Women and Children First (18 page)

Eventually Sarkisian comes to, looking more irritated than anything. He picks up the book he’s dropped, slams it on the counter, says nothing when June checks it out. June gazes out the window after him. “This isn’t the first time,” she says. “He really shouldn’t be driving.” But now it is Alvar who feels slightly weak in the knees, guilty for not having offered to help, and for even thinking that he has just missed the perfect opportunity to make Sarkisian’s acquaintance.

At dinner, Marlise’s artichoke has her complete attention. Her delicate, pointed face tilts toward it; she could be reading a magazine. Marlise is Swiss, but has been in this country so long she sounds American. Alvar’s stopped thinking of her as European, except when she takes things like artichokes so seriously.

Marlise is an arts administrator; she and Alvar moved here from Boston when she was hired to head the South Jericho Cultural Center. Since then she has invited Sarkisian to every opening and show. He never accepts, and though Marlise respects his work she calls him a selfish old man. Alvar is instantly sorry for having told her about Sarkisian’s faltering in the library. It’s the same regret he felt long ago when he told his parents how his favorite baby-sitter sent him up on the roof with a garbage-can lid to boost the TV reception: he would have given anything to unsay it. Most likely Marlise won’t be sympathetic—Alvar wouldn’t have mentioned Sarkisian if he had had anything else to report.

Alvar’s work isn’t going well. In Boston he was a medical illustrator and did large thick-paint abstractions. In Vermont he began doing landscapes—moody, expressionistic. On good days he thinks of Burchfield and Albert Pinkham Ryder; on bad, of the muddy army greens and browns of untalented children’s art. When they moved here, Alvar had just turned thirty. He’d given himself five years to put together a show; it is now three years past that.

Alvar blames everything on the condos. Last spring a developer put fifty vacation units in the field across from their house. Alvar’s best memories are of buggy June evenings, bright October afternoons: he and Marlise cutting through that field on their way to the woods. When the bulldozers came, they walked the edge of the cut, probing it with their sneakers, as if it were a giant scab that might yet heal over. The buildings went up in no time. Now Alvar stays in the yard or drives into town; he can’t look at a tree without thinking how soon it will disappear. He thinks of
National Geographic
stories about ecological disasters—El Niño blowing in off the condos, blighting his whole world. Marlise says: This is America. What did he expect?

Marlise spent last month getting funding for a local woman—a terrible weaver who drives around in a van with I WEAVE vanity plates—to take her loom into fifth-grade classrooms. One night Marlise told Alvar that her only consolation was stealing from the state. She hadn’t talked like that in ten years. Back in art school, where they met, she took him across the river to Cambridge to hear a Marxist historian lecture on primitive bandits as prototype revolutionaries. He remembers that cinderblock classroom, how conscious he was of her arm beside his, the happiness that came over him as the craggy charismatic professor assured him that he had been right to love Robin Hood. He’d nearly forgotten all that, but now he is glad he didn’t. He feels that this memory prepares him, gives him some way to understand what is happening when, after a long silence, Marlise looks up from her artichoke and says that she has an idea.

This is Marlise’s idea: they apply for a grant in Sarkisian’s name and keep the money themselves. Just that day, a flier had crossed her desk, announcing a new program to bring established artists to small towns. She’d actually thought of Sarkisian: how his silence and stubbornness impoverished them all. The grant is for eight thousand dollars. They have only to fake Sarkisian’s signature and resume; his work is so famous they won’t need slides. All Sarkisian has to do is live where he lives and give two public lectures they can pretend he gave. Plenty of visiting poets can testify that you can appear in South Jericho and have not one person come.

“Sarkisian
owes
guys like you,” she says. “Think of it as your grant, the grant you could get if he’d write you the recommendation he’s too mean to write. Think of it as our tax money coming back.” But all Alvar can think of is that it really is possible to lose track of who someone has become. Though why should that surprise him? Consider their evenings: after dinner Alvar reads while Marlise watches the VCR. She’ll rent anything—teen drive-in horror films, low-budget sixties westerns. The last tape he watched with her was a kind of
Mondo Cane
pseudodocumentary about Bombay transsexuals and snake-blood bars in Japan. The funny thing was, it made him feel stuffy for reading, made him wonder if the books he liked—Proust, Tolstoy, biographies of Bloomsbury types and abstract expressionists—weren’t just substitutes for a social life of his own.

“It’ll be easy,” says Marlise. “Someone in some office somewhere will figure Sarkisian wouldn’t apply unless he needs the money. They’ll be happy to grant him. There isn’t one person in arts administration who doesn’t at some point start telling you about the Japanese and their national treasures.” As she talks, she is surgically cutting the fuzz from her artichoke heart. “Eight thousand dollars,” Marlise says. “Think about fifteen acres.”

There are many reasons why Alvar doesn’t stop her. He is moved that she would risk so much for him; the condos bother Marlise, but, really, he is the one who talks about land. He begins to think she believes in him in ways he has come to doubt. Also, he is intrigued to find that the angry, disaffected, rebellious streak in her wasn’t just something put on to intrigue him. There is a mystery in this, and Alvar’s reminded of when their differences excited instead of worried him. Sarkisian doesn’t need the money, the state will only waste it. Alvar wants the land.

Everything happens fast. Marlise comes home the next night and tells him she has already sent the application off. There is a rolling deadline; they’ll hear in about three months.

Is Marlise the grant-hustler Lady Macbeth? Or the arts-council William Tell, a leveler driven by some primitive justice deeper than Alvar’s simple right and wrong? Alvar is interested. He feels that he and Marlise are partners in crime, keeping secrets—not only from the world, but from each other. Perhaps that is what they are looking for as they stare at each other a moment too long, that split-second catch of attention. The air has a buzz, the tension of early flirtation. As they hang out together, cooking in the kitchen, all sorts of things seem, inexplicably, funny.

They never mention Sarkisian and could almost pretend nothing’s happened. But when Alvar doesn’t see Sarkisian in the library for a few weeks, he nervously asks June if Sarkisian is all right. June says yes, in fact he seems
better
; he’s not having those episodes any more. He and Alvar are just coming in at different times.

In the bookstore, Alvar buys a glossy art postcard, a photo of Bonnie and Clyde. Bonnie is pointing a rifle at Clyde and poking him with one finger. They stand on a roadside, a ’38 Chevy behind them. Bonnie’s long flared skirt strains over her trim little hips and the visible curve of her belly. In her beret, her stylish T-straps, her dress-top like a kid’s long-sleeved polo shirt, she is an incredible fox. Alvar laughs out loud. Half-smiling, half-squinting, focused entirely on Clyde, Bonnie reminds him of Marlise.

Alvar and Marlise fall in love all over again. He is triumphant that she is once again more interested in him than in Japanese snake-blood bars. He’s disappointed when the passion doesn’t translate back into his work, but is, in general, much happier, and even has moments when he would choose his life over anyone’s.

Marlise says nothing when the grant money comes through. She carries out the details of cashing and depositing and lets Alvar find out only when their bank statement takes an eight-thousand-dollar jump. Alvar buys champagne and they celebrate, convinced the money is rightfully theirs. It has nothing to do with art, or moral responsibility, but with the immunity and entitlement of new lovers: the world owes them what it begrudges the unloving and unloved. That they should be married so long and still feel this way seems like yet another crime they are getting away with.

One day when Marlise is at work, Alvar goes up past Gilboa and drives around with a real estate agent named Joelle. Chainsmoking Merits, Joelle tells Alvar she’s been married three times and has gotten divorced whenever she tried to quit smoking. When they get out of Joelle’s car, the air smells so sweet Alvar wants to buy it. Joelle says the acreage is the real estate equivalent of the old lady who sells you all her Fiestaware for thirty bucks. The land includes a granite quarry and a high meadow completely surrounded by mountains. Alvar puts a binder down, and Joelle says, “Sometimes everything comes together.”

Alvar waits for a sunny day to show Marlise the land. The meadow is a steep climb and as Marlise walks ahead, the light hits a red in her hair that Alvar had forgotten. At the top they turn to look at the view. A hawk glides by. The sun is hot. They’re sweating. When Alvar kisses the top of her head, Marlise says, “We could be one of those jeans ads in the
Sunday Times Magazine
.” Alvar knows that feeling this young is a trick, and so is thinking that fifteen acres is any protection at all. One TV tower could ruin everything. But right now he feels reprieved, as if time has slowed down for him; if he hurries, there may be enough of it for him to do serious work.

Mornings, Alvar takes pencils, sketch pads, and watercolors and drives up to his land. He fears being corny, like some bereted fruitcake out of the Barbizon School. But drawing takes him beyond self-consciousness, straight back to childhood Saturdays, to drawing along with the
Jon Nagy Show
and the actual buzz that came up through his arm when he copied something right. He starts with close-ups, Dürer-like botanical drawings, goes on to render the mountains in planes that suggest Cezanne’s. The summer sun beating down on his head is part of it. Alvar feels all art history streaming across his sketchbook, until he envisions a way to combine what he’s learned about nature with what he knows about paint.

Alvar longs to start painting again, but hesitates; even delay has its pleasures. His worries balance against his curiosity and desire. Finally, he goes back to his studio.

At first there is only pleasure: the smells, mixing colors, the oily gleam of the paint. At first he is entertaining himself, but after a while the choices of color are so right he feels as if something is choosing. The paint does exactly what he wants. He has the same odd tingle up his arm he gets drawing in the fields. His studio even smells like the fields—they’ve followed him inside. Hours slide away. Working is like a dream from which he wakes thinking: Joelle was right. Everything comes together. El Niño, the condos, stopping smoking—anything can upset the ecosystem. The secret is what will restore it. For a moment, Alvar sincerely believes—or, in any case, remembers a time when he did sincerely believe—that art provides that secret. All the connections—the money, the land, Sarkisian, Marlise, his work—seem complex and mysterious, and make Alvar feel larger than himself, included in a brotherhood embracing Gorky, Sarkisian, Alvar, Michelangelo and his least-gifted apprentice….

The better Alvar’s work goes, the more he thinks this way—and the more he can’t stop wanting to thank Sarkisian in person.

If Alvar told Marlise, she’d say: Thank me. Sarkisian did nothing. Why thank him? She’d say Alvar’s wish to contact Sarkisian is a suicide wish to get caught. Alvar too is suspicious: all those stories of perfect crimes spoiled by the murderer’s sentimentality, Bonnie and Clyde thinking they could hang out with C. W. and his kindly old dad. Alvar’s mystified by this urge which comes over him whenever he stops working. Marlise would point out that a social call is no way to thank a hermit. Still, Alvar imagines some journey or pilgrimage, some risk he must take to thank Sarkisian for being eighty and still painting. Several times he has gotten as far as looking up the number.

One morning Alvar puts down his paintbrush and picks up the phone and dials. When Sarkisian answers, Alvar explains that he is a painter, lives nearby, has always admired Sarkisian’s work. Sarkisian says, “I’m not interested,” and hangs up. Alvar is so humiliated he wants to take a nap. He keeps stopping what he’s doing to look at himself in the mirror. But that night, when Marlise asks what’s wrong, he says, “Nothing.” Not telling her reminds him of how he almost didn’t mention Sarkisian’s stumbling in the library. Now, of course, he’s glad he did. Clearly this is different—this time he knows not to tell. But what is familiar is how the impulse towards concealment distances him from Marlise.

Now everything drives Alvar back to work. He rarely visits his land, or the library. Now he paints in the evening too. Marlise has lots of new tapes to catch up on. Alvar finishes one canvas, and though it is nowhere near what he had in mind, immediately starts another.

One day Alvar paints a line that reminds him of Arshile Gorky, and suddenly he knows what he must do. He writes a note saying he has just bought an early painting of Gorky’s, a previously unknown masterpiece about which there is some question of authenticity. He wants Sarkisian to see it. He squeezes all this onto the Bonnie and Clyde postcard, and without letting himself reconsider, sends it off.

After a week Alvar gets a reply, a postcard of an empty restaurant dining room: Joe’s Steak Out, Jefferson, Mo. On the other side, in a spidery handwriting, “Call me” is written over Sarkisian’s phone number and name. This time, when Alvar introduces himself, Sarkisian laughs, a rumbling and wholly unspontaneous Santa Claus “Ho ho ho.” “That’s some picture!” Sarkisian says. “That Bonnie was one terrific chick! Come to my house next Friday at two. Bring the Gorky, okay?”

Alvar’s armpits are wet as he goes into his studio and takes his canvas down from the easel and puts up a clean one. He feels like a character on one of those TV sitcoms based on fakery, more fakery, exposure, confession, reconciliation. What if the prince finds out that My Little Margie isn’t royalty? There is never any option but to take deception to its absurd extreme.