"I met him in Amsterdam, in nineteen sixty-seven. He had some business with the family firm, and one of the employees told me about him. Then we did some business, and then we became friends. We have seen each other I suppose ten or a dozen times in the last twenty years. By the way, please call me Piet. It is spelled differently, but it sounds the same."
"Piet."
"Piet actually is my middle name; my first name is Coenraad, or Coen for short, but it is spelled C-o-e-n and pronounced 'coon,' and that confuses Americans."
"It's too bad people won't take the trouble to get it right.".
He shrugged. "Not many people can manage Dutch noises. I have a friend named Schildt, he has lived in this country for many years now. He pronounces it 'Skildt' now, because he says" -- his voice dropped and became guttural -- " 'Doesn'd id zound like schidt?' "
She laughed, and he smiled for the first time. "Maggie, I hope we will be friends," he said.
"I hope so too."
Chapter Twenty
-- Con su permiso. The porter wheels up His cart, dumps litter beside the trash can. Smiling taxi drivers ask, -- żAmigo? -- Si, amigo. The telephones demand special coins. The seats Have been stolen. Children are asleep Under corrugated cardboard. They wake, Stand in a circle like football players. -- żDonde vamos a robar hoy? The particles Are too small to be seen, a miasma of the mind. Over the tilted city, in bright sun, the sky is gray. --Gene Anderson
Next day Gene announced that they were all going to the beach for a party. After a light lunch Pongo packed a huge picnic hamper; they set out a little after two in Gene's motor home, drove across the causeway and up the line of islands, past the funereal row of hotels and condominiums, to a public easement on Redington Beach, where the sea-front was still lined with private houses on ample lots. They walked through yucca and sea-grape and found themselves on a deserted beach. To the south they could see a few tiny black figures, small as ants; to the north, no one at all. Almost on the horizon, a white pleasure boat was trudging northward.
Anderson walked through the gentle surf until he was thigh-deep, then dived and disappeared; they saw him after a few moments stroking out toward the breakers. A bottle-green wave curved over him; he dived again and reappeared, a dark moving dot on the white glare.
Margaret and Irma swam nearer shore; Linck and Pongo were still busy putting up a shelter on four poles near the seawall. The water was only a little cooler than the air; Margaret felt it as a caressing softness on her body. When she came out, the sand was hot underfoot and the sun warm on her head; she was deliciously cool in between. Walking along the shore with Irma, she saw Anderson coming in with powerful slow strokes. He rose dripping like Triton, waded ashore, and walked up to the shelter.
Margaret trudged up through the loose sand. Pongo and Linck were in the water now, Pongo with a mask and flippers snorkeling in the shallows, and Linck performing a decorous side-stroke farther out. Anderson was sitting cross-legged in the luminous blue umbra of the shelter. Margaret sat down on the blanket beside him. "This is so beautiful," she said.
"Yes."
"I still can't get used to the colors, and how clean everything is. It's like a child's drawing, almost."
"Some people would call it gaudy."
"It seemed that way to me at first, but now when I remember Albany, I realize how drab it was. All those muddy colors, gray and brown, and the grit and grime over everything."
Linck came trudging up toward them, his broad gray-haired chest glistening with moisture. "That was very pleasant," he said, dropping beside them. He reached over and opened the cooler. "What do we have? Heineken's, all right." He brought up a bottle with a rustle of ice, offered it. "Maggie?"
"No, thanks. Do we have any Coke?"
"Almost certainly." He handed the bottle to Gene, rummaged in the cooler, found a Pepsi for Margaret and another beer for himself. "You have chosen a good place," he said. "It is very beautiful here."
"So Maggie was just telling me."
"How easy it is to know beauty when you see it, and how hard to define."
"Aquinas said that the three requirements for beauty are wholeness, harmony, and radiance."
"That is in Joyce's 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,' isn't it?" Linck asked. "Yes. But the Latin is claritas, which is better translated 'clarity.' "
"No, I think radiance is right."
Margaret looked up at Anderson; he was staring out at the bright ocean." 'Clarity' seems to be much simpler," he went on slowly. "But then what you're saying is that a work of art must be clear. To whom? That's a prescription for poster art. No, I think it's radiance -- a shining. That's where the mystery comes in. You can understand wholeness, the unity of a work, and you can understand harmony, when all the parts work together. But where does radiance come from?"
"At the moment, I should say from the sun," Linck said comfortably, and took a long draught from his glass.
Irma was strolling back along the water's edge. They saw her stop and talk to Pongo, who was standing up in the shallows with his mask on top of his head. Something she said made him laugh.
"As for poster art," Linck said, "I have seen some very good posters. Toulouse-Lautrec made them, for instance. Even if you mean posters advertising toothpaste, it may be there are people who find them beautiful. If so, why not? Do we all have to admire the same things ?"
Gene gave him an ironic glance. "Retro me, Sathanas," he said.
"Well, really," Linck said, "you may treat this as frivolous if you choose, but beauty is relative, isn't it? I know a man who sincerely believes that Boston bull terriers are beautiful, whereas to me they are simply a mistake."
"Depends on how you define the term. To some people, beauty is just whatever is desirable or useful. My father would look at a painting of some old barn and say, 'Why can't they paint a picture of a nice house?' "
Margaret said, "I've known people like that. My mother's housekeeper couldn't see anything beautiful in snow, because she hated it."
"Sure," said Gene. "And then there's physical beauty in people. It varies a lot from one culture to another, but it all comes back to what the person is good for -- bearing children, or fighting off tigers, or whatever. But there are other kinds of beauty you can't explain that way. Beauty in nature that doesn't seem to have any function, it's just there. Geometric beauty. Patterns."
"If by patterns you mean things like a butterfly's wing," said Linck., "or the veins in a leaf, those are certainly functional. In the butterfly it's a matter of species recognition, or sometimes misdirection, and in the leaf -- "
"All right, but have you thought about coquinas?"
"I'm sorry?"
"You haven't seen them? Maggie, have you?"
"No, I don't think so."
"Well, if I'm not mistaken, Irma has just found some." He raised his voice. "Irma!"
She looked up; she was on her knees in the strip of wet sand above the water. Anderson beckoned. She came toward them with her hands cupped together, and Pongo followed her.
"Let me see," said Gene. Irma held her two hands over his palm and took them away. In his hand was a heap of little glistening shells, seed-shaped, each no more than half an inch long. Some were white, some pale yellow, some pink; others had delicate ray patterns of blue or violet alternating with white. Gene stirred the pile with his finger while the others bent close.
"Pretty little things," he said. "They live along the beaches here, and use the tides to move back and forth. When the tide starts to go out, you'll see them coming to the surface and washing out in the water, hundreds of them. Shore birds eat them. So what are these patterns and colors for? Not for camouflage. If you wanted to hide from shore birds, wouldn't you be the color of sand?"