The long corner, p.23
The Long Corner, page 23
I was beginning to reach the limits of my compassionate mind.
“Are you an anti-Semite, Mr. Light?”
“Of course not. Ask anyone, nobody loves the Jewish people more than I do.”
I smiled. I thought, He will look you in the eye and insist that what you see you do not see. It was another provocation, another trap. Do not allow him the pleasure. I said, “All of them?”
He waited, but I gave him nothing and after a long moment of his ostentatiously regarding his thumbnail, he said, “So many jokes, Solomon Fields. Let’s return to the question of choices. When it comes to art, yes, I believe all are curious. You want so desperately to organize and arrange and categorize and understand everything. Why are you so determined to separate the white beans from the black, the screws from the bolts?”
“Let’s come back to Crystalline’s painting. You were very angry.”
“I don’t think it’s too much to ask for a little courtesy.”
“Why do you keep her here then? She insults you, despises your philosophies, your aesthetics, doesn’t respect the other painters.”
“She’s very skilled. I believe we can teach her the rest.”
“Is skill different than talent?”
“Certainly.”
“How so?”
“One is learned, the other is innate.”
“You don’t believe in innate talent?”
“I do not. Everything can be learned.”
“See, this is what I mean. Are you serious or do you have some point to make?”
“You ask all the wrong questions.”
“Yes, so I hear. All right, let me ask you this, do you regret defacing her painting?”
“It’s no surprise that you should want to focus all your attention there.”
“It is far and away the best thing I’ve seen here. Or anywhere, for a very long time.”
He looked so wounded, I said immediately, “But I have seen other work here that I like.”
“Such as?”
“The heads. The hand in The Spiral.”
He nodded.
“Are those yours?”
“Would you be surprised if I told you they were?”
“I think my supply of surprise might be spent.”
“I’m pleased to know that you like them.”
“I do,” I said. “Particularly the hand.”
He sighed as if he’d just tasted something good.
“But they don’t quite hew to the local aesthetic.”
“How so?”
“They’re a bit sad, no?”
“Perhaps you see them that way because you are yourself a melancholy boy.”
“Maybe. When did you make those sculptures?”
“Years ago.”
“Do you still sculpt?”
“No.”
“Why did you stop?”
“Why did you stop writing?”
“The ugliest reasons of all.”
“Which are they?”
“Cowardice and money.”
“A person has to live.”
“I was living.”
“Just not well enough?”
“It was a lot of money.”
“I understand,” he said, and in this I did not doubt him.
For a long moment we sat together, sipping our champagne, not speaking. The alcohol and the vista and the evening air were all making me too calm. For a while, nothing happened and then, far down below, moving from The Barn I could see a black procession.
“What’s happening there?”
“Saber is giving a concert this evening in The Spiral.”
It was another nice, carefully composed image: all those people twisting toward the center and its six-fingered hand.
“So, things are returning to normal? Will they be fed tonight?”
“From time to time, I find that it is necessary to remind our artists of what we give them.”
“For example, when they don’t display their loyalty?”
“I won’t apologize for expecting loyalty.”
“Will you apologize for being cruel?”
“Cruel? How have I been cruel, exactly? I do nothing but give to them.”
“Do you think Heaven wanted to participate in your ritual the other night?”
“She had every opportunity to leave. She chose to stay.”
“The way Sunny’s mother chose to sell you her land?”
“That is precisely right, Mr. Fields.”
“As simple as that?”
“Yes. As you have seen, more than once, our guests are free to come and go as they please.”
“And the way you speak to Siddhartha? To Crystalline? Cutting her painting? Expelling Theo? You don’t see any of this as cruelty?”
“Mr. Fields, at a certain point, people must always suffer for their beliefs.”
I laughed.
“You laugh because you don’t understand what we have done here. What we are willing to do. What has been sacrificed in the name of change. This is a benevolent dictatorship. The rules are complete, but the doors are always open.”
“Do you ever get bored of yourself, Mr. Light?”
“Oh,” he said, as if entirely surprised by the idea. “Never. Never once in my entire life.”
I nodded. “That’s remarkable. I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone who could say that.”
“How sad.”
I changed tack. “Plume tells me that your time in New York didn’t go well.”
This didn’t please him. “Plume is not always her best self.”
“What is your relationship to Plume?”
“She is many things to me.”
“I see. Is she correct about your time in New York?”
“It did not go well.”
“Would you tell me about it? About your time with Frankel?”
“Again, I do not understand why.”
“If you want to see your face in one of the magazines or newspapers you seem to so revile, you’ll need to play along.”
“I think I’ve made my feelings about New York clear. But because you are so desperate for simple answers to complex questions, I will say this: because it is a place that pretends to celebrate art and beauty, while only celebrating money and fame.”
“A little simplistic.”
“If you say so.”
“New York is many things, no? Eight million people, eight hundred languages. The world you describe is a splinter of it.”
“And yet it’s a splinter with so much power.”
“When did you change your name?”
“Who told you I changed my name?”
“Do you intend to answer any of my questions?”
“Your questions are reductive.”
“Do you still paint?
“I do.”
“Would you allow me to see your work?”
He smiled at the horizon. “Oh, yes, of course.”
“When?”
“Soon, soon. Though you have already seen so much of it.”
He was so dull. I had to fight to keep going. I didn’t know why, but it seemed to me then as if by stopping, by giving up, I would forfeit; I would fail; I would lose something vital of myself.
“Where do you keep your paintings?”
“There,” he said, pointing to the chain of studios. “The first along The Ridge. The first we built. Hundreds of canvases. A lifetime of work.”
Now at the horizon there was only a fading stain of red, otherwise, the sky was becoming its old incandescent blue and in it a few bright stars appeared.
Sebastian Light stood up, pointed above us to the west and said, “Venus.” Then he went inside for a moment and returned carrying a folded blanket whose color I couldn’t see. He shook it open and spread it around my shoulders.
“You seem cold, Sol.”
I hadn’t been, but the warmth and weight of it was soothing, and his gentle gesture felt better than it should have. I was afraid to speak and so I didn’t thank him.
He took his seat again, and said, “I understand, Sol, that your grandmother killed herself.”
He had surprised me, and he knew it. Such a simple sentence, each word meaning only what it did. Incontrovertible, unyielding, solid. I kept my mouth shut. Whatever his intentions, I was grateful to him for saying it. Even if now I was certain about Siddhartha, it didn’t feel a betrayal, really. More, it was like the shock of house lights coming up at the end of a sad play. And maybe this revelation meant Sebastian Light was a genius. Or a lunatic.
Or maybe it only meant that his artists must sell out their lovers in exchange for patronage.
“Yes,” I said, “she did kill herself.”
He didn’t offer his condolences. He didn’t say anything. I knew he’d meant it as an attack, but I was thankful for the kindness of sparing me another empty assembly of words. For the wine and the blanket. The perfumed air and this view over his darkening world.
I was supremely comfortable then, my body dense and heavy. I had slunk so low in my chair that now everything I saw before me was framed in a vertical rectangle formed by two balusters and two rails. The faint burn of the horizon line was at the top. There to the bottom right, the barn in its yellow light, and toward the center, his narrow archipelago of studios where Eva’s painting rested on its easel and where, supposedly, somewhere was stored his lifetime’s trove of canvases.
A royal palm bent beyond the frame to the left while ribbons of footlights twisted and rolled in all directions. He shifted slightly in his chair. I glanced up at his fine jaw, which he engaged as if to speak but mercifully did not.
I saw Lina Klein looking down at me from her Orchard Street bedroom window, teetering a glass of red wine in her right hand, laughing, threatening to pour it on me as I stood squinting at her from the sidewalk. I thought of my mother on her knees scrubbing the bathtub, her exhausted eyes, and all at once, my adrenaline began to run. I felt a fast rise of anger and then something vibrant and close to the skin. An old sensation I hadn’t felt since my first years in New York.
I said, “My grandmother was like you in some ways.”
“How so?”
“She was a terrible mother in service of an absurd ideal, but without talent she really had very little to show for it in the end. She was damaged and selfish, and her daughter suffered for it.”
“Are you trying to insult me?”
“No,” I said.
“Then what?”
“I came up here with every intention of giving you a chance. But what I realize now, Mr. Light, is that I cannot do more for you than what Eva has already done.”
“And what has she done?”
“Made you a person.”
“That painting? She made me a monster.”
“Not at all. She was very gentle.”
He stared off into the darkness for a long time.
“And so what does that mean?
“That I’m not going to write about you.”
“Of course you are,” he said.
I shook my head.
“Why did you come up here then?”
“I thought I could do it. I was wrong.”
His voice turned dry and meager again. “Do you not see that what we have made here is rare? Don’t you see that what we are doing is good? That it is art?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t see it as either.”
“You have to.”
“I don’t.”
“Listen to me, Sol, write something. I don’t care what it is but write something.”
Bit by bit, he seemed to be abandoning his controlled, domineering self for something more like the wild-eyed man backing out of The Barn. I watched now as he ramped up and, for the last time, I tried to work out if any of it was earnest.
“I mean it, Sol. Make me out to be a lunatic, an autocratic madman, a monster. Put my head on a platter like your little friend did. I don’t care. But you have to write about me. We’ve come too far. You have no choice.”
It was a slip of the pronoun. At last he’d said what he meant.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It isn’t a matter of choice. I just don’t think I have the skill.”
“The skill?”
“I don’t know how to do it. I don’t know how to write about you without being cruel. Without making you a fool. I’m sorry.”
“Be cruel, then.”
“Listen, Mr. Light,” I said, “if you tell me right now that all of those terrible paintings, your ridiculous lectures and slogans, the cliches, the cant, the aphorisms, the jargon, the self-righteous nonsense, all of it is performance, an elaborate installation, then I will write about you, but otherwise, I can only paint you an idiot and I won’t to do that. I’m sorry, I wish I had the kind of talent Eva does, but I just don’t.”
For what seemed like a very long time, he didn’t make a sound, and I watched him, waiting, hoping for some grand revelation. Was I right? Was he no more than a sad, wealthy, wounded, woefully sincere old man who had nothing left to offer?
“But,” I said. “I’m very grateful for your hospitality.”
“I see.” He said the words softly. “And that’s your final decision?”
“It is.”
Then after a long moment, he asked me very quietly, “Do you know Death of the Doll House?”
“What is that?”
“I thought you’d be smarter, Sol.”
“You and me both.”
“Heather Benning. Canadian. She replaced the side of an abandoned farmhouse with plexiglass, made the whole thing just so, all the rooms exposed to the public.”
“I don’t know her work,” I said.
Very delicately then he placed his glass on the table and closed his eyes and kept them shut for a good five seconds. When he opened them, he said, “Eventually the foundations began to fail, the structure was unsound. So, she burned it to the ground.”
Then he took a deep breath, exhaled with an unnerving little moan and raised his right hand. I flinched. I thought he would hit me. But he didn’t. He kept it raised at forty-five degrees between the horizon and Venus before finally letting it fall gently to his knee.
Nearly a minute passed without action.
And then, through the frame, as if on canvas, or television, I saw a flame.
There, at the bottom right corner. The whole front wall of The Barn was, in a single, violent shot, obscured by fire. I glanced sideways at him. His eyes were on the burning, lips parted as if in wonder, as if he himself were surprised.
I took the railing in my hands and pulled myself up so that I was standing, leaning forward toward the fire.
The whole structure was now nearly consumed, roaring and cracking.
“What is happening?”
He stood at my side. “You wanted it darker,” he said. “You wanted chaos.”
Whatever he’d used as an accelerant was working well. I could just begin to feel the heat. The wind whipped the fire to burn with greater ferocity. A massive beam collapsed and crashed and sent sparks splashing outwards. And then all at once the outline of The Barn was utterly gone. Now it was only flame.
I said, “This can’t be real. You can’t be serious.”
Then the studios went up. At the base of each, a small burst and then another rush, the same rhythm all the way as if being played along a keyboard, until the last down the line, the one he said was his, exploded as if it had been packed with gunpowder. I gasped then as they all joined together in a single ridge of red and yellow, tearing at the sky.
I thought, He must have warned her. It has to be a trick. She would have saved the painting. At the least he would have warned them.
Light’s face was bright orange. “Now you’ll write it,” he said gently, pleasantly, as if making small talk in church.
“Have you burned her painting?”
He laughed and, nearly in the same instant, The Library exploded.
In that surge of flame, I could see figures come racing from The Spiral. They all appeared as silhouettes. The firelight cast their shadows across the lawn. They were moving so frantically and so constantly it seemed there were hundreds of them flashing and cutting here and there until they began to pool and gather in the jacaranda’s stretching shade.
Against the flames, the sky appeared to be pure black, unadulterated by stars or satellites, planes or planets. Sebastian Light gripped the back of my neck and dug his fingers into my flesh. He pressed his mouth to my ear and said, “You have no choice now. You have to write it.”
I said, “Have you lost your fucking mind? What have you done?”
I saw one of the black figures separate from the group and streak toward the house.
I couldn’t get myself to break free of him. He wouldn’t let go of me. The wind shifted and now smoke was everywhere, its smell oppressive, suffocating. My eyes were burning. I was having trouble breathing.
He pressed his hard forehead against my skull and moved his lips against my ear. “Answer me,” he whispered. “What will you write?”
I kept trying to blink away the stinging smoke and ignore his mouth. I wanted to see it to the end, but the smoke was making it more and more difficult. I thought I could hear people yelling down below, but it seemed impossible given how loud the collapsing buildings were. It looked exactly like every fire I’d ever watched on television.
He said, “You have no choice now. You have no choice.”
I tightened my grip on the railing. I couldn’t speak.
And then Plume was there at our backs, screaming, “What the fuck have you done? What the fuck have you done?”
I tried to turn to see her face, but he was powerful and unrelenting. He had me in a strange vise, using his height and his head and his arm and his thick fingers to keep me facing forward. I wanted to see if she was part of it still, if there was some logic here, some last theatrics, but I could only get a brief glimpse of her pounding on him, her fists like little plastic hammers, her eyes wild and furious. He paid no attention to her. He had managed to return my head to his burning garden. His fingers dug in deeper and all the while he was speaking in his madman’s whisper: “Keep looking, Sol, just keep looking. This is what you wanted. Now you have no choice. You have to write it.”
