Murder in Pastel (2 page)

Being gay in Steeple Hill is not easy. Sure, we’re only about two hours from San Francisco, but it might as well be two light-years. Different solar system entirely. The only other homosexual in a hundred mile radius is Joel. As we both live in the “artists’ colony,” I guess it confirms what the townsfolk say about us: fags and liberals. And that’s the nice stuff.

As artists’ colonies go, ours is pretty tame. Yet we’re still viewed skeptically by some of the town’s old-timers, despite the fact that my father grew up here and, starting with my father, the income per capita has verged embarrassingly on the bourgeois. Very little suffering for art goes on these days. Very little suffering, period. That’s okay. Fag though I am, I’m not into suffering much.

I’d been at the computer for a couple of hours when the phone rang. It was Joel.

“The Addison is holding an exhibition of Cosmo’s work.”

“I know.”

“They’ve asked me to speak opening night.”

“I heard.”

Joel Shimada was my father’s best friend. They started out together in the 1950s, doing the Greenwich Village Bohemian artist gig. Joel was the first one to earn the critics’ attention, but in the end Cosmo’s star eclipsed Joel’s.

But Joel was gifted. He did a small oil of my father, age thirty, which hangs in the alcove in our dining room. It’s brilliant; like I remember Cosmo—unless my memories stem from that painting.

Joel’s later stuff is in the style of Peter Samuelson; lush homoerotic studies. He was painting for himself; why not? Then he quit painting altogether and started writing, beginning with
Greenwich Time
, a colorful memoir about my father and their reckless youth. Thus Joel became the accepted expert on Cosmo. Cosmo. No last name. Like Rembrandt. All the world was on a first name basis with my father, thanks to Joel. A couple of years later Joel wrote a critical treatise on Cosmo’s work. Who better?

The latest project was not going so well. He wanted my story. Son of Cosmo. I had declined. I kept declining. It made for some strained moments.

“I think you should go,” Joel said.

“I think not.”

“They’ve invited you. You should go. When are you going to forgive him?”

The psychological angle. That was new. Usually it’s all about my filial duty to keep the flame burning.

“
Forgive
him? What the hell are you talking about, Joel? What is there to forgive? He went his own way from the time I was a kid. It’s all I knew. It’s all I expected—and don’t quote me either.”

“If you don’t resent the way he walked out on you, then I really don’t understand why you continue to refuse to participate. It’s what Cosmo would want.”

I guess Joel had been making stuff up about my father for so long he was starting to believe his own bullshit. I said, as mildly as I could, “Joel, I don’t want to argue with you.”

“What did you say? I can hardly hear you.”

“I don’t want to fight with you.”

Silence followed my terse words.

“Kyle, don’t get upset. Just consider it, all right?”

“No.”

“Oh. Then don’t.”

Another silence. I opened my mouth to say I had to get back to work. Joel rushed in nervously, “Have you spoken to Adam yet?”

“No.” I was dismayed at the way my gut knotted at the unexpected mention of Adam’s name. I was over this, right? Surely this wasn’t going to be a problem? “Not yet.”

“But he
is
back?”

“Yeah.”

“Micky says you met…Brett.”

It was that naked pause before the name “Brett” that threw me. Was I supposed to know that Joel had history with Brett, or not?

“I met him.”

“I didn’t think Adam would bring him here. I would have thought some sensitivity…what do you think?”

“About?”

“Brett. How did he seem? Did he say why they were here?”

“I only met him for a moment. Micky thinks Adam’s putting the house on the market.”

“He wouldn’t have to come here for that.”

“Maybe he wanted to see the place one last time.”

“Maybe. Do you realize we’re all here together for the first time since Cosmo—since your father—”

“Went out for a pack of cigarettes?”

Joel ignored my flippancy. “Are you going to the Berkowitzes’
soirée
tomorrow?”

“It depends on if I get any work done today.”

“I suppose that’s a hint,” he huffed. “Well, fine.” He banged down the receiver.

I sighed, considered ringing him back. But I decided I didn’t have energy for Joel’s emotional crisis—or even time for my own. I returned to my computer.

I was thirteen when Adam MacKinnon moved into the cottage across the meadow. Originally the cottage belonged to Drake Trent who had been a silver screen heart throb in the 1940s, but was a paraplegic alcoholic by the ’70s when he rolled his wheelchair down the seventy-five narrow steps leading to the beach.

Authorities listed Trent’s death as an accident, but everyone knew—even I knew—that he’d killed himself. Adam picked up the cottage and most of the furnishings in a state auction. Very practical. Cosmo’s friends and students weren’t known for their practicality.

At the time Adam joined our merry band, he was twenty. He had a mane of curly black hair, a mustache and a Vandyke beard that gave him the look of a cavalier out of a Romantic painting by Gericault or Delacroix. He was tall and spare and beautiful. He wore a gold earring. He was the first openly gay man I had ever known, my “uncle” Joel not counting. No wonder I fell in love; I saw him every day for the next four years.

Adam was cool about the puppy love. Maybe because I was Cosmo’s kid. Adam was one of my father’s students. The best. The brightest. Which was saying something, because my father didn’t suffer fools. He didn’t suffer anyone for long. Including me.

After Cosmo split the last time, and I’d been packed off to Stanford, I lost touch with Adam. I didn’t lose track, because you can’t live in an artists’ colony where everyone eats, sleeps and drinks oil paint, and not hear about Adam MacKinnon from time to time.

I wasn’t a painter. I didn’t inherit my father’s gift. But I kept the cottage in the colony. After I graduated I moved to Oakland and lived for about a year in a closet—the closet being of the mind as well as of real estate—but I ended up moving back to Steeple Hill. Despite the isolation and the shortage of eligible males, it suited me.

Lunchtime came and went. About one thirty I stopped long enough to throw a banana, some frozen blackberries in the blender with some cranberry juice and the last of the Häagen-Dazs frozen yogurt. I measured in a scoop of lecithin and bee pollen and swigged it down while I re-read the last pages I had typed.

Another hour of trying to find words—another hour of struggling to keep my thoughts from straying to the cottage across the meadow.

The doorbell rang, ripping me out of my creative cocoon.

“Who the hell now?” I exclaimed peevishly, pushing away from the monitor and pulling my glasses off.

Who now wished to be regaled with the details of my two-minute encounter with Adam’s hunk lover? The Berkowitzes? The Nashes? Had it spread to the village? Maybe the mayor himself?

As I padded into the living room I could see a familiar outline through the screen door. My heart sped up.

He was smiling at me through the mesh.

“Hello, Kyle.”

The door wasn’t hooked. I pushed it open.

“Hello, Adam.”

Chapter Two

I
stood aside. Adam stepped past me, close enough that I picked up the scent of almond soap.

He stared about the room. “My God, it hasn’t changed a bit.”

Adam had though. The long curls were cropped short and wavy, the beard, mustache and golden earring were all gone. He was still startlingly handsome: tall, lean, but older. Maybe harder around the edges.

“I expect to see Cosmo come striding through that door any minute.” His eyes, blue as the faded denims he wore, homed in on my face.

“How are you, Kyle?”

“Good.”

“You look good.” He still studied me; it was not a rhetorical question. “Actually, you look great.” His eyes tilted up at the corners when he smiled. I’d forgotten that.

He lifted his hands and then dropped them. I think he wanted to hug me, but didn’t quite know how to bridge the years. I was a big boy now. A big, self-conscious boy, and I couldn’t have made a move toward him if my life had depended on it. Not after Brett’s “scout” crack.

Instead Adam turned to the fireplace where
Virgin in Pastel
used to hang. In its place was mounted a gilt-framed mirror I’d picked up at an auction for twelve dollars. It reflected the two of us appraising each other.

“The
Virgin
never turned up?”

“No,” I answered.

He was making conversation; if it had shown up, he would have known.
Virgin in Pastel
is theoretically considered Cosmo Bari’s masterpiece. I say theoretically, because the painting went missing the same time as my father. The cartoon, or rough draft, hangs in the Getty, and a series of preliminary sketches are in the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover. Although the prelims and the rough draft were done in pastels, which Cosmo was experimenting with at the time, the completed work was painted in oils. It was called
Virgin in Pastel
for the delicate coloration he achieved.

Adam gave a funny laugh and said, “I’m trying not to say something idiotic like, Gee, you’re all grown up!”

“Is it such a shock?”

He didn’t answer directly. “I read your books. Both of them. Funny as hell.” His cheek creased in a faint smile. “The ‘Gay Donald Westlake,’ huh?”

“They have to put something on the book jacket.”

He continued to smile at me in the old affectionate way. It bugged me.

“I met Brett,” I said.

“He told me. In fact, that’s why I’m here. We want you to come to dinner tonight.”

I threw myself into emotional reverse, stripping gears in my panic. “No. Uh—that is, I’ll let you get settled in first. Let Brett get used to—”

“We’re not newlyweds,” Adam interrupted. “It was Brett’s idea.”

“Great.” That’s what I was afraid of.

Adam headed for the door. Hand on the screen, he paused. “You never heard from him? Not a word?”

I knew whom he meant.

“No. Never. Not a postcard.” After a moment I said, “I think I would have, if he’d lived.”

“What?” His blue-blue eyes narrowed.

“I think he’s dead. I’m almost sure of it. Otherwise, I think he’d have come back—if only for a day. He liked to see the finished product.”

I never could read Adam’s face.

He smiled after a moment. “See you about seven?”

“I’ll be there.” If my prayers for divine intervention in the form of earthquake or tidal wave went unanswered.

* * * * *

My grandfather has the only existing picture of my mother. Mine is a copy of her high school graduation photo; she’s younger in it than I am now. All the other photos, all the paintings he did of her, were destroyed by my father after her death.

Judging by her high school photo, Kyria Lipez was pretty, but not exactly the type to inspire lifelong devotion. She was my father’s high school sweetheart. There’s no graduation pic of Cosmo, because by then he’d booked for parts unknown. After a number of years and unexpected artistic success, Cosmo Bari, former resident-black sheep came home to Steeple Hill, and against the fierce opposition of her father, married Kyria. This house was their wedding gift, my grandfather being of the opinion that my father could never provide my mother with stability or security.

Who knows? They were married for two years when I came along. Three years later my mother took an ambulance ride and never came home. I don’t remember her except as a gentle voice, the cool scent of Wind Song, and the bleakness in my father’s eyes.

The house is hers though. The garden was hers. She planted the purple-blue wisteria that winds along the porch overhang. The tangle of peonies and roses that grows as high as the front steps. The William Morris patterned rugs, the “Osbourne” china—everything in the house was hers and her mother’s before her and
her
mother’s before her. I know my mother through the furnishings of the house I grew up in—and a spiral notebook of sweet but sophomoric poems she wrote in high school, which my father spared for reasons known only to him.

This is to say I know her a lot better than I ever knew my father, with whom I shared this house for sixteen years. I don’t know that anyone ever knew Cosmo. I read Joel’s books, and frankly, I don’t think Joel knew him either.

But maybe it’s easier for me to think so than face the fact that I never knew my father because he wasn’t interested in knowing me. After my mother died he used to disappear for weeks, even months, at a time. No one knows where he went, though Joel speculated plenty in print. I know he traveled abroad because he once brought me back a poster of an air show in France—the only time I remember him bringing me a souvenir, or giving indication that I was ever anything but out of sight, out of mind.

Anyway, I take after my mother in looks: tall and slim and ordinary. And I suppose in temperament too, being quiet and something of a homebody. My father looked like Stewart Granger, and carried on like Stew in his more dramatic roles. It’s that artistic temperament thing, I guess.

* * * * *

I brought peonies from my garden and a bottle of Merlot to dinner.

The lights from Adam’s place twinkled through the trees as I walked across the meadow. The still-warm earth released a pungent scent of sage and wild flowers into the dusk. As I drew nearer I could hear Stan Getz on the breeze, the sultry voice of Astrud Gilberto murmuring “
Corcovado
,” recalling long summer evenings spent listening to Adam and my father talk Art on our front porch.

It’s bullshit, Adam. Modern painting is significant in one way only: it’s new. You’ve got these young punks focused on nothing but trying to top each other; switching styles and manners, feverishly seeking new thrills, new chills, new giggles for a jaded bourgeois audience.