The House of Dreams (5 page)

“Sure.” She hesitates, uncertain whether to ask him what has changed so suddenly.
What an idiot,
she thinks.
I've been out of the game so long, I completely misread him.
Disappointment settles quietly on her like mist on a lake. Harry pulls in to the side of the narrow road. “Thanks.” Sophie hops down from the cab. “It was good to meet you.” She reaches over and takes her bag from him.

“Sophie…”

“Yes?”

“Don't do this, please?” He touches her hand. “I know your mom said you've been working on this for months—”

Sophie laughs uneasily. “Sounds professional, doesn't it?”

“It's just a story—can't you let it go?”

“I can't do that,” she says, reluctant to pull away. “It's about my family, too. I want to know the truth about Vita, and Gabriel's the only one who can tell me that.”

“But he's an old man, and now…” Harry settles back. He won't look at her. Emotions pass over his face like cloud shadows scudding over hills. He points toward a rough track up ahead. “Head down there. When you get to the end…” He pauses. “Turn left. Keep on walking up the beach, you can't miss it.”

“Thanks for the ride. Once you've built that gallery, why don't you give me a call?”

“Hope you're patient.” Harry raises his hand in farewell as she closes the door and steps back. “See you around?”

“Sure,” Sophie says, and watches as the truck drives away. A line from her research comes to her:
I'll see you soon, in New York.

 

FIVE

F
LYING
P
OINT
, L
ONG
I
SLAND

2000

G
ABRIEL

This year, for Annie, we had Christmas a little early as a surprise for her. I can see Tom and his brother, Albie, dragging the tree across the yard to the trash, a thin line of green needles trailing them like a file of ants. Some days it still surprises me to see my boys grown men, with sons of their own. I still remember the pair of them running across the beach in the summertime after school, their hair bleached white, their beautiful tan bodies thin and flexible as reeds, lambent, full of sap and new life. The yellow school bus would drop them at the end of the lane, and they'd race straight through the house, flinging their bags down on the way to the beach. In and out, and gone. Damn, it goes by so fast.

A strand of silver tinsel catches the light as the bare branches sweep along the sand. I can see Tom pointing at the studio and saying something to Albie. He's probably telling the boy to keep an eye on me while he finishes up outside, but there's no need for that. Tom always was the stubborn, bossy one, as most eldest kids are, but then so was the man he was named for.

We set up the crèche just the way Annie likes it, too, with the cradle empty until the day. The girls are packing it away in the house now, but I've taken the little Santon figure Annie bought me in Marseille in November 1940 with me. The little clay figure of a shepherd facing the mistral is worn and chipped now, but then so am I. I remember the market, the lamps strung from the stalls, the crush of bodies, and the warmth of Annie's hand in mine. There was little food by then, but they were roasting chestnuts on braziers, and sweet smoke filled the air. She chose him for me, her gloved fingers dancing over the identical heads until she saw just the right one for us, and she wrapped it in her lace-edged handkerchief, pressed it into my palm. “One day,” she said, “this will be in our home.”

Now, my littlest great-grandchild holds it in her tiny fist. She's curled up asleep on my lap in the studio. The guileless sleep of children moves me. The child's fontanel is pulsing in her sleep, and her perfection, her peace, awes me. I think I've slept with one eye open since 1940.

The girls shooed me out of the way while they tidied up the lunch, told me to stop the little one from crying. Her first teeth are coming in and her cheeks are flushed. I'm not use for much these days, but I can still soothe a baby to sleep, rocking in my old Shaker chair looking out to sea. In her sleep, her fingers extend like a starfish, her perfect little mother-of-pearl nails shining in the autumn light. The shepherd tumbles from her palm to my lap, and I put him away safely in my pocket as I carry her back to the house to tuck her up in her cradle in the kids' old bedroom.

My daughter glances up as I close the screen door behind me, and I raise my finger to my lips. She smiles and bends her golden head to scrub the old wood table clean, her sleeves rolled up, her hands soft and pink from the hot water. A chain of silver stars and shells glimmers on her wrist.

One of the toddlers is napping on the bottom bunk already, and the midday sun is diffuse and warm through the orange curtains. I lay the baby down in her cradle and switch on the little lamp at her side. Her eyes open lazily, register the familiar stars and shells rotating slowly around the room, then close, contented, and I pull the door to, silently.

How many nights did I do that for my kids when the wind raged outside? My throat is tight, suddenly, at the thought of all the days, the thousands of nights, that have gone by unremarked, and I lay my head against the door. The sand is running over the smooth hip of the hourglass. I know the creak of this particular door and the click of the latch by heart. I know every breath and sigh of this house that I built with my own hands.

I wait at the porch for the girl to come and turn the shepherd over in my fingers in my pocket, the old clay smooth and good to the touch. The little figure
Le Coup de Mistral,
this man battling against the gods, holding on to his hat as he soldiers on, leading his sheep out of the storm, always makes me think of Varian. I find I think of him more often now. I owe him, I owe them, all of this, and I never had the chance to thank him. Because of him, we are here.

Sometimes I think I left my heart at the Villa Air-Bel in Marseille. When I think back to the war, my memories are all of the house of dreams. Our greatest joys and tragedies played out there. Ask Varian, ask any of them, and they'd have said the same. We knew, even then, that life would never be as vivid as this again, felt guilty, even, that we found such unexpected happiness.

Air-Bel was a sanctuary. There, I saw André Breton conjure a court of miracles. Perhaps when the horror of war surrounds you, when everything—life itself—could be taken from you in an instant, this is what men like André and Varian do. They become gods, fight back any way they can. Some of us—artists and writers, lovers and children—well, while others give up and wait to die, some of us fight the only way we can and create something marvelous.

I still see them walking down the driveway of the château for the last time: Varian, the police at his shoulder, and his loyal dog, Clovis, at his side. After the rain, even the cedar trees seemed to be weeping. In a year, Varian said, we lived twenty. I have never been so afraid and yet so alive.

When he wrote his memoir, Varian said he had to exorcise his ghosts. Maybe that's what I have to do today. He reckoned he couldn't lay them to rest until he'd told his story—all of it. Well, this is my story. I don't want anyone to feel sorry for me—the world is full of miserable childhoods, it's incredible any of us survive. It's where you go, not where you're from, that counts in life. You're dealt a bad hand—make something of it. Every day I thank the stars for my luck. I made a living, made a life doing something I love, with someone I love at my side, and I gave my kids the childhood I never had. Maybe I had a lucky star guiding me home to Annie. I've lived with guilt my whole life, but I am a fortunate man.

For fifty years of peaceful tides and stars, I've waited for this day to come, and now it's here. I close my eyes. The girl, Sophie, is near, walking along the road toward me, her slender dark figure growing closer, and I am afraid again. Bring on the ghosts. It's time.

 

SIX

F
LYING
P
OINT
, L
ONG
I
SLAND

2000

G
ABRIEL

“Are you Gabriel Lambert?”

“No. Go away.” Well, it's worth a try.
I'm ready for you, missy.
No one has seen me in public for years, and it might just fool her. I squint my eyes against the clear autumn light and try to close the screen door, but the girl slings her fancy suede bag up against the jamb. It thuds on the deck with the weight of a brick, and the door gets stuck on a silver laptop I can see poking out the side like a knife. “I said, go away. This is private property. Didn't you see the sign up on the track?”

“Yes.” She folds her arms. What is it with girls today, they try to make themselves so deliberately plain? Not a scrap of makeup. I used to love watching Annie making up her face in the morning. It was like she was joining the dots, clearly defining the beauty in her face. I loved it when our kisses smudged her lips, when her eyelids grew smoky with kohl. Nothing like that with this girl, no sir. Even the heavy black-framed glasses are some kind of statement:
Listen, buddy, I know I'm young, and my limbs have the refinement of a gazelle, but I wear this beauty lightly, with a sense of irony
. Jeez, the things we take for granted—if I knew how swiftly the power of my body would desert me, I would have spent the first decades of my life on a beach like my kids, just enjoying the grace, the luck of being alive and young. These days, when I wake in the warm, familiar nest of my bed with Annie at my side, there's a weightless moment when I am still as fresh as this girl. Then—I always think of it like a white-haired janitor in brown overalls walking through a dusty warehouse flicking on strip lights—my old body crackles into life and all the aches and pains fire up, one by one. I'm useless now, before my shower in the mornings. The hot water eases my old limbs, and I've always had my best ideas in the shower. Annie gave me some whiteboard markers for my birthday a while back, and now it's the best time of the day for me—I can shower, and think, and sketch out my ideas on the glass of the stall and the tiles. If it's going well, I stay in there for ages, whistling tunelessly, through the gap where my pipe stem has worn down my teeth like an old limestone doorstep over the years.

But look at this girl, with her sharp black suit and her attitude. Just in case that's too sexy, she's got her hair scraped back so hard, it's like she's had a face-lift, and her jacket's buttoned up tighter than a preacher's pants.

“You don't take any notice of signs?” I say.

“You don't take any notice of e-mails. Or your lawyer doesn't.” She smiles sweetly, but there's clarity to her speech that makes me feel she doesn't take any nonsense, and a toughness to her eyes that says:
Come on, give it your best, big shot. I'm not afraid of you. I'm not impressed by your so-called reputation.
I can see her weighing me up, how I've changed from the most recent catalog photograph, which is thirty years old now. I never did like having my picture taken. What does she see? The thick hair in need of a cut turned from black to white. The hollow cheeks tanned and burnished like driftwood, the silver scar above my jaw. Faded blue jeans and espadrilles, a billowing white shirt, untucked. Maybe she notices the cerulean-blue paint under my fingernails and wonders what I'm painting now. “You gave me no choice.…”

There have been a lot of girls like this over the years, journalists or students from Parsons or Columbia, come to kiss the hem of the great man or to try to dig up some dirt. I live at the end of an unmarked coast road on Long Island, well away from the chichi villages and “cottages” the size of civic buildings, but still the most determined find me. Sometimes I think it would be easier if they just stuck me in formaldehyde like the sharks and cows the young guns are showing and exhibited me in MoMA under a flashing red arrow with a neat Perspex sign saying,
Gabriel Lambert, artist,
next to some of the big abstract expressionist pieces that made my name way back in the fifties.

Annie used to field the girls for me, kill them with kindness—cookies and milk at the old pine table in the kitchen or chicken soup in the winter. If they had any romantic illusions, she soon sorted them out. They were out of the house and on the bus back to New York before they realized they hadn't seen me or my studio. Annie never had any cause to worry, there was only one girl for me. Is only one girl. I've loved only two women in my life—not much, I know, in all my years, but enough for me. The first, well, that didn't end so well. Annie was different.
We're like swans,
she'd say,
bobbing along side by side whatever the current throws at us.
There were often a few girls sniffing around, but none for a while. The aphrodisiac power of fame and money never ceases to amaze me—they can make a twenty-year-old girl overlook white hair and haunches sagging like an old sofa. But this one isn't looking at me like that. She's different, I can tell. She looks determined, in spite of her lips, lips that remind me of someone. The bottom one is fuller than the top. It has a crease in it like the indentation of a head on a plump pillow.

“E-mails?” I say. “I don't use a computer.”

“What about my letters?”

I think guiltily of the endless letters on creamy laid paper, her looping script. Who uses a fountain pen these days? When she kept on writing, I got my lawyer to scare her off, but that didn't work either.

“I assume you got my last letter?” She's talking slower now, like she's thinking maybe I'm deaf or doolally. Well, I can use that to my advantage. I got your letter, sure I got it. Saved your ace till last, didn't you, missy. I hear the sounds of them tidying up the lunch behind me, my great-grandchildren's laughter a bubbling brook, Tom ragging on his brother, the soothing tones of my granddaughter trying to smooth things over.