Bright Segment (34 page)

Rogero, the universe is indeed leagued together to make fools of us.

I leave the bench and the river, not to be a pilgrim, but just to take my misery to familiar surroundings and wrap it up in weariness. And tomorrow I shall wake with the comfort—if such it is—that I am Giles and will continue to be Giles without the intrusion of Signor Ariosto’s parables. It had better be a comfort; I may even turn my staring white canvas to the wall, now that I think of it; I wouldn’t be able to bring myself to touch it.

So I walk and I walk. And then up the long steps and down the long hall, fling open the door which unveils the dirty—

But it isn’t a dirty bed, and I have one mad moment of childish panic; I have burst into the wrong place; and then I see the easel, the bright clean easel, and I know I am home.

“I hope you don’t mind; the door was open, and I thought … so to keep myself busy while I waited, I—” She makes a smile, and tries harder and makes another, but smiles over hands which rapidly clasp and unclasp are unconvincing. “I’ll go,” says Miss Brandt, “but I wanted to tell you I think you did a splendid thing.”

I look at the clean, shelved dishes and the drum-tight bedclothes, and my paints and brushes sensibly left untouched. But what impresses me is the unthinkable statement that I have done a splendid thing. I sit on the bed and look at her.

“How did you ever find out?” she asks. “You weren’t to know, ever.”

“I know a lot now,” I tell her. “What specially do you mean?”

“About the money. Giving it back.”

“I gave it away,” I admit. And, because it’s the truth, “I don’t call that so splendid.”

“It was, if …” And then, as if she’s had the question held down tight and can’t control it any longer, she flashes a glance at the easel,
and asks, “Does it mean you’ll paint again?”

My eye follows hers and I shudder. She turns pale as the new light at the window. “Oh,” she says in a very small voice. “I—guess I’ve done the wrong thing.” She snatches up a shiny black pocketbook and runs to the door. But there’s a Giles standing there first, who pushes her back hard so she sits down—
plump!
—on the bed.

I am tired and hurt and disappointed and I want no more wonderments. “You tell me all the things you’ve done, wrong and otherwise, right from the beginning.”

“Oh, how it began. Well, I’m her secretary, you know, and we had a sort of quarrel about you. She’s a mean, small, stupid sort of person, Giles, for all her money and the way she looks—she is lovely, isn’t she? In case you want to know (everybody does) that streak of silver is real. Anyway, I—”

“You’re
her
secretary?”

“Yes. Well I got so terribly distressed about—” She waves at the easel again, and the miraculous lashes point away, “—you, you know, that I suppose I got on her nerves. She said some mean things about you and I sort of blew up. I said if I had her money I’d see to it that you started painting again.”

“Just like that.”

“I’m sorry. It was—so important; I couldn’t bear to have you just—”

“Go on with the story.”

“She said if I had her money and tried to use it that way I’d just make a fool of myself. Well, maybe she was right, but … it went like that until she swore at me and said if I was so positive, go ahead. Take all the money I wanted and just see how far I’d get.” All the while she talks she is pleading, underneath. I don’t listen to that part of it. “So I came here yesterday and I was to phone her the way you sign your name, and she would call the bank and fix it up.”

“Nice of her.”

“No, it wasn’t. She did it because she thought it would be amusing. She has so much money that it wouldn’t cost her anything. Anything she’d notice. And then you found out about it, I don’t know how, and gave her the checkbook. When she came back last night
she was wild. It wasn’t half the fun she thought. All you did was to be amusing in a restaurant for a couple of hours. Please don’t look at me like that. I just did what I could. I—had to. Please—I had to.”

I keep on looking at her, thinking. Finally, “Miss Brandt, you said a thing yesterday—my God, was it only yesterday?—about my not being able to paint now because I don’t know why I painted before. Do you know what you were talking about?”

“I—” and the lashes go down, the hands busy themselves, “—I only know sort of generally. I mean, if you can do a thing and know how you do it and—and especially
why
, and then something stops you, I think it’s easy to see the thing that stops you.”

So I lean against the door and look at her in the way that makes her squirm (I’m sorry but that’s the way I look when I’m thinking) and I think:

Does anyone ask a painter—even the painter himself
—why
he paints? Now me, I painted … used to … whatever I saw that was beautiful. It had to be beautiful to me, through and through, before I would paint it. And I used to be a pretty simple fellow, and found many completely beautiful things to paint.

But the older you get the fewer completely beautiful things you see. Every flower has a brown spot somewhere, and a hippogriff has evil laughter. So at some point in his development an artist has to paint, not what he sees (which is what I’ve always done) but the beauty in what he sees. Most painters, I think, cross this line early; I’m crossing it late.

And the simple—child?—artist paints for himself … but when he grows up he sees through the eyes of the beholder, and feels through his fingertips, and helps him to see that which the artist is gifted to see. Those who had wept over my work up to now, I used to say, had stolen meaning out of it, against my will. When I grow up, perhaps they will accept what I willingly give them. And because Miss Brandt feels this is worth giving, she has tried to get more of it for people.

So I had stopped painting because I had become too discerning, and could find nothing perfect enough to paint. But now it occurs to me that the girl with the silver in her hair can be painted for the
beauty she has, regardless of her other ugliness. Atlantes had a magic, and in it one walked the battlements of a bastion—which was only, in truth, a byre. Miss Brandt can paint me, in her mind, as a man who turned back all the money in the world, and for her, this is a real nobility.

The only key to the complexity of living is to understand that this world contains two-and-a-half-billion worlds, each built in a person’s eyes and all different, and all susceptible to beauty and hungry for it.

I ran out of things to paint … and now, now, there’ll never be enough time to paint beauty! Rogero did a knightly thing on the black rock, because he was not a good knight. I did a manly thing about the money because I was a fool. All successes are accidents in someone’s world … so: “You tell her it worked, Miss Brandt. I’m going to paint, Miss Brandt; I’m going to paint
you
, Miss Brandt, because you’re beautiful.”

And I paint, and she is, because I paint, because she is.

Never tell the truth to humans
.

I can’t recall having formulated that precept; I do know I’ve lived under it all my life.

But
Henry?

It couldn’t matter with Henry.

You might say Henry didn’t count.

And who would blame me? Being me, I’d found, was a lonely job. Doing better things than other people—and doing them better to boot—is its own reward, up to a point. But to find out about those murders, those dozens and dozens of beautiful scot-free murders, and then not to be able to tell anyone … well, I act like a human being in so many other ways—

And besides, it’s only Henry.

When I was a kid in school, I had three miles to go and used roller skates except when it was snowing. Sometimes it got pretty cold, occasionally too hot, and often wet; but rain or shine, Henry was there when I got to the building. That was twenty years ago, but all I have to do is close my eyes to bring it all back, him and his homely, doggy face, his odd flexible mouth atwist with laughter and welcome. He’d take my books and set them by the wall and rub one of my hands between his two if it was cold, or toss me a locker-room towel if it was wet or very hot.

I never could figure out why he did it. It was more than just plain hero-worship, yet Lord knows he got little enough from me.

That went on for years, until he graduated. I didn’t do so well and it took me longer to get out. I don’t think I really tried to graduate until after Henry did; the school suddenly seemed pretty bleak, so I did some work and got clear of it.

After that, I kicked around a whole lot looking for a regular income without specializing in anything, and found it writing features for the Sunday supplement of one of those newspapers whose editorial policies are abhorrent to decent people, but it’s all right; no decent person reads them.

I write about floods, convincingly describing America’s certain watery grave, and I write about drought and the vanishing water table, visualizing our grandchildren expiring on barren plains that are as dry as a potato-chip. Then there’s the perennial collision with a wandering planet, and features about nuts who predict the end of the world, and biographies of great patriots cut to size so they won’t conflict with the editorial page. It’s a living, and when you can compartment it away from what you think, none of it bothers you.

So a lot of things happened and twenty years went by, and all of a sudden I ran into Henry.

The first thing about him was that he hadn’t changed. I don’t think he had even grown much. He still had the coarse hair and the ugly wide mouth and the hot happy eyes. The second funny thing was the way he was dressed, like always, in hand-me-downs: a collar four sizes too large, a baggy suit, a raveled sweater that would have fought bitterly with his old herringbone if both weren’t so faded.

He came wagging and panting up to me this early fall day when everyone in sight but Henry was already wearing a topcoat. I knew him right away and I couldn’t help myself; I just stood there and laughed at him. He laughed, too, glad to the groveling point, not caring why I was laughing, but simply welcoming laughter for its own sake. He said my name indistinctly, again and again; Henry almost always spoke indistinctly because of that grin he wore half around his head

“Well, come on!” I bellowed at him, and then cussed at him. It always made him wince, and it did now. “I’ll buy you a drink. I’ll buy you nine drinks!”

“No,” he said, smiling, backing away a little, bobbing his head in that funny way, as if he was about to duck. “I can’t right now.”

It seemed to me he was looking at my sharp-creased dacron suit, or maybe the pearl homburg. Or maybe he just caught my eye on
his old set of threads. He waggled his hands aimlessly in front of him, like an old woman caught naked and not knowing what to cover up. “I don’t drink.”

“You’ll drink,” I said.

I took him by the wrist and marched him down to the corner and into Molson’s, while he tugged ineffectually at me and mumbled things from between his solid, crooked teeth. I wanted a drink and I needed a laugh, right
now
, and I wasn’t going to drag all the way down to Skid Row just to keep him from feeling conspicuous.

Somebody was sitting in a back booth—someone I especially didn’t want to see. Be seen by. I don’t think I broke stride when I saw her, though. Hell, the day won’t come when I can’t handle the likes of her …

“Siddown,” I said, and Henry had to; I pushed him and the edge of the seat hit the backs of his knees. I sat down, too, giving him the hip hard enough to slide those worn old tweeds of his back into the corner where he wouldn’t be able to get out unless I moved first. “Steve!” I roared, just as though I didn’t care if anyone in the place knew I was there. Steve was on his way, but I always yelled like that; it bothered him. Steve’s also sort of a funny guy.

“Awright, awright,” he complained. “What’ll you have?”

“What are you drinking, Henry?”

“Oh, nothing—nothing for me.”

I snorted at him and said to Steve, “Two sour-mash an’ soda on the side.”

Steve grunted and went away.

“Really,” Henry said, with his maybe-I-better-duck wobble, “I don’t want any. I don’t drink.”

“Yes, you do,” I told him. “Now what’s with you? Come on, right from the beginning. From school. I want the story of your life—trials and triumphs, toils ’n’ tragedies.”

“My life?” he asked, and I think he was genuinely puzzled. “Oh, I haven’t done anything. I work in a store,” he added. When I just sat there shaking my head at him, he looked down at his hands and pulled them abruptly down into his lap as if he was ashamed of his
nails. “I know, I know, it’s nothing much.” He looked at me with that peculiar hot gaze. “Not like you, with a piece in the paper every week and all.”

“Steve came with the bourbon. I shut up until he’d gone. With Steve, I like to pretend I have big business and don’t trust him to listen in. I swear sometimes you can hear him grinding his teeth. He never says anything, though. A good customer’s got just a little more rights than just anybody else, so there’s nothing he can do about it. He just works there.

When he’d gone, I said, “Here’s to the twist that don’t exist, and her claim there’s a game that can’t be played. Here’s to the wise old lies we use—”

“Honest, I don’t want any,” said Henry.

“If I’m going to be hospitable, you’re going to be housebroke,” I told him, and picked up his glass and shoved it at his face.

He got his lips on it just in time to keep it from falling into that oversize collar. He didn’t take but a sip, and that great big mouth snapped down to button-size as if it had a drawstring on it. His eyes got round and filled with tears; he tried to hold the liquor on his tongue, but he sneezed through his nostrils and swallowed and started to cough.

Laugh? I got my breath back just this side of hernia. Some day I’ll plant a sound camera and do that again and make an immortal out of old Henry.

“Gosh!” he gasped when he could.

He wiped his eyes with his frayed sleeves. I guess he didn’t have a handkerchief. “That
hurt
.” But he was grinning the old grin all the same. “You drink that all the time?” he half whispered.