without forcing myself up off the chair. Then you walked in the door. I kept calling the number of a friend, missing, she’s one of the photographs on the walls and windows everywhere, Davia, officially missing, I can barely say her name, in the middle of the night, dial the number, let it ring. I was afraid, in the daytime, other people would be there to pick up the phone, somebody who knew something I didn’t want to hear. Then you walked in the door. You ask yourself why you took the briefcase out of the building. That’s why. So you could bring it here. So we could get to know each other. That’s why you took it and that’s why you brought it here, to keep me alive.”
He didn’t believe this but he believed her. She felt it and meant it.
“You ask yourself what the story is that goes with the briefcase. I’m the story,” she said.
7
The two dark objects, the white bottle, the huddled boxes. Lianne turned away from the painting and saw the room itself as a still life, briefly. Then the human figures appear, Mother and Lover, with Nina still in the armchair, thinking remotely of something, and Martin hunched on the sofa now, facing her.
Finally her mother said, “Architecture, yes, maybe, but coming out of another time entirely, another century. Office towers, no. These shapes are not translatable to modern towers, twin towers. It’s work that rejects that kind of extension or projection. It takes you inward, down and in. That’s what I see there, half buried, something deeper than things or shapes of things.”
Lianne knew, in a pinprick of light, what her mother was going to say.
She said, “It’s all about mortality, isn’t it?”
“Being human,” Lianne said.
“Being human, being mortal. I think these pictures are what I’ll look at when I’ve stopped looking at everything else. I’ll look at bottles and jars. I’ll sit here looking.”
“You’ll need to move the chair a little closer.”
“I’ll push the chair up to the wall. I’ll call the maintenance man and have him push the chair for me. I’ll be too frail to do it myself. I’ll look and I’ll muse. Or I’ll just look. After a while I won’t need the paintings to look at. The paintings will be excess. I’ll look at the wall.”
Lianne crossed to the sofa, where she gave Martin a light poke in the arm.
“What about your walls? What’s on your walls?”
“My walls are bare. Home and office. I keep bare walls,” he said.
“Not completely,” Nina said.
“All right, not completely.”
She was looking at him.
“You tell us to forget God.”
The argument had been here all this time, in the air and on the skin, but the shift in tone was abrupt.
“You tell us this is history.”
Nina looked at him, she stared hard at Martin, her voice marked by accusation.
“But we can’t forget God. They invoke God constantly. This is their oldest source, their oldest word. Yes, there’s something else but it’s not history or economics. It’s what men feel. It’s the thing that happens among men, the blood that happens when an idea begins to travel, whatever’s behind it, whatever blind force or blunt force or violent need. How convenient it is to find a system of belief that justifies these feelings and these killings.”
“But the system doesn’t justify this. Islam renounces this,” he said.
“If you call it God, then it’s God. God is whatever God allows.”
“Don’t you realize how bizarre that is? Don’t you see what you’re denying? You’re denying all human grievance against others, every force of history that places people in conflict.”
“We’re talking about these people, here and now. It’s a misplaced grievance. It’s a viral infection. A virus reproduces itself outside history.”
He sat hunched and peering, leaning toward her now.
“First they kill you, then you try to understand them. Maybe, eventually, you’ll learn their names. But they have to kill you first.”
It went on for a time and Lianne listened, disturbed by the fervor in their voices. Martin sat wrapped in argument, one hand gripping the other, and he spoke about lost lands, failed states, foreign intervention, money, empire, oil, the narcissistic heart of the West, and she wondered how he did the work he did, made the living he made, moving art, taking profit. Then there were the bare walls. She wondered about that.
Nina said, “I’m going to smoke a cigarette now.”
This eased the tension in the room, the way she said it, gravely, an announcement and an event suitably consequential, measured to the level of discussion. Martin laughed, coming out of his tight crouch and heading to the kitchen for another beer.
“Where’s my grandson? He’s doing my portrait in crayon.”
“You had a cigarette twenty minutes ago.”
“I’m sitting for my portrait. I need to unwind.”
“He gets out of school in two hours. Keith is going to pick him up.”
“Justin and I. We need to talk about skin color, flesh tones.”
“He likes white.”
“He’s thinking very white. Like paper.”
“He uses bright colors for the eyes, the hair, maybe the mouth. Where we see flesh, he sees white.”
“He’s thinking paper, not flesh. The work is a fact in itself. The subject of the portrait is the paper.”
Martin walked in licking foam from the rim of the glass.
“Does he have a white crayon?”
“He doesn’t need a white crayon. He has white paper,” she said.
He stopped to look at the vintage passport photos on the south wall, stained with age, and Nina watched him.
“So beautiful and so dignified,” she said, “those people and those photographs. I’ve just renewed my passport. Ten years come and gone, like a sip of tea. I’ve never cared much about how I look in photographs. Not the way some people do. But this photograph scares me.”
“Where are you going?” Lianne said.
“I don’t have to go anywhere to own a passport.”
Martin came around to her chair and stood behind it, leaning over to speak softly.
“You should go somewhere. An extended trip, when we get back from Connecticut. No one is traveling now. You should think about this.”
“Not a good idea.”
“Far away,” he said.
“Far away.”
“ Cambodia. Before the jungle overtakes what remains. I’ll go with you if you like.”
Her mother smoked a cigarette like a woman in the 1940s, in a gangster film, all nervous urgency, in black and white.
“I look at the face in the passport photo. Who is that woman?”
“I lift my head from the washbasin,” Martin said.
“Who is that man? You think you see yourself in the mirror. But that’s not you. That’s not what you look like. That’s not the literal face, if there is such a thing, ever. That’s the composite face. That’s the face in transition.”
“Don’t tell me this.”
“What you see is not what we see. What you see is distracted by memory, by being who you are, all this time, for all these years.”
“I don’t want to hear this,” he said.
“What we see is the living truth. The mirror softens the effect by submerging the actual face. Your face is your life. But your face is also submerged in your life. That’s why you don’t see it. Only other people see it. And the
