Skyscape (26 page)

“Everything is ruined, isn't it?”

“You can't possibly believe that, Margaret. Give it a few weeks, a few months. Let Curtis do his work. It's really what we need, isn't it?”

“You're a wise man, Bruno,” she said.

Bruno responded teasingly, “You're trying to think of a way to blame me if everything fails, aren't you, dear Margaret?”

She slept fitfully, except towards dawn. As she made toast there was a knock at the door.

Mrs. Wye was at the threshold. “There is a curious something that has just happened.”

Recent events had made Margaret wary of this neighbor, a person she ordinarily liked very much. Mrs. Wye had put on some weight and did not carry a walking stick. Margaret could hardly bring herself to frame a question.

“I do believe your bird is on my balcony,” said the white-haired neighbor.

“I was sure he was dead,” Margaret said.

“Such an odd bird,” said Mrs. Wye. “Tame, but he doesn't seem to want to be touched.”

Margaret brought the cage out of the studio. The cedar chips at the bottom were still fresh, and there was still water sloshing in the drinking dish wired to the rungs.

Downstairs, the starling sat on the carpet near Mrs. Wye's television, its wings outstretched. Margaret caught her breath, thinking that the bird had broken a wing, or was in a trance state that might occur in starlings in the seconds before heart failure.

The bird was warm in her hand. The creature made a stream of metallic cackles at the sight of the cage, climbed up the steel bars, and fell inside, alive.

Margaret tried to lose herself in her work.

There was much to do. There was the troublesome duck, Earl, to distract her. Earl played Watson to Starr of the Yard's Holmes, but generally the role he played was to squawk loudly when danger was approaching. A runaway hay wagon. Starr of the Yard would be examining the fresh prints of a mysterious creature, wondering
musk ox? water buffalo?
and Earl would squawk and warn Starr, who, with a degree of aplomb and humor, would dodge the hay wagon with the grace befitting a goat detective.

The trouble with Earl was that he had been an afterthought. Starr was bright-eyed, loved marshmallows, read the financial page, and despised horses, which Starr felt were entirely overrated as useful animals. “A goat race would be much more exciting,” was the sort of thing Starr would say.

Earl had too little personality. His eyes were two tiny dots, and his feathers were hard to draw. In one tale after another, Earl was a sidekick, company to the quick-witted Starr, but adding little to the story. One of her most successful stories had excluded Earl altogether.
Starr of the Yard in the Mayan Temple
had been a very ambitious tale—treasure hunters captured Starr, and he ate his bonds.

This episode had been so exciting that a film company—not simply a television production company, but something promising fluid animation and a musical soundtrack—had taken an option on the work. The company now was casting about for animators.

It was Margaret's favorite book, at least partly because she was able to draw jungles and huge Olmec heads. No one had complained that she had blurred Mayan with other cultural traditions. But librarians, bookstore clerks, and young readers had asked time and again: where was Earl?

Margaret usually wanted to reply that Earl was nowhere. Earl didn't exist, and he didn't matter. But she had failed to anticipate that what we accept on faith comes, in its small way, alive. There is a logic to loss, and a mandatory accounting of a lapse in what we have agreed to pretend. Earl's absence was a gap, a place in her tapestry that no longer resembled itself.

So, in the weeks of Curtis's absence, Margaret tried to absorb herself in her work, and
Starr of the Yard Comes Home
was a reuniting of the two main characters in a way she knew was a grace note to her own hopes. This time, she promised herself, Earl would have more of a role to play.

Furthermore, there was the design of a Starr of the Yard doll to oversee. The prototype sent to her from the factory in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, was a cheerful creature stuffed so full and firmly that he was hard-muscled rather than cuddly, and his horns were too short. The intelligent, cheerful frown was there, but the entire impression was that of an imposter.

She contributed drawings to an auction to support the local public television station, and sat in on luncheons and panels, ignoring the stares and the sympathetic smiles. She kept busy.

But Curtis was still gone.

His absence hovered over her life, her days a play devolving into earlier and earlier rehearsals, until the comments she made at the children's literature convention sounded like someone who could hardly concentrate on matters at hand. She was forced to have questions repeated, and when she tried to describe the book she was working on currently her mind went blank. Only later did she realize that the title, with its promise that Starr was coming home, amounted to a confession everyone understood more clearly than she could herself.

Margaret and Mrs. Wye spent more and more time together, sharing egg salad lunches and vegetable lasagna suppers. Mrs. Wye took an interest in Mr. Beakman, and checked out books on the care and feeding of caged birds, failing, however, to find starlings in any of the volumes.

Sometimes Margaret called Owl Springs, and Loretta Lee answered, when she got anything other than an answering machine. Everything was just fine, Loretta Lee would say.

Just fine. The two words would turn themselves over and over in Margaret's mind.
Just fine
. Meaning, she supposed, exactly excellent, perfectly splendid. In truth, the words communicated nothing.

Loretta Lee had an intriguing voice, and there was a trace of friendliness behind her few words. “Curtis and Dr. Patterson are working hard,” said Loretta Lee once when pressed.

“Working at what?” Margaret had asked, excited.

“Nobody tells me,” said Loretta Lee, letting the word
nobody
sound so elongated and mournful both of them had to laugh.

One afternoon Margaret was having lunch with Mrs. Wye, in Mrs. Wye's apartment, big glossy photos of leading men and child stars piled neatly on a corner of the table. They had just finished delicate sandwiches, vinegary cucumber and butter. “You don't like any of it at all, do you?” asked Mrs. Wye.

Margaret allowed herself to misunderstand, for a moment, imagining that Mrs. Wye could be referring to the sheet music she had just spread on Margaret's lap, or, perhaps, the frail, crustless sandwiches they had just eaten. “Curtis is already working on something new,” said Margaret, feeling over-rehearsed.

“But you feel abandoned,” said Mrs. Wye. “Or maybe that isn't quite what you feel. You feel that you have abandoned Curtis.”

Margaret was quick to say that she knew Curtis was doing fine. “It's intuitive,” she said.

“If something were wrong you would know it?” asked Mrs. Wye.

Margaret stopped herself on the point of saying: of course I would.

“I certainly wish my mind worked like that,” said Mrs. Wye, with a laugh that was silvery, certainly much-practiced, and which Margaret could not echo.

“But when you stop and think,” said Mrs. Wye, “there really isn't very much you and I could do if something went wrong, is there?”

28

Margaret wondered why Curtis did not call, and why she never had a chance to speak to him when she called Owl Springs.

“Dr. Patterson and Curtis are like this,” Loretta Lee said, and Margaret visualized the woman holding up two fingers held close together, or two fingers pinched tightly together to cling to something gossamer, easy to lose. Although Loretta Lee was friendly, it was easy for Margaret to understand that her phone calls were a slight nuisance, a hindrance to the success Patterson was sure to be having with Curtis.

Margaret taped the show every day now, in case there was a chance to learn about Curtis, or to see the work she was certain must have begun.

The show had changed. Red Patterson's television slot had been taken over by a suave, tanned man with blue eyes named Marvin Kelvin. Marvin Kelvin entertained guests who were troubled, individuals who had been raped, molested, battered, people who had been injured by events or genes, citizens who had been cheated of something essential.

But without Red Patterson the show lacked that final mastery over fear. There was no surprise awakening, and no sense of having been forgiven. There were no miracles, few tears, and many of the guests slipped into a mild form of belligerence. The world was unjust, they said, and the studio audience, and the viewers, were doing nothing to help. The tone of the show had become common and anecdotal, but there were no complaints from the psychiatric community.

A columnist or two called the show “ordinary trash.” Without Red Patterson there was little hope, and little scandal. The show's ratings dipped, but only slightly, and Marvin Kelvin was on the cover of the Sunday paper's television supplement, and then on
TV Guide
, and was asked to testify, in Red Patterson's place, before a Senate Hearing on abused children. In several weeks Red Patterson had become a historical figure, imposing, potent, but no longer a part of the daily spin.

The day before Margaret was to visit her mother, Marvin Kelvin concluded his show with, “And tomorrow we'll have some long-awaited word on Red Patterson and how he's doing at Owl Springs with celebrated artist Curtis Newns.”

There was applause. The long, pauseless sentence had slipped out as Margaret reached for the remote, and only when she rewound the tape and watched it again did Margaret feel certain that there was going to be news at last.

Margaret did not want to be late. Traffic was hectic, big rigs gunning engines, switching lanes. Buses to Reno, billboards for Harrah's, dominated the road. There was a caravan of these chartered buses, as though a small nation had decided to go gambling. After Vacaville, and all the way east, it was hot, and the car's air conditioner was a relief.

There was none of that bay-softened air here, none of that ever-presence of the Pacific. The pasture land and rice-growing country spread on either side of the freeway. The horizon all around was tarnished with a vague agricultural smog, the haze from so much vegetation lying green and fertile under the hot sun.

Her mother lived in a house surrounded by oak trees. Roses lined the walkway to the front door, and the plants had been trimmed to resemble lollipops, long thin trunks with a tight, brambly bouquet of pink or white.

“I've been admiring your books,” Webber said. As if to prove this, he had several of Starr's adventures laid out on the coffee table.
Starr of the Yard in Egypt
was open to a rendering of the Sphinx. “I want you to sign these. I'm giving this set to my grandchildren.”

“Webber owns cable all over Northern California,” her mother said. “If you watch CNN, you're probably watching it on Webber's system.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” said Webber.

“Are you being modest—or truthful?” asked Margaret.

He laughed, as though to admit that he was neither. “You ought to paint again,” said Webber. “I mean, in addition to your books. You have real talent.”

“Do you paint?” asked Margaret.

He enjoyed being asked. “I'm only an art lover,” he said. He emphasized the last word, perhaps to imply that he felt passionate toward more than art. Margaret could see the stone of his ring, the mint-candy gleam of emerald.

Margaret had a strange, uneasy thought: my mother's boyfriend is coming on to me.

“We're going to miss the show,” said Andrea, ostentatiously drying her hands, not to demonstrate that she was laboring hard to prepare supper so much as to say: I can wipe my hands on anything here.

Today's program featured people with no arms or legs. This was a pretty cheerful bunch, even when Marvin tried to goad them into complaining about their condition. It was possible that the guests were anticipating the “latest from Owl Springs with Dr. Patterson.”

Andrea hovered, sitting, then standing to shift the plate of salted nuts in Margaret's direction. There was a parade of commercials, childhood photos of the guests, one of whom had published an autobiography. The spouses joined the guests, and the show settled into a remarkable display of good feeling.

Margaret asked “What is it that you do, exactly, at your cable service? I picture a desk, lots of desks, secretaries, window envelopes coming in with checks from subscribers, and every now and then someone calls up because they can't get the Playboy channel. You have a satellite dish on the roof and you spend a lot of time on the phone. You have some pictures of grown children on your desk, even though they resemble your ex more than you.”

“You've been spying on me,” laughed Webber.

The show would be right back, after this.

They all had Bloody Marys now. Margaret was tense, and not in the mood for one of these celery-laced cocktails. “Are you going to marry Mother?” she asked.

Webber was still smiling. But his eyes flicked to where Andrea was sitting and he took a moment before he said, “You are so much like each other, you and your mother.”

“I think that comes as a surprise to both of us,” said Margaret.

“Webber wants to tell you something important,” said her mother.

“Are you guys going to gang up on me?” said Margaret.

“Margaret has always talked like this,” said her mother. “She thinks manners are a throwback to the age of gaslight.”

“I like manners,” said Margaret, and she was about to add, “what I hate is hypocrisy.” She stopped herself. This so often happened around her mother. She regressed to a snotty adolescent, belligerent, defensive. “I'm sorry,” she said.

“You have a lot on your mind these days,” her mother said, sounding gentle, accepting.