Seven Kinds of Death (2 page)

Out, she thought clearly, and yanked the curtain closed. She felt as if the decision had been there for more than two years, but she had not found the words to tell herself what it was until that moment. Now it seemed so simple. One word, that was all. Out. Dawn light edged the curtain when she finally fell asleep.

“He’s wonderful,” Toni said the next day. “You said best seller and I kept thinking of those other books you loaned me, you know, best sellers. But this is different.”

“I know.”

“He understands everything,” Toni went on, oblivious. “He knew how to put the questions, the answers he was after. He knew.”

Victoria watched her, the sparkle that had come to her eyes, the animation in her face; she listened to the excitement in her voice as long as she could bear it, and then said, “Come to the office before the end of April and I’ll introduce you to him. It has to be before the end of April. Will you be on your feet by then?”

Toni counted quickly, then nodded. “Five weeks. Oh, yes! Victoria, how can I thank you?”

“For what, for heaven’s sake? It’s an introduction, not a betrothal.”

“It’s more than an introduction,” Toni said in a low voice. “It’s more than that. You know what you said about that fat man in the dining car? He was right. Being in the right place at the right time, meeting the right person, something arranges things like that. Fate. Karma. Whatever.” She almost added, or a prankster god toying with you. She still felt herself to be on a string, pulled this way and that, with no choices, but now it felt wonderful, even if a little eerie. She said, “If I hadn’t had the accident, I wouldn’t have taken the train. If I had got the job, I’d be in San Francisco right now. But I wasn’t meant to be there. We had to meet, and now I have to meet him. That’s what Paul Volte understands. That’s what he gets people talking about, and you feel as if, as if… it’s as if someone managed to look into your head, into your heart, your soul even. Talking with all those other people, he could have been talking with me, making me say things I never dreamed of saying out loud. Things that are just right. I can’t explain it, but he knows what it’s like.”

“Possession,” Victoria said. “That’s what he was talking about in the book all the way through. Fanaticism. Absolute egomania. An acceptance that the artist is the tool without choice.” When she became aware of the anger in her voice, she stopped speaking.

Silently Toni nodded. Her face had become set in a curious expression, withdrawn, distant. For a moment her exhilaration was like an adrenaline rush of fear; for this moment she felt she could choose after all. Right now, this instant, she felt, she could still say no.

Victoria stood up, shaking her head. “You’ll meet him. Give me a call at the office before the end of April.” What she had not added, something Paul’s book said distinctly, was that the truly gifted artist was owned by a jealous muse that would give success with one hand and snatch away happiness with the other. He had written it, she thought then, but did he believe what he had written? She did not know, and not knowing, and having no way of learning the truth made her more determined than she had been the night before. Out, she said to herself again. Out!

At lunch the next day, gazing moodily at the flooded fields of Iowa, gray and unquiet water in every hollow, every flat place as far as she could see, and if not standing water, then mud, drowned shrubs and trees, she realized that she had done what she had to do; she had made her decision. Now she could leave the train in Chicago and fly home.

She went to Toni’s room to tell her goodbye, and made her a present of all the books, even Paul’s. Later, in Chicago, she took a cab to O’Hare and by ten that night she was in her own apartment.

It was Friday of the last week in April when Toni walked haltingly into the anteroom of
New World Magazine
at four in the afternoon. She was approaching the reception desk, carrying a large canvas bag that she managed awkwardly; it was heavier than she had realized, the walk was longer, her leg weaker. Then she saw Victoria coming toward her.

“Hi. Good to see you on your own feet,” Victoria said. She waved to the woman behind the desk, took Toni’s arm, and reached for the bag. “Let me. Hey, what’s in there? This way.” She led Toni around the reception desk, through a doorway, into a narrow hall. Everything looked old and threadbare, as if the building had been decorated back in the thirties and not touched again since. Carpeting on the floor was worn, with holes before some of the doors; molding that was almost to Toni’s shoulders was chipped here and there, with an undercoating of brown paint showing through the top layer of tan.

They passed an open door beyond which was a room that looked to Toni like chaos: long tables were piled high with papers, several people were talking in loud voices, one woman was holding up an oversized color print. Victoria continued to lead her to an elevator that creaked and groaned its way to the fourth floor; they went down another corridor as shabby as the first one, and finally into a small office, barely big enough for both women. Victoria left the door open and moved behind the desk, leaving room for Toni on the other side. In here were cartons, most of them taped closed, a few not quite filled, stacks of papers, manuscripts in piles, a wall of shelves, nearly empty, and on a narrow window sill three pots of pink geraniums.

“Home,” Victoria said. She put the heavy bag on the desk on top of some papers, and surveyed Toni with a critical eye. “You look fine. How’s it going?”

“Wonderfully,” Toni said. “I got a lawyer, and he’ll get me enough to live on for a year, he says. Maybe he will. And two different insurance companies are paying my bills, the doctors and everything. I… I have something for you.” She opened the bag and, using both hands, carefully removed an object wrapped in a dish towel. She set it down and took the towel away. Another bas-relief, this one life-sized, of Victoria’s face. It was done in a streaky blue-green soapstone.

“Good God!” Victoria breathed. “It’s… it’s very beautiful. Too beautiful.” She touched the stone, then let her fingers trail over the surface, over the cheek, the forehead. The stone eyes were downcast, the expression introspective, somehow sad. Her fingers lingered over the smooth face that was pleasantly cool. “Toni, it’s wonderful. Thank-you.”

Toni nodded mutely. Too idealized, she knew. Too beautiful. Not quite right, but she didn’t know how to make it more right. Suddenly, perversely, she wished she had not brought it, not yet, not until she was better, until she knew how to get it right. Her hands were clenched painfully; she wanted to weep because it wasn’t right yet.

“Well, come on. I’ll bring this. Paul’s office is on this floor, not far.” Victoria picked up the stone carefully and they went down the corridor. She stopped before a partly open door, took a breath, then called, “I’ve got the artist I wanted you to meet. Are you decent?”

The door was pulled open and Paul Volte moved aside to admit them. He was tall and almost too thin, like a marathoner; his hair was gray, and his eyes a bright, sparkling blue. Although he glanced at Toni, and at the stone, Victoria was the one he looked at with a yearning so visible, so unconcealed, it was painful to witness. Victoria made the introduction.

He shook Toni’s hand, and looked more carefully at the bas-relief when Victoria put it down on his desk, then nodded. “Nice,” he said. “Very nice.”

Toni’s eyes burned more fiercely than before.

“Well, I’ll leave you two to get acquainted,” Victoria said. She had not looked directly at Paul, and did not now. She lifted the bas-relief and turned toward the door. “I’ll give you a call in a couple of weeks,” she said to Toni. “This is my last day here at the magazine, then off for a little vacation, and back to a new job. Busy time. Toni, this is one of the nicest presents I’ve ever had. Thank you so very much.” She left the office.

Toni started to follow her. “I’m sorry,” she said without any clear idea of what she meant.

Paul Volte was staring at the empty doorway. Abruptly he looked at Toni. “Can you make another one? Just like it. I’ll buy it.” The sparkle had left his eyes; he looked old; his voice had become harsh.

Slowly Toni nodded. She had read and reread his book many times; she had even bought a copy and read that to see if there were differences. She could quote long passages. In her head she quoted one now:
People think of it as a gift, and they’re wrong. It isn’t like that. A gift implies something freely given with no thought of reciprocation, nothing is asked in return. This is not a gift; it is a trade. It’s as if this something promises success but at a price. With the first success, the death of a pet. Then of a parent perhaps, or a lover. On and on until you don’t dare love again. You don’t dare.

TWO

As soon as Toni arrived
at Marion Olsen’s house in the lush countryside of Montgomery County, Maryland, she knew she would not stay more than politeness demanded. Since Paul Volte had acted as if this were Mecca or something, and she felt obligated to him, she had to do this much. If he was trying to help her, and believed that Marion Olsen could help her, she would be able to say she had tried it. The problem was that Marion Olsen was about the ugliest woman she had ever seen, the coarsest, almost brutal, with a harsh, husky voice, and a peremptory manner that made Toni cringe. Toni was afraid of her.

“Is it Antoinette?” Marion demanded, surveying her as she got out of her car. She had come off a porch to meet Toni.

“Antonia,” Toni said, taken aback. Marion Olsen was a large woman, looming over her like a dream menace, with ropy muscles in her arms, hands like a stevedore’s; she was dressed in black sweatpants and an oversized black T-shirt that reached nearly to her knees. She wore sandals, no socks; her feet were dirty. Her hair was long, streaked with gray, tied back with a string. She glanced inside the car, at the boxes of artwork that Toni had crammed in beside her suitcases, and other boxes of her personal things. A mistake, Toni knew; she should have brought only enough for one night.

“I’d be Toni, too,” Marion said. “Antonia ended up with what, nine, ten kids, living in a hole in the ground? So much for that. Come on in.” They started to walk toward the house, and she asked, “What’s wrong with your leg? Can you do any work?”

Toni bit her lip, then answered in a measured voice, “I am quite capable. I broke it, but it’s almost healed now.”

“Well, I hope it is. You’ll sleep upstairs, and there’s always garden stuff that needs doing. This used to be a little farmhouse,” Marion said. “We’ve been adding to it right along.” They entered by a side door that opened directly into a very large workroom with a smaller studio angled off it. Several people were in the studio working, men and women in jeans, one woman lying on the floor with her feet on a chair, hands behind her head, a man sitting cross-legged on a cushion playing a mouth organ badly. Marion did not introduce anyone, but waved and led Toni on through to a hall, past a bathroom, another room that might have been a breakfast nook but was actually an office, she said, although it looked like a dinette. Kitchen, pantry, dining room, several halls that just made it all more confusing. At the other end of the original core of the house a huge living room with a fireplace big enough to walk into had been added; a library or television or music room adjoined it. That room seemed to serve all purposes. The additions attested to various levels of skill of the builders, none of them as good as the people who had constructed the original building. The floors of the additions were wide planks; the original floors were lovely oak. The new walls were drywall with inept taping that was peeling here and there; the original walls were well plastered. It was like that throughout.

Some windows had leaded glass, others did not quite close because they did not hang perfectly straight.

But everywhere there was artwork: stone sculptures, wood pieces, bronze, iron, copper. … They were on every flat surface, on the floor against the walls—abstract pieces, representational pieces, some that reached the ceilings, others no bigger than her hand. Every shelf was jammed with art, every table, the top of the piano in the television room; pieces lined the staircase, mobiles hung before windows…

Upstairs, Marion said, were six bedrooms; Toni would share a room with Janet Cuprillo, who was out somewhere or other right now. Abruptly she left Toni and started to talk to a youngish man about a statuette he was holding. She appeared to forget Toni completely.

“Look at that line,” Marion said. “Get one of the girls to model for you. You just don’t contort muscles like that. You need the tension in her as a whole-body, whole-person tension, not in particular muscles… What the hell? Looks like she’s got grapes under her skin.” They walked away, leaving Toni in the hall.

At dinner Toni did not say a word. She made no attempt to remember anyone’s name, since she planned to leave again the following day. Tommy, Hal, Janet… it didn’t matter. They were talking excitedly about a trip that most of them were taking in ten days—to Italy for six months or longer. Toni didn’t try to sort that out, either.

As soon as dinner was over, Marion said, “I had Willy put your pieces in the office. Let’s go have a look.”

She didn’t wait for Toni’s response, but started out the door, and after a moment Toni followed. One of the other women in the room winked at her, but it didn’t really help. She wanted to turn and run the other way; her legs felt leaden, her stomach suddenly ached, and curiously she was freezing and sweating at the same time. She should have locked the car, she thought, but rejected the notion; Marion would have got the pieces out somehow.

In the office there was a green formica-topped dinette table and several matching chairs with splits in the plastic, stuffing turned brown poking out. One wall had floor-to-ceiling unfinished wood shelves, all filled with more art objects, with boxes, glasses, a Barbie doll, a rubber frog, a wind-up bear, a mason jar filled with chopsticks… Toni’s few pieces were on the table: her bas-relief faces, several full-figure statuettes, some wood pieces she had done years before in art school, one studded with bits of colored glass.

Marion walked back and forth examining the pieces carefully; Toni gazed past her out the windows, which were grimy. This wasn’t real country, she thought, not farming country; but countryside that had freed itself from the burden of crops, and now was reverting back to forest as quickly as possible. The country she had driven through that afternoon had appeared almost empty of people; even the developments, the projects, the subdivisions without end had seemed devoid of people and preternaturally quiet. All the people had been in cars driving on the roads. And she had lost them all, she thought then. From the interstate, to the state road, to the county road, then on to a dirt road where her car was the only thing that moved. She felt as if she had journeyed to the end of the world.

Twilight had come while they were at dinner, and the shadowless world was still, the tender May leaves that had been whipping in the wind an hour earlier were quiet, as if waiting, just as she was. Not that it mattered, she told herself fiercely.

Marion touched one of the pieces of cherry wood, carved, abstract, with such a high gloss finish it could have been metal. “How long a period from this,” she asked, “to this?” Her hand went unerringly to the last piece Toni had done before Victoria’s, the face of an elderly woman who lived in her apartment building in New York.

“Eight years,” Toni said. Her voice came out as a whisper.

“Yes. You can stay as long as you like. You have the hands and skill. But do you have eyes? I don’t know yet.”

Toni swallowed painfully. “Thank you, Ms. Olsen, but I think I’ve already decided that this isn’t my sort of thing. I don’t think I would fit in.”

Marion smiled. “All right. I would never try to talk anyone into going into art seriously, never. In fact, I usually advise people to keep it as a hobby, something they can enjoy doing without pain. I advise you to do that, let it be your hobby. Amuse yourself and your friends with it. You may even sell a piece, the faces especially. That saintly woman would like that on her living room wall, don’t you think?”

Toni watched Marion’s long hard finger trace the chin of the woman’s face. The stone was a gray soapstone, very cool, very smooth. The image was exactly like her neighbor who had offered her a hundred dollars for it, a hundred dollars she certainly could not afford to part with.

“What’s wrong with it?” Toni demanded.

“Nothing. Your hands did exactly what your eyes reported. It’s your eyes that lied. I wonder if anyone ever suspected that she killed her first husband,” Marion mused, regarding the face.

Toni gasped. “She didn’t!”

“Maybe not. It was her child born without the benefit of a wedding first or a doctor, back alley stuff. She drowned it. Or maybe it was just kittens she drowned.”

“What are you talking about? You don’t even know her!”

Marion looked from the face to Toni and shrugged. “Neither do you. She isn’t real to you. People generally aren’t very real for you, are they? You invent them and your clever hands create the image you require to keep yourself safe. Stay or go, I don’t care which. If you stay, you’ll work very hard, and you’ll learn to see. It may be that you won’t like what you see and you’ll wish you had left. But until you can believe that people are real, and stop inventing them, I don’t know if you can create good art or not. You don’t have to tell me your decision. If I keep seeing you around, I’ll assume you’re staying. Janet can help you stake out studio space, if you want it. And you can put these things in your room or your car, or in your space. Or just leave them where they are.” She pulled at her black shirt and added, “I’ve got to get out of these mucky rags before Max gets home.”

“Why did you say I could come?” Toni asked as Marion started to leave.

“You know as well as I do,” Marion said. “Paul told me to. If he saw talent, no doubt it’s there. No one has a better eye than he does.” She left the room and closed the door behind her.

Toni sank down on one of the ratty chairs and stared at the gray stone face. She couldn’t remember her name. Mrs. Franklin? Mrs. Frankel? She shook her head. All her life she had pretended, and at this first meeting, within seconds, she thought wildly, Marion Olsen had seen through her pretense. People weren’t real. She had come to understand that very early. Her mother was a face on television telling everyone what had happened that day. Her teeth were capped, her hair tinted, her figure controlled by a careful diet and more carefully chosen clothes, and at home she did not look or sound like the television person. At home she had always been extremely busy, but that had not mattered since she had not been home very much. Unreal. Toni had not seen her for five years. Her father had managed a print shop until he left them when Toni was twelve. He had been three or four different people—a loving stranger with presents; a strange man with beer on his breath; a furious, swearing, cruel stranger; a pitiful, weepy, red-eyed stranger. She didn’t believe in him, either. She hadn’t seen him since she was twelve.

She remembered Victoria’s words,
too beautiful
, and Paul’s,
nice, very nice
. Paul had bought the bas-relief she had made, not because the art was all that good, she understood now, but because she had created a Victoria who was lovely and not quite real, the way he wanted her to be, the way Toni had seen her. Had invented her, she corrected herself under her breath. Victoria was not real, nor was Paul. The face of the stranger from her apartment building now looked like someone she never had seen before in her life; the woman’s name was gone, she was gone, hardly even a memory of her remained. An unreal woman.

She tried to conjure up Marion’s face, the way she always did before starting to mold the plasticine; nothing came. She could say the words that described Marion: too large a nose, a mouth too wide, deep-set dark eyes, heavy eyebrows, long graying hair. No image came with the words. She shivered. Marion refused to be created, imagined, idealized. Marion was too real already. Whenever she thought of what Marion had said, that Paul had told her to invite Toni, she shied away from all the possible reasons she could think of for Marion’s being that compliant. As far as Toni could tell Marion was not that manipulable with anyone else.

Day by day she delayed her departure. Tomorrow, she told herself. Tomorrow. She watched the others work although she did no work of her own. She listened intently when Marion critiqued a piece of work; everyone listened intently. She hung back at the group discussions. Tomorrow, she told herself again. Tomorrow.

Those heading for Italy left, and now she and Janet had private rooms; two of the men remained behind also, but still they had the group sessions, and with so few people, she felt pressured to contribute to the session both with her own work, and her critiques. The pressure did not come from Marion. She did not pressure anyone about anything. You did things or not; she never asked what you were working on, or to see what you were doing, or if you had plans for next week, next month, or next year. She was a hard critic, merciless and radiant. When she talked about a piece, Toni found herself thinking, of course, she should have seen that; it was so obvious now. Marion illuminated art in a way no one had done for Toni, and her language was earthy, never elevated, never obscure or abstract, always to the point.

Toni did only small things in clay. The others critiqued her work seriously and listened to her with concentration. But it was Marion they all wanted to hear. And Marion’s face eluded her. She watched her as she spoke, the animation that changed her from second to second, from youthful, even pretty, to ancient and cruel. She memorized the coarse features, big nose, heavy eyebrows, a slight crookedness in her grin, up on the left, down on the right side… but as soon as she was away from Marion, the face vanished from her mind and she was left with the words instead of the image.

There was a fancy party in Washington in Spence Dwyers’s gallery, to celebrate Marion’s coming touring show. The young people did not attend that one, the real party would be here at the house, and to this private party she invited Paul Volte.

Now Toni started saying to herself that she would leave after the party. She wanted to see Paul again, to thank him again, but not to show him what she was doing. What she was doing was crap, she told herself, just as it always had been. She stared at her hands with hatred. All they could produce was crap.

Claud Palance from nearby Bellarmine College brought a couple of graduate students and began to teach the others how to crate artwork for a touring show. They worked in the big barn on the property across a narrow dirt road. The barn was another studio, bigger and dirtier than the one in the house. Massive pieces of granite were strewn about; what appeared to be whole trees stripped of branches and roots were behind the barn. A kiln was back there. Inside, all the work for the tour had been gathered together; only the major piece
Seven Kinds of Death
was missing. It was in the center of the living room floor, the focus for the real party, Marion said with satisfaction when the movers safely positioned it.