Agnes Mallory (27 page)

‘
Agnes Mallory,' I said now to the girl. Her on the couch, nursing her coffee, bathing her nose in the steam. Me by the mantelpiece, elbow on the mantelpiece, scotch in hand. Trying to keep the emotion out of my face. And the wind falling and rising outside, the rain hissing and pattering. And the fire crackling. ‘Agnes Mallory,' I said. ‘The name's familiar. Why do you want to know about her?
'

The girl did her impression of a thoughtful gaze across the surface of her coffee mug. ‘Well … because
…
Like I said – or like you said – I want to be an artist. A sculptor. And as a woman sculptor, she's, like, this important influence for me. I feel' And she tucked her legs up under her and swiveled that ingenue kisser on me, all blinky with youthful candor
.

I could barely stand to look at her – I could barely stop – now that I recognized the face. ‘So read her biography,' I said
.

‘
Oh, great
.'

‘
There are several. Three, I think:
‘

‘
Great. Are you gonna, like, toy with me?
'

I, like, might, I thought
. ‘Dweller In A Secret Place.
That was one, wasn't it?
'

‘
You know, obviously
.'

‘
Yeah. Arthur Levine. That was the best one, I thought. The heroine artist. From the psalm: “Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night
…”
and so on. Then there was
Shaping the Night,
the critical one. Sheila Solotoff. Which wasn't bad either as far as it went. Agnes chisels the horrors of the twentieth century into art. Simple, but not stupid anyway. Which brings us to the feminist one, what was it …?
'

She sucked her cheeks in to hide a smile
. ‘In the Valley of the Dead Elms.'

‘
Right, right. Those sterile, phallic elms standing envious guard over the fruitful valley. Those bad, bad elms
.'

She pressed cute lips together hard; raised pert chin defiantly. ‘You were there, weren't you? In the actual valley?
'

I snorted and swigged scotch, to show I couldn't be tricked out of my eternal silence that easily. Then I treated her to a nice, hard study, swirling my drink, feeling the heat of the fire on my calves. Feeling her face, the memory of her face, the memory of the mornings in Vermont. ‘So who are you?
'

‘
What do you mean?
'

‘
Well, what's your name to start with?
'

A suspicious pause. ‘Uh … Anne Truitt
.'

‘
Honk. A lie
.'

‘
Anne Truitt! That's my
…'

‘
Sorry. She's a famous sculptress
.'

‘
Well … I was named after her
.'

‘
Both names?
'

‘
Well …' She burst out laughing. ‘God. You're being such an asshole
.'

I laughed too, mighty pleased with myself. I shook my head. ‘Mystery and romance,' I said into my drink. ‘Mystery and romance
.'

She forced herself to stop laughing – and then went right on with the melodrama, solemn and watery-eyed, as if her laughter had just been erased, edited out like a blown take in a movie. Kids. ‘Look, it's just important to me, okay? It's something I need to know about. You were, like, right there. Right in the valley of the dead elms and everything.' She actually said that. In the valley of the dead elms. Like something out of H. Rider Haggard or Conan Doyle. The romance was suffocating, the past like a hand on my throat
.

‘
Christ,' I said
.

‘
You knew her. You were with her. You were there when she died.' And she really wound up for the next pitch, setting her coffee mug down on my cobbler's bench, lifting her eyes
–
where did this cherub get such a range of gazes? ‘And you have her letters too, don't you?
'

Nothing from me. I watched it go by
.

‘
Arthur Levine wrote about it in the
New York Times.
He said you had no right to keep history from people
.'

‘
Oh yeah. History:
'

‘
He said you admitted you had them by refusing to give them to him
.'

My scotch was gone but I grinned at the ice cubes. ‘I told him if he didn't get off my lawn I'd stuff them so far up his ass he'd be eating her word
.'

‘
Then you do have them
.'

With nothing to say, I rattled the cubes against my teeth. This was no good, I thought. You could get to enjoy this. The fencing with her. Even the fencing with myself, knowing who she was, not quite letting myself know. Like one of those relationships where you spar about sex so much it becomes impossible, the sparring becomes everything. What was I going to do about her? that was the question. I thunked the empty glass onto the mantelpiece
.

‘
It's like I said,' I told her. ‘I don't need my life interpreted for me. It bugs me. I've resigned from the
Zeitgeist.
Okay?' I wanted to leave it at that but, ah, bitter, bitter, bitter boy; on I went. ‘I was there – you're right. And somehow, call me shallow, but I missed seeing the heroic artist unafraid of the terror by night or the sculptor shaping the chaos of the twentieth century and – hey, maybe I just don't get it, but I didn't even see any phallic elm trees, silly me.' I managed to shut it off. ‘Ach! Have you got a car somewhere? I'll give you a lift
.'

‘
But I'm not a biographer
.'

‘
That's right. You're Annie Truitt. Not that Annie Truitt, this one. Only not. Have I got it now?
'

She was having a problem hiding that smile of hers. I guess she was enjoying it too, all this sparkling dialogue. But she soldiered on. ‘Listen, Mr Bernard,' she said. Leaning forward earnestly now with a Listen-Mr-Bernard sort of expression worked onto her tilted face. She rested her crossed arms on her knees in a manner meant to be engaging. ‘I understand it must, like, hurt you to talk about these things. And I don't mean to be mysterious. It's just … Well, I'm not supposed to be here. Okay?
'

Her father again, I thought – and then wondered if I'd muttered it aloud
.

‘
And I need to know, that's all,' she went on anyway. ‘It's not, like, so ridiculous or anything. She's an inspiration. A lot of people say so. I mean, when someone dies, a famous artist – especially, for me, a woman artist, you know – and they die and no one knows who they are and then their art, you know, becomes recognized, becomes famous …' I was nodding now: yeah, yeah, yeah. ‘Well, it's, like, inspiring. You know? It is. I mean, it's like … she didn't die. Like … her art lives on. Or something. And so, like, if you're going through a hard time, you can think to yourself well, this happened to this other person too, you know, so it's not so bad. You can think: well, look at Agnes Mallory.' A noise aloud from me: exasperation, disbelief:
gah! ‘
Well, you
can,'
she said. ‘It can teach you, you know, how to live. And I happen to be having kind of a hard time with that right now. How to live. So, like, I need to know.' She gave a simple, ingenuous shrug. Was there no bottom to the girl's performance?

‘
Christ,' I said. ‘The Easter story of art
.'

‘
What? I don't
…'

‘
An artist dies obscure, or kills herself or whatever? And then her work is resurrected and she ascends into the heaven of our admiration and the faithful learn how to live? Horseshit. She just be dead, kiddo. All of them. John Keats. Jesus Christ. A million and a half murdered children. Dead, dead, dead. That's the only thing you need to know. That oughta be the headline every fucking morning
.'

Anne Truitt (the younger) closed her eyes tight and opened them as if she were having an hallucination and wanted it to go away. ‘Uh – what murdered children?' she said. ‘Like, what are we talking about?
'

I laughed. I put my hand to my forehead, dragged it down over my nose, over my mouth, wiping my lips dry. Trapped in the cinema of her soul. One of those chubby-but-hardboiled character actors was going to play me, I could tell. With a gravelly voice and narrowed, twinkling eyes. How could I tell her this story, if she wasn't wise enough to despair?

‘
Tell the truth and shame the devil,' I said. ‘You're Lena, aren't you?
'

Caught out, her reaction was less than subtle. She looked like the heroine in some B-movie thriller. Backed to the wall by the claws of an oncoming shadow: panicky, trapped
.

I pulled up the other Windsor – the one she hadn ‘t put her dripping things on. I drew it nearer the sofa and sat down on the edge of it, leaning toward her over the cobbler's bench, elbows on my knees. I did this because my legs were getting tired from standing, but perhaps it was suggestive to her of greater kindness, more earnest intimacy. At any rate, she settled down. Her face went still, blank. She waited
.

‘
Evelyn,' I said quietly. ‘That's who you look like really. You look like Evelyn
.'

She pressed her lips together, casting her eyes down in sensitive distress. Yes, this was better. This was the kind of melodrama she'd had in mind all along
.

‘
How is she?' I asked. ‘Is she still alive?
'

She nodded slowly. ‘She's pretty much all right right now, I guess,' she said. ‘But she's been sick a lot lately. She had a blood clot in her leg or something. And she has arthritis, which bothers her because she likes to work in her garden. She has a house in San Mateo. My father got it for her. It has this, like, really nice border of flowers around it – these impatiens – and then a trellis of roses on one wall. They were really, really nice when she could still keep them up. Sometimes I go up and help her with it, with the gardening. She likes to see me. And I like her too but, you know, I don't get to go up there too much. Uh – what else can I tell you?' She shrugged. ‘She's, like, getting old, you know. She must be, like, almost seventy or something
.'

‘
No. I don't think so. She's not that old
.'

She shrugged again. ‘Sixty-five
.'

‘
And so she lives all alone there?' I asked her
.

‘
Well, my Dad has a woman look in on her every day. He's offered to bring her down to Los Angeles, but she says she doesn't want to be a bother. I don't think she gets along with my Mom very well
.'

I nodded. I was moved. Moved simply by having news of her. And by her old age. And by the girl's father – Lena's father – and his kindness. He was always like that. A good straight guy, didn't question the verities, did what had to be done. I sometimes thought – and it was a thought I could really torture myself with late at night, a thought that could close my throat with tears on a moment's notice – I sometimes thought that he was the man I had wanted to be when I was nine years old. The kind of steady-shooting hero-type I pretended to be back then. Which, with my Marianne theory, would pretty much bring the Agnes-Harry circle to its miserable close: she had married what she thought I was and I had married what I thought I loved in her
.

‘
I went and saw her just before I left,' the girl offered now. ‘I told her I was coming here. She's the only one who knows. She said to say hello
.'

‘
Did she?' The feeling welled in me and that was all I could trust myself to say
.

‘
Yeah.' She hesitated. ‘We wrote down some questions. I mean, I wrote them down, but I talked them over with her: the things we thought you could help with. Some of them – the questions – were hers.' She made a diffident gesture at the wet clothes on my other chair. ‘They're in my vest
.'

With an expression of long suffering, I indicated my permission. She lifted off the sofa and reached across me for the soggy down vest. She hung there across me, futzing with the vest's inner zipper, so that her armpit was in front of my nose and I could smell her sweet deodorant and the rain in her hair and steal a look down over the curve of her backside as she lifted her leg up to make the stretch. I toyed briefly with the idea of reaching inside my chest and squeezing my heart to cinders to stop its agony of longing, but I figured another thirty years or so and I'd be dead anyway. And then, anyway, she sat down again
.

She sat down again, and she had a notebook in her hands. One of those small, thin ones reporters use. It must have been part of her original disguise. She flipped it open quite professionally too; maybe she'd spent nights practising in her garage. Goofily – attractively – she made nervous circles in the air with one white, glossy-nailed hand – she went into a ditzy preamble that went like this: ‘So these are … It got a little wet in the rain. These are just, like, some things I just sort of, you know, wrote down.' I chewed my cud and watched her, damned if I'd help her along. ‘So, like, one thing I wanted to know was, like: Were you, like, in love with her?
'

I laughed. ‘Is that what you wrote? Were you comma like comma in love with her?
'

She deflated; made a face: I was being a paternalistic asshole
.

‘
Here. Here,' I said. I extended my hand. ‘Don't sit there reading them to me. Let me see
.'

She had another face for this: reluctant, but what the hell. She handed the notebook over. It was damp, thickened with the rain. The pages were gray at the edges. Some of the writing near the edges was blurred. But it was all legible. She'd made her list of questions neatly in a round, schoolgirl script. Each one numbered, with a few lines under it left blank
–
space for the answer, I guess. This was the first page: