I traced my finger over the nude savage’s figure and was about to close the book when the phone startled me by ringing. I jumped, as if I’d been asleep, and picked up the receiver. I noticed the time. It was 4 A.M.
“Hello?”
“Katherine, is that you?”
It was my mother.
“Katherine, are you there?”
“Yes. Where are you?”
“I’m where you left me. I can’t talk for long.”
“You sound well. Are you?”
“As well as can be expected. They changed my medication.”
“I’ll come see you.”
“No. You should stay away. Your father’s very angry.”
“He’s been angry for twenty years…”
And then Boris called from the bedroom, “Katherine, who are you talking to?”
“I’m on the phone,” I said.
“I hope that’s not long distance,” he added.
“I have to go,” said my mother.
“How did you get this number?”
But the line had gone dead.
Several weeks passed and I waited for my mother to call back, but she didn’t. I was beginning to wonder if I’d just dreamed it. I thought of calling her at the hospital, but I didn’t think she wanted me to. I thought she might be worried that my father would find out that she’d been making phone calls, or something like that, and I didn’t want to inadvertently get him on the phone. Also, my mother had sounded so good that I wanted to enjoy that. I didn’t want to call back and get my mother overdrugged, underanimated, somewhere in the pale.
5
Ann had a show so I took the train to Soho. Boris was working and said that we could go later, but I knew how he was and that the possibility of missing Ann’s show didn’t bother him. Honestly, I wanted to go. Boris had no friends so any contact with other people happened over these desperate conversations with shop folk at Zabar’s (What does that mean, hand-rubbed chicken? Is it sanitary?) or gushy “thank you”s at the Korean grocers (No. Thank you so much.) My going to the show may seem over solicitous to Ann, who still found me difficult to tolerate, but I was eager for time away from Boris. I thought I might have a conversation with someone.
I pictured an event where legions of turtlenecked men and slickhaired women turned in tight circles before paintings, looking alternately through and then over the rims of their glasses, bending in to check price, stepping back to gauge value. And I was right about everything, except for the legions. There were five people in the whole gallery, and one of them was Ann, another the owner, who, while I stood on the sidewalk and wondered if I could nip down the block and get a real drink before entering, stepped out to have a cigarette. Ann was drinking from a large glass of wine. She accidentally met my eye, then looked away. I suppose she wanted to give me the chance to escape. But some generosity of spirit made me go in. I don’t know why, but I felt that I should.
“Ann,” I said. “I’m early. Boris is coming by in about a half an hour. He had something to finish up.” I gestured at the something, which might have been just outside the door of the gallery.
Ann looked at me, unsmiling. “You’re not early,” she said. She drained the last of her wine.
“Maybe not,” I said. “But some of these paintings are really wonderful.”
“Really?” said Ann, not believing. “Which one do you like?”
I saw a portrait of Boris in the corner. The picture must have been a few years old, because Boris was a bit thinner around the middle and a bit thicker on top. He was sitting naked in a chair, bored. Light from somewhere lit up half his body in bold purples, blues, and yellows. “I love that,” I said, pointing to it.
Ann smiled finally. “I liked it when I first did it, but now…” We walked over to the picture together. “I don’t know. Doesn’t it look like Boris is decomposing?”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s why I like it. You’ve somehow captured Boris’s spiritual decomposition.”
Ann looked at me and smiled. She seemed grateful for my company and, though this didn’t feel altogether comfortable to me, I said nothing, scared that I would somehow wreck the mood.
“I met Boris at a show, you know,” she said.
“Really?”
“Yes. At the Orbiting Spoon Art Gallery. It closed a year ago. I recognized him immediately from the picture on the back of his book. Boris walked over for a glass of wine and I caught him looking at me out of the corner of his eye.”
There was a moment of silence. “He introduced himself?” I said.
“No,” Ann said. “Well, sort of. He was looking at the paintings.” Ann rolled her eyes. “He starts gesturing around the room and he says, ‘Horrible, isn’t it?’”
“No,” I said, and then higher, “no.”
“Yes. And then he goes on. ‘No sense of depth, color juxtaposition is offensive, obviously a no-talent.’”
“I’m assuming he didn’t know it was your show.”
“No,” said Ann. “But I told him.”
“Good for you.”
Ann shrugged. “I was in assertiveness therapy at the time. I don’t know if I’d have the balls to do it now.”
Ann and I looked at Boris, who looked unapologetically out from the canvas.
“Was he at least embarrassed?”
“No,” Ann said. “I actually liked that about him.” Ann paused to recall. “He said, ‘I really love the show. I’m tired of conventional depth. There’s something in your treatment of depth reminiscent of Manet in his Fallen Matador. I find your color juxtaposition innovative and I like your work. The only reason I insulted the exhibition is it was the only way I knew to start a conversation. To insult a show is a common way of breaking the ice. If I’ve offended you, it wasn’t me, just the casualty of society’s stupid dictates.’”
“And you bought it?”
“Sort of.” Ann couldn’t seem to remember. “I told him I’d read The Soulless Man. I liked the first line, ‘Why would one choose to hold a hand so cold?’ and the last line,” here Ann paused dramatically, “‘In the final closing of those eyes was the end of a personal history important to no one, except for the executor of this action.’ I told him that I loved the last line so much that I read it over and over. Which is why I remember it. But I just kept reading it because it didn’t make any sense.”
There was a moment of quiet. Ann was deep in thought.
“And then you went out for a drink?”
Ann shook her head. “Assertiveness therapy. We dispensed with any formalities.”
She slept with him that night and did his laundry the next morning.
Ann sold a painting to a wealthy couple from Oklahoma, but aside from that, the evening was pretty much a disaster. The two of us sat on the front step of the gallery with a bottle of wine, passing it back and forth. The gallery owner and Ann’s manager were involved in a discussion with an interior designer from Philadelphia, who thought Ann’s work would be popular with her clientele. Neither of us had said anything about it, but I knew that Ann was waiting for Boris and I hoped to God he’d show up.
“How’s Moby-Dick?” asked Ann.
“I’ve finished that,” I said.
“That’s right,” said Ann wearily. Conversation was becoming difficult. “What’d you think?”
“I read an essay by this guy at Columbia, Crain, I think. Anyway, I knew that Melville was a big queen, but Crain has this theory that, at the time, sex between men was the greatest taboo, so every time someone’s about to fuck someone else…”