Silence.

  “Good,” he said and began to move through the crowd, which drifted after him. When Sid passed me, he smiled but said nothing and we continued into the night.

  We followed down the ridge and then Light stopped before Theo’s studio. This was, apparently, unexpected. There was some murmuring, some worried glances. After a moment, Theo extricated himself from the crowd and said, “It’s not my turn.”

  Light said, “Now’s the time, my friend, now is the time.”

  “Could I have another week? Just one more week. I’m not ready.”

  “Open the door and submit.”

  And then we all waited like a mob out for justice while the artist, head down, rolled his door open. We crowded in after him, but there was no covered easel. There was only a high-backed wooden chair. Theo sat in it, and I found a place next to Crystalline.

  Light said, “Do you have anything to show us?”

  Theo was pleading now. “I’m not ready. You didn’t tell me.”

  “Enough.” Light turned and faced the crowd. I watched Theo close his eyes as our critic-in-chief began yet another sermon.

  “Art, my friends, is made by the committed. And it is those of you here who have sacrificed everything, those of you who give your souls, your blood, yourselves, you who will be artists. Is it enough? No, it is not. It is the minimum. Talent and imagination and an ability to truly see, these are all required. Passion is not enough, love is not enough, no more than loving another person is enough for that love to be reciprocated, but it is essential and those of you who do not have it, those of you who live in fear, those of you consumed and blocked by your own egos, you should go home, for you have no chance.”

  Then he turned and stepped to the side so that we could all see him turn his eyes on Theo.

  “Those of you,” he said, quieting his voice, “who’ve not managed even to choose a name, to make a single painting, who complain, who are inhospitable, who are jealous and spiteful, who cannot harness your anger, your pain and translate it into art, but instead turn it to more anger, more hatred, more jealousy, more ugliness, it is time now for you to become something else, something safer, something that requires less spleen and more mind.”

  Theo remained motionless, eyes shut tight.

  I thought, What does he mean, inhospitable?

  “Go, Theo, go back to New York, where cowards are celebrated, where meanness is mistaken for intelligence. You’re not fooling anyone here. Enough. This is not your home.”

  It was the first time I’d heard him speak the poor kid’s name.

  Silence.

  And then, Theo, without raising his voice, said, “Fuck you.” Only now did he open his eyes. “Fuck you all.”

  He looked around the room as if searching for someone to join him, to come to his defense. But, of course, no one did. I said nothing. Crystalline, her shoulder touching mine, said nothing. Sebastian Light said nothing. Theo took a deep breath, paused and then screamed in our faces, as we all stood still watching this single sad person alone in his chair.

  When he ran out of air, his fists fell open and his shoulders sagged. Then he stood up, pushed forward through the crowd which followed him outside to watch his slight silhouette growing smaller, moving in the direction of the studios.

  Light turned to us. “Well, my friends, on that unhappy note, let us bring this evening to a close. Even in The Garden, life is always life.”

  And with that bit of scintillating wisdom, he strolled off in the opposite direction, Plume following a few feet behind.

  As I began to extricate myself from the gossiping scrum, Siddhartha appeared at my side and nudged me in the ribs.

  “There’s something to write about,” he said, smiling as if he’d done me a favor.

  “What happens to Theo now?”

  “Who knows? You didn’t like him anyway.”

  He said this a bit too casually, as if Theo’s trial had meant nothing at all and for the first time, I didn’t entirely like Sid.

  “I only said he didn’t like me.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I’m sure he has a trust fund. He’ll be fine.”

  “So bitter.”

  “You met him. You want me to feel sorry for him now?”

  “You know, it occurs to me that you haven’t changed your name. Doesn’t Light give you shit about it?”

  Sid leaned forward and whispered in my ear, “He thinks my name is made up.”

  I laughed. Siddhartha of the wit and charm. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said. “I’m exhausted,” which wasn’t true. I was just tired of talking and of Sebastian Light’s silly show.

  As I walked away, I thought, I should leave here. It’s enough already. Beneath the shell, there is nothing alive. Nothing I didn’t already have in New York. It was all banal. Go home. Go see your mother. I thought of the desperation and fury of Theo’s scream. I wondered how long he’d been calling himself an artist. Maybe he really had the talent and the will and the patience and the ego for it, but I didn’t think so. On this, my instincts aligned with the head gardener: this night was the end. And now he’d have to find something else, something new to call himself at parties, and whatever that was would never be quite so beautiful.

  Still the image of him being driven away, being abandoned at the airport like a failed contestant on some shitty television show bothered me and I wished Lina Klein were there to walk me home, to talk about it. I wanted her eye, her assessment. I wanted her to sit with me there on the porch before bed and tell me where to go, what to be.

  “Be a proxy. When I can no longer be there, be there,” she said, and I swore I would try. During her life, I believed those entreaties were born only of the regret of an old person with a young heart. But she must have meant, when I end my life in your mother’s bathtub.

  “Frankel,” I so assuredly wrote (and she so proudly quoted to anyone who would listen), “as do all great artists, always maintains an area within himself of pure wildness, a place wholly free of control, of moral logic, of any logic, any law at all.”

  Was there some pure wildness, some real art, in her final moment? The planning required no courage, no originality of spirit, concept, or character, but the doing was something else entirely. To choose to draw a blade with enough pressure along her wrists, to make such an unrelenting, unequivocal decision, yes, I thought, there must be some art in that. Even some beauty.

  “Proximity to beauty, Soli,” she told me, “to talent, even if you don’t have it yourself, is what’s necessary for any kind of a good life. Get yourself as close to passion and genius as you can. Conform to nothing. Move back downtown.” Downtown, Lina Klein loved to say. Even if that mythical place barely existed, even if, as my mother gleefully reminded us, it had long ago been decimated by the capitalist machine.

  I wanted to ask her if this, Sebastian Light’s bizarre little wonderland, counted as downtown, if she’d approve, or how she’d read the place and she was so present in my mind that it wasn’t until I was a few steps from my porch that I saw Plume waiting for me on the top step.

  I recoiled. I wanted the other side, the unfastened, the irrational, the unrestrained. No more marketing, no more publicists.

  “I was passing by,” she said.

  “Just in the neighborhood?”

  “Would you sit with me, Mr. Fields?”

  I sat.

  “I’m wondering whether you’ve considered writing about us.”

  “Jesus, why does it matter so much to you? Won’t he pay you otherwise?”

  “He’s a man approaching the end of a great life. I want him to have what he wants.”

  “And he wants a profile?”

  “Yes.” Now she reached down and ran the nail of her right middle finger across the top of her left foot. “Though,” she said, sitting upright again and dropping into a confessional register, “between us, I think it’s a mistake.”

  “Why a mistake?

  “It will only disappoint him. Even if you were generous, you’d never quite get him right, or this place, or us. And then until he dies, he will feel—”

  “What?”

  She shook her head. “Sullied. This is a man who notices every dead flower, every pebble out of place. So, we go through with it. The profile is published and then he will read what you’ve written and will be forced to see his life’s work in some other way.”

  “Which is something you don’t think he should have to do?”

  “He’s an old man. What good is it? He made this extraordinary thing, changed the lives of so many artists. He used his money in such benevolent ways. Why cause him pain?”

  “Where did that money come from?”

  “You’re always asking the wrong questions.”

  “Have you considered a life in politics? You’d make a superb press secretary.”

  She shook her head. “I’ve never understood your humor. People like you. I try. I have tried. But I just don’t understand why you’d want to move through the world like this. Why must everything be mean and cold?”

  I glanced at her. She seemed genuinely frustrated. I was trying to find some indication of performance, some tell, but I only saw an unhappy woman shaking her head and looking at the sky.

  “You want me to write about this man—”

  “I don’t want you to do anything.”

  “Okay, okay. He wants the profile, but without me having any of the information I’d need to do it.”

  “Why are you so seduced by that idea?”

  “Which idea?”

  “That you must know everything. That you have some obligation to show us our flaws, our failures. You want to break them across our heads. You take such pleasure in ugliness.”

  “You’re not interested in those things?”

  “I don’t think there’s any reason to show them to an old man. What good will that do him? You want to bring him pain in the name of what, truth?”

  “I have no interest in causing anyone pain,” I said, and wondered if that was true.

  “Well,” she said and looked down at her golden feet, “I don’t know what you’re interested in, but I don’t imagine you’re likely to write something purely kind.”

  “If I were to write about him, about this place, no, I wouldn’t write some letter of adulation.”

  “But why not? Why not return his hospitality with kindness?”

  I laughed. “Let’s remember that you brought me here. You came to me. Not out of kindness, but because you wanted something. It’s not as if I was some hungry traveler whose car broke down and you took me in.”

  “Isn’t that exactly what happened?”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I said. “I like you so much more when you’re not reciting from your sacred book of saccharine.”

  I liked that line, but she didn’t even smile.

  “It’s not up to me,” she said after a long pause and with a new sadness in her voice. “This is what he wants.”

  “And you don’t want to see him wounded.”

  She raised her head now and looked at me with the softest expression I’d ever seen on her face. “Yes. That’s right. I don’t want to see him harmed at all.”

  “Why do you think this profile is so important to him?”

  “Because as is true of so many old men, he’s concerned with his legacy.” Then again, her voice fell into that confessional whisper, its sincerity impossible for me to determine. “And with revenge.”

  “Revenge?”

  She looked away. “This is off the record.”

  “All right.”

  “He tried you know. This was years ago. He went to New York, had a studio, a gallery for a while.”

  “He was a painter?”

  “Yes. He spent close to ten years there. They nearly destroyed him. They were all so cruel and smug and mean. So certain of their own perfect taste.”

  I nodded.

  “They gave him a show in a fancy gallery. They built him up and convinced him he was something different from the others. Then they attacked him.”

  “When was this?”

  “A long time ago.”

  “When?”

  “Not so long that he’s forgotten. Still, he was a different man then. Different name.”

  “What name?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It does if you want a profile.”

  “He’ll tell you what he wants to tell you.”

  “And this profile would be his revenge?”

  “That’s the way I believe he sees it, yes. He’d never say so. But yes, it’s what happens when a wound doesn’t heal right. You make terrible decisions for reasons that are beneath you.”

  “Why me, Plume? He could have chosen anyone. I can think of any number of journalists who would come here and happily produce precisely what you want.”

  “Well, as I’ve told you several times, he admired the way you wrote about Ernst Frankel. He’s really never forgotten it and—” Here she hesitated for a moment. “And they knew each other.”

  “No.”

  “Yes. In New York. Early on.”

  “And?”

  She sighed. “Frankel was ruthlessly ambitious, cruel. He betrayed him.”

  “How?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  “Come on.”

  “That’s all he’ll tell me.”

  “And so the idea is what? That I write a glowing testament to Light’s brilliance and Frankel will remember what terrible sins he committed thirty, forty years ago?”

  She shrugged. “He has the idea that it has to be you. That somehow it’ll be more potent.”

  “A little thin, don’t you think? And awfully petty for the priest of prettiness and love.”

  She looked as if she might agree with me for a moment, but then she closed her mouth.

  “Why are you telling me all of this, Plume? Why be so suddenly forthright?”

  “Because I think, in the end, you’ll write about him. Whatever his motivations, whatever yours, and even if you don’t know it yet. Also, I believe that writing about him will save your life. Which is to say, he will save you as he’s saved so many. I’m telling you these things because when you do begin to write, I hope you will do so with tenderness. I hope that you won’t make a human being who has been alive for many years, who has suffered, who is imperfect, who once had a father and a mother, who was once a child, who is as complex and strange and beautiful as anyone, into something flat and simple to be destroyed.”

  “I have no interest in destroying anyone.”

  “Perhaps not, but you seem as interested in ugliness as you are in beauty.”

  I nodded.

  She shook her head. “You adults who claim to be drawn to chaos, to violence. To what you call the real. It’s very childish.”

  “Like most of the art I’ve seen around here.”

  “Mr. Fields, I’m not here to argue aesthetics. To be honest, I don’t care what you think of the work you’ve seen here. Technique, originality, talent, it’s just not the point anymore. What matters now is service, is utility.”

  “I thought what mattered was beauty.”

  “That is what beauty is for. Nothing for the sake of itself, Sol. Those days are done. Art without aim, without argument? All that is nothing more than decadence.”

  I imagined Lina Klein listening to Plume incanting the Garden lines. How gleefully she would have filleted her. But because of the lovely lime blossom air, or for some other reason, I couldn’t muster the appropriate indignation. And who was I to argue? Perhaps there was nothing more beautiful than service. In a manner of speaking, was this not what my mother had been arguing all my life? That my very existence was tantamount to decadent performance art, that real meaning, real beauty was achieved through devotion to others?

  But was my silence an affront to my fiery grandmother? A woman who, for as long as I knew her, cultivated an incandescent hatred of “mealy, lovey-dovey, gutless bodhi tree bullshit made by pathetic painters obsessed by their precious little traumas?”

  Lina Klein loved to make pronouncements about art. As do so many who fail to produce it themselves. In these pronouncements and, more generally, in her increasing demands that I should live in a way she found admirable, in the last years of her life, I’d begun to see something in her I didn’t always like—a desperation, a fragility, an intellectual thinness. Worse, and much harder to confront, a pure black loneliness.

  “So,” I said to Plume, “art is like the electric company or the sanitation department?”

  “Of course. Do you not see that there’s beauty in the electric company? In the processes, the systems, in the machines and the people who, while you sleep, silently take your trash away.”

  “You obviously have never lived in New York.”

  Not even a smirk.

  “You’re trapped,” she said. “You’ve tied yourself to those awful old ideas and they will drown you.”

  “And you believe Sebastian Light’s ideas are better, faster, newer?”

  “I think a wiser man might grant him the possibility.”

  “I’m surprised to find a woman like you so devoted to an old billionaire living in a gated community.”

  She sighed. “And what am I like, Mr. Fields?”

  “I have no idea, really. You’re clearly intelligent.”

  “Is that all I’m like?”

  “Aside from being strange and withholding and obviously playing a role?”

  “Sure. Aside from all that.”

  “Well, you’re staggeringly beautiful.”

  She turned to me. “That’s a very nice thing to say.”

  “It’s pure truth.”