Madonna of the Apes Page 4

  Wind, blowing upstream at the same rate as the current flowed against it, seemed to hold the ripples steady, keeping the odd bits of floating material, leaves, sticks, or crumpled paper, in such ambivalence that they could not decide whether to obey the force of the current, give up, and move toward the Atlantic, or to give in to the wind and use it as an excuse to sail upstream. Since it was May the grass, though it was kept cut short, was struggling to bloom along with the clover. A few wild yellow irises bloomed against the bank, in places the mower could not reach. In the same protected areas milkweed was sending up its spikes. Swallows, swooping in swags after insects too small for anyone else to see, were too busy to make a sound.

  The city was fully awake, with traffic bustling along the parkway separating the riverbank from the city. The river continued running against the wind. The wind continued blowing against the river. Two sculls from rival universities, happening to find themselves in the same stretch of water at the same time, moving upstream, started an improvised race too suddenly serious for the women in one boat and the men in the other to shout things at each other.

  “Though it’s not my business,” Fred went on, “what’s Tilley doing this far from Atlanta, with a queen’s ransom in paintings he can’t understand?”

  The coffee was sweet and black. It no longer held even the memory of heat. Fred took a sip and rolled it around his mouth. A thin man, wearing jeans and a Red Sox jacket and hat, wandered down the bank from the paved footpath, slapping a folded Herald against his thigh. He stood looking up and down the expanse of grass. The sun, burning out from the early mist, made a long shadow lurch away from the man’s feet so suddenly, with such visual violence, that the shadow should have made noise: a ripping or tearing sound.

  “The box he sold us, was it inherited or stolen?” Fred said.

  The thin man glanced at him as if he’d spoken aloud. Maybe he had. Being alone so much, perhaps he’d gotten into the habit.

  The thin man with the paper began the elaborate calculations by which a single male on an expanse of public green decides the right place to sit and read his paper, given that the space is already occupied by another single male holding a paper cup and occasionally drinking from it. If the newcomer sits too close, it is a challenge, suggesting hostile intent. If he sits too far away that also is a challenge, suggesting that he suspects hostile intent on the part of the already established tenant.

  “Correction. Nobody sold us anything,” Fred added, quietly this time.

  The thin man moved three paces upstream and made his decision. He sorted through the paper, held out the Sports section to read, and used the news sections to keep the night damp from his skinny rump.

  “Nice day,” Fred observed, gesturing toward the river. “Nice day for almost anything.”

  “Nice day for being eaten alive by ants?” the man asked, not looking up from his paper. “Maybe. Nice day to drown in dung. Or lose your money then get home and find your house on fire. I see your point.”

  Fred sipped at his cold coffee. “Thinking more about the weather,” he said. “Not globally.”

  The man looked up from his paper. A screech and a honk behind them signaled trouble, but not trouble enough to make them turn around. “Nice day I grant you,” he said. “You said nice day for almost anything. That’s where you lost me. For example, say a taxi jumps the curb and takes us out like that.”

  “That would be ironic,” Fred agreed. “Especially while we’re having this pleasant conversation.”

  “Or the shooting war starts and there’s thirty-nine dead just in the next block, in the first hour.”

  “I didn’t think of that,” Fred admitted.

  “You see how many dogs shit on this grass?” the man said. “Nice day for that, too. And the birds, the geese, the insects. I keep something between me and the grass, I’ll tell you.” He patted the paper he was sitting on.

  Two joggers passed on the worn path next to the water, a man and a woman, wearing the outfits, talking in a jerky way.

  “Not to mention the wolves,” Fred said.

  The skinny man was interested enough to put his paper down and give Fred his full attention. “What about the wolves? What wolves?”

  “I don’t think we should disregard them,” Fred said. “Wolves hate that.”

  Chapter Nine

  Once his companion had moved off, Fred read the day’s news, which had been influenced by the damp impressions made by the man’s bony backside pressing the newsprint into the night dew.

  “Hey, Fred!” The woman’s voice lifted his head. Anne? Janice? Annie? Fanny? Pamela? She’d dressed to run in red shorts and a white sleeveless top and she, with a female companion similarly dressed but with green shorts, halted and ran in place next to him, the river running behind them. Fred struggled to his feet. “Can’t stop,” she panted. Martha? Bertha? Paula? Marcelle? “Call me.”

  “Great to meet you, Fred,” the other woman said and the two ran on, leaving behind the scents of soap and bed and effort. The snake moved with her arm, its swaying head poised on the back of her left shoulder, keeping track, like a bird riding an antelope. She turned and called back something else, but she was too far away to hear. Long hard legs she had; dark skin, dark hair. And she was funny, though she did not smile; at least in Fred’s presence she had not smiled, not that he’d seen, not even when something pleased her, or when she said something funny.

  “As if it’s all work,” Fred said.

  Clear five hundred years away and put Leonardo here, with his monkeys, his model, and the chubby baby. Who was the model for that Virgin? Was it a person? A comely boy? A genuine red-blooded woman with moving parts who, come eleven o’clock, protested, “Lenny, if you don’t let me get out from under this stuffed baby and take a leak, and maybe grab a cup of coffee…”

  A woman tied into a whole world of worlds you couldn’t guess at or predict. Not that it mattered, and it wasn’t his business anyway. But, if there was a woman involved, who was she? It was still an interesting question. How much did Leonardo’s images (if the painter was Leonardo. Since it wasn’t Fred’s painting, it wasn’t Fred’s problem), how much did Leonardo’s images depend on being records of what he saw? With talent like his, could he not just up and draw whatever he wanted, measuring it against his memory of something he’d seen no matter how long ago?

  The folds of the Virgin’s robe had been so sculpted and precise, they might have been carved from wood. The composite landscape, whose foreground came from a different country than its background, read more like the dreams of two different people pasted together, than like any places actually experienced. Those toppling rocks—gravity would not permit them to poise like that even long enough for a man to draw them. The world behind the Madonna was collapsing.

  Was the whole thing not invention?

  The baby didn’t look like anybody’s kid. But it wouldn’t. In those Renaissance pictures Jesus never looked like a real person, much less like a real baby. You’d be in trouble with the armed and dangerous forces of theology if you said, Looks just like his Mom. Even, Just like his Dad. But the apes, on the other hand, were observed. That painter had not only seen, he had studied apes. He knew how they spent their time, how similar they were to humans and, once you had acknowledged the similarity, how disquietingly different.

  The fig, also, was observed. Its split, and the seeds exposed there, had been depicted with an almost pornographic care. Was the boy circumcised? Did anyone—woman, ape, or child—throw a readable shadow onto the rocky ground? The plants in the foreground were clearly enough differentiated to have names, but even so they were too perfect, their leaves and tendrils too symmetrical and parallel, to be found in nature.

  This painter was pretending a world whose skin was perfect, though its elements were hostile. You wouldn’t trust the apes more than you would the rocks. You would not trust the colors, or the fine sheen of the paint, so glossy—was it oil paint or tempera?

  Fred
pulled clover out of the greenery next to him and looked at its clumsy, homely, serviceable lines. Once drawn by a Leonardo, it would be subverted into elegance. You might say that he studied nature. If Fred recalled his drawings, he was informed by nature. But he wouldn’t leave it alone. The curl of any stem he drew was guided by mathematical aesthetics rather than, as it was in natural fact, by the conflict between gravity and hydraulics or—maybe more accurately—by the conflict between life on one hand, and the combined forces of gravity and hydraulics on the other. Because gravity and hydraulics are on the same team. Would a da Vinci bother with as humble a flower as this little fist of white tassels?

  “We’re assuming it is a Leonardo, aren’t we?” Fred said, standing again and folding the paper. He’d leave it on a bench, or somewhere where the next reader could find it.

  Fred sauntered to the Boston Public Library’s main branch in Copley Square and stood with the others on Boylston Street until the main revolving doors to the new wing were opened at nine o’clock. He gave a cordial nod to the guard at the desk, glanced briefly at the exhibition concerning Artists of the Book in Boston, laid out in glass cases where the books could not be read, and took the stairs to the basement facilities.

  When he found himself on the street floor again, he said to himself, “It’s not my business, but I’m interested,” and spent the rest of the day in the Fine Art department until, at eight o’clock, he noticed both that he was hungry and that the building would close in an hour anyway.

  Chapter Ten

  Wherever his sympathies might lie, Fred could not claim to be on the street, not as long as he had the place in Charlestown. It had been a derelict house in what was a rather out-of-the-way corner of Boston that he had bought with some other veterans of this and that, which gradually, as they made it livable, he had come to control more or less, although the aim was to keep the use of it fairly democratic.

  Coming back to the States and slowly, with reluctance, setting up shop as he had, Fred had made a pact with himself that was almost as simple as the one they’d developed for the house in Charlestown. It included a vow of almost poverty, and the expectation of a life that, if it must be lived, would remain simple.

  The world he’d left had been filled with exotic turbulence, intrigue, betrayal, danger, opulence, frightful extended periods of mortal boredom, and agony, some prolonged, some mercifully quick; some experienced and some inflicted. He’d had enough of death but that didn’t make him wish to live. It was a dreadful quandary, he’d realized, waking one morning in front of the Cambridge Public Library, where he’d spread out his bedroll in the company of some gentlemen of no fixed abode. If you’ve had enough of death, but have no appreciable desire to live, it makes you accident-prone. And if you are accident-prone, you are not dependable.

  If you are not dependable, you are of no use to anyone and, being no use, have not much reason to be around.

  He, and these other folks, were better than that, he’d guessed, or inferred, then argued. And in a year or two the Charlestown place was up and running. Then, once he had a place, he had begun seeing women again. But he couldn’t get past the quandary that kept him from joining the civilization that surrounded him. He wanted nothing, not in a passive, but in an active way. If he could live naked on a crag, his food brought once a day in a bowl, by pilgrims, that might suit him, except that he would despise the pilgrims and get tired of watching the birds circling and waiting for the moment when his wary eyes would close.

  When he needed a jolt he would step into a shop that sold paintings or, if he was reasonably clean, into a museum, though in a museum he was obliged to suppress the knowledge that these places were prisons made for the protection of money, and for the capture of spirits that by their natures should be free. Free, that is, as a bird or fish should be. Hell, artists should get their wages, like anyone else.

  Free, not innocent. A work of art had no innocence, and nothing like it. It held within it as much coiled and potentially vicious energy as does a seed. Passion went into it, and passion resided in it. Or so Fred felt. But aside from the rubbish he’d handled occasionally in the low end antique stores he wandered into, whose proprietors tended to watch him warily, he’d never had his hands on a painting that sang, or shrieked.

  The door was always open at the Charlestown house. Someone was always awake at the desk in the vestibule. It was necessary to keep this sense of security. Some of the tenants were nervous, and of those, some had good reason to be. Fred took his turn at the desk, as the rest of the men did, if they were up to it. Though they did what they could to discourage people with substance problems that were beyond control, some were too far gone with demons of one kind or another to be trusted with access to the firearms that went with the post back of the desk. Eddie told him when he came in, “Floyd’s not doing so well. I guess he’s asleep, though.”

  Fred nodded. Floyd was in the room next to his, and it was easy to tell when he was not doing well. He had a tendency to hallucinate, and the hallucinations were seldom of the peaceable kingdom.

  “Did he look like he’d eaten?” Fred asked.

  “I had a sub saved for him,” Eddie said. When Fred came in he’d put down the comic he was reading. The cover suggested well-developed women exploring outer space, perhaps in search of the garments they had misplaced. He picked the comic up again saying, “I know he likes ham. I made him eat it down here so he wouldn’t forget. I used operating funds, and left the receipt in the thing. He’s bad enough we might have to do something.”

  Fred nodded. Floyd thought he was wanted, and in fact he might be wanted. If they took him to a public hospital, or to a veteran’s hospital, next thing you knew, he’d become public property. Social workers, in all due mechanical sympathy looking into his history, might next discover that he’d taken a lam from some rougher institution in Montana or Bangkok.

  “We might want to vote on it,” Fred said. “But as long as he’s not hurting anybody, or threatening anyone, I’d as soon let him be.” Eddie shrugged. “It might work itself out,” Fred said. “He’s not carrying anything, is he?”

  Eddie shook his head. “We checked his room while he was out. I looked through his pockets when he came in. It’s like he doesn’t mind. He’s like a child, thinking about something else. You can do anything. Try to search me, you’d better think again.”

  The room Eddie sat in, the vestibule or whatever it might be called, was as bare of decoration as a robbed motel room. They’d painted the walls white but they looked gray. The kitchen, such as it was, was not visible from here; nor were the two other downstairs rooms, one in which Floyd could be locked down if that seemed to be what he needed, and another in which the men kept the TV, a pool table, some comfortable chairs from the street, and a bookshelf with enough to read if you wanted to read.

  Behind Eddie a calendar picture hung, a glossy photo, representing Springtime in the Rockies. It was from July of a former year. It had been left here by a former tenant, Henry, who had said it represented a place he would rather be, and whose body had been taken from the river last fall.

  It was Fred’s shift at the desk tonight. They took it in eight-hour watches, with some men working more watches in lieu of contributing money to the operation. Fred owned the place, along with the bank; but he lived there and he did his shift like the others. So at ten he took over from Eddie, who went upstairs to sleep.

  Eddie had left his comic book on the desk, and Fred read that until it was finished. He read it again, translating it into a Hmong dialect for practice, then once again, translating it into French. The fourth time through, struggling to recapture his acquaintance with a Tibetan tongue, he found the American concepts refusing to make the transition into the high clear regions, even though both cultures were equally comfortable with cruelty and unlikely gods.

  The men came and went. It was a rule that everyone’s business be kept private. The place was to be a staging ground, not a halfway house. If people began discu
ssing each other’s business, friendships and enmities might develop, as well as relationships that suggested mentoring, discipline, dominance and submission, or even love. It was not to be a prison, camp, or monastery, but a place where men whose training had molded them to do well by exercising anti-social skills, struggled to turn their inclinations and expectations to patterns more closely resembling those of Main Street. It was meant to be an alternative to living on the street. It was meant to be safer, if less interesting.

  They got together once a week for an hour and talked through anything that needed considering. When a man didn’t show up for a week or more, unless he had made prior arrangements his room was declared vacant. He’d moved on, or been jailed, or gone back to Cincinnati, or nosed under the surface of the black river.

  No one would settle down here because no one could settle down here. The idea was that you had to want to get out and into something better. But Fred, who had invented the system, seemed to have settled down in the room upstairs, like the abbot of a Godless monastery that boasted only two rules: No women in the rooms, and Mind your own business. Whatever might happen if a couple of men wanted to sleep together, that issue hadn’t come up. But any coupling threatened the balance in a democracy. Besides, it wasn’t really a democracy, because Fred’s name was on the mortgage, and everyone knew that. And it was Fred who must meet the payment every month, whether the guys could manage their rent or not.

  Chapter Eleven

  Lester wandered down at six in the morning, looking unkempt and distracted. He was too lean. The recruitment of new tenants was haphazard. Bart had brought Lester in one day after they got talking at the bus station. The guys had agreed Lester would stay while they took his measure.

  Fred told him good morning. “I’m not crazy,” Lester said. “Not bonkers, crackers, missing a wheel, half-baked, half-assed, off my rocker, one sandwich short of a wedding, three sheets to the wind, or nuts.”