The Art Student's War (7 page)

His speed was intimidating. A few scratches of shading to the apple’s underside, a few smudging strokes of the eraser, and the apple commanded what it had lacked heretofore: the true reserved weight of a terrestrial object.
This
was fruit, however modest in size, to strike a dozing Isaac Newton on the crown of his head and awaken him to a universe bound by gravity …

Ronny displayed much the same speed and smoothness in spiriting her away after class. They didn’t head to the Run Way. They marched to a little luncheonette a few blocks on, where they were unlikely to encounter classmates. It was called Herk’s Snack Shack. They sat in a booth over mugs of watery coffee. Bea was feeling hungry, but she didn’t order any food because Ronny didn’t. The confident way he’d hustled her here, as though she couldn’t possibly have anything better to do, might have been insulting had it not been so suave.

She’d thought Ronny “stuck up.” But he spoke warmly and directly—and with a rapid precision comparable to his rapid precision with a pencil. Bea’s rushed sentences characteristically went astray. (Maggie was forever teasing her about this, when not mocking her “overflowery vocabulary;” Bea had a weakness for the picturesque and polysyllabic.) Typically, she’d wander off into conversational detours, looping back to establish necessary preconditions, or would leap into parentheses that failed to close. Ronny—impressively—spoke as if dictating to a secretary.

He had mesmerizing eyes. They were mostly green, but mixed with a tempered gold, almost amber. It was a little hard to concentrate when those eyes were upon you.

He called her Bianca, the name she, letter by letter, affixed to her artwork. “Bea,” she corrected him, but when he did it a second time, she let it pass. He talked mostly about art. Some of his observations had the pitch and polish of true epigrams. (You had the feeling he might
have said them before.) He talked about the Impressionists, whom he didn’t much admire (“Human vision is muddy enough without deliberate muddying”) and Albert Bierstadt, also unworthy (“I’m afraid I can only deride anyone who would insert a moose into a painting”), and Whistler, whom Ronny applauded somewhat (“He encourages us to examine only parts of his canvas—but usually the right parts”), and Sargent, of whom he mostly approved (“Though you get the feeling, since he really could
draw
, he’s often too easy on himself; he trivializes his gift”).

No one in Professor Manhardt’s class talked this way; indeed, Bea had never heard anyone of roughly her own age talk this way. Dazzling in themselves, the words were also welcome for reasons Ronald Olsson had no way of knowing: at home, on Inquiry Street, things were far,
far
worse than Bea could ever remember. Sitting anxiously across from Ronny Olsson, Bea felt her heart lift—lift and lighten—as it hadn’t in weeks.

In retrospect, everything at home had started unraveling nearly three weeks ago, with the trip to Lady Lake and Aunt Grace’s little accident. (Though you might say it began the day before, really—the afternoon of the bandaged soldier on the Woodward streetcar, when Bea came home to find Mamma staring blackly at the kitchen calendar.) The mishap at Lady Lake had shaken everybody, but Mamma most: it seemed to fix the hovering darkness over her head.

And then came the night—a Wednesday night, four days after the lake—when everything altered with such swift violence it seemed the family’s old peace and happiness might never be revived.

Bea had been lying in bed, nearly asleep, when she heard something peculiar. Her father was raising his voice. He was a man who steadfastly refused to argue. When he became angry, which he did rarely but terribly, his practice was to make forcible, irreversible pronouncements and storm from the room. (At work, a couple of times, he’d resorted to fisticuffs, but that was different. He had to maintain discipline
on his watch
—a favorite phrase of his.) Now, though, he was arguing.

In the darkness Bea crept from bed and noiselessly twisted the doorknob. She stepped out onto the landing. Her parents were downstairs, in the kitchen. Papa’s voice dropped away on a peculiar phrase (“Sylvia, you have to clean your mind”) and then Mamma, voice honed like a razor, spoke the saddest words Bea had ever heard. When a dark mood was upon her, Mamma had a penchant for hopeless pronouncements,
but these were words to rip the heart right out of a person’s chest: “But it isn’t in
my
mind—it’s in
yours
. It’s in
yours
, Vico.
It’s in yours
. It’s true. It’s true, it’s true. Deep in your soul, Vico, it’s Grace you’ve always loved!”

Once, back in grade school, Bea had seen a boy, Glenn Coney, fall spectacularly out of a tree. This was at Chandler Park. He must have dropped thirty feet, straight down. You could actually hear the leg bone splintering when he crashed to earth. Afterward, Bea had replayed that scene over and over. Far stranger even than hearing a boy’s leg—Glenn Coney’s leg—cracking into useless fragments was the moment just before impact, while his body was plummeting. Over and over she witnessed the descent, and though it lasted but a second—the interval between the slip and the sickening, shattering thud—still Bea had had time within it to realize that the coming destruction was ineluctable: once Glenn lost his footing,
nothing
could be done. The earth was unforgiving. There was no going back …

Now, too, she was confronting something as irreversible as gravity: hearing those low deadly words of Mamma’s while standing tiptoe on the landing, Bea had felt similarly unable to undo what cried to be undone. After such a ravaging declaration, how could their neat little home ever be quite the same? Shivering in her pajamas, Bea had heard other things as well—horrible things—but nothing could ever match that most shocking and sad of accusations:
Deep in your soul, Vico, it’s Grace you’ve always loved!

Bea knew she shouldn’t be lingering over coffee in a place called Herk’s Snack Shack with a boy named Ronny Olsson; by now, she ought to have boarded a streetcar. Yet she didn’t wish to. Although a measure of civility had been restored at home, in other ways life had only degenerated. After words like those, how could things get any better? The desperation and fury could only go underground …

So if she heard herself egging Ronny on to deliver still more sweeping and severe judgments, and laughing more recklessly than usual, surely she was to be forgiven. And the truth was, Ronny Olsson hardly needed encouragement. He was something of a performer—actually, an extraordinary performer.

It was a sign of how things stood at home that Papa for the last two Saturdays had put off the Poppletons with excuses. Neither Uncle Dennis nor Aunt Grace had been glimpsed since the outing to Lady Lake. When would normal family life return?

Bea didn’t want to go home—she didn’t want to think any more about the declaration overheard on the landing. She wanted another cup of coffee. She wanted to listen to Ronny Olsson talk and—almost an equal thrill—she wanted to watch him talk. My goodness, he was handsome!

A crazy notion occurred to her—so outlandish, she momentarily lost the drift of his conversation … But
if
she were somehow to marry this Ronny Olsson (about whom, admittedly, she knew next to nothing), she could move out of her bedroom on Inquiry Street. And begin a new life.

So when Ronny said to her, “You’ll go with me Saturday to the DIA, won’t you?”—meaning the Detroit Institute of Arts—and she replied, “That s-s-sounds just lovely,” it wasn’t hesitation bringing a rare stammer to her lips. It was sheer bounding eagerness.

After dinner, miraculously, the telephone really freed up. Papa retreated into the living room, to listen to the radio. Edith cajoled Stevie upstairs for a game of rummy, though Stevie typically refused to play card games with Edith, who almost invariably won. And Mamma, who hovered endlessly round the kitchen, decided to take a bath. It seemed a perfect time to call Maggie. Bea longed to discuss handsome, dapper Ronny Olsson.

But if it was hard for Bea to find a private phone in the evenings, it was harder still for Maggie, whose mother-in-law, Mrs. Hamm, seldom left the house, or strayed far when Maggie was on the phone. Still, Bea decided to give it a try.

“And he’s
muy splendido?”
Maggie asked, once the conversation really got rolling. The word was pronounced
splen-dee-doe
. Maggie’s bright chatter had always been spiced with funny and preposterous slang, often of her own devising. But her talk had grown even more distinctive and peculiar since her move to the Hamms’. These days, she often spoke in a kind of code.

“Very.
Très splendido.”

“And a sharp dresser?” Clothes were a passion the two girls shared—though Bea sometimes wished her friend’s taste weren’t
quite
so flamboyant.

“The tie he wore the other day?” Bea said. “Blue and gold silk? It would have made the most beautiful scarf you can imagine. And there’s a camel’s hair coat …”

“Sounds like money,” Maggie said.

“Looks
like money. But I don’t know. I don’t even know where he lives.”

“Maybe he’s a con man,” Maggie suggested.

“I’m thinking a European prince in exile.”

“I say a con man.”

“Or a Hollywood scout?”

“A con man. You’ll be visiting him in jail before you know it.”

Maggie wasn’t playing along, quite.

Ever since Maggie’s wedding, and especially since she’d moved in with her in-laws, conversations about boys had grown complicated—difficult. And it was mostly boys the two girls had always talked about. What else? Certainly not art—a subject Maggie treated with uninterest at best, peevishness at worst. Actually, lots of subjects made her peevish.

Still, there had always been plenty to discuss. For it was of course an inexhaustible subject: the obstinate, proud, uncooperative, thrilling constitution of the male mind. It was the mystery beyond other mysteries: why do boys act the way they do?

“What’s he doing studying art?” Maggie went on.

“What am I doing studying art? I suppose he’s improving his technique.”

“He’s a boy, Bea.”

“I noticed.” There was a pause. “You would too.”

This last remark produced its desired effect, eliciting a bright little giggle from the old Maggie—Maggie Szot—as the distance between them on the telephone line shrank away to nothing. “Hard to miss it, huh?” she said.

“Impossible.” And they both giggled.

Of course conversations couldn’t be the same as before, now that Maggie was a married woman. But often the chief impediment wasn’t so much Maggie’s married state as her misery at living with her in-laws. Maggie seemed to resent Bea’s still being able to look freely at boys, to talk about boys. It was as if Bea, too, was supposed to be married to George, stationed out there at Pearl Harbor. As if Bea, too, were being not merely disloyal but almost unpatriotic in noticing any boy not in uniform.

So it was a little risky, bringing up Ronny Olsson. But if Maggie could be cool and standoffish when Bea spoke of boys, she was also—trapped out there on the West Side with Mrs. Hamm and George’s
whiny little brother, Herbie—deeply, desperately bored. And it was this desperately bored Maggie, hungry for any stray glimmer of glamour, who began warming to the topic of Ronny Olsson.

“Why isn’t he in uniform?”

“Maggie, I can’t just ask! Besides, I’ve only just met him.”

“Only just?
You make it sound like you’ll be seeing more of him.”

“Maybe. I don’t know. I guess so.”

“Well, you’d know,” Maggie said, and repeated the phrase somberly:
“You’d
know.”

This was a long-standing joke between them: Bea had second sight.

“And he’s tall?” Maggie went on.

“Nearly six feet, I guess. Maybe he looks taller than he is because he’s thin? And because of the cut of his clothes?”

“A tall boy in a camel’s hair coat and a beautiful necktie? I can’t imagine. When was the last time I saw somebody like that? Don’t ask me. Don’t ask.”

“Well I’m in no hurry to introduce
you
to him …”

This, too, was a long-standing joke: Maggie’s appeal to men was irresistible. It went beyond her bright good looks. As with second sight, the power was—ultimately—mystical.

Maggie giggled. Bea giggled.

“Bea, surely I’m entitled to a
little
fun.”

“Not at my expense you aren’t.”

“I wish you could see me now,” Maggie said. “I’m sticking out my tongue at you.”

“It’s a scary thought.”

And it was. For Maggie could stick out her tongue much farther than the average person could. It was all but lizard like, the way she could nearly touch the tip of her nose with the tip of her tongue. Maggie was double-jointed—or just weirdly jointed, like a contortionist. Her body was unnervingly loose and elastic.

“It’s a gesture you deserve,” Maggie said.

“Not yet I don’t,” Bea replied.

CHAPTER IV

“Bianca, look at those
textures,”
Ronny cried softly. His finger darted and danced in the air, directing Bea’s attention toward the satin crown of a hat, a velvety cuff, a crinkly piece of paper, and a scarf that was a different, less brittle kind of crinkly. The painting was called
Young Man Reading a Letter
. It was by a Dutchman, Gerard Ter Borch, whose name evidently rhymed with stork.

Look at the textures! Ronny urged again, with the schooled reverence of an artist attuned to all the pains taken in their replication. If Ronny was the best overall draftsman in Professor Manhardt’s class, nowhere was his preeminence more dramatic than in his mastery over textures. He wasn’t the best portraitist perhaps, but nobody could equal him when it came to reproducing a coarse, wayworn rag, a swept-together heap of broken glass, a tender pussy willow, a rust-blistered bolt.

The two of them had made it to the museum at last. The trip had begun to look ill-starred. Twice Bea had had to cancel—first for a reason she naturally couldn’t explain (terrible cramps) and then because Papa had asked her to attend, in Mamma’s stead, the wedding of Jack O’Reilly, the son of his boss Mr. O’Reilly. (Mamma wasn’t feeling well, or so she said.)