Death of an Artist (6 page)

Winners and losers, he thought, always winners and losers. He was thinking of the box that was not for sale and would never be for sale. He had made it five years ago, working on it in stolen minutes at a time in a closetlike space that was barely big enough to hold him, his workbench, and his tools, many of them inherited from his father.

On Evelyn's birthday he had presented the box to her, a peace offering as well as birthday gift. In a marriage that had started turning sour several years earlier and was deteriorating faster month by month, it had seemed right at the time.

She had eyed it eagerly, opened it, and said in a disbelieving voice, “It's empty! You gave me an empty box?” She snapped it shut and put it down hard on a table. “You gave me an empty box! Your idea of a joke? It's not funny.”

She left to go to her sister's condo, where a birthday party was being given, and he stayed home and got drunk. The next day she flashed a bracelet studded with diamonds.

“Where did that come from?” he demanded.

“I bought it!” she said defiantly. “Leonard gave Judith a twenty-thousand-dollar necklace for her birthday. I deserve a little something.”

“Your sister's married to a millionaire broker. You married a cop. We can't afford that.”

“I didn't! I married a man less than a year away from being a lawyer! By now you'd have the corner office and we'd live the way Judith lives. But you couldn't stand the idea of having a desk job,” she said scornfully. “You wanted to play cops and robbers.”

He had gone to the telephone, taken out his wallet, and extracted four credit cards, two of them maxed out, a third one probably also maxed with that bracelet. He jerked open the telephone book, then jabbed in the number he found and reported a lost credit card. After the woman on the other end got the necessary information, she said they would send a replacement. He had said, “No, don't send a new one yet. We're moving and I don't have the new address yet.”

From across the room Evelyn stared at him, white-faced and shaking. “You can't do that to me,” she said harshly. “How dare you pull a filthy trick like that!”

He found a second number and was punching it in when she ran from the room.

The following day he dismantled his shop and started selling the tools, and Evelyn went to stay with her sister. Two months later they sold the condominium, which they had bought when the price was affordable, and it brought a handsome profit with the skyrocketing prices that had since set in. His attorney and hers had agreed that the mortgage and all debts had to be paid before the proceeds could be divided. It didn't leave much. He hadn't cared. For the first time in years he was debt-free, and he had thought mockingly she might even have to go back to work. She had left a good job, buyer for a hotel consortium, because it hadn't left her enough free time to go places with her sister. He hadn't seen her since the day of the divorce.

He closed his eyes and leaned back against warm basalt, while in his mind's eye he was seeing the condo bedroom the day she moved out. She had taken the tables and chair he had made, probably to sell, but the empty box was in the middle of the bed.

 

5

T
ONY
DROVE
TO
Stef's house that Saturday. He had found that walking uphill was to be avoided, although he had no trouble on flat ground and little on stairs. The weather had turned gray and rather cold with a steady wind and the smell of rain or fog in the air. Stef opened the door promptly at the doorbell. She was in baggy black pants with a loose, bright-red, long-sleeved shirt that clashed with her pink hair.

“Hi. Come on in.”

She didn't offer to take his Windbreaker, and he kept it on as he followed her past stairs through a hall to where the house opened to a large room that took up the rear half of the house, with a kitchen at one end, a counter separating it from a dining area, and the living room. The view from the back of the room was panoramic, unobstructed through oversize windows and a sliding door to a deck beyond. Ocean and sky were almost the same gray color, broken by white spray and breaking waves, merging in the distance.

Opposite the window wall a low fire was burning in a fireplace, with a grouping of chairs and a sofa in front of it. The furniture in the comfortable room was in shades of dark green, gold, and russet, with russet and deep-red throw rugs, and pillows on the sofa.

Marnie set a glass of wine on a low table, then rose from a chair before the windows. She nodded to him. “It's warm in here. Let me take your jacket. I'm Marnie Markov, by the way. We almost met before.”

“Just toss it anywhere,” Stef said. “I'm having bourbon and water. Bloody Mary, rum, beer, name it, it's probably available.”

“Beer would be fine.” He went to Marnie, held out his hand. “Tony Mauricio. Glad to meet you more formally.” Her hand was soft and warm, her handshake firm.

He nodded toward the window. “That's spectacular. Do people get used to it, stop seeing it?”

“I haven't yet. And I've been here for forty-five years.”

Stef brought a bottle of beer and a glass and her own glass and sat in one of the chairs, pointed to another one, and said, “He's making a table now. He doesn't sell his art, either.”

“What do you do with furniture after a certain point is reached?” Marnie asked curiously. “Finite space being what it is.”

Tony grinned. “Just the box. Anything else will be up to Dave. He'll decide and handle it.”

“Oh,” Stef said. “You do sell things, then?”

She had an ever-changing expression, Tony thought. Seconds earlier an approving one, now a distant, colder look, not entirely disdainful, but almost.

“It's never been an issue,” he said. “I never had anything to sell before. But I guess I'm less interested in the object than in the process of making it.”

“Process,” Stef said. “The act of creation. For me it's what I end up with that counts. Getting there is…” She took a long drink and turned to face the window. “It's hard to know when it's finished or if it ever is. There's always a little more that can be done, a final touch that needs doing. I don't think I ever finish anything. How can you part with something that isn't finished?”

“You do what you can,” Marnie said, “and then you let it go. Or you drive yourself crazy.”

“And it's off to the attic with you and a padlock on the door,” Stef said gaily. She set her glass down and jumped to her feet. “Come on, have a look at my stuff.”

He followed her upstairs, through another hall with two open doors opposite each other, revealing bedrooms, two closed doors, and on to the studio, which took up the whole end of that floor. Windows were on three walls, the north and east windows high, and wide, sash windows facing south. An outside door was near the corner of the east wall. He had seen a passageway up there, with stairs down to the sidewalk below.

Paintings leaned against every inch of available wall, hung on every available inch of wall space. A long table held portfolios, a stack of sketches, and a counter with a utility sink took up several feet of another side. The sink and counter were badly stained, daubed with paint that entirely covered the original surface. Five easels held more paintings, one with a cover over a work.

He was surprised to see so many styles, impressionist, abstracts, realistic … and it appeared that she had switched mediums often. Acrylics and oils, side by side with watercolors and charcoals. He asked if she had settled on any of them and she said she was sticking to watercolors. For now.

Gazing at a landscape in oils, with glaring yellow and orange, dead black slashes, forest green, he said, “I don't know the language of art, how to express a reaction in technical terms. But I think that's great, shocking and great.”

She was watching him closely. “Why?”

“I think it's honest,” he said after a moment. “And I don't know what I mean by that. It's stark, cruel in a way, and honest. Hard-edged.” The painting had nothing of the serenity she had captured in her
Newport Bay,
nothing of the pastoral gentleness of some conventional paintings that any fine painter might have produced. This one screamed Stef. It depicted a dynamic landscape that could kill you if you weren't on guard.

Two paintings were turned to the wall and she didn't offer to turn them around. He didn't comment as they passed by them to continue the tour. It was a tour, he felt, through the mind and sensibilities of this woman with her chameleon changes and what she was willing or perhaps compelled to reveal of herself.

Finally she led him to the covered painting on an easel and threw back the cover to reveal
Ladies in Waiting
. He took a step back and gazed at it silently for a long time before he turned to study her face. She was watching him intently again. “It belongs in a museum,” he said.

“Not in a private house, adorning the space above a family sofa?” Her tone was mocking as if she was aware of what she had done, what it meant.

“You know not that. Who would be willing to live with it, face its truth every day? A world of hypocrisy, deceit, reality hiding behind a facade of gentility, animality in skirts, the roles women play … A museum.”

For a moment longer her gaze held his, then abruptly she covered the painting again and gestured. “Let's go down. I have some pizzas in the freezer. We'll have pizza.”

Marnie felt only a mild surprise that Stef had asked him to share a pizza. Marnie made a salad and they ate pizza and salad. Stef said little during the scant meal, and Marnie talked about the early days of Silver Bay, how few people had discovered the livability of the coast back then, how deserted it had been.

“We had an apartment in Newport,” she said. “Then Ed found out that the builders of this house were leaving and he wanted it. Stef was three when we came here, and at that time ours was the only house on the ridge, except for the retreat up above us. Land here was cheap, a cottage could be had for twenty-five thousand, and now a postage-stamp-sized lot goes for sixty-five thousand or more. Progress, I think they call it.”

Something had changed, Marnie thought as they ate and chatted. Her own flow of conversation was light and easy, requiring little thought. She told him about Van, studying to be a doctor, with her internship coming in the fall. As she spoke, she became aware of the difference in the air. A wariness between Stef and Tony had vanished, and Stef was no longer eyeing him speculatively. Marnie hadn't known the thought had been in her head until it was no longer there, and its absence made her conscious of the change. She was surprised with a second thought: a mutual respect had replaced wariness, Stef's former speculative interest had been replaced by respect, a far deeper and more meaningful emotion. And, before, Tony had regarded Stef as he might have regarded a puzzle, with an almost analytical attitude. Marnie imagined that was how he looked at those he interviewed in his investigations, as if asking,
Who are you and where do you fit in?
That was gone also, replaced by a respectful regard that was still questioning, but different. She wished she had gone to the studio with them, heard what they had said there.

Stef had not mentioned Dale since that last ugly scene, and Marnie had asked nothing. She had stopped asking her daughter questions long ago after accepting that she would not get a satisfactory answer. But Stef had never appeared respectful of Dale, or any other man in her life.

Tony didn't stay long that evening. When he pulled on his jacket to leave, Marnie said, “Next week, Sunday, please come to a real dinner. Van and her little boy will be here. I'd like you to meet her.” Smiling, she added, “She'll be here through spring break and she'll sleep for the first two days, but by Sunday evening she'll be conscious.”

“Thanks,” Tony said. “I'd like to meet her. And thank you, Stef, for letting me see your art. I regard that as a privilege.”

“I'm glad you saw it,” she said.

The response was not sarcastic or self-deprecating in any way, Marnie realized, but trusting. Respect and trust, she mused that night, two qualities she had thought never to see in her daughter.

*   *   *

T
ONY
DIDN
'
T
GET
to the gift shop to see the new display until Thursday. It seemed that the days slipped away before he had a chance to realize one had come and gone and another was already upon him.

When he entered the gift shop, Marnie was helping several young people wearing green-and-yellow sweatshirts with UO letters. They were examining the kites, and he continued past them after waving to her. His glance at his own box was quick. It was open, a lace glove draped over a side, a mirror positioned in such a way that the top was clearly visible. He nodded approvingly and turned his attention to the new painting by Stef.

At first, from across the shop, he had thought it was an abstract, or impressionist, something that had beautifully combined blues in all shades and tones, from a cold iciness, to a warm, larger expanse, to muted blue-green.… As he drew nearer, a pattern emerged. There were fern leaves in pale green, a grouping of white feathers, what had to be a contrail, a wake from a swimming bird, a bigger wake made by a ship possibly, clouds.… The shapes were as alike as snowflakes, and all completely different from one another, each one exquisitely rendered, each shaft precise, each branching form unmistakably itself. The frost patterns brought memories of a car windshield in upstate New York. The longer he gazed at the painting, the more shapes became clear, overlapping, one merging into the next, each one perfect, the same general form again and again expressed in plants, in water, ice. He didn't know how long he had been trying to discern where one shape morphed into another until he became aware that Marnie had come to stand near him.