Gilbert skidded to a halt. He turned to Cyril and stated solemnly, as though declaring a long-meditated decision to renounce the world and join a monastery, that he wanted to be a bird.
Cyril shattered in laughter.
Gilbert shoved the Bug in gear and drove on. “I am a bird.”
Cyril spread his arms, the right one out the window feeling the wind, the left reaching into the back seat. They passed a stone church and Gilbert looped the block like a hawk banking to come in behind its prey. As they entered the familiar gloom, Gilbert said, “I’m leaving my soul to science.”
Cyril envisioned lab-coated doctors dissecting the mist that was Gilbert’s soul.
They each took an aisle, Gilbert traveling on down the left, Cyril the right, leaving the middle open to a black scarfed woman kneeling at the altar where candles burned on a tiered iron rack like a silent choir of small spirits. A stained glass crucifixion throbbed in the evening sunlight. The cool cement floor chilled Cyril’s bare feet. He envisioned Roman soldiers tramping the hard dry roads of Palestine. Opening his eyes, he saw Christ gazing at him from an alcove. One of Christ’s eyes flickered, as if winking at him, then it rose into the air—Christ’s eye was taking flight! Cyril staggered. Reaching for balance he grabbed the statue’s ankle, hollow plaster instead of solid concrete, and it toppled, grazing his shoulder and striking the cement floor. Christ’s head snapped off at the neck and rocked side to side and then was still, while the moth Cyril had mistaken for an eye flew off toward the candles.
Cyril woke before dawn. He hadn’t been sleeping so much as awake and dreaming. Now he was shivering and thirsty. He drank from the tap and then went outside and stood listening to the idling machinery of the city. The eastern sky was turning apple green by the time he reached his mother’s. He entered the dark basement and did not turn on the light because he knew that his father was there waiting for him and that in the light he would vanish.
“Cyril.”
“Dad.”
“I’m glad you’re here.”
“Me too.”
“You’re grown up.”
Cyril wanted to say not really, that he was still a child, that they could pick up where they’d left off. His father appeared luminous and yet solid. There was a hiss of gas and the scrape of a rasp-lighter and the welding torch spouted its perfect flame. His dad flipped down his face plate and went to work cutting a door in the darkness. He worked his way slowly up one side and across and then down the other with his blue and gold flame as precise as a knife blade. A doorway dropped open like a drawbridge revealing a field of wheat higher than their heads. His father switched off the torch and turned off the valve then flipped up his face plate and hung it on its nail. He stepped through the door from the darkness to the light. The sky was a deep blue and a breeze combed the wheat.
“Don’t go, dad.”
“Come.”
They entered the wheat that smelled of wet grain and hot sun.
“How far?”
“All the way.”
Cyril followed. His father was in overalls with the sleeves pushed to mid-forearm. They moved soundlessly, the wheat stalks flowing past, his father singing slowly, quietly, then louder, in a voice deep and resonant as if rising right up out of the land itself, the land he was born in and had returned to, with its winds that blew across thousands of miles of tilled fields and through birch forests, and even though his dad sang no words, only notes, Cyril understood—
“Cyril.” The basement light went on, the bare bulb’s brutal glare obliterating the vision to reveal his mother on the stairs in her housecoat.
He worked on a letter to Connie, achieving a pile of crumpled paper and two words:
Dear Connie,
Too formal. He crossed out Dear and in a burst he wrote:
Hey Connie, great to hear from you.
He pondered then replaced the period with an exclamation mark.
I Spy! That’s great. I love I Spy.
This was true. He especially enjoyed the theme music and the opening credits that showed a silhouette of Robert Culp—undercover CIA agent Kelly Robinson—playing tennis, backhand, forehand, then pivoting with a pistol and blasting some Russian or Albanian as the names of exotic cities slid past: Moscow, Rome, Beirut.
Where does your episode take place? It’s great you’re doing so well.
Rereading what he had so far, he discovered that he’d repeated the word great three times. Clunky. He tapped his pencil on the lined letter paper.
I finished art school and just had my first solo show and sold everything.
He contemplated, then added,
I’m moving to New York. Get there much?
He reversed the pencil about to erase it all then changed his mind and laid the pencil down, discovering that the very act of letting the lie stand for a minute was an exhilarating act of bravado. Two days the letter remained on the table. During those two days Cyril’s moods churned. He felt guilty, he felt silly, and then he became critical of Connie—not harshly, but gently, as if he was older and wiser—and thought she could benefit from his example by proceeding more slowly with her career. Was she taking acting classes or blindly hurling herself into auditions and blowing opportunities?
On the third day he came home from work with the staccato echo of hammers in his head to find Gilbert at the table, a Lucky in one hand, the letter in the other. He’d shifted the tube-metal chair so that he sat parallel to the table, his legs crossed at the knees, looking the picture of comfort.
“If you’re still carrying a torch for her you should go to la.”
“She’s with someone.”
Gilbert popped the cap from a beer with the opener on his Swiss Army knife and slid the bottle across the Formica.
Cyril drank deeply.
“So why are you suddenly writing her? You think these fantasies about shows and New York will what, bring her running?”
“I was drunk.”
“A little bullshit can go a long way,” admitted Gilbert.
“I wasn’t going to send it.”
“Maybe you should.”
“Send it?”
“Go to New York.” Gilbert swirled his beer and looked at the sketches tacked to the walls, portraits, landscapes, houses, body parts, bottles, boxes, bugs, forks and spoons and knives. “Anything and everything,” he said. “You need to focus. You have no direction. You need a teacher. A mentor. Isn’t that how it worked in the old days, you apprenticed, mixed the master’s paints, shined his shoes, stretched his canvases?”
SIX
FEARING THAT ATthe grand old age of twenty-three he was too old to return to school, even if it was only night school, where all you had to do was pay your tuition to be admitted, Cyril was relieved to see students of all ages. They were mostly women, about a dozen, some in smocks with kerchiefs around their heads, others with elbow length hair and hoop earrings. The instructor was named Sandor Novak. His damp hair and dark eyes drooped like his moustache, and he moved with slow slapping steps as though his feet were flat and ankles weak. He showed them his own work, which focused almost entirely on dismembered dolls. He’d set their heads like boulders in bleak seascapes with crab claws and screwdrivers and broken rowboats and rat skulls. A doll’s foot, a doll’s butt, a doll’s eyes large and lidless, each rendered with detail verging on the mad. Many students exchanged sceptical glances. Cyril was excited. The juxtapositions of such strange and diverse subject matter was a revelation: suddenly everything had aesthetic potential. Over the following weeks, Novak put the class through exercises where they drew with their eyes closed, with their opposite hand, where they drew whatever they were looking at as though it was upside down or imagined it from the opposite side.