A Grave Talent

'They're sure to have something. Saturdays are always slow.'

'Anyway, Lee and I will stay inside from now on, as there's sure to be people wandering up and down the street. Hopefully it'll be a couple of days before one of the neighbors squeals on us. Lee has to go out tomorrow afternoon to see one of her clients at the hospice, and she has two people coming to the house, one tonight and one Monday night, that she really doesn't want to put off. The rest she's cancelled. Is that okay?'

'Let the guys across the street know exactly who they are and when they're coming, so they don't get nervous. There's no point in locking yourselves off entirely, so long as—' He stopped with a look of astonishment, and Kate jerked around to look at Vaun.

She had broken, at last. Her eyes were shut and her mouth open in a little mewling o, and she was trembling. Her hands came up to cover her face, and she twisted toward Lee, who held out her arms, and Vaun went blindly into them and curled up as best she could, with her head in Lee's lap, and with Lee's arms and upper body bent fiercely around her. She huddled there all the way home, and Lee rocked her and murmured to her. The others sat silent with their thoughts.

Vaun spent the rest of the afternoon upstairs. Lee cooked, making croissants from scratch and an elaborate salade nicoise with fourteen separate marinated ingredients that took her several hours and filled the kitchen with pans, and might have been iceberg lettuce with bottled dressing for all any of them tasted it. Kate prowled the house until her nerves were jangling, and finally disappeared into the basement to pedal the exercise bicycle for an hour. She came up dripping and had a glass of wine, showered and had another glass, and watched the local news, including the amateur videotape of the backs of three blurred women, after which she felt like having several more glasses but did not.

When the news was over Lee went upstairs with a glass of whiskey, which she made Vaun drink, and then came back and set out the dinner, which they all picked at. Finally she took the food away and went to make coffee. Kate and Vaun cleared the table, but to Kate's surprise Vaun, instead of retreating upstairs, went to sit on the sofa. Kate obligingly laid and lit a fire and wondered if Vaun just wanted company. She fetched the coffee tray and poured them each a cup.

'Do you feel like a game of chess, or checkers? Backgammon?' she offered.

'No, thanks. I'd like to tell you something, you and Lee. Something about myself.'

The hum and swish of the dishwasher started up in the kitchen, and Lee came in for her coffee. Vaun rattled her cup onto the table and got up to make a silent circuit of the room, touching things. When she got back to the sofa she folded herself up into it and simply started talking. For the next two and a half hours she talked and talked, as if she had prepared it all in advance, as if she never intended to stop.

31

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'I cannot remember a time when my hands were not making a drawing,' Vaun started. 'My very earliest memory is of a birthday party, when I was two—I have a photograph that my aunt sent me four or five years ago, and it has the date on it. One of my presents was a box of those thick children's crayons and a big pad of paper. I remember vividly the sensation of pulling open the top of the box, and there was this beguiling row of eight perfect, smooth, brightly colored truncated cones, lying snugly in the cardboard. They had the most exciting smell I'd ever known. I took one out of the box—the orange one—and I made this slow, curving line on the pad. There were all these other presents sitting piled around me, but I wouldn't even look at them, I was so fascinated with the way the crayon tip made this sharp line and the flat bottom made a cobwebby wide rough line, and how I could make a heavy line of brighter orange when I pushed hard, and the way it looked when I scribbled it over and over in one place. I can still see it, my fat little hand clenched around that magical orange stick, and the thrill of it, the incredible excitement of watching those lines appear on that clean, white paper.

'My poor mother, she must have looked back on that day with loathing. Everything she hated, everything she feared, there it was, welling up in her sweet, curly-haired, two-year-old daughter.'

Vaun smiled crookedly and leaned forward to refill her cup. She put down the pot and poured a dollop of cream into the black liquid, where it billowed up thickly to the surface. She watched intently the color change, her mind far away.

'My mother was born in Paris, just after the First World War. Her father considered himself an artist, but he had absolutely no talent, other than for latching on to real artists and drinking their wine. He and my grandmother weren't married, but she put up with him until the winter of 1925, when my mother, who was about six, nearly died of pneumonia from living in an unheated attic. Grandmother decided to emigrate to California, so when he was out at a weekend party in the country she gathered up all the presents he'd been given, or helped himself to, including several respectable canvases, sold them, and bought passage for herself and my mother to New York. It took five years to work her way to San Francisco, but they made it eventually. She married when my mother was twelve, and had two more children, Red and another daughter who died young, but she never let up on her first child and drilled into her the unrelenting image of an artist as someone who steals, drinks, and is willing to allow his own daughter to die of neglect in his self-absorption.

'In due course my mother married a man who was as far from the art world as she could get. He was an accountant. He rarely drank, his parents lived in the same house they'd bought when they were first married, and he hadn't been inside an art gallery or museum since high school. Utterly stable, unimaginative, twelve years older than my mother, completely devoted to her, and, I think, somewhat awed by her sharp mind and beauty. A good man, and if he wasn't exactly what my mother needed, he was certainly what she wanted. The snapshots he took of her in those early years show a happy woman. Until my second birthday. They didn't have any other children, though as far as I know there was no physical problem. And I never had another big birthday party—she was probably afraid of having someone give me a set of paints or something.

'Of course, at the time I knew nothing of her background, why she so furiously hated my obsession with drawing. I was probably too young, even if she'd tried to tell me, but she never did try. It was only recently, about five years ago, that I finally pieced it together.'

'And how did you feel about it?' Lee asked curiously.

'Vastly relieved. When I was young I thought it was my fault, and that my inability to control myself led to their deaths. Later I put it onto her, and it seemed to me that she was a sick, jealous woman. After I dug out the truth and learned about her parents, I felt a tremendous relief. It wasn't my fault, it wasn't even her fault. It was inevitable, perhaps; certainly acceptable.

'I wonder too if her phobia didn't drive me more deeply into it. It would have been there anyway, but perhaps a more gentle, natural talent. As it was, her continual attempts to distract me, find other interests, pull me away from my crayons and pencils served only to make me more completely single-minded. I wasn't interested in toys; I didn't want to play with other kids; I just wanted to draw. Before I was four, the lower half of the house walls were a disaster, and nobody could put down a piece of paper or a pen without my making off with it. I can remember having a screaming tantrum one day when she tried to get me past the crayons in the grocery store. It must have been one unending nightmare.

'When I started going to nursery school, at about four, at first the teachers were overjoyed with this little kid who could do the most amazingly mature drawings. After a few weeks, though, they got very tired of fighting to drag me out into the playground, or sit and listen to a story, or do all the things normal, well-balanced kids do. That's when I started going to a psychiatrist.

'I must have gone through a dozen of them in the next couple of years. The earlier ones were mostly women, and looking back I think that at first they all figured that I just needed a firm hand and an understanding ear. When that made no difference they'd begin to suggest that perhaps they should be treating Mother instead, and soon I'd go off to another one.

'When I was about five, maybe six, they began to be men, rather than women, and older, and more serious. I remember asking my mother once why some of them had framed pictures on their walls that had only writing on them, and she explained about diplomas and the like.

'Finally, when I was seven, we met Dr. Hofstetter. He had a whole wall of framed diplomas and letters in his waiting room, and I was intrigued with the pattern of the black frames against the white paper and the beige wall. Four of them had red seals, beautiful symmetrical sunbursts that leapt out from the wall, the color of blood.

'I spent several months with Dr. Hofstetter, talking about what I liked to draw and looking at books, and finally he must have decided that radical therapy was needed, because one afternoon my father took me out to a