Chris was a skillful mimic. Holding out his arms to indicate a substantial paunch, ballooning his cheeks, he had the manufacturer’s gassy pomposity down pat. “My product’s got
sass,”
Chris boasted once more and all three of them laughed.

Encouraged, Chris went through a gallery of clients. Bianca wasn’t used to seeing Ronny serve so willingly as audience, but he seemed not only amused but proudly enthralled. There was the Scottish tool-and-die manufacturer who had asked, in a low simple tone of childlike apprehension, “But what if ad-ver-tising fails to increase my revenues?” The Jewish maker of women’s undergarments who had worried that the slogan “There’s a better you in you” might be unacceptably racy. The car
dealer whom Chris had had to drive home because his car wouldn’t start. Each had a different accent, a different repertoire of gestures. At dinner parties on Middleway, Grant could be quite amusing with his Irish brogue, but this was something else again …

A pause opened and Bianca said, “Are you interested in art, Chris?”

“I’m
quite
interested in not seeing art.”

The remark was a little cryptic, though Chris seemed quite pleased with it.

“I’m not sure I—”

“Ronny takes me to a museum once. And he announces, Okay, Chris, here’s the most beautiful painting in the place. And what is it? It’s this
cramped
little affair, Adam and Eve and the Serpent, and all three are sort of long and twisted, with these weird, slanted, inhuman eyes. And I say, Okay, Ronny, but which one’s the snake? Huh? I mean, this was a painter who couldn’t get a job drawing Tootsie Rolls for the firm I work for … I don’t think Ronny wanted to take me to a museum after that.”

Actually, Ronny looked delighted with the story, though he protested, “That’s not what happened! Not at all!”

Chris replied, “What you’re saying is, Just because something’s implausible doesn’t mean it’s true.”

“So that’s what I’m saying, is it?”

“Or you’re saying, Just because something sounds logical doesn’t mean it’s incorrect.”

“So that’s what I’m saying, is it?”

The little exchange left Bianca feeling quite disoriented. Ronny was bantering—but not with
her
. And not in quite the same directing
way
he bantered with her.

Ronny and an advertising man … The peculiar truth was that Ronny Olsson had always been fascinated by advertising. This had puzzled Bianca, long ago—the brilliant art student who found nearly all modern art too crass, who was most at home with Fragonard and Poussin and Vermeer and Dou, but who nonetheless pored over advertisements with an absorption that originated in condescension but did not end there. Ronny had constantly found in ads secret meanings that Bianca couldn’t see, deep veins of humor underlying the ostensible humor. In truth, he used to make her far more nervous—his spirit seemed more faraway—when chuckling over an ad for deodorant or mouthwash or trusses than when swooning over some refined French canvas that utterly failed to move her.

So there was a kind of logic and rightness to this unorthodox triangle—the former boyfriend and girlfriend taking different sorts of pleasure in a young man who wrote ads for a living—as well as a tension which, though not jealousy exactly, was closer to jealousy than to any other emotion she could name. The tension openly declared itself when, abruptly, Ronny had to leave for his lawyer’s appointment. Outside Jason’s, Chris was headed one way, Bianca another—toward her car and home. The three of them stood in the doorway. Ronny was visibly torn.

And then he said to Chris, “I’ll catch up with you later,” and Chris said, “Olsson, I look forward to it”—and Bianca felt a pang of resentment on discovering that Ronny had initiated Chris into this little joke of addressing each other by surnames. Mostly, though, she felt relieved at Ronny’s decision to accompany her. Gallantry of course demanded that he walk the pregnant woman to her car. And whatever other turns his circuitous life might take, gallant her gallant Ronny would always be.

“I don’t know what to
wear.”

It was one of Grant’s jokes—an echoing of something his clotheshorse of a wife might say—but the truth was, neither of them knew what to expect. Stevie and Rita were taking them out to dinner. To a restaurant. And not just any restaurant, but the Tupelo Country House, way out on Telegraph. This was an evening without precedent.

Stevie and Rita were taking them to the Tupelo Country House? Bianca, in her puzzlement, and her fretting over what the bill might come to, had tried to dissuade them, but Rita was adamant. She and Stevie were inviting them to celebrate, belatedly, Grant’s birthday. And “something else” as well.

“She’s pregnant,” Grant declared, for what must be the fourth or fifth time, and for the fourth or fifth time Bianca replied, “No, she made it quite clear she isn’t.” But what else could
something else
be?

The sitter, Mrs. Hornberger, arrived at 5:45, just when she was supposed to, and Stevie and Rita pulled up at six, just when
they
were supposed to. “Oh dear Lord, Stevie’s wearing a suit,” Bianca called from the downstairs hall, having glimpsed her brother through the front window. Grant was sitting in the den, reading the
News
. He was wearing khaki slacks and a seersucker sports coat. “Stevie
never
wears a suit. Grant, you’ve got to race up and change.”

Always eager to show how fast he could move, Grant had sprung
upstairs even before the doorbell rang. “Hey, don’t you look nice,” Bianca said to Rita. She was pleased to be able to mean it. Rita was wearing her new blue dress and her new yellow angora cardigan with pearl buttons, both of which Bianca had helped pick out at Hudson’s.

“And isn’t my little brother quite the Beau Brummell?”

Stevie, stiff and embarrassed, pointed at Rita. “Blame her.” He pushed past Bianca into the living room.

“Doesn’t he look nice?” Rita said. “That’s exactly what I told him: Stevie, you look so nice.”

Bianca and Rita followed Stevie into the living room, where he’d already sat down. After a few moments, Stevie called, “Hey, Grant.” Grant was descending the stairs in an impeccable charcoal suit complete with gray-and-yellow necktie and white handkerchief in the breast pocket. Grant really could change his clothes at astonishing speed.

“Hey, Stevie.”

It would have been more comfortable to go in the Studebaker, but Stevie wanted to drive—or Rita expected Stevie to drive. For as they headed west down Seven Mile, and Rita prattled on, sometimes talking sense (canned peaches weren’t worth the expense and it was best to wait for the real thing) and sometimes nonsense (a vote for Ike might not be all that different from a vote for Adlai), it became clear she was conscientiously playing hostess.

For Rita’s sake, Bianca was glad they were given an excellent table. This was actually Grant’s doing, and all the more commendable for not looking like Grant’s doing; he had a warm, easy way with maître d’s and waitresses.

Would they care for anything to drink?