The House of Dreams

 

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For LAW

 

Love is a flame; we have beaconed the world's night.

—Rupert Brooke

 

F
ROM
THE
D
ESK
OF
S
OPHIE
C
ASS

 

New York

August 28, 2000

Dear Mr. Lambert,

Here's the thing. You can ignore my letters if you wish, but my piece will run in
The New York Times
whether you, or your lawyers, like it or not. If it weren't for our family connection, I'd sue you in a heartbeat. I don't like threats. I am a professional investigative journalist, Mr. Lambert, and I'm just doing my job. This is not some personal vendetta as you claim, nor have I used underhand tactics. As an artist, I'm sure you appreciate the key is to look, to listen clearly, and see the things that other people miss. I looked, and I saw the truth—plain and simple.

My sources are rock solid, and more importantly I have new evidence for my claims. You see, I have discovered photographs, Mr. Lambert, taken by Alistair Quimby in 1940, the summer before you met Varian Fry in Marseille. Not only are there stunning photos of my great-aunt Vita, there are photos of you at work in the studio at the Château d'Oc. Both of you. I assume I don't need to explain any more?

Your lawyers have done their damnedest to warn me off, but now I am warning you—this piece celebrating your illustrious career and 95th birthday will run. I'm going to give you one last chance to put your side of the story before I file my copy. I will come and see you after Labor Day, at midday on Thursday, September 7. I imagine now you'll be ready to talk.

Yours,

Sophie Cass

 

ONE

F
LYING
P
OINT
, L
ONG
I
SLAND

September 2000

G
ABRIEL

There are few things emptier than the space where a Christmas tree used to be. At least, that's what Annie always says. If my lovely girl had her way, we'd have a tree all year long and the white lights strung out on the deck. When I was younger, I'd swim out at sunset and see Venus and the stars above and that rope of lights guiding me home, luminous as pearls on the dark throat of the bay. When we walked the dogs along the beach at night, she'd take my hand or loop her arm around my waist.
Gabe,
she'd say,
look, it's like our own galaxy on the shore.

Plenty are surprised by this home of ours. They expect the great man to have something grander, but they don't see I have everything I ever dreamed of here. I have the clear light of the sea spilling in through the square open doors to the barn where I work, and I have Annie. One summer I paid a bunch of boys to come up from Pennsylvania to raise the barn for me—it's an old red colonial, with a hipped roof and doors that open wide to the north. I need space to work, to spread my canvases, but Annie never wanted a studio. When I offered to build her one, she said, “What do I want with that?” She just set up a little table off the kitchen, facing the wall. She says she likes to be in the middle of things, so the kids can come and go as she sews her beautiful clothes. Her work's in collections across the country, but you wouldn't know it to look at her with her head bent over her embroidery. There's always a dog sitting at her feet and a cat curled up in the warmth of the lamplight beside her as she sews. First it was our own kids, and now there's always one grandchild or another in the high chair beside her or playing with their bricks or dolls on the floor and the radio singing away in the background. Maybe that's why people love her art—each stitch pulses and shines with life. My paintings scare people, intimidate them. They are big and intense, just right for uncompromising white-box galleries and soaring corporate atriums. I know which I'd rather live with. Over time people confused me with my paintings. Here's something I've learned—if you do good work, make it to my age, and keep your trap shut, you become a reclusive genius. I like my reputation, play up to it: the enigmatic old man of abstraction. People are afraid to ask too many questions, which suits me just fine. Only the bravest bother me out here. I glance over at the girl's letter on the table. Only the boldest find me.

My cup of coffee's grown cold as I rock the child in my arms and look out to sea. I'm listening to Billie Holiday singing “It's a Sin to Tell a Lie” on my 1959 Magnavox Imperial, and Lady Day's voice is dancing up among the rafters with the angels, the Calder mobile swinging with the tune as it rises into the air like bubbles in pure water. This song is Annie's favorite, and she always has a mischievous glint in her eye, singing along softly as we dance, our bare feet shuffling on the sandy deck overlooking the sea. My wife knows me well. I've lied about plenty in my life, but I never lied about loving her.

I love this time of year, too, always have. There's nothing like an empty beach for me, with the dazzling white sand, the sea turning to winter swells, and the pure blue sky above you. I can breathe here. Every day I wake feeling like the first man on earth, with his Eve at his side. After Labor Day, once all the fancy cottages along the dunes close down for the season and their topiary is tied up in its dust sheets for the winter, Annie and I kick off our shoes, get our toes in the sand, and take a walk down to our beach. We build a bonfire, grill a fish or two, and toast another summer's passing with a glass of Chardonnay. Annie doesn't drink much, but those nights she curls up under an old plaid blanket, and her cheeks flush, and she talks freely about the past, our life, and the future like the girl I met used to when we walked in the woods at Air-Bel like children in a fairy tale.

I am a contented man. This is all I wish for my children. I gave them each enough to help them start out in life, but not so much that they didn't have to work at it. Too much ease can ruin you; that's what I've always thought when I look at some of the kids of wealthy folks I've known. You lose your edge. I didn't want the kids to struggle as Annie and I did, but the rest I quietly gave away. If some fool banker wants to pay my dealers a million bucks for one of my early abstracts, then let him. Hell, I am the Robin Hood of the art world. There are plenty more folks in the world need the money more than we do, and I have so much to be thankful for in this life that I've had, this good and simple life I don't deserve.

 

TWO

W
ILLIAMSBURG
, B
ROOKLYN

Wednesday, September 6, 2000

S
OPHIE

A flurry of white wings wakes her, whirling, silhouetted against the bright morning light spilling through the curtainless loft window. Sophie leaps from deep slumber, sits bolt upright on the living room sofa, shielding her face with her arm from the light, from the bird. She squints her eyes, makes out the dove's frantic search for the narrow margin of space it slipped in through, helpless wings battering the high panes of glass.

“How did you get in here?” Sophie throws wide the window. The noise of the waking city spills into the studio on the warm breeze: honking traffic below, the whirr of air conditioners on the roof above, a tinny radio somewhere, playing “Said I Loved You … But I Lied.”

Jess's favorite,
she thinks instantly. A Pavlovian cocktail of memories swirls in her mind. She remembers teasing him about his taste in music when they met, how his unlikely love of power ballads became a running joke:
Seriously? Beneath that Brooks Brothers suit you're all big hair and stonewashed denim?
Sophie thinks of the night they slow danced to the song on the deck at some party in East Hampton—his request. Everyone had laughed and groaned as the DJ played the tune, but that gave the moment, the way Jess had walked toward her and held out his hand, a perfect lightness. She remembers his certainty, his focus only on her, the sound of the surf, and the sweet taste of strawberries still on her lips as he kissed her. She flexes her hand at the memory of the ring sliding onto her finger, the glint of the stone in the moonlight. Sophie gathers up the white bedsheet.
Of all the songs. Our song …
She corrects herself.
His song.
The tune carries up, up into the morning sky, from an open doorway on Grand Street, taking her thoughts with it.

Sophie speaks softly to the bird, calming its frantic search for freedom. “There you go,” she says, dropping the sheet over it the moment it lands in the corner of the studio. Gently, she enfolds the bird in her hands, feels the staccato beat of its heart against her fingers, the fine, cathedral arch of its breastbones.

At the window, she releases it, watches it soar up across Brooklyn into the hazy morning sky. The air is hot, edible, laced with the scent of the streets—gasoline, coffee, ripe melon skins in the Dumpsters behind the grocery store. The dove joins its dull-plumed friends roosting on the pediment of the building opposite, a pale punctuation mark among the Morse code line of birds cooing and shaking the night from their feathers.

Sophie sits on the windowsill in the sunshine, the brick already warm against her aching back through the thin cotton of her white camisole. She closes her eyes, raises her face to the morning sun, and cricks her neck from side to side, loosening the tense ligaments. Her gold-blond hair spills across her shoulders, a glossy halo she scoops up and secures in a loose bun with practiced ease. Beside the window, the sagging red velvet sofa and single pillow still bear the imprint of her restless sleep. The tune ends, and as the radio station jingle releases her from thoughts of Jess, the letter runs through her mind again, as it has on a permanent loop since she woke at four
A.M
.
Was I too hard?
she thinks.
What if Lambert won't see me?
She has read the letter so many times that she knows it by heart.
“Professional investigative journalist.”
She cringes inwardly.
Wonder what effect “newly graduated arts writer with zero professional experience” would have had on his hotshot lawyers
?