7

I stayed at the Villa, and I began to work seriously on my paintings. I didn’t know if they were any good or not, but I felt that I was no longer simply intimidated by technical concerns. I had left college to escape what I felt was an academic fussiness, and I was trying to paint with some emotion, with some sense of life.

I worked hard. There is nothing like unrequited love for priming the creative pump, and I finished twenty-two paintings that winter. That was a lot, since I painted in a painstaking manner, layering paint, trying for a kind of translucence that would send the onlooker searching for metaphysical answers—with real hope of finding them. I painted realistic objects and scenes, intent on profound revelation. I was certainly grandiose in my dreams of what art, and mine in particular, could do. I always believed in art’s transforming power, and I still do, although I sometimes feel as though I’m worshipping in an empty church.

Anna got in the habit of coming up to my room during the day. She would watch me paint, read her miniature metaphysical books, and doze on the dusty, sheet-covered sofa. She would sometimes leap out of sleep, shivering and scared, lost for the moment. “I’m a magnet for bad dreams,” she said. “I draw them into my head.” Looking at the winter skies, she would wax philosophical. “I always feel like I’m missing my life,” she said one day. “Do you ever get that feeling?”

“Everybody gets that feeling,” I said.

“Yeah. Maybe.” Anna hugged herself. “I wouldn’t mind dying if it would answer questions. But I’m afraid of dying most of the time, because it might be more confusing than living.”

Anna thought long, convoluted thoughts, and, lying on the sofa, she would speak them at the rafters. I didn’t know what she believed, and what she didn’t believe, what she was merely trying out, launching into speech.

“I like your paintings,” she said. “But they are sad paintings.”

“Sad?”

“Well, maybe not sad. They just aren’t hopeful. There aren’t any people in your paintings, you know.”

“There are enough people in the world. No need to fabricate more people.”

Anna stood up and walked to a painting of the suburbs, houses with pink roofs that rose like the backs of dinosaurs foundering in a murky twilight tar pit.

“This is my favorite,” she said. “It makes my mind fly.”

“I’d like to give it to you,” I said.

“David! Really?”

“Sure.”

She hugged me.

“It’s a wonderful present,” she said. She was genuinely excited, and she took the painting and ran out of the room. Later she came back and had me come downstairs to look at where she had hung it over her dresser.

Larry’s gonna love that, I thought, smiling around the cluttered room.

Ray wanted me to enter a juried show in Charlotte, and I let him submit some slides of a few paintings, but I wasn’t enthusiastic about the proposition. In any event, the slides impressed no one, and they were returned with a polite letter of rejection. I wasn’t surprised. My paintings didn’t photograph well; they turned muddy and dowdy. My favorite aunt, Helen, was the same way. A beautiful woman, but put her in front of the camera and you would capture a stocky, sullen female with a formidable jaw, squinting into the sun in a rage. My father, on the other hand, photographed beautifully. The camera failed to reveal his self-serving soul.

Christmas came, and I got a Christmas card from my father with a check for five hundred dollars. I gave Anna a little necklace with a scrimshaw pendant. She was delighted and the next day gave me a present, the collected works of Father Walker, spiritual leader of the Dancers of Divine Logic. I expressed delight, and was delighted—Anna had given me a present.

I rarely saw my landlord, often going weeks without catching more than a glimpse of him. I would leave the rent check under his door on the first of the month, and he would cash it in a week or two. Then, two days after Christmas, when I was experiencing the usual holiday isolation blues, Robert Kalso visited my room. It was around four in the afternoon and Kalso was wearing an olive drab army jacket and blue, billowing pajama bottoms. His feet were bare and he was holding a bottle of wine.

“If you are busy, say so,” he began. “Throw me out. If the muse is wearing her slinkies and breathing heavy, heave me out. I am an artist myself, and I understand that you can’t drop the muse when her blood is up and expect to find her waiting patiently under the covers when you come back. So say the word and I’ll leave.”

I assured him that I was finished painting. He produced two wine glasses and poured us each a glass of wine. “Ostensibly, I’m here to invite you to the Villa’s New Year’s party. Actually, as a resident of the Villa, you don’t need this invitation, but I know your type, pathologically sensitive, and you might not venture out of your room if you thought for a moment you weren’t invited. It will be a costume party, but you needn’t costume yourself if you are not so inclined. I have proclaimed it a costume party because some of my friends, alas, are always in costume, and this way they are less apt to look out of place. Anyway, I hope it will be fun, and I would like you to come if you can.”

I told him I would be delighted to come if I were not working, but that the hospital would probably require my services that night.

“In any event,” Kalso continued, “I’ve actually come to look at your paintings. The invitation was a transparent excuse for gaining entrance. I have known, of course, that you painted, but I confess I didn’t have much curiosity about that. Frankly, I suspected that you might be another unfortunate fan of Dali’s, like poor Skip, a sort of Grandma Moses on drugs. But you gave Anna a painting, and she showed it to me, and …” Kalso shrugged. “I thought I would like to see some other work by you. Do you mind?”

He was already up and prowling around the canvases in his bare feet and ballooning pants, evoking images of Charlie Chaplin in a highbrow skit, and I did mind, but I didn’t tell him so. He took a long time looking at them, saying nothing, which I found yet more irritating as I began to imagine some comment being formulated, some summing up of my winter’s work that, complimentary or derogatory, would be monstrously off-base and condescending. But when he returned to his chair, he only nodded and said, “You are a serious painter. Do you have an agent?” I told him I didn’t. He nodded his head and poured another glass of wine for each of us. “It is almost impossible to make a living as a fine artist,” he said, and I felt I was about to hear a lecture I had heard before, but he continued, “but I believe you can do it. You have genius and you have luck.”

I raised my eyebrows. I wasn’t taking exception with the genius, just the luck. Kalso, to his credit, recognized the gesture for what it was and nodded his head violently. “Yes, luck. You’ve met me. I’m going to be your agent.”

As it turned out, I didn’t have to work on New Year’s Eve, having worked Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. I didn’t think about the party until I heard it in full roar, and I didn’t feel much like celebrating, so I stayed in my room doing some rough sketches for a large canvas, an abandoned warehouse that I had photographed earlier in the year. The photos were undramatic, but they helped remind me of the day, what the light had been doing, a certain ominous, alien feel, and I was trying to draw that and failing. Anna came into the room and sat down.

“Who are you supposed to be?” I asked.

Anna laughed. “Dracula,” she said. “What do you think?” She was wearing a top hat and a black cape and her face was covered with pancake makeup. Her lips were bright red and two Halloween wax incisors increased a slight overbite. She stood up, turned around and sat down on the sofa again. “Well?”

“That’s not who I would have guessed.”

“Who would you have guessed? No, forget it.”

“I would have guessed Bugs Bunny as a funeral director.”

Anna laughed and I joined her, feeling suddenly light-hearted and witty. I could never avoid the echo effect of Anna’s laughter; it always resonated within me even when there was nothing to laugh about. She was a virulent infection, in her brightness and in her darkness.

“There’s too many people downstairs,” Anna said. “And some of them are real weird. New York fags. Creepy stuff.”

“‘Creepy stuff?’ says Dracula?” I asked, goggling my eyes. “Pot calling the kettle creepy.”

Anna slid off the sofa and onto the floor. “Are you happy, David?”

“Huh?”

“Are you happy?”

“I love you and I ain’t got you,” I said. “You belong to an underworld drug magnate. Of course I’m not happy, under the circumstances.”

I was seeing more of Anna by then, and my declarations of love, having met with derision, had evolved into clownish, self-deprecating set-pieces. I wasn’t happy with that evolution; it seemed to settle passion’s hash for all time, but at least there was warmth between us now, friendship. I didn’t want to be her friend. I wanted to be her lover, and sometimes I would go into sulks when she was around. In Anna’s presence, I was capable of mood swings to match her own.

“No, really,” Anna repeated, “are you happy?”

“Come away with me and I will be happy.”

“Maybe I will,” Anna said. “If that’s all it would take to make you happy. You’re sweet, you know.”

I decided to kiss her then. New Year’s brings out a horror of oblivion in me, with its terrible retrospective. She let me. She touched my cheek with her hand, and then she stood up and said, “I’ve got to go now. But everything will work out, you’ll see.”

I didn’t know what she was talking about, but I doubted that anything would work out. Later on that night, I ventured down to the party. Kalso was dressed as a circus ringmaster, and he winked at me as I passed him. The house was jammed with people, most of whom I didn’t know. I saw Diane, perched beside her man, who was supposed to be a sultan or something and who was leaning over a waterpipe making obscene sucking noises. Anna and Larry were engaged in a loud shouting match out back, their cloudy breath exploding over them. I could see Anna had had too much to drink—we all had too much to drink that winter—and she was staggering slightly. She turned and ran off toward the woods that bordered the Villa in the back, running with a ragged windmilling of arms, and Larry chased after her into the cold, brittle black of 1967. I snatched the better part of a bottle of Gilbey’s gin from an end table—with no remorse for the man whose hangover would be lessened by its theft—and went back upstairs to engage in some serious self-pity.