Women and Children First (19 page)

In the library, Alvar is afraid that Sarkisian will come in and find him taking out the Gorky book. He forces himself to ask how Sarkisian is. “Pretty chipper,” says June. Alvar would have preferred semichipper—chipper enough to say something significant, not chipper enough to tell a masterpiece from a fake, a forty-year-old painting from one that is barely dry.

The book reminds Alvar of what he’d forgotten: that Gorky spent most of his life imitating other artists. “Then I was
with
Picasso,” Gorky would say. “Now I am
with
Kandinsky.” Alvar loves the irony—imitating the imitator; he sees it as confirmation. What’s disappointing is that the Gorky
he
wanted to do was one of the mysterious, rhapsodic canvases of the artist’s late career. The reason he said “early painting” on the postcard was that he thought Sarkisian would be interested in something from the years when he and Gorky lived near each other on Fourteenth Street and were close friends. On the radio in Alvar’s studio, the DJ is saying that nothing has felt quite right since Benny Goodman died. Now, hearing the first notes of “Sing Sing Sing” Alvar decides to pile tribute upon tribute and paint a Gorky imitation of Picasso’s
The Three Musicians
.

Alvar finds his Picasso book and begins mixing colors, seeking those jazzy oranges and browns. The idea taking shape in his mind is to do a late early Gorky, to create, in fact, the watershed painting marking Gorky’s emergence from imitation into genius. Secretly he is hoping to be
with
Gorky, or with Picasso, or even with Benny Goodman, that something of their spirits will rub off on him, guide his hand—just keep him company while he works.

But nothing like that occurs. Gorky isn’t there, Picasso isn’t there, Alvar’s Benny Goodman record sticks and repeats the same maddening phrase. Alvar is utterly on his own. He can’t even lose
himself
. He is conscious of everything quotidian and small—passing time, his tongue in his mouth, the laundry he’s promised to do. He worries about Marlise, about Sarkisian, about stopping his own work for this—though, in a way, it’s more satisfying: the result is so much closer to the intention. Halfway through, Alvar starts seeing the Gorky he had in mind. And yet it gives him no joy. Its satisfactions are all minor, mostly technical, matters of problem-solving, corner-cutting, a little like the pleasure of finding a way to combine two unrewarding errands. Alvar hasn’t a prayer that Sarkisian will be fooled.

Now he
should
tell Marlise, for there is always the chance that one discovery will lead to the next—to Marlise getting caught for that grant. Then Alvar will be responsible. But
Marlise
is responsible; it was all her idea in the first place. Even if his meeting with Sarkisian goes well and nothing else comes of it, still, he may never be able to tell Marlise. Though Alvar and Marlise have never mentioned it, they treasured being able to tell each other everything. Suddenly their previous life together, even the worst of it, seems to Alvar as innocent and far away as childhood, and no more possible to recapture. He cannot bring himself to tell Marlise that he has painted a counterfeit Gorky. He hides it when she comes home.

The corn is in tassel and smells of urea—cloying and sweet. Why has Alvar never noticed that the smell of the cornfields is the smell of the nursing home? The land he drives past on his way to Sarkisian’s reproaches him. It is early August. He has not been to
his
land for a month. Though he knows better, he can’t help feeling the land isn’t his anymore, that he has lost it. What has he done with his summer? Getting the grant and buying the land seems like ages ago; he remembers irises blooming outside Joelle’s office. For comfort, he thinks of the painting he stopped working on in the middle; he can go back to it tomorrow. The thought of it should cheer him, but it doesn’t. Last night he watched
Panic in Needle Park
with Marlise; they couldn’t look at each other when the junkie couple fought. Alvar thought: Better addicted to heroin than to a VCR. When one of the characters died, Marlise said, “Everyone dies.” Her voice had a kind of sob in it which sounded, to Alvar, phony and Garboesque.

The Gorky is in the back of Alvar’s pickup. This morning, wrapping it in butcher paper, he’d felt like an Egyptian embalmer. Now he can’t stop thinking about Gorky’s death. He remembers a conversation from years ago, his art-school friends arguing about Gorky’s suicide, each one insisting it happened in a different place. The most success-oriented of them claimed Gorky hanged himself in his gallery; the purist said no, in his studio. The nature painter said outside, from a tree. How romantic his death seemed, especially when they ignored its circumstances—the fire in Gorky’s studio, the car wreck, a cancer operation, divorce.

Alvar parks by Sarkisian’s mailbox and walks down toward the house. First he sees the metal roof, rusted a rich burnt sienna, then the dark wood siding, weathered to a patina which looks polyurethaned and reminds Alvar of Japanese temples where the whole esthetic is the effect of time. He considers turning around. If he gets no further, it will have been worth it.

Sarkisian greets him at the door. He looks up at Alvar and says, “A Viking!” Alvar cannot pretend he has never seen Sarkisian. He hears himself mumble, “I think we may have met. At the library.”

“
This
library?” Sarkisian studies Alvar more closely. “This country is full of Vikings,” he says. “After a while I quit looking.” Then Sarkisian laughs, a loud, theatrical poke in the ribs telling Alvar not to take seriously this being lumped with the faceless American Vikings. Alvar is surprised that a hermit would bother maintaining the social skills to be, simultaneously, a charmer and a son of a bitch. “Come in,” Sarkisian says.

The main room is just large enough for a table and two chairs, a large cast-iron cookstove, and a kind of daybed covered in red velvet. Every beam is worn to a glossy, exquisite grain; what daylight gets through the one dusty window reminds Alvar of pictures of Central Asia—those smoky blue yurt interiors where children in embroidered beanies play in the shafts of light. But here it’s Sarkisian who is dramatically lit as he motions for Alvar to sit down, and takes the chair where the sun finds the white in his hair, the gold of his skin, the hollows of his great cheekbones. Alvar wonders if Sarkisian invited him to come at the hour when he knew the light would do just that. On the table between them is a book, a plastic-covered library copy of
The Lives of a Cell
. Alvar has never read it, but wants to now; he makes a mental note to check it out.

Sarkisian says, “You are a reader! I can tell! It’s how they look at books, sideways, like at a girl. You know that Doisneau photograph, that very bourgeois French gentleman window-shopping with his wife, his eyes are over
here
, there is a painting of a naked woman? That is how readers look at books. I am a painter, but literature is my love. I went to my friends’ studios, but first, before I saw their work, first I looked at their books.”

Alvar says, “I read all the time.” His voice is strained and unrecognizable. He hasn’t sounded like this since he and Marlise fell in love. That they were so scared of each other made him realize how serious it was. Now he thinks: I am thirty-five years old, and I sound like an art-school girl on a date.

“All right!” says Sarkisian. “Here is a question. Who was the greatest writer who ever lived?”

How can Alvar answer? “I give up,” he says. “Proust?”

“That homo?” says Sarkisian. “That social climber? Let me tell you: Henry James.”

Alvar says, “Henry James?”

“Proust is like stuffing your face with a cream puff,” Sarkisian says. “Some complicated French dessert. Henry James is clean—like good strong caviar. Proust is a skating bug, skating ever-bigger circles on the surface of the pond. Henry James is a diver. He goes deep.” Sarkisian plunks his fist on the book and leans across the table toward Alvar. “Deeper and deeper,” Sarkisian tells him. “That is the purpose of art.”

Alvar thinks: Fish eggs? Henry James? Is Sarkisian out of his mind? Still, this “deeper and deeper” thrills him. He feels that he has gotten advice here, great advice about art. Deeper and deeper is something to point his life toward. He also suspects it’s the kind of advice that is good for about twenty minutes. Deeper and deeper could be the punch line in one of those holy-man life-is-a-fountain shaggy-dog jokes.

“We will have time,” Sarkisian says. “We will talk about Henry James.”

Alvar can’t believe he is hearing this. Does Sarkisian mean, time
today
, or in the future? Maybe they can be friends. Alvar imagines painting till late afternoon on those suicide-gray winter days, then driving to Sarkisian’s. Perhaps, in time, he can even tell Sarkisian about the grant they collected in his name, and they will laugh at how life imitates Henry James: Alvar and Marlise, one of those Jamesian adventurer couples. He will take Sarkisian to the land, show him what they have, in a way, bought together.

“Do me a favor,” Sarkisian says. “You are a literary man. See that poem up there on the door? Maybe you can tell me who wrote it. I don’t know.”

The door he is pointing at is open. To read the card tacked up to it, Alvar has to step into a small adjoining room, empty except for an armchair in the middle. On all four walls and the ceiling are pasted up movie-star photos, art reproductions, newspaper clippings, most of them yellowed with age and shellac, though some are newer. The newest, Alvar’s flattered to see, is his postcard of Bonnie and Clyde. He wants to go over and look at Bonnie’s foxy familiar smile. But he’s afraid to, afraid of Sarkisian, and of the room making him feel like a button in some Victorian housewife’s decoupage box. “My study,” Sarkisian says.

Alvar reads the poem, copied out by hand. “As I was going up the stairs / I met a man who wasn’t there. / He wasn’t on the stairs today. / I hope to God he stays away.” Alvar can’t help saying, “This?”

“That,” says Sarkisian. “Who wrote it? Any ideas?”

“I don’t know,” Alvar says. “Ogden Nash?”

“Very good!” says Sarkisian. “I doubt it.”

They both fall silent. A few moments later Sarkisian says, “Here’s what I can’t understand. All those fellows in Henry James going through life without sex. Young people should be in love all the time. Like Clyde and Bonnie. When I was young, I fell in love every day. Then—if they want to be artists—then they have to give all that up.”

“Give it up
why
?” Alvar asks, smiling lamely.

“Too distracting,” says Sarkisian.

Alvar wants to say: What about Picasso? He wants to say: No one believes this anymore. Nobody insists that artists starve and live like hermits and go crazy and kill themselves. New York is full of artists—real artists—eating in first-class restaurants. Even Gorky had a wife—two wives. Two daughters. Then Alvar thinks of how they had left him by the end, and of Gorky’s suicide note: “Goodbye my loveds.” Maybe Sarkisian is right. So that when Sarkisian asks, “Are you married?” Alvar is astonished to hear himself say, “No.”

So: yet another thing Alvar wishes he could unsay. He feels that he has betrayed Marlise, that ten years of loving and being faithful to her count for nothing. Waves of guilt and sadness roll over him, even as a meaner thought crosses his mind: What if he and Sarkisian
do
become friends? How will he explain Marlise? He considers how all this began and will end in deception. Alvar is a counterfeiter, Sarkisian an incredible ham. Nothing will ever come of this but lies and more lies. How foolish he was to hope for anything more. But even so, when Sarkisian says, “Now the Gorky, you have brought it?” Alvar thinks: Not yet.

Because the painting will end everything. Sarkisian will spot the counterfeit, and Alvar will have to leave. And though Alvar knows he was wrong to expect more, still some part of him goes on hoping—though for what he doesn’t know. It reminds him of how, just before he and Marlise became lovers, they would linger in each other’s presence, with nothing more to say but reluctant to part, and even a little angry.

Alvar excuses himself and goes to get the painting from the truck; he almost drives off. Back inside, he unwraps the canvas. Sarkisian examines it a moment, then says, “Where did you get this?” Alvar pauses. There is still time to confess, to accept his humiliation and get out. He says, “London,” where he has never been. “At an auction.”

Finally Sarkisian says, “I remember when Gorky painted this.”

Alvar is conscious of steam escaping quietly from a kettle on the stove, and that he is holding his breath as Sarkisian says, “I will tell you something about Gorky. None of us thought he could paint. Personality, yes. But talent? Talent, no. The joke was: Gorky will be an old man and still-imitating Kandinsky. Then one day I ran into him on Fourteenth Street, he dragged me up to his studio. I saw there this painting. This one here. I thought: Another imitation Picasso. But then I saw that it was different, not just Picasso—but Gorky. Understand?”

“Yes,” Alvar says, suppressing a crazy desire to laugh. He has gotten away with it! He knows it is nothing to be proud of. But maybe Gorky’s spirit was working through him. And really, what harm does it do for Sarkisian to recover these memories, this moment of connection with his old friend?

“I told Gorky we must celebrate,” Sarkisian goes on. “Between us we had a dollar. Gorky said, ‘Let’s go to Central Park and rent a boat.’ It was a beautiful day. So we went to the park and went out on the lake and rowed a while, and pretty soon we saw two girls on the shore. Beautiful girls! We said, ‘Come for a ride!’ The girls got in the boat. We rowed out again, talking, very polite. Suddenly Gorky began rowing like mad, leaning way back. I said, ‘Gorky, what the hell are you doing?’ Then Gorky winked at me and I saw: each time he leaned back, he was looking up those girls’ dresses!”

Sarkisian laughs, as does Alvar. Alvar feels privileged to have heard this, feels that he has been taken back in time to the day when a great painter’s work turned a corner. He remembers that sense he had—when he first bought the land and started painting again—of a brotherhood, a line of artists spanning past and future. So what if the painting isn’t a Gorky? Meeting Sarkisian was a blessing, even if the agents of that blessing were petty crimes. Alvar thinks: Deeper and deeper. He promises himself to remember Gorky and Sarkisian in that rowboat, to keep that image with him, like part of his own memory, changing his whole future life.