Forgetfulness (16 page)

Well, he said finally, what do you think?

Oh, she said. It's beautiful.

I'm pleased, then, he said.

Do you mean that?

Oh, yes, he said. Of course.

Naturally I wonder, she said.

Why would you wonder?

You've made me look so sad, she said, and burst into tears, her hands over her eyes. She made gasping sounds as though she were short of breath.

He was astonished. That was not his intention at all, and that was not how he saw her. He reached for her and took her in his arms. She was trembling, peeking through her fingers at the portrait.

She said, White on white on white. You did that with Francisco. And that's the saddest picture you ever painted.

Look for yourself, she said. Look at the eyes you've given me.

He explained what he saw in her eyes, which was not sadness or disappointment but understanding. Sympathy, he said, and wit. At some level sympathy implied knowledge and knowledge had a melancholy aspect. He believed that was universally true, no exceptions. When you knew too much you felt a natural distress but that was something quite different from fundamental personal sadness, sadness as a trait, like blue eyes. Her distress was not temperamental but intellectual. They argued the matter all that night and the next night, and in the end there was no resolution. God, she was stubborn. So the portrait had not been a success, at least with Florette, and he never forgot the sound of her weeping, a moan that seemed to reach to the heavens.

J
UST BEFORE CHRISTMAS
Thomas received a long handwritten letter from Bernhard Sindelar, postmarked Washington. Bernhard had been called back to headquarters for a conference, a general review of current operations with special attention to methods and sources, connecting dots while they walked back the cat, a dispirited and dispiriting exercise. Morale was terrible, the fudge factory's bureaucracy nervously broken down without energy enough for rebellion. Congress was asniff, the Pentagon frightened, and the White House in deep prayer. So many of the old boys had retired that Bernhard was now the senior field man, sitting around the long table with people young enough to be his children and, in two cases, his grandchildren. "The problem here is Gulliver's problem, if you get my meaning." Still, he was able to bring the youngsters one or two items of interest, pristine material from impeccable sources, produce from Tiffany's window. They were childlike in their appreciation, Bernhard said, going so far as to offer a polite round of applause. And so there'll be no fuss about the renewal of my contract. As to the urgent matter at hand, he had nothing new to report. Several promising leads had fizzled, but one was very much alive. Not Tiffany-window produce but not dross, either. Stay tuned, Thomas. More anon. I know you're anxious but these things always take time, as you know. The goods were almost certainly still in France. No one had given up, and in time they would find what they were looking for. No doubt of that, none whatever. And when the time came they would set about doing what they did best, breaking faces, an honorable revenge for a terrible wrong. And the score would be settled. The letter ended with a long paragraph of instructions, one old friend to another. Sixty years of friendship, Thomas, so trust what I say.

It's evident to me that you're not cut out for the country. You're an urban man, a rootless cosmopolitan, as a matter of fact, wholly unsuited to the rustic life. You should sell the Schloss and head at once to the Sixth Arrondissement. It's time you kissed the dreary weather in dreary Aquitaine bye-bye. You need a time-out, Thomas. Come to London, take a cruise, go skiing, find a girlfriend, see a bullfight, attend the opera,
get out of the house.
By the way, Russ is in Tripoli but should return to Paris very soon. He wants to see you, and sends this reminder: Degas is at the Grand Palais until the end of January.

Thomas read the letter in front of the fire and when he was finished pitched it into the flames, Bernhard's standing orders. He wondered if Russ was truly in Tripoli or if Tripoli was code for Tbilisi, Timbuktu, or Trenton. Thomas never knew which parts of Bernhard's letters to believe. His friend was at heart a fabulist, living always for a glimpse of Tiffany's window, contemplating honorable revenge by breaking faces, quick to issue instructions in the certainty that he knew best what was good for you, anticipating applause. Bernhard Sindelar was a stranger to solitude and unacquainted with doubt and that was what made him a capable intelligence agent. Also, people were afraid of him, his glare and his huge hands. Thomas would have been afraid of him too, except they had been friends for so long. Even so, Bernhard's bite was much worse than his bark.

For the hundredth time that day Thomas wondered if he should buy a Christmas tree and a wreath for the front door, decorations they had always had when Florette was alive. He poured a glass of wine and went to the billiards table, selected a cue, and began to practice three-cushion shots, drastic angles. Dead men's round robin. After a while, studying the drastic angles, he was able to put Bernhard's letter and the last-paragraph instructions out of his mind. The prediction that Florette's killers were still in France was
alarming. He didn't want them in France or anywhere. He had nearly succeeded in forgetting about them altogether, as one does with unwelcome strangers who arrive unannounced, invading one's domain, troubling one's sleep. In that sense they were dream-visitors. He concentrated hard while he chalked his cue. Maybe a wreath, he thought. No tree.

After New Year's a false spring arrived in St. Michel du Valcabrère, the temperature rising to nearly 10°C. under a watery Mediterranean sky. The snow remained but here and there brown patches were visible in the fields, along with the persistent sound of running water. Each afternoon Thomas drove to a different village and sketched churches inside and out. Many of the churches dated from the Middle Ages. He had an idea he could discover the medieval rhythm of life from the altars and choirs—bare ruined choirs, according to the Bard—and the worn wood of the pews, heavy stones underfoot. The fathers had ruled things to suit themselves, in those days and later, and now the churches were relics, sparsely attended, mostly by old people. The priests were old. There was great beauty in the architecture, in the silence and the overhead space—a beauty, he concluded, of a sentimental kind, the beauty of a very old woman praying fiercely. He was unable to judge the inner beauty of men, since there were so few in church of an afternoon. Surely men had as many troubles as women but did not visit church to solve them. Thomas looked at the old women and tried to imagine them when they were young, as young as Florette when he first met her, or the model he'd lived with when he was twenty-one and struggling to discover if he had talent or merely a flair for illustration.

He thought Karen could help in the discovery and to that end listened to her comments with the attention New York collectors had given Bernard Berenson. Then it turned out that Berenson was not all he seemed to be. He knew everything there was to know about Venetian masters including the devious ways of the doges, sharp practice as second nature, and then he met Duveen. Karen knew nothing of sharp practice. She was rarely devious, and when
she was, it was inadvertent. She said that she often wished she could care about something as much as Thomas cared about his art. She said, You'll have it as long as you live, no matter what else happens to you, because you'll never use it up or wear it out. Whether that will make for a happy life, I'm not sure. Maybe not. Maybe that one thing is so large it crowds people out. And then again it's possible you can get along without them. The other people, including me. Maybe you can tell me what inspires such devotion. Believe me, I'll listen. I'm all ears. He told her that a true picture came from loving the work itself—the paint, the brushes, the canvas, the look and feel and smell of it, the space itself, negative space until you made the first stroke—confident that at a certain moment the oils would explode off the canvas, the picture revealing itself as dawn revealed the day to come, not its weather or its events but its presence. He had forgotten all that in the weeks since Florette's death and searched now to get it back, something he believed was second nature to him, his own version of sharp practice. But apparently not, and so in the afternoons of the false spring he went from church to church in search of—he supposed he would call it enlightenment. In any case, some way of beginning again.

The churches were empty but if he stayed awhile he would hear the creak of the portal and someone would enter and take a seat and begin to pray silently. Often the penitent would light a candle and then Thomas would wait for the decisive clink of a coin slipped into the metal box behind the vase full of white tapers. Of course it was cold inside the churches and noisy, too, with wind and the creaks and groans of centuries-old stone and wood. He never believed he was alone, owing to the unsettling noises. When he was far enough inside his work he believed he could apprehend souls gathering around him, scrutinizing his sketch and deciding it wasn't worth their attention; it was only a sketch, after all, something provisional. After a while his eyesight began to fail in the dim churchly light. When his fingers seized up, the cold locking his knuckles, Thomas gathered up his paper and charcoal pencils and stood, his knees stiff as wood. Lightheaded, he had to grasp the back of the pew to steady
himself. He walked to the alms box and deposited ten euros and walked out of the church and into the square, feeling every bit as old as the women he watched at prayer. The time was always dusk or near dusk and he would walk at once to the café across the street-there was always a café in the church square—and order an espresso and a pony of the local marc, firewater to chase the chill from his bones. He sat at one of the round tables and listened to the conversation that often involved local gossip and horseracing, with the usual gibes at the government. No one ever paid much attention to him, an elderly foreigner who evidently desired solitude.

When Thomas finished his espresso and marc he paid up and drove home. Often he forgot the name of the village he was in and how he got there and had to ask someone to give him directions home. Then he heard Florette's baritone laugh, rich as chocolate and as seductive. She was with him every hour of every day and he wondered how long he could live with a ghost. He began to think of her as a kind of benign god, present everywhere and visible nowhere. She was with him in the church and the café afterward and when he drove home in the darkness and later in the evening when he played solo billiards, the only sounds in the room the click of the balls and the soft thump when one of them struck a cushion. Billiards was now an essential part of his evening repertoire, along with the nightcap when he finally gave it up, racked the cue, and sat heavily in the high-backed chair that oversaw the billiards table. He used the remote to put an end to
La Bohème
and listen instead to the piano music of Art Hodes, blues in the old style. With the billiards table and the portraits, his living room had the look and feel of a men's club in London or a bar in the tropics, British India or Malaya, except it lacked ceiling fans and a white-coated barman. But as Thomas poured a glass of cognac he was remembering not the Garrick or the wide-verandahed resort hotel in Mysore but the lobby bar of the Hotel Pfister in Milwaukee, all dark wood and cocktails in large glasses. He remembered portraits of women on the walls but may have been mistaken; this was more than forty years ago. He drank beer, his father a bourbon and soda. They
were in Milwaukee on some errand, had dined together at Mader's and stopped by the Pfister for a nightcap before driving home to LaBarre. His father was upset about something. What are you going to do with your life, Tommy? What are your
plans,
boy? Yes, it was the semester he was on probation at the university. The dean had written a sharp letter and the doctor was embarrassed and irritated at the imperious tone. Thomas remembered that it was Christmas vacation and they had been shopping, a grim business because his father was so upset about the dean's letter.

Thomas said, My plans are to go to New York and learn how to draw.

My God, his father said.

I'm leaving school at the end of January. Madison doesn't have anything I want.

God, Tommy.

He said, Sorry. There's no other way. Madison's just an awful waste of my time and your money.

What are you going to live on?

I'll get a job, he said.

His father sat for a long moment looking into his glass. Jesus, he said finally. New York. Why New York?

New York has jobs, Thomas said. Restaurant jobs, driving a cab. The important thing is that New York is where the artists are. New York is where things are happening. Then Art Hodes began his set and they listened quietly for a while, neither of them speaking. His father finished his drink and ordered another and a beer for Thomas. Hodes, slender and hawk-faced, beautifully turned out in a tuxedo, was playing stride. The room filled up and they moved to the far end of the bar.

It'll kill your mother, his father said.

I don't think it will, Pop.

Well, he said, and offered a hint of a smile. Maybe not right away.

Thomas remembered laughing and touching his father on the arm. The old man could be droll.

He said, What about Bernhard and Russ?

They'll finish up, get their degree. A degree's important to them.

But not to you, his father said.

No, he said. Not to me.

And what will they do when they graduate?

Work for the government, Thomas said.

His father looked at him blankly. The government?

Yes, he said. The government. Our government. The Kennedy administration.

What do they intend to do for the Kennedy administration? It's all arranged, Thomas said.

Government work, his father said, still trying to put things together. He had never known anyone who worked for the government except the LaBarre postmaster and the local Social Security administrator, both of whom were patients of his and good Republicans. Do you mean they'll work for the government in Washington?