Love and Will (16 page)

No no no. He was killed in an auto accident. He asked his wife the day he died to take him back to the land of his youth. She said he was too frail to go anywhere. He then asked his son to take him there. His son agreed with his mother. “Then I'll get there myself,” he said. He tried to get out of bed. They stopped him. He said “I will die of a heart attack tonight if I don't make a quick journey back to the land of my youth.” They called the doctor. The doctor said he might be able to survive the trip. So they dressed him and got an ambulance to come. They put him in back of the ambulance on a cot. The ambulance hit a truck three miles from the house and turned over and the painter died. So did the ambulance driver and the attendant in back. His wife broke both arms in the accident. His son was in a car behind them.

No, the painter died in his sleep. In his sleep he was journeying back to the land of his youth. He got out of bed, in his sleep, did half an hour of the same vigorous exercises he used to do thirty years ago, showered and dressed himself, went downstairs, kissed his wife on the lips, patted her backside, kissed his son's forehead, drank a cup of the very strong black coffee he always used to drink in the morning but hadn't been allowed to for ten years, had a large breakfast, more coffee, said “Goodbye, I'll see you both in a few days,” went outside, got into his sports car and drove down the hill and past the gatehouse. In his dream a truck hit his car just as he was crossing the border. Just after he crossed the border. Several hours after he'd crossed the border and was driving into the small village of his youth. While he was approaching the farmhouse his family had lived in for more than—

No, in his dream he gets on his horse, after his morning coffee, breakfast, kisses and goodbyes, and rides back to the land of his youth. The journey takes him three days. The horse is the one he had as a youth. He crosses the mountains on it, fords several streams. The border guards of both countries wave him on without asking for his passport. They yell out “Maestro…great one.” They say “Hail to the liberator of our unconscious…emancipator of our imaginations…of our dreams.” He salutes them, rides for another day to the two-room farmhouse he lived in as a youth. He ducks his head and rides through the front door right up to his old bed. He jumps off the horse, hugs it around the neck, brushes its coat, walks it outside to the grass.

No, he brings grass and water into the house, puts them on the floor, has the horse lie down by the bed. Then the painter gets into his old bed and covers himself up to his neck with his coat. His hair comes back to his bald head. It turns from white to gray to black. His pubic hairs disappear, his chest and back hairs, his wrinkles, illness, clots, most of his scars. He's smaller, shinier, slimmer, solider. His sheet's clean and cool, the bed newer and he has a blanket over him. The horse snores. The young man becomes a boy thinking about becoming a great painter. “I won't be great, I'll just be as good as I can. I'll do things no one else has. No, I'll just paint without thinking what anyone else has done. No, I'll just paint, that's all, and not even think about not thinking of what anyone else has done with paint.”

No, the old painter's in bed. In the two-room farmhouse of his youth. His eyes close, he falls asleep. Colors, shapes, patterns, move around in his head. Scenes from his past, from his future. His wife twenty years ago, forty years ago, as his bride. His son as a young man, as a boy, then being born. The painter making love with his wife, with the woman he lived for years with before his wife, with women before that: models, other men's wives, an actress, a princess of a principality, other painters, a young woman he met at a cafe and went to a hotel with, a young woman he met on a train and slept the night in their compartment with, prostitutes in his adopted country, a girl in his native country when he was a schoolboy. In the bed he's in now. His first time, hers. Scenes of his parents working in the fields, his horse drinking from a stream, nudging its dead foal. Sunrise, sunset, nighttime, full moon on top of the chimney of this old farmhouse. “Wake up,” his mother says. “Get to work,” his father says. “Do you love me?” the young woman on the train as it's pulling into his station. “Do you love me?” his wife says. “Daddy,” his son says. “Papa, dada, fada, ba.” Pens, brushes, palettes, tubes of paints. Newspapers calling him a mountebank, defiler, the greatest painter of them all. He tears the newspapers up, pastes them on his canvases, paints over them.

No, the painter's born. We all know who. His mother's legs are open. The doctor says push. Out he comes, brush between his gums, tubes of paint inside his fists. The doctor slaps his behind, cuts the cord. His father gets down on his knees and says “At last, a son,” and prays. The painter, no more than eight pounds, starts painting on the soiled sheet. The doctor cleans and dries him, puts a canvas on the floor, the painter crawls on top of it, paints a big circle and then a small circle inside. The outside of the big circle's white, the inside of the small circle's black, the space between the two circles is red. The doctor puts the painter to his mother's breast, blows on the canvas till it's dry, rolls it up, rushes to a gallery with it and sells it for a half a million dollars. It's now worth ten times that. The painter sucks at his mother's breast, nothing comes. He cries, his tears act as a warm compress on her breast, milk comes, he drinks and soon falls asleep. His father goes outside and plants a tree in his son's name. The tree's now ninety-one years old. Once a year till around five years ago the painter returned to the farmhouse to paint that tree. He's kept all of those seventy or so paintings. As a series, art dealers say, the tree paintings could be sold for quarter of a billion dollars. If sold individually the total sale should be around half a billion. The tree has a fence around it, a plaque embedded in the boulder inside the fence which says “This tree was planted on the day of birth of the greatest painter our country has produced in five hundred years. Any defacement of the tree, enclosed area and fence will bring swift prosecution to the full extent of the law.” The painter gets out of bed, goes outside, kicks down the fence, pulls an ax out of a tree stump and chops down the tree, has his horse defecate on the boulder and eat the grass in the enclosed area. When the horse is full it lies down and goes to sleep. The painter lies down, rests his head on the horse's neck and falls asleep. In his sleep he's a newborn child. He floats backwards into the house and up his mother's birth canal. It's dark, it's light, he fingers around for his paintbrush and tubes, the dream explodes.

No, he's an old man riding a paintbrush in the sky. The sky's a clear blue. He seems to be flying around aimlessly. Far below is green farmland, terraced hills, olive orchards, a farmhouse. A boy's sleeping beside a horse. The painter's father is digging a hole. His mother's nursing a baby. His wife's making coffee. His son's playing with the wood toys he carved for him. His infant daughter holds out his eyeglasses to him. She seems to be the only one below who sees him. She drops the glasses and holds up her arms to him. She wants to be picked up. The brush drops out from under him and he floats to earth. The horse stands, shakes itself off, flicks its tail. The painter lands beside it, holds out his arms, someone lifts him and puts him on the horse. He rides to the top of the hill, looks at the brush flying around. His hand reaches up till it's able to snatch the brush out of the sky. He looks around for his paint tubes and a canvas, doesn't see any, and sitting on the horse, starts to paint the sky. Whatever color he wants comes out of the brush. One time he paints the sky five different shades of red, another time a solid gray with a thin yellow line through it, another time it's a combination of fifty different colors. Then he paints it the original blue and flings the brush down the hill.

No, the painter dies. The great one. In the middle of the night. Everyone in the house was asleep. The nurse who was sitting beside him had just fallen asleep. She said she heard a sound in her sleep. We all know what sound. It woke her. Most of the world's newspapers the next day carried the news of his death on the front page.

He goes into the apartment. His wife's waiting for him at the door. “I got this postcard today.” She holds it out. He takes it and reads. “Your husband is in love with me, what can I say? Leave him, he doesn't love you. When he makes love with you, it's all sham. That's what he tells me. He pretends to have a good time with you in bed. Oh, all right, maybe he still has a good time with you—at the very end, but every man is like that then. But he has a good time from beginning to end when he's with me in bed. Or on the floor. Or against the wall. Or on the coach. Or even under the coach, and once, I kid you not, in the bathtub. It's me he loves, me he loves making love with, me he wants to be with when he sleeps with you or is just with you. Let him go. Let him be with me. Make him happy, no matter how unhappy it might make you. Are you still reading this? So, what are you going to do? Sincerely, Cecile Strick.”

“I never heard of her,” he says. “It's some postcard. How can anyone write so small? Must take a special pen or at least a special fine or extra-fine point on a pen. What's this word mean—coach? Couch? Has to be couch. But under the couch? Whoever heard of that? And who has a bathtub so large? I suppose some people have, and that it could be done in just about any size tub. But I've never known a Cecile in my life. My Aunt Cecile. Forgot her. She's been dead tor twenty years—no, more like twenty-five. I was still in college then.”

“You never told me about her.”

“Sure I did. I had to. My Uncle Nate used to beat her up. It's my feeling, but maybe I got the idea from someone in the family, that he beat her up on the head so much that he was the cause in some way of her getting brain cancer. That's what she died of. She was only around fifty. Maybe fifty-five. She died, actually, more than thirty years ago. I wasn't in college yet. So maybe she wasn't even fifty. I can't believe she'd be around eighty now if she had lived. He hit her on the head with a chair a number of times and once or twice knocked her out. I remember my father telling me about it. I even remember the calls he used to get from Cecile that Nate was trying to kill her again.”

“You never told me about him or her.”

“Never told you about Uncle Nate? I don't see how I couldn't have. My father's only brother. Or only one that lived past the age of five. Whenever we'd see him he used to give us a fifty-cent coin each. I remember wanting to go over with my brother and sister just to get that fifty cents. And they were always shiny—mint condition, almost. As if he got them straight from the bank and had asked for them to be brand-new. After he gave us the coin, or just me if I only went with my father, I'd show it to my mother at home. She was never impressed. They didn't get along. But poor Cecile. He once tried to throw her out a window, from maybe ten stories up. They lived on Riverside Drive, around Seventy-Ninth or Eightieth.”

“What number?”

“Ninety-Eight.”

“That's on Eighty-First, southeast corner. Didn't Bill live there for a year? Sublet somebody's apartment—Dan Freer's?”

“I think you're right.”

He called today—Bill did. I was going to tell you. He wants you to call him back.”

“Did he say about what?”

“Nothing. Just to call back. He sounded loaded. Two o'clock. Loaded. He's never going to be able to finish it.”

“Don't worry. He starts it, gets into it, gets loaded for a week or so, and then he finishes it. I've been through it with him before. I'll call after dinner. But Cecile and Nate.”

“You're making them up. It's impossible for you to have had an uncle and aunt I never heard of.”

“No, I must have told you about them. If you forgot it's because I probably only mentioned them once or twice in five years. Why would I mention them more? I saw Cecile maybe twenty times in my entire life, and only brief visits—maybe once a dinner at their home and they at ours. Nate was a bookie, worked out of his apartment, so we didn't, I think, for that reason—the kids at least—go over there much or stay very long. He usually had, maybe ten hours a day, someone in the kitchen manning the half-dozen phones, and sometimes two to three people working there and in the master bedroom for very big races and sports games. And policemen coming over to get paid off or make bets, and things like that. But I liked going over—and they were only ten or so blocks from us—for the good snacks, and Cecile was always very kind to me, and that half dollar. But when he tried to throw her out the window—well, after that my mother didn't want us to go over there at all. If she disliked him before, she hated and maybe even feared him now. Cecile was two-thirds of the way out the window—head first and face down and he was holding her by her legs and shaking her, shaking her, maybe just to scare her or I don't know what. That's what the doorman saw and told my father and my father told my mother and I overheard. Then some people on the street screamed—or maybe they were in the park, because most of the apartment faced the river—and he pulled her back in. He also shot her once—after the window incident—or shot at her, missed, or just grazed her arm—burned her. Whatever the bullet does. I know she was hurt but not that hurt. Nate said the wound came from the broken bottle the bullet smashed, but Cecile always claimed she'd been shot, not just shot at. Or not, as Nate told my father, that he shot at her clothes closet ten feet to the left of her, but because he was such a bad shot, the bullet hit a perfume bottle, I think it was, ten feet to the left of the closet. Once when we were there I asked my father to show me where the bullet went. He showed me a hole in their bedroom wall. The bullet had been dug out but the hole was still there.”

“Maybe he was kidding you.”