He would be patient and kind. He would never blame a woman for her indifference, for her preferences, for her failure to love him. And yet, here he was repeating the same mistake, unable to paint or, even, build his new name, knowing full well that he didn’t stand a chance with towering Crystalline no matter how many hours a day he spent before his easel or working through the tongue exercises he memorized from Maxim.

  “I think I’ll leave you two to your reading,” I said and stood up.

  Crystalline looked at me with something more focused than friendliness and said, “I hope you’ll come and see my work soon, Sol.”

  “I’d like that very much. And yours, too, Theo,” I said, but he only grunted, as I headed for the door.

  In the balmy night, out of the cold library air I felt energized and fully awake for the first time since I’d left Los Angeles. Perhaps it was Crystalline’s attention, or believing I’d defended Theo, or because I’d adapted and performed Lina Klein’s story, or because the jet lag was fading at last.

  Whatever it was, instead of walking home, I entered The Spiral and wound around in the dark until I came to the six-fingered hand, lit from below, its shadow fracturing in the shifting bamboo. And then Siddhartha stepped out of the dark-green night.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, when I jumped. “I wasn’t trying to scare you.”

  He sat next to me on the bench.

  “Come here often?”

  “Cute,” he said.

  “Are you following me?”

  “Just passing by.”

  “This is good, I think,” I said nodding at the hand.

  “I like it, too.”

  “Is it his?”

  “Depends on who you ask.”

  “And the heads outside?”

  “As I told you, some people say they’re his. Some say Henry Moore.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “He’s got the money.”

  “But does he have the taste?”

  “See for yourself. There’s an eval tomorrow,” he said and then, after a long moment, “Are you happy here, Sol?”

  “I’m glad I came, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “People have been good to you?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Though I don’t think Theo is all that happy I’m here.”

  Sid leaned forward, all at once alert and focused.

  “No? Why do you say that? Did he insult you?”

  “No, no. Of course not. Forget it. It really makes no difference at all.”

  “All right. Do you think you’ll write about us?”

  “Us?”

  “This place. Him. Whatever.”

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure what there is to say, really. As I’ve told the Director of Communications.”

  Again, he didn’t take the bait.

  “You’re loyal to him,” I said.

  “How can I not be?”

  I was tempted to answer his question, but I didn’t have the energy for it, or for a conversation at all. I’d have been happy to sit with him there without speaking, watching the greening hand and its ever-changing background. I wished then that he’d put his arm around my shoulders, which surprised me. The desire and its intensity.

  “Well,” he said, standing up, “I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

  I shook my head as if to say, don’t worry, but I don’t know how he translated it. Then he was gone and I stayed on and thought of Lina Klein drifting into one of her darker moods at the end of her SoHo story, “All those people gone, Soli, disappeared from my life, most of them dead. And after all their chatter, their philosophies and opinions, I can’t remember a single one of their names. Sometimes, what I’d really like is to just stop talking altogether.”

  “You mean forever?”

  She shook her head as if to say, forget it.

  And now I thought, More than anything else, maybe that was her reason. Just for the silence.

  18

  It was a dark and stormy night and all along the ridge, The Garden’s artists stood before their studios. They wore summer scarves and buttoned shirts, cotton dresses and black denim, Birkenstocks instead of bare feet. Crystalline sat outside her studio on a tall yellow stool all dressed in bluish grey, one leg thrown over another. It seemed impossible that she didn’t have a cigarette slotted between two fingers, or, at least, a phone in her hand. It was striking how different the world was without those contemporary props of diversion, how their absence altered the states of both solitude and assembly. It forced our chins up. It kept us still. Or most of us. Pacing in front of his studio was put-upon Theo, who appeared to be on the verge of combustion. He moved like a man one avoids on the subway.

  As for my own phone, from the instant I was sealed into that airplane at LAX I’d stopped paying attention, but it wasn’t as if in New York I was deeply invested in worlds outside my own. I let the news go the way of books. I gave up watching those synthetic-skinned sermonizers diving after our nation’s own supreme leader deeper and deeper into the oily catacombs, prattling on and on, more and more befuddled between the incessant ads for pharmaceuticals.

  Do not take Abilify if you’re allergic to Abilify.

  One day after the next, our surrealist tragicomedy strained the bounds of credulity and after a while I changed the channel and moved to the insane nation of Bravo, where at commercial breaks, I was more likely to be confronted by my own handiwork.

  I wish I could say that I stopped paying attention because the horrors of our time, the sociopaths we deserved, and all those cabinets of cowards caused me too much despair and pain.

  Really though, as Charlotte Klein loved to point out, the problem was my own cowardice, my utter failure to do a single thing about any of it.

  After I’d moved in with Charity and stopped responding to my mother’s constant barrage of increasingly conservative op-eds, I told her that I’d given up.

  “I liked you more when you were self-righteous,” she said.

  “But have you ever watched Revenge Body?”

  She was not amused. “How long have I been telling you how little your feelings matter? Other people’s suffering depresses you. You’re tired of it. You don’t like the way you feel. You’re bored and your feelings are hurt because some cop beats a man to death? And then you come home parroting your goy girlfriend and lecture me about what I can and can’t say? And now you quit altogether?”

  I’d heard these lectures so many times before. They always ended with the same rousing conclusion: do something for someone else. First the someone should have been anyone who had less than I did. But later, she modified her directive to, “Above all, a Jew. A Jew would be a start. All the Jews would be better. Israel would be ideal. But at this point I’ll take anyone. Anyone other than your precious little self.”

  The three of us at the beach together. A rare outing. Cloudless winter day, too cold to swim, but warm enough for mother and daughter to sit on the sand and yell at each other. I was maybe eleven years old, before my father went out for cigarettes. I had, as I always did when they fought, a stomachache and complained. She burst into a rage. “I don’t give a fuck how you feel,” she said. “I’m so tired of hearing about your feelings. Go puke in the bushes if you need to, but you’re not the only one here.”

  Lina Klein looked at me and shrugged, which always meant, you see what she’s like? As if I didn’t already know. Nearby there was a scrubbed family sitting on a big Navajo blanket having a picnic. The parents gaped at my mother while their kids stared at me.

  “Go fuck yourselves,” my mother said.

  They swept up their blanket and scurried away. And after they’d gone, Charlotte Klein said to me, “I don’t give a fuck about you. It isn’t you we’re concerned with. The individual will be the end of us all.” A little Marxist parenting at the seaside.

  My grandmother kept her eyes on mine, perhaps trying to mitigate whatever damage was being done to my spongy mind. Always that slight smile on her face, which for so long I took to mean wisdom and kindness but would only later come to understand as something else.

  Other times, my mother was gentler. Though she would never explicitly apologize, later she’d come into my room and rub my back as I pretended to sleep. “Sweetest of dreams,” she’d say sounding just like her mother, something I don’t think she ever understood.

  Now she was vivid in my mind while lightning veined the horizon and I waited with those pretty painters for her least favorite kind of man. I missed my mother and felt an abrupt and awful sense of guilt for having abandoned her alone in that apartment where she had knelt to scrub pink tint from the yellowing porcelain. I should have never come here. Not after, for the first time in my life, she told me to do as I pleased.

  But then there he was, sweeping down the hill, chin high, dressed all in white, arms spread as if for flight, and as he slowed to a stop, I felt moved in a minor way. Here he stood before us in the flesh, the guru, the master himself. And what was that feeling if not, when all was said and done, hope? Didn’t he carry with him the possibility of better lives, better selves? Answers to impossible questions? Antidotes to sadness and suffering?

  “Come, come, my friends. Gather around, please,” and all the artists made a crowd in the light of The Barn. Once they had settled, he took a breath and began to speak. The man, it seemed, could do nothing without first giving a speech.

  “We are all cowards, my friends. Even I, after all these years of life, am a coward. We, all of us, must understand the direct, indisputable correlation between cowardice and failure. This is crucial. It is not just that you are afraid. Understand: cowardice is not fear, cowardice is failure to act in the face of fear. In all the ways we are cowards, that is, in all the ways we fail to act, each instance of paralysis constitutes a sharp point of loss. You must understand this. It is essential. Let us consider commitment, let us consider devotion and engagement. When we fail to commit—whether to art or to love—we shall be punished for that failure. Fail to risk heartbreak and you will be punished with solitude. Fail to devote yourself to beauty and you will be punished with hollow work. Devotion is total. Risk is total. There must be no equivocation. Too many of these failures and you will be left angry, regretful, vacant and in the end, at the very best, if you’re very lucky, you’ll be left warning others not to make the same mistakes you did. Of course, if your failures of courage are few, if your accomplishments are many, then you may have the luxury of both, you may stand before an audience of young artists offering well-earned advice and wisdom gained from years of devotion and risk.”

  Here he bestowed upon us, a bright, knowing smile. I could just see the top of Crystalline’s head. There was no sign of Plume. Siddhartha was standing toward the front looking particularly striking, the soft orange light enhancing the line of his jaw.

  I tried to decode Crystalline’s face.

  Plume appeared then at her master’s side looking alert and professional, hair drawn back in a tight ponytail, revealing the full proportions of her elegant neck. I saw not a flicker of humor in her eyes.

  “Come,” Sebastian Light said, “let’s begin.” He floated through the crowd and his flock followed. He passed the first studio and raised his hands at the second. We all stopped and then from the crowd stepped the slender man I’d seen playing guitar in front of The Barn, the man whose very fingertips were connected to The Garden.

  He entered the studio and in the bright light looked out at us with his snow-blue eyes.

  “Saber, are you ready?”

  “Flow, flow,” Saber said with that familiar California-rich-boy-burnout-twang that says I’m so relaxed even the full expression of complete words is taxing. And so, flow flow was pronounced flah flah. He bowed and swept his arm in welcome. Light entered, and we all pushed forward behind him.

  I stood behind Siddhartha, close enough to smell him. Over his shoulder, I could see Crystalline in profile, her jaw set. Toward the back was an easel draped with a white sheet and just to the side a metal folding chair.

  Light raised his chin and began again. “I will approach this painting as I would a painting in any gallery. I will not consider my personal relationship with Saber, such that it is. Perhaps as patron, I will be harsher than the average critic, for his success will also be mine. I will look, I will absorb, and I will respond. I hope that it will not only be Saber who learns from this experience, but all of you. I hope that you will see through my tired eyes, which have seen terrible things and wonderful art, terrible art and wonderful things. So much of both. Have faith that my intentions are pure. My aim is to educate and elucidate, to use my experience, my knowledge, my love of beauty, of you and all your potential, to inspire. I do not wish to cause pain, but when I do cause pain, and pain is often caused, I do so with tremendous regret. Please know that. Please know that I understand the terror, the hope, the desire, the dream. In the end, what I want is what you want. Beauty, my friends, beauty.”

  Somehow the crowd was transfixed, not, incredibly, because its members were witnessing an astonishing outpouring of dreck, but because they were moved. It seemed impossible that the man was serious, that any of them were, yet no one broke character, no one laughed.

  I looked over at Crystalline, who looked back. She grinned just barely, but it wasn’t clear if it was flirtation, or some acknowledgement, some agreement that the whole thing was, yes, absurd. Then Light was speaking again.

  “Come,” said our Susan Sontag of the palms, and Saber stepped forward to present his smooth, shadowless Germanic face, upon which everything was revealed—no darkness beneath the eyes, no furrows, no hollows in which to hide secrets or perversions. He was the Light ideal—skin taut, heart red. No, there was no chance Saber went home to torture his Chihuahua or masturbate in a moose suit.

  “I am undefended. I am free.”

  Sebastian Light turned and drew the sheet away with a little flash of flair. Then there it was, a single painting exposed to the air, to the eyes of us all, to the expert gaze of our supreme critic. A silence fell. We waited for the answers: good or bad? art or not? beautiful or hideous?

  There were our swaying palms rendered with slight impressionistic style set against skies of sunset colors, planted in seas of fire, in which floated various words dashed out in a loose cursive: soul, live, dance, forever, truth, believe, gratitude, sing. Saber had slashed his name in the blue sands beneath the flames.

  I looked at Crystalline. She’d sunk her shining front teeth into her bottom lip. There was loathing in her eyes. I leaned to my left in hopes of seeing Siddhartha’s face, but no joy.

  “Well,” Light said, as he began to move around the painting, “this is something extraordinary. A gorgeous balance between the glory of the physical world, our physical world, and an attitude, a philosophy of openness and hope, optimism and light. You see, here in the flames, we find danger at our feet, always lapping at our knees, but above us there is freedom, there is life. Even in the terrible fire below, we may find our souls, our faith, the will to live, to dance, to believe. Not only have you revealed yourself, but in so doing you have revealed a love for the natural world. This painting incorporates passion and fear, scale and scope. And it is true. What you have achieved is beauty. I’m proud of you, and so should we all be.”

  By the time he’d finished, Saber was sobbing. This was the only sound. Were the others impressed? Did they share our critic’s opinion? Did anyone, too, believe that this shit in any way resembled what Light had described?

  “Anyone?”

  “I like it,” said a muscular blond woman with magnificent teeth.

  “Yes,” whispered a wiry, wire-haired woman, her stern mouth in argument with her lively eyes. “It moves me in ways I can’t explain.”

  “Mmmm,” agreed her neighbor.

  “I love the words. The words draw the piece together.”

  On they went, the soft oohs and gentle ahs of inoffensive concurrence.

  And then Crystalline spoke. “Come on.”

  Light turned on her. “Yes, Crystalline, an opinion?”

  “It’s always the same thing, isn’t it? More kitschy trash.”

  Light stepped before the painting as if protecting a weaker man from violence, leveled his eyes at her, but said nothing. She held his gaze.

  Was he displeased? Was it part of the show? Was her little rebellion staged for my benefit? It was impossible to know.

  “Saber,” Light said at last.

  Saber stood up from his chair and joined his hands. “I have no room in my heart for hatred,” he said. “I am here on this earth for beauty, for love, not for anger. If you have something better to show, Crystalline, then bring it with you to the Biennale.” This last he did his best to pronounce with real Italian gusto, really hammering on that last syllable.

  Crystalline squinted at the painting as if it were a plate of rancid offal.

  I glanced at Sid, who was watching her with an unsettling coldness.

  Light said, “This is a lesson to be learned here. Not everyone will like your work. Some will despise it. Out of jealousy or true differences of aesthetic tastes. Perhaps Crystalline spoke out of turn, but another artist’s sharp tongue is something to get used to, for the art world is as cruel as any other. We must survive it or die. As I said from the outset, as I’ve said before every evaluation, there will be pain. And here, I can only imagine, that Saber is in pain. The question now is whether he will be defeated by the brutality of his compatriot. Or will he use suffering as fuel?” He laid his hand on Saber’s shoulder. “I maintain that what you have created is a superb work and I hope that’s worth something to your heart. Before we finish, I want to say something about cruelty. We are not compelled to like what we see, but here at least, we do have the responsibility to be kind in the transmission of our opinions. I will urge you, Crystalline, to calibrate, to consider the way you communicate, to think about what is necessary and what is not. Now, does anyone have anything to contribute before we move on?”