The Art Student's War (29 page)

Slowly, methodically, the two of them visited the ducks, the bears, the camels. On every creature, Henry fixed the same penetrating glare. “Look at him!” Bea cried, when a bear, suddenly plump as a Buddha, sat up on its hind legs, begging for popcorn. “How cute!”

Yet cuteness evidently wasn’t what scowling Henry was seeking in the amiable animal faces around him.

They stopped to rest and Henry bought her a Boston Cooler. “Henry, tell me more about Calvin College. You really enjoyed it?”

Henry’s mouth twitched. He was about to establish a fine distinction.

“I think it was absolutely the right place for me, at the right time for me. I learned to love geometry there.”

“I liked geometry, too, especially the shapes,” Bea replied, though immediately aware of how fatuous this might sound. “Talk about geometry, Henry. If it’s not too complicated.”

“But it’s simple. Which is the greatest mystery of all.” Henry went
on: “Sometimes the mystery in something—or let’s go ahead and call it the miracle in something—simply disappears when you look closely. But this was just the opposite.”

“Yes,” Bea said.

“I’d always loved the way you can translate some little string of symbols—something as simple as
x = y
, say—into a figure on a plane. And you know what? The closer I looked, the more miraculous it became. Generally, you lose something in translations, but here nothing was lost. In all the universe, there isn’t one
x
that doesn’t fall on the line; and there isn’t one point on the line that the equation fails to cover. Then you make what appears to be a minor adjustment—you adjust a plus sign to a minus sign, say, or you raise an exponent by one—and the form doesn’t merely alter: it transforms, it blossoms, it leaps into another dimension. Your finite ellipse becomes an infinite hyperbola, your circle becomes a sphere. With every step, there’s a new sort of blossoming. And I saw—you know what I saw?”

“No, Henry. Tell me what you saw.”

“Well, it’s like the opening, the very opening verses of the Book of John,” Henry said. “You have only the Word, and yet you could say the Word begets everything. You could say, the Word is the world itself. And here was the Word again, this time as a little string of mathematical letters, and you know what? All of Creation happens anew. Do you see what I’m saying, Bea? Every time somebody writes an equation, all Creation is created. I truly believe that. If I write
x = y
on your napkin, the world is born anew. Yes, math may be
true
in this world, but it also
makes
the world. And so what does that tell us about
truth?”

“It tells us something,” Bea said.

Henry said, “It speaks of God. You remember my telling you I talked to the other soldiers about God? Well one of them was an atheist—he freely admitted it—though actually I think he was an agnostic, since he was open to persuasion.”

“I’m sure you’re right.”

“Anyway, he kept wanting me to talk about theology from the mathematical angle. He’d say, If you added up all the good scientific arguments for God’s existence, what
percentage
likelihood would you arrive at? He’d say, And if you added up all the arguments against, what
percentage
would it be? It sounds a little silly, but I eventually realized it wasn’t at all. The question maybe was naïve, but it was also brilliant. It’s precisely what the greatest, greatest mathematician—the ideal
mathematician—would accomplish. He’d find a way to quantify all the arguments and sum it up. If you
believe
in God, and you
believe
in mathematics, I don’t see how you can fail to posit the magical point of intersection where—where … Oh my—listen to me,” Henry said, and he looked both vulnerable and exultant, and Bea felt closer to him than she’d ever felt before. “I’m back in deep water, aren’t I?”

“It’s a big ocean. So you tell me.”

Henry smiled at this. And added, apologetically, “It’s all but impossible to express such things without sounding like a blockhead. To say it right, you’d have to be not only a mathematician but a poet.”

“But you are! A poet. And I have it by heart.” Bea began to recite: “‘The life I used to think of as my life—’”

An anguished look crossed Henry’s features and a quelling hand lunged forward, seizing her forearm. Bea paused, unsure why she felt so embarrassed. But Henry, too, was acutely embarrassed. Then a different sort of look dulcified his remarkable features. “You do? You have my poem by heart?” he said.

“I could prove it, Henry. If you’d only let me.”

Bea waved her hand at him, imitating his lordly gestures. Henry understood, and took this mockery well. She went on: “Silencing me with a royal wave. Honestly now. Sir Henry of Pleasant Ridge.”

Henry said, “Certain things are very hard to say, but I sometimes think they’re the only things worth saying.” He sipped his ginger ale, or would have done so if any had remained; he rattled the cubes instead. “Do you remember the first time we ever went walking? I walked you to the Woodward bus stop.”

“’course I do. You make it sound as if it were months ago, Henry.”

“Well, that was another of those mystical occasions. Remember, you were talking about art?”

“Not very articulately, I’m afraid.”

“And the light thick as cream—remember?”

“Don’t remind me.”

But Henry shrugged off her levity and self-disparagement. And in the end there was no denying his earnestness, his heavy expectant pauses.

“Yes, Henry,” Bea said somberly. “I do remember.”

What next emerged was the most roundabout and also the most extraordinary utterance the extraordinary Henry Vanden Akker had managed so far: “Well I realized then, in some objective way that had
nothing to do, finally, with my subjective state, or with anything I’ve been through this past year … The truth is, I realized that you are, as a physical presence—you are, as I say, in some absolutely objective, in almost mathematical fashion—well, that you are, Bea, without question, the most beautiful girl in the world.”

Her breath couldn’t find its way out of her throat. Then it came forward in a headlong rush: “Oh Henry, I don’t know what to say …”

In fact her words were precisely the sort of demure reply she’d been trained to make when, over the years, lavish and unexpected tributes had dropped into her lap. But this time, they were literally accurate. Up until now, Henry had never offered—not once—a true compliment about her appearance. And when he finally chose to do so, how like him it was—how wonderfully
Henry
it was—to dispense with preliminaries and plunge headlong into the wildest superlatives.

“Bea, have I let my feelings as a male influence my judgment? Perhaps. I don’t think so. But perhaps. Still, I’ll tell you something where no
perhaps
is admissible. Having watched you draw—having watched you so closely—I can inform you that you have the most beautiful hands in the world. Honestly, they’re so perfect, I don’t know whether I dare try to hold one of them.”

One of Henry’s hands, big-knuckled and yellowy pale, twitched on the tabletop. He didn’t appear to be joking or exaggerating—no, not the least little bit. And whether now, if given time, Henry would actually have reached across and taken her hand wasn’t something Bea would ever know for certain—given the way, oh so naturally, she reached across to slip her hand into his.

Slowly, Bea laced her fingertips through Henry’s, interlocking their hands, and when the bases of their fingers conjoined she experienced an internal thud-in-the-blood so potent it made her eyes water. It came with the force of a revelation: who would have guessed that, merely by taking his hand, she would feel this way? But Henry had felt it, too, and who in the world would have guessed that Henry Vanden Akker’s raw-looking eyes would well up at a simple touch?

The two of them sat in the zoo refreshment shed in silence a minute or two, sharing a single commanding pulse. When at last Henry withdrew his hand, he said something both typical of him and a little peculiar: “Thank you.”

So once more they wandered out into a world recolonized by animals: bears, lions, bison, alligators. The thrill of their hands’ coming
together continued to daze her. Oh, Bea had peered speculatively at Henry’s bony hands at times—rather homely hands, if the truth were told. Likewise, a few times she’d glanced at his thin lips and wondered about kissing him. Mostly, though, she didn’t like thinking of Henry in this way. All the more surprising, then, to have such powerful pleasures unlocked with his touch … This was all so unlike her experience with Ronny. She’d fully expected it would be marvelous to hold Ronny’s hand, to feel his kiss, and marvelous it had turned out to be. She hadn’t looked for anything so pleasurable in
Henry’s
touch.

It seemed the two of them had crossed an as-yet-unidentified threshold, and Bea was left feeling jittery and giddy and voluble, while Henry appeared inexplicably morose. Perhaps his back was bothering him.

But something more than his back oppressed him in the house of the great apes. Such an extremely peculiar, unforgettably unpleasant thing happened there …

They stood and watched a very animated chimpanzee behind a sheet of glass. He swung from a sort of hat rack, he hung upside down, he bounced off a stool on springs. There was a sign on the wall behind him: “Greetings! My name is Custard and I used to play with a spare tire. But I turned it in for salvage, as my part in the War Effort.”

Custard, the irrepressible patriot, peered out coyly from behind a wooden crate. Then he stooped low for a drink of water. He must have been ten feet away.

And then (with an altogether astounding accuracy and jetting force) Custard squirted from his mouth a stream of water, directly at the two of them. The water crashed and broke against the glass, sending Henry and Bea leaping backward—it was all so sudden!—and Bea released a little scream. And Henry, too, released a cry—a much higher sound, almost a bleat, than you’d ever expect from his measured throat.

And Custard? Custard threw back his evil skull and howled and howled. He danced—he bounced and leaped with blazing glee. From ear to ear he grinned, grotesquely. The human beings? Their backward stumbling and stunned sheepish looks—these were everything Custard had hoped for …

Truly, the creature’s joy was insufferable, and Bea and Henry fled the ape house just as quickly as Henry’s ailing back would allow. They would put the chimp behind them—but in fact there was no shaking Custard’s demented ecstasy: no ridding themselves of that smirking,
ferocious, superior, inhuman face. “Well that was something,” Bea said, when they reached the outdoors. She felt utterly humiliated, somehow, and this was new: to be
humiliated
by an animal. “I guess he doesn’t have enough to do.” She waited for Henry to answer but Henry made no reply. “It’s the sort of stunt Stevie would pull. Honestly, wouldn’t you think a monkey might behave better than my little brother?”

Bea laughed, inviting Henry to join her, but he didn’t. Henry refused to make light of the encounter. Under his eccentric hat, he stared forward as thoughtfully as he ever stared—very thoughtfully indeed.

“You can see how deep that sort of pleasure runs,” Henry began at last.

“Hm?”

“The pleasure we all take in inspiring fear.”

“Well it certainly was very startling,” Bea said.

“Bea, admit it. It was more than startling. Think about it. For just a moment, for one split second, we were terrified. And the chimp knew we’d be terrified.
Hoped
we’d be terrified.”

“Well, it was all so quick.”

“Despite the glass, we were terrified.”

Henry Vanden Akker swung his head around and squeezed her hand. “Bea, don’t you see? It runs so
deep
in us, inside the primate brain. Even a chimpanzee can feel it with extraordinary intensity.” Under the brim of his ridiculous hat, Henry’s eyes were afire: “I’m talking about the pleasure, the unholy pleasure, of inspiring fear in the heart of a stranger.”

CHAPTER XVII

Uncle Dennis seemed so much his old self—affectionate, attentive, solicitous, a little scatterbrained—that Bea immediately forgot all her earlier misgivings about this encounter. Everything would be all right.

He took her to a restaurant on Gratiot, near Eastern Market, called Uncle Danny’s. Ever since she was a little kid, Uncle Dennis had been bringing her here, presumably drawn because its name so closely resembled his own. It was the sort of silly coincidence that tickled him. He bought her a clam roll and a chocolate shake. He ordered nothing but coffee for himself. And lit his pipe.

Actually, Bea would have preferred coffee, but the moment they were seated Uncle Dennis had said, “I suppose you’ll want a chocolate shake,” and she didn’t have the heart to disabuse him. He seemed to think he was still dealing with some sort of child—not an eighteen-year-old art student.

“So tell me the latest one you’re reading,” Bea said.

“Let me see … Well in the newest one, I forget the title, the earth’s being destroyed by earthquakes. Everything’s sort of collapsing and the only escape is outer space. Different groups go up in rocket ships, carrying whatever they most value. You see, they’re never returning to earth again.”

“How dreadful.”

“Yes.” Uncle Dennis’s huge bespectacled eyes kindled with pleasure. “And there’s one old woman who brings some ancient family journal she’s never gotten round to reading. It turns out to be a chronicle of her great-great-grandmother’s journey by covered wagon across the Rockies. Pioneer stuff. And you know what? She begins to spot all sorts of peculiar coincidences, weird parallels between the wagon-train group and her own rocket-ship group. The same personalities, same problems. In fact, the parallels soon grow so uncanny, she has to wonder whether she’s caught in some bizarre reincarnation loop. Either that, or she’s going mad.”

“Is she?”

“Mm?”

“Going mad?”

“Don’t know,” Uncle Dennis said. “Haven’t finished it yet.”