Concord, Chapter 9
Everything is everything
The next morning he decided to seek out the Painter. He could have bearded him closer to home, but Mrs. Dodge was always there, always watching; he could picture her standing in the kitchen with her mouth open, listening to the upstairs doors creak open and closed. All day he went through the motions, avoiding Jean and Hank and the others as much as possible. Lila was absent once again; it was almost a relief. He wasn’t prepared yet to enlist her in his plan, if you could even call it that. It was more like an impulse rising in him like a scream. No one talked about the Code Green, of course. Such incidents were thankfully rare, and discussing the weather was held to be in poor taste—a holdover from the bad old days on the mainland. Even on Concord, the habit persisted, since to complain about a little turbulence was to put the judgment of Navigation and the Commodore into question.
Long Now Street was lined with little boutiques and stores, their facades adjusted seasonally to appeal to the shopkeepers’ whims. It was the only street to cut on a diagonal through the village grid, narrow and enclosed so as to generate a feeling of openness and release when you passed through it back out to Main Street. A barbershop, a nail salon, an ice cream parlor, a hardware store: these useful emporia were supplemented by antique shops, museums of the lost world, into which one might wander in to caress an ancient timepiece, study faded prints, or finger outmoded appliances. One shop specialized in lamps, dozens of lamps in every style: Tiffany, Scandinavian, Art Deco, each casting the same stark white light onto the walls. Another resembled a tackle shop: besides the fishing gear (only to be used in the Pond; no one would think of fishing over the side into the dead waste of ocean that surrounded Concord) it was festooned by taxidermied sea life. A lurid model, nearly two meters in length, of Nemo’s Nautilus grappled by its cephalopodic nemesis dangled from the ceiling. Next door was a junk shop, its display window devoted to telephones: a complete-seeming menagerie from a nineteenth-century handset to a pink Princess phone to an array of mobiles, terminating in sleek blank bricks of the sort that had vibrated in the older villagers’ pockets in the long-ago days. Inside the walls displayed posters of films and Broadway shows dating as far back as the 1890s, mixed in with a few motivational posters of the hang-in-there-kitty variety. The rest of the stock consisted of porcelain dolls and mechanical toys, lovingly maintained by the owner, a squint-eyed codger who had once run the world’s largest hedge fund out of a modest two-story ranch house in Wichita. He sat on a wooden stool with a fixed grin on his face, nodding to himself as he replaced the spring on a cymbal-striking monkey or adjusted the mechanism of a tin replica of the Wright Brothers’ airplane, complete with figurine of a tiny Wilbur lying face-down between the wings.
To judge by its storefront window, the Painter’s studio masqueraded as a record shop. A dusty curtain framed a seemingly random array of ancient LPs without their covers—it looked as if some kind of miniature multi-wheeled vehicle had crashed there and its wreckage had been put on display as a warning. Saul stood in the doorway, listening to the music echoing tinnily from within: B.B. King singing “The Thrill Is Gone” in little looping leaps and growls. There was no bell on the door and he stepped inside hesitantly, conscious of a sense of intrusion. But the shop was empty. Two of its three walls were covered with posters and album covers, mostly old soul acts—Percy Sledge and Isaac Hayes, Marvin Gaye and Diana Ross, Teddy Pendergrass and Erykah Badu. The third wall displayed a few of the Painter’s paintings; the largest of which showed a view of Concord from a high point, in darkly saturated colors, the buildings stark abstract planes and the streets unpeopled, while a green band surmounted by a gray band represented the horizon. A view from the church steeple? From the Conn? Had Ray ever actually seen such a view?
The other paintings were portraits of Concord’s most prominent residents. He paused before a three-quarter length portrait of the Commodore in mufti—sweater vest, twill trousers—posed in his garden with scarlet roses climbing behind his noble head. To one side of him a portrait of the Constable, wearing sunglasses in which miniature replicas of the village’s modest skyline could be seen. The Headmaster stood with his arms folded in front of the Lyceum entrance, all craggy nobility and lordly purpose. A smaller portrait at waist height took him by surprise; it was only about the size of his hand. He crouched to look at the image of Dr. Moody in her black cloche hat, offering a thin wry smile with her hands hidden inside what looked like a fur muff. A dual portrait of the Doctors Moody would not have been surprising to find, but to see her portrayed on her own was uncanny. Her mad eyes seemed to follow him as he searched for the source of the music; he realized it came from behind a velvet curtain that purpled over a doorway where the counter and cash register ought to be.
“Hello?” he called. The music stopped. “Hello?”
Saul felt more than he heard the sound of a record needle being replaced in a vinyl groove, and a moment later a new song began that he couldn’t immediately identify. “Come on back,” the Painter’s voice said.
Saul pulled the curtain aside and stepped into a back room with a high ceiling, from which light from a paneled skylight dappled the paint-spattered hardwood floor. The walls were stacked with canvases large and small, most with their faces turned from view. Ray sat on a stool before his easel, on which a large canvas presented the outlines of a woman’s head and shoulders, a semi-abstract swirl of blacks and grays that looked to Saul like a photonegative of a soft-serve ice cream cone. The Painter’s had thrust his face into a complicated-looking apparatus that looked like a dozen telescopes smashed together, or an imploded optometrist’s phoropter. Its lenses were trained preposterously upon a passport-sized photograph of a woman—it looked to Saul like a vast array of weaponry trained upon a miniscule target. On an upright wooden crate there stood a portable turntable with a record going around on top. The chorus made the song’s identity clear.
“’What’s Going On,’” said Saul.
“Not too much,” replied Ray, eyes still pressed to the lenses of his machine.
“No, the song,” Saul said, feeling foolish. On the record, Marvin Gaye was asking him just who had the right to judge us.
He bent down for a closer view of the photograph and saw the face of a Black woman in her forties with an elegant coil of hair on top of her head, startling slate-colored eyes, and a Mona Lisa smile. There was something familiar about her, like the song; Saul felt himself somehow impaled by her ironic gaze. An undefined emotion worked its way loose inside him, a sensation like the keel of a boat rubbing rock. But he couldn’t place her.
Ray leaned back, the impression of the rubber goggles having left a racoon-like impression around his eyes. He fished a paper cigar out of his shirt pocket. “I wasn’t expecting you quite so soon,” he said mildly. “Whatever happened to ‘stay the hell away from me’?”
Saul indicated the portrait. “Who is she?”
The Painter lit his smoke and thought about it for a while. “My wife,” he said at last.
“She’s beautiful.”
“Yes, she is,” Ray said softly.
“But she’s no longer with us.”
Ray selected a brush and turned to his canvas. “Not in the way you mean. Forgive me, Mr. Klein, but I am rather busy, and the last time we spoke you told me in so many words to fuck off.”
Saul watched him work for a few minutes. Ray addressed the background of the canvas, meticulously putting down a layer of blue-tinted gray with miniscule movements of his brush. Then he leaned back on his stool and twirled the brush between his fingers, apparently deep in thought. Abruptly it seemed to occur to him to lean forward and dab in some feature of the face. The undefined shadow under the figure’s eyebrow became, with a single stroke of the brush, a woman’s eye. Then Ray bent down again to his machine to re-examine the photo, summoning detail.
Saul had his briefcase with him. He knelt down to snap it open and slid out the photo of Suzanne. He remained on his knees, holding it in front of him as though it were a religious icon, waiting.
“You still here?” grunted Ray, still focused on his machine.
“I changed my mind.” Saul cleared his throat. “About telling you to fuck off.”
“Well, I didn’t.” Ray turned to look at him then, saw the photo. He lifted his eyebrows in an exaggerated manner. “Hello there, Mrs. Vespucci.”
“You said you did commissions.”
“Indeed I do.” The Painter gestured with his brush at the stacked canvases on the floor. “All the leading citizens of Concord, and a few of the not-so leading.” He turned back to his work. “I’m not sure our First Founder’s adulterous wife qualifies.”
Saul climbed to his feet. “What if I said I’d help you?”
“I don’t want any help. Thanks all the same.”
The photograph trembled in Saul’s hands. To calm himself, he walked about the studio, glancing at the canvases, most of which had their backs turned to him. He paused in front of one facing outward that depicted a young Black man wearing the white coveralls that indicated indenture to Vital Services. His face wore a serious expression. In his white gloved hands he held a peony, an outrageous splash of color against the monochrome of the rest of the image. “What’s this?”
Ray glanced over. “Dr. Ojekwu’s son.”
“David. He’s my student,” Saul said. “He isn’t indentured yet.”
“He will be,” said Ray, putting flecks of light into the pupil of his wife’s eye. “Not everything I do is by commission.”
“Did he pose for this?”
“I thought I asked you to leave, Mr. Klein.”
“Just tell me one thing,” Saul said. He stood next to the easel, breathing in the scent of oils, turpentine, and smoke. “If you somehow get a hold of the boat, and if they let you leave with it. Where on earth will you go?”
“I told you. Home.”
Saul pointed at the canvas. “You think she’s still alive?”
Ray smiled slightly. “Yes”
“Then why isn’t she here? You left her behind?”
The Painter’s smile faded. “This was no place for her.”
“But for you it was?”
The smile returned. “I’m a shareholder.”
“You abandoned her,” Saul accused. “You left her in hell.”
Ray raised an eyebrow. “Why this is hell,” he murmured, “nor am I out of it.” He bent to his canvas. “Seems to me I’m not the only one who had to leave somebody behind.”
“That’s different,” Saul said, feeling aggrieved and foolish at the same time. “Our situation was more complicated.”
“Seems to me,” the Painter mused, “that you don’t know squat about my situation.”
“You can’t really think she’s still alive.”
“Maybe both of them are.” Ray put down his brush, turned to face Saul with his hands on his knees. “You ever think of that?”
“You’re crazy.”
“Pot, meet kettle,” the Painter said calmly. The music had stopped. He got up and moved to the record player and, with some delicacy, removed the album from the turntable. He slid it into its sleeve and selected a new album. He displayed it to Saul. “You a fan?”
A smiling man played ring-a-round-the-rosy with a group of children. The smallest boy wore a blue cops-and-robbers-style mask. Saul said, “I can’t say I know his work.”
Ray nodded. He turned away from Saul and put the record on. “Brilliant, but crazy,” he said over his shoulder. “Killed himself when he was thirty-three, same age as Jesus. No telling what else he might have accomplished if he’d lived.”
The two of them listened in silence for a while. I hear voices, I see people, Donny Hathaway sang.
“I never thanked you,” Saul said haltingly. “For hiding my contraband when the Constable came searching for it.”
“That’s okay,” Ray said, still looking at the album cover. “You were too mad at me for busting into your room and taking it. But I put it all back.”
“You did. Why?”
“Because I’m not a thief.”
“No, I mean, why did you help me?”
Everything is everything
Everything is everything
Saul waited. Ray sat down at his easel again and picked up his brush.
“I didn’t always use this kind of thing to paint with,” he said, indicating the machine. “Back on the mainland I wasn’t a figurative painter at all. I was interested in form, the textual qualities of the picture plane. All that Cy Twombly kind of shit. But here, in my afterlife, I find that all I care about is getting it right. What real things look like and feel like. And I’m not painting for the dealers any more. People ask me to make pictures from photographs. People and places. Houses, views of the Grand Canyon. Disney World. The projectors aren’t enough for them somehow. It’s like they want someone else to look at their pictures as closely as I’ve got to if I’m going to make paintings out of them. You understand me?”
Saul said nothing. The Painter addressed his canvas.
“I’m not an artist anymore,” he said, licking his thumb and wiping at one of his wife’s cheeks. “I’m not sure art’s possible in a place like this. Art depends on the tension between form and life. That’s a distinction that’s become impossible to draw.” He extended a hand. “Let me see her.”
Saul handed him the photograph of Suzanne. Ray studied it critically. “Was this taken in…”
“Venice,” Saul confirmed. “Not long before the cyclone wiped it off the map.”
“She was beautiful,” said Ray matter-of-factly. “You can see that she was a woman of character.”
“What was her name?”
“My wife?” Ray looked at the half-finished canvas. “Josephine. Joey to her friends.” He looked into Saul’s face. “You don’t recognize her.” It wasn’t quite a question.
Saul shook his head. “You haven’t answered my question.”
“Because we can help each other. I’ve got something to get back to. And you, Saul. You don’t want to stay here anymore, is that right?”
“It’s not me,” Saul said quietly. “I’m not important. I deserve to spend the rest of my life here, if life is what it’s called. I think you’re right about it being something not quite like life. But there’s someone else who deserves a life, and I want to get them out of here.”
“Not Jean Rodefer,” Ray said.
“Jesus,” said Saul indignantly. “Does everyone know about that?” The Painter shrugged. “No, not Jean. My daughter.”
Ray tapped the photo. “You mean, Suzanne’s daughter.”
“Yes.”
Ray expressed no surprise. “Tell you what,” he said. “You look into it, and I’ll look into this. Do up a portrait for you. Or for Marco, make it a present to him.”
“That isn’t funny.” Saul’s knees and ankles were hurting him. He got to his feet, and a white flame of flight flew up the column of his neck and into his eyes. He staggered, arms akimbo. Ray leaped up to catch him. “Saul. You all right?”
“I just…” He massaged his temples. “Headache. I get them sometimes. Not usually this fast.”
Ray inspected his face. “Don’t stroke out on me,” he said seriously. “It won’t look good. I’m here on sufferance as it is.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because of her,” Ray said, indicating the painting. “Dr. Carter. My wife.” He turned back to Saul, guided him to the Painter’s stool. “Sit here for a minute and catch your breath. I’ll get you a glass of water.”
He disappeared into the bathroom. Saul stared at the half-formed face on canvas, its one brightly mocking eye. The name was finally awakening something in his mind, something like a memory of that face taking shape against the white outline of his headache. When Ray returned, Saul said, “I remember her now. Dr. Josephine Carter. She was an engineer for us. Resigned not long before the launch, didn’t give a reason why.”
“There’s a flag on her file, I imagine,” Ray said soberly, handing the glass to Saul. “And on mine. Maybe ask your friend the Constable sometime.”
“He’s no friend of mine.” Saul drank. He pointed at the photo of Suzanne. “How long will it take?”
“How long will it take you to find the boat?”
“If it exists, not too long.”
“And if it doesn’t exist?”
Saul held up the empty glass in his left hand. “Then we’ll build a goddamn raft, or a canoe, or something.” He extended his other hand, and after the barest of pauses, the Painter shook it.
Ray watched Saul go, then turned back to his canvas. On the stereo a pair of intertwined voices, a man’s and a woman’s, crooned Where is the love?
He bent once again to his machine, in which his wife’s face floated, three-dimensional, perpetually ready to break out of her enigmatic expression into a scream, or a smile. He’d make it a smile, he decided. A smile like his own.
He whispered to her, See you soon.
