The House of Dreams (34 page)

“Just wait. He's perfect, I promise you.” He beckoned to me. “Come on, Lambert will see you now.”

*   *   *

I stepped into my father's room sick with dread. The heavy red velvet drapes were still closed, and the only light came from the smoldering fire in the grate. I blinked, my eyes adjusting to the darkness. My hearing seemed more acute, and I could make out the wheezing breath of a man. With the dust and the smoke, I could feel my own lungs tightening up, I can tell you. I turned to the heavy four-poster, and against the white sheets I began to make out the dark shape of someone. Of my father. The coal of a fat cigar glowed as he inhaled.

“Gabriel Lambert,” Quimby said with a flourish, “meet Gabriel Lambert.” I felt like he was laughing at me, at us, and my cheeks burned with humiliation.

“Of course your mother named you for me.” My father's voice was breathless and harsh. “The woman never got over me. All those letters, Christ.” He leaned forward in the bed and stubbed out his cigar in a Chinese ashtray on the bedside table. The firelight flickered over the purple silk drapes of the bed. Still, I could not see his face. “I'm not at all surprised she stole my name for you, too.” He laughed bitterly. “All those years, calling herself ‘Madame Lambert.'” I blinked. Perhaps it was the smoke from the fire or the dust, but my eyes pricked with tears. “Well, step closer. I can't see you.” I felt as wary as Red Riding Hood.

Vita barged open the door and dumped the tray into Quimby's hands, coffee cups rattling. “Good grief, no wonder. You can't see a thing in here with the drapes closed all day.” She flung open the curtains, and my father recoiled in the bed, his hand shielding his eyes.

“Not all the way, Vita.” She closed them slightly, so that a thin shaft of sunlight cut through the room, illuminating the tangled roses of the faded rug. “Step forward, boy.” I moved to the line and raised my chin. I heard him gasp. “Well, well.” He threw back the bedclothes, and again, that sweet, heavy scent caught at the back of my throat. Vita chattered on as she set out the coffee on the table beside the fire, but I watched him in silence as he struggled out of the bed. He walked toward me in darkness, a white nightshirt falling to his knees. We were the same height, I realized, the same build, shadows of past and future meeting. “It's remarkable,” he murmured. “It's like looking in a mirror.”

“It's like you've been reborn,” Quimby added.

My father circled me. Unnerved, I kept my gaze ahead, waiting for him to stop in front of me. This he did, and as he stepped into the light, I tried not to cry out in shock.

*   *   *

By that evening, I had grown a little more accustomed to my father. In the dim gaslight of the drawing room, he sat in a red velvet wingback chair, talking to Quimby beside the fire. The heat was stifling, and sweat stuck my shirt to my back as I laid white plates on the mahogany dining table next door. They gleamed in the shadows like four full moons.

“Syphilis,” Vita whispered to me as I helped her set the table. “In case you were wondering.”

“Oh God,” I said under my breath.

“You're fine,” Vita said tetchily.

“I didn't mean that.”

“We're both fine.” Vita threw down the last of the napkins and stalked toward a large Chinese gong. She plucked up the carved beater and thumped the gong—the note vibrated through the house, through my chest like a heartbeat. I was so nervous, eating was the last thing I felt like doing, and the smell of the mushroom soup turned my stomach. “Dinner is served,” she called.

Lambert and Quimby joined us, still deep in conversation. My father leaned heavily on an ebony cane as he walked and barely glanced at me as he sat at the head of the table. Only when he raised his glass in a toast did he look directly at me.

“As Plautus said: ‘I wined, I dined, I concubined—'” He broke off into a hacking cough.

“Perhaps good food, good friends, good health, would be more appropriate, my darling,” Vita said, handing him a napkin.

The children of depressives are alert to the subtlest shifts in mood—they are very good at reading people. Living with my mother all those years had trained me well, and I learned a lot about my father during that first meal. He hid his bitterness well, but I saw something flicker over his face as he looked at me. Jealousy. I came to the conclusion that the corruption of his skin was the final manifestation of whatever poison twisted in his heart. He must have been quite something when he was my age, all that vanity and greed cloaked in beauty. No wonder my mother with her desperate unhappiness fell for him—she must have realized no one could make her more exquisitely miserable than him. Now, he lolled at the head of the table, his bow tie loose around his neck, like some young buck at a party. I wondered if he forgot sometimes, if he thought he was still as he had always been, forever young. Perhaps that was why all the mirrors in the house reflected darkly or had been hidden away.

My father drained his glass. “To hell with this, we should be having champagne, celebrate the return of my prodigal son.” He clicked his fingers at Quimby. “Fetch a bottle, will you?”

Quimby hid his flash of annoyance rather well. I guessed he must be used to it. He dabbed his lips with the heavy linen napkin and scraped back his chair. I heard the sound of his footsteps going down to the cellar echo through the silent house, and the fire crackling in the grate beside the table. My cheeks were burning under the intensity of my father's gaze, but I was determined not to let him intimidate me. Quimby returned with a dusty bottle of Dom Pérignon in his hand. “Shall I?” He began to peel away the foil and loosen the wire cage.

“Do it like a man.” Lambert lurched from the table and grabbed the bottle. “Watch, boy,” he said to me, lifting a tarnished saber from the mantelpiece. “Always slide the blade along the seam,” he said, warming up with a couple of short slides, the metal scraping on glass. “There!” he cried, slicing the neck of the bottle neatly. The champagne gushed, and Vita casually leaned forward with a glass to catch the flow.

“Gabriel?” she said, passing me a glass.

“In one!” Lambert cried. It was the first time I had tried champagne, and the bubbles caught in my throat, making me cough. “Come on, boy, drink!” Red faced, ashamed, I knocked back the wine. “That's more like it.” He filled my glass again. “Drink!”

“Darling, stop it,” Vita said, reaching out her arm.

“Go to hell.” He pushed her away and concentrated on me. “Drink.” So I did. I drank the whole damn bottle and I've hated the stuff ever since, but I proved something to him that night.

Vita cleared the plates in silence, her gold shift glimmering in the candlelight.

My humiliation over, Lambert turned his attention to her. “Why are you so tarted up? I can't believe you still have that ghastly dress,” he said.

“It's a special occasion.”

“I told you when I met you, you don't have the tits for it.”

“Why do you always have to be such a shit, Lambert? Why can't you be nice for once?”

“Whoever said artists had to be
nice,
” he yelled after her as she carried the plates to the kitchen. “We're all heartless, selfish bastards,” he said to me, “don't think you are any different, dear boy,” and drained his glass, catching a dribble of red wine with the back of his hand. He gestured at Quimby to fill his glass and turned to me. “Oh dear. Have I embarrassed you?”

My cheeks were burning, the champagne lurching in my stomach, but I held his gaze. “Not at all.”

“It's quite remarkable, isn't it, Quimby?” He staggered to his feet and walked around to my chair, lowered his ravaged face beside mine. “He's identical.” I tried to keep my head steady and not to recoil. He was, what—only seventeen years older than me, but close to, I could see clearly the corruption of his face.

“Identical? In your dreams.” Vita thumped down a board of sweating cheeses on the table. “How old are you now, Lambert? Thirty-four, thirty-five?”

“I'm thirty, if I'm a day.”

“As I said, in your dreams. The boy's mature looking for eighteen, but you…,” she said, her voice low. “Do you know, Gabriel, your father is so vain that his new passport and papers still carry a picture from over ten years ago?” She raised her chin defiantly. “And a false birth date by the sounds of it—”

“Go to hell,” Lambert yelled. He heaved himself up from his chair and limped outside to the terrace.

*   *   *

I don't like conflict, never have, but they thrived on it. Half an hour later, they were dancing in each other's arms on the terrace like Beauty and the Beast, moonlight gilding the beads of her gown. Their argument upset me, though, and that night I couldn't sleep. I was jealous, too, I admit it. The memory of his hands on her ate away at me, and I tossed and turned, fitfully, in my bed, the sheets tangled around me. No breeze came through the open window, and the heat and weight of the empty rooms soaring above mine weighed on me like a tombstone. The house seemed alive at night, full of sighs and creaks. The scream of a fox jolted me awake, and I sat bolt upright in the bed, my heart racing. It was hopeless trying to sleep, so I padded downstairs, feeling my way through the dark house. The cool stone wall was rough to the touch. I remembered someone had told me if you were lost in a maze, all you had to do was hold your left hand to the hedge and follow it around. Is that true? In the hallway I paused. A faint, reddish light glimmered from the stairs to Vita's studio. I began to feel more confident at the thought of catching her alone. Perhaps there was still a chance she might want me as I wanted her. Yes, I know, did I have no scruples? She was my father's girlfriend and all that, but I was eighteen, for goodness' sake. I may have looked mature, but I can tell you I wasn't exactly thinking with my brain in those days.

My footsteps on the stone stairs were silent, and I followed the spiral down. I frowned as I made out Lambert's and then Quimby's voice.

“Do you think he'll go for it?” Quimby was saying.

“Of course he will!” Lambert's words were thick and slurred.

“I think you should just do the decent thing and let the boy go on his way,” Vita said. That annoyed me—“the boy.” Vita wasn't much older than me. It's funny, that throwaway line stuck with me. It always makes me think of that Noël Coward song “Mad About the Boy.” You could picture Vita saying it somehow: “My dear, I'm simply mad about the boy.” Well, blame it on her or him—maybe that's why I've spent my whole life thinking I'm Peter Pan. In my head I never aged past 1940. A lot of moons, a lot of years, have come and gone since then, but part of me burned as bright as phosphorus that year.

Vita turned at that moment and must have spotted my foot on the stairs. “Gabriel, is that you?”

“I'm sorry, I didn't mean to intrude.” I pushed the heavy, iron-braced door fully open.

“Well, don't just stand there, come in,” she said. “Whatever you do, don't slam that door, though. The handle's broken.”

I wedged the iron bar propping the door open and rattled the handle. “I can fix this for you, if you like. I'm good with things like that.”

“See, Vita, the boy's good with his hands.” Lambert raised his chin. “Takes after his old man.”

“Could you, Gabriel? The whole damn place is falling apart.” She cast a surly look at Lambert.

“What do you expect me to do? We're out of cash, dear heart.”

“Which is what we were just talking about, Gabriel,” Quimby said. There was a sibilance to his French pronunciation that made my skin crawl. When Annie and I took our first grandchild to see
The Jungle Book
at the cinema, Kaa, the snake, reminded me of Quimby. “Your father has a business proposal for you.”

“We have a proposal for you,” Lambert corrected. “You'll make enough cash to get out of France, too, Quimby, if Gabriel will help us.”

“Help you? With what?” I said.

“Here's the deal.” Quimby settled back on the high wooden stool beside Vita's easel and made a bridge with his hands, pointing at me with his index fingers. The way his thumbs were cocked, it looked like a gun. “Lambert will house you, teach you all he knows about art…”

“Which is no more than a father should do for his son,” Vita muttered.

“And in return?” I held Quimby's gaze steadily.

“You must agree to impersonate your father.”

“That's ridiculous!” I cried. “He's seventeen years older than me.”

“Hear us out,” Quimby said. “Before the unfortunate effects of Lambert's condition, he was a handsome man—youthful, tall, olive-skinned like you. He wore a black beard, like you, had longish dark hair…”

“Like you,” Lambert said. He had the glazed expression of a bored cat toying with a mouse. I noticed when he looked up at me as he leaned in to the candle flame to light his cigarette, his eyes remained black, the pupils fully dilated.

“All we need you to do is meet some rich American clients of mine who are thinking of buying up everything your father has ready. They collect art deco, and already have several of Lambert's best pieces, but they realize this is a buyer's market.”

“Fuckers. People like Peggy Guggenheim are just profiteering,” Lambert said.

Quimby coughed delicately. “Like I said. It is a buyer's market. Artists are selling at rock-bottom prices, and they want to clean up before they get out of France.”

“The thing is, Gabriel,” Lambert said, “they want to ‘meet the artist.'” He glanced at Quimby. “Clearly they think they will get a better price if they deal with me rather than with Quimby alone. Of course I can't meet them like this.” He waved vaguely at his face. “No one would buy a beautiful dream from a monster.”