WE WERE ON OUR WAY to the Vermeer exhibition when I realized I didn’t love Duval anymore. We were on the plane, high up above the state of Mississippi, when I knew our love was through. All those years, children, friends, houses, all gone down the drain. He was a boring, depressed man and I was still young at heart and happy to be here, on the planet Earth, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and ninety-six.
“What do you have to be unhappy about?” I told him. “Here we are, on our way to see an exhibition that thousands of people worked for years to create. On our way to look into the heart of genius. We have a Carey limousine coming to meet us at the airport. The snow has melted. You are a rich man in reasonably good health. If you don’t know what you are about to see, that’s okay with me. When you see the paintings you will know. I wish I hadn’t brought you with me. You are ruining my dream come true.” I sat back in the seat. We were on our way to see twenty-six of the thirty-one extant paintings of one of my favorite painters. I had to appreciate that. Even if I did have this depressed sixty-two-year-old man by my side.
“I think we are going to lose Allen,” he said. “He’s lost, Callilly. We have to admit he’s lost.”
“He is not lost. He’s living on a sailboat in the Virgin Islands. He has an adventure every day. He toils not. Neither does he spin. How can you feel sorry for him? He doesn’t have children. Why should he care?”
“He’s thirty-five years old. It’s too late now. He’ll never have a home. Never marry. It breaks my heart. I’m sorry I can’t get excited about your paintings but I can’t think of anything but Allen.”
Our son, Allen, had showed up the day before. We live in Pass Christian, on the beach, in a house that was Duval’s summer home when he was a child. At one time his family owned two newspapers and half the land in the Delta. Now the fortune has dwindled to a small pile of money in the bank. Duval’s sister drank up a lot of it. His brother gambled away the rest. Then they died. There is nothing left of the family but us. Duval is a good and sober man. He is a lay reader in the Episcopal church and he talks to stockbrokers on the phone and does good deeds.
“Okay,” I said. “Our kids didn’t turn out well. It’s not our fault. We are still on our way to see the Vermeer exhibition in Washington, D.C., even if Allen is staying in our house and will probably have a party and ruin the carpets while we’re gone. I told you not to let him have the house but you did it anyway. Brighten up. Are you hungry? You didn’t eat a bite this morning.”
“Sally lives in an apartment with a cat. Allen lives on a boat. No one achieves a thing. I can’t take it anymore, Callilly. What are we doing on this airplane?”
“Okay. That’s it.” I got up and went to the back of the airplane and sat alone near the bored stewardesses. I got out a book I was trying to read. The Best Poems of 1994. It was bleak. There were elegies, laments, sadness. I think I’ll go to Mexico, I decided. I’ll go feed the children on the streets.
I put down the book and took a magazine from a rack beside the stewardesses’ station. It was Mademoiselle, the January issue. Are You Having Orgasms? the cover asked. No, I answered. I guess I forgot about that. I turned to the article. I read it. I got up and went back to my seat by Duval and sat down beside him and put my hand on his dick. “What are you doing, Callilly?” he asked. “What’s this about?”
On the limousine ride into town I stroked his arm and leg. This is my life and I’m taking charge of it, I decided. As soon as we got to the Four Seasons Hotel, I took off my blouse and brassiere and followed Duval around until I got him into the bed. It was four in the afternoon. We made love like there was no tomorrow. We made love like we hadn’t made love in months, maybe years. It was nasty and bad and fabulously fulfilling. Afterward, we fell asleep. We ordered dinner in our room. We drank wine and ate filet mignon and had dessert. Then we watched a movie on television and then we fooled around some more and then we went back to sleep.
“We are already under the spell of Jan Vermeer,” I told him that night. “He had ten children and died young. Tomorrow we are going to view the record he left behind. I’m already starting to want to paint. As soon as we get home I’m going to paint.”
The skies are very beautiful over the beaches of the Mississippi Sound, which runs into the Gulf of Mexico. Every moment they change. All day long the sky and sea make paintings of such intensity and wonder a mortal human cannot hope to capture a millionth of that beauty. That should free us to paint but it has always made me afraid and shy. After this, I won’t be afraid, I decided. What do I have to lose, at age sixty-two?
When we woke in the morning Duval called Allen to see if he had destroyed our house yet. “Don’t call him,” I warned. “Don’t spoil this happiness. Get back in bed. Let me make love to you again.”
He called him anyway. It was eight in the morning in Pass Christian and Allen was up and dressed and on his way out to try to find a small house to buy. “I want a place to come to so I won’t always have to stay with you,” he told Duval. “I’ll fix it up and rent it when I’m not here.”
“How will you pay for it?” Allen asked.
“I have some money. I’ve been working in the islands. You never listen when I tell you that.”
“Don’t start thinking Allen is going to be all right,” I told him at breakfast. “One sober morning does not a breakthrough make.”
“I can hope,” he answered. “Without hope, we’re really lost.”
The paintings were divine, that’s all there is to that. The Geographer is the image that killed Duval. He couldn’t stop looking at it. “These paintings prove how depressed women were in the past,” I told him. “Of all the portraits, only the geographer looks really happy, really engaged. Of course the women look satisfied, with their satin dresses and their maids and their pearls. But only the geographer looks like he’s in charge of what he’s doing. Maybe we underestimate Allen. Maybe we just don’t understand what he’s doing. He’s a geographer, Duval. He has sailed across the Atlantic Ocean. Why do we keep thinking he’s a failure?”
“He doesn’t have a home. He doesn’t have a family. What will become of him when he’s my age?”
“He has us. We’ll probably never die. And he’s buying a house. This very morning he’s out looking for a house.”
“He’ll want me to co-sign the note.”
“So what? The house we live in was given to us. Left to us in a will. Where would we be if we hadn’t inherited money? Allen’s okay. I’ve decided to believe he’s okay.”
“He’s drinking. He’ll never settle down as long as he drinks. No one in our family can drink. He will die like my sister and my father.”
“Duval.” I pulled him over to a corner of the gallery and reached under his coat and put my hand on his dick.
“Oh, God,” he said. “Not that again.”
We returned to the exhibition the next day. It was still terribly crowded but this time we knew what to do to make our way into the center of the circles around the paintings. I was concentrating on looking at the musical instruments and Duval was caught up in the idea of camera obscura. I think we both forgot about Allen until after lunch.
“Let’s go home and see him and help him out,” Duval said. “I’ve had enough of Washington, D.C. I want to go home and talk to my son.”
“Nothing will come of it. You’ll just end up getting mad. He’ll stomp out like he always does.”
“Maybe not. Maybe I’ll sit down with him and get him to show me on the map where he’s sailed. Hell, maybe I’ll go back to the islands with him for a week. We have to keep on trying, Callilly. Have to keep on believing something good will come of something that we did.”
He hung his head. I could see the trip sliding away, all the good I had achieved going back to sadness.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go pack up. Let’s go home and see about our child.”
And so we did. It was, you might say, as T. S. Eliot did, referring to the journey of the Magi, satisfactory. Allen was getting better. He was growing up. He might live and thrive and flourish. We might get to have some pleasure from him and not end up going to his funeral. I guess that’s hope. If it isn’t, I guess I can always paint or take a walk.