Catalogue Raisonne (14 page)

I bore down harder in the second game, trying the trick of piling on complications that I had used with Robert. Enough of them so that I made the big scabbed hands hover for a moment, then some long moments, before diving down at a piece. Things got gnarled and knotty for a few minutes. But eventually the solution he discovered was as brutal a refutation of Robert's floundering as the bridge that morning had been. Turning away from the trade-offs I was forcing in the middle, Armin plunged down one side, risking all, letting me strip off pieces in the process like so many booster rockets he was jettisoning. And then I was cornered and it was done.

Afterwards, mollifed perhaps at being stretched more than usual, Armin accepted my homage – “You're a
great
player, Armin” – with more than his usual snort. He shrugged. “I know some openings. Good endgame maybe. But I
study
” – tapping his head – “the people.” That was news: he treated us like fodder. He swept a hand, knuckles bristling with pieces, out at the heads bent over boards, hands spanking their time clocks, all concentrating too intensely of course to be aware of our little corner. “Look at these guys, memorize Nimzo-Indian. Twenty moves deep. They should be watching
each other
.”

Our third game reverted to the blitzkrieg norm. Slashing attacks along several fronts at once, shattered defenses. Surrender.

“What's wrong with my game, Armin?” I asked, not caring if it sounded pathetic. Sometimes, if you have a real mind handy you have to consult it, no matter how noxious its answers are likely to be. Armin kept setting up the pieces, the new game almost ready. “How do I get beyond the snake-in-the-grass stage?”

But when he looked up, eyes clouded with confusion, I realized that I'd forgotten to factor in simple craziness. He didn't seem to recognize me, though we'd played dozens of games together. And the “snake-in-the-grass” idiom was probably alien to him, too. A badly executed gambit.

Armin bent his head, hand over the king's pawn. “Is your game,” he said softly. “Get better at it.”

For some reason the words brought Robert back more powerfully
than had any other reminder all that long afternoon and evening. He could have written his symphony some day. Or done something else. Anything. He was twenty-two.

When I looked back from the door, Armin already had his invisible opponent thrashing, grasping for an honourable endgame.

Walking. Not paying attention to the street names. Evening cooler now. Filled with scents of grass and flowers and, with the wind from the west, not much smoke. I put my hands in my jacket pockets. Found the Holst tape, which had been forgotten in the circus of the night before. Knowing I would never listen to it again, I decided to return it to its present owner.

Piccone's pissed-on sign had already been replaced with a fresh one. The new stake pounded deeper into the ground. Prompt attention, even to a sagging property.

Claudia's face, parts of it, appeared in a crack of doorway, eyes over the chain. Eyes narrowed in suspicion but not reddened. Hers wasn't a face that would change much in grief. Pale. Gaunt. Unkempt hair. It seemed to have been prepared for grief already.

I pushed the tape up toward the crack. “I borrowed this from Robert. I'm very – ”

“Don't want it.” And shut the door.

But flung it open again before I'd quite turned away. Jeans and T-shirt in the open space, as if to demonstrate that the chain hadn't been fear. “And hey,” she said. “Fuck off, why don't you?”

This time the door slammed.

When I'd gone about half way down the hall, I heard a door open behind me. She was leaning out of it. “If you're looking for company, why don't you talk to your friend from the gallery?”

“What friend?”

“Yeah, right.” Sneered. “Whoever phoned my brother last night.” She disappeared back inside and the door shut, but softly this time. One of those safecracker-like turns of the knob when you're so angry you don't want even the intimacy of a shared click.

I was still holding “The Planets” in my hand. The plastic tape case actually felt hot between my fingers, I wanted to get rid of it so badly. Down in the lobby, I tried to fit it in the Jongkinds' locked mailbox, but the slot was too narrow. Peering through it I could see a number of uncollected envelopes, bits of Robert's name on the nearest one. Death's stale jokes to go with its nagging: the postcards, bills, subscription offers still arriving, even as the embalmer is doing his best. I left the tape on top of the box, hoping Claudia would find it before one of the neighbours did.

Rick, last night's drowsy exercise, entered the building just as I was heading out the door. His eyes flicked to mine, a recognition without a greeting, and then he bumped me heavily in the chest, lowering his shoulder like a hockey player making a check. It was a casual move, but the impact sent me thudding against the wall, the back of my head cracking painfully against the plaster. It happened too fast and unexpectedly even to produce an adrenaline rush, though I felt the rage chemicals begin to mobilize as his sheer mass moved away.

He didn't look back. That was important, I knew: show that you can hurt easily, thoughtlessly. And with no fear of retaliation: the unprotected back the aggressor's display, just as the exposed belly was the victim's. I thought of Claudia standing in the wide open doorway. A circle of displays. And watching Rick's bulk move slowly up the stairs, black pointed boots sliding out to ten and two o'clock to grant his thick thighs more leeway, I thought that grief could be expressed by more than reddened eyes. Certain late-night lumbering visitors might capture it even better.

I relaxed against Angela's soft body, my nose in her caramel-smelling hair. Feeling the muscles I'd held stiff without knowing it begin to loosen, letting myself sag. Angela had begun to use words like “supportive” and “nurturing” far too often, but she actually was those things. It was partly why I loved her. It was also why I hated to hear her talk that way. And if it was true that her tenderest sympathies usually found their way back round to herself, was she any different from the
rest of us in that? From me? At least her feelings made the outward journey first.

Turning her head from side to side against my chest, like a medic catching a fading heartbeat, she said, “How can I feel happy about some crappy little picture, with Robert. . . .”

“You can. You have to, actually.”

It's me, I thought, whose instincts are in doubt. Never mind direction. Next move, even. And why did absolutely everything now have to come packaged with that tinge of shame, that creep of guilt? If I hadn't confided in Angela now, I never would. She was inside the gallery now in ways I never could be. That meant she had to stay outside whatever had happened. Was happening? Would happen? Among other things, it was a compact I had – unspoken, binding – with dead Robert and his still-alive sister. And when had that deal been signed?

After a few minutes we made love. Still the best consolation in a crisis, the best antidote to the sad stress of events. And something which by now we could, and mostly did, do entirely with our eyes closed.

Afterwards Angela, though I hadn't known her to think of Robert other than as a foppish pretender, cried for him. No maudlin reversals of opinion, no exaggerated intimacy. But tears freshened her eyes at just the waste of death. I envied her the release and the generosity of this, but knew I couldn't match it. Terrible losses and hurts were necessary to wrench tears from me – falls much greater and more personal than this weird squalid drop. Even then tears usually had to ambush me, jerking and spurting up out of me long after the events I grieved. Television was often the nearest cause. Some sentimental set-up on
M*A*S*H
, or even a phone commercial yanking the heart-strings by means of a senior and a child, might be the proximate goad that bucketed the pain up from some deep inner well. All I felt now was something like a white dot in the centre of my chest, near the spot where Rick had thumped me. A tiny white dot of fury that couldn't help but expand into a fireball.

Twice in the night I woke up confused. Each time from a jumbled dream that, on waking, resolved into a simple clarifying statement. In the first dream, Angela reared up above me, her back arched so far that her unseen face and breasts pointed up at the ceiling. Except that this time, in the dream, there was no practiced easy release; instead, deep groans of mounting frustration, a crescendo of barks and grunts which woke me with a start. And the thought, blinking in the dark, Angela asleep beside me:
Robert probably died a virgin.
How that fact would mortify him. Mortify: to kill with shame.

In the second dream I was wandering gloomy, artificial-looking streets – like the shadowed toy-classical cityscape, streets and colonnades, of the de Chirico painting in the exhibition – thinking, I've made a mistake, I've forgotten something important. And again the simple understanding, almost instantly on waking:
The tape was a copy. Robert meant for me to keep it.

Embarrassed
.

Oddly, that was the first word that came to my mind when I woke up and remembered about Robert. Or the second word, of course.
Dead
being the first. But right after it, I thought of how humiliating and how pathetic, how pathetically humiliating, Robert would find the circumstances he was now in. What were they, exactly? Stretched out on a tray in some kind of refrigerator, long and thin and naked, probed by strangers' warm fingers. Not hearing jokes, not getting them. Not understanding. Not
knowing
anything. This picture of Robert in death seemed to tell me something of what he'd been in life. Something I'd missed. Or known, but not entirely. I'd never really thought of him as a private person. With all the sweeping gestures and grand talk. The flaunted big briefcase. Now, strangely, I saw him as some kind of translucent sea creature that had never grown a thick enough shell, so had to scuttle quickly between a succession of caves or other creatures' abandoned houses. Had death done that? Or was it really showing me something about Robert I'd never seen before, or had mistaken for something else?

A private person. Sad. I couldn't stand to think of it for long. And then I thought: Christ, come off it, man. Of all the reasons to become someone's friend, the worst one's got to be because he's dead.