After the kid reporter left, Galen couldn’t finish his burger. The whole place reeked of charred grease and cinders, like a crematorium. All he wanted to do was go home and collapse into bed. He trailed out to the street, where a taxi cab was idling at the curb. The driver nodded, and Galen got in, telling him the address.
They headed over to the other side of town. On the way, Galen rebuked himself. He had lied to the kid. He hadn’t told him the real story behind his attack on the Madonna and Child. How could he? It was the cause of his rage, but love was tangled into the story like gold thread in a martyr’s hair shirt.
Two years before, he had decided to spend a rainy afternoon in the art museum. This wasn’t a predictable choice. Museums didn’t figure into Galen’s short menu of possibilities for a rainy afternoon, which usually included catching up on work, reading back issues from a dusty pile of Scientific Americans, or rearranging the newest samples in his mineral collection—he specialized in rare earths. Nowhere on the menu was visiting the art museum, because he didn’t really like art.
What he liked was strolling through places where he could feel alone in a crowd. He went to shopping malls on Black Friday for the same reason. Being part of a mob scene—an invisible integer—made him feel armored, protected. It reinforced his splendid isolation. It also happened to be a Wednesday, and the art museum was packed because admission was free. If Galen had known that picking up girls was the goal of a good percentage of the day’s male art lovers, he would have stayed at home.
A young woman was standing beside Galen as he gazed at a prized Madonna and Child from the Italian Renaissance. The serene expression on the Madonna’s face was a depiction of timeless peace.
“Mmm,” the woman murmured in appreciation.
Galen paid no notice. He was only staring at the painting to figure out which mineral might have produced a peculiar shade of green. Malachite? It was a good guess, unless the lush grass beneath the Blessed Virgin’s feet was tinted with a vegetable dye. He decided this was unlikely. A vegetable dye would have long ago faded to gray.
The young woman’s glance darted sideways, although Galen had no idea she was taking him in.
“Lovely,” she murmured.
This constituted too much communication. Galen sidled away. Without warning, she plucked at his sleeve.
“I could tell you were enjoying it.” She gestured at the painting, but her eyes remained on him. “Tell me what you see.”
“Why?”
She smiled. “Because I’m interested.”
Galen couldn’t help but notice how young and attractive she was. His immediate instinct was to retreat, but he took another look at the painting.
“The mother looks hypnotized. The baby’s face looks shriveled, like an old man’s.”
“Fascinating. Go on.”
The young woman fixed him with an adoring smile. This was even more unnerving than plucking at his sleeve.
Galen continued. “There’s a disease that shrivels children’s faces,” he pointed out. “Progeria. It’s quite horrible. That baby probably had progeria.”
His clinical remark didn’t repel her. Quite the opposite—her eyes lit up, and with a laugh she exclaimed, “Brilliant! I knew I should talk to you. My name is Iris, by the way.”
Galen stared. An attractive woman no more than thirty, with loosely gathered blonde hair that fell to her shoulders, the kind of hair once referred to as tresses, was admiring him. He peered over his shoulder to see if she had an accomplice—chatting up a middle-aged nonentity like Galen might be their way of having a cruel laugh.
His discomfort made Iris laugh again. “Let’s get a drink,” she suggested. “We’ll take one last look at this marvelous painting that we both love, and then I know the most amazing place where the mixologist is divine.”
He’d never met anyone so vibrant. If Galen had been imaginative, he could have compared her tinkling laughter to sleigh bells attached to a troika in a romantic Russian novel. If he had been versed in abnormal psychology, on the other hand, he would have frowned at Iris’s unquenchable exuberance. Who assails strangers in public with outbursts of emotion? Borderline personalities? Normal people don’t act this way.
Caution should have stopped him. Instead, he allowed Iris to drag him, half-dazed, to a bar. Galen didn’t drink, so the allure of exotic cocktails was nil. He sat there with a glass of soda water while Iris did all the work of seducing him. She flattered and cooed. His every remark invited a peal of laughter.
Being a virgin and nervous, he didn’t ask Iris back to his place that first night, but she got his number. She had to be the one who called; he never would have. A real date followed, then two. He learned, with awkward, embarrassed slowness, how to kiss. An omission in his adolescence, petting with a girl at the movies, was remedied. Within a span of two months Iris became his wife. An oyster dies when its shell is cracked open, but Galen was reborn as a flood of love entered his being. His initial fear changed to intoxication. He lay awake at night with Iris cradled on his shoulder, and he never complained that the pressure made pins and needles shoot down his arm.
The way that love turned to violence was just as unexpected as their courtship. Iris’s passion began to shift. She didn’t grow tired of Galen, but suddenly her exuberance demanded a creative outlet. He came home from work one day to find a pile of art supplies stacked up in the living room.
“What’s this?” he asked.
There was a large easel with mechanisms to adapt it to any size canvas, along with myriad jars of acrylics in every possible color, and blank canvases ranging in size from miniature to epic.
“I’m a painter!” Iris exclaimed.
“I didn’t know,” Galen said cautiously. “You didn’t tell me.”
“Oh, not before. I just realized it. I’m a painter. I always have been, but my talent was hidden.”
As much as he loved her, some part of Galen looked upon his wife as an alien being, beginning with her passion for him. He began to worry that this was her first delusion. Being a painter might be her second. Yet his fears proved unfounded. Iris spread a plastic drop cloth in the middle of the living room and set up a makeshift studio. She threw herself into her first painting, and by the time Galen was ready for bed, she rushed in with a wet canvas.
“Done! What do you think? Isn’t it beautiful?” she enthused.
He was afraid to look. But instead of being a garish daub, she had produced a semi-abstract landscape in harmonized colors, which, to his eyes, was amazingly good. It didn’t matter that the sky was yellow and the grass blue. The colors worked. They expressed the same vibrant joy that Iris could find in anything, like life bubbling up from an endless spring.
She pointed to a streak of light that crossed the canvas from a source far in the distance. “That’s an angel. Angels are pure light.”
“Oh,” Galen said. Angels were a nontopic for him.
Iris began to paint furiously, barely leaving time for sleep. Galen would wake up after midnight to find that his wife had quietly gotten out of bed to return to her latest canvas. Not that her love for him waned. If anything, it grew warmer. She greeted him when he came home from work wearing a dress, complete with matching pearl necklace and earrings.
When he suggested that she needed to slow down, tears welled up in the corners of her eyes. “I just want to show you my soul,” she said. The soul was another nonsubject for Galen. He was mystified as he witnessed her paintings grow more religious. Not conventionally religious, though. She produced shimmering organic shapes—they reminded him of intricate snowflakes under the microscope, only in iridescent colors.
“That’s what souls really look like,” Iris said, as certain as when she told him what angels looked like.
Galen couldn’t tell anyone what was happening at home. It was too dreamlike. Not that he had any colleagues to tell. His days were spent at the university library collecting references for scientific articles. He cobbled together a livelihood as a technical writer and researcher for professors at the university; his nights, however, were spent at a love feast. He had married a force of nature, not merely a lover and artist. What did he have to complain about, and who would believe him if he did?
Inevitably the day arrived when the outer world intruded. Iris wanted him to meet her parents, who lived in Milwaukee. There had been no formal wedding, just a civil ceremony at the registrar’s office.
“Don’t worry,” Iris promised. “They’ll love you as much as I do.”
Galen knew otherwise. Intruders would break the enchantment that protected their crazy bliss. He was sensible enough to know that they were gripped in a folie à deux and, like any mad folly, outside eyes would expose it. Iris went to the airport, while Galen waited at home, sitting forlornly in his armchair. He felt naked and vulnerable.
That his in-laws were nice, pleasant people didn’t relieve his anxiety. They stayed two days, and no one commented on the wide age difference between Iris and her husband. The chat was civil, if not warm. Her father, a doctor with a prosperous practice, assumed the role of alpha male. He paid for dinner at an expensive restaurant and told hunting stories.
“We’ve got pheasant and quail in the freezer back home. I’ll send you a batch. It’s too much for us.”
Galen was content to submit. He tried not to look too hard into the mother’s eyes. He expected to find worry there, and his own mother’s constant worry still cast a shadow, all these years later.
“What’s wrong?” Iris asked after her parents had left in a taxi for the airport. Her father had insisted on a cab, which would cost sixty dollars, his last show of dominance.
“Nothing. They’re nice,” Galen muttered.
He looked around, but could see no shards of wrecked enchantment littering the floor. Maybe they were protected after all. Iris went back to painting—her parents had been astonished at her hidden talents—and, if anything, her output increased. She was shy about approaching a gallery, so Galen set up a website to show off her work.
“Call it Divine Messenger,” she said. Within days it got dozens of hits, which turned to hundreds very soon. Her paintings clicked with people with spiritual stirrings.
One day an e-mail arrived in his inbox from Arthur Winstone, M.D. It took a moment for Galen to realize that this was his father-in-law.
Mr. Blake,
I’ve taken the liberty of writing to you privately. I hope you don’t mind that I did a web search to find this address.
During our recent visit, I thought I spied a tremor in my daughter’s left hand. It was faint, but I noticed that the shaking increased when Iris became emotional. I must add that her heightened exuberance felt unnatural to me. The Iris her mother and I know doesn’t act this way.
I’m not a neurologist, and I don’t mean to alarm you. But I strongly urge you to take her to a brain specialist. If my fears are unwarranted, I profoundly apologize. You must believe that I write out of a father’s love.
One last thing—please don’t share our communication with my daughter. In a good marriage, husband and wife tell each other everything, but at least consider keeping this e-mail a secret.
Respectfully,
Arthur Winstone
Galen was stunned. He read the e-mail twice more. His chest began to ache. This couldn’t be happening.
The year that followed was a nightmare that ended only when Iris went into hospice and died. As he was leaving the room where Iris lay, unplugged from the medical monitors, pale and cold as a wax effigy, a voice in Galen’s head spoke, having waited like a spoiled child holding its breath until it turns blue. Fool! Wake up. You knew it couldn’t be real.
Now, sitting in the back of the cab on the way home from the burger joint, Galen shuddered. He was too exhausted to feel enraged anymore. He had been humiliated by God. He had been deceived in love by the very cruelest deception, that he could ever be loved in the first place. Now the last hope was gone. There would be no revenge to wipe the slate clean.
He suddenly noticed the cabbie’s eyes in the rearview mirror.
“You okay back there?”
“What?”
“Sorry. You just looked a little upset.”
Galen opened his mouth to tell the driver to mind his own business, but he was suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of complete futility.
He sank back into himself, oblivious of the time until the cab driver said, “We’re here.”
Galen reached for his wallet.
“That’s okay,” the cabbie said. “No charge.”
Galen was confused. “Why not?”
The driver hadn’t stopped looking at him in the rear-view mirror. “Because you’ve been chosen.”
For no reason, this meaningless remark sent a wave of panic through Galen. He grabbed for the door handle, but it was stuck. Or had the cabbie locked him in? Galen wrenched the handle as hard as he could, and the door flew open so fast he almost tumbled into the street.
The cabbie jumped out of the front seat and ran around to help him.
“Leave me alone,” Galen gasped.
“I can’t do that.”
The cabbie was short and dark, with stubbled cheeks, the very image of someone Galen feared. Hysterically, he wondered if the man had a bomb strapped to his chest.
Without looking back, Galen lurched from the icy street to the curb. His house, a wooden row house with peeling white paint and a sagging stoop, offered refuge. He stumbled as he went, kicking up sprays of snow like a rabbit fleeing a fox.
The cabbie followed a few feet behind. Feeling his shadow, Galen became terrified. He could barely extract his keys from his pants pocket, and when he tried to get a key in the door, the bunch flew out of his hand.
“Let me,” the cabbie said, picking them up. He inserted the house key and turned the doorknob. “I’m Jimmy, by the way.”
Galen’s heart thumped in his chest. “If you want money, here,” he exclaimed, thrusting his wallet at the man.
“I just want to talk.”
Galen’s eyes widened helplessly. The cab driver was blocking the door with his body.
“We’ve been watching you for a while,” he said, smiling. “You’re kind of my assignment. Look, it’s freezing out here. I can explain everything better inside.”
Galen was agitated, but he knew one thing for certain. Jimmy was the last person he’d ever let inside his house.
“I’m going past you,” he exclaimed, “and if you lay a finger on me, I’ll scream for the police.”
Jimmy’s smile broadened to a grin. “No offense, but I think the cops have had enough of you for one day.”
Galen had his head turned away, so he never saw how Jimmy knocked him out, with a truncheon or the butt of a gun. There was no pain. A veil of darkness gently came down over his eyes; his knees crumpled. There was the sensation of cold as his cheek hit the packed snow on the stoop and a vague sense of Jimmy talking into a cell phone.
“I’ve got him, but he’s so scared, he fainted. He’s in no shape to plug in. Please advise.”