I had visions of my arriving at her condominium to find her gone, God knows where, and it would all be my fault. I’d be accused of murder, kidnapping, or running a white slavery ring. In fact, she wasn’t gone when I arrived, but the actuality wasn’t a whole lot better than the fantasy. Before she even had the door all the way open, she was screaming at me.
“I can’t stand this, I’ve got to get out of here!”
“Have you had anything to eat?”
“I’m not talking about eating, I’m talking about getting out of here!”
Still standing outside the front door, I gave her a confident, manly smile and said, “Look, Mallory, we can do both those things. Let’s get out of here and go find someplace to have breakfast, okay? You may not need sustenance, but I do.”
“All right, I’ll get a coat—but don’t come in.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’ll sit down or something.”
So I stood there on the stoop till she was ready. I was so flummoxed that it didn’t even occur to me that I could have waited in the car, where I would have looked and felt marginally less ridiculous.
Though she claimed to have no appetite, she attacked a plate of eggs and bacon as if she hadn’t eaten in a week. Unfortunately, having a full stomach didn’t seem to improve her outlook a whole lot. I was beginning to wonder if Gloria MacArthur had died in childhood. It would explain Mallory’s evident lack of maturity, but I hesitated to ask, knowing how suspicious she was of every question.
It came to me that a heavy irony was at work here. For the first time ever, I’d made my way into a case early enough to safeguard the evidence, but precisely because I was so early, I couldn’t get anywhere near the evidence. The subject was preoccupied with more elemental matters, and it was going to be days, if not weeks, before she was ready to help me with the investigation I’d come to make.
I asked what she was thinking about her future.
“What do you mean?” she asked in reply—evasively, I felt, since she was plainly thinking about nothing else.
“Well, for example, do you plan to go back to your job at the library?”
“Don’t be stupid,” she said. “I wouldn’t even know where to find the goddamn place, much less do the work.”
“Then how are you going to make a living?”
“There’s some money in the bank,” she told me. “Mallory was a saver.”
“That’s nice. It gives you some time to think.”
“Yeah,” she agreed sullenly.
“Your family may be able to help.”
She gave me a disgusted look. “My family’s dead.”
“Mallory has a family, and as far as they’re concerned, you’re Mallory. You’ve got to get used to that. It’s a fact that’s not going to go away.”
“It can go away as far as I’m concerned.”
“What have you got against them?”
“They’re—” she started, then caught herself.
“They’re what?”
“Weasels. Warts.”
I wanted to tell her they couldn’t possibly be as bad as all that, but I knew I’d be wasting my breath.
We were on our third postprandial cup of coffee. I had no idea what was supposed to come next, and she didn’t seem disposed to enlighten me. I considered telling her I was going back to New York City and she could get in touch when she felt like it, but I was afraid she’d think that was fine.
Finally I said, “I take it you don’t want to go back to your condominium.”
“That’s right, I don’t.”
“Then what do you want to do?”
“I want to find someplace else to live.”
“What kind of place?”
On that point she was standing mute.
“Where do you want to look? Here in Oneonta?”
“What’s the point of that?” she wanted to know.
“I don’t know. It’s here, it’s handy, and, like it or not, you’ve got all sorts of connections here, including a bank account and references.”
She shook her head.
I signaled to the waitress for the check. “Look, Mallory, I’m glad to help, but I can’t read your mind. We can’t just sit here drinking coffee for the rest of our lives.”
“I know,” she said, giving me an anxious look. “What would happen if we went to New York City?”
“What would happen? We’d be there instead of here.”
“Then let’s go there.”
At last it was my turn to shake my head. “Maybe someday, Mallory, but not now. Not unless you get together with your parents and let them know what’s going on. I’m not taking you outside Oneonta unless they’re in on it.”
She glared at me and said, “You’re a fink.”
“A what?”
“A fink. Don’t you know what a fink is?”
“No, I’m afraid I don’t.”
She shrugged. “I guess it’s slang of a different generation. It means you’re on the side of the big shots. You know which side your bread’s buttered on.”
“You mean because I want your parents to know where you’re going?”
“That’s right. You won’t take my side against them.”
“Why should I, for God’s sake? You shouldn’t be making enemies of them—and I certainly won’t help you make enemies of them.”
“All right,” she said, getting up. “I’ll stay in fucking Oneonta.”
“SO,” I SAID, once we were back in the car, “what does staying in fucking Oneonta mean? Do you want to get a paper and look for rentals or shall I just drive up one street and down the next?”
“Let’s look around downtown,” she replied.
Oneonta is one of the ancient cities of the Northeast, proud of the fact that it has remained steadfastly small and old-fashioned. When its elderly brick buildings crumble, they aren’t so much replaced as re-created, and the locals say the venerable bandstand on Main Street has been there from the outset (though by now every stick of it has doubtless been replaced many times over).
A railroad freight line roughly parallels Main Street a few blocks to the south, and a Railroad Avenue parallels the tracks in the eastern section of the city—and this dismal lane, faced with warehouses and factories, seemed to strike Mallory as especially promising.
“You’re not going to find any housing down here,” I told her.
“I’m not looking for housing.”
“Then what? Are you planning to open a paper mill?”
She withered me with a scornful look.
After taking down the numbers of several agents with property in the area, we were heading off to find a phone when we accidently stumbled on a building that satisfied her heart’s desire. Unlike most of its neighbors, it was a single-story structure, concrete block, with tall lattice windows, advertised to be twenty-four hundred square feet. If the peeling sign on the facade was to believed, it had once been home to Wilson Mackie Wire Products.
“You can’t seriously think of living there, Mallory. It won’t have anything like a kitchen or a bath.”
“I know how to live without a kitchen or a bath,” she said darkly.
It wouldn’t be exactly true to say that that was that. The real estate agent was happy enough to show us the building, which was surprisingly clean inside, but balked at giving her a lease. He wanted either six months’ rent in advance or a cosigner—“a grownup,” as he undiplomatically put it.
“Not me,” I said, when I saw her gaze swivel in my direction. “Not a chance.”
She thought a moment, then reached for her checkbook.
“You shouldn’t do that,” I told her. “Contact your parents. Let them cosign with you.”
She hesitated, but only for a fraction of a second, then wrote him out a check for six months’ rent.
It was a strange development, but it had its points. On the lease, Mallory had acknowledged having a residence (her condominium), her parents (as references), and a
place of employment (the library). Despite her habit of denial, she was willy-nilly beginning to forge some links to the present.
Mallory had different ways of being silent, depending on whether she was furious, just wanted to be left alone, was self-absorbed, or was uneasy about how her next move was going to be received. The silence that swallowed us up as we headed back to the condominium was of the last type, I sensed, and she confirmed it when we arrived.
She no longer needed my services. She was ready to take up life on her own. She wanted to be left alone, at least for the time being.
“It’s going to take a lot of work to make that wire factory livable,” I told her. “I’ll be glad to help, and it’ll go a lot faster with two pairs of hands.”
She shook her head. “You’re always dragging me back, always telling me what I’ve got to do and what I can’t do. Every single thing you think I should do is something I don’t want to do, and every single thing I want to do is something you think I shouldn’t do.”
I had to admit she had a point.
“You just wear me down,” she went on.
“I’m sorry,” I said, meaning it.
“You’ve got to—” Mallory paused, blinked, and made a sign with her right hand. “I can’t think of the word, the expression.” She made the sign a couple more times, watching as if the hand itself might reveal the word she wanted. “It means, like, you’re paddling the boat north and I’m paddling it south. All we’re doing is wearing each other out.”
“I understand what you’re saying, and I agree to a certain extent, but I don’t think you’re being fair. You wanted to get out of the hospital, and I helped you with that, didn’t I?”
“Yes, that’s true.”
“You wanted to redecorate your apartment, and I helped you with that, didn’t I?”
“Yes.”
“You wanted a new place to live, and I helped you with that too. Everything you’ve gotten done in the past two days is something I helped with.”
“Yeah, all right,” she said, disgusted. “But this is what I want to do next. I want to put together my own pad. I suppose that’s dated too—‘my pad.’ ”
“It is, but I understand what you mean, from the context.”
“Will you help me do that?”
“Do what?”
“I said I want to put together my own pad. Will you help me do that?”
“Yes.”
“Then go away for a week. This is something I’ve got to do by myself. I want to do it by myself. Can’t you dig that?”
I smiled, feeling oddly flattered to be initiated in this way into the secret code of her antiquated slang.
“I can dig it completely,” I said, feeling a bit idiotic.
She giggled, and I guess my heart gave a little surge of delight. “You don’t dig something completely,” she explained. “You either dig it or you don’t.”
“I dig it,” I said—and felt a boyish flush burn across my cheeks.
IN THIS WAY was I banished from the one place on earth I really wanted to be. I wasn’t in a mood to go home and start making explanations to my parents, and I certainly wasn’t going to hang around Oneonta like a spurned lover. The only other place I belonged was with Reggie and Marcia Fenshaw in Tunis, so I went there. The moment I began to be enfolded in their grubby, nicotine-saturated cheeriness, I realized that Mallory (or rather Gloria MacArthur) would undoubtedly be much more at ease with them than she was with me.
Even when they finally understood that I wasn’t bringing back barrels of evidence and testimony, the Fenshaws insisted that my return was a signal for celebration. A vacation from “work” was announced, though I knew that, for them, this would be more a penance than a holiday. After two days of fairly nonstop revelry, they began to fidget, and, pleading exhaustion, I retired to my apartment near the ruins of Carthage.
Tunis has never outgrown its exotic reputation, and visitors expect to be able to hear the muezzin’s soulful cries on the morning air or to wander in a spicy old madina on a sultry afternoon. They’re disappointed to find themselves in a rather commonplace French city that nowadays would seem perfectly at ease on the other side of the Mediterranean looking out on the Golfe du Lion. In fact, this explains its attraction to the Fenshaws, who belong to that special breed of very, very British types who are much more at home among the French than anywhere else.
When I’ve been away for a while, I’m always happy to spend a couple of days poking around in the antique shops. Many are to be found under the roof of what is said to be the Dar al-Bey, which served as guest quarters for the Ottoman Regents, and many more are clustered around the Zitouna Mosque, itself now a great museum. Charming relics of the city’s romantic past abound, and it doesn’t much matter that they’re virtually all fakes. In the better shops, the fakes themselves are centuries old, desirable and even respectable antiques in their own right.
I wrote a preliminary report on the case of Mallory Hastings for the newsletter. I took my time over it. I took my time over everything, dawdling over menus and wine lists, planning excursions, finding a gift for my mother’s birthday. At last, however, my sentence of exile was up, and I boarded a plane to wing my way back to New York.
When I finally got there, I approached Mallory’s industrial-park cottage with a profound sense of dread. I pounded on the dented metal door at the front, waited, then pounded some more. At last the door swung open, and Mallory reluctantly admitted me—and the secret was revealed in an instant.
Gloria MacArthur was a painter—and not of pleasant garden scenes or arrangements of fruit on Spanish shawls. It was a moment of profound awkwardness for us both. For her part, Mallory knew how much of a shock she was presenting me with, and for mine, I knew how much of our future relationship depended on the way I handled the shock.
After a moment of stunned silence, I said, “I’ve never seen anything like this”—a statement full of truth but not too full.
“Yeah,” she said, half deflated and, I felt, half relieved.
The children of the rich learn about art, but not the way other people learn about it. The world of art belongs to the rich, the way a certain province might belong to a prince who lives far away. In the same way that ordinary people are allowed to inhabit that province (though it belongs to the prince), ordinary people are allowed to look at the art (though it belongs to the rich). Here it should be evident that by art, I don’t mean “something painted” or “something sculpted.” Most of what is merely painted or sculpted never becomes art, because it never belongs to the rich. Before that, it may be the very life’s blood of the painters and sculptors who starve themselves and drive themselves mad to create it. Before that, it may make interesting and striking decoration for restaurants or suburban villas. Before that, it may be collected by enterprising investors in hopes that it might someday become art. But it isn’t art until it begins to be seen in the mansions of the wealthy and in the catalogues of the great auction houses. Then it truly leaves the domain of ordinary folk and enters the domain of the rich, who assuredly know—and assuredly teach their children—how to value and care for it.
This is what I know about art. Art is treasure that hangs on our walls, sits on our tables, and stands in our hallways. And my parents take it for granted that I’ll be able to differentiate a Dürer from a Schongauer, a Steen from a Terbrugghen, an Houdon from a Canova. If the Fenshaws were to have such knowledge, this would strike my parents as marvelously droll, like a legless man owning an exquisite French racing cycle.
Since I have intimate knowledge of my family’s treasures, people think I’m being modest when I tell them I know absolutely nothing about art. But if they show me a piece of student work, I won’t have the slightest idea whether it’s art or even “good.” What I will know is whether such things hang or stand in the houses of the rich—or in the museums where the rich allow their treasures to be seen. And when people understand this, they’ll instantly agree with what I said in the firs
t place, that I know absolutely nothing about art.
But my ignorance goes beyond this. I have, additionally, no idea what’s being produced in the garrets, cellars, and lofts of the art world—no idea and utterly no interest. This is not something I either brag about or apologize for. It’s just how I am—and how I was when I walked into Mallory’s studio.
Beyond the fact that nothing like her work has ever hung in the houses of the rich, I had no idea what I was looking at, and I told her so. To me, in my innocence, it was simply an abomination—a nauseous mess, an insolent defiance of taste, artistry, and craft. It might have been done by an ape or a lunatic or a pervert.
“Is this,” I began feebly, “the sort of thing artists were doing when you—when you were …?”
“When I was alive as Gloria MacArthur? Yes. Not every artist, of course. This was … the school of New York, you might say.”
“And were you successful?”
She made a face. “I was only starting. I was … young.” The admission seemed to stick in her throat.
I walked around, taking a polite interest. There were just four canvases in work at this point—all quite huge. She’d had only a week. I say they were “in work,” but I had no real way of telling whether they were in work or finished. They reminded me of the rags painters use to clean their brushes, except on a giant scale. That anyone could be driven to such work struck me as profoundly pathetic.
Having nothing to say, I walked round and round the four of them groping for any plausible word of praise I could bring forth. I felt sure that adjectives like colorful and different and interesting would be received as merely patronizing. Finally I just told the truth and admitted I had no idea what I was looking at.
“I wouldn’t expect you to,” she snapped—but at the same time I had the feeling she was secretly pleased.
“Can you explain what you’re trying to achieve?”
“Achieve? What are you talking about? They’re paintings.”
Clearly the word painting had a different meaning for the school of New York than it has for me.
She said, “Don’t you have anything like this now?”