Skyscape (10 page)

“I'm leaving,” said Margaret.

“I'm not going to let him ruin your evening, Margaret. That's what he's there for. Sit still.”

She stood.

“I swear to God, Margaret, if you leave I'm going to tear this place apart.”

She allowed herself a wry thought: she liked a man who didn't exaggerate. He had demolished that bar in Carmel one afternoon.

But then it looked like everything was going to be all right. The staring contest seemed to dwindle away to nothing. Curtis was taking a bite of sourdough and chewing, trying.

The headwaiter floated by, but it was a deliberate, nervous sort of drifting. Margaret caught his eyes. “Right away,” he said, meaning: we'll be glad to see Curtis Newns take a nice long walk in the fresh air. Since the TV star had overdosed the headwaiter had lost weight. He looked tired. She slipped the headwaiter the Amex card and knew it would be only another few minutes.

It was going to be okay. They were going to leave the restaurant, and get Curtis home, and there would be no problem.

You see? she told herself. He's not as bad as he used to be.

Curtis was a man who cared about what happened. If he saw the reports of a storm on television, children drowned, a village destitute, he would send a check to the Red Cross and spend a night tossing, getting up, wandering the semidark.

A hitch was developing. The headwaiter was not coming back. He was nowhere.

She couldn't believe it. Everything had stopped but the voice of the loan broker, a relentless, asinine drone.

There it was, the white jacket, the hand holding the tray, the check in its leather folder. Margaret signed the slip, her signature legible even now, snapped up the card, and all was well.

Then the loan broker made his mistake. He didn't make it quickly. He made it worse by taking so long. He eased himself up out of his chair, tossed down his napkin, and stepped over to their table.

The broker was tall, and had a pudgy, careless face, the face of someone who knew the computer screen better than the human gaze. He had probably read a book or two. His eyes were intelligent, but lit with the overconfidence of booze. He had a square jaw, muscular shoulders—bulk. He had the thick neck of an ex-athlete gone only moderately to seed, the sort of man who had always been attracted to Margaret, thinking her “a whole lot of fun,” the sort of man Margaret had always loathed.

“Is there some kind of problem here?” asked the broker.

Curtis took his time. He folded his napkin easily, carelessly, but in no hurry. He stood, and while Curtis was a good six feet, he was not much compared with the broker.

The broker let his gaze fall upon Margaret. He looked at as much of her as he could see, and when she stood he gave her a smile that said he liked what he beheld. “You having any trouble here?” the broker asked her.

Men were idiots.

The headwaiter put out his hands, and parted his lips, looking like a statue dedicated to maintaining calm, good sense, manners.

Margaret gave what must have been a weary smile, a look the broker misunderstood. What Margaret had meant to communicate was: please go away.

What the broker read was: I wish fate had brought us together before now.

Margaret saw what the waiters, what all the dazzled diners, did not: Curtis made the first move, a subtle, definite move as crisp as a white pawn's opening.

He stepped on the broker's foot. He put his shoe on the broker's and let all his weight press down, until the broker's eyes narrowed in nasty disbelief, squinted in that universal masculine expression of unintelligent ferocity.

The broker took a swing. He swept his fist back, and brought it forward. He had done this before in his life, the big ex-jock, and knew how to economize the punch, calculating where the head would be when the head saw the fist on its way.

Curtis stepped forward, and embraced the broker, the punch ending up nowhere. Curtis began digging his left fist into the broker's mid-section. It looked like Curtis was thumbing the big man in the ribs, prodding him affectionately.

But the broker made a windy, coughing bark, and staggered. Curtis stayed with him, walking the man back toward his table, working, now, with both fists. It looked playful, the heel of Curtis's hand flattening the big man's nose.

Blood blossomed, and the broker swung back, missing. Two white-jacketed bouncers were there, and it was going to be over soon. Except that now it did not look playful, not at all.

Margaret tried to give the broker's date a reassuring smile, but the woman looked bewildered, hand to her lips. And Curtis was really hurting the man, now. It had nothing to do with the man's manner, anymore, his conversation or his bearing or his attitude toward women. Margaret understood this much: Curtis wasn't fighting a human being.

He was fighting something in Curtis, something he thought was standing in front of him, ducking, bleeding, getting hurt.

Margaret readied a lie. It was not a complete and total lie. It was an artful fiction, one she knew the waiters would support. The big man had started it—offered unwanted and unrequested attention and had thrown the first punch. After all, being a celebrity these days wasn't easy.

Strangers joined in the struggle to separate the two. One of the diners had a police transmitter in his fist. He was one of the senior police bureaucrats Margaret had met over tea at the Museum of Modern Art, something in press liaison. More police were coming as Margaret whispered premature thanks into the ear of the graying cop.

Curtis was looking around as one of the burliest bouncers put his arm around the artist and said something in a joking tone. Curtis's eyes took in the scene without seeing very much. He was panting, a half-smile on his lips.

When Margaret was sure that the episode had spun itself out, that everything was finished, she began to experience a tiny bit of relief.

The broker touched his fingertips to his mangled nose. He examined the blood. He looked lost in a reverie, a philosophical consideration of clotting factors, of hemoglobin. The big man shook himself, and the bouncer who had his arm dropped it.

Then, like a man reaching into his hip pocket for a wallet, the broker worked at getting something out of his belt, or his pants, something back there, something snagging and not coming out as easily as it was supposed to.

It took awhile, but he finally got it out.

The pistol was black—a dead, carbon black. It made the man's fist look pale and freckled. The people in the restaurant had stirred, surprised, disturbed, and, Margaret sensed, perhaps even a little pleased at the tussle they had witnessed.

Now chairs toppled, bodies fell to the floor, there was a general gasp, a cringe throughout the room, as the revolver, dull and chunky with its snub-barrel, searched up, away from the floor, up toward Curtis's knee, his groin, upward.

The fist was trembling, the pistol unsteady as the fingers worked to unfasten a safety or a catch, thumb and fingers hesitating as Margaret forgot every promise, every sorrow.

11

Her father had known it: the moment is everything.

The feel of the felt on the bottom of a chess piece, the subtle absence of sound as the piece slides across the chess board.

She did not know what allowed her to act. Later, she would understand. At that moment she knew only this room, this tableau. Just a step was all it took.

She put her hand over the pistol, over his fist. She said, in a whisper, “Thank you so much for doing everything you could to help.”

What an absurd thing to say. She sounded like a demented stewardess, or lethally sarcastic—or both. She had no idea what else to do.

But then, just that simply, she did.

His hand was cold. Her heartbeat was so strong she could feel it in her fingers, feel her pulse against the man's knuckles, against the gun, each heartbeat moving the man's arm minutely but urgently as his eyes met hers with an expression of anger fading to shock: what am I doing?

Then the room flung itself into motion. There were hands, faces, voices. Two uniformed police were there, grappling the big man easily and kneeling on him, fastening the handcuffs on him as though they were a well-practiced team, the two cops and the arrested man all a part of a crew of stunt men.

Margaret found herself sitting, gazing at the unwrinkled white table linen. Someone thrust a glass of water into her hand. It was the police bureaucrat, and he was saying, “Don't worry about a thing.”

There was nothing like his painting. She had run across it in the local library as a girl, the big volume of contemporary art, much of it already boring and out of date.

The Sacramento summers were hot, the sun broken by elms and oaks. The winters were, to a girl, long and ceaselessly wet, the lawns bleached white by frost. The art she could find, needed to find, found herself thinking of the first thing in the morning, always eventually left her dissatisfied.

But not Curtis Newns. His work did not have “sparkle and magic,” as the notes in the book expressed it. Magic, Margaret knew, was what her own art relied on. Even in high school she had earned awards, savings-and-loan-sponsored art contests, county competitions, harbingers of the success she would be enjoying ten years later. Her drawings had always been, in the phrase of an early catalog, “deft, delightful,” deer rendered in colored pencils, the inevitable grazing horses in watercolor. Magic was charm. Magic pleased. Curtis's work had something better—it had power.

The local bookstore had carried books about railroads, paperback mysteries, cookbooks, the books that her neighbors found diverting, helpful. She had ordered the catalog of his “Burn Heaven” show and called up every other day until it arrived. She sent away for posters of his shows, and her father took pains to say that he found Curtis Newns's work “very interesting,” trying to establish a link with a daughter he knew he had lost.

But her father had chess, and the articles about chess, the problems he created, over the years of her mother's increasing bitterness with a husband who was “a hopeless adolescent.” He had chess, and he had fishing. Her mother had called him, with pained affection, “the man who flunked adulthood.”

Only in the end did Margaret see that her father was not a dreamer at all, that her mother was wrong. But by then the chess tournaments, in which her father would play twenty nervous, brilliant people at a time, and the chess problems he wrote, and the computer firms he consulted with, beating every piece of software anyone sent him, were all in the past.

On the wall of her bedroom as a high school student she had hung the glossy, bright print of
Skyscape
. Someone somewhere believes in life, the painting told her, believes in the sun that is traveling toward you across the empty morning. A
New Yorker
article Margaret clipped and saved said Curtis brought the power of Monet into a “post-industrial feel for the last wilderness, the sky.” Margaret knew this was true, but she also knew what humanity the great painting implied, what faith.

She had dreamed once that she was lying in bed naked, holding an art book copy of
Skyscape
to her breasts, the cold resin-slick page on her nipples as she rocked, eyes closed, to peak after peak of pleasure.

They left The Blond Spike. There were a few photographers, an Eyewitness News van. People wished them good night.

Curtis said nothing. Margaret drove. It was good to have the driving to make her concentrate. There was a truce between them for awhile. They would be silent because it had all been said before. Because words of any sort reminded both of them of promises, and promises had once again failed.

I could just say: it's all right, Curtis. Forget about it. And for awhile it
had
been all right. Curtis was moody, fiery. She had known that.

They had moved to this high-security building in Pacific Heights because it was safe. No fans could stalk Curtis to his doorway, no striving fellow-artists could waylay him for a kind word or a loan. The police took special care to watch the politicians and fellow celebrities who lived nearby, and the building had security guards. They were on the fifteenth floor, and the penthouse apartment was so big she felt that she lived in a house perched, somehow, on the edge of a cliff.

The apartment was decorated with paintings, his own work, things he had done before he met her at one of his openings. She had been just another one of many, she knew, just another smile uttering compliments.

Then they were home.

You couldn't see the beautiful paintings in this light. They were maps of night sky, glints of bad light off the acrylics, the oils. When he was like this she knew he hated light. They sat in the dark.

Well Margaret, she asked herself like an interviewer, that withered little man from the
Chronicle
. How did the evening go?

Exactly as planned. Hey, don't look surprised. I planned this.

Our little way of having fun.

Curtis did not move. She poured him some cherry-flavored Calistoga water, the refrigerator light illuminating the kitchen, the light reaching him where he gazed down, like someone trying to recall something that would change everything.

She put the glass on one of the coasters her mother had given them for Christmas, enameled copper rings backed with cork. Margaret felt a little sorry for her mother. The woman never knew what to give them, never sure who her daughter was, what she liked, what she loved.

He left it untouched. The sparkling water made the faintest fizz, a happy sound. If only he could speak. That would begin their lives again. But he didn't talk. He sat, but it was not the posture of a person at rest. She wondered if she had ever really understood him. Maybe, she thought, she wasn't the right companion for him. Maybe she had no idea what it was like to be him, to exist inside his body.

Margaret found the telephone. She pushed the memory button at the top of the row, over the police and the fire department, and the button Curtis never pressed, Bruno's number in Rome.