A Masterpiece of Revenge (3 page)

How wrongheaded and irritating were those friends who with good intentions offered bad advice. They told me to send Jean-Louis to summer camp so that I could go off by myself and get some rest. Many were concerned I needed to meet a woman. “You ought to be having fun,” they said.

What imbeciles. They had no idea that my son was the source of my greatest happiness, and that watching him live, grow, eat, run —these were my raisons d'etre. All those hours spent standing up in the surf, my shoulders getting burned by the sun, watching with pride and anguish while a small silhouette squared itself on a surfboard to do battle with the waves. Those plates of seafood we shared every evening. I remember thinking there would be only four or five summer vacations when the two of us would be together. Then would come that moment when he would announce he wanted to spend his vacation camping with friends.

We spent every vacation in each other's company — on the backs of camels traveling the Silk Road, diving into the blue waters of the Pintade, drinking coconut milk on the Marquesas Islands. We saw the Promised Land, crystal-blue desert skies, palaces painted by Carpaccio. We drank the wines of Cyprus.

And every summer I took him surfing. Jean-Louis had talent; there were competitions in Hawaii and Reunion Island. My vacations were scheduled around them. We were always together. And never, never, did Jean-Louis ask if he could go camping with friends.

Standing there on the landing, holding that photo, I felt a deep sadness. There he was, surfing, and I wasn't there with him. Someone else's camera had taken the picture. Perhaps that was what hurt the most. It was as if the photo was telling me that my days with him were over, that my son was riding the waves on his own. He no longer needed me to watch over him. Now he preferred going to Pizza Hut with his pals to sharing seafood on the shore with his old man.

“Everything comes to an end, happiness included.” That was the cruel message the photo was delivering.

I believe that the reason I called Jean-Louis later that day was not worry, but jealousy. I asked him, as casually as I could, who might have sent me the picture. He told me he had no idea.

“It must be a joke, Dad.”

I placed the photo on the mantelpiece and thought no more about it. After preparing my Thursday lecture, I went, as always, to the Guy Savoy Restaurant. The Guy Savoy was one of my bachelor hangouts. Every Wednesday evening I dined there in the company of my good friend Luciano. The Savoy has a wonderful ragout of mushrooms, and foie gras steeped in a truffle sauce.

That evening I planned to suggest to Luciano that we play a game of chess. A game I was determined to win. Luciano had defeated me the last time we'd played. “Defeated me” is putting it mildly; he had crushed me, rather, on the twenty-seventh move, right after I had moved my pawn to C2. All I needed was to move it to Cl to get queened, but, blinded by that ambition, I fell into his trap.

Playing with Luciano was an intellectual experience. One could never predict when and where he would set his trap. The precision and rapidity of his calculations were confounding. He planned eight moves in advance. To him chess was more than a pastime. Though Luciano was a successful corporate lawyer, his life revolved around moving pieces on a chessboard, while I played purely for pleasure, and because playing well means using your imagination and your instinct. Chess is a perfect vehicle for revenge — of the slow, quiet sort. That night I checkmated Luciano with my bishop.

A dinner at the Savoy followed by chess: here was a marriage of the pleasures of palate and mind.

A week passed. I got a long, chatty letter from Jean-Louis. He loved Berkeley, he wrote, and was being challenged by his courses. He was playing tennis again. His backhand was improving. All this pleased me. Anyone working on his backhand wasn't likely to spend evenings doing drugs at a rave in San Francisco. The more sports my son did, the more contented I was.

My mind was at rest and my work proceeded peacefully. I was planning a few trips: a short visit to the Stuker Gallery in Bern, which was seeking my counsel, followed by a day at Christie's in Dusseldorf. A private collector in London wanted me to have a look at a Poussin he'd bought. I worked on the proofs of my latest book, and was polishing an article for an art journal.

I also needed to finish my biographical entry for
Who's Who
. Generally I dismissed any suggestion of including my name in these sorts of publications. But
Who's Who
would be practical from a professional point of view, particularly to promote my credentials abroad. I didn't mind the world knowing I considered myself— and was considered — the greatest authority on the work of the French landscape painter Claude Gellée, also known as “le Lorrain” or Claude Lorrain, born in 1600 and died on November 23, 1682. I was an expert in seventeenth-century French painting in general, but the paintings of Lorrain had been my passion for many, many years.

I felt territorial about Lorrain. The artist himself had been mortally afraid of imitators, who were legion in his day, and had drawn shaded outlines of each of his paintings. He called this private register the
Libro di Veritá
, the “Book of Truth.” What I was putting down about myself in the
Who's Who
entry was nothing more than the truth, the shaded outlines of my career.

Right after I'd finished I went down to get my mail. A vague feeling of unease spread through me when I retrieved an envelope that looked suspiciously like the one that had contained the photo of Jean-Louis. The label was identical. The enveloped was postmarked Rome.

I opened it. Inside was another photo of Jean-Louis, playing tennis. It had obviously been taken at Berkeley. Again, no identification, no note, nothing. Just the photo.

This nonsense was starting to irritate me. It was a tasteless joke. Or was it a joke? I shuddered involuntarily, as if a small electrical current had passed through me.

What worried me was the postmark. First Geneva, now Rome. What linked them? What did it mean? I knew at least that my theory about the absentminded friend was untenable.

Again I thought it might be from one of Jean-Louis's jilted girlfriends. Perhaps she was trying to show me that my supposedly studious son was spending all his time having fun. “See?” it seemed to be saying. “He's nothing but a playboy.”

Perhaps it was from some guy who was attracted to Jean-Louis and expressing his feelings voyeuristically, by sending me photographs.

I didn't think my son kept things from me, but what parent knows all there is to know? He didn't tell me everything that was going on in his life. Maybe he led a secret life. Did he have enemies? My mind started turning over scenarios, each more dreadful and absurd than the one before.

Whatever the case, I knew that I would receive a third photograph, and perhaps a fourth, and a fifth. Whoever was trying to get my attention had gotten it.

I determined to put an end to this by phoning Jean-Louis. I dialed the number. He answered on the eighth ring, by which point my nerves were completely on edge.

“Hi, Dad!” His voice was balm to my soul. “Sorry it took me so long to answer. I was in the shower. Just played two hours of tennis.”

And there I had been imagining the worst sort of catastrophes. All because he was taking a shower.

I asked him when he had started playing tennis again. About three weeks ago, he told me. That meant the photo had been taken recently. I had intended to tell him about the new picture but changed my mind. This time it would worry him. And for no reason, very likely.

After asking him some silly questions, designed purely to gauge what I could from the tone of his voice, or to glean some detail — something that might hint at trouble or the outline of a problem — I said good-bye and hung up, feeling calmer.

The reassurance was temporary. This business of the photos had put me in a foul mood. I found it difficult to concentrate on “European Estheticism Toward the End of the Seventeenth Century,” the tide of my next lecture. The situation was upsetting the smooth operation of my routines, leaving me feeling disorganized and edgy.

When I least expected them, dark thoughts would swirl in my mind, a noisy chaos of them. I don't think now that I felt any specific fears of immediate danger. That was the problem. I couldn't make the photographs fit into a frame; hence there was no way of figuring out the motives behind them.

The following day I had lunch with Luciano at the Savoy. We played chess and I lost. I unnecessarily and stupidly sacrificed my bishop for a knight. I never would have done that had I not been distracted.

The third photograph arrived a week later. I opened the envelope, my heart beating hard, my ears buzzing. Only later did I note the postmark indicating it had been mailed from Brussels.

The photo showed Jean-Louis reading on a balcony, presumably that of his Berkeley apartment. It had been taken from a distance, again with a telephoto lens. My son seemed unaware his picture was being taken.

I sat down and tried to think. I couldn't even play my Haydn. Noise of any sort was disruptive. Clouds were darkening over me. A current of dread ran in my veins.

I struggled nonetheless to remain composed, for I knew that I needed to find some kind of design. I put a stray pencil back into its tray, refiled a folder lying on the desk, and plucked dead leaves off a geranium. Then I began examining the third photograph.

Instinctively, I sniffed it, hoping for the trace of an odor: a woman's perfume, or tobacco, or a chemical, something that might set me on the right track, like a bloodhound given a scent and then taken off the leash.

I examined the photograph minutely, looking for a fingerprint, a lipstick trace, a smudge of nail polish, some varnish, a stain.

I lit a match and heated the back of the image to see if something might have been scrawled in invisible ink, or if it bore the impression of some writing. Please, I begged, give me a code. Anything.

Finally in desperation I lined up the three photos and tried to make some sense of them as a series. Perhaps I needed to find the right way of reading them, of finding their meaning in their order, as if each were parts of a single sentence, visual words.

Jean-Louis surfing … ocean, tide, wave, undertow, drown.

Jean-Louis playing tennis … court, serve, double fault, overhead, put away.

Jean-Louis reading on his balcony … height, vertigo, fall.

When you play this kind of game, danger lurks everywhere, even in the happiest of photos. Behind the tanned skier is the tree that can kill him. Beneath the foot of the young man hugging his girlfriend is the step waiting to give way. It was silly, regressive. Still…

In the corner of the beach in the first photo was a brown-haired woman. Was she meaningful? Was her look malevolent?

What about the flower bushes to the left of the tennis court in the second photo? Could they mean something malevolent, as they did in the tarot cards my grandmother used to read the future? One card had a bouquet of flowers in the corner, signifying, she told me solemnly, “I'll luck to the man who strays from the straight path.” The simplest bouquet of flowers can foretell doom.

My grandmother had attempted to initiate me in the obscure arts of divination. I used to laugh, though now I think it had some influence on my choice of careers. My life revolved around the search for hidden meanings.

Symbols and signs are inscribed even in those paintings whose meanings seem self-evident. From the works of Cranach, Bellini, Piranesi, I had learned a thing or two about puzzles. Fm not talking about hidden figures, magic squares, crosses, skulls, or scales, all of which you can decipher with the help of a half-decent reference book. Fm talking about symbols that on first view don't seem like symbols at all: a color, a chubby baby, a stone terrace, a bouquet of flowers.

The
Allegory of Purgatory
,
 which for many years was attributed to Giorgione, then to Bellini, is a veritable hotbed of clues that yield unending interpretative possibilities. Thousands of feverish imaginations have focused on the painting, trying to account for all the arcane references and multiple meanings. To say the painting deconstructs itself is too easy an excuse for giving up.

Observing Piranesi's
Prison
or De Chirico's abandoned cities, those factories of the uncanny, we learn that the only way they can be approached is through metaphor, in an association of ideas. You find the first word, which in turn gives you the second, and so on. By a sequence of decoding, the visual turns linguistic.

Even were my son not involved, I would have spent the day poring over the photographs. I do not like being kept in the dark. Having devoted my life to deciphering the seemingly indecipherable, I know that it is possible to find meaning. The problem this time was that my judgment was clouded. Behind these photos lurked some danger. Instinct was telling me to beware.

“Premonitions are like instinct,” my wife used to say. “They are infallible.”

Sophie's intuitions had been infallible. She could tell if Jean-Louis was ill before the symptoms appeared. She sensed when he had a fever. She would run to Jean-Louis's crib even before he awoke in tears from a bad dream.

Thinking of Sophie made me think I should ask for advice from someone, but I did not feel I had anyone to whom I could turn. I had always been a bit of a loner. It's not that I'm misanthropic, for I'm not. I enjoy the company of good friends like Luciano and Sylvie.

But I relished solitude more. That is perhaps why I chose the line of work I did. I enjoyed being alone with a work of art, alone with its beauty — even if the work contained some wisdom I might share with my fellow man, its pleasure for me lay in the poetry of contemplation. In solitary communion with beauty one achieves the highest state of awareness.

The truth was I did not feel I could confide in anyone. Yes, there was my sister, and Sylvie, and Luciano, all of whom were above suspicion in that matter of these photographs. But I mistrusted the rest of the world. How can I confess to this? For a split second I even imagined my son was sending me these photos, as a ruse for extorting money.