Mr. Bones (11 page)

She smiled at the idea that I was still using a paintbrush, and I suspected she believed that my work lacked depth. She could be severe with people she disapproved of. “I have a mental list of people I want to kill,” Mrs. Everest used to say, and her gargling old-actress voice made her sound more murderous. “Not die a natural death—I want to deal the fatal blow.” She would then name the wished-for victims: a talk-show host, a celebrity humanitarian, a new neighbor, an art dealer—one of her competitors, usually a woman. “Quite a long list. I keep adding to it.”

We always encouraged her with our laughter. Isabel and I were among her best friends. In the beginning we thought it was a joke, and later it became too awkward to say anything.

“I'm putting him on my list,” she'd say at a party, and friends like us always knew what she meant.

 

We were summer people on the island. When our house was finished and we moved from the mainland, someone said, “Mrs. Everest wants to meet you.” The implication was that I was lucky she was taking an interest. She was prominent on the island, where she spent the season in a house built by one of her ex-husbands—“the third or fourth,” people said. I was told that she thought highly of my work. “Thought highly” was intended as a kind of catnip. Mrs. Everest was a well-known collector, and art dealer. I had never met her. Though I had been successful in my work, I was on the periphery. Her gallery was busy, the openings always packed with people. Until then I had not been exhibited in her gallery nor invited to any parties.

I knew she dealt in whatever was in vogue in New York City, installations, giant photographs, acrylic artifacts, rusted hubcaps, even color-coded condoms arranged in menacing mandalas. All of this was a far cry from my monoprint etchings and the portraits of, for example, the people who had worked on my house—the carpenters, electrician, plumber, roofers, plasterers—my
Workmen
series. No one mentioned these pieces; they talked about Mrs. Everest.

Whispers tend to enlarge the unmet person. She was one of those people who was preceded by an enthusiastic prologue of buildup, someone whom everyone spoke about and quoted—quotes always delivered with force, but so unmemorable you suspect the enthusiast to be somehow in thrall to the person. “You mean you haven't met her yet?” And then you meet the person and she never quite matches the talk, but you find so much else that no one mentioned, perhaps didn't notice, and you wonder why, because it doesn't seem like the same person at all.

In the case of Mrs. Everest, the quotes were slight but always repeated with gusto, usually how she had been sharp with someone, teased them or dispatched them with a word, the rudeness repeated with a shiver of approval. “She has a list of people she wants to kill.” I smiled and said I couldn't wait to meet her, but I was also thinking, I don't get it.

Then the party came—the Callanders, her friends, a room full of people, a table of food, waiters offering filled wine glasses from trays. A lull in the conversation and glances at the entryway meant that she had arrived. She was greeted by Biff Callander and his wife, Lara. She took a glass of champagne, but didn't drink—it was an accessory—and she was shown my way.

No one had said how tiny she was, and misshapen, slightly bent over, almost hunchbacked—probably her age, some sort of fused vertebrae or twisted spine. She was ugly in a startling way, an ugliness that gave her authority, the ruined face, the staring, wide-open blue eyes, the elderly fingers, the walnut-sized rings, putty-like makeup and heavy jewelry, ropes of beads, dangly earrings. She looked like a crone from a folktale—untidy, her hair tousled, her battered suede jacket a poor fit, and she limped a little. No one had mentioned that she was doddery and uncertain, pawing the air as she shuffled along, or that she tried to make this oddness into a kind of majesty.

I felt a bit sorry for her. She knew she wasn't beautiful, was no longer young, was noticeably frail.

The first thing anyone said about her was the predictable reference to her mountainous name. “One of her husbands” was the explanation—at least four of them, all of them out of the picture. You didn't think of Mrs. Everest with a man. Her best friends called her “Dickie,” though no one asked how she got that name.

By way of greeting, in that first meeting at the Callanders', she snatched up a platter and said, “Walter Rainbird! Have some cheese!”

This disarmed me and made me laugh.

“You're so much bigger than I expected. I wish I could have you in my gallery.”

Some people are blunt because they're shy. Shyness can even turn them into shouters, if sufficiently riled. Then I thought about her forthright remark, and it became ambiguous: Did she mean that she wanted me, or that she couldn't possibly exhibit my work? Perhaps she was not so blunt after all.

No one could tell me where Mrs. Everest came from, or her true age, or what her real name was, or how she'd spent her first thirty or so years. She must have been attractive long ago, and being small, still had the pursed lips of a flirt. In the beginning, I asked about her—just wondering aloud. No one would say more than “I really don't know.”

I was struck by her defiant opinions. Her confidence extended to her business activities: her gallery with its looks-like-art was a success, and was a vortex for the best parties. She knew her own mind, so I thought, and never hesitated to damn something. “I hate it,” she would often say of anything she regarded as conventional. I guessed that she hated my work. Yet I represented money to her, and though she had perhaps a smaller net worth than her clients, she had the big investor's sense of insecurity, the wealthy person's fear that without warning she might lose it all.

She respected my financial success more than (if I may say so) my artistic achievement. This was the point: I seldom had shows because my pieces were spoken for in advance, not commissioned but sought-after. Always on the lookout for buyers, she habitually cultivated the rich. She tolerated my wife, Isabel; she never mentioned my work. This was a common occurrence in my life: the way my fame made me a magnet for philistines. People wanted to know me for my success rather than my paintings, because I was good at something and made money off it. As time passed I knew fewer and fewer people who were passionate about art, and more and more socialites, many of them Izzy's friends, as I smiled in the role of a preoccupied spouse, not a painter at all but rather like someone with a secret vice or a private income.

Though we had no friends on the island, I knew a handful of artists. I made the mistake of introducing Mrs. Everest to two of them. Morrie, who was a sculptor, showed her his studio and then said, “I've got some more pieces out back.” She said, “I've seen enough.” She was offhand with Marsha, an etcher. I asked her what she thought of Marsha's work. She said, “Lipstick lesbian.” After this, Morrie and Marsha were cooler toward me. I didn't blame them.

When she went about wooing me, I was struck with self-conscious fascination, realizing that this little woman, being obvious—but offering attention, grand meals, glittering occasions—was actually succeeding. I saw myself succumbing and wanting more—and getting it; and then I was in her orbit. In ignoring my work, she seemed to imply that she was making an exception in liking me, and that I should be grateful for that. Meals were central to our relationship, food was important, cheese was a theme.

“What they do, no one has ever done before,” Mrs. Everest said of a husband and wife whose photographs she exhibited. Each was a transvestite. They photographed themselves in costume. “That is the proof they are artists.”

At this early stage of my knowing Mrs. Everest, I did not examine this remark. It seemed debatable. My paintings had never been done before. Yet I decided that I liked her conviction. I wanted her to say things like this about me. She didn't, yet my credentials—the ones that mattered to Mrs. Everest—were soon established.

It happened this way. One weekend in our second year on the island, my wife and I were visited by Andy Wyeth, with Helga Testorf in tow, stopping off on their annual early-summer migration from Pennsylvania to Maine. He flew into our small airport in a private plane. This quickly became news on the island. Where was he staying? What was he doing? Whom was he with? Mrs. Everest had the news early, but it was not until Andy left—he hated socializing—that I revealed to her that he had stayed with us, that I was putting the finishing touches to a portrait of him that I had begun the year before in Port Clyde, Maine. Mrs. Everest only wanted to know about the Helga detail. She said she hated
Christina's World.

“What about Betsy, his wife?” Mrs. Everest asked.

“There's Betsy's world and Helga's world, and Andy proceeds from one to the other,” I said. “Think of it as a kind of informal polygamy.”

This complex shuttling romance bewitched Mrs. Everest, who had the old coquette's weakness for steamy gossip.

She wanted to see my painting of him, his lined, deeply tanned face like a landscape, his kindly smile, his luminous eyes. In the foreground, one of his hands was lifted, his delicate fingers crooked in the manner of a painter gripping a brush. He had the leathery look of a sportsman, and although he was in his eighties at the time, he seemed much younger—his smile gave him everything, youth and intelligence and confidence. I posed him standing at a window, his sloping meadow and the harbor just visible beyond.

“Why didn't you give a party for him?”

“He doesn't go to parties,” I said.

“Helga was so beautiful in those pictures,” Mrs. Everest said. “She must be really old now. Is she fat?”

When I said that Helga was lovely Mrs. Everest took it as a rebuke. I mentioned that Andy had a painting with him, of a cataract on a woodland stream, he called
The Carry.
He had showed it to me, saying, “I fell in,” and he pointed to the place where, as he had stood painting, he'd stumbled into the water. The picture was real to him, the experience a vivid piece of his history; but he had made it, not installed it.

She wasn't interested in that, and she frowned at my portrait of Andy, as though concealing her reaction, like a wine snob swilling a sip. They were not the sort of pictures that she would ever exhibit. Yet I had been given face, in the Chinese manner, by this visit by the master of my school of painting. I tried to explain to Mrs. Everest that to me much of Wyeth's work, especially the later landscapes and coastal scenes, verged on abstract expressionism, or were studies in color. But she wasn't listening. She cocked her head at my portrait and looked closely, asked more questions about Helga and the Wyeth marriage, and seemed annoyed by my upbeat replies. But this was a turning point for me, my validation, the Wyeth visit.

 

Confident of her friendship, I saw more of Mrs. Everest, nearly always in the ritualistic restaurant-going way, and the paradox was always her ordering three courses and seldom eating anything. Junior's restaurant, where we often met, was a casual place, with excellent food, that was nicknamed “the kitchen” because the old-time islanders gathered there. In the summer, no one made lunch at home, and the islanders were sociable, so it was always lunch at Junior's.

A meal in most societies on earth represents a peacemaking gesture. But you have to eat something—anything, a nibble is enough. Mrs. Everest seldom swallowed. I took this to be hostile. A concentrated thought darkened her face, and she used her fork and knife as though she was killing and mutilating the food on her plate, lingering over it, always with her mouth open, seeming to utter a curse. And then at last the slow, disgusted way she ate, masticating it like a gum chewer, not swallowing. She had a habit of spitting food onto her plate, turning her whole meal into dog food. No one mentioned this, perhaps because, like me, they stopped looking. And here is the irony: she once said to me, “I hate watching people eat. And I can't stand to see them laughing.”

My wife was off-island for the day. I was sitting with Mrs. Everest, and we were about to order, when I saw at a nearby table a man I had met in England on one of my trips, an American Foreign Service officer, Harry Platt. He'd kept in touch as he'd been moved from one post to another, and over six years or so he'd been to three countries in the Middle East, Turkey the most recent.

Seeing Harry Platt's face from far off in our local seafront restaurant made him seem gaudily familiar, like an apparition. He must have felt the same about seeing me, because he smiled broadly and got up. He was with an older woman, who stared but did not rise from her chair.

“Well met!” The pretentious expression was not pretentious the way he said it, but suited his old-fashioned Ivy League manner. “How great to see you. What brings you to the island?”

“My wife and I have had a place here for a few years. She's away at the moment.”

He explained that he was catching the ferry in the morning, and then he became self-conscious and nodded at the older woman at his table.

“Will you join us? This is my mother.”

I glanced at Mrs. Everest, who had been eyeing the other woman, perhaps sizing her up. She said, “Absolutely not.”

Harry Platt was an experienced diplomat, a charming man in his late fifties. He had been helpful to me, putting me in touch with various people, once helping with a visa, another time explaining a tricky piece of foreign policy. He knew presidents, he had sat with prime ministers. But hearing Mrs. Everest's rebuff (and his mother had heard too), he became flustered, his face reddening, his eyes frantic, as though he'd been slapped. His mother looked furious and chalky-faced.

“Maybe I'll see you tomorrow,” I said.

“We're leaving at seven,” he said with a desperate smile.

At that, his mother got up and went to the door, and Harry seemed to lose his balance, actually to topple, as if yielding to the gravitational pull of his mother in her heaving herself out. Harry's embarrassment made him fumble his farewell, and I saw, just a flicker—the glint in his eyes, the set of his mouth—that he was enraged.