Love and Will (15 page)

“With all this traffic?”

“I meant ‘hot.' They're supposedly having, though a lot worse than ours, a heat spell in New York, the radio said, but maybe I got it all wrong. Because my assumption has always been that Times Square, because it's the most congested area in New York, would also be the hottest during a heat wave.”

“Actually, it isn't the most congested. Fifty-seventh and Sixth, for instance, or Forty-second and Lex, as another example, are probably way more”—No, still all wrong, or mostly. “And that is where you're from, isn't it?” the man with the dog says, or without one. Just two men without baby, dog, stick or anything who have walked toward each other from opposite ends of the cove. “You're Magna's husband if I'm not mistaken, and according to my stepfather, Turner Haskell, you drove up from there a few days ago.”

“Oh, how do you do, I'm Will Taub. We've been meaning to drop in to say hello to Mr. Haskell, but we've been so busy with a million things that we haven't had time yet. But where do you know Magna from—summers here?”

“Summers, once or twice—we only visit for a week every other year—though also through colleagues and mutual friends. My wife's in her field. We hear you had a baby over the winter.”

“Nine months tomorrow—a girl. In fact, babyproofing entails half the million things we've been doing”—No, back again, just about everything's wrong. One man's on the beach, holding his baby girl. He's standing in the middle of the cove in front of his dilapidated boathouse. He and his wife and child drove up from New York two days ago and this is the first chance he's had to come down to the beach. Unpacking, shopping, cleaning, babyproofing the porch and house, putting up the mailbox, cutting back the alder, mowing, getting the lawnmower repaired, buying a washer and dryer, clearing a path to the woodshed and one to the beach. He's been coming to this cottage for the last five summers. His wife started renting it three summers before that. The cottage wasn't lived in for twenty years before she convinced the owners, who also had a winterized house in town, to let her open it. They thought nobody would want to live in it because everything in it was made or bought sixty years ago and the cottage was so run-down. She fixed it up, had part of the cottage rewired, bought a new water pump. Something like that. A phone installed, and also an electric stove. The rent was that cheap. He only knows of this part of Maine because of his wife. She started coming to it six years before he met her. Six and a half to be exact. They met in November, the following June they flew to Bangor, rented a car at the airport and drove to the cottage. Now they own a car. They'd like to buy the cottage. They've lived in Baltimore for the last two years but stayed for a week with his wife's parents in New York. His wife first came to this peninsula to visit her dissertation adviser and his family. That professor and his wife have since split up and sold their cottage. The man with the baby and his wife also teach and are on vacation for the next two months. The professor visited them here last year and his former wife will stay a week with them this summer. Go back. He and his child are on a beach, forget about getting there, why they're there—they are there. Man and baby, or just he's there. He took the baby down before but it was too hot and sunny for her—he forgot her bonnet—so he brought her back to the cottage, left her with his wife on the fenced-in porch, and went back to the beach. The beach there is a cove that's part of the property they rent. He sees at the end of the cove a man sitting on a rock and looking at the lighthouse in the bay. The end of the cove is called something but he forgets the word. The arm, promontory, reach—none of those. The “end of the cove” will do. It extends into the water, is shaped like the end of a crescent and is the beginning of the next cove in that direction. Will's in the middle of this cove, his cove. The man's sitting and looking out at the water. Maybe the man's looking at the lighthouse which is on an island about a mile away. The man stands and starts walking toward Will. If the man keeps walking at that regular pace it should take him several minutes to reach Will. Less, of course, if Will walks toward him and the man continues walking. Will walks toward the man, but only because he did come down to the beach to walk. To go from cove to cove and then after resting at the end of one, to go back. He could walk in the other direction and would prefer to, since he doesn't like meeting strangers on the beach, but the sun would be facing him. It'll be facing him coming back, but because of the reason he came down to walk on the beach, he wants to avoid the sun now more than he wants to avoid the stranger. So the man who was sitting at the end of the cove is now walking toward Will. He wonders who the man coming toward him is. Will wonders the same thing about the man. The man thinks Jesus, it's hot, why the hell did he ever come down here? He'll be glad when he gets back to the house. Will thinks he should've stayed on the shaded part of the porch. But he wanted to get away from the cottage, to take a long walk and let his mind wander. What comes into his head is that he left hot Baltimore to stay for a week in hot New York to come to an even hotter Maine. But it'll be mostly pleasant during the days and nights for the next two months while in Baltimore and New York it won't. The hot sticky weather must be traveling north because the radio this morning said that fairer drier weather was predicted for New York tomorrow and for New Hampshire the day after and for this part of Maine the day after that. The temperature and humidity when they left New York two days ago was in the mid-nineties. When they stopped for the night at a motel just over the Maine-New Hampshire border the weather was about the same as it was in New York. When they got to the cottage yesterday—No, he has his days mixed up. They got to the cottage two days ago, left New York the day before that. Today was the first chance he had to come down to the beach. The man's a few feet from him now and says hello. Will says hello.

Hot enough for you?” the man says, neither of them stopping.

“I'll tell you, worse than it was where I drove up from.”

They've smiled at one another, now pass one another. Will continues to the end of the cove. The man continues to the other end. Every now and then one of them looks back at the other. One time each looks back at about the same time and sees the other looking at him.

“Caught me,” Will says.

Just looking, the other man thinks—not having much else to do, so just looking. But he doubts, knowing what he knows about him and his wife, that he's the type to mind somebody crossing his beach property which really isn't his. Which really isn't anybody's but everybody's, one could say. Say, that's not bad, even if he really means from the high water mark down. He just wishes his stepfather was the type to also believe it.

The man continues to the end of the cove and then goes around it and heads for the stairs in the middle of his stepfather's cove. When Will looks back again he doesn't see the man. On the next cove, he thinks. For a while he didn't want to look back because he didn't want to get caught again and have the man think he was spying on him. The man looks back again but only when he hears a seagull squawking. The gull flies over his head, dives to about fifteen feet of him, sweeps up, circles him twice—all the time squawking fiercely at him—and then flies back to the end of the cove and settles on a rock and seems to stare at him. He must have got too close to its nest, he thinks, when eggs or chicks were in it. Then he tums back to the stairs when he hears his grandchildren approaching them from the road. No, go back again. Two men. Maine. Its northern coast. Hot. Humid. Morning. Beach. Cove. Lobster boat dropping a trap about three hundred feet out in the water. No. One man, no boat, dusk, northern coast, cooler, orange-green striped sky. The man sits on a rock in front of a boathouse in the middle of the cove. He's tired. He did a lot of work today. Fenced in the porch, built two gates for it, scythed the overgrown grass around the cottage and then mowed it, two car trips to a town twenty miles away to get fencing and gate materials and a lawnmower part. He's holding a gin and tonic. He's showered and changed clothes and in a half-hour he'll have dinner. He's already cooked for his wife and himself and all he has to do when he gets back to the cottage is heat up the pot on the stove and take out the pan in the oven. He looks at the lobster boat in the water. Too far from shore and late in the day to be lobstering so probably going home. He thinks of the man he saw on the cove before. He was walking behind a woman and four children and a dog. He only had a baby with him. The baby wore a blue bonnet and pink overalls and the man with the drink in his hand couldn't tell if it was a girl or boy. The men said hello to each other, then passed one another. The man with the drink was returning from a short walk to the end of the cove. The man holding the baby looked familiar—not someone he knows personally or knew long ago but a public personality perhaps—an author, politician, TV newsman, someone whose face has been in the news lately, maybe a stage or movie actor. Back again. No men passing, no man on the beach. A quiet cove, except for a lobster boat far out in the water. Dusk, multicolored striped sky. No boat. Plain sky. Just a buoy ringing. No buoy. No sounds. Maybe the wind passing through the trees that line the cove. No wind. Trees along the cove stay. The old boathouse stays. A half-filled glass on a rock in front of the boathouse. The ice in it melted. A slice of lime in it.

So the great painter dies. Within minutes of his death the colors disappear from his paintings, the canvases crack and come apart, the frames fall to the floor. Millions of dollars worth of paintings, perhaps a billion dollars worth, are gone. Museum curators summon the police. Private collectors of his work—

No, the painter dies. The great one. Nobody would dispute that. Nothing happens to his paintings after his death. What does change is their value. One painting up for sale that day with an asking price of close to a million dollars, suddenly has an asking price of two million. A private art collector, interviewed on TV that night, says “When I bought this red one ten years ago for a hundred thousand, friends in the know said I paid twice what it was worth. Just a month ago an art dealer offered me five times that amount. Now with his death—not that I don't grieve for him like the rest of us and think, if he was alive and healthy, what he could still do—I could probably get—”

No, the painter dies. The great one. Almost every artist and art expert agrees with that. The paintings he had in his studio will be exhibited this year in a major European museum and then travel to five of the top modern museums in the world before being put on the market. The heirs, to save on paying an estimated hundred million dollars in taxes, have made arrangements with the government where half the paintings—

No, the painter dies. We all know who. The great one. The greatest or second greatest painter in the last fifty years. Certainly one of the five great painters of the century. At least one of the ten great ones in the last hundred years. Definitely one of the ten great ones, of this century, and one of the most influential painters of all time. What modern art movement in the last sixty years hasn't been influenced by him? Maybe some haven't. There have been so many. But five, maybe ten of the major art movements in the last sixty to seventy years have been directly or indirectly influenced by his work. He died in his sleep last night at the age of ninety-one. Ninety-one years old and still painting. The painting he was working on for the last two months was to be one of his largest. Art dealers say the asking price for it, though it's little more than half finished, will be around three million dollars, which will be one of the highest sums paid for a modem painting if it's sold at that price.

No, he's dead. The painter of the century. Or one of them. The day he died—he knew he had little time left, his wife said—he asked her to destroy the painting he was working on. He also asked her to write down his last words. They were “I didn't paint any of the paintings that bear my signature, nor any painting that is said to be mine but doesn't have my signature.” All his paintings bear his signature. He then gestured that he wanted to sign his name to the words she wrote down. His son held his writing hand as he wrote his name. Then he said he'd like a glass of his best champagne and some cherries. His wife went for them. By the time she got back he was dead.

No, he died. In his sleep. A peaceful death. Painting he was painting on before he got sleepy and had to be put into bed was of a man sleeping in bed. A dead man, it looked like. Didn't look like an ordinary sleeping man. That's what just about everyone said when the painting was later viewed at an auction house before it was sold for more than three million dollars.

No, he's dead. His paintings aren't. They live on on whatever walls they're on. The colors haven't faded. Nor the themes. They're still alive.

No, they've all faded, colors and themes. The painter for the last week was fading, now he's dead. Died in his sleep. He was drinking champagne at the time. No, can't be.

Dead. The painter. Had a glass of champagne in his hand. He was awake when the glass dropped out of his hand. Or was awake just a moment before the glass dropped out of his hand. His wife, who had her back to him at the time, turned when she heard the glass smash on the floor. Her husband was slumped across the bed, hand dangling just above the floor. She called for her son. “Jose!” He ran into the room. He'd been in bed with the housekeeper in her room a floor above. Two floors above.

No glass broke. He did die while he was in bed. He was put there for a nap, but could have been awake when the accident happened. A painting hanging above the bed, one he did four years ago of his wife and him copulating and which he said he'd never sell for five million dollars, ten million, “all the money from all the countries in the world,” fell off its hooks on the wall and hit him on the head. “It probably killed him instantly,” the doctor said. The frame alone weighed 200 pounds. The painting doesn't weigh more than a pound or two. “He painted that one thickly,” his wife said, “night after night after night for months, and it's one of his largest, so maybe it's three pounds, even four.”