A warm wind blew into her face, whatever kindness it carried not meant for humans. Still, there were humans everywhere, carousing on the sidewalk, many of them laughing. Someone shouted, “Ilaria!”—a name no one called her except her father. When a hand touched her shoulder, she turned, ready for a fight.
But it was only Mr. Hal—the relief so profound that she embraced him. He seemed surprised, stepping back to adjust his glasses.
No, not Hal. Hal was old, and the man before her was young. But she knew this one too—didn’t she? He had a very pretty name, something to do with flowers.
* * *
In the car she told him everything. Well, not everything; just everything about Michael. The painter made no attempt to comfort her, which in itself was a kind of comfort. That he didn’t offer assurances or anything with feathers made her feel she was with someone she could trust. At one point, when referring to the boy’s parents, he used the same word as Teena. Disgusting. Honey thanked him.
“For what?”
“For being outraged.”
“How could anyone not be?”
“You’d be surprised,” she said.
When they were parked at the curb, neither made a move to get out of the Thunderbird. They only stared through the windshield, at dark lawns glazed by lamplight. Honey turned to see the little tree Jocelyn had planted. As if to taunt, the sapling had finally begun to thrive, the last late blooms emerging in silver pink and the first leaves coming in, the impossible green of innocence. Trees were thieves, weren’t they? They stole precious things—air, water, sunlight—yet they weren’t criminals. In nature there was no morality. All the rape and pillage served the common good.
From somewhere came the sound of music. For a moment Honey thought Nathan had turned on the radio, but then she realized the noise was coming from Jocelyn’s house. No discernible melody, only the heartbeat of the bass, a pounding like the music at the Shelter.
Jocelyn and Lee were no doubt rolling about, flesh to flesh, howling like animals. Or maybe he was hurting her. Honey put her hand to her mouth, but it was too late. A sob erupted violently, like sickness. And then it happened again. Honey was unable to control herself. And since she didn’t like being out of control, she did something she hadn’t done since she was a child. She pinched herself to stop the tears, dug her nails into the soft flesh on the side of her hand. After several deep breaths she managed to speak. “This isn’t me,” she explained. “I’m not myself.”
The young man said nothing, though he looked at her without flinch or fear. He seemed to have no wish to escape the dreadful position she’d put him in.
Honey, too, wanted to be brave. And since she couldn’t bear the idea of being alone, she asked the young man—not caring if it sounded like a pickup line—if he’d like to come inside and see her Redon.
* * *
In the kitchen they drank large glasses of water, gulping shamelessly. Perhaps they drank to avoid speaking. Even after putting the glasses in the sink, they remained silent, the length of this silence impossible for Honey to gauge, due to her tipsiness. Finally, she asked Nathan if he’d like something to eat, and was relieved when he said no. She would have felt like his mother making him a snack.
She turned on another set of lights and gestured toward the painting. “Did I tell you I had a Morandi too?”
Nathan nodded and approached the piece. His blank expression Honey read as awe—but then he grimaced.
“I’ve never really gotten Morandi. I mean, I think it’s beautiful—the colors and the composition, but, I don’t know, it doesn’t drive me crazy, the way I want a painting to. Maybe it’s just too calm.”
“And what’s wrong with that?” said Honey. “There has never been enough calm, and there never will be. Not on this planet.”
Nathan stepped closer to the canvas. “Those pale blues and yellows are pretty great. Like something you’d want to spread on toast.”
“Exactly,” said Honey. She stood beside the young man and told him a bit about the history of the piece, how and when she’d acquired it.
What she really wanted to talk about, though, was the light in the painting—her interpretation of it, anyway, which was that the light on the objects was not the sun, but the glare of consciousness, perhaps Morandi reckoning with mortality.
Instead, she spoke about the arrangement of the jars and bottles on the deftly rendered tabletop.
“I’ve always seen the painting, I suppose, as a sort of metaphysical chess game, in which Morandi has forced chaos into checkmate. When I look at those objects, they seem very brave, very intelligent.”
Nathan tilted his head, puppy-like, as if to consider this idea. His eyes were eager, and as he fell into the painting, Honey did too—though for her it wasn’t a painting, but an old friend.
All her life, she’d been turning something in her mind, an agitating math whose solution seemed a matter of life and death. Perhaps it was an attempt to factor out violence. There’d been no success until she’d entered the world of art, of paintings. Morandi, in particular, provided a consistent charge of hope. To her this canvas was more than a still life; it was a history painting. Those sweetly colored bottles stood there in a line—familiar, mundane, huddled in a way that might be interpreted as frightened. And yet they were brothers, sisters, working together to resist something in the atmosphere surrounding them, something terrible.
“I think it speaks to what humans are incapable of—selflessness, harmony.” She said that, in a way, she saw the bottles and jars as sages. “Think of those Tibetan thangkas, with the rows of bodhisattvas, all those heavenly beings and guardians who refuse to dissolve into the void because they feel compelled to protect us.”
When Nathan turned to her, she felt slightly breathless. “I do go on, don’t I?”
“No. I love the way you talk about art.”
“I have my lines,” she said. “All very well rehearsed.”
“Great lines, though. You have a unique way of putting things.”
“Yes, I’ve been told that before, and it wasn’t always a compliment.”
Nathan studied the Morandi again, and then he surprised her by asking if she wanted to talk more about her grandnephew.
“I don’t,” she said. What the young man didn’t understand was that she was, in fact, still talking about her family. Guardians, protectors—things the Fazzingas had failed to be. She, too, had failed. What had she ever done for Michael, let alone her own child?
Honey steered her heart back to the painting. “Do you see the curving neck of the green vase, the way it leans toward the bottle next to it—the extraordinary kindness of that?”
Nathan sighed appreciatively, then asked if she believed in God.
Honey rubbed her eyes. “I’m not sure I know how to answer that question anymore. If you’d asked me a year ago, I would have said yes. Hell, if you’d asked me yesterday . . .”
The painter was quiet again, though now it felt strained. Honey glanced at the clock. “It’s late,” she said. “I’m sure you need to go.”
“I thought you were going to show me the Redon.”
“You still want to see it?”
“Are you kidding? Of course. Unless you’re tired?”
She was. She was dead. But she told the boy: “I’m never too tired to talk about art.”
* * *
When they were in the bedroom, though, she said nothing. Nathan said nothing. It was Redon who took the floor. Uncannily, he seemed to be speaking about the two people standing in front of him. Don’t pretend, he seemed to say.
The accusation was complicated. Don’t pretend you’re not alive went alongside Don’t pretend you’re not miserable. The creature standing on the cliff had never looked more lewd, more beautiful; the woman in the sky had never seemed closer to the sun, her tiny feathers more incandescent.
“The flowers,” Nathan said, referring to the eccentric overlay of blossoms stitched across the sky, like psychic weather.
“Brilliant, aren’t they?” said Honey.
Nathan took a step back and sat on the bed. He shook his head. “It’s incredible. Why have I never seen this before? I mean, like in a book or a catalog?”
Honey explained that the piece had never been exhibited. “I’ve always been selfish with it.”
What she didn’t tell him was that there’d been some doubt about the painting’s provenance, a rumor that it might be stolen. This had put the auction house Honey worked for in a tricky position. They couldn’t risk selling the piece publicly, and it had sat in limbo for nearly a year—at which point Honey, using her inheritance from Hal, had been able to acquire it. Under the table, shall we say?
When Nathan asked the title, she sat beside him. “Le Dilemme de l’Ange.”
He nodded. “Yes. Wow. The Angel’s Dilemma. It’s fantastic.” And then he laughed. “But I can’t believe you keep it here.”
“What do you mean?”
“Most people would put it where everyone could see it. Show it off. The Morandi, too. I mean, who keeps a painting like that in the kitchen, and that close to a stove?”
“I’ve always lived dangerously,” said Honey. She tossed this off lightly, but when she looked again at the little beast flying toward the sun, she began to cry.
Nathan hesitated only briefly, before taking her hand.
* * *
Frozen. Burning. How is it possible, she wonders, for two bodies not moving, barely touching, to give off this much heat?
Don’t pretend you’re not alive.
Don’t pretend you’re not miserable.