A Dangerous Fiction (20 page)

I heard the scratching of a pen. Then Tommy said, “You got all that just from reading his novel?”

“Sure.”

He lowered his voice. “I'll tell you something. We brought in a behaviorist. Real smart guy; I've worked with him before. We gave him the manuscript and a lot else besides. He came up with virtually the same profile. You're good, Jo.”

“
He's
good,” I said.

We were ready for the call. Lorna was prepped; the tracers were good to go. But a week went by and nothing at all happened. Like a groundhog, Sam Spade had stuck out his nose and pulled it right back in again.

W
e left early so that the ride home would be by daylight. The night chill was still in the air when I reached Westchester, and a thin white rime covered the suburban lawns. Molly must have been waiting by the window, because as I pulled into her driveway she came out lugging a purse, two travel mugs, a walking stick, and a cloth Trader Joe's bag so heavy she listed to one side. I hurried out and relieved her of the stick and bag, which was full of books—for Leigh, no doubt. Lately Molly had been giving away her possessions. I stowed them in the backseat, next to Mingus.

“He's safe with books?” Molly asked.

“Unless they have cats in them.”

She settled herself in the front passenger seat and we set off. I drove north on the Taconic. It was a narrow highway hemmed in by towering cliffs. Now and then the cliffs receded and we had open views of rolling hills, crimson, orange, and gold. Our plan was to take the scenic highway all the way north to Old Chatham, where we would lunch with Molly's old friend Leigh; then home through the Catskills. I had suggested taking an extra day and extending our trip to Saratoga Springs, which was a charming old town, and not far from Gordon Hayes's kennels. We could have taken Mingus home for a visit. But Molly had been reluctant; these days, she said, she sleeps better in her own bed.

Molly gazed out the window, exclaiming now and then at the colors of the foliage. We'd hit it exactly right this year. Her jeans were a size too big for her, tightly belted. She wore a purple sweater and a denim jacket and an orange kerchief, tied at the nape of her neck, to cover her head.

For the first hour we hardly spoke at all. It was an easy silence, Molly drinking in the colors and me trying to decompress; for today I meant to leave all my troubles behind me and enjoy our time together. As we crossed into Dutchess County, forests gave way to orchards and rolling farmland. Eventually, Mingus grew restless, and we stopped at Lake Taghkanic State Park. We followed a trail into the woods, Molly holding her stick in one hand and my arm in the other. There was no one around, so I let Mingus off the leash. He gave a little shiver of excitement, then bounded ahead. The ground felt strangely soft and giving under my feet, which had grown used to pavements. Except for these annual jaunts with Molly, it had been years since I'd spent any time in the countryside. During our marriage, Hugo and I had divided our time between New York and Paris, and when we traveled, it was to other cities. Friends urged us to get a place in the Hamptons, but Hugo, a city boy through and through, preferred fresh air in moderation and nature contained within the bounds of city parks. That suited me fine; growing up, I'd had enough of both to last me a lifetime. We were urban creatures, Hugo and I; we did not amble, we strode. Thinking this, I unconsciously lengthened my stride, until Molly protested. “What's your hurry? We're not catching a bus.”

“Sorry,” I said, slowing to her pace. Mingus forged ahead, nose to the path.

“I heard Vonnegut speak once. A commencement address, only without all the usual gobbledygook about following your dreams and staying true to yourself while making pots of money. He talked about taking time to enjoy the good moments in life instead of rushing by them. When you see something beautiful, he said, stop and look, and ask yourself, ‘If this isn't great, what is?' It sounds simplistic, but it stuck with me, and lately I find myself thinking of those words more and more.”

“They're good words,” I said, and as I looked around me, the world suddenly came into focus. Dappled sunlight filtered through a canopy of gold and red boughs, and the air was rich with that fecund, foresty blend of growth and decomposition. I squeezed the arm linked in mine. “If this isn't great, what is?”

•   •   •

Leigh Pfeffer lived just outside the village of Old Chatham, on a hilltop surrounded by acres of meadowland. As we drove up the gravel track to her house, an enormous, shaggy gray beast rose from the porch and ambled down the steps toward the car.

“Good God,” I said. “Is that a dog or a pony?”

“That's Sasha. He's a Russian aristocrat, I'll have you know, so treat him with respect.”

As if I'd treat him any other way. Molly opened her door and got out, and the dog rushed over to her, nosing her hands and pockets, then raising its long, narrow head to lick her face. It looked like the Knopf colophon: some kind of wolfhound, I guessed, though I'd never seen any dog as big as this one. On its hind legs, it would have towered over Molly, and it certainly outweighed me.

Mingus was staring out the windshield, front paws on the console, hackles raised. “Behave yourself,” I said. “That dog could kick your butt.” I got out of the car, meaning to close him inside, but he jumped into the front seat and was out before I could shut the door. The two dogs eyed each other warily. Then Sasha advanced slowly, ducking his head and wagging his tail, and they introduced themselves in the usual way.

A screen door slammed, and Leigh Pfeffer came running down the porch steps with her arms outstretched. She was a tall woman, almost Molly's height, but rounded where Molly was gaunt. She had long black hair, which she wore gathered in two braids, and large, competent hands with traces of paint around the nails. Except by Manhattan standards, where anything over size 6 is obese, Leigh wasn't fat but solidly female, with the abundant breasts and thighs of ancient fertility sculptures. We'd met before, at Molly's and once at an exhibit of Leigh's paintings. She'd seemed awkward and shy to me on those occasions, out of her element. On her own turf, she had the presence of an Amazon.

She embraced Molly ferociously, then pushed her back to arm's length. “You look like you've gone a few rounds.”

“You oughtta see the other guy,” Molly said.

Then I got a hug too, but a gentle one, as if I were a porcelain doll. “Jo, beautiful as ever and
très, très chic.
I'm so glad you came. And who's this?” she asked, turning to Mingus.

“That's Mingus, her bodyguard,” Molly said. “We brought him in case the deer attack.”

“I wouldn't put it past them,” Leigh said. “Come on in.”

We had tea in the kitchen, an enormous, old-fashioned room with a stone-clad hearth and a massive, butcher-block island. Clay pots of ivy lined the windowsills, and cast-iron pots and pans hung from a rack above the island. The house felt deeply lived in, as if Leigh had occupied it all her life, although she'd moved in only a year earlier.

Leigh had prepared a picnic lunch, which she proposed eating at a spot beside Kinderhook Creek. “Unless,” she added, with a forthright look at Molly, “it's too chilly for you, in which case we can picnic right here.”

Outdoors, we all agreed, and the dogs could come too. “But first I want to see what you've been working on,” Molly said, and Leigh was quick to comply. She took us out to her studio, a converted barn behind the house. I'd seen her work before, and admired its technical virtuosity without being in any way moved by it. The new paintings were very different. Since her move upstate, Leigh had switched from oil to watercolor and from portraits to landscapes; and somehow the landscapes seemed more animated and sentient than the portraits ever had. Infused with light, they were beautiful to look at but difficult to assimilate in a single viewing. The tall trees leaned toward one another, boughs intertwined, and seemed to have relationships unknowable to the viewer; and along with the intense luminosity came equally intense shadows. These paintings I felt in my gut; they were exhilarating, unexpected, and a little scary. I walked all through the studio, looking and looking, and then I turned to Leigh. “Who
are
you?”

“Seriously,” Molly said. “I've got goose bumps.”

“Goose bumps are good,” Leigh said.

One particular painting kept calling me back. In the center of the frame, bisecting it from top to bottom, a wild, foaming stream rushed through a glade and, it seemed, through time itself. In the background, the bordering trees were black and wintry-looking, the light a sullen gray. In the foreground, rays of golden sunlight haloed trees in full bloom. The picture seemed to tilt outward, as if the stream were about to overflow its frame and sweep the viewer along. I turned to find Leigh watching me. “Does it have a title?”

“I thought of
The Same River Twice,
but I'm not sure about it. What would you call it?”

“
Swim at Your Own Risk
?”

Leigh laughed. “That's where we're having our picnic, by the way. You'll be able to judge if I did it justice.”

•   •   •

In fact she'd done it an injustice. No actual landscape could compare to the magical scene in her painting. Real nature is mute; it is what it is and nothing more, whereas Leigh's rendition was infused with purpose and meaning. That an imitation should outshine reality could not surprise me, who saw it all the time in fiction. I subscribe to the view of British novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett, who, when asked if she based her characters on real people, replied, “People in life hardly seem definite enough to appear in print. They are not good or bad enough, or clever or stupid enough, or comic or pitiful enough.” I have known only one man as vivid and outsized as a proper fictional protagonist, and reader, I married him.

If this spot was not as mystical as it appeared in Leigh's painting, it was nonetheless a charming place for a picnic. The noontime sun was warm enough for us to shed our coats. The stream was wider and less precipitous than its portrayal, the boulders smaller, the trees less majestic; only their color, brilliant autumn hues of orange, gold, and scarlet, surpassed their depiction.

Leigh had prepared everything with an eye to Molly's comfort. We lolled on cushions atop a large, flat rock, overlooking the stream. While the dogs cavorted below, daring each other into the water, Leigh decanted a feast from her wicker picnic basket onto a checkered cloth. There were four different types of sandwiches, potato salad and cole slaw, Macoun apples and ripe pears from a local orchard, homemade oatmeal cookies, and two bottles of chilled Riesling.

While we ate, we talked about Leigh's painting. “What caused such a radical departure?” Molly asked her.

“I needed a change. You can't just go on doing the same thing over and over.”

“But how did it happen?”

Leigh stretched out her long legs and raised her face to the sun. “It happened when I moved out here. I'd been in the city for ages, and I loved it. I thrived on the faces, the whole wonderful mishmash and all that jangling energy. I thought I'd stay forever. Then one hot summer day, I had a meeting in Midtown. I took the uptown local, and it was hideously crowded, steamy, and stinky despite the MTA's feeble stab at air-conditioning. I got off in Times Square and climbed up to the street, which was even more mobbed than the subway, full of tourists who don't know how to walk. Suddenly I felt suffocated, totally claustrophobic. I had to get out of the city. The Hamptons were out of the question; too expensive, and I don't like the art scene out there. A friend of mine had a place in Old Chatham, so I knew the area. I called an agent, and one week later, I had a summer rental, a sweet little cottage in Ghent with two acres and a separate studio.

“I started doing landscapes just to clear my palate—pun intended, thank you very much!—and because there wasn't anything else up here to paint. Pretty soon I found myself fascinated by formations and shapes around me, and above all by the light. After all the portraits I'd done indoors, in artificial light, I'm embarrassed to say that I had to rediscover sunlight, which is as different from the fake stuff as Häagen-Dazs is to fat-free yogurt. To try to capture that light, I switched to watercolor, which I hadn't used since I was in art school. This time, I discovered a whole new vocabulary.

“It was a paradigm shift, a different way of seeing the world and working with it. When the summer ended, I realized that I didn't want to leave. I was into this new series, and I wanted to see where it would take me. So I sold the loft, bought the farmhouse, and here I am.”

“You found your place,” I said, feeling that I understood her completely. Hadn't I found mine in Hugo? “Like Rousseau found Tahiti, like Van Gogh found Arles.”

“Oh, really!” Leigh said, blushing. “Why stop there? Like Michelangelo in Rome, like Mark Twain on the Mississippi.”

“Like God in his heaven,” Molly added, and we laughed so hard that the dogs came over to investigate and stayed to eat.

•   •   •

Back at Leigh's, I asked to see the paintings again. Molly stayed behind to rest while Leigh walked me over to the studio. “How is she really?” she asked as we crossed the yard.

“Not great. The chemo wasn't working, so they stopped it. But at least she doesn't have to deal with the side effects anymore.”

Leigh said nothing; what was there to say? They'd been friends since grade school, though you'd never know it to look at them now.

I was drawn again to the same landscape, which on second viewing pleased me even more than at first. I thought of all the blank walls in my apartment, where photos of Hugo used to hang, and I asked if the painting was for sale.

Leigh tried to give it to me. I refused. An odd negotiation ensued, in which the buyer bid the price up and the seller pushed it down, until at last we arrived at a figure both of us could live with. I wrote a check. Leigh wrapped the painting in cardboard and brown paper, and we laid it carefully in the trunk of my car.

•   •   •

Molly, who had taken some pain pills, struggled against dozing on the way home. “Who knows if I'll ever see this again?” she asked, sending a shard of glass through my heart. “Talk to me, kiddo. Keep me awake.”

“I bought a painting from Leigh. It's in the trunk.”