Archibald Full Frontal, page 22
I recalled Penelope in a tense moment with a contract and a lot of small print. “Just a formality,” she had said. “It is done this way so the gallery doesn’t lose money. The gallery gets the opportunity to sell your paintings for a set period of time.” I had been so eager and so easy to buy off.
“Fuck. Yes, I signed something. They get to keep the paintings until they sell or decide to return them.”
“That’s bad.”
“Bad. I’ll give you bad!” I pick up the book and shake it. “It’s a tabloid. It’s trash! Let’s burn it! I’m going to kill him!” I scream, jumping up. “Give me a lighter! I am going to burn an Archibald effigy in the art gallery. Let’s call the news people. Let’s call the cops!”
“Wait. Listen. Calm down, okay?”
“Other people are reading this! More people will be reading this!” The realization assaults me like a waterfall of bricks. I lurch against the couch.
“I know. I know. But … before you burn it and, believe me, I fully support you in that effort, there is something else you should read.”
“What? What now?! I can’t take it.” My heart will stop. I am sure. “No more!”
He takes the book and flips through its pages doggedly. “This. I think you need to find out before you hear it anywhere else.”
I look at him. He nods to the book, urging me.
He had been so young that summer. An aspiring writer with minimal talent, but ambitious, so ambitious. Edward had been bedazzled. He had always had a weakness for younger men, boys really. And James was pretty, so pretty you couldn’t help but stare at him, gossamer curls, a cleft chin, skin like velvet. James had applied for a job as Edward’s assistant. In a plain cotton, button-down shirt, slacks, and a St. Christopher’s medal as his only adornment.
He even knew about the St. Christopher’s medal!
Edward, ever a fool for love, if not in any other capacity, had hired him on the spot. And James was brilliant. He grew to know Edward so well that he could anticipate his needs. They would savour late-night dinners on the veranda of his beach house overlooking the ocean: smoked salmon and angel hair pasta, with a bottle of Pinot Grigio, followed by champagne the colour of honey and strawberries in crème fresh. Bathed in moonlight James would ask his advice with an earnestness that was beguiling, and Edward would discuss his next novella. Soon, Edward gave James his own room. They were spending so much time together, it seemed only reasonable.
And, then, one evening as Edward sat on his private veranda, smoking the spicy clove cigarettes he favoured, he heard a splash. He stared down at the pool, startled. Had a Canadian goose fallen in again? They were such filthy creatures! But it was not a goose at all. From its rippled surface, James emerged up the steps, graceful as a fateful siren enticing a sea captain.
Exquisitely nude, he stood in profile, towelling himself slowly as if preparing for an ancient Greek festival, where he would be adorned with oil and slowly paraded in front of a crowd of adoring thousands, wearing only fresh garlands about his throat and hair. Zeus himself would have been overcome! He was the most strikingly beautiful being Edward had ever seen.
“Devi, divine goddess, I beg you,” he whispered to himself. “Strike me dead or make this boy love me forever.” It was as if James had heard Edward’s whispered prayer. He turned towards Edward and smiled. It was a smile that made Edward certain he was the only human being on the face of the planet. It stirred him deeply. James, for his part, had known he was there. He knew Edward’s schedule backwards and forwards; after all, Edward was a creature of habit.
That night, Edward slept fitfully. Tossing and turning in his sleep, overcome with dreams of longing, desires unfulfilled. He awoke to a creaking baseboard and opened his eyes suddenly. It was James. In bed. Beside him.
“Don’t get up on my account,” James whispered. He nuzzled close to Edward, his naked, sculpted body, warm and close. And Edward melted, became putty in his hands. James knew what Edward liked and would continue to give it to him, provided that Edward gave James what he wanted. Quid pro quo. It was an unspoken contract whose conditions became more and more demanding.
Edward would be essential to the creation of James’s first novel. And when it was published, James would drift away, but like a ship with a fatal leak, he would not make it too far.
James awoke suddenly. He had not dreamt of Edward for years. He looked over at Zoë, sleeping beside him. He surveyed her boyish back and long flowing hair and thought of the incongruity and, yet, the strange symmetry she created. If she only knew that he was her grandfather’s former lover. That they now formed an unusual love triangle. What it would do to her sweet face, so innocent, he could only imagine. It was a face he was fond of, but he had never been quite sure why. Until she had told him, quite innocently, what she had discovered: She was Edward’s granddaughter. He had not told her, then. How well he had known Edward once. He had tried, but not especially hard. For he was a bisexual and a coward. And now he knew that he would never tell her. If he’d had a conscience, the truth would have made him ashamed. But as it was, there was a little bit of Edward in her. Just enough.
I put the book down. I can read no further. Cannot. Will not. I walk from the room, from the apartment building. And then I run.
I make it as far as the lobby. Before I know it, I have hurled myself into the elevator. I will not let him get away with this! I will confront the old sophistic fart and put a hex on him. I feel exposed. Worse, violated. My paintings will stand in my place as an endorsement of the book, of his version of me.
I try his door, but it is locked, and I realize I have left my keys inside.
“Fuck it! Archibald, open up!” I scream as I pound on it. I realize that it’s after seven and he is at a dinner party. I kick the door in frustration. A pen, I need a pen! But of course I haven’t brought anything with me. Just then, Rita sashays out of the elevator.
“Rita, do you have a pen?” I accost her.
She considers me grumpily. “What? Archibald without a pen?”
“I’m locked out. Please. It’s an emergency!” She sighs and opens her cream leather purse and peers inside. I notice the familiar bright red shade of her lips.
Lipstick, exactly what I need. “Can I borrow your lipstick?” I ask, thinking of the lipstick beside the pool of blood on the cover of his horrible book.
“Why?” she asks suspiciously.
“I won’t hurt it,” I lie.
She hands me a gold lipstick case. I take it and rush to the door. I remove the cap and swivel it open.
I scrawl on the door in bright red letters:
COWARD, COCKSUCKER, SHITBREATH
I QUIT! I QUIT! I QUIT!!!
MAGGIE
“Shit! My lipstick!” Rita is more upset about the damage to her lipstick than by the fact I have vandalized a door in her hallway. I hand it back to her. Then, to my surprise, she leans into the door and begins writing. She stands back and I read:
FUCK YOU TOO! RITA
“This is about his book, ja? I got a copy and I am in it! He says I have bad teeth and mannish hands! Bastard!”
I make for the elevator. Our moment of solidarity over, she shouts, “You owe me $44.99 for the lipstick!”
“Maggie?” my mom asks. I am sitting on the porch of her house in a little town outside Newport, Oregon. From here, I can see the waves lapping the white sand. I didn’t bother to tell her I was coming; just caught a bus and then another, not really caring where I ended up. But I ended up here.
She drops a bag of groceries on the stoop.
“Hi, Mom,” I say.
She inspects me. I must look a sight: two-day-old clothes, chocolate donuts and coffee spilled down my front, bloodshot eyes. She is in a business skirt and blouse, hair fanning in the ocean breeze. She sits down beside me. “What did he do?”
I look at her. “What didn’t he do?”
My mom has a few vacation days owing. She doesn’t complain, just quietly arranges to be present. We take long walks on the beach. I love the way the sand feels on my feet. The vast sky, stormy, clouds jostling for space, ripped apart by the wind, then reforming on the horizon — I wish it were that easy, putting one’s self together again. I watch the filaments of light, bright and then sombre, pierce through the grey. The surf crashes against rocks, sprays the air, and coats the sand, leaving a frothy foam, the colour of decay. I watch a piece of driftwood be sucked down into a liquid mouth, then spring up as it is spat out. Hair “the colour of driftwood” pops into my mind. I fight to drown his words.
Mom somehow manages to get a copy of the book and finishes it.
“I don’t know what to say,” she says at last. “I should never have sent you there. I never imagined this.”
I try to picture the last years without Archibald, to undo the damage he has done, to smooth out the cavern he has carved beneath my feet and become the person I was before. But to do that, I have to erase Sam and Dan, the people I met at art school, even the Pink Palace. The fault lines widen instead of sealing shut.
“I need to know how and why this happened so that this never happens again.”
Mom pulls her sweater around her shoulders. “Your guess is as good as mine.”
“But how did he know? I just don’t understand how he knew so much about me. I was really careful.”
She considers: “Did you ever see a person following you? Or meet someone who just didn’t seem … right?”
“Well, we are talking about friends of Archibald. They’re all from another planet to begin with.”
“Did you meet any Hungarians?”
“Hungarians? Well, there’s Maria … his maid … and Zoltan — uh — he never really had a last name.”
“I ask because he used to employ a Hungarian private detective agency back when your grandmother would disappear, to make it look like he was doing something. So, there’s the how.”
“Now that I think about it, he never seemed right. He used to carry a note pad. Who does that? And he had private meetings with Archibald. Could those meetings have been about me?”
“If I had to guess, I’d say you found your spy.”
“Shit!” It had never occurred to me that I had been watched all that time. That Zoltan, who played poker, attended his parties, ate Maria’s food, was also a detective! And now I recall he had even been present in the lobby that very first night I met Michael in the elevator. Had he been there at even more events? Was he here now? My eyes darted around in nervous paranoia.
“As to why, well, I doubt even Archibald could tell you that. But he has a gift … for filling in the blanks of his subjects. And then some…”
“For filling in the blanks?!” I froth. “He fell into the blanks of me and took me straight to hell.”
She sighs wearily. “And these paintings for the exhibition? What happened to them?”
“They are on display as we speak.” I sigh.
She returns my sigh. “Let me call him.”
“No, it will only make it worse.” I wasn’t sure that Archibald cared what became of my paintings. He hadn’t even acknowledged their existence. His “people,” Penelope and the art gallery employees, had taken care of the process from start to finish. But if Mom showed concern, I was sure that would awaken a sleeping giant. “I don’t really care what happens to them, anyway. Not anymore. I get them back if they don’t sell after two months.”
“You can always stay here,” Mom says late one night as I sit in front of the television, weary but unable to sleep.
“Thanks,” I say. But the shock is wearing off, and in its place I can feel the tiniest bit of optimism. It is just a book. Not everyone reads, or reads Archibald for that matter. He’s no Hemingway, I tell myself.
“You have that look on your face. You used to get that look whenever you were digging your heels in about something. It’s not because of the boy?”
“Michael?”
“No … the janitor.”
“No,” I say. “Of course not.”
My bags are packed. Mom loads them in the back of her car. She is driving me to the airport in Portland. Along the way, I work up my courage. There is something that plagues me. A shadow that waits for me at each turn we make in the highway.
“Mom? Do you think he got me? Is it really me in his book?” I want her to tell me what I need to hear so badly. That he was wrong, way off. That I am nothing close to the girl he described. Her flaws are not my flaws.
She sighs as if she has been waiting, as if the question has been there in the back seat of the car all this time. If she could lie, it would be now. And it would be a mercy.
But she gives me the cold, straight-up truth: “Only you can answer that.”
I slide through his bedroom window. It is after 1 a.m. He is out late.
I flick the lights on. The place is a mess: dishes piled in the sink, an ashtray filled with half-smoked cigarettes, which is strange because he doesn’t smoke. I sink into the couch, thinking I will just wait. It occurs to me he might be worried. I did literally sprint out of here after I read the excerpts from Archibald’s malice-laced scroll. The offending book is on the couch, as though it has been tossed aside. I pick it up and it falls open to a dog-eared page. I cannot help but read:
He loved her but did not know it. For him, her ordinary features coalesced into something magnificent. He cherished the sound of her voice; her high-pitched laugh; the way she bit her nails; the smattering of freckles across her nose that seemed to expand each year; the way she accidentally lashed people in the face with her bounty of hair when she turned. Yet, she was eclipsed by Dove, his perpetually absent childhood love. Dove was beautiful and intelligent, with two university degrees in her curriculum vitae, ambitious but still feminine, graced with sophistication and charm. But that ambition had torn her from him and deposited her on a desert isle of her own design. And from this location, she seemed in no hurry to return. She had aspirations for him, too. She had made that clear. She expected him to make professor at a “real” university out east. And Zoë, here, in the flesh, flawed but real, she didn’t seem to mind him being a caretaker or a gardener, if he was on the wrong side of thin, if his hands were work-worn and his apartment small and inexpensively furnished. He gazed into her open mind, a mind free of hubris, so gapingly receptive that it was like a balm to his ambivalent, hyper-educated intellect. Her simplicity suited him, and even more, made him feel valued, the featured diamond in a royal tiara.
As she stood beside him, slightly tipsy, a state typical for her these days, jostling his arm with hers, listening to the music at the party that Edward had been kind enough to invite them to, he reinforced his defence mechanisms by recalling the list he had long ago formed of the reasons he loved Dove. Zoë tilted her face close to his, lips moist, curved, and slightly parted. And he thought: If I kissed her, she would kiss me back. What could be wrong with a kiss? He inclined his head towards her, inflamed by a passion that had been dormant far too long, but stopped short. Then what? They would make love, hot, sticky, passionate love, back in his apartment. And this, he would enjoy wholeheartedly, as well as the realization that his sexual dysfunction was really sexual frustration. Dove was remote at the best of times. And Zoë was nothing if not a creature of the earth. But then what? He summoned his logic and self-restraint. They would eat, sleep, copulate, and do it all over again in varying orders, and he would find that thing that had been eluding him all his twenty-seven years: contentment. But what would become of Dove? Well, he would have to break it off with her. And that would require tremendous will. He had been destined for Dove, as she had been for him, since they were seven years old. She had a hold on him. And he had grown accustomed to the grip of each one of her beautifully tapered fingers. Bud’s greatest failure was the inability to act. Overly analytical, his doubts dominated any clear-sightedness he may have achieved. A moralist, the slightest variance from those morals threw him into a psychological disarray that undermined the calm waters of his tepid existence. His desire for Zoë was a current, which if realized, would become an undertow, and he knew he was not a skilled swimmer.
I slam the book shut, heart racing. Poor Sam! Archibald had always thought he carried a torch for me. Was there no person in my life he left unscathed? Thank God Dan had met him only once.
“Maggie. Maggie! Wake up.” Sam leans over me. He has hold of both my shoulders and is shaking me hard.
I blink into his face inches above mine. “Sam — Sam!” My head bobs back and forth, a rag doll’s head on a spindly neck.
Dan puts a restraining arm on Sam’s shoulder. “Sam, take it easy.” Sam releases me and I fall back into the couch. My head spins. I blink repeatedly, bewildered. I see an upside down version of Dan peering at me. “Pedal, we were so worried.”
“Sorry, you guys. I just had to go.”
“Where in Christ were you?!” Sam shouts. His face is drawn and strained, wild. “Fuck, Maggie!”
“I went to my mother’s in Oregon.” I recoil. From the look on his face, I can tell this isn’t going to be pretty.
“Oregon! We thought she lived in Arizona. Do you realize Dan was about to get on a plane to Tucson tomorrow?”
“Really? No, well, she lives in Oregon, now. Tucson was before that. She moves around a lot.”
“We thought you were in a ditch somewhere! We didn’t know what happened or where you would go after what you did to Archibald’s door. Rita told me you were crazy. We were going to file a police report. A missing person’s report! The only thing that stopped us was that it would give that idiot even more publicity!” Sam was pacing, holding his head.
“Oh, jeez.” I scramble for words. “I was upset, but I just didn’t think anyone would worry under the circumstances.”
“Of course not! Of course, you didn’t think. And, then, you come sneaking through my window and just sit here waiting. Napping for Christ’s sake! We haven’t slept since you took off.”
“Sam. She’s okay. She was upset. She wasn’t thinking clearly. It is understandable,” Dan reasons. “With the book, with everything that happened…”
