stages of their estrangement, and the old passport photos as well. This was work done half a century earlier, the paintings, and the photographs were much older, most of them, and it was work that both women loved. But she honored her mother’s wishes, arranged the shipment, thought of the dollar value of the paintings, respected her mother’s integrity, thought of the paintings themselves, Berlin-bound, to be bargained over and sold in a cell-phone transaction. The room was tomblike without them.
The gallery was in an old industrial building with a cage elevator that required a living human, full-time, to crank the lever on a rotary control, bouncing visitors up and down the shaft.
She went down a long dim corridor and found the gallery. There was no one there. She stood at the first canvas, looking. The show was small, the paintings were small. She stepped back, moved close. She liked this, alone in a room, looking.
She looked at the third painting for a long time. It was a variation on one of the paintings her mother had owned. She noted the nature and shape of each object, the placement of objects, the tall dark oblongs, the white bottle. She could not stop looking. There was something hidden in the painting. Nina’s living room was there, memory and motion. The objects in the painting faded into the figures behind them, the woman smoking in the chair, the standing man. In time she moved on to the next painting and the next, fixing each in her mind, and then there were the drawings. She hadn’t approached the drawings yet.
A man came in. He was interested in looking at her before he looked at the paintings. Maybe he expected certain freedoms to be in effect because they were like-minded people in a rundown building, here to look at art.
She moved through the open doorway into the office area, where the drawings hung. At the desk a young man leaned over a laptop. She examined the drawings. She wasn’t sure why she was looking so intently. She was passing beyond pleasure into some kind of assimilation. She was trying to absorb what she saw, take it home, wrap it around her, sleep in it. There was so much to see. Turn it into living tissue, who you are.
She went back to the main room but could not look at the work the same way with the man there, watching her or not. He wasn’t watching her but he was there, fifty and leathery, a mug-shot monochrome, probably a painter, and she went out of the room and down the corridor, where she hit the elevator button.
She realized she hadn’t picked up a catalog but didn’t go back. She didn’t need a catalog. The elevator came rattling up the shaft. Nothing detached in this work, nothing free of personal resonance. All the paintings and drawings carried the same title. Natura Morta. Even this, the term for still life, yielded her mother’s last days.
There were times, in the sports book, when he glanced at one of the screens and wasn’t sure whether he was seeing a fragment of live action or of slow-motion replay. It was a lapse that should have unsettled him, an issue of basic brain function, one reality versus another, but it all seemed a matter of false distinctions, fast, slow, now, then, and he drank his beer and listened to the mingled sounds.
He never bet on these events. It was the effect on the senses that drew him here. Everything happened remotely, even the nearest noise. The high room was dimly lit, men seated heads up, or standing, or walking through, and out of the stealthy tension in the air come the shouts, a horse breaking out of the pack, a runner rounding second, and the action moves to the foreground, there to here, life or death. He liked listening to the visceral burst, men on their feet, calling out, a rough salvo of voices that brought heat and open emotion to the soft pall of the room. Then it was over, gone in seconds, and he liked that too.
He showed his money in the poker room. The cards fell randomly, no assignable cause, but he remained the agent of free choice. Luck, chance, no one knew what these things were. These things were only assumed to affect events. He had memory, judgment, the ability to decide what is true, what is alleged, when to strike, when to fade. He had a measure of calm, of calculated isolation, and there was a certain logic he might draw on. Terry Cheng said that the only true logic in the game was the logic of personality. But the game had structure, guiding principles, sweet and easy interludes of dream logic when the player knows that the card he needs is the card that’s sure to fall. Then, always, in the crucial instant ever repeated hand after hand, the choice of yes or no. Call or raise, call or fold, the little binary pulse located behind the eyes, the choice that reminds you who you are. It belonged to him, this yes or no, not to a horse running in the mud somewhere in New Jersey.
She lived in the spirit of what is ever impending.
They embraced, saying nothing. Later they spoke in low tones that carried a nuance of tact. They would share nearly four full days of indirection before they talked about things that mattered. It was lost time, designed from the first hour to go unremembered. She would remember the song. They spent nights in bed with the windows open, traffic noises, voices carrying, five or six girls marching down the street at two a.m. singing an old rock ballad that she sang along with them, softly, lovingly, word for word, matching accents, pauses and breaks, hating to hear the voices fade. Words, their own, were not much more than sounds, airstreams of shapeless breath, bodies speaking. There was a breeze if they were lucky but even in the damp heat on the top floor under a tar roof she kept the air conditioner off. He needed to feel real air, she said, in a real room, with thunder rumbling just above.
On these nights it seemed to her that they were falling out of the world. This was not a form of erotic illusion. She was continuing to withdraw, but calmly, in control. He was self-sequestered, as always, but with a spatial measure now, one of air miles and cities, a dimension of literal distance between himself and others.
They took the kid to a couple of museums and then she watched them toss a baseball in the park. Justin threw hard. He wasted no time. He snatched the ball out of the air, took it in his bare hand, smacked it back into the glove, reared back and threw hard and then, next toss, maybe a little harder. He was like a pitching machine with hair and teeth, register set to peak velocity. Keith was amused, then impressed, then puzzled. He told the kid to calm down, ease up. He told him to follow through. There was the windup, the release, the follow-through. He told him he was burning a hole in his old man’s hand.
She came across a poker tournament on TV. He was in the next room scanning a landfill of accumulated mail. She saw three or four tables, in long shot, with spectators seated among them, clustered in pockets, in spooky blue light. The tables were slightly elevated, players immersed in a fluorescent glow and bent in mortal tension. She didn’t know where this was taking place, or when, and she didn’t know why the usual method was not in effect, close-ups of thumbs, knuckles, cards and faces. But she watched. She hit the mute button and looked at the players seated around the tables as the camera slowly swept the room and she realized that she was waiting to see Keith. The spectators sat in that icy violet light, able to see little or nothing. She wanted to see her husband. The camera caught the faces of players previously obscured and she looked closely, one by one. She imagined herself in cartoon format, a total fool, hurrying to Justin’s room, hair flying, and dragging him out of bed and standing him up in front of the screen so he could see his father, Look, in Rio or London or Las Vegas. His father was twenty feet away at the desk in the next room reading bank statements and writing checks. She watched a while longer, looking for him, and then she stopped.
They talked on day four, sitting in the living room, late, with a horsefly fixed to the ceiling.
“There are things I understand.”
“All right.”
“I understand there are some men who are only half here. Let’s not say men. Let’s say people. People who are more or less obscure at times.”
“You understand this.”
“They protect themselves this way, themselves and others. I understand this. But then there’s the other thing and that’s the family. This is the point I want to make, that we need to stay together, keep the family going. Just us, three of us, long-term, under the same roof, not every day of the year or every month but with the idea that we’re permanent. Times like these, the family is necessary. Don’t you think? Be together, stay together? This is how we live through the things that scare us half to death.”
“All right.”
“We need each other. Just people sharing the air, that’s all.”
“All right,” he said.
“But I know what’s happening. You’re going to drift away. I’m prepared for that. You’ll stay away longer, drift off somewhere. I know what you want. It’s not exactly a wish to disappear. It’s the thing that leads to that. Disappearing is the consequence. Or maybe it’s the punishment.”
“You know what I want. I don’t know. You know.”
“You want to kill somebody,” she said.
