Skyscape (11 page)

The lawyer's voice was sleepy, but as soon as she heard Margaret's “hello,” Teresa asked, “Is anyone hurt?”

“Well, not hurt. Not the way you mean it.”

“Good Lord,” said Teresa, and Margaret could hear the woman fumbling for a lighter, snapping it, inhaling. “What happened?”

Margaret told the story. She told it well, and even made it sound a little bit funny. Another breezy evening with Curtis Newns and his wife, the former Margaret Darcy, the Bay Area's artistic Fun Couple. “I thought it was okay when it was over. Like it was almost a joke.” She gave a little laugh, inviting Teresa to find this all amusing.

Teresa did not laugh. “Are you okay now?”

“I was always okay.”

“How is he?”

Margaret glanced at him. Curtis did not move.

“Calm,” said Margaret.

“Really—what's he doing?” She had known Curtis for years, and Margaret was still a relative newcomer, and ten years younger than Curtis.

“He's okay.” Meaning: I can't talk now; he's sitting right here.

“They didn't take him into custody.” It wasn't a question, more of a statement to be confirmed.

“They were more concerned that we could drive safely.”

Curtis was rarely arrested. It was a part of his power—the law did not dislike him any more than women and critics.

Margaret continued, “I was ready to tell everyone that the other person started it, which was a little true. Or else mention your favorite phrase, ‘mutual combat.' And the restaurant loves him, they'll probably put up a plaque.”

“This man took a concealed weapon to a restaurant?”

Margaret spoke through her tears, “He collects rents. He had a gun permit.” He wasn't even a loan broker. He worked for an absentee landlord, renting out apartments in the Mission. And it turned out he wasn't even a real estate agent. His broker had fired him.

“You know what I'm going to tell you,” said Teresa.

“I know exactly, and I know you're right.”

Teresa said that now it was time to forget about the police and think about other issues. Maybe it was time to think about Curtis. Maybe it was time to think about her own future. She meant: someday he'll hurt you.

And Margaret was listening, but she wasn't listening with her complete attention. Curtis was on his feet.

He walked to the sliding glass door, and undid the latch. The door slid with a low, pleasant sound, and then Curtis stepped out onto the balcony.

She had always been afraid of this. She had hesitated to buy one of these penthouses, fifteen stories up. She herself suffered just the slightest bit of vertigo. Nothing really dramatic—just that spark of anxiety when she approached the edge of a great height and that realization that it would be so easy.

She had not been afraid for herself. She had been afraid that Curtis would do this: step out, stand there, and then throw one leg over the retaining wall, balance himself.

And be gone.

He wasn't over the railing—not yet. But he was leaning on it, looking out at the bay, the cool night wind streaming along the half-opened drapes, making the pleated fabric billow and float.

It hit her: she could not trust him. She had never been able to trust him. She could not help him, either. He was beyond her.

It was as though the love was an extra organ in her body, a gland with ducts and veins. When they drew the symbol of love as a stylized heart maybe they had an idea, after all, maybe it was something like that, secreted somewhere near the liver, or behind the real heart, the one that beat out life. Curtis was a part of her.

Teresa's voice was a tiny squawk. Margaret lifted the phone to her ear. “I don't know what he's going to do.”

The telephone cast light, a pale glow from its buttons where they lit up. When Margaret hung up the phone, cutting off whatever Teresa was saying, the room was too dark. She hurried onto the balcony.

Curtis stared down at the city glow of the clouds reflected in the wrinkled bay. He turned to face her, and put a hand out; a gesture of acceptance, benediction, but also a way of warding her off. She could not see his expression, only a faint gleam from his eyes, but she relaxed inside, knowing—sensing—that he was not going to hurt himself.

“It's cold out here,” she said, a way of telling him that she would be happier when he was back inside.

He nodded. He stepped back into the apartment, and she fastened the door behind the two of them and drew the drapes shut, as though that barrier would make a difference, as though that was all it would take to save his life.

She fumbled, and found a light.

She blinked. Curtis sat on the sofa. His head was in his hands.

She wouldn't talk to him now. She would wait.

But the feeling now wasn't one of being powerless. Her feeling was something else. Now that she knew he wasn't going to do anything terrible, a new feeling was free to sweep her and she felt herself breathing hard.

He did not make a sound.

She said, when she could not keep quiet any longer, “We have to change the way we live.”

He looked up at her with a tired smile, a smile of such elaborate world-weariness that she wanted to slap it.

People who didn't know her very well thought she was nice. She could manage. But she had grown up around nice people, people who lived on elm-lined streets and went to church and followed baseball, and she had sworn away all of that for this.

For what? This was his first marriage, but at thirty-eight Curtis had worked his way through one relationship after another. More than one of his ex-lovers had moved far away, to New York, London, to avoid risking seeing him again.

“I want to help you,” she heard herself say, her voice remarkably firm, as though she knew exactly what to do.

He was laughing, quietly, his shoulders shaking. There were tears in his eyes. Because they both knew that there had been so many therapists in the past, long stays in health resorts in Mexico, vitamin B injections, Jungian analysis, earnest months of drug and booze-free living only to end in the legendary and even publically approved spinouts.

The phone had been ringing. It was a phone they had bought recently, and it made a peculiar warbling sound Margaret did not at once associate with incoming calls.

It was Teresa. “I'm coming over.”

Margaret reassured her.

“You don't realize that he is really a textbook case,” said Teresa. “It's not drinking, and it's not temper.”

Margaret insisted that Curtis was going to be all right.

“You've been the picture of patience,” said Teresa.

Margaret heard a strange sound, a noise that wrenched her vitals, because she knew exactly what it had to be.

She let the phone drop. She was wrong, she tried to reassure herself. She had to be mistaken.

He had gone into the studio for a moment and brought out a knife. It was an ugly, paint-crusted blade he had used for everything from sharpening pencils to applying paint to canvas when brush and pallet knife seemed somehow pallid alternatives.

The multicolored steel was in Curtis' hand, ripping through the canvas of one of his most brilliant paintings. What van Gogh could do with a field of wheat, Curtis did with the energy and color, the sweep and vitality, of lanes of freeway. A painting like this transformed the mundane landscape into a place of passion.

The blade was sharp. It tore through the glistening artwork, the line dangling in shreds. It was hard to force the blade through the canvas. The old knife was something primitive, something shamanistic and brutal, weapon as primal art. She almost thought—wanted to hope—that was what it was for an instant. He was doing something impromptu and sudden, something good.

But the feeling in her stomach told her the truth. She had her arms around him, but he was muscular and seemed rooted where he stood. She fought for the blade, but he tossed her away with a single chop of his arm.

The canvas was white, slashed through.

12

He could have explained to her if he'd wanted to, but he didn't feel like talking.

This old knife was having trouble. It was stained and ugly, although it did have a decent edge to it. He had a whet stone and an oil cloth and kept the blade keen.

“Please stop it,” she was saying. He had started back to work again. He really loved this old knife, but he had to face it: it didn't cut canvas like this worth shit.

If he did not destroy the painting, they would just come and take it.

The cop from the press liaison office said that the man was going to be charged with something, not to worry, go home and take it easy. That man had been there with a mission. He had been working for someone. The deal was: get Curtis to act crazy so we can sue him and sell his paintings to the highest bidder.

So we can burn them.

It was brilliant the way the world worked. You had to be careful. Margaret, for all of her intelligence and all of her goodness, didn't understand that. She didn't understand that what you made, you could unmake. So he was cutting these really pretty good oils, strong paintings, but they were his. It was okay.

Her eyes were wild. She was actually afraid. That stopped him. He didn't want to frighten her. He didn't want to do anything but have her calm down and let him finish cutting up this stuff so then he could carry it out to the garden and have a good fire. Then he could take a shower and go to bed. It had been a horrible evening. It was starting to be a horrible night. My God, couldn't he just take care of a little personal business for awhile? Cut up his own work and throw it away and then go to bed. Couldn't he do that?

You painted something and it evolved into a thing that wasn't yours. He painted in his head, now, started with a blank space and filled it with juicy pigment, in his mind. The only work he had done in an age was in pencil, putting her image on paper. She fascinated him.

He turned again and showed her the knife, like: I'm busy here, can't you see that? And she backed away, with her eyes all big and practically sticking out of her head. She put her hand to her throat.

Jesus, she was such a sweet girl. What, twenty-eight? That's right—they had her birthday about a month ago. No, two weeks. She had brunette hair that was streaming down her shoulders, and she had that dark-eyed look that made him think of early movies. She looked like a silent movie heroine, all pale and big-eyed. In silent movies if you didn't overact you were not really coming out of the projector and onto the screen.

“You think I'm going to cut you with the knife,” he said, making his voice sound nice.

“Don't cut up those pictures, Curtis, please,” she said, trying to hang onto him.

“They
are
mine,” he said.

“They're beautiful!”

They were, in their way. That was a part of the problem—it made them all the more valuable. It was a matter of logic. He tried to explain. “Sooner or later someone will get a lien on my property. Teresa can't work miracles. It will happen, and I won't let my paintings fall into the hands of people like that. He wasn't there by accident.”

“You aren't right, Curtis, you don't have any judgment.”

Now
this
made him just a little bit angry. Just a little bit pissed off. Because he
was
an experienced artist, and a professional. And he knew what was real.

Somebody told him that Monet had once owed money to the French government. The tax collectors were closing in. He destroyed over one hundred of his paintings.

“Look,” Curtis said, really forcing himself to sound calm. He impressed himself. He sounded wonderfully calm, completely in control. “Look,” he said again. “I told you I was sorry.”

“Please stop it, Curtis.”

“I'm sorry about the restaurant. I'm not sorry about this. This is okay. I'm rational. Relax.”

His friends said she was just a wispy, soft girl, a woman from the Central Valley. Just another of those earnest, beautiful women you can pick up every day on the way home, six pack in one hand, woman under the other arm, your daily minimum requirement set for another night. They might be smart and they might have talent of their own but they are lightweights. Pretty. Soft-voiced. A dove.

But he'd taken her to Reno, and they'd stood there in the Chapel of the Chimes and the minister was even nice about it, shaking his hand and saying the old, dumb, serious things and the art world had not been amazed so much as amused. Curtis Newns had gone and
married
one. Why? Why go to all the extra trouble?

But they were wrong. Not gloriously wrong. They had a point. She was quiet. She looked good in tight pants. She had one of those figures you associate with angels, pink-nippled and innocent but with that other-worldly ability to shock. Margaret was complicated, and it was Curtis himself who was the human cartoon, the caricature, the man you could just put a label on and know all there was to know: Curtis Newns, whose signature on a canvas was money in the bank. Curtis Newns, world's oldest
enfant terrible
.

He loved her. There were some basic truths. He had skin, he had hair, he had bones, and he loved Margaret.

He got the paintings cut up, all three, and stomped the frames, and it was a pretty good job. You really couldn't tell what the paintings were supposed to be anymore. He rolled up the flapping canvas. A good night's work.

“It's all right,” he said. “I'm done.” It was a lie. He planned to go into the bedroom and finish the job.

“I won't let you touch the paintings in the bedroom.”

He showed his teeth. Showing a woman his teeth was usually a pretty good method to get them to shut up for a second or so.

“I won't let you hurt them,” she said, her back against the bedroom door.

He liked the way she put it:
hurt them
. To her the paintings were alive. They were alive to him, too, but in the way that cattle is alive to the rancher. It walks, breathes, and dies.