The Veranda

SHE’S ON A VERANDA FRONTING A BEACH cut short by the bandit tide. The sea beyond, its mysteries and waves, she’s used to them, but then again, she never is. Those waves pillaging the shore each day. From time to time, she glances at the single white rose on the table. The same crystal vase as always, a different rose each day, but always from the same garden, hers. A Bach partita—winter light in a faded mirror—flows through the open French doors. She’s reading Marcus Aurelius again, and again finds comfort in the obvious: To lessen the pains of living, one must diminish desire for the material world, its promises and illusions.

There is a polite rustle at the door. Michelos, the butler—who else would it be?—with a silver pot of coffee wrapped in a linen napkin. He nods. She smiles for thanks.

Michelos is old. He has seen her through three husbands, two of whom had married her for her money. The first husband died mid-sentence at breakfast—a sentence she had no wish for him to complete, in any case, because it concerned his allowance and the need for its substantial increase.

She was young when she first married and still young when her husband left her, the planet, his bespoke suits, handcrafted shoes, and the beige cashmere socks he so cherished and had kept rolled in ten cedar-lined drawers. She had come to dislike him not only because she had gradually understood that he had married her principally for her wealth but also because she found his sartorial desires, like his lovemaking, so conventional.

The second husband, on understanding that her wealth was not to flow endlessly into the mansion’s garages, flooded with his custom-made cars, and who considered Bentleys and Rolls-Royces mere Fords, left her for an older woman who appreciated the elegant way he mixed cocktails and chattered with her guests at dinner parties, and who was willing to pay for his ever-increasing automotive needs.

The last husband, who was fifty-eight when they married and who made her happy well into her mid-forties, drowned in the same ocean she was now regarding with tenderness and fear. At breakfast one morning together, as every summer morning, he kissed her, a deep kiss on the mouth and not just a husbandly peck. Then he was off for his usual swim. He waved to her from far away in the ocean and then he was gone. He was the love of her life.

He was an artist. Not very famous but not unrecognized. He was appreciated, respected, living modestly on the sale of his paintings, which unabashedly had roots in Poussin and Cézanne. Like them, he searched for the immortal structure beneath and underlying the painting in whatever subject it represented. Like them, his life was a consecration to art and a daily presence to its fulfillment. (He, however, would have been shy about such words as consecration.) “You cannot know what the work will look like unless you show up for it” was the way he put it. He made no fuss about being dedicated to his art and he did not feel superior to those artists without similar devotion. But he did not spend time in their company, either.

He lived decently and did not require much to do so—a small loft that he had bought for a song in the early sixties, in a building now a condo and a warren of billionaires, was all he needed and wanted for shelter and work. He had no retreat by the sea or elsewhere as had many of his colleagues. I say colleagues because he did not have friends in the full sense of the word, though he believed in the idea of friendship as found in the essays of Montaigne. He liked the idea so much that he did not attempt to injure it through experience. He stayed in the city through the hottest summers on the deadest weekends, when no one but tourists and the homeless roamed the burning streets. In the spring and into the late fall, he walked to the park on the lower East River and read on a bench fronting the watery traffic of tugs and barges. A white yacht on its way to Florida or the Caribbean might pass by and someone might wave. In winter, he kept in, breakfasted on Irish oatmeal and coffee and then more coffee; he often skipped lunch and ate bread in torn hunks and drank coffee: two sugars, three ounces of milk. At night, he dined at an Italian restaurant with so-so food on the corner of his street. It had a green awning in summer, and you could sit under it in the rain.

Sometimes one of the young female assistants from his gallery found a pretext to visit him. He was friendly, solicitous, but did not mix business with sex. He imagined the resulting complications, the discomfort of going to his gallery and facing a woman he had slept with a few times but in whom he had no deeper interest. And he did not welcome the discomfort he imagined for her or the awkwardness of his circumspect dealer of fifteen years, who never mixed business with anything if he could help it.

He liked the city, he liked solitude, he liked going and coming when he wished; he liked sleeping and waking in his own bed. He liked women, but mostly on a certain basis: that they did not want to live with him, did not want to have children, did not want to call him at any hour they chose to chat; that they did not like or affect to like sports; that they did not buy or urge him to buy new clothes, to get a haircut, a shave, or have his nails trimmed, though he always kept them trimmed and his face shaved and hair cut short. The women he liked did not or needed not to work. This excluded many women, even those women of leisure married to wealth, because he considered their marriage a job, a fancy one without regular hours or a visible paycheck, but a job nonetheless. In any case, he did not sleep with married women, first out of principle—the one that has to do with not hurting people—and the other because he was selfish about his time and did not wish to squander it on clandestine arrangements and their inevitable time-consuming and emotional complications.

He liked women who read books he honored: He was snobbish about that but did not care that he might be thought so. The books one read were as telling as the friends one chose. You could be fooled or betrayed by friends but never by books. Plato, for example, always stayed faithful and always gave more than he received. Proust could be relied on for his nature descriptions, especially flowers bordering paths through luxuriant gardens. He loved gardens because of Proust but felt he need not visit any because he had seen and walked through enough of them in the Frenchman’s world. He used this as an excuse to get out of visiting his collectors in Connecticut, who prided themselves on their gardens, their endless yards of rose beds, especially.

He liked above all women who loved painting. He did not care for them as much if they liked sculpture, because he did not care for sculpture, except for smallish items such as Mycenaean heads and masks from Côte d’Ivoire, very abstract and synthetic. In short, he liked sculpture the starker and the more minimal the better. He disliked mostly everything else ever deconstructed or assembled and felt antipathy for the grand posture and thus disdained Rodin’s figures in particular among the moderns. Everything, in fact, after the time of Pericles he found dreary and dead, the stuff to fill old movie palace lobbies. He once wrote in his notebook that we need not bother to fill empty space with sculpture—any natural rock formation is better than any sculpture, so, too, trees. Deserts do not need sculpture; emptiness is their point and their beauty.

About painting he had no illusions. He did not believe in its social or psychological or spiritual transformative powers. He did not believe that there is progress in art or in civilization. All great, significant art was timeless and equal in value—in beauty. Beauty was the end and reason for all art, period.

He had few extravagances. But he would travel long distances to revisit paintings he loved and he would make, with great planning, expeditions to places holding paintings he admired. He spent two weeks alone at the Ritz Hotel in Madrid so that he could walk across the road after breakfast and before dinner to look at Velazquez’s Las Meninas, which he considered the greatest painting ever made after the sixteenth century. His certainty about this annoyed other artists, who saw in it an inflexibility of taste that might be applied to his judging their own work. They were also put off by his unwillingness to consider that no single work of art is the “greatest.” Sometimes, for fun, he would seem to concede the point and say, “Well, it is the first greatest among equals.”

He once trailed a beautiful woman after seeing her studying with great intensity a painting by Picasso in a hall at the Louvre. He followed her into a room of Poussins and was pleased to see her fixed on one painting, Echo and Narcissus, for several full minutes. That she might have seen the affinity between the two artists intrigued him and she increased in stature and thus grew more and more interesting by the minute. Then she seemed to take a different track altogether when she went into other rooms and gave her attention to a canvas by Perugino and then later focused on a painting by Parmigianino. He was a bit let down. It occurred to him that she was progressing or governed along no aesthetic insight or principle but merely visiting artists whose surnames began with the letter P.

He followed her to the museum’s café, where she sat alone by the window facing a vast courtyard and Paris beyond. He sat at the table closest to her and took his time ordering un grand crème and a tartine with butter—exactly what she had requested and what finally was brought to them both. She spoke to the waiter in a French from an earlier day, when words were sounded in their fullness. She would have made a great actress on the seventeenth-century stage, reciting Racine or Corneille. For all that, he wasn’t sure he liked the elevated, rich, overeducated, worldly, superior tone of her voice. But then he liked it—he supposed her to be French and thus she could sound as fancy and superior as she wished, or why else be French? He glanced her way, hoping to make eye contact, but she had pulled a book out of her bag—expensive, smooth, trim, no frills, oxblood red, with a narrow strap—and engaged herself in its lines.

He was shy except with women, from whom he would gamble rebuff, even rebuke, to meet. His theory was that the chance of knowing an interesting woman was more important than any rejection, and since his advances were soft-spoken and courteous, his politeness was met with the like or, at worst, with a little coldness born of natural suspicion and wariness.

“Look,” he said, taking the chance that she knew English. “I understand your interest in the connection between Poussin and Picasso, but I don’t see your leap to Parmigianino, a fine artist but irrelevant to what connects the other two.”

She gave him a long look. Almost scientific in its disinterestedness. Then in a pleasant but firm voice and in an English more beautiful than her French, she said, “I’m married. Happily or unhappily is another matter, but married and obedient to all its obligations and injunctions and oaths.”

“Lamentably so,” he replied, not sure exactly what he meant.

She drank her coffee slowly, looking at the sea, its thick swell and sullen heaviness. It covered the world. It raided its shores, carrying trees and husbands in its teeth. One day the sea would gallop over the dunes and drag her into its watery camp. But if she chose, she would not wait for it to come to carry her away and she would take a long swim from which she would never again step onshore.

She had walked into his gallery cold, looking for a watercolor by Marin and a painting by Hartley she knew were being offered there. It was an old-fashioned gallery she felt comfortable visiting because the owner kept his distance, did not make too much fanfare about his artists or their work.

The gallery specialized in early to mid-twentieth-century American art; thus he was in the company of Walt Kuhn, Kuniyoshi, Fairfield Porter, artists he admired, although they were too tame for him, never reaching beyond the literal. He was sometimes fearful that that was also true of him, too tame, too literal, and whenever he got sufficiently worried, he took the train to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and for a full half hour stood in front of Cézanne’s large Bathers. He would grab a sandwich in the museum’s café and let his mind go nowhere; then he’d return to the painting and start absorbing it again. He would come home feeling purified and try to purge his work of the superfluous without eliminating areas that gave his painting its valuable subtext and life. He strove.

He had been approached by galleries more important and chic than his, ones that had offered him monthly stipends and lavish catalogues written by distinguished critics whose names would give added weight to his reputation, galleries that had juice in the art market and could inject oil into its machinery.

But he liked his gallery, having been invited to join it when he was still unknown; he stayed loyal to the man who had the intelligence to understand his work and to act on it—to put his money where his taste was. He found in the dealer a man not too chummy and not too remote and who quietly and successfully did his job of promoting and selling his few living artists. He liked also that his dealer always wore modest pinstripe suits and bow ties, and that he went to the Oak Room at the Plaza at 5:30 every weekday and drank a dry martini and then, in nasty weather, took the Madison Avenue bus uptown to his home and to his wife of thirty years.

She bought the Marin watercolor and, undecided, put a hold on the Hartley. Then the dealer asked if she would be interested in seeing the work of an artist he had long admired and long represented, and he took her into his office. He had spoken to her of this artist before, but she had not made the effort to see the work. The three paintings in the dealer’s office unnerved, then calmed her, as if she at last had found her map home after being lost for years in a faraway country whose language she did not understand and could never learn. Musical they were, these paintings, in melancholic counterpoint with death. By what alchemy did paint become music?

She did not know who he was, had never seen his photograph, as he shunned having his face in the catalogues of his shows—there were no catalogues, in any case. His picture had never appeared in any of the art magazines she subscribed to, which, with the exception of the bulletin from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she was a trustee, were none.

She bought one painting, asking that she remain anonymous. Then, two weeks later, after the first painting’s music had occupied her dreams, she returned and bought another.

Weeks later, she sent the artist an unsigned note of appreciation via his gallery. He answered, through his gallery, with a handkerchief-size drawing—in the mode and friendly parody of Poussin—of a tree on fire and a medieval battlement in the distance also in flames. She withdrew, feeling the heat of his closeness and the threat of disappointment. (Better never to get too close or meet an artist whose work you admire, because all artists are inferior to their work.) She wrote back, thanking him politely for the drawing—and then, in a rush of feeling, added some heartfelt lines on what she loved about his work. She feared those lines would be misunderstood and open doors better left shut, but she also felt that a polite mere thank-you would not have expressed the fullness of her, of her emotions. She knew she was equivocating, because her letter might suggest that while her doors were shut, they were also unlocked.

He responded a day later. Come, his note said, to his studio and choose a watercolor.

While the principle never to meet the artist remained true, she also wanted to meet him, if nothing else than to confirm the principle—a lie. She wanted to meet him because she wished to like him, to be moved by him, to have him move her. She wanted to believe that the untroubled purity she found in his paintings mirrored his own distinguished soul. She thought she might be disappointed should she ever meet him, and she was pained by her longing for someone perfect or someone whose very imperfections and failures she would find noble.

In short, after some days of indecision, she went to his loft. She had her car and chauffeur wait in the street should she decide on a quick getaway. They smiled both comfortably and uncomfortably. They chitchatted some minutes and, much to her own surprise, she asked if he lived alone.

“Lamentably,” he said.

She laughed. “You seem fond of that word.”

He nodded. And slyly said, “Regrettably.”

“What if I said I’m still married? What would you say to that?”

“That should you leave this room, I would lament you.”

“Then perhaps I won’t leave.”

She gave her driver the day off. He was glad for the reprieve. She stayed there in the artist’s loft until the next morning, when they both went to breakfast—the scrambled eggs were cut into white strings, the bacon was undercooked and burnt at the same time, and the coffee was tar hauled from a back road in Tennessee—in a dim diner by the Hudson River favored by truckers and taxi drivers and artists of that era.

“And what about God?” she asked. “Where are you on that?” She was still young enough to think about and to ask such questions. In any case, she was not asking about God; she was probing to discover his weak spot, and having found none after hours of talking, finally, at 2:38 in the morning, when he said, “It’s time,” she followed him to his bed.

For the first several months of their years together, they divided themselves between his loft and her apartment, from whose windows they could see Central Park and the Plaza Hotel. They shared breakfast at six, after which he vanished in a taxi to his studio downtown and spent the day painting. If by seven that evening he felt not ready to leave his work, he’d phone her and they would or would not meet again for dinner, or they would or would not meet again that night, in which case he’d sleep alone, but she would come downtown at six to breakfast with him at the diner with the bad food. The string eggs, burnt bacon, and tar coffee had worked into their history. Or sometimes she would appear with a full breakfast, silver service and all, her chauffeur and maid and herself toting platters and coffeepots up to her husband’s loft. Then she might linger awhile after they had sipped their last cup of coffee and go to his bed.

He had been painting with a new vigor and insight, which his dealer recognized immediately. There was also a certain charity, a kind of generosity lacking earlier while still keeping the work within its usual reserved boundaries. “Love does its wonders,” the dealer said dispassionately but with a conviction born from romantic memories of his youth, when he first met his wife.

Everything seemed in balance, so the dealer was upset when he learned that she was building a house in Montauk. “Why go out there in the first place?” the dealer asked her.

“For the calm and the air and the sea,” she replied. “He’s too old to spend summers broiling in the city. I’ll build him a studio he won’t want to leave. A place he and every other artist has only ever dreamed of.”

The dealer had seen artists appear from the mist and then vanish from the scene; he had seen exalted reputations fall into the mud—or, even worse, just melt away slowly into oblivion. And not always because the work had changed for the worse. The moment had changed and the artist was no longer in that moment but suddenly somewhere else, far away, in the land of the forgotten and fruitlessly awaiting the day to be rescued and brought home again with honors.

But sometimes, their flame went out because the hungry fuel that had fed it was no longer there, and the rich life took its place. He knew artists who, when they reached the pinnacle of their art and reputation and had earned vast sums, turned out facsimiles of their earlier, hard-earned work and were more concerned with their homes, trips, social calendars, their placement at dinner parties than with anything that might have nourished their art, which coasted on its laurels.

And for that last reason, the dealer said to her, “Go slow and keep the life contained, for his sake and yours.”

She laughed. “Don’t worry, no one will come to our dinner parties, should we ever give them, and we shall not go if ever asked.”

“This is not a moralistic issue,” he said. “And I’m not against money. You know it’s not about you. I love you,” he said, turning red.

“And I love you for how you were in his life and in his work from the start.”

He made an exaggeratedly alarmed face and said, “Were?”

“Were, are, and always will be,” she said, then repeated it.

They left on good terms. He apprehensive of what was to become of his artist; she concerned that in trying to make a gracious life for her husband she might be digging their cushioned graves.

Now he was dissolved in the sea, vanished in a soup of bones and brine. And now she was alone until the sea took her away, too, if it were the sea that one day would be her executioner. Until that time, she would remain alone with the butler, who in time would tremble and whose hand would spill the coffee and let the morning rose fall. Then, one day, he would tremble all over and, after the back-and-forth of hospitals, he would be gone. Then she would sit on the veranda and face the sea and listen to music, maybe some somber cello pieces from Marais or Saint-Colombe or Bach—music on a small scale, where, atomlike, the energy of beauty compresses.

Eventually, she would answer the phone and seem delighted that a friend had called to invite her to dinner. An elegant dinner with distinguished guests—an ambassador who had written a memoir, a former editor of a venerable publishing house, a novelist always mentioned for the Nobel Prize, two widows who funded the arts, a young poet who would have preferred not to be there but who understood the draw and use of powerful people—all affable and solicitous of her. The food, a poached wild salmon with sorrel, would be excellent, the wine even better. The conversation would flow with delicacy and nuance, with worldly authority. But not one word said the whole evening would approach her heart.

She would be home by eleven and sit and read in an old leather chair he had loved. The lazy cat would curl about her ankles and fall asleep. She herself would start to doze off—as she got older, fewer and fewer books held her interest. Only Proust still spoke to her, an old, intimate friend with long, twisting sentences whose fineness still absorbed her and kept her feeling grateful for his visit. She left her gardens to the gardeners, who went wild with the freedom, each planting to his own vision. Rose beds rushed against walls of blue hydrangeas; a field of yellow daffodils invaded a stand of black tulips. The grass went from tame to wild without transition. She enjoyed the anarchy and the disorder, but it delivered only so much pleasure and then the excitement went flat. People also went stale quickly. The interesting ones, the ones with character and who had struggled to make their place in the world, had died. She was too tired and too far away in time to meet their replacements, if there were any.

He had left her everything. His clothes, of course, a closet full of khakis and pairs of brown loafers worn down at the heels; one pair of black shoes, soles and heels as good as new; one suit, gray pinstripe, hardly worn, made for him in London, where he had once spent a week drunk on museums; three sports jackets, two for winter, a red-and-green plaid for summer; two dress shirts to be adorned with a tie, the rest just blue cotton button-downs. Apart from the art, and there was little of that, she prized his notebooks, some filled with sketches like the one he had sent her years earlier and some with jottings and notes and quotes from the reading he loved.

He wrote about the Bathers, how he loved the awkwardness of the nude figures, the almost childish painting of their forms. As if Cézanne had set out to fail. As if he had sought through that failure a great visual truth at once obvious and occult. He quoted from a letter of Cézanne’s in which he spoke about his unfinished paintings—paintings he had deliberately left unfinished, patches here and there of raw canvas as if left to be painted later. Cézanne had found truth in their incompleteness. That the empty spaces invited color, leaving the viewer to imagine that color, leaving the viewer his exciting share in the completing of the visual narrative; blank spaces suggesting also that art, like life, does not contain all the information and that it is a lie when it pretends so.

Silence, except for the churning sea. The sea is high, just some fifty yards from her, black and cold. The house, too vast for one, feeling the sea’s chill, gives a shudder. She gives a shudder. Then she makes her way up the stairs to her too-large room and her too-large bed, under a too-high ceiling, and she waits for the sea—having taken from her everything else—to come crawling to her window like a bandit hungry for silver.