The Art Student's War (46 page)

Two men stand weeping in the very room where a brooding woman constructed a view of the world that wound up severing friend from friend, brother from brother. Day after thoughtful day, she hatched her vision. The two men are in love with the same woman—so Sylvia surmised, sitting in her kitchen, all alone but for the oceanic murmur of the wall calendar’s pages.

In love with the same woman? The possibility hardly troubles these two brothers, whose shuddering lives, nonetheless, have coalesced around a single dumbfounding revelation: in the end, a fanciful, imagined act of passion can be just as blighting as any consummation. Could Vico have created a deeper schism had he in fact gone ahead and secretly seduced his sister-in-law? The singular tragedy of this particular household, and story, is that a contemplated act and a consummated act may come down to a similar disaster …

Dennis is more inclined than Vico to analyze their friendship, and a few times, fumblingly, he has attempted to issue some formal statement of gratitude, which Vico, in bluff embarrassment, has always cut short.

What Dennis has attempted to say, and never quite managed to say, is that he’s boundlessly grateful for the numerous ways Vico has welcomed him into the Paradiso family. Vico has shared his children with a man who has no children, encouraging Dennis to be more than an uncle to Bea, to Stevie, to Edith. Vico has sought out Dennis’s advice on how to be a father; he has solicited Dennis’s approval. It’s painfully obvious to Dennis that in this, his closest friendship, he is far more owing than owed …

And so, one winter night in wartime, Dennis drops everything on a
moment’s notice to drive alone up to Detroit. His other patients will have to wait. He finds his niece dwindled into a child, the child’s head peaked like a death’s head. “Papa,” she says.

The two men hold each other. Their daughter has been burning up for weeks and weeks, she is nothing but a smoldering pile of sticks, and their only fit response—the only livable response—is to weep and embrace while they hang over the abyss of what is surely an unendurable life.

Why didn’t you call me before now?
Dennis is saying, effectively.

You know I couldn’t call until I had to call
, Vico is saying, effectively.

You did not have to come all this way
, Vico is saying.

Of course I had to come
, Dennis replies.

Of course you had to come
, Vico concedes, and he trembles and gasps in mute male gratitude.

The girl is burning up and for both fathers the prospect of any future without their child, their mercurial Bea-Bia-Bianca, is unendurable. It was something of a miracle from the start—the arrival of this large-eyed changeling, the spirited artist girl—and yet how is life sustainable without miracles? How are they to live without the burning girl who has never known a cool response to anything—who has, from her first day on earth, met every face and flower and flowering cloud with a headlong, vociferous ardor?

How is life to be lived without the soul of this girl who has lost her way and cannot find any means to live?

Her head has gone up in a final fountaining of pyrotechnics, there in the Land of Colors without Objects, and the distant firmament whereupon those fireworks flare and fade, flare and fade, is the deepest and most welcoming blue imaginable—and blue has always been her favorite color. It invites her, it speaks her language, and she now must choose her world … Even so, even yet, there are those other, quieter colors, too, the dun hues of human voices, including that of an old peasant woman, any true tale’s true hero, muttering prayers and advice in a dialect none of us understand any longer, and those voices likewise have their claims, peripheral and importunate and common as dirt. They are calling her.

PART THREE
All the Lost Houses

CHAPTER XXVI

She wakes to a sense of an illicit touch—a male touch—before waking further to find nothing the slightest amiss in this particular contact. Nobody can fault her: she has been sitting on a Woodward streetcar with her head leaned against her husband’s shoulder. She’s innocent.

“I seem to have drifted off,” she says.

“Me too,” Grant says. “Or nearly.”

“How long was I out?”

“Awhile. You were smiling.”

“Was I?” And an unsettled pause. What is she trying to recall? She says, “It’s been ages since I rode a streetcar. They seem so comfy.”

“They take you back, don’t they,” Grant says. “Not many left …”

What had placed them here was a queer series of coincidences—good luck masquerading as its opposite. Normally, they’d be driving. But as it happens, both cars are in the shop, Grant’s Studebaker with transmission problems and her Mercury with what may be a dead solenoid (whatever that is). Grant initially suggested postponing their little expedition—they’re off to lunch at Pierre’s. But it turns out to be much more fun, and romantic,
not
to drive. They’re celebrating their seventh wedding anniversary.

Bianca was the one to propose the streetcar. Wouldn’t that be swell? Yes, just like old times … And it was Bianca who proposed Pierre’s, a restaurant they’ve somehow never visited together. Once, it held a significant place in her life, and lately, for all sorts of reasons, she has been rethinking the old days, before she met Grant, back when the War was still raging, still dragging on.

It seems a shame to lose this disorienting drowse, which links her, as drowses sometimes do, to out-flung memories and perceptions … But Grant is cataloguing some frustrations at the office, and his conversational claims are legitimate claims—all the more so on their anniversary. Nonetheless, as Bianca listens she’s pursuing someone else or something else: there’s an immanence dissolved in the dusty sunlit air of this old streetcar, a someone or a something almost achingly precious and proximate. But who or what is it?

It’s the most familiar sensation in the world, and a little dispiriting even so, to disembark from the streetcar. Something—an ongoing process—closes up. All sorts of fluid, wordless feelings recede and Time itself shifts—shifted—the moment the two of them stepped down into the street. (On how many more occasions would she ride a streetcar? All across the city, the lines were being pulled up. Grant was right, of course: the streetcars were dinosaurs.)

They walked down Jefferson, holding hands in the August sunshine. The blue sky looked freshly washed. “I’m so glad you suggested the streetcar,” Grant said. “A brilliant idea,” Grant declared—something he often wound up declaring. His deference in such matters (which restaurant to dine in, which couch to buy, which color to paint the shutters) was flattering to the point of being faintly alarming. The joke in their house—which wasn’t completely a joke—was that Bianca had something more than feminine intuition, she had second sight. What mere male judgment could compete?

“Look! A gull!” Grant pointed upward at a bird flapping south, toward Canada. (This was the only place in the country where you headed
south
toward Canada.) “Now you’re happy,” he said.

She was touched, anyway, at how excited he became at having a gleaming white gull to point out to his wife. “I do love them,” Bianca said.

You often saw gulls in the neighborhoods near the river. They’d been a much more common sight in the skies over her old street, Inquiry, than over her new street, Middleway, seven miles north. She loved her new house, but the move had brought its share of unexpected losses. Gulls were one of many things whose loss she hadn’t known she would mourn until they became, abruptly, a symbol of her past.

To step once more into the interior of Pierre’s felt quite peculiar, actually. How many years since she was last here?

The man himself, Monsieur Pierre, still presided, though shorter and more peculiar looking—a bit lopsided in his features—than in Bianca’s recollection. He still sported the thinnest possible of all moustaches. His hair was darker than it used to be.

The dining rooms had been redecorated. Burgundy and gold had replaced salmon and yellow. In ways that Bianca couldn’t quite put her finger on, the place looked shabby.

The moment they were seated, she said, “Tell me the boys are fine. And for once we won’t talk about them.”

Grant laughed. “Of course they’re fine. They’re always fine.” The boys, the twins Chip and Matt, were home on Middleway with Grant’s mother, who could hardly refuse to babysit during an anniversary lunch. Mrs. Ives usually avoided being left alone with her only grandchildren. “Hey, we finally made it to Pierre’s. Aren’t you glad?”

“Very,” Bianca said. “But somehow it makes me feel odd. I haven’t been here since I came with Mrs. Olsson.”

“I hear she’s not doing too well.”

“What do you mean—not doing too well?”

Grant shrugged. “Not doing too well.”

“I saw her picture in the
Free Press
not long ago. She looked wonderful. Older, of course, but wonderful.”

“Maybe my source was no good. It was all very vague.”

“Yes …”

Generally, though, Grant’s sources were good. He worked for Cutting and Fuller, a big law firm in the Guardian Building, the most beautiful office building in the city. Grant wasn’t a gossip, but he kept his ears open, and he often brought home intimate news of the city’s elite.

“Back then, I think she had a drinking problem.” Bianca added, fair-mindedly, “Of course, that may no longer be true.”

“Speaking of which,” Grant said, “here comes a waiter.”

Would they like anything to drink?

“I’d
love
a glass of wine,” Bianca said. Grant looked at her questioningly. For some years now, he’d generally restricted himself to one daily drink—though often quite an ample drink—before dinner. “Do, of course,” she urged him. “Honey, it’s our anniversary lunch.”

Grant ordered two glasses of Bordeaux (“Very nice,” the waiter said, and went off mumbling, “Very nice, very nice”), and Bianca lit a cigarette and, leaning forward into the sudden confiding intimacy that a restaurant cigarette reliably created, she said, “You know what? Pierre dyes his hair.”

“No big surprise,” Grant said. “He’s an old fruit, honey.”

He was? Pierre? The notion had never occurred to her. Bianca tested it now and recognized, immediately, that Grant was correct, and all at once a number of things fell into place.

Actually, the topic of male homosexuality fascinated her—how could anyone interested in art not feel that way?—but she’d repeatedly learned it wasn’t for casual conversation. Even among sophisticated people. Grant’s fraternity brother Jerry Romeyn, though one of the
city’s most successful lawyers, and though he stood six feet four and had long scandalized Grosse Pointe society with his womanizing, once stammered himself red-faced at a Christmas party when Bianca broached the subject.

Grant, by comparison, had initially seemed so sane and humane. The topic scarcely discomfited him, probably because it turned out he had an uncle, his father’s brother Hughie, who was “an old fruit.” Grant always spoke affectionately of Uncle Hughie, a bald, soft-spoken man who owned an antiques shop in Royal Oak specializing in grandfather clocks. It was a detail that Grant, who loved to tell stories, recounted with incredulous delight.
Grandfather clocks?
Grant himself was no more likely to cultivate such an interest than to take up Morris dancing or Japanese calligraphy.

Later, though, after they’d been married a while, Bianca had come to find Grant’s easy tolerance objectionable in its way. Her reservations had solidified on the evening when Grant finally met Ronny. For years, Grant had been hearing about Ronny Olsson—perhaps too much about Ronny Olsson—and, though not an overly jealous husband, Grant perhaps had grown to regard Ronny as a rival.

The two couples had met unexpectedly at the symphony. Ronny was with his then-wife, Elizabeth, the former Libby Hubbins. (By a weird coincidence, Bianca had known Libby forever; they’d gone to junior high school together, where Libby, who wore glasses even then, had been a very bright girl absolutely devoid of sparkle.) Whatever else one cared to say about Ronny Olsson, his manners were irreproachable. He could hardly have been more gracious, insisting on taking them out for a drink afterward and displaying a special interest in Grant—who, fifteen seconds after Ronny and wife had driven off, complacently remarked, “So
that’s
Ronny Olsson. Why, he’s an old fruit, honey.” The wife? Poor bespectacled Libby, who was getting a master’s degree in Classics at U. of M., who was actually learning to read ancient Greek? She counted for
nothing
. And never again would Grant take seriously any tale of long-ago romantic dates with Ronny Olsson.

Thoughts of Ronny Olsson led naturally back to his mother, and Bianca said, “I do hope Mrs. Olsson’s all right. You know, when I wasn’t scared to death of her, I was really fond of her. I think.”

“Quite the beautiful woman,” Grant observed. “In her time. Not that I ever spoke to her. But I saw her out and about, of course.”