chapter 3

Leaning against a gust of cold rain, Matt and Sally dashed the short distance from the curb into the quiet lobby of Charles’s apartment house. As they waited for the elevator Matt shook out the umbrella, still soaked from their long search for a cab outside the museum.

“Are we going to see Gubbio?” Sally asked, combing the tangles out of her hair as she examined her reflection in the brass doors.

“I hope so,” Matt said. “It’s not far from Assisi, and June would be a lovely time to be there. There’s no art worth seeing, but you’ll love the town. Most of it’s medieval,” he added, following her into the small car. He pressed the button for Charles’s floor. “All stone and narrow winding alleys, and above it on the hillside the palazzo where the studiolo came from. There’s an old Roman amphitheater outside the town that’s one of the best preserved in all of Italy,” he added, thinking of the last time he had been there. He had wakened before dawn one early morning from a vivid dream. Unable to get back to sleep, he had decided to do what he had been thinking of for the past week, to climb up to the hillside above the town and watch the sun rise over the valley. It had been a cool night, and with the rising mist the old city and the ancient amphitheater would be a sight that he would remember forever; it was why he was there, he told himself. He had second thoughts, though, stepping from the warm house into the damp cold. The ancient cobblestone alleys, slick underfoot, disappeared in the impenetrable black, uninviting and vaguely threatening. But dark as it still was, there was the indefinable feeling in the air that morning had begun, so he had set off to find his way out of town.

Once walking, he began to enjoy the stillness of the early morning, fresh with the scent of the wet stone and the poplars by the river that cascaded down a narrow ravine through the town. He was well up the hillside with the houses barely taking form against the blackness when he heard the sound of hooves coming down toward him, echoing off the stones of the alley and the silent houses. Soon an old peasant appeared out of the shadows leading a donkey laden with packs. The donkey had his head down, and the old man never looked at him as he passed, but riding on top and holding on with both hands as if he were on the largest elephant in the world was a little boy. He gave Matt an enormous smile. Matt hadn’t looked back to watch them go after they had passed, feeling that it would have been a betrayal. He had gone on, and as he left the town behind, the sun had greeted him, the warmth flooding through him as he climbed the steep hillside, winding along a path through rugged olive trees and grass, yellow, with delicate wildflowers that he couldn’t identify. The mist lay in the valley below, obscuring the old Roman ruins and the town, any sign of human presence, and he had felt a wonderful freedom, walking in the brilliant sunshine of the early morning.

“Medieval?” Sally asked. “Do they have indoor plumbing?”

“Don’t worry,” Matt said. “They even have television in the rooms. But, still, that’s the sense you get of the whole area, that it hasn’t really changed since Roman times. They still hunt wild boar up around there. I saw a wolf, once, when I was hiking in the hills above the town. When I got back to the hotel and told them, they said that wasn’t unusual.”

“Maybe not for them. No, thank you. I don’t care how cute people think they are, to me they just look hungry.”

When they reached the apartment Matt recognized the woman who opened the door, but couldn’t place her. At first envious of the wide circle of friends and acquaintances that Charles had acquired, he now wondered where he found the stamina, much less the time, to keep up with them all.

A glass of wine in her free hand, the woman waved them in. “There’s no food yet,” she said, “but corks are flying. You haven’t seen our host, have you?”

“He’s doing some last-minute donor stroking,” Sally replied. “He said he’d be here soon.”

The apartment was comfortably crowded. In the kitchen, bustling with activity, all the burners on the stove were being used and the door to the refrigerator was opened again as soon as it was shut. Dishes clattered, a cork popped, everyone and no one was in charge.

“Here, Renaissance man,” a thin woman with short blond hair and bony wrists said to Matt, handing him a flute with bubbles cascading down the stem. She wore a black jacket with its sleeves turned up, rayon shimmering blue and green in the bright kitchen lights. “You look like you could use this.” She began to fill another, cupping the glass in the palm of her manicured hand. She stopped pouring just as the bubbles surged to the rim, and then smiled as they ran over and down the side. “And for you,” she added, handing it to Sally.

“I’m Sally,” she said, taking the glass.

“Karen,” the woman replied, watching the wine as she filled another glass, this one for herself.

“So how are things at the gallery?” Matt asked. He had last seen Karen at the opening of a show that she and Kent had collaborated on a few months before. The artist, a Buddhist from Los Angeles who divided his time between Fez and New Mexico, had achieved a certain renown by arranging wood in circles on the floor. Kent, with some sharpness, had corrected Matt when he had referred to it as firewood. That was not what it was at all. In a heuristic sense, perhaps, since it called upon the communal memory of fire that is within all of us, but the installation was about displacement. The artist had lived with the Pueblo Indians, who as Matt knew—yes?—had left their art outdoors, not so much exposed to nature as in recognition that it was a part of it, inseparable, and that its transience as a discrete object was illusory in the greater context of permanence. It was all about what was there before and what would be there afterward. It was about eighty grand, Matt remarked, reading from the list he had picked up. The artist supervises the installation, Kent told him, adding that it had been acquired by the Whitney.

“We’ve got a group show opening in a week,” Karen replied. “Recent work of the Chicago women’s cooperative. I’ll send you an invitation. Aren’t they beautiful?” she asked, studying the thread of bubbles floating upward as she held her glass against the light. “Like a waterfall to the sky. The laws of gravity have been repealed.”

There was a loud round of laughter from the living room, a voice rising above the others, and then Kent appeared around the corner. He slipped through the crowd, a gazelle leaping through tall grass. “All this food,” he exclaimed, reaching Karen and giving her a kiss on the cheek. “Hello, Matt,” he said, “Sally.” He took the glass that Karen had filled for him. “Really, Karen,” he said, transferring the glass to his other hand and shaking the sparkling wine from his fingers, “this drip thing is cute, but it’s been done. Jackson Pollock, anyone? Does the name ring a bell? Alton, take this.” He passed the glass to the young man who had followed him through the crowd and now stood by his side. His skin dark enough so that his short dreadlocks didn’t seem affected, Alton still had a reassuringly prep school air. Dealer and artist, they were like a place setting in a museum gift shop—a knife and a fork, stylish and readily identifiable. Alton eyed the platter of penne with basil and olives on the counter next to him. “Man, I’m hungry,” he said, with the faintest trace of an English accent. “I haven’t eaten all day.”

“Eat?” Kent asked. “What would you want to eat for? All it does is fill you up.”

Karen, laughing, steadied herself with one hand on Matt’s shoulder and the other holding her glass away so that it wouldn’t spill on her.

“Food is so inefficient,” Kent continued. “What do cars run on? Or airplanes? Liquid is the way to go. Solid food just slows you down.”

“Rockets use solid fuel,” Sally said.

“Yes, but they’re going to outer space,” Kent returned. “What’s that all about? That’s like moving to the suburbs. Start eating solid food and next thing you know you’ll be in Scarsdale in a split-level. Mowing the lawn and spending Saturday mornings in a station wagon on Route One.”

“There’s Charles at last,” Matt said.

Seeing him at the same time, the crowd in the kitchen broke into applause and loud cheers. Charles flushed and waved them down. “Food,” he said. “Let’s focus on what matters.” He came up to the group and took the glass Karen offered him.

“So was it an enormous hit?” Kent asked.

“Whatever it was, at least it’s done,” he replied, and drained his glass. “È finito.”

“I love it, Charles,” Karen said, refilling his glass. “I’m going to do one for the gallery.”

“A studiolo?” Charles asked.

“Yes. When you showed it to me a few weeks ago, I started thinking. About what we have and what we don’t have. Every home used to have a room like that. I mean, not like that one, of course, but you know what I mean. They called it the library. My grandfather’s house, that’s what it made me think of, with the wood paneling and the books, how quiet it was. And that’s the thing. What happened? TVs and record players, and then VCRs and computers and CDs and play stations. Media centers. And now DVD and broadband and streaming. But the Zen. No Zen. That’s what we’ve lost.”

“Zen is key,” Alton said, heaping penne onto a paper plate.

“It’s key,” Karen said. “Think interior space for a new millennium. The studiolo.”

“No one could afford anything like that these days, not even a cyber baron,” Charles protested. “They might have the money, but who would have the patience? It took ten years to build that room.”

“Old thinking, Charles. New millennium. Wood is cute, but is it now? I think not. It’s not about the walls, anyway. It is but it isn’t. The continuum, yes, but inside the mind. That’s what we need to key on.”

“We?” Charles asked.

“Alton, tell him what we’ve come up with.”

“Alton, this is Charles,” Kent said.

“Hi,” Charles said.

Alton lifted his plate in acknowledgment of the greeting. “Pretty simple, really. What you see is what you get. It’s inside your head, it’s on the walls. Colors, patterns, but also images. From a data bank. Anything you want—old photos, film clips, whatever.”

Charles laughed. He looked at Karen and then at Kent. “You’re not serious,” he said.

“It’s going to be huge,” Karen replied. “Huge.”

“I think it here and it shows up there?” Charles said, gesturing at his head and then the wall with his glass. “That’s impossible.”

“Technology’s all there,” Alton said with a shrug.

“So’s the software,” Kent added. “Alton did this at the New School a year ago. That’s how I met him.”

Charles gave Alton a more appraising glance. “A year ago.”

“Yeah,” Alton replied, shaking his head. “Seems like the Stone Age. I used a TV set and electrodes to pick up changes in body temperature and brain wave patterns. Now you can do it all by infrared. And the walls, that’s the best. Plasma flat screen. Wall-to-wall, totally.”

“The virtual studiolo,” Karen said. “What do you think?” she asked Charles.

“I think I could use a martini,” Charles replied, and reached up into the cabinet behind him for a glass.

“Didn’t I tell you he would hate it?” Kent asked.

“Are you in on this too?” Charles inquired.

“Well, whose idea do you think it was?”

“I should have known.” Charles pulled the vodka bottle out of the freezer and poured a solid two inches into the glass. “No, it’s a great idea,” he said, and laughed, adding a splash of vermouth and an olive. “What are you going to call it?” he asked, stirring the drink with a silver rod he had taken from the drawer behind Kent.

“The Rumor,” Karen replied. “The Room, Or—”

“That’s good. I like that,” Charles said. “The Rumor. What do you think, Matt?”

“I think I’ll have mine with a twist,” he said.

Matt leaned back against the old leather armchair in the calm oasis of Charles’s own study, glad to be out of the storm of the party. The initial boost of the martinis had passed like a team of speedboats, leaving him bobbing uneasily in their wake, unsteady on his feet, like a water-skier who has let go of the rope. He was glad to lose himself in one of his favorite paintings, a woodland scene nestled in a faded gilt frame. It was typical of Charles to hang his prize possession in an out-of-the-way corner where it could easily escape notice. He had found it in a gallery in Florence, one that he had happened upon during an afternoon’s stroll through the quiet side streets of the Oltrarno, near the Boboli Gardens. He had brought the painting back to the department and cleaned it up, which hadn’t required much, for it had been in surprisingly good condition. All the tests indicated it was genuinely old, but as to authorship, that was anybody’s guess. “Circle of Paolo Uccello” was the consensus, and in its muted colors and dramatic foreshortening it did show the heavy influence of that Quattrocento artist. Although not a copy, the scene was clearly based on Uccello’s Hunt at Night, now at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the painting that had been the subject of Matt’s master’s thesis. “The Perspective of Dreams,” he had titled it.

But this was a hunt by day, deep in the woods, and Matt loved the confusion of the horsemen and the dogs scrambling through the underbrush under the thick green canopy that arched overhead like the roof of a cathedral, supported by the fluted columns of the tree trunks. The prey—a boar, or a wolf—was out of sight, but he had spent hours searching out the figures concealed in the tangle of bushes, always finding some new detail that had previously escaped his eye. Like the flash of color almost out of sight, hidden behind the tree trunks on the gentle rise in the back. What was it? He leaned in for a closer look. Odd, he thought; it looks like an animal. Feathers, bright blue and green, tipped with yellow. A wing, but too large to be a bird. There was more, but it was hard to make out in the gloom and the patterns made by the sun coming through the leaves. Rear haunches like a lion, the muscles bunching as the animal twisted through the underbrush, trying to escape, but covered in scales, not fur. He blinked—had it moved? His eyes must be adjusting to the light. He could see more of it now. The wing was joined to the body, and the tip of another was barely visible just behind.

The noise of the party vanished as Matt concentrated. There was no wind in the forest, the trees were still, and so the yelping of the dogs and the neighing of the horses hung in the air. He listened closely. Yes; the dry scrabble of claws on stone, that’s what he had heard. And labored breathing, the beat of wings—it was trying to escape. The tail whipped around, balancing as the animal reared back. Scales coruscated in the dim light, it was a lizard’s tail, ending in a broad flattened point. A harsh cry like an eagle cut through the gloom. Matt stared, fascinated and disbelieving—the proud head, lifted on a scaled neck, nostrils flared, black eyes wide, the dragon of his dreams. God, he thought. A manticore.

The dogs, frenzied with excitement, snarled in pursuit, closely followed by the men spurring their horses on. Excited shouts and the sharp repeated calls of trumpets were answered by the shriek of the manticore.

“Come on,” Matt whispered, “come on, go.”

The manticore found a purchase and leapt up the steep escarpment, its powerful wings at last free of the encumbering underbrush. The dogs, unable to follow, bayed in unison, circling like an earthbound tornado. Matt, aware of a sudden danger, tensed, but not soon enough. A gloved hand slammed his head back into the rough bark of a tree, lifting him as it tightened around his throat. A black helmet, the closed visor with a narrow black slit across it like a sword cut, leaned in as the bronze eagle roosting on its crest, wings raised, nodded down at him. A laugh grew, louder and louder until it hurt Matt’s ears, sliding down the scale into the rough growl of the wolf, a tone resonating deep within, chilling him—

He jumped sideways as he felt a hand on his neck.

“Matt!”

It was Sally. Slumping against the chair, Matt closed his eyes and rubbed his face, the skin hot and clammy under his hand. He felt his throat, but it was fine. Nothing.

“You’re soaked,” Sally said. Her hand, light on his back, moved to his forehead. Cool, like stepping into a patch of shade on a blistering hot day. “You’ve got a fever.”

He opened his eyes. The painting. He stood up, looked. There they were, the men on horseback, the dark trees, the dogs, but in the distance on the hill—nothing. No manticore. He leaned in, closer and closer, hands braced on the wall on each side until his face was only inches from the panel. The trees loomed, fading from sight on each side. The underbrush dissolved into splashes of green and dark brown, but nowhere could he find even a trace of gold. Or yellow or blue, no feathers, no scales shimmering in the refracted light.

“Matt, please.”

He felt Sally’s hand on his arm, pulling him back. He pushed himself away from the wall. Finding her looking at him, eyes wide with concern, he drew her to him and kissed her as hard as he could.

“Wow,” she murmured in his ear, after they broke apart. “Martinis and art, a heady mix. Let’s get out of here. You need some fresh air.”

“Wait,” he said, and looked back at the painting.

“What is it?” she asked.

“A manticore doesn’t have wings.”

“So?”

“Nothing,” he replied. A manticore had a man’s head on a lion’s body. What he had seen had the body and legs of a lion, but wings and scales, like a griffin, and a dragon’s head and tail. But there had not been the slightest hesitation in his mind that what he saw was a manticore. Why?

The party was still well under way, even though midnight had come and gone. Charles gave Matt a pat on the back and then broke the story he was telling for a quick kiss on Sally’s cheek. Karen squeezed his arm on the way by.

“Let’s be in touch,” she said, raising her glass in Sally’s direction as though to include her.

“How brazen can you get?” Sally asked, as she and Matt edged their way through the crowd.

“What are you talking about?” Matt asked.

“That bimbo in the too-short skirt, bombed on champagne. I can’t believe she made such a pass at you. ‘Let’s be in touch.’ Right. And she had the audacity to act as though she knew me.”

“You mean Karen?” Matt asked.

“If that’s her name, then yes.”

“Sally,” Matt said. “We were talking to her earlier. The studiolo, remember? She has a gallery downtown.”

“I’ve never seen that woman before. Look, Matt, a word of advice, just between you and me?” she said, shrugging on her coat. “If you’re going to carry on like this, that’s your business. But avoid the martinis. You’re not good enough at it, and I don’t want to know.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Let’s just get out of here, shall we?” With a swirl of black she was gone, out the door. The embarrassed looks on the faces of the small group who had overheard the entire exchange lent her accusations credibility, making Matt’s confusion complete. Not knowing what to believe, he hurried after her.