Catalogue Raisonne (36 page)

“Robert always knew less than he was telling,” Claudia said, twirling her coffee spoon. Sadly now, and ready to give this up. But I couldn't.

“Once he's really off his head, that's where it splits. The Lady or the Tiger time. I think it's quite possible she cut him loose” –
discarded him
, I almost said, then realized I had anyway – “and it happened just like you said. Misadventure. Some wild crazy vision when you're buzzed out of your face. But I also think she could have driven him up there and lost it. Maybe starting as a threat.”
Talk. Tell me who –
“It doesn't even have to be really intentional. I mean, he's tall, two thirds of him is above the railing. A little shove in the chest. . . .”
Just like Rick and Neale
.

“Maybe she was showing him the city that could be his,” I added, when too much time went by without her saying anything.

“That bitch,” Claudia said. So quietly that it made me afraid of my own scene, the one I'd just sold to her. Finally she raised her eyes and gave a thin, pinched-looking smile.

“Afflict the comfortable,” she said.

“Pardon?” I said. Though I'd heard her perfectly.

“There was an art school guy who used to say that. It was his slogan.

He was a shitty painter who turned to semi-sadistic performance art out of sheer desperation. I thought it was stupid at the time – let's all put on our leather and play de Sade. But it comes back to me sometimes. I think it may be what I want to do, even if it's stupid. I mean, look at those dumb ‘Adjusted' things. What have I got against Vermeer?”

“I know exactly what you mean.”
Afflict the comfortable.
It wasn't a noble goal, in fact it could feel downright pissy. But at times it was all you had. At the moment it was damn near all I wanted. What kept me moving most of the time. ATC. Like the acronym of a disease. A wasting one. But maybe a notch, a small one, above
Galleria.

Angela was doing a great job of removing her things from the apartment while I was out. She knew my schedule, and she was doing it in stages. Each time I came back another box-load of books or tapes or knick-knacks was gone. There was lots of room in the closets again. We hadn't even seen each other at the gallery since Tuesday morning. Nobody asked me to go up to Administration, and she must have gone out through security on her lunch breaks. I hadn't seen Jason either. Bud was right: we did do awkward well. But that couldn't last forever, surely.

I looked around rooms that, space by added space, were beginning to resemble the ones I remembered from four years before, the ones I'd asked Angela to move into on an impulse over coffee in Le Papillon. And there was nothing pissy or mean about the way she was doing it. Nothing that was definitely mine got touched, and not much that we'd bought together. It was a slow, gentle draining of the shared life, a careful siphoning off.

I set up the chessboard and started playing out a transcription of Bobby Fischer's “Game of the Century”, the one he'd played to become U.S. Champion. Fourteen-year-old Bobby sacrificing his queen, in what looked like a stupefying blunder, then pushing middle-aged Robert Byrne all around the board in a staggeringly long series of forced moves. Getting back a pawn for his lost queen, another pawn, a bishop . . . then the checks started. The book described Byrne's
position as “severely embarrassed”, a term usually used to describe a king pushed around helplessly in an endgame, forced from his corner to flail about in the open, seeking cover where there was none, his troops all dead or dying. The term was popular at the chess club – a sweet thing, to severely embarrass someone, to humiliate his king, before finishing him. Only Armin never used it. He didn't severely embarrass opponents: he crushed them.

Severely embarrassed
was the minimum I wanted to see Barbara be. If she was capable of it. If I could arrange it somehow.

And that, of course –
embarrassed
– led me back to the sight of Angela and Jason standing in the library doorway. It's amazing how many things you can understand seeing two people standing together, just lightly touching each other . . . but closer than a couple locked in an embrace. And the embarrassment was mainly for myself, for how late my understanding had come. Ignorance was a shameful thing. The oblivious or willed kind anyway. Angela's boozy Sunday lateness; her – our – fits of flaring passion; her improved painting that I never saw in progress and that must have been painted elsewhere, in a more inspiring location . . . all the missed fragments flashed through my mind in an instant – not in sequence, not deduced or reasoned retrospectively, but apprehended all at once, like the details of a wreck raised to the surface.

I looked around the familiar, space-spotted room. Like an old sketch that someone was applying an eraser to, rubbing bits out. One month more on the landlord's time. And I thought how not giving much of a shit about anything crept up on you gradually, like lead poisoning. You didn't notice it for a long while – in fact that was one of its most insidious symptoms – and then suddenly it was up at toxic levels, your indifference making a harsh mess of your life.

And then, three strides to the door, I couldn't take another minute in the place.

“You didn't see it coming?”

I thought about this. “No, I didn't.”

“Really?”

“No. Should I have? I mean, are there always signs?”

“I'm hardly the expert. But yes, I would think so. Some sign anyway.”

“Well, I don't know then. We had arguments. Though not many lately. Things got a little slow sometimes, after four years. But the sex was still good. Great, actually. And we were still talking. Laughing.”

“Great sex.” For some reason she was shaking her head.

“Don't knock it.”

“I'm not. Why would I?”

We were still standing just inside her door. I'd started talking before she'd even closed it. She was wearing another of Robert's white shirts, untucked, over black jeans. I wondered how she'd spent the hours since dinner.

“You wouldn't do that, would you?” I said.

“Do what?”

“I mean, if you were with someone, you'd let him know.”

Her look – a little smile, her eyes rolled up – like she was hearing a joke told on herself. Or maybe telling it.

“You'd – ”

“Give him the message?”

“Yeah.”

“He'd probably know before I did.”

She reached behind me and slid the chain lock on the door.

Her fingers at my temple, below my eye. Pressing until the burn started.

“I think that's when I started to get interested in you. When I saw your bruises.”

“Bruises turn you on?”

“People who get them sometimes do.”

And that's when the answer to the problem came to me.
A victim must be sacrificed.
It wasn't a misleading riddle. It was the simple truth, albeit on a slant. The king was the victim. Always. But how could a king be a victim? By being threatened. And what could he sacrifice
then? Not his life, or the game was over. But his safety. By leading the king out of his nest of pawns, exposing him to danger, two successive checks, the plays with knight and pawn became routine. I didn't even need the board or the scrap of paper, whichever pocket I'd left it in. I could do it all in my head.

H
ow do you know when it's time for a change? When you can't stop thinking about one. Or especially when you
do
stop. If I really believed I'd learned that lesson, why did I have to keep repeating it to myself? Like an old person patting his pocket for his keys.

Doing things with Claudia felt interesting again. Not always pleasant, and certainly not always comfortable – but with a fresh slant and edge to them. Our conversation felt like one that was continuous, though we could be silent for long stretches, the silences part of the talking. Even awkward questions belonged.

“You don't really think that kind of thing's bolder, do you?” she said one afternoon when we were setting up the chessboard. Somehow I knew immediately what she meant.

I thought about it. “No, I guess not. There's nothing like an outright grab. The Great Train Robbery. Remember that teller who fiddled with the bank's computer to skim a fraction of a cent off millions of transactions? People thought that was kind of cool – but kind of laughable too.”

“Clever maybe. But small-minded.”

“Yeah. I guess it would fall under the heading of sustainable development.”

“Which is fine if you're just looking to be sustained.”

I had nothing to add to that, and there was something happening on the board, but the silence made me nervous for some reason. So I said, “Apparently she would never have got caught, or was unlikely to, but she upped her electronic skim from something like one twentieth of a cent to one fifteenth.”

“Got greedy,” Claudia said.

Excursions – no, expeditions – out of common sense. I didn't have the slightest doubt that Claudia would be up to them. Or that I
wouldn't
be always. This was what I knew that I could have with her. That, the appetite and stamina for it, was what connected her with the surrealists. What drew me to her. What I knew I wanted, and even more, needed. Expeditions out of sense.

The “bolder” conversation was actually the looped-back coda to one we'd had over another chess game. Claudia hadn't come close to beating me yet, but I had to work a little harder each time. Talking over the board didn't bother her at all. I began to wonder if, instead of the bad listener she'd called herself, she was actually a perfect one. Able to screen out everything except what she needed to hear.