Gryphon (49 page)

“I know,” he said. “Oh, I know, honey. Staying here makes you a child, doesn’t it?”

“Yes.” She could feel the goddamn tears flooding over her. And she could feel the ghosts of the house gathering around
him
, now, easing his way into the next world that awaited him. And somewhere on the planet, her mother, too, drove toward the horizon, forever. “I’ll watch out for you, though. I’ll drop in. I’ll check on you.”

“No, you probably won’t,” he said. “No one does. But that’s all right. That’s how it happens. By the way, do you hear that violin? That girl is practicing as if her life depended on it.”

Melinda bent her ear to the silence. “Yes,” she agreed. “I do hear it. All the time. Morning and night. It never stops.”

AFTER CALLING IT QUITS
with being a model and actor—his eyes were a bit too close together for the big time—Nicholas went into the business of acquiring and selling folk art. He and Daphne lived in Brooklyn, where she worked as a real estate agent, and in early autumn he had been up in New Paltz, at the country house of one of his clients, Mrs. Andriessen. Daphne referred to Mrs. Andriessen as “the Adult.”

The Adult, a childless woman of a certain age, owned a largish woodstone-and-glass house with a lap pool, along with views of trees and a lake. She had a crush on Nicholas, which evened things out slightly between them. Every month they ate lunch together in either New Paltz or one of the neighboring restaurants near her city place on East Eighty-sixth, where she spent the weekdays during the winter. On weekends, and during much of the spring, summer, and fall, she stayed put in the country, filling her days with gardening, reading, and bird-watching. The Adult had two degrees from Princeton, one in art history and another in Slavic languages, and she sat on top of several million dollars that she shared with her husband, who resided most of the year in Shanghai. He spoke fluent Mandarin and had a business that the Adult never referred to, because, she said, she was ashamed of it. His income allowed her a measure of indolence. Various accommodations had been made.

She was a tall, brown-haired woman who walked with the deliberation and poise of a former dancer. She laughed easily, but her beauty was complicated by her eyes, which were deep and haunted, and by her distracting habit of falling into thoughtful silences.

When you entered the Adult’s house, period-instrument Baroque music would usually be making its way out of the audio system in the living room, and in the foyer you would be confronted with a signboard painted in red on oak slats.

Nicholas had found this signboard in Kansas a year or so after he had started up a private dealership. A retired dairy farmer, Nahum Fester Cobb, who had put up this sign and others alongside the dirt road leading to his cow barn, had painted it. Nicholas knew that the Adult, his best client, would like it, although “like” was not quite the correct word for the way she responded to these artifacts. He had once asked her if she wanted folk art around the house because it was cutting-edge, and she had scowled.

“The ‘cutting edge,’ ” she said, “has cut its way right out of what I’m interested in. I wish you wouldn’t use clichés like that, Nicholas.”

“What
are
you interested in?” Nicholas inquired.

“Terror and prophecy,” the Adult said quietly, taking a sip of her iced tea. Scattered around her house were little Mexican Day of the Dead skeletons riding their bicycles in processions with grinning voodoo dolls behind them, along with handmade coaches with spectral mad dogs and cats in the passenger seats, followed by more skeletons. Several signboards, with horrifying warnings and predictions printed on them, were hanging on the walls right above the beautiful expensive furniture. She had passed through irony a long time ago and had made a stop somewhere else.

Nicholas hadn’t heard about the Twin Towers until he got back into his car, after his lunch with the Adult, and had been driving back home when he had turned on the radio and listened to people being suddenly hysterical. Still on the freeway, he called Daphne to see if she was okay (she was), and then he had called Mrs. Andriessen.

“Yes,” she said. Her voice was strange, with an odd stillness. “I just heard. Someone else, a friend, called to tell me.”

“Isn’t it terrible?” Nicholas asked. “My God.”

“Yes, it is,” she said calmly. “Quite terrible.”

“I don’t know what to think,” Nicholas said, imagining the smoke and the piles of the dead.

“Oh, you don’t?” the Adult asked him. “I do.”

Two weeks later, on the day that Nicholas flew up to Alaska, the airplane had so few passengers in economy class that the flight attendants were handing out free meals—this, from an airline known internationally for its stinginess. Nicholas himself had taken a seat in first class, suspecting (correctly) that no one would question his right to be there. The anxious, unattractive people clumping down the aisle toward steerage stared at him helplessly.

Once airborne, after eating the broiled chicken, green beans, muddy mashed potatoes, and brownie, and gulping back the last of his scotch, he turned off the reading light, expecting to see from his window the empty black familiar nothingness of space and the Yukon Territories. Instead, he gazed outward at a vast velvety array of northern lights folding and unfolding. Shimmering with color, purple and blue, as hideously majestic as a floor show in heaven, they kept up with the plane, not underneath or above but
beside
it, and beside him, somehow. He closed his book and for a moment felt deranged by humility.

In Fairbanks he checked into a Holiday Inn near the airport. The next morning, he decided to take a walk after breakfast. The sky had acquired a peculiar royal blue, and when he returned to the hotel lobby, an airline pilot told him that the sky looked that way thanks to the ban on airplane travel that had been in effect for the past two weeks. The upper atmospheres had cleared themselves. Deep colors had returned overhead, at least for now.

The trees around Fairbanks were in full autumnal display. Leaf gold was everywhere. There were no maples up here, so all the usual reds had gone permanently missing. Nicholas drove north of Fairbanks to the house of Granny Westerby, one of his regular suppliers. Like Nahum Fester Cobb, Granny W. was a bit of a graphomaniac, and like him—like all of them—she imagined up for herself Blakean angels, devils, and end-times. A retired cleaning lady whose husband had worked for the Alaska Railroad, Granny painted words on the sides of jug lamps and bottles, though she also made the occasional message board. Her specialty was visionary Eros.

The sources for these feelings, the words themselves, stumped him. Nevertheless, that blue love-craziness on a painted closet door happened to be the first piece of folk art Nicholas had bought from her. Shipping it down to the lower forty-eight had cost him hours of trouble. A client of his in Connecticut, a lawyer, had bought it and used it as the door to her guest room. When Nicholas had paid out the sum Granny W. had demanded in cash, he had asked her who the lucky guy had been she was referring to on the door. Was it Grandpa Westerby, rest his soul?

Granny Westerby had given Nicholas a look. “Nicholas,” she had said, “don’t be that way. The blessèd words are there for all to see,
these
words.” Occasionally she treated him like a schoolboy. He was used to this treatment from women, who doted on him.

Of course, she didn’t really want to sell her art. None of these proletarian folk artists did, and they wouldn’t have parted with their signboards and dolls and little sculptures, their private expressive outbursts, if they hadn’t needed the money, usually for advanced—that is, optional—medical procedures, or if they had owned personal computers hooked up to the Internet and a blogosphere on which they could have editorialized. The art they made was dying out, as they were. Most working-class oldsters had cancer and diabetes and heart troubles from lifetimes of labor-intensive work and carbo-overloaded diets. Sometimes the income from their art rescued them from the crowds at the outpatient clinics and got them some form of private care. Anyway, he liked to think so.

Granny Westerby was out in her backyard, seated on a bench in front of what looked like a picnic table scattered with brushes, paints, bottles, brake drums, and turpentine, when Nicholas arrived in his rental car. A radio playing rural white gospel was blasting away from inside the house. The old lady’s gray hair was pulled back in a bun, and she had one eye
shut as she finished painting a phrase on the side of a wine bottle. Beside her, her golden retriever, Roscoe, eyed Nicholas as he approached. But the dog did not get up; he seemed to lack manners in this respect. Everyone in Alaska had at least one dog, Nicholas had noticed. The dogs seemed to be instrumental in getting their owners through the winter. On the Alaska license plates, Nicholas thought, the state motto should have been “The Dog State.” Granny W. looked up from her work.

“Oh, good,” she said. “It’s you.”

“Well, I told you I was coming. Hi, Granny,” Nicholas said, presenting her, suitor-style, with a clump of cut flowers he had bought at the florist’s on the way out. She glanced at them, grinned briefly, and nodded. “Thank you kindly. Would you please put them in water?” she said. “Inside?” With the slightest movement of her head, she indicated the back door of her house. Like her dog, Granny W. lacked conventional hospitality. Nicholas scritched Roscoe on the head before going inside. The dog continued to ignore him.

In the kitchen he found himself surrounded by a welter of antique kitchen equipment: a bread box, flour sifters, rolling pins, popover trays, a flyswatter, a manual toaster. A soiled teddy bear looked down from one of the cabinets. He found a flower vase in a heavily painted blue cupboard above the radio, from whose loudspeaker the gospel music had concluded and some maniac was now shouting rubbishy doomsday predictions. Nicholas cut the stems of the flowers with a steak knife, filled the vase with water, and dropped them in before noticing that, on the side of the glass, Granny had written, in her characteristic royal blue lettering,
MY GOD WILL HEAVE ME.

“Heave”? Granny W. sometimes had the diction of a rustic religioecstatic prophet. Maybe she meant “heare.”

Okay. So be it. He saw an unplugged TV set in the corner of the kitchen, next to the dog dish. Across the glass face of the picture tube, Granny had painted,
DO NOT GIVE OVER YOUR HEART TO IGNORANCE.
The set would not be turned on again anytime soon, not with this lettering on it. It was like a personal admonitory test pattern. Nicholas loved it; the altered TV would be worth quite a sum on the open market.

Back outside, he sat down next to her and waited while she finished decorating the wine bottle with words. “I used to like autumn,” she said, without looking up. “I always loved the spiritual requirements. Not anymore. How about you?”

“Oh, actually, no,” he said. “I’ve never thought that. I like warmth better than cold.”

“Of course you do,” she said, with a crone’s smirk. “You belong in the tropics. Do you know where I get this blue paint? This hue?”

“No,” Nicholas admitted. “I don’t.”

“From the sky,” she said, pointing upward. She was an old tease. “I paint with sky.” She finished inscribing the sentence on the side of the bottle and gave it a hard professional look.
FEAR AND LOVE HIS LOINS
, the bottle instructed. It was perfect: wacky lovelorn profundity written in beautiful blue lettering. The Adult might want this one. Finally Granny W. sat back and looked directly at Nicholas. “You can’t have this,” she said. “The paint’s all wet.”