As I Die Lying (16 page)

I read the card beneath the painting: "In
this work, entitled 'Landscape, Inner View,' I explored the
imbalance between symmetry and the actual chaos underlying the most
basic forms. What is a square but four lines? What is a cube but
twelve lines? What is a circle but one line connected to itself?
These principles, applied to nature and given color, make up the
world we see. But when stripped bare, we see the world as it
actually is, lineless, vague, and transient. Sale Price,
$1,975."

I was chuckling to myself when my elbow was
bumped. I looked beside me to see a young woman with a canvas
backpack under her arms, taking notes in a pocket composition book.
She studied the painting as if there were actually something to
see, then wrote in the notebook, her jaw clenched in
concentration.

She wore a too-round brown felt hat with a
floppy brim, and her hair stuck out underneath like straws of
toasted amber. She had thick, earnest eyelashes and her eyebrows
were poised on her forehead as if they were frozen in a constant
inquisitive stare. Her mouth was a red primrose, dewy and delicate.
Her cream-colored wool sweater was rolled up at the sleeves,
setting off the healthy tan of her skin. Loverboy twitched but I
battened down his hatches.

She spoke without looking at me. "What's so
funny?"

There were other people in the gallery, but
we were alone in this corner, twin victims of the garish painting.
Its ugliness shone like a painful light.

"Just admiring the coming wave of great art
in America," I said. Or maybe I was mouthing a mix of Bookworm’s
intellectual aloofness and Loverboy’s smart-assed seduction.

"And you find it funny?" She bent over her
notes.

"Well, I must give it points for sheer
brass."

"Brass? I don't see that color." Her nose
wrinkled prettily as she looked at the painting. Little Hitler
wanted to slap her, Loverboy wanted to…do that thing Loverboy
did.

"'Color is mere absence of non-color,'" I
said with mock gravity, perhaps quoting some great painter. It
should have been a famous quote, if it wasn't. I'd have to ask
Mister Milktoast later.

"If it's non-color, then you
can see it even when it's not there," she said mock-seriously, then
looked into my eyes. I drank greedily of the dark rings of her
irises, green rings flecked with gold that glittered like sapphires
in a seedbed. My face,
our
face, must have been too hard, too stern and
uninviting, because she looked down.

Her bright lips curved into
a tiny
moue
, the
primrose folding up as if touched by winter’s first snow. Her
cheekbones were high and finely sculpted by fingers far more
feathery than those of Michelangelo. Her eyelashes fluttered like
dark quick moths as she gazed at the floor.

"You're not the artist, are you?" I asked,
suddenly too much aware again of my own brutal insensitivity. And
of those inside my head, who might burst out at any moment like
lunatic extras from an old Bette Davis movie.

"No, but I'm a friend of the artist. I'm
taking notes for a class. I'm going to write a paper on her
work."

I looked at the canvas, saw a black "x"
scrawled in one corner. "She's a minimalist when it comes to
signatures," I said, pointing.

"That's short for Xandria, which is short for
Alexandria. Pretty cool, isn't it?"

"She's an American original, even down to
leaving the price tag on the canvas and painting right over
it."

"That's her statement that materialism
ultimately pervades all artistic endeavors." She smiled, perhaps
playing me like a sport fish that had a barbed hook in its mouth. I
liked what the smile did to her face. I hadn't known many smiles.
Loverboy leaped from the dark waters like a trout on a line but I
reeled him back into the Bone House.

"So, what do you see in this thing? I mean,
between the lines, of course," I said. I was enjoying playing the
critic, even if I didn't own a black turtleneck or rakishly cocked
beret, or even a blog for that matter. I had stewed in my own
soiled juices too long, wearing isolation as insulation. I had been
on a few dates since I'd been in Shady Valley, and had a few casual
acquaintances sprinkled among the bookstore regulars whom I
sometimes joined for lunch. But not enough contact to feel
connected to the human race. Going to the movies or library or art
shows were my sole escapes from my own unpleasant company.

But you know what they say: wherever you go,
there you are. And there they are.

Just being close enough to smell the faint
soap on her skin was as invigorating as standing under a silver
waterfall. Sally’s bubble-gum breath, Hope Hill’s hair, Virginia’s
leather jacket, Mother’s bourbon, all the feminine scents I’d come
to know where subsumed by this new Bethness. I tried to think of
mindless banter, to dredge up thoughts from some pool of wit,
anything to keep the music of her voice filling my ears. Or maybe
it was Loverboy, now jittering in my chest like a slam dancer on
amphetamines.

Her voice played on. "See how these stick
figures cower in insignificance against the sweeping vista of
nature? That portrays the futility of human endeavor as well as the
artist's own realization of the futility of her own work. The
artist's failings are displayed proudly, almost flagrantly, yet not
without a certain humility."

"Ah, self-flagellation is flaunting the
obvious. And these color schemes that look like they were lifted
from the interior of a 1950's diner?" I asked.

"Reality as fabrication, an artificially
colored environment, nature as plastic plants and wax fruit."

"Did the artist tell you all of this?"

She hugged her notebook to the attractive
curve of her chest and looked from the painting to me. "I'm working
on a Masters in Art Theory. I can do this kind of stuff in my
sleep."

With thoughts like that, who could ever
sleep? "So you take this stuff seriously."

"Everybody's a critic. Most do it for free,
but I'm going to do it for a living. Or else teach paste-eating
first graders how to cut construction paper."

"Are you an artist yourself?"

"I've done my time, a few miles of charcoal
scrawls and a dozen pounds of zinc-plate etching, but you know the
saying about 'Those who can't, teach'?" She smiled again, forming
cute lines at the corners of her mouth. Real lines, not Xandria's
invisible ones. "What about you?"

"Me? An artist?"

My art was casting myself in misery as if it
were bronze. Looking in the mirror as a self-portrait of the artist
as satire, the artist as mud-eyed madman, the artist as inside
joke. My life's work was a study in flesh, its cravings and pains,
splashed in crimson on the canvas of the past. My masterpiece to
date was a Father-carving, done in material so much more
unforgiving of error than granite or wood.

"No, I'm no artist. Just another unpaid
critic, I guess."

"So, do you want to meet the artist?"

"The mind behind the masterpiece?
Certainly."

"The mouth behind the mind is now in the
house."

The artist and her entourage entered through
the gallery's double doors. The artist was a tall umber-skinned
woman with a wide forehead and dark, piercing eyes. Her hair was
corn-rowed tightly against her head, and a half-dozen earrings
jutted from her left ear. She wore white coveralls, the better to
show the multicolored stains that proclaimed her an artist: watery
turquoises, weak lavenders, and poignant grays. She walked with an
air of regal arrogance, an African empress.

At her sides, crowding her like cryptic
bookends, were two teenaged twin boys dressed entirely in black.
They both were gaunt and wore too much makeup. The one on the left
had a bright red scarf tightened around his scrawny neck and his
eye shadow made him look like a malnourished raccoon. The right
bookend had a bad complexion that was threatening to erupt under
his mask of whiteface. I could almost hear their bones rattle as
they walked.

"Hi, Beth," the artist said, stepping toward
us. The twins hung in the shadows, as if the spotlights over the
paintings might turn them to dust. Xandria didn't seem overjoyed to
see either Beth or me. She acted as if she was rarely overjoyed
about anything. "Come to the show, I see."

"I said I would. Looks like you've got an
audience," Beth said, nodding at the people at the other end of the
gallery. "And groupies," she added, lowering her voice and glancing
toward the twins.

"Them boys don't know much about grouping.
Most of their action is with each other," Xandria said. "And who
are you, white boy?"

"I'm Richard," I said, extending my hand. She
looked at it as if it were a drop of blood. Beth looked away, back
at the painting, the hideous "Landscape, Inner View."

"You a critic?" Xandria asked.

"No, just an art admirer."

"Well, what you think?"

"The truth?"

"Hey, man, this ain't no
wine-and-cheese affair here. I hang these pieces of shit on the
wall and put whatever ridiculous price on 'em that I feel like at
the time. Last year, some blue-haired bitch from Charlotte came up
for an exhibit, and the next thing I knew I was a 'discovery,' what
she called in the newspaper 'a contemporary genius, a master of
Zulu urban angst.' Before that, I was just a painter, now I got to
have
attitude
. I
got to be a nigger. I got to be an oppressed bitch. Plus I got to
put up with your cookie-dunkin’ horseshit, too?"

Beth was laughing behind her hand.

"Hey, girl. Is this here your friend?"
Xandria said, pointing at me.

She shrugged. "I just met him myself. He
really likes your work."

I was caught off guard, but Mister Milktoast
worked the pulleys and wires so that I nodded in response.

"Well, get in line, home fry, and ketchup.
You're going to write me up nice in that paper of yours, ain't you,
Beth? Say I cussed and shit?"

"Yeah. Richard's helping me. He's already
given me some fresh insight. What was it you were saying, Richard?
Something about 'an American original'? And something about
pretension?" Just hearing Beth say my name was a sweet note, even
with the sarcasm.

"Oh, Lord, do I got
pretension
?" Xandria drew
back in mock horror. She dropped her street accent, which
apparently had belonged to a stage character—something to which I
could relate. "Put that in the paper, Beth. Your supercilious
friend just might get you an 'A' if you listen to him. Now,
pardon moi
, because I see
some suits down there at the other end who look like trust-fund
liberals who just can't go home without 'a street-wise rendering by
an African-American visionary.' Politically correct guilt keeps me
in mineral spirits and Chardonnay and Virginia Slims."

"Xandria, you're nuts," Beth said.

"'Nuts' sells, girl. And
Richard—it's a real pleasure to meet you. And you're in the game.
Maybe I'll get you to write the little placards for my next show.
And I might even lay off the asshole artist persona next time.” She
shrugged. “Maybe not.
Ciao, mon
amie
."

Xandria brought her hand up near her chin and
fluttered a wave of good-bye. Then she adjusted her "artist's
face," stuck out her lower lip and narrowed her eyes, and slouched
over to meet the adoring masses. Her bookends followed ten feet
behind, as if searching for crumbs she might drop.

Beth put away her notebook. "I could say some
bullshit about life imitating art, but that's been done to death. I
suppose this is where I say 'So long, it was nice to meet
you.'"

"And we turn and walk away, and maybe you
look back and maybe you don't,” I said. “And maybe we run into each
other somewhere along the line, at the next great art show. Maybe
one of us will be a nude model."

She looked at me, her face clear and wide and
fearless. "You talk crazy. Like you’re writing a book. And maybe
you'll remember my name."

"Beth."

"Except maybe we never meet again, and
someday you'll take your wife and kids to the park, and you'll look
out over the landscape, inner view, or maybe up at a cloud and see
some invisible lines. Then you'll remember me, maybe even see my
face in your mind, the features fuzzy and out of place, in the
wrong proportions but close enough. And you'll think to yourself,
'I wonder whatever happened to what’s-her-name.'"

"Beth." I laughed, strange music in my
head.

"Or maybe you go on the rest of your life and
never think of me again."

"Or maybe I
do
think of you. Or maybe
we don’t meet until the next life or two."

The crowd at the end of the
gallery may as well have been a thousand miles away. I felt as if I
were on an island with no one else but Beth. I don't know why I
felt so comfortable with her. Maybe it was Mister Milktoast oozing
his harmless charm. Or maybe it was that black thing that
flickered
sometimes in my head like a
serpent's tongue. Maybe somebody in the Bone House kitchen was
playing with the chemicals again.

"I don't play 'what if.' Would you like to
join me for a cup of coffee?" she asked.

My heart froze and my breath stalled in my
lungs. The Bone House shook with the jumping of my inmates. No,
this wasn't Virginia or Sally Bakken or Mother. Did every woman
have to measure up or down to such stained ideals? Did every woman
have to be either an angel bitch or virgin whore or a way to get a
dollar’s worth of candy or make the bedsprings squeak? And this was
just an afternoon cup of coffee, not a commingling of souls or a
remake of “Romeo and Juliet” or another chapter in my
autobiography.