The Painting on Auerperg's Wall Read online

  Most of the properties on Wadsworth Avenue had long ago been renovated, extended, topped with a second storey, or replaced altogether. David and the old woman next door had been the last holdouts. Now his house was the only reminder of the beach cottage era. Nancy Auerperg, who won the bidding war for the double-sized lot next door, had the bungalow razed and put up a house inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright, all glass, stone, and cedar. She put in a pool and next to it a cabana with a Swedish spa.

  That’s what he saw from his sunroom: the back of the cabana and, at the end of his own lawn, a garden shed, a mini barn from Home Depot. There used to be a row of ficus trees marking the property line. But they were gone now. He could see Nancy Auerperg’s pool shimmering through the newly planted hedge. Why the hell did she have to cut down the trees?

  Well, why not? The ficus trees had monstrous, driveway-heaving roots. His neighbour had done the right thing. Maybe. Probably. Fucking doubts again.

  The phone started ringing. David didn’t move from his chair in the sunroom. No one called him on the landline except telemarketers, pollsters, and scammers. And now that the semester was over and he had escaped the harlotry of lecturing, there was no need to answer the phone. He was no longer on call. He hadn’t shown his face in the department for three weeks, resisted doing anything: answering email, doing research, filing his overdue income tax return. He did nothing, stuck to the house fungus-like, procrastinated, delaying the walk to the ATM machine until he was down to his last dollar.

  The petulant ringing stopped.

  David looked at the coffee stains at the bottom of his mug and made a mental note: Put mug into dishwasher. He had a habit of rinsing it in cold water and using it over again, sometimes for days. Did everyone do that, or was it a sign of slipping standards? He winced at the triviality of his own thought. Please. Someone stop the questions in my head! He tried to rouse himself. Get a grip, David! Do something.

  He got up, made himself walk to the kitchen, open the fridge, take out the bottle of Prosecco that had been sitting there since Christmas since, no shit, Christmas! He looked down on his feet, pointed them toward the front door, and gave them marching orders. He walked over to Nancy Auerperg’s house, bottle in hand, a housewarming present for his new neighbour, and rang the bell. His brain was stirring fitfully. He wasn’t sure what he wanted from the woman next door. It was a wish without defined object, an amorphous wish originating in the limbic brain, a vague search for someone to fill the void and end his doubts. Was Nancy Auerperg the one? The burnished gold bangles on Nancy’s wrists flashed ominously as she opened the door.

  He introduced himself, handed her the bottle of Prosecco, his welcome present, and she asked him in and gave him a tour of her house, pointing out, as she put it, “the palette of natural materials.” She had the modernist terminology pat. She never used a generic term. The cladding wasn’t stone. It was Ledge stone. The ceiling wasn’t wood. It was Jatoba. The cabinets were Wenge wood from Zaire, and so on. She talked with the fluency of an architectural digest about the elegant distillation to essentials, the dynamic spatiality, the great staging areas the house offered, the rhythmic flow of rooms. Yes, the house had all that, but most of all it had a quality of trying too hard to be pure and beautiful. Like Nancy herself?

  David suspected she had undergone a few nip and tuck procedures to bring her features in line with the prevailing esthetics, to achieve that sculpted look. He couldn’t pinpoint Nancy’s age. In the soft lighting of her living room, she could pass for a woman of forty, but the raised veins on the back of her hands and a hint of stiffness when she got up from the sofa pushed the estimate closer to fifty. Nancy began to slip off his mental stage. He couldn’t imagine blue-veined hands unzipping him and moving down into the nest of his pubic hair. And there was no comfort in her words, her perfect tech-language, although he noticed that she slipped occasionally. She had a tendency to gush when she got off the safe subject of things and entered the dangerous territory of feelings.

  “When I first saw the architect’s design, it gave me a thrill,” she said, stroking her arms as if to flatten goosebumps. “Even on draft paper, the house was full of drama, energy, and momentum.” There was religious excitement in her voice, or at any rate, the fervour of consumerism.

  “The moment I saw the plans,” she said, “I knew it was a house that would give proper attention to my art.”

  She was right about that. David noticed the stunning effect of the afternoon light on the large, Neoplasticist painting above the fireplace. The yellow, red, and black lines had a primordial glow, and Nancy confirmed what he had guessed already. It was a Piet Mondrian. David took a professional interest in art. For the last three years he had been labouring over a book, Objets d’Art and Their Role in Burgundian Family Feuds, a book never to be finished, he feared, because he could no longer tell what was or wasn’t playing a role in anything. The book had turned into a labyrinth of questions, ground zero for his doubts.

  “My husband was a collector,” Nancy said, and of course she had all the details about the Mondrian at her fingertips, the sort of information you find in auction catalogues. There wasn’t a shadow of doubt in her voice as she gave David the rundown. She certainly knew what was what, how to distinguish genuine art from kitsch, authentic from fake, appearance from truth.

  Now that she had moved from furniture to art, her wealth of words began to have an effect on David. There was something soothing about the rich flow pouring from Nancy’s mouth like milk and honey. Maybe Nancy was on to something. Maybe that was the way to overcome doubt: to have a name for everything, fill every space in your brain with crystal-clear words, and crowd out any hesitation. And yet, something was missing from her talk. It was bloodless. Nancy reminded him of an idiot savant, someone who knew that November 13, 1974, was a Wednesday or that 134 people died in a plane crash on April 2, 1968. Except that Nancy had words at her command instead of dates and numbers. No doubt, she could tell you that an s-shaped moulding was called an “ogee” and the strip with the buttonholes on the front of a man’s shirt was a “placket.” She knew the difference between columns and pilasters, but when David trawled for native thought, Nancy kept a polite silence. Either she had nothing original to offer or she disapproved of intellectual engagement on first contact. Perhaps she thought it was too intimate, like sex on a first date. But even when David got to know Nancy Auerperg better, his knowledge of her life never progressed much beyond her initial autobiographical sketch.

  Nancy told him she moved to L.A. from Mendocino County, where her husband had been an executive in the wine industry. He owned vineyards in California and in Austria. They used to travel back and forth a great deal, she said, until Max had a series of crippling strokes.

  “Poor man,” she said devoutly. “He was in a wheelchair for the last two years of his life. I miss him terribly.” She put in a reverential, commemorative pause before resuming her regular, sprightly tone.

  “I still go to Vienna every summer,” she said. “I can’t get myself to sell the condo.” It was, she said breathlessly, absolutely marvelous, divinely furnished, and in a superb location, right in the centre of the city. Her voice was tinged with feelings of bereavement over the unimaginable loss of the apartment.

  “If you ever go to Vienna, David, you must come and visit,” she said.

  “I might take you up on the invitation,” he said, although he knew she didn’t mean it. She was only being polite. But he really should go to Vienna. With a pang he thought of his work-in-progress, Objets d’Art and Their Role in Burgundian Family Feuds, and of the travel funds he had wrangled from the Department to visit the Austrian National Library in Vienna. That was before he fell into the black hole of depression, and now time was running out. The grant money had to be used before the end of the fiscal year.

  “As it happens, I’m working on manuscripts owned by the Burgundian Habsburgs,” he told Nancy. “They
were bibliophiles. The bulk of their collection ended up in Vienna.”

  David hadn’t worked on his book for months, but now that he had managed to leave the safety of his house, made it past his driveway and initiated a conversation with Nancy, he felt he was entering a new phase. He was coming out of his stupor. Who knows, he might resume his research and make the deadline for using the grant money.

  “Fascinating,” Nancy said, but didn’t let her fascination run away to the point of asking for details.

  “They have some spectacularly beautiful manuscripts in their collection,” David said and lingered over the description of his favourite, a fifteenth-century herbarium. He told Nancy about the vellum leaves, the fine illuminations, the historiated borders, the red Morocco gilt binding and ornamental clasps. He thought she might appreciate the adjectives, the technical terminology.

  Nancy listened with polite attention but had no further comment. Perhaps there were limits to her vocabulary after all.

  She returned to the subject of her late husband and tried to make out that he was a scion of Viennese aristocracy. But when David asked a follow-up question, she faltered and backed away from the claim. Their conversation stalled. She looked at him, suddenly tongue-tied. Perhaps his plain T-shirt, department store khaki pants and run-of-the-mill loafers stumped her. Not a single haute couture label. It left her mind blank.

  She saw David to the door, waggled her fingers at him and said, “See you,” with a perfunctory little smile.

  “Just call if there is anything I can do for you,” David said. “Come over for a drink. Any time.”

  He instantly regretted his words. Why encourage Nancy? She was probably casting around for a liaison, a replacement for the late Mr. Auerperg. What if she took his invitation as a come-on? There had been a certain flirtatious tone in her voice when she told him about the Mondrian, a certain airiness in her movements, a half-hearted, fleeting play for his attention. He had given her a look meant to chill, meant to tell her she wasn’t his type. Wouldn’t do. Couldn’t fill the void. She seemed to recognize the futility of her efforts, took a step back as if to regain her balance, kept her distance from him for the rest of the house tour, slipped into an interpersonal style, smiling at him in an amiable uninflected way. And then he spoiled it all by giving out the wrong signal, inviting her to come over.

  But it’s just a polite phrase, he thought, as he walked back to his house. She won’t take me up on it.

  NANCY DID take him up on the invitation. She dropped by the next day.

  David led her into the living room, hoping it might pass for shabby chic in her eyes, but he could tell she wasn’t fooled. She averted her eyes from the overstuffed sofa with the white linen throw and the old TV set. He should have given that set away years ago. By now, even the people at Goodwill might turn up their noses at the ancient thing.

  Nancy kept a poker face and made no comment as she followed David and they passed through the unrenovated kitchen to the sunroom. He wasn’t quick enough to steer her to the swivel chair facing the planter on the patio, which offered a floral still life. Instead, she sat down in the recliner, with the dented garden shed directly in her line of vision.

  “Can I offer you a drink?” he asked.

  “Just coffee, thanks. I’m watching my calorie intake.” She gave him a decorous smile.

  He went into the kitchen, leaving Nancy looking around the room, no doubt noticing the penumbra of dust on the furniture and the fluff on the carpet. Perhaps he should have the cleaning lady in more often.

  He hoped Nancy would not ask to use the washroom. The toilet seat was up, and the porcelain rim unwiped. There was probably hair in the sink and toothpaste smears. Damn. It was too late to do anything about that now. David stood in the kitchen, embarrassed by the dowdiness of his house, the sound of the throbbing refrigerator, now falling silent with a lurch. Was the sound audible in the sunroom?

  When he returned with a Scotch for himself and a mug of coffee for Nancy, she was looking out the window, past his property line, at her own immaculate lawn and the cabana, now outfitted with vertical blinds. There was a confessional look on her face. Was she about to speak up? Express her disgust with his slipshod housekeeping or his lack of taste or the cheap reproductions on the walls of the sunroom?

  “I’ve decided to rent out the guest house,” she said.

  For a few seconds David was stumped. “The cabana, you mean?” He knew at once that he had said the wrong thing. It sounded as if he was questioning Nancy’s choice of words. She had a perfect ear for naming objects. If she called the structure in her backyard a “guest house,” it was a guest house.

  Nancy ignored his interjection. She crossed her shapely legs, one heel hitched behind the other.

  “I thought it would be a good idea to have someone around to keep an eye on the house while I’m in Europe.”

  “Whatever you do, don’t put it on Craigslist,” he cautioned her, “I’ve heard…”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t go there,” she said quickly, as if the idea was too crass to contemplate. “The daughter of a friend happened to be looking for a place, and I thought the arrangement would suit us both. Laura is a curator at the Getty.”

  Nancy paused to make sure David understood the implication. The future occupant of the cabana (correction: guest house) was no ordinary tenant. The Getty was the sort of place that conferred prestige on its employees, wrapped them in a mantle of culture and refinement.

  “She’ll move in next weekend,” Nancy said. “I’m having a few people over for dinner tomorrow, a welcome party for Laura. I hope you can join us.”

  She suddenly seemed uneasy. Was it over the cabana/guest house flap? The Craigslist remark? The short notice? To clear the air, he quickly said he’d come. And of course he had second thoughts the moment he closed the front door on Nancy with a final, “See you tomorrow then.” He hated parties. He thought he had permanently escaped the party circuit by the simple expedient of never returning an invitation. Eventually, the neighbours got the message and stopped inviting him. And now he was caught in Nancy’s flytrap, stuck with her invitation.

  He tried to reason with himself. Going to a party was good for him. He needed to get out of the house. He needed a burst of activity in his life. But he couldn’t silence the interior backtalk: Come on, David, you like your splendid isolation! Why set yourself up for a strenuous social exercise, the bloody how-are-you ritual, the name dropping, the boring travelogues, Thailand and Hawaii or unknown European corners, all the rehashed anecdotes? Keeping away from people was the better choice. The only drawback was a tendency to talk to himself — internal conversations exploring the past or just musing about the human condition. That was okay when he was at home, but he needed to pay more attention to his body language in public. Sometimes a murmur got away from him, or a hand gesture. He didn’t want to end up like the fellow at the supermarket who scowled at no one in particular, hollered a string of profanities, and was escorted outside by security.

  The natural alternative was to talk to friends. But when you divorce, you divide up your friends as well as your property. And the friends he had made in college thinned out and dropped away. Michael, who was his best buddy for years, moved to the East Coast. Their email messages became fewer. Now they wrote once a year, at Christmas. Erin was another lapsed friend. In her case, it was a quick cut. She picked a quarrel and became a stranger after telling him: “Lose my number. I have nothing more to say to you.” Lose my number? You’d expect a more literate dismissal from a librarian. With others, there were no flashpoints, only a ghostly drifting away. And Jerry died last year, during a week of face-blenching events: the destruction of the World Trade Center and the collapse of Jerry’s lungs, the racing fire trucks in Manhattan and the blaring ambulance taking Jerry to UCLA Medical Center. The images piled up in David’s mind, heaped on top of the other wreckage, the bits and pieces o
f his broken marriage. He couldn’t take any more. CNN was the worst. Watching it was like playing an interactive game for which his thumbs were too clumsy, a game governed by rules he couldn’t understand. David’s eyes were used to history books with solid lines about done deals that were unalterable. There was no crawling tickertape at the bottom of history books, no news travelling across, dissolving on the left, and reforming on the right. There were no changing figures or call-in polls, and it was too late to cast a vote for or against bygone wars and economic trends.

  He stopped watching TV and switched to porn movies, but the frantic humping and sucking of the DVD whores, their fake orgasmic moans left him flaccid. They all looked the same, and their silicone enhanced balloon breasts had no beneficent effect. He tried a live prostitute and made her bend over his crotch and work hard for her money. He had to rent a mid-sized car from Avis because the vintage sports car he bought to console himself after the divorce couldn’t accommodate that kind of action. At least it worked, but the relief was temporary. Remorse set in almost immediately. He was ashamed, disgusted. He had committed a sin, not against God — David wasn’t a religious man — but against his own aesthetic standards. It was an ugly thing to do. It added to the bleakness in his soul. And sex didn’t change anything. The news reports were still dismal and full of dire warnings. David gave up watching TV, but he was still confronted with the articles and images in the LA Times, especially the gloomy op-ed pages. And Jerry’s column was missing now, replaced with lifestyle articles that had no punch. He missed Jerry’s witty column. He missed his camaraderie. “Come on over, David. Have a drink. How goes the battle in the trenches of academia?” Jerry was that kind of guy, all-embracing, and generous with encouragement. He was the kind of guy who hosted noisy parties that silenced the ghosts of sorrow.