Wonderland (17 page)

“We are almost there,” he says. “Are you tired from the show?”

“No. I’m pumped.”

“What?”

“Energetic.”

“Ah.”

We turn left. I realize that I am not just pumped, I am happy. I will write that in the composition book later:
I am happy.
It is a happiness that, if it had a color, would be an almost electric light blue, like the eye of a peacock’s tail. An improbable, excessive, supersaturated blue. The blue floods me with surprising force, pure oxygen, the heat of this night, slight pressure of William’s fingers, the green and white sign of a cheap kebab place, the scent of lamb cooking, we pass through a little group of German teenagers singing raggedly, drunkenly. The electric light blue prickles the skin on the back of my neck, widens my eyes, lightens my bones. I feel that I must be getting taller. William takes us into a smaller street, a cul-de-sac.

His apartment is above a restaurant and looks out over a square behind the cul-de-sac. He opens a few windows. Some of the furniture looks as if it must have been his parents’, being large and dark and old, but there are modern photographs on the thick, uneven walls that tell me he is curious, melancholy, carnal, with a biting sense of humor. Three vintage electric guitars—good ones—hang on the wall as well. We embrace, we kiss. I stroke the shoulders of his white shirt, feeling his arms beneath the good cotton. He is hard almost immediately and I am wet, taking his cock in my mouth, unbuttoning my blouse, unfastening my bra, with one awkward hand to get my skin closer to his. It is very warm up here; we sweat. He takes off his glasses. When I rise to kiss him, his tongue is hard, too, his lips are hard. I like the fervor of it even as I wonder, stepping out of my pants, how he could have gotten through life like this, with these hard kisses. I wonder what his ex-wife is like. He bends to suck at my nipples, the part in his salt-and-pepper hair exposed, and then, kneeling, he folds that hard tongue inside my cunt, his damp, warm hands on my knees. I hear him breathe. I lie down on his bed and spread my legs, stroke his head as he licks until I beg him to fuck me.

He stands, looks down at me as he unwraps the condom, a look on his face of wonder and excitement but also some other, darker emotion, a premonition of doubt, not sexually, but in some other, larger way. Some way I won’t be here, later, to see. The lines in his face are more prominent as he gazes down, his eyes bare. I lick my forefinger and touch it to my clit, looking back at him. We fuck and it is only, sheerly, ridiculously good. Our bodies fit, our rhythms match, as if we’ve been fucking our entire lives, as if I came across the world just to be here at this moment, in this room, with this man, in exactly this way. It is all electric light blue.

I don’t know this man, this William, at all, and yet I feel I know him very well. Just like with Simon, how it started. His small nipples, the delicate scattering of salt-and-pepper hair on his chest, the interconnected freckles on his shoulders. He murmurs, “My God, this is such a good fuck, I’m barely moving.” And it’s true. He is far in me, rocking in a movement so small, intense, and precise that it’s like a sound only the two of us can hear. This is who he is, a man for whom a good fuck, the best fuck, is one that almost can’t be seen, only felt deep within. He is a shy man. I am nearly coming, desperate to come, but also enjoying the tug of waiting, because in this bed, in this room, on this street of which I don’t even remember the name, in Berlin, I trust this man completely for these few minutes. I have no idea where I am, and I know exactly where I am. I am here with him, in the near silence, now, in the inner room. We fuck, we fuck, and the waves come over me, then over him as he lets go with a low sound.

We move apart, lie side by side, sweating, breathing. The waves spread out, growing fainter, becoming the past. He takes the condom off carefully, ties a knot at the top, discreetly drops it over the side of the bed. When I leave, he’ll throw it in the trash, wash up. His mattress is lumpy and soft, the sheets are soft as well, clean and worn.

“Do you do this a lot?”

He smiles. “Sometimes. I meet so many interesting people, you know.” He turns on his side. “And you?”

“It comes easily to me. I don’t know why.”

“People on the road,” he says, palming my belly, damp with sweat. “I used to be in a band, I know how it is.”

“I guess.”

His belly is taut on the surface, but it bows out on the sides. There is gray in his pubic hair, gray on his thighs. His dick is soft, but I want him again; I put his hand between my legs and he circles his thumb slowly over my clit. I touch my tongue to his chest. He tastes of sweat and soap. His chest is barely sagging, surprisingly strong. The muscles in his pale arms are solid. He looks almost dreamy, concentrating. His thumb circles firmly, precisely, sure. I think about how much physical labor club work is, how many boxes of liquor he must have carried over the years, how long he must be on his feet every day, how he will run the club until he is an old man, how his grown children will come to see him in this apartment, talk about his health and his misconceptions on the stair. There is an oval burn scar, raised flesh, on the inside of one of his forearms. He watches me come, I close my eyes.

I rest my head against his chest, sighing, he touches my hair, my back. A weak breeze finds us, tickles us. Why do I like this sort of encounter so much, why has it always come so easily, beyond the plain pleasures of it? Because it feels pure, though I know that’s an illusion? Because it feels like only the touch of a stranger is this clean? No: because it feels like the way in. I believe that it is the way in, that I’m going somewhere at the moment, at every moment like this. I open my eyes. The room has gone dark since we’ve come up here. I can’t make out the details in the photographs on the walls anymore; the shapes are softening, draining of color, turning to blank squares of glass. Downstairs, cutlery dings. Laughter, doors opening and shutting, the sound of an iron pan or pot crashing to the floor. People speaking French outside the restaurant. Music of an ordinary night. It’s as if the dimming of the visual field inside this room has increased our ability to hear the sounds outside it. They seem near and far simultaneously, so different are they in quality from the silence, the small sounds, here. Somewhere else in the building, a door closes.

He turns on the lamp next to the bed, puts on his glasses. “Do you want some coffee? I am about to make some,” he says. “I will have to go back to the club to close up. You can stay? It won’t take long.” His face in the light is sober, angular. His body, in the light, looks different from the body I touched—ropier, longer. Even his voice in the light, a foot away rather than right in my ear, is different—higher and kinder. I half expect to see
AMOR
written over his belly button, but the flesh is unmarked.

“No, I have to go.” I begin fishing around for my underwear, my clothes, bending over at what is probably an unattractive angle. I stop. “What is the German word for ‘beautiful’?”

“
Schön.
”

“
Schön.
” I lean back to the bed to kiss him. “
Schön. Schön.
” I’m not sure which I mean—the man in the dark, the man in the light, both, neither.

Back at the hotel, the sky just beginning to lighten outside my tall windows overlooking Berlin, I find a note from Boone slipped under my door:
Call as soon as you get in.
When I call, Boone doesn’t ask why I haven’t turned my phone on all night. He just tells me, very gently and straightforwardly, that my father has died, of a heart attack.

M
Y FATHER’S STUDIO
, a red box, stands in a field of wildflowers. Outside, birds chirp. It’s quite cool inside the studio, because summer proper hasn’t arrived in Vermont yet. In any patch of shade, it’s still early spring. Lila touches a large, unfinished canvas of my father’s resting on the main easel; it seems to depict the field outside his window, rendered brushily, lyrically, even.

“I just had a vision of that color in Berlin,” I say to Lila, pointing. “That blue.”

“You think it was Dad?”

“Maybe.”

“I don’t know.” Lila stands awkwardly before the canvas. “Why was he doing this? It looks like a postcard.”

The studio looks like a postcard, too, perhaps from a better store. The floor is made of wide, aged planks, paint-splattered. Long windows open the walls to the field of wildflowers, transparently frame the start of forest at the north end of the building. Shadows delicately dapple the old, marked-up floor. The room smells of paint, turpentine, plaster, and yellow soap. A pair of my father’s glasses lies open on a worktable, clearly tossed down as he rubbed his forehead, or picked up a different pair, or went to pee outside. There are three worktables in the room, each one scattered with stuff: the skulls of several small animals; colors he was mixing—a complicated reddish brown, a white, four different blues—crusting in their cracked plastic dishes; a jigsaw blade; a sheaf of enormous, deep green ferns; an old white enameled bedpan with a voluptuous white curve; a ragged block of veined marble, perhaps four by four uneven inches; a hand-tinted picture of his mother; the browning core of an apple with his teeth marks in it. A taxidermied, surprisingly lifelike raccoon with a button in place of one of its eyes. A hurricane lamp. Two broken bricks. A few of my father’s many orthotics are scattered over one table; the impression of his bad foot rests, like a series of prints, in each one: shadows of big toe, arch, rind of heel. An invitation to a show of someone else’s work at the Miami Biennale two years ago. A half-empty pack of Gitanes. A dirty glass ashtray. A battered sketchpad with ruffled pages, as if they fell in water.

It’s perfect, really. A well-composed still life of an artist’s workspace. Lila and I, our cups of coffee clutched like life preservers, eye the studio, and each other, uneasily. Lila is right about the big field painting. It’s bad. It’s just a patch of pleasantly colored paint with a little motion in it, suitable for framing. Resting against the exquisitely rough-hewn walls are stacks of other canvases. Lila and I clack through them: one after another, we discover, they depict the field, the field, the field. It’s difficult to tell which are older and which are more recent. He seemed to go through a phase where he included the window frame around the view of the field; then another where the field is so smudged, so abstract, that it might be a cloud; then yet another that was close to botanical illustration; another that might be described as angry, with slashing brushstrokes. Lila, squatting on her heels, says, “Jesus Christ. I feel like I don’t even know the man who painted these.”

“They’re so weird.” I let fall my stack, the light canvases exhaling their weight against the wall, glad to lean again. I look at the one that’s in front: a billowing, even blowsy field, Watteau-esque. One could almost imagine a girl in dishabille running barefoot through it, laughing over her shoulder at an unseen suitor in pursuit. “They’re pretty, I guess.”

Lila stands up, dusting her hands on her pants. “There’s nothing going on in them. They’re totally empty.”

“Harsh,” I murmur, but she’s right. Every painting, every single one, fails. In none of them did he apprehend what he saw outside his window every day. All he did was paint a picture of it. I can’t decide which is worse, to imagine that he knew it, or that he didn’t.

Lila and I turn our backs to the walls with their feather-light cadavers and hover awkwardly in the center of the room, as if some sort of warmth is concentrated there, though it isn’t. In fact, it’s colder away from the windows and the light that pools in glowing, graceful trapezoids beneath them. I hold the coffee cup against my cheek to get its fading heat. It is supposed to be my and Lila’s job to inventory what is in our father’s studio, arrange for the distribution of whatever is valuable in it with his dealer in New York, and then decide what to do with the rest. Jenny, our father’s second wife, has sent us out here to “get a start” on it. She is making phone calls in the kitchen, one eye on the six-year-old twins—our half-brothers. Everything about Jenny, a forty-two-year-old lawyer who works with disadvantaged children, is practical and fair and sensible; assigning us this task is her concession to our mother, to the more glamorous and slightly suspect life our father once led, to the Brundage myth. When we fled the kitchen, she was up to flowers, lots of flowers. The twins were eating gingerbread men.

Lila picks up our father’s cane, a metal contraption with a flesh-colored plastic bulb on the end, duct tape wrapped around the handle, and puts it down again. “Lord,” she says. “What are we going to do with all this? What are we going to say to Jenny?”

“I have no idea.”

“I blame that stupid prison in Texas. He couldn’t do anything after that mess.”

“Well. Don’t you think it started before that? Since Rome—”

Lila shrugs. “Rome, I don’t know.” Her eyes are red from crying on the several connecting flights from Wyoming, but she isn’t crying now, nor am I. We look like sisters around the eyes, the shape of our mouths. We both still wear our hair long. But whereas I am tall, long-armed, bony-kneed, Lila’s face and body are even, classic, firm. She wears a tiny diamond stud in her nose; that and the cascade of blond hair are her only visible rebellions against the norm. Otherwise, she could be any suburban wife and mom anywhere, though an especially beautiful one, in sneakers and sweatpants, a long-sleeved jersey. A single golden wedding band. Her physical perfection, now that she is slightly older, has the effect of making her seem more vulnerable, like a precious vase. I wonder if her husband sees that, if he treasures her more because of it, or if it frightens him. She suspects him of having affairs, and her reasons always sound uncomfortably plausible. Lila, as far as I know, has never had an affair. Emotionally as well as physically, she is terrifyingly true.

“How’s the tour going?” she asks, but her voice is flat.