The Painting on Auerperg's Wall Read online

  The hopelessness of Jerry’s condition was allegorical, wasn’t it? His death was indicative of everything David felt that year when Elaine moved out, a sense of an ending, a relentless decline. After Jerry’s death, he was reduced to shoptalk with colleagues, exchanging niceties with dogowners on the boardwalk, or carrying on safely boring conversations with neighbours. Time to move on, get past Elaine, past Jerry’s death, and out of his daze of self-pity, he thought. So why not make a start at Nancy’s party?

  NANCY’S CROWD was well-heeled — stockbroker types mostly, an investment banker, a few lawyers, a software engineer, a sprinkle of people in the film industry. Money was the social lubricant, but academic credentials, preferably earned at an Ivy League university, counted for something as well. Which explained why Nancy had invited him, why she thought he fit in. But David was uneasy. He had the prickly sensation of danger, of something he should avoid or escape altogether.

  The guests milled around, eddying in and out of rooms, forming little clusters, talking. Nancy discreetly surveyed the scene. She saw David stuck on the fringes, wandering aimlessly from one group to another, and came to his rescue.

  “Let me introduce you to Laura Nagy,” she said, putting on her warmest hostess tone. Nancy’s enthusiasm for her guest of honour was palpable. She steered David across the room to the future occupant of the guest house.

  “Isn’t she darling?” she breathed into his ear.

  But “darling” wasn’t the adjective David would have used. Nancy’s choice of words was off when she was in gushing mode.

  Laura was model-thin, achingly stylish, with adamantine cheekbones. Her beauty was of the austere kind. She was wearing a thigh-grazing black dress, glittery black ankle socks, and high-heeled pumps. The matching glittery choker around her neck reminded David of a dog collar. She was definitely not darling. She was slightly outré. A type that attracted him, dangerously. Please, God, don’t let me fall for her, he thought. She’s got NO written all over her face. I’m too old to suffer that kind of humiliation. But he felt a miraculous stirring as his eyes wandered over her slender body.

  Nancy cheerfully slipped an arm around Laura and introduced David. The man in the grey Armani suit, who had been talking to Laura, broke for another group. Nancy lingered long enough to cement the new configuration. She managed to spark a conversation, gave David’s shoulder an encouraging squeeze and moved on, resuming her duty round and leaving him to face Laura on his own.

  It was hard going. He knew it would be like that. Laura was stingy with words, and he wasn’t good at making conversation, could hear the drag in his own voice. Meanwhile, his brain was cross-firing questions: Where have I seen those amber cat eyes before? The narrow face framed by thick dead-straight bangs? The boyish, faintly cruel smile? Nowhere, he thought, except in my imagination. Laura was the perfect fit for his desire. She was a fantasy déjà vu. He couldn’t resist Laura’s gamine promise and struggled to keep the words going despite the cold anger in her eyes, as if she, like David, had been dragged to the party against her will.

  From across the room, Nancy shot them a look of approval. Red highlights were running across Laura’s dark hair like lightning. The prime colours merged nicely with the Mondrian on the wall behind her. David wondered whether Nancy used aesthetic principles in picking her guests, choosing them like design elements to show off the house to advantage.

  He asked Laura about her work at the Getty. She gave him clipped answers and dodged sideways. He could see she was impatient to get away. She had no time to waste on a nondescript, thirty-something academic. She was probably looking for an art dealer or a media chief or a software entrepreneur.

  Her tight-lipped answers began to sap David’s energy. Or was it her voice, which had a shadow of a drawl, a slight foreign accent. Or the funereal black of her cocktail dress? Their conversation was flagging. He was about to give up when he realized where he had seen her before. Jerry’s funeral! She was a fellow mourner. He suddenly remembered Laura’s solemn upturned face as she was listening to the eulogy, the fish-pale colour of her cheeks and forehead, the pursed, disapproving lips. Did she, too, think that the cemetery was too beautiful and the man who gave the eulogy not eloquent enough? That his words, floating above the perfect lawn, did not match the man they were meant to describe? Still, the mourners were moved by the eulogy. They were weeping in each other’s arms. Their tears at least did justice to Jerry. David and Laura had stood apart, solitary and dry-eyed.

  “We’ve met before,” he said to her. “At Jerry White’s funeral.”

  “Ah, yes,” she said, “last September.” Her carmine mouth turned soft. She was about to say more, cut across the boundaries, but then she swallowed the words and lowered her eyes. When she raised them again, her face had turned to pasteboard, and her lips were a pencil-thin line refusing to divulge private information.

  But David couldn’t admit another uncertainty. His brain was overloaded with doubts. There was no more room for unanswered questions. He needed to know: What was the connection between Laura and Jerry? He knew Jerry’s friends. He had been to many of his parties, but he’d never seen Laura until the day of the funeral. Was she a secret Jerry guarded from his friends?

  “Did you know Jerry well?” he said.

  “Sometimes I think I didn’t know him at all,” she said. Before she could say more, Nancy came by, put a possessive arm around David and asked everyone to move to the dining room. The conversations broke up. People began circling the elegant table, looking for their place card.

  It was a moment of hope and fear. Please, God, don’t let me sit next to the lawyer whose brain is a mash of bylaws or the jovial man who has been on a thousand cruises.

  David ended up across from Laura’s father, a barrel-chested fellow with a florid complexion and abundant wavy hair. Zoltan Nagy did not share his daughter’s reticence. He talked volubly, with large hand movements that threatened to overturn his wineglass. His black shirt and candy-pink tie clashed with the décor of the house. No aesthetic principle could account for his presence at Nancy’s table.

  The caterers were gliding behind the backs of the company like dancers. Perhaps that’s what they were, moonlighting dancers, impossibly lithe and elegant, weaving in and out of the room, balancing serving dishes and refilling glasses.

  Zoltan was holding forth on the meaning of life. His heroic tenor carried and dominated the conversation. His ideas, it seemed to David, were a fuzzy catalogue of grammatical possibilities, a pileup of words growing at a dizzying rate. Zoltan was an analyst. Was it typical of shrinks to talk like that?

  Irritation crept up on David, became unbearable. He interrupted Zoltan and said sharply: “So, what does it all mean — put in logical terms?”

  Zoltan gave him a crinkle-eyed look. “You want to know what it means? Okay, I’ll put it in logical terms for you. Are you familiar with the reductionist-vitalist argument?”

  “Never heard of it,” David said. Apparently it was part of the General Systems Theory. Zoltan spouted a great deal about the difference between the closed, purely physico-chemical processes of organisms and the open systems that import free energy from outside themselves and could, under certain circumstances, result in states of mutual dynamic interaction.

  “That’s a well-established phenomenon,” he said. “And what is valid in behavioural sciences — self-actualization, intermingling, and re-formation — can also, under specific conditions, take place in biology.” As he spoke, his hands drew arcs in the air, banking and swooping like seagulls.

  “I’m afraid I don’t follow,” David said. “Are you suggesting that an object or a person might, physiologically, become another? That a fake Mondrian could turn into a real one, for example? Or that Nancy could turn into Laura?” Out of the corner of his eye he saw Nancy looking at Zoltan with the expectant smile of a child waiting for a magician to work his trick.

 
Zoltan leaned back and gave David a quizzical smile. For a moment, it seemed he had no comeback, but then he recovered and carried on in the same fluid style, as if he was quoting himself. “Let me put it this way, David. If schemes are isomorphic in regard to the underlying invariances and if all areas of reality are reduced to a single level, yes, they may become interchangeable and vertically interrelated. Isomorphy of invariant constructs is known to occur in nature in differentiated forms.”

  “You mean there is scientific proof for this reductionist — what did you call it?”

  “Reductionist-vitalist argument,” Zoltan said with a kindly smile, as if to placate an idiot. “I regard it as scientific proof. It is, of course, intuitive rather than mathematical, but it follows the logical deductive principles of mathematics.”

  “I find it confusing,” David said doggedly.

  Zoltan shrugged his shoulders. “Some things,” he said, “are difficult to put in layman’s terms. A minimum of mathematical training is required to understand the implications of the theory, I’m afraid.”

  Pompous ass! David looked at the rest of the table for confirmation, for support. Nancy looked suddenly flustered. There was a smirk on Laura’s face, a mocking smile, which disappeared as soon as she met David’s eyes. Her expression became unreadable.

  The investment banker, who had been raring to hold forth and give them his economic prognostications, riffed on Zoltan’s psychobabble.

  “Let me tell you about the mutual dynamic interactions in the marketplace,” he said.

  The faces of the men around the table showed relief. Here was a topic they knew something about. Everything was back to normal: Gourmet food, vintage wine, the mellow glow of silver serving dishes, and the light patter of trade deals, travel anecdotes,and political jokes.

  HE HAD FEARED the party would be a disaster, but walking home, David noticed that his lethargic mood was lifting, giving way to a tingling sensation of annoyance at Zoltan’s one-upmanship, and a prick of desire for Laura, whose perfectly defined butt had entered his force field. He felt no more than a shadow of guilt when he plugged her into a mind game and bedded her down on satin. The fantasy felt good, the buzz held. The next morning he woke up with a spurt of energy.

  After breakfast, he went up to his study and pulled the printout of his manuscript from the filing cabinet, where it had rested for months. He flipped through the pages and the questions and corrections he had written in the margins. Pre-empting the doubts that threatened to hobble him again, he quickly sat down at the computer, opened the file and started editing the text.

  It went well until he started thinking about Laura and anxiety set in. Desire tinged with the fear of failure ran down his spine. He stopped typing. Remember: Relax your posture. Rest your eyes every thirty minutes. This was advice for which David had paid a chiropractor eighty dollars. Looking up from the computer screen, he rested his eyes on Nancy’s backyard, on the immaculate green lawn and the glittering reflection of the sunlight in the pool, the cabana soon to be inhabited by Laura, the object of his desire and the source of renewed anxiety, both. He straightened his spine, rolled his shoulders and stretched his neck. Most neck pain results from a head forward posture, according to the leaflet the chiropractor had given him. He drew his neck back. Was he doing this right? Guiding the chin with the fingertips helps to avoid an unwanted up and down movement, the leaflet said. He retracted his chin once more, this time using his fingertips to ensure he wasn’t nodding up and down. Keep your eyes level. If the exercise is performed correctly, you will feel your chest rise. He was concentrating on his chest, when a movement outside caught his eye. Zoltan was strolling across the lawn, heading for a lounge chair. He was wearing a Bolshevist red T-shirt that revealed a tuft of chest hair, and he was carrying a glass of orange juice.

  Was it a follow-up visit or a sleepover? David squinted, trying to decide whether the pants were the same pants Zoltan had worn last night. Nancy appeared in a burst of colour, dressed in a kimono with a Bird-of-Paradise design. As she settled into a deck chair beside Zoltan, the kimono birds seemed to flap their wings, ready to take flight. Zoltan leaned forward and said something to her, moving the conversation along with a wave of his hands to give his words momentum. His mouth opened and closed steadily. His voice drifted through the open window into David’s study. He couldn’t tell whether Nancy had anything to say in response. He could see only the back of her head. Zoltan finished his story with a belly laugh, and Nancy’s hands went up in a gesture of pleasant surprise. Her tinkling laughter seemed to make ripples in the pool.

  That’s alright, then, David thought. He needn’t have worried about being in Nancy’s crosshairs. She had found an escort or boyfriend or whatever role Zoltan was playing there. David watched him giveNancy a half-hug and Nancy wiggle her painted toes in response and touch Zoltan’s shoulder with an addled coziness. That was settled then, but the sight of the old lovers discoloured his dreams of Laura. She needed a sexier background. He turned his eyes away from the window to guard his perfect fantasies of Laura.

  DAVID’S ENERGY LEVEL was holding steady. He was at his computer the next morning when a moving van pulled into Nancy’s driveway. A black Mini Cooper drew up behind it, with Zoltan in the driver’s seat. It was a ridiculously small car for a large man like Zoltan. Of course the vintage Karmann Ghia in David’s garage wasn’t much bigger, but it was the right size for him. And it was a beautiful car, which excused a lot, including the fact that he had paid too much for it.

  Zoltan wriggled out from behind the steering wheel, Houdini-like, stood on the pavement dipping at the knees as if to limber up, and started giving instructions to the movers. They carted a couple of IKEA boxes into the guest house, and wheeled along a clothes rack with zip-up bags.

  Nancy appeared in the backyard and bussed Zoltan on the cheek. There was a replay of the tinkling laughter scene David had witnessed the morning after the party. This time, Zoltan did a little pantomime for Nancy, capering on the lawn, waltzing with an imaginary partner.

  There was no sign of Laura. No sign of the real-life Laura at any rate. Only her avatar, her effigy which was now firmly lodged in the back of David’s brain. He started to worry. Were the clothes bags on the rack he had seen Laura’s, or was there a change of plans, with Zoltan staying at the guest house instead of his daughter? Was Laura doomed to a virtual existence in David’s head, while a reality show developed next door with Nancy in the lead? He didn’t think that Zoltan was right for the role of Nancy’s lover. He remembered her claim to aristocracy by marriage. She had an old-fashioned sense of class. It was surprising to see her on such friendly terms with a man like Zoltan, a shameless self-promoter, a crass type really. Of course, Nancy was a woman of a certain age, and eligible men were hard to find. And perhaps she liked Zoltan’s antics. He was a showman at any rate, the kind who pulls rabbits out of hats.

  David got up from his desk. Why was he so irritated by the Nancy-Zoltan scenario? Was he begrudging them a good time because he had no partner? So Elaine had walked out on him. These things happened. Relationships collapsed. He and Elaine weren’t compatible. But that was no reason to resent other people having a good time. If Nancy liked Zoltan, great. It wasn’t his business to judge her taste in men. No, he realized, it had nothing to do with Nancy or Zoltan. It was his desire for Laura that was making him short-tempered.

  Perhaps it would be better to roll his computer desk away from the window and cut the pool deck from his peripheral vision. Or should he keep the desk where it was and close the blinds instead? He hesitated, and the indecision troubled him. Was he slipping back into his former state of morbid doubt? Half an hour later he was still sitting at the desk, wondering if he should move the computer or shut the blinds, when he heard the doorbell ring.

  He craned his neck and had a bird eye’s view of Nancy standing at the door. She had changed into Capri pants and was jangling the golden bra
celets on her arm as if the sound of the doorbell needed reinforcing.

  He went downstairs and opened the door.

  “Nancy!” he said, feigning surprise, hoping that she had not seen him peering from the window. “Come on in.”

  “I need to ask you a favour,” she said with just the right tone of polite hesitation. Her hand went up in a supplicant gesture. The golden bangles at her wrist slipped, lodging halfway up her arm.

  “Consider it done,” David said gallantly to make up for his uncharitable thoughts about her and Zoltan.

  She patted his shoulder playfully. “Don’t say yes until you’ve heard what it is.”

  She sat down on the ancient sofa in the living room, making the centre sag and the end cushions rise. Air escaped from the seams like a suppressed sigh. I really must get rid of the sofa, David thought. And the white throw as well. It looks like a dead man’s shroud.

  “So what can I do for you, Nancy?” he said, trying to sound hearty, although now he was afraid that he had promised too much and would be drawn into something more than he was able to do.

  “I expected Laura to move in this weekend,” Nancy said, “but now it seems there will be a delay, which is awkward, because we’ll be leaving for Cairo in a couple of days.”

  We? Meaning she and Zoltan?

  Nancy left the “we” unexplained. “We booked the trip months ago — a Nile cruise — and we can’t possibly change the dates now.” She paused, giving David a helpless look. Her mouth was shaped into a plangent “o,” a mute complaint about Laura’s whims and about her own predicament.

  So, no Laura. At least not this weekend. David pushed down his disappointment.