The Whore's Child (4 page)

Martin whistled a few bars of “Take the ‘A’ Train.”

“—in case I need rescuing.”

Watching her cross the room, he had a pretty good idea what the sunscreen was for. She’d sunbathe on a rock, topless, in some secluded spot, while the young fellow from the ferry scrutinized her through binoculars from an adjacent bluff.
You could go with her,
he said to himself.
There’s nothing preventing you.

But there was.

From what he’d read in the brochure, roughly a third of the houses on the island had to be artists’ studios, though to the casual eye they looked no different from the other houses inhabited, presumably, by lobstermen and the owners of the island’s few seasonal businesses. All of the buildings were sided with the same weathered gray shingles, as if subjected, decades ago, to a dress code. He’d half expected to discover that Joyce had lied to him, but Robert Trevor’s studio was right where she said it would be, at the edge of the village where the dirt road ended and one of the island’s dozen or so hiking trails began. Martin had watched Beth disappear up another of these half an hour ago, purposely waiting until he was sure she hadn’t forgotten something and wouldn’t return until early evening.

Trevor’s studio was unmarked except for a tiny sign with his last name to the left of the door, which was open. Martin was about to knock on the screen door when he heard a loud crash from around back of the house. There, on the elevated deck, Martin found a large man with a flowing mane of silver hair, dressed in paint-splattered jeans and an unbuttoned denim work shirt. He was teetering awkwardly on one knee, his other leg stretched out stiffly in front of him like a prosthesis, trying to prop up a rickety three-legged table with its splintered fourth leg. Jelly jars and paintbrushes were strewn everywhere. One small jar, which according to its label had originally contained artichoke hearts, had described a long, wet arc over the sloping deck and come to a teetering pause at the top of the steps before thumping down all five, coming to rest at Martin’s feet.

He picked it up and waited for Robert Trevor—clearly this man was the artist himself—to take notice of him. The wooden leg fell off again as soon as the man, with considerable difficulty, got back to his feet and tested the table. “All right, be that way,” he said, tossing the leg aside and collapsing into a chair that didn’t look much sturdier than the table. It groaned under his considerable weight, but ultimately held. Martin saw that Robert Trevor was sweating and his forehead was smudged with several different colors of paint from his palette. There was an easel set up next to the table, and Trevor studied the halffinished canvas resting there, a landscape, as if rickety furniture were the least of his problems.

It took him a minute to sense Martin’s presence at the foot of his deck, and even then he didn’t react with as much surprise as Martin himself would have displayed had their situations been reversed. The painter nodded at Martin as if he’d been expecting him, and he did not get up. “You,” he said, running his fingers through his hair, “would be Laura’s husband.”

“Martin.”

“Right, Martin.”

“Joyce called you?”

Trevor snorted. “I don’t have a phone. That’s one of the many beauties of this place.” He paused to let this vaguely political observation sink in. “No, the sun went behind a cloud and I looked over and there you were. I made the connection.”

Okay, Martin thought. So that’s the way it’s going to be.

The sun
had
disappeared behind a cloud in that instant, and Martin thought of Beth walking along the cliffs on the back side of the island. She’d be disappointed now, lacking an excuse to sunbathe topless.

“I’m going to need that, Martin,” the painter told him, indicating the artichoke jar.

“Can I come up?” Martin asked.

“Have you come to murder me?” Trevor asked. “Did you bring a gun?”

Martin shook his head. “No, no gun. I just came to have a look at you,” he said, pleased that this statement so nicely counterbalanced in its unpleasantness the painter’s own remark about the sun.

Trevor apparently appreciated the measured response as well. “Well, I guess I’ll have to trust you,” he replied, finally struggling to his feet.

Martin climbed the steps to the deck, where there was an awkward moment since neither man seemed to relish the notion of shaking hands.

“There’s another of those jars under the table, if you feel nimble,” the man said. “I could do it myself but it would take me an hour.”

Martin fetched that jar and two others while Trevor picked up his brushes, arranging them in groupings that made no sense to Martin, then added solvent to each of the jars from a tin can. Martin, crouching low, managed to wedge the leg back in place fairly securely, then stood up.

“I didn’t mean for you to stop work,” he said, realizing that this was what was happening.

The painter regarded him as if he’d said something particularly foolish. He was a very big man, Martin couldn’t help but notice; he had a huge belly, but was tall enough to carry the weight without appearing obese. He’d probably been slimmer before, when he and Laura were lovers. Martin hadn’t doubted that this was what they were from the moment he unpacked the painting.

“The light’s about finished for today, Martin,” the other man shrugged. “The best light’s usually early. The rest is memory. Not like that bastard business you’re in.”

So, Martin thought. Laura had talked about them. First she’d fucked this painter and then she’d told him about their marriage and their lives.

“What’s that term movie people use for the last good light of the day?”

“Magic hour?”

“Right. Magic hour,” Trevor nodded. “Tell me, is that real, or just something you people made up?”

“It’s real enough.”

“Real enough,” Trevor repeated noncommittally, as if to weigh the implications of “enough.” “Well, if you aren’t here to murder me, why don’t you have a seat while I get us a beer. And when I come back, you can tell me if
my
Laura’s ‘real enough’ to suit you.”

She had arrived professionally wrapped and crated, and when Martin saw the return address on the label, he set the parcel aside in the corner of his study. Joyce had always been an unpleasant woman, so it stood to reason that whatever she was sending him would be unpleasant. She’d called a week earlier, telling him to expect something but refusing to say what. “I wouldn’t be sending it,” she explained, “except I hear you have a new girlfriend. Is it serious, Martin?”

“I don’t see where it’s any of your business, Joyce,” he’d told her, glad to have this to say since he didn’t have any idea whether he and Beth were serious or not. Still, it was something of a mystery how Joyce, who lived clear across the country, could have heard about Beth to begin with. Why she should care was another. What she’d sent him, crated so expertly against the possibility of damage, was a third, but all three mysteries together aroused little curiosity in Martin. That the parcel contained a painting was obvious from its shape and packaging, but he’d idly assumed that talentless, bitter Joyce herself was the painter.

So he’d left the package unopened for more than a week. Beth had been curious about it, or maybe just intrigued by his own lack of interest. She loved presents and received a great many, it seemed to Martin, although the majority were from her doting father, a man not much older than Martin himself. Daddy, as she referred to him, lived in Minnesota with a wife his own age, and Martin, thankfully, had never met either of them. Beth displayed little urgent affection for her parents, though her eyes always lit up when one of her father’s packages arrived. “You never buy me presents, Martin,” she sometimes said, feigning complaint, when she opened one of these. “Why is that?”

Whatever instinct prevented Martin from opening the painting in front of Beth, he was grateful for it as soon as he tore the outer covering off the skeleton of protective latticework. Seeing Laura there, just behind the crosshatched slats, he had to suppress a powerful urge to lock the front door and pull the curtains shut against the brilliant California sunlight. After she was uncrated and leaning against the wall, he’d remained transfixed for a long time—he couldn’t afterward be sure how long—and for almost as long by Robert Trevor’s signature in the lower right of the canvas. He didn’t need the signature, of course, to know that Joyce was not the painter. She hadn’t anything like this measure of talent, for one thing. For another, she never would’ve seen Laura like this. It wasn’t just his wife’s nakedness, or even her pose, just inside an open doorway, light streaming in on her, all other objects disappearing into shadow. It was something else. The painting’s detail was minutely photographic where the light allowed, yet it was very much “painted,” interpreted, Martin supposed, an effect no camera eye could achieve. Joyce would’ve gotten a charge out of it, he had to admit, when the spell finally broke. The sight of him kneeling before Laura would have covered both her trouble and the expense.

“So what was it?” Beth asked when she returned from work that evening. He’d opened a bottle of white wine and drunk half of it before he heard the garage door grind open and Beth’s Audi pull inside.

“What was
what
?” he said, affecting nonchalance.

She poured herself a glass of the wine, regarded him strangely, then held up a splintered slat from the latticework he’d broken into small pieces over his knee and stuffed into one of the large rubber trash cans they kept in the garage. Had he forgotten to put the lid on? Or was it Beth’s habit to examine the trash on her way in each evening, to see if he’d thrown away anything interesting?

“Something hateful,” he finally said, believing this to be true, then adding, “Nothing important,” as pure a lie as he’d ever told.

She nodded, as if this explanation were sufficient and holding her wineglass up to the light. “Not our usual white,” she remarked, after taking a sip.

“No.”

“A hint of sweet. You usually hate that.”

“Let’s go to Palm Springs for the weekend,” he suggested.

She continued to study him, now clearly puzzled. “You just finished shooting in Palm Springs. You said you hated it.”

“It’ll be different now,” he explained, “with us gone.”

“So, Martin,” Trevor said when he returned with two bottles of sweating domestic beer, a brand Martin didn’t realize was even brewed anymore. He’d partially buttoned his blue denim work shirt, Martin noticed, though a tuft of gray, paint-splattered chest hair was still visible at the open neck. The man sat in stages, as if negotiating with the lower half of his body. “Have I seen any of your films?”

“
My
films?” Martin smiled, then took a swallow of cold, bitter beer. “I’m not a director, Robert.”

The man was still trying to get settled, lifting his bad leg straight out in front of him by hand, clearly annoyed by the need to do so. “When I was inside, I was trying to remember the word for what you are. Laura told me, but I forgot.”

“Cuckold?” Martin suggested.

Robert Trevor didn’t respond right away. This was a man whose equilibrium did not tilt easily, and Martin found himself admiring that. His eyes were a piercing, pale blue. Laura, naked, had allowed him to turn them on her. “Now
there’s
a Renaissance word for you,” Trevor said finally. “A Renaissance notion, actually.”

“You think so?” Martin said, pressing what he felt should have been his advantage. “Have you ever been married, Robert?”

“Never,” the painter admitted. “Flawed concept, I always thought.”

“Some might say it’s people who are flawed, not the concept.”

Robert Trevor looked off in the distance as if he were considering the merit of Martin’s observation, but then he said, “Gaffer! That’s what you are. You’re a gaffer.”

Martin had to restrain a smile. Clearly, if he’d come all this way in hopes of an apology, he was going to be disappointed. The good news was that this was not—he was pretty sure—what he had come for.

“Laura explained it all to me one afternoon,” Trevor explained.

“Actually, I’m a D.P. now,” Martin said, and was immediately ashamed of his need to explain that he’d come up in the world.

Trevor frowned. “Dip?” he said. “You’re a dip, Martin?”

“Director of photography.”

“Ah,” the other man said. “I guess that makes you an artist.”

“No,” Martin said quietly. “Merely a technician.”

He’d been called an artist, though. Peter Axelrod considered him one. He’d gotten an urgent call from Peter one night a few years ago, asking Martin to come to the set where he was shooting a picture that starred a famously difficult actor. It was a small film, serious in content and intent, and for the first three weeks the director and star had been embroiled in a quiet struggle. The actor was determined to give a performance that would be hailed as masterfully understated. To Peter’s way of thinking, his performance, to this point, was barely implied. Worse, the next day they’d be shooting one of the pivotal scenes.

Martin found his old friend sitting alone in a makeshift theater near the set, morosely studying the dailies. Martin took a seat in the folding chair next to him and together they watched take after take. After half an hour, Peter called for the lights. “There’s nothing to choose from,” he complained, rubbing his forehead. “He does the same thing every fucking take, no matter what I suggest.”

To Martin, perhaps because he could focus on one thing while his friend had to juggle fifty, the problem was obvious. “Don’t argue with him. He’s just going to dig his heels in deeper, the way they all do. You want a star performance, light him like a star, not like a character actor.”

Peter considered this advice for all of about five seconds. “Son of a
bitch,
” he said. “David’s in cahoots with him, isn’t he.” David, a man Martin knew well, was Peter’s D.P. on the film. “I should shit-can the prick and hire you right this second.”

Martin, of course, had demurred. The following week he was starting work on another picture, and Peter’s offer wasn’t so much literal as symbolic, a token to his gratitude. “You just saved this picture,” he told Martin out on the lot. “In fact, you just saved me.”