The keys, if she’s ever wondered, are to storage bins in the basement, Sid Morris tells Marie. You cannot believe the junk people leave behind—all their masterpieces! Years of work! Pouf! They’re gone and I’m left with the crap of their labor.
She hasn’t asked, she does not say.
They stand in Sid Morris’s office in the empty School of Inspired Arts, the Yoga Center on the third floor holding some kind of meditation retreat. Scores of scruffy men and women shuffle up and down the stairs. They must have just let them out for a cigarette, Sid Morris says.
Imagine sitting all day saying nothing, Marie says.
Death would be more interesting, Sid Morris says. Tried it once. Meditation, not death, but what’s the difference? You should hear the idiotic questions: “If I’m breathing out my left nostril and I accidentally breathe out my right, is that a problem?”
Marie laughs. She does not know what she expected showing up on a vacant Saturday; she had come to tell him that she is leaving her house after all, that she does not want Sid Morris to embark on the journey west and find her gone.
It happens to the best of us, Sid Morris says, looking down.
He checks a book of some kind, a ledger filled in pale ink. She watches as he draws a line through what she sees is her name in a long list of others and now x-ed like his calendar days—before noon?—the month almost passed, late May. Outside, the weather has turned glorious, lilac and rose.
“It’s a beautiful day,” she says. “You should get out.”
“Is that so?” he says. He leans against his battered metal desk, Henry’s canvas behind him somehow mounted to the cinder-block wall. A heater clicks on and off in the corner though it is too warm and the windows are open, the air sweet or perhaps the Chinese are cooking. Chopin again on the radio, she thinks, remembering aloud the day with Simone, the snowflakes melting on the wooden floor.
Debussy, Sid Morris says. Compliments Helen. She thought I might be interested. Cézanne’s musical counterpart, she says. An Impressionist, she says.
I see, Marie says.
Our resident intellectual, Sid Morris says.
Debussy?
Helen, he says.
Oh, she says. She listens to the music awhile, they both do. A lost sound retrieved from an archive of lost sounds. Debussy himself on the piano—restored, polished—so that suddenly the great composer sits in the room at his instrument, the two of them politely listening like guests. The rest of the building has gone quiet as well, the weekend meditation retreat back to its group sit. From time to time, a bell chimes, the only other sound besides Claude at his piano, concentrating. Above Sid Morris, behind his desk, the completed Brooklyn Bridge spans the wall; Marie thinks of how Sid Morris guided the brush in Simone’s hand, shading this, foreshortening that, and how afterward Simone had said that even though his breath smelled rank it had felt good to be held. It had felt very good.
Katherine hardly hugs back, she said. And you remember how Henry was in so much pain.
Eventually, the music stops.
“The bridge looks beautiful,” Marie says to fill the gap, because it does: anchored to the mighty river, the steel of it against a darkening sky that showed, in certain places, the possibility of blue, a color, Sid Morris once told them, most primal, not of the soil but of something more—the rock at the center of the earth. Cézanne knew this, he had said. Cézanne understood blue, he said.
“A work in progress,” he says, smiling.
He steps out from his battered desk and he is very close, as close as he sometimes stood behind her before, watching. What she painted she never fully understood, nor did she care. It was the paint is all; the smell of the paint and the color of the paint and the paint on the brush; she was trying to make something of the way life felt. This is what she could never say. The way life felt, or that particular moment of life—if it could be cleared of everything else, if it could be seen and heard and felt: the light through the filthy windows, the sighs of the tattooed model, Sid Morris behind her, watching.
“I’m very sorry to see you go,” Sid Morris says. “I have enjoyed your company.”
“Well,” she says.
“I would have snuck back but the last time your son gave me the evil eye.”
“Did he?”
“Someone did. Handsome chap. Well dressed.”
“That was his friend, Larry,” Marie says.
“He didn’t tell you?”
“No,” Marie says. “But he doesn’t say much to me. I think he and Jules have had a falling-out.”
“Jules?” Sid Morris says.
“My son,” Marie says, understanding how little Sid Morris knows at all, or remembers.
He guides her toward the broken-down divan; she suddenly shaky—it comes on, from time to time, out of nowhere.
“Mrs. Shivers,” he says.
“Mrs. Shiver-Me-Timbers,” she says, sitting. He’ll find the fringed Renaissance scarf the model wears for the draft, thrown out from the prop shop across the street in late autumn about the time you and your sidekick showed up, Sid Morris says. I say silk she says polyester mix and it itches but she uses it anyway, he says. What a complaintnik! It’s too hot! It’s too cold! I need coffee! I need air! I can’t breathe! This is giving me a leg cramp! My God! Sid Morris says, wrapping Marie in the fringed scarf, tucking it around her frail shoulders—she looks to have shrunk since he last saw her.
The fringed scarf smells of the model’s smell, she tells him, or what she remembers of the model’s smell: a little moldy.
“Hah!” Sid Morris says, but he knows what she really means is those were happy days; happy, happy days.
* * *
Sid Morris lumps sugar into his tea and stirs too loudly; she can see from here white whiskers in his ear and a tiny plastic ball tucked there for hearing. He tells her what he hasn’t wanted to say to anyone. He is in the same straits. They are clearing the whole building out. They have offered more than he can turn down for his lease and so. He shrugs. “Va bene,” he says, dunking a crumbling cookie into his cup. “I’d be a fool not to take it. Besides,” he says, gesturing to the suitcase. “I’m already packed.” He slurps his tea. “Veritas offered the apartment over her garage in Baltimore, God forbid. Maybe there and Vero Beach for winter. Seasonal rental. Rauschenberg’s light or used to be. I don’t know what’s happened to the light.
“Anyway, the City is no longer the City,” he says, looking elsewhere.