Skyscape (21 page)

He stopped walking. He felt an inward quiver. He hadn't been wearing his glasses. Surely, he thought, it didn't say
that
.

He leaned against a wall to let a Vespa clatter past and then shook out the newspaper. He held it at arm's length and read for a moment. Then he folded the paper again, folded it hard.

Bruno needed to sit down.

He found himself in Ristorante dell' Orso, out of the flow of motorscooters and hurrying pedestrians. He sat at a table. He let the bag of white netting half-tumble at his feet with its load of vegetables.

He took his time, feeling, as he sometimes did, that little movements could change everything. It was an attitude easy to maintain in Rome, where the way one tossed off a cup of espresso, or slipped off one's sunglasses, bespoke so much about one's life.

He slipped his glasses out of their case, and when he had read enough, he put his glasses back into their case and closed his eyes.

His favorite waiter, the blond from Lucca, smiled down at him, asking if he needed anything.

Bruno thanked him, and explained, in his fairly decent Italian, that the heat was too much for him suddenly. He asked for a cup of espresso, and when it arrived he absentmindedly fed two cubes of sugar into the cup.

This situation was difficult, but not impossible. He told himself that he would have to contrive something very clever to tell Renata. She knows I was, at the very least, exaggerating when I described Curtis Newns's work-in-progress. After all, there was Curtis, in the article about Red Patterson, announcing to the universe that he was not painting anything at all, had stopped painting completely.

True, the famous psychiatrist had announced that Curtis was going to paint with Patterson's help. That was good news. Except that now Red Patterson had been stricken with “undetermined injuries,” and the would-be assassin and two other people were dead.

And what of the wonderful new masterpiece, Renata would be thinking. Bruno drank down the coffee, left four thousand lira on the table, and reentered the heat.

Curtis would just have to find himself a new miracle worker, thought Bruno. The situation was slightly embarrassing—nothing more. Bruno found his way out into the Via dell' Orso, wondering what in the world he was going to tell Andy.

Andy was a devout follower of Red Patterson. He had videotapes of Red Patterson on Depression, Red Patterson on Dreams, Red Patterson on How to Steal and Get Away with It. Well, maybe Bruno had the title of that last tape slightly wrong.

Imagine—violence like that. It was the sort of thing one expected about the Home of the Brave. And people asked him why he preferred to keep his visits to the United States fairly short. America was not the country one remembered, reliable, optimistic.

He had just flown in last night. He had spent several hours in London, gazing upon the remains of the famous painting, commiserating with technicians, solemnizing art's great loss still further in an interview with the Sunday
Times
. He had not realized how thoroughly linen and oil gives itself to flame when the opportunity presents itself. He had been happy to leave London, and was feeling wonderful about being here, in his favorite city.

It would be a miracle if Renata were not on the phone this very minute. Bruno would have to devise another lie—it would be fairly easy, really. He would say that Curtis was exaggerating—that he had a perfectly excellent work in progress, and that Curtis was keeping it secret.

Later, Bruno would wonder if he hadn't had just the slightest inkling that something further had gone wrong.

Andy opened the door to the apartment, breathless. “Did you see what happened to Curtis Newns?”

“You mean, what has happened to my career, don't you?” said Bruno.

He could joke about it now. A few minutes reflection had convinced him that his life was not scattered about in ruin. It was one of those durable monuments, like the Pantheon, powerful, although lacking a certain superficial perfection.

Bruno had seated himself, and now, standing up again, was sure that he had misheard what Andy had just gone on to say.

“I saw it on CNN,” said Andy.

As though to refute Andy's words, there was no news on at all, only the usual hash of American and Italian comedies. Bruno turned the set off again, and stepped toward the phone, which he knew was waiting to ring.

Andy was better at finding what he wanted on the television. When important events took place in the United States, American news was carried on Channel Four. Today the reception was poor. The news was about the U.S. economy, U.S. politics, U.S. pollution, the usual run of self-involvement that made the land of his birth seem both energetic and adolescent.

There, Bruno was beginning to think. I know all about this. Andy's wrong.

The two of them were on the screen, the psychiatrist and the artist. Red Patterson and Curtis Newns were hugging, there was applause, and then there was a jerky, wobbly picture that the voice-over explained was Red Patterson's house besieged by onlookers. And then a still photo of Curtis Newns as the voice intoned that he was listed in grave condition after an apparent suicide attempt on “a busy San Francisco freeway, after learning of what was initially thought to be the murder of—”

Bruno used the remote to snap off the sound.

Good Lord.

“What is it about television? A person tells you something, you don't believe it,” said Andy. “You see it on the tube and it's the truth.”

Bruno put a finger to his lips to hush Andy. Bruno needed to think for a minute. Curtis was one of those people you found yourself believing would never die. Despite his dynamic behavior, or because of it, he had seemed too vital to end up a mere corpse.

“You think I'm not shocked. I think it's a terrible thing,” Andy was saying.

Before Curtis dies, someone should get their hands on the drawings his wife has there in the studio—the last work of Curtis Newns. It might be too late. Curtis might already be dead.

Bruno was not one to dwell on unpleasantness, but he did not feel confident at all. He hurried upstairs, grabbed the bag that he had not troubled to unpack, and looked at the print of
Skyscape
on the wall.

The timing was terrible. Andy was a photographer, collecting atmospheric views of the Jewish Quarter, the hidden fountains, the sleepy, furtive cats of Trastevere. Andy was attractive and bright, but he had that impressionable quality Bruno had recognized in so many young people. They were lively, but filled with easy fantasies of what tomorrow was going to be like. Facile, cheerful, Andy was one for whom the world was a map easy to master, greater distance meaning only a moderate increase in the price of a first-class ticket. Their relationship was loving but indescribably ephemeral. Andy would be gone, Bruno was certain, on his return.

“You're going again, aren't you?” said Andy.

“This is an emergency.”

“What good can you possibly do?”

“I'll be back as soon as I can.”

“We were going on a picnic to Ostia Antica.” Andy was allowing himself a minimal sulk, but Bruno could hear a touch of relief.

Bruno felt terrible for a moment. Dear boy, he thought—dear, shallow boy. Who was it who smoked the American-brand cigarettes? The waiter from Lucca, perhaps, or the broad-shouldered young teller at the
cambio
window at the Banco d'Italia.

Bruno eyed the flat gray telephone. He could pick it up, make a few calls. Maybe he could stay here, and Andy would have a deepening understand of things, of Bruno himself, as a result. People had so little understanding of each other. Television, instant travel, the revolving door of lovers had made life both exciting and easy, even in these days when so many good people were dying, or gone. Even the cloak and jewel of one's sexual identity had become less a matter of discretion, of silence, and little more than another option in life's boutique.

Perhaps Andy would never know what it was like to build a career, a persona, a view of the world stone by stone, a bridge from uncomprehending past to a future of passion, of beauty. Bruno loved life. He had courted it and won.

Bruno punched Curtis's phone number into the telephone. He let it ring nine, ten times. He hesitated, then punched in Renata's phone number.

She was, of course, the last person in the world he wanted to talk to, but Bruno did not let squeamishness or the time difference slow him down. Renata's line was busy. Or perhaps she had left a telephone off the hook; Renata was often careless about details like that, preferring to live in the bigger picture of hired people who opened mail and answered phones.

When the phone rang Bruno did not want to answer it, but it was that sweet girl at the BBC, the one who did all the obits, asking for a statement from Bruno “just in case we learn the worst.” Bruno ran through the usual bio, the artist orphaned, his parents killed in a landslide in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Very early promise, astounding success while he was still in his teens. If he died a great loss to art world, to the world of thinking people.

That sounds so
archaic
, he told himself. There are no
thinking
people anymore. The sweet BBC voice thanked him, and rang off.

Bruno realized how badly he was trembling. It was the truth: he loved Curtis.

Margaret Darcy Newns, thought Bruno, will not necessarily have the good judgment to let me and me alone dispose of the latest, marvelous drawings of Curtis Newns. Besides, bereaved family members had been known to destroy valuable manuscripts, precious works, in the blind throes of sorrow. And maybe there
was
a grand work-in-progress, a new painting half-done but exciting enough so that Bruno could point to it before selected journalists and say: I knew he was working on something exquisite, and here it is, a bare inkling of what it could have been, of course …

There almost
had
to be something like that tucked away somewhere.

“It's so sad,” said Andy.

Was it possible that Andy wanted him to stay?

Trembling, giddy, almost believing that if he arrived in San Francisco in time all would be well, he took a moment to reflect upon Andy's words. Like so many of the young, Andy was preoccupied with his own reactions, discovering in sorrow something new about himself.

But Bruno did not believe in lingering over sadness. He believed, above all else, in the preemptive strike.

“After all the things Red Patterson tried to do for him, too,” said Andy, putting the espresso maker on the stove.

That stopped Bruno. “Patterson is personally responsible for this.”

“He was just,” said Andy, airily, “trying to save Curtis Newns from himself.”

Bruno saw actual spots before his eyes, flashing. “Patterson is a fake.”

“He has revolutionized psychotherapy,” said Andy, in the tone of someone explaining the profound to the dim-witted.

“I am going to expose Patterson for what he is,” said Bruno, glancing through his wallet, aware that while the San Pablo Foundation would pay for all of his expenses there were tips, snacks, the occasional liquid refreshment.

“Do you realize the thousands of people he's helped, worldwide?” asked Andy. “There's a network of people devoted to him.”

Bruno smiled. “He's going to need them.”

“Red Patterson might not even be alive,” said Andy, with that talent for the dramatic that Bruno had so recently found refreshing.

When the phone rang again it was Renata San Pablo. The connection was crisp. Satellite lag was a phenomenon of the past. “I don't know where to begin,” she said.

“I know exactly how you feel,” said Bruno.

“I am wondering how to make you suffer,” said Renata, with something like good humor. She was no doubt enjoying this, thought Bruno. So much of her life was a game. Although it was a contest she felt she needed to win, it was a pleasure, too. Just now she felt she had Bruno at a disadvantage, and this made her perversely kind, despite her choice of words.

“How nice of you to call and ask for suggestions,” said Bruno.

“Do you know that old phrase, ‘shooting fish in a barrel'?” said Renata cheerfully.

Meaning: I'm the fish, thought Bruno. Already he could tell that Renata would not stay angry. After all, Bruno was too useful to her, and had been too amusing for too many years. “Yes, but I've always wondered about that,” Bruno was saying. “Does it mean fish in a barrel full of water, or just flopping around at the bottom. Because, if there's water, the bullet might be deflected or slowed down.”

“Not slow enough,” said Renata soothingly.

23

People outside the bathroom door were making a real fuss. All he wanted was to be left alone. That was not too much to ask.

There was another knock on the door. “Dr. Patterson—are you okay?”

Quite a bit of time had passed but he still needed to pull himself together. He was tired of rushing through everything, day after day. He deserved some quiet. The truth was, he had felt very shaky, and he was just now starting to feel okay. Not really wonderful, but not bad, considering.

He sat before a mirror in the bathroom. The chamber was as big as some of the living rooms of his childhood, a spacious atrium with asparagus ferns and limestone tile. The shower stall was a niche, and the bath itself sunken, surrounded by fronds. The commode was discreet, parenthetical. There were little pockets in the tile, like acne scars, and if you looked closely they were the impressions of shells. You could pad around in your bare feet across a fossil record.

Beyond the door, out there, people were very annoyed. They stood, like parents barricaded by a teenager, trying to be patient, failing, perfectly able to break the door down. At least, they
thought
they could. Patterson knew it would not be so easy. Besides, they were kept from battering it down by the feeling that Red Patterson had a right to lock himself in his own bathroom after everything he had been through not even two hours before.