The Drowning Girl (34 page)

I didn’t see her again for two or three days. She took the train down to Providence, some errand for Perrault. She didn’t go into the details, and I didn’t bother to ask. When she came home, though, Eva was mostly her old self again. We ordered Chinese takeout, moo goo whatever, kung pao pigeon, and she talked about the life castings she’d done. Her body nude and slicked with Vaseline, and then they’d covered her with a thick coating of blue alginate, and when that had set, they’d covered the alginate with plaster bandages, making the molds for Perrault’s sculptures from her living corpse. I asked if they put straws up her nose so she could breathe, and she laughed and frowned. “They don’t do that,” she replied. “They’re just careful not to cover your nostrils. It was claustrophobic, but in a good way.” She told me that each mold would be used only once and then destroyed, and that they did five separate life castings of her over five consecutive days. “When it hardens, you
can’t move?” I asked, and she frowned again and said, “Of course you can’t move. That would ruin everything, if you were to move.” I didn’t ask exactly what Perrault intended to do with the casts, and Eva didn’t say. It was the next evening, though, that she produced a photograph of one of Albert Perrault’s paintings and asked me to look at it, please. Eva never, ever fucking said please, so that was sort of a red flag, when she did. She was sweating, though it was chilly in the apartment, because the radiator was acting up again. She was sweating, and she looked sick. I asked if she had a fever, and Eva shook her head. I asked if she was sure, because maybe she’d picked up something on the plane, or while she was in LA, and she made a snarling sound and shoved the photograph into my hands. It was in color, an eight-by-ten printed on matte paper. There was a sticker on the back with the painting’s title typed neatly, black Courier font on white. It read
Fecunda ratis
, and there was a date (which I can’t recollect). Written directly on the back of the photo, with what I took to have been a ballpoint pen, were the words “De puella a lupellis seruata,” about a girl saved from wolf cubs, circa 1022–1024; Egbert of Liège. “So who is this Egbert of Liège?” I asked. She glared at me, and for a second or three I thought she was going to hit me. It wouldn’t have been the first time. “How the hell am I supposed to know?” she snapped, trading in my question for a question of her own. “Will you fucking look at the
front
? Winter, look at the front of the picture, not the goddamn back of it, for Christ’s sake.” I nodded and turned the photograph over. I recognized it immediately as one of Perrault’s, even though I’d never seen that particular painting before. There’s something about the easy violence, the deliberate carelessness of his brushstrokes. Almost like Edvard Munch trying to forge a Van Gogh, almost. At first, any simple representational image, any indication of the painting’s composition, refused to emerge from the sooty blur of oils, the innumerable shades of gray broken only by the faintest rumors of green and alabaster. There
was a single crimson smudge floating near the center of the photograph, a chromatic counterpoint to all the murk. I thought it looked like a wound. I didn’t say that to Eva, but that’s the impression I got. As if maybe someone, Perrault or someone else, had taken a knife or a pair of scissors to the canvas. Heaven knows, I’ve wanted to do it myself, on more than one occasion. I would even argue that, at times, his art seems intended to provoke precisely that reaction. Art designed, premeditated, to elicit the primal fight-or-flight response, to reach in and give the hindbrain a good squeeze, dividing the predators from the prey. “What do you see?” Eva asked me. And I said, “Another one of Perrault’s shitty paintings.” “Don’t be an ass,” she replied. “Tell me what you
see
.” I told her I’d thought she wanted my honest opinion, and she gave me the finger; I had it coming, I suppose. I looked at her, and she was still sweating, and was also chewing at her lower lip. Peering into her eyes was almost as bad as trying to make sense of
Fecunda ratis
, so I turned back to the somber chaos of the photograph. “Is this one going to be in the show?” I asked. “No,” she said, and then, “I don’t know. Maybe, but I don’t think so. It’s old, but he says it’s relevant. Albert doesn’t have it anymore, sold it to a collector after a show in Atlanta. I don’t know if he still has access to it.” I listened, but didn’t reply. Her voice was shaking, like the words were not quite connecting one against the other, and I tried harder to concentrate on making sense of
Fecunda ratis
. I wished I had a drink, and I almost asked Eva for one of the American Spirit cigarettes she’d begun smoking after meeting Perrault, though I’d stopped smoking years before. My mouth was so dry. I felt as though my cheeks had been stuffed with cotton balls, my mouth had gone so dry. “What do you see?” she asked again, sounding desperate, almost whispering, but I ignored her. Because, suddenly, the blur was beginning to resolve into definite shapes, shadows and the solid objects that cast shadows. Figures and landscape and sky. The crimson smudge was the key. “Little Red Riding
Hood,” I said, and Eva laughed, but very softly, as if she were only laughing to herself. “Little Red Riding Hood,” she echoed, and I nodded my head again. The red smudge formed a still point, a nexus or fulcrum, in the swirl, and I saw it was meant to be a cap or a hat, a crimson wool cap perched on the head of a nude girl who was down on her hands and knees. Her head was bowed, so that her face was hidden from view. There was only a wild snarl of hair, and that cruel, incongruent red cap. Yes, that
cruel
red cap, for I could not then and cannot now interpret any element of that painting as anything but malevolent. Even the kneeling girl, made a blood sacrifice, struck me as a conspirator. She was surrounded by pitchy, hulking forms, and I briefly believed them to be tall standing stones, dolmens, some crude megalithic ring with the girl at its center. But then I realized, no, they were
meant
to be beasts of some sort. Huge shaggy things squatting on their haunches, watching the girl. The painting had captured the final, lingering moment before a kill. But I didn’t think
kill
. I thought
murder
, though the forms surrounding the girl appeared to be animals, as I’ve already said. Animals do not do murder, men do. Men and women, and even children, but
not
animals. “I dream it almost every night,” Eva said, near to tears, and I wanted to tear the photograph apart, rip it into tiny, senseless shreds. I’m not lying when I say that I loved and still love Eva, and
Fecunda ratis
struck me as some sick game Perrault was playing with her mind, giving her this awful picture and telling her it was
relevant
to the installation. Expecting her to study it. To fixate and obsess over it. I’ve always felt a certain variety of manipulation is required of artists (painters, sculptors, writers, filmmakers, etc.), but only a few become (or start off as) sadists. I have no doubt whatsoever that Perrault is a sadist, whether or not there was a sexual component present. You can see it in almost everything he’s ever done, and, that night, I could see it in her eyes. “Eva, it’s only Little Red Riding Hood,” I told her, laying the photograph facedown on the coffee
table. “It’s only a painting, and you really shouldn’t let him get inside your head like this.” She told me that I didn’t understand, that full immersion was necessary if she was going to be any help to him whatsoever, and then she took the photograph back and sat staring at it. I didn’t say anything more, because I knew nothing more to say to her. There was no way I would come between her and her
bête noire
, nor even between her and the black beasts he’d created for
Fecunda ratis
. I stood up and went to the kitchenette to make dinner, even though I wasn’t hungry and, by then, Eva was hardly eating anything. I found a can of Campbell’s chicken and stars soup in the cupboard and asked if she’d eat a bowl if I warmed it up. She didn’t reply. She didn’t say a word, just sat there on the sofa, her blue eyes trained on the photograph, not sparing a glance for anyone or anything else. And that was maybe three weeks before she flew out to Los Angeles for the last time. She never came back to Boston. She never came back to me. I never saw her again. But I suppose I’m getting ahead of myself, even if only slightly so. There would be the one distraught phone call near the end of April, while Perrault would still have been busy working on the pieces for his installation, which was scheduled to open on June 1 at a gallery called Subliminal Thinkspace Collective. It’s easy enough, in retrospect, to say that I should have taken that phone call more seriously. But I was working two jobs and recovering from the flu. I was barely managing to keep the rent paid. It’s not like I could have dropped everything and gone after her. I make a lousy Prince Charming, no fit sort of knight-errant. Anyway, I’m still not sure she wanted me to try. To save her, I mean. It’s even more absurd to imagine Eva as a damsel in distress than to imagine myself as her rescuer. Which only goes to show the fatal traps we may build for ourselves when we fashion personae. Expectation becomes self-fulfilling. Then, later on, we cry and bitch, and pity ourselves, and marvel stupidly at our inability to take action. The therapist I saw for a while said this was “survivor’s
guilt.” I asked him, that day, if the trick to a lucrative career in psychology was to tell people whatever might make them feel better, by absolving them of responsibility. I look around me, and I see so many people intent upon absolving themselves of responsibility. On passing the buck, shifting the blame. But I’m the one who did not act, just as Perrault is the one who messed with her head, just as Eva is the one who needed that invasion so badly she was willing to pay for the privilege with her life. All I was paying the therapist was money, and that’s not even quite the truth, as I was piling it all on a MasterCard I never expected to be in a position to pay off. Regardless, during our very next session, Dr. Not To Be Named Herein suggested that some of us are less amenable to therapy than are others, that possibly I did not
wish
to “get better,” and I stopped seeing him. I can be a guilty survivor on my own, without incurring any additional debt.

Eva called near the end of April. She was crying.

I had never heard Eva cry, and it was as disconcerting a sound as it was unexpected.

We talked for maybe ten or fifteen minutes, at the most. It might have been a much longer conversation, if my cell phone had been getting better reception that afternoon, and if I’d been able to call back when we were finally disconnected (I tried, but the number was blocked). Eva was not explicit about what had upset her so badly. She said that she missed me. She said it several times, in fact, and I said that I missed her, too. She repeatedly mentioned insomnia and bad dreams, and how very much she hated Los Angeles and wanted to be back in Boston. I said that maybe she ought to come home, if this were the case, but she balked at the idea. “He needs me
here
,” she said. “This would be the
worst
time for me to leave. The absolute worst time. I couldn’t do that, Winter. Not after everything Albert’s done for me.” She said that, or something approximating those words. Her voice was so terribly thin, so faint and brittle in
the static, stretched out across however many thousands of miles it had traveled before reaching me. I felt as though I were speaking to a ghost of Eva. That’s not the clarity of hindsight. I actually
did
feel that way,
while
we were speaking, which is one reason I wouldn’t permit my therapist (my ex-therapist, now that we’re estranged) to convince me to lay the blame elsewhere. I clearly heard it that day, the panic in her voice. Hers was such a slow suicide, a woman dying by degrees, and it would be reprehensible of me to pretend that I’m not cognizant of this fact, or that I did not yet have my suspicions that day in April. She said, “After dark, we drive up and down the Coast Highway, back and fucking forth, from Redondo Beach all the way to Santa Barbara or Isla Vista. He drives and talks about Gévaudan. Winter, I’m so sick of that goddamn stretch of road.” I didn’t ask her about Gévaudan, though I googled it when I got home. When we were cut off, Eva was still sobbing, and talking about her nightmares. Had it been a scene in a Hollywood melodrama, I would surely have dropped everything and gone after her. But my life is about as far from Hollywood as it gets. And
she
was there already.

A few days later, the mail brought an invitation to the opening of The Voyeur of Utter Destruction. One side was a facsimile of a postcard that the man purporting to have murdered Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia, sent to journalists and the police in 1947. The original message had been assembled with pasted letters snipped from newspapers, and read “Here is the photo of the werewolf killer’s/I saw him kill her/a friend.” There was an indistinct photo in the lower left-hand corner of the card, which I later learned was of a boy named Armand Robles. He was seventeen years old in 1947, and was never considered a suspect in the Dahlia killing. More mind games. The other side of the postcard had the date and time of the opening, please RSVP, an address for Subliminal Thinkspace Collective, etcetera. And it also had two words printed in red ink,
handwritten in Eva’s unmistakable, sloppy cursive: “Please come.” She knew I couldn’t. More than that, she knew I
wouldn’t
, even if I could have afforded the trip.

Like I said, I googled “Gévaudan.” It’s the name of a former province in the Margeride Mountains of central France. I read its history, going back to Gallic tribes and even Neolithic people, a Roman conquest, its role in medieval politics, and the arrival of the Protestants in the mid-sixteenth century. Dull stuff. But I’m a quick study, and it didn’t take me long to realize that none of these would have been the subject of Perrault’s obsession with the region. No, nothing so mundane as rebellions against the Bishop of Mende or the effects of WWII on the area. However, between the years 1764 and 1767, a “beast” attacked as many as 210 people. Over a hundred of them died. It might have been nothing more than an exceptionally large wolf, but has never been conclusively identified. Many victims were partially eaten. And I will note, the first attack occurred on June 1, 1764. From the start, I saw the significance of this date. After Eva’s call, I could hardly dismiss it as a coincidence. Perrault had knowingly chosen the anniversary of the beginning of the depredations of the infamous
Bête du Gévaudan
as the opening night of his installation. I spent a couple of hours reading websites and internet forums devoted to the attacks. There’s a lot of talk of witchcraft and shape-shifting, both in documents written during and shortly after the incident and in contemporary books, as well. Turns out, Gévaudan is one of those obscure subjects the crackpots at the fringe keep alive with their lavish conspiracy theories and pseudoscientific, wishful blather. Much the same way, I might add, that the true-crime buffs have kept the unsolved Dahlia case in the public eye for more than half a century. And here, Albert Perrault seemed intent upon forging a marriage of the two, along with his unrelenting fairy-tale preoccupations. I thought about the life casts, and wondered if he’d chosen Eva as his midwife.