Picturing Will (10 page)

But life is strange, and years later he became reacquainted with one of Luther’s sons. The bitch remarried—step, step, stepping up the rungs of the social ladder in her Manolo Blahniks—so that when Haveabud saw her again she was the young wife of a sixty-year-old multi, standing outside Collegiate, waiting for her son (the other twin being, for some reason Haveabud never got clear, with her parents in upstate New York), with a Cuban au pair who stood at her side, looking into the swarm of children leaving school with the wide eyes of one of her relatives fleeing Castro’s Cuba. The bitch looked Haveabud up and down and then spread an inappropriately radiant smile on her face. What was
he
doing there? He was about to attend a meeting, with his third wife, about her nephew’s progress in overcoming dyslexia. (His third wife’s sister was at the Betty Ford Clinic, and Haveabud had been persuaded that he should attend the meeting as a show of support to the boy.) Luther’s son turned out to be his third wife’s nephew’s classmate. His third wife emerged from a cab then and was introduced. The bitch said that she and Haveabud were old friends and invited them to dinner that Saturday, and his wife accepted. On a run, the seven-year-old boy rushed not into the bitch’s arms but into the arms of the au pair, and a most extraordinary thing happened to Haveabud: He felt a surge of tender affection for the boy. The boy was a dead ringer for his father, so much so that Haveabud had the eerie feeling that Luther in miniature stood near him on the sidewalk. It brought back memories of the good times he and Luther had had—the shopping expeditions for clothes sure to impress, when the two of them laughed so merrily that one clerk had said, as she wrote up the sale, “You know, evening wear is not returnable.” The two of them used to toke up and go for tango lessons. They had owned, together, a ski chalet in Stowe and a house on the beach in Barbados, half a mile from the Sandy Lane. They had had drunken sing-alongs with Dolly Parton records, late at night, savoring the quality of Luther’s Blaupunkt, even learning an a cappella version of “Old Flames Can’t Hold a Candle to You” that would have friends rolling on the floor. When Haveabud had to explain to his third wife who Luther was, Luther became an eccentric artist who had encountered fleeting fortune. He did not fill her in on their personal relationship. He did warn her that the bitch was poison, but she discounted his words because she thought he was always too harsh. The bitch’s lawyer and her hairstylist had been at the dinner that night, her multi out of town on business (it gave Haveabud pause: The bitch was one of those women he would have encountered years before in the bookstore, who would have given him a bottle of champagne), and she and Haveabud’s third wife chatted merrily about house renovation, agreeing that exposed beams were as necessary for aesthetic reasons as a frame on a painting. His wife was astonished to learn, during the warmed-goat-cheese-and-grapes course, that Luther and Haveabud had enrolled in an Arthur Murray dance class. The hairdresser wanted to have a dance with Haveabud, but he declined, saying that he’d forgotten everything he’d learned. (Later that night, alone in his living room after his wife had gone to bed, he went through the dance movements.) Roederer Cristal was poured throughout the evening, and at party’s end the two women kissed the air, his third wife inhaling the bitch’s Graffiti, the bitch sniffing his wife’s lavishly applied Joy. The two would meet again, to discuss ceilings.

Haveabud disdained the lawyer’s Republican politics, but since the hairdresser—whom Haveabud had rather come to like—had given him such a rough time, Haveabud had not had to expend any energy in that direction. But the child, Spencer, he was quite fascinated by. In the boy’s bedroom were hundreds of dinosaur models, some cast in bronze and arranged on a long shelf, others standing among the palm and ficus trees. An inflated Rhamphorhynchus dangled from the ceiling fixture. (“It means ‘prow beak,’ ” Spencer said.) That one Haveabud had to be informed about, but he was able to recognize the large green Stegosaurus, and he nodded with faint recognition when Spencer told him that that particular dinosaur usually weighed almost two tons. “How long have you been collecting them?” Haveabud had asked, and the boy’s answer made it clear that he would have preferred teething on dinosaurs if they had been offered in place of teething rings. Here was a child who would not plead for a pet, unlike his third wife’s nephew, who would agitate himself into weeping fits, chanting corgi, corgi, corgi. In a frame was a drawing of a Brachiosaurus, which Spencer proudly pointed out, saying it was probably the largest animal that ever lived. “It was strictly herbivorous, too,” the boy said. “Do you know what that means?” Assuming that the boy was asking if he knew, in point of fact, what “herbivorous” meant, Haveabud nodded yes. The implications, on the other hand … But the boy had rushed to pull a massive book from the shelf. “This one is about carnosaurs,” the boy said, raising his lip and exposing his little top teeth. “They were
really
wicked.” Haveabud was startled that the word “wicked” was in a seven-year-old’s vocabulary. He wondered if at night the dinosaurs came alive for him, ranging around the room or wading into the river of his dreams.

But the au pair had come to the door for the second time, accompanied by his impatient wife, and because he had felt protective of Spencer and his reassembled prehistoric world, he quickly said goodbye and left the room to rejoin the party. He also had the distinct thought that the au pair knew he did not love his wife, an impression she later confirmed over cappuccino at The Cupping Room in SoHo. But that night he had really not planned to meet Gloria again. It was only later, thinking it over, that he realized the obvious: The au pair was his way to Spencer, and Spencer was a person he wanted to know better. How much of Luther, besides his looks, had gotten planted in the child? To his complete surprise, he began to swell with emotion, like the buddy of a soldier killed in action who must go to that person’s hometown and kiss the wife’s cheek, lift the child into his arms. It was surprising because, while Luther was indeed M.I.A., his disappearance was only into
le monde chi-chi
of Paris. But really, why bother to understand your reasons when you are so strongly drawn to something or someone? Sipping through the foamy milk, Haveabud knew there was something that he wanted, but he did not know exactly what that something was. Only that it involved Spencer, and staying on good enough terms with the bitch to have access to Spencer.

But that was the past, and right now Haveabud was sipping not cappuccino but a sour-sweet, fashionably silly blue margarita with Mel Anthis, from whom he also wanted something, and Mel Anthis’s ladyfriend, who turned out to be a more impressive photographer than he could have imagined. To get Mel, he might have mounted a show of thumbtacks and string, but this woman, whose name he had forgotten in the haze of remembering that night, several years ago, with the lawyer, and the hairdresser, and Gloria, and the person who had served the dinner, and Stegosaurus, and …

The waitress asked if he would like his salt rim freshened.

“What?” he said. The Rolling Stones were singing “Wild Horses” and a group of hyperactive partygoers had just come in and were playing musical chairs around a table too small for them.

“If you would like your salt rim freshened,” the waitress said, raising her voice slightly.

“I’ve never heard of that,” Haveabud said.

She took this for a no and went away. Mel Anthis and Jody—that was her name—were frowning at him, as if he had anything to do with the waitress coming to the table.

He shrugged, indicating his own puzzlement and surprise. He was also surprised to have heard, just as the waitress interrupted, that Jody was the mother of a small child: a boy, Will, going on six. He was entering her life when she had a son just a little younger than Spencer had been when he had reentered the bitch’s life. How would Will deal with his mother’s becoming a star? She was a very smart, very attractive woman, and her work was stunning; this one was going to be almost too easy. He would call in a favor and get some notice on Page Six. He would ask his former assistant, to whom he had advanced money so that two thugs would not break his legs for nonpayment of a gambling debt, to find some way to borrow a gold evening dress he had just seen in the window of Charivari.

He tried to get the waitress’s eye, to take her up on her offer. A little salt to cut the sweetness. Another night on the town, during which possibilities arose when you least expected them.

NINE

S
itting under an umbrella at a table outside the Empire Diner, Haveabud took in the passing parade as he waited for Jody. A limousine driver in Ray Bans sat doing a Jack Nicholson imitation, trying hard to look oblivious of passing people and traffic. He could have been shot, stuffed, and put back in the front seat, for all the life his expression betrayed. He was not going to leer at anything,
à la
Jack. He had joined the ranks of what Haveabud thought of as New York statues. Yes, they moved, but for all intents and purposes they were statues: guards at Bendel’s, doormen, hatcheck girls, out-of-towners waiting fearfully on the curb to cross the street when the lights changed. They were the startled fawns and self-contained spiritual masters, the repositories of peace in our time. Haveabud’s mother, who visited once a year just before or after his birthday, searched for these buoys the way a drowning insect rides the current until it encounters a solid object to fasten its grip upon. His second wife had had quite a talent for both amusing his mother and keeping her calm, but his present wife had no regard for a woman who chose to live without being smothered by fur or anesthetized by French aromatics, and so it had fallen to Haveabud to squire his mother around, carefully leading her on a zigzag through collapsed women with ulcerated legs and Senegalese hawking imitation Rolexes. Still, she would say to him, “Whoever would have imagined that you would want to live this way?” Amid the chaos of Jackson Pollock at the Modern she would find the simple shape of the treehouse he had once climbed into. Lifting her head to see the blinking warnings to planes on the tops of buildings she would remember carrying him outside to see the stars. His mother had an unerring ability, with her sincere questions and her well-intended assertions about the value of a peaceful life, to make him question every aspect of his existence, and remember to say his prayers at night, too. What
was
Pollock up to? Might it not have been the externalization of the body’s death wish, bleeding out, so that all the world could see, onto the canvas? How
did
Diane Arbus have the nerve to poke her camera into the face of a mental patient? If Albers’s colors vibrated, was there really so much value to that? It was all he could do to refrain from mentioning that he had considered suicide himself, that he had been emotionally, and sometimes physically, involved with other men. It made him nearly wild to see his mother, though he thought that perhaps he would have been driven to distraction no matter whom he had to tour around the city unwillingly. You simply had to march forward like the conqueror or you would be done for. The mere presence of a doubter could undercut your own confidence.

In his breast pocket was a letter from his mother, who would be coming to town in about a week. It was a half-formed thought that perhaps Gloria could be useful in entertaining her—that is, if he could think of a way to make Gloria seem just a casual acquaintance while at the same time communicating to his mother that she must not mention her name to his wife. Or even Jody—surely she would be beholden to him, but the problem was that she might be back in Charleston, or … shit, the name of the town, the name of the town, he simply could not remember. Charlotte. That was it. Or maybe it wasn’t. Charlotte was in North Carolina, and he remembered her saying that she lived near the foothills of the Blue Ridge. Charlottesville, he was thinking triumphantly when she turned the corner, leading a little dog on a blue leash. Mel’s dog? Most dog owners mentioned their pets, and Mel never had. Well, no matter, he would have been happy to see her if she had been leading Quasimodo by the hand. A pigeon flapped a few feet away, clearing the path for her black Indian moccasins (oh, how he admired the
outré
trendy) and the little dog’s clicking paws. She had style—there was no problem there. Anyone who had melded into Chelsea well enough to wear her lover’s shirt over white painter’s pants with neon-green socks and moccasins would need no coaching on how to make an appearance. Then, in a sudden jumble of thoughts as she saw him and smiled, he imagined fucking her, or, alternatively, asking her to take his mother for tea at the Palm Court. As a groundswell of desperation rose in his brain, he wondered if she was drawn to Mel for the same reasons he was: a steadfastness and dedication that had a loony spin to it, a faint suggestion that a masquerade was going on the more one revealed oneself. He was not, Haveabud firmly believed, either a drug user or—other side of the coin, and harder yet to deal with—a person who had religious beliefs. He did not seem to be reformed anything, but neither did he seem weighed down with the cynicism so chic in his profession as advisor to
artistes
. Or rather, those concerned with the fates of
artistes
. Or, to be honest, those concerned with their own fates, who trucked with
artistes
. The little dog was all bright eyes and tongue and looked as if it had lived all the sexual moments Haveabud imagined. Haveabud raised his hand to gallantly kiss hers, but she surprised him by taking his hand and leaning forward to plant a little kiss on his knuckle. Women were never what you expected, even when you thought you had no expectations. When she sat down her chair scraped the concrete. She stood again, after drawing it in toward the table, to drop the top of the leash under the chair leg.

“What is it like?” Haveabud said, searching her face. He waited for confusion to register. When it did, he moved an inch closer to her. “Being an artist but … taking photographs of weddings. We all have to keep ourselves amused, don’t we?”