Forgetfulness (32 page)

Thomas pushed a button on the stereo and Billie Holiday was back on her sailboat in the moonlight, a voice filled with regret and desire; revenge would be the furthest thing from her mind. Successful revenge required the cramped discipline of an accountant and she preferred the unruly emotions of the spendthrift. She needed protection but there was none and so she sang. He threw a log on the fire and stood staring into the flames and then he threw another on for good measure. For what he was about to do Thomas needed fortification and so he poured a glass of calvados and listened to the song, true American blues, imitated everywhere in the world, never
equaled. He wondered if there was anywhere in America now where you could hear the real thing. The Mississippi Delta of course, probably New Orleans, perhaps South Side Chicago. It would be a good thing if presidents were obligated to listen to the blues in the vast formality of the White House and a good thing also if they were to drink while listening. The blues would give them an idea of the limits of human ambition and the consequences of righteous action, an appreciation of grief and ecstasy and inscrutable providence and the certainty of betrayal, along with the imprecision of memory and often its loss altogether. Truth and falsehood were next of kin. That was what Lincoln knew.

Billie Holiday was singing parlando, one of the late songs when she had lost her voice and had only her nerve in reserve. Thomas threw the last of the calvados into the fire, where it flared orange. Next, delaying matters still further, he backed away and racked the billiard balls with the triangle. He stood with the long stick in his hand surveying the field. When with one violent thrust he broke, the eight ball fell into the side pocket and the cue ball in the corner. He took this as an omen; he had hoped for a coup and now he was twice scratched and the game not fairly begun. He laughed out loud, concluding that he had committed the billiards equivalent of original sin.

Thomas put away the long stick and poked the fire. Then he stepped slowly to the coat closet and reached inside for the cardboard tube he had taken with him from Le Havre, the drawing of Florette inside. But when he gently shook the tube the bastinado fell out first, and he remembered slipping it inside as an afterthought, an appalling souvenir of the afternoon in Antoine's loft. He put the bastinado in his pocket, removed the Canson paper with its glassine wrap, and brought it to fireside. Looking at it critically, he decided he had drawn too quickly but even so it was an accomplished piece. He did not know what Florette was thinking but he thought he could hear her voice, a whisper of encouragement. The orange firelight cast strange shadows and distorted things. He barely recognized the portrait as his own work. But he was not himself when he
drew it. He weighed the Canson paper in his hands and with a sudden motion placed it on the flames and watched it smolder, then flare, burning from the inside out. In ninety seconds it was ashes. Thomas adjusted the fire screen and waited one minute more to assure himself that everything was secure. Then he drew the bastinado from his pocket and dropped it on the fire, where it disappeared into the ashes. The rubber gave off an unpleasant smell. The smell followed him across the room and up the stairs into his bedroom. He checked the elephants one by one and got into bed and the smell still lingered.

He could hear, but faintly, Billie Holiday's parlando downstairs. The melody was unfamiliar to him but above the singer's voice he could hear Prez Young's soaring saxophone and Teddy Wilson's evenhanded piano, so surely the piece was from the standard repertoire. Thomas was wide awake, his thoughts tumbling, trying and failing to identify the song. Thinking hard about the future, he had an idea it was time to visit America.

H
IS FIRST MONTHS
in America were marked by irresolution, a fate as familiar to him now as the drawn face in the mirror. He had found equilibrium, a fine balance that allowed him to live but allowed nothing more. His past life seemed to vanish bit by bit and the future was a blank slate, leaving the precipice of the moment. He did not know where he belonged or if he belonged anywhere. Thomas contrived a nickname for himself, Mr. Parlando, because he was talking his way through the song. In New York he stayed for a time with Russ Conlon, lunching with Russ at his midtown club, visiting galleries in the afternoon and going to the theater at night. More often than not he fell asleep during the third act, and when he awoke suddenly he was unable to remember acts one and two. Russ introduced him to attractive widows but the attractive widows seemed to have more troubles than he did. Every time they opened their mouths he expected a dead husband to pop out like a jumping jack; and his mouth was full also. When they asked him about Florette he avoided answering or answered falsely and that annoyed them because Russ had told them the score. Does he think we don't understand death, for heaven's sake? Thomas seemed to them one of those men who trusted no one, a man in hiding. One night at dinner the conversation turned to the uses of torture and peremptory detention of persons suspected of terrorism, and one of the widows had said, Whatever it takes. Thomas said, Where does it end? The widow said, It doesn't matter where it ends. What matters is that it stop. And if you have a better solution, please tell me what it is. Her eyes filled with tears and for a moment Thomas suspected that her husband had had offices in the twin towers. That was not true. But
she had been nearby on the morning of September 11 and had seen the bodies tumbling from the heights of the buildings and she still had nightmares, terrible nightmares, and for that reason demanded action, the more severe the better. She said, There were many victims of nine-eleven and not only those who died. We deserve satisfaction, too.

You of all people should understand that, Thomas. Thomas said he understood, but he didn't, quite. You've seen them face to face, haven't you? Thomas said he had. They don't deserve to live, she said. He did not reply to that. What did they look like? Most ordinary, Thomas said.

The conversation moved along to something less contentious, dessert, coffee, the settling of the bill. The widows were sympathetic but frustrated and concluded Thomas was damaged beyond their repair; and they were not eager for nurse work in any case.

Thomas was scarcely more communicative with Russ. Mr. Parlando didn't know how he felt. He didn't feel. He had lost the rhyme and melody of feelings and meantime he existed on his precipice, mindful always that there were many people in the world much worse off than he. To the extent there was a bright side, that was it. Thomas believed he had made a mistake in Le Havre but he didn't know what it was. He imagined the mistake was some form of Lebenslüge. But what was the lie that allowed him to live? He wondered if the lie was his refusal to have blood on his hands. So the interrogation at Le Havre, too, was unresolved and marked by doubt.

After a fortnight in Russ's flat he took a suite in a downtown apartment hotel and began to sketch again but without conviction. He attempted a series of self-portraits but they were not successful, owing to his minimalist approach, five or six long looping strokes; he was not Matisse. His material was somewhere else. He had no idea where. Thomas thought that going to America was a mistake, as whims almost always were. Because you were born in a country didn't mean you had a connection to it. It was only a birthplace. The
country was so foreign to him that it might as well have been on another planet. But here he was, and he decided at last that he should make an attempt at reconciliation. Thomas rented a car and drove west to Wisconsin, his apprehension growing with each mile. LaBarre was confounding, like visiting the abandoned set of a familiar film and finding that the characters you knew and loved had vanished. Mr. Rick and Miss Ilsa were long gone long with Ferrari and the piano player Dooley Wilson and the crazy Russian and all the others. The house he had grown up in had been demolished to make room for a two-story apartment house called Covington Court. The lawn at Covington Court was unmowed, the garbage cans upended in the street. Cats were round and about but the sidewalk was empty. Thomas stayed at a Best Western near the LaBarre Mall, wandering the streets for a day, arriving in late afternoon at the police station. Russ had told him that a high school classmate had become chief of police. Thomas wanted to buy the chief a drink and catch up on the news of the town but the desk sergeant told him that was impossible, Chief Phillips had taken his retirement five years before and moved to Florida for the tarpon. After a few minutes of aimless conversation the desk sergeant became suspicious. What did you say your name was? What are you doing here? The sergeant sat in a swivel chair behind heavy glass and spoke through a microphone. I don't remember any Dr. Railles. That name is not familiar to me at all. You better be on your way, the desk sergeant said.

And put that out.

No smoking in this facility.

Jesus, the sergeant said. Everyone knows that. Secondhand smoke. Biohazard.

Where are you from, anyway? France, Thomas said.

Well, the sergeant said, you better get back there, then.

Thomas left for Chicago the following morning, stopping in Milwaukee for lunch at the Pfister. He thought the bar looked the same but couldn't be sure. He had no trouble recalling the conversation with his father forty-five years before and the promise of a thousand dollars to ease his passage to New York. He ate a club
sandwich and read the Milwaukee paper, filled with news of the war, two local boys killed in Fallujah, assailants unknown. He read every word of the account, then put the paper aside, wondering if he should visit his two portraits at the Milwaukee Art Museum. No, he thought, wait for Chicago. Thomas knew no one in Chicago but put up at the Drake in a room with a view of the gray lake. At dusk he stood at the window and looked at the water, flat as a billiards table. Not a painterly lake, he thought, because it lacked depth. The weather was fine and in the morning he strolled down Michigan Avenue to the Art Institute. When he inquired after his portrait,
Young Woman in a Fur Hat,
he was told it was not on display. At once Thomas expected the worst.

Deaccessioned?

No, the clerk said. In storage.

That's a shame, he said. I wanted to see it. I've come a long way. I've come all the way from Wisconsin. Are you a friend of the artist? I am the artist, Thomas said. Oh dear, the clerk said.

Thomas imagined the fur-hatted woman, a friend from Barcelona days, in a dark closet somewhere in the basement weeping bitter tears over her exile, the Spanish diaspora reaching even to an air-conditioned basement in Chicago. She was a high-spirited señorita who adored the Catalonian sunlight and often sunbathed on the balcony of her apartment overlooking the Ramblas. He had drawn her in a fur hat on the balcony on a chilly sunlit morning in January. Thomas took his time in the uncrowded rooms of the Art Institute, avoiding the room where
Young Woman in a Fur Hat
had hung. But when he came upon the room he could not resist a peek and was unhappy when he saw a de Kooning in its place. Thomas enjoyed himself in the soft light of the museum, revisiting many of the rooms and standing for minutes at a time before his old favorites. He was looking at the edges of canvases, defining the limits of the idea. There were many scenes from the south of France and from Aquitaine, too. He recognized many of the villages and rivers and
mountains and the people who inhabited them, and inhabited them still. French visuals, human and topographical, had not changed in centuries. He paid serious attention to American artists but was always drawn back to the Europeans. It turned out that dead European impressionists were most companionable and the plump girl in the haystack reminded him of Florette.

Thomas returned to New York but after a month decided that equilibrium did not come easily in the city that never slept; even at five
A.M.
it did not have repose. He bought a car and took trips out of the city, trying to find a suitable venue which, if asked, he would have been unable to define. In due course he settled in the state of Maine, attracted by the raw light and habitual fog. He rented a house on an island north of Portland, the house situated two miles from the village on a low, rocky bluff with a view of the sea. Ferry service to the mainland was infrequent but dependable. He rarely traveled to the mainland in any event. The house was small, two bedrooms up, one big room down, including the kitchen. Half the big room was given over to his easel and canvases. The ensemble reminded him of the studios he had rented in New York more than forty years before, except there was no carnival outside the windows. At night there were no sounds at all except the harbor foghorn and the occasional stutter of a fishing boat entering port or leaving it. At night the old house creaked, seemed to strain at its moorings, but these sounds were companionable, compatible with silence. In this uncomplicated zone of well-being Thomas had the idea that anything could occur, including the miraculous.

He lived a spare life, occupied mostly by his work. During the cold weather he worked in the big downstairs room making portraits. He thought that before he was through he would draw everyone he had ever known or heard of. These included many self-portraits, himself as a young man and later on, at fifty and sixty. In a number of these, remarkably, Thomas saw the pentimento of his father. Arthur Malan thought enough of the work that he proposed a show in New York.

You've turned some kind of corner, Arthur said. I'm damned if I know what it is, but whatever it is, you've turned it.

It would be good if you'd come to the city, do some interviews, make nice.

It wouldn't kill you, Arthur said. We'll see, Thomas said.

When the weather was tolerable Thomas spent adventurous afternoons drawing his pier. The sign at the end of it read
DANGER DANGER UNSAFE PIER KEEP OFF THIS MEANS YOU
but everyone knew to stay clear. The pier listed drunkenly as it fought the breeze and the tides but it was unsafe in any weather. An August storm had wrenched the mooring yet again. The wood was rotten underfoot, causing alarming gaps in the planking. Still, if it gave way the fall wasn't much, five feet into a fathom of cold water, and it served you right for ignoring the sign.