Love Maps Page 9

  “No, not at the moment. But it’s happened. I did get that Florida job, though. That’s why I’m calling. I wanted to buy a piece of art to celebrate, and I keep on thinking about that painting you did, that Town X.”

  “Map of X?” She lights a cigarette, trying to tamp the flutter inside.

  “Yes. I’ve got the perfect spot for it. I have this idea that it will spark my imagination. I have a thing about plans of French villages.”

  “I thought you’ve never been to France.”

  “I said plans, not the villages themselves.”

  He’s smiling, she can feel it. That lopsided smile. She closes her eyes and takes a breath. “What about I lend it to you?”

  “Lend it?”

  “I don’t want to sell it. I—I can’t think of a price. If I can think of a price, maybe you can buy it.”

  They agree to meet at her studio. By the time she leaves her apartment, the scattering of raindrops has turned into a barrage, but she doesn’t mind, she welcomes it, actually. She loves storms, the jumping backward as cars whoosh through puddles, the fountains of black water all over the place. Lightning flashes. She can feel it zinging through her, relieving her of her thoughts. At the studio, she wraps up Map of X, first in cardboard, then in double layers of plastic. Rain pelts against the window. The thunder claps and rumbles so loudly that Sarah doesn’t hear the buzzer right away. She hurries downstairs, purposefully not looking at the mirror near the entry, and throws open the door.

  “Isn’t this insane?”

  Philip doesn’t hear her. He is leaning into the backseat of a taxi, struggling to get something out. A wet cardboard box. A case of some kind of wine.

  “A token of my gratitude,” he says, rain dripping down his forehead, his eyelashes wet and dark. He tilts the box to show her the label.

  “That’s good champagne. Hurry. You’re going to float away out there.”

  “It’s from a client. I figured I ought to give you something in return.” He makes it to the doorway and shakes the rain from his hair, inadvertently spraying her. She can smell the wool of his coat. He looks around her studio, rubbing a crick in his shoulder. “This place looks different in the daytime,” he says.

  “You want some tea or something? You must be cold.”

  “No. Where’s that painting? I want to put it up right now.”

  It leans against the wall, tied up with twine.

  “You promise this is it?” Philip says. “You’re not fobbing me off with shoddy goods? Come help me hang it.”

  “I shouldn’t. I need to paint.”

  “On a Sunday? Come on. Let me show you my office.”

  Sarah breaks into a big grin.

  The taxi tires swish reassuringly in the rain. He puts his arm around her. She studies his profile, wondering what he has been up to the past month. If he feels this way, why didn’t he call? Perhaps he had as many reasons for not wanting to see her as she for not wanting to see him. But he seems to have made a decision; there is no hesitation in the fingers that curl around her waist. She closes her eyes and inhales. Tweed and solidity. She could ask him to explain himself, but why bother? Out the window, the headlights glow foggily, and beyond them, the gaudy neons, eventually replaced by the soft grays of the Upper East Side. The cab stops on a well-to-do block. They run through a light drizzle to a town house half covered in ivy. Philip’s office is on the second floor. The lobby is a big windowed room with tall ceilings and a minimum of furniture. It’s a good place to hang a painting, and there’s a perfect spot behind the reception desk.

  Philip opens the door to his workroom. “Here we go,” he says, “the inner sanctum.” Quite a different thing: bookshelves double stacked and sagging with books, coffee mugs, a woebegone aquarium sitting on top of a minifridge, articles and notes jotted on legal paper pinned to the walls, a defunct copying machine, shabby armchairs. Not what she would have imagined. He edges to the wall behind the largest drafting table and unpins a Polaroid and a scrap of graph paper.

  “This is where I want to put it.”

  “There? Don’t you think it’s kind of dark?”

  “I’ll install a light.”

  He sorts through a desk, looking for a hammer and hanging hooks. Sarah flops down on an armchair. His portfolio is on the table in front of her. She flips through it. The exteriors of his buildings are clean-lined and understated, made of steel and stone and slabs of handsome wood. They all have windows, large walls of them, giving the impression of openness, but the interiors are complicated, spiral staircases and multitiered rooms. In one, a zigzagged hallway.

  “You specialize in convoluted insides,” she says.

  “I wouldn’t say convoluted, I’d say precisely organized.”

  “What’s with the zigzag hallway?”

  “That was for a client who said she didn’t want to know who she was going to bump into until the last minute.”

  “Sounds like a dangerous way to live.”

  Philip finds the hammer and swings it in the manner of a golf club. “She knew what she wanted.”

  “You don’t play golf, do you?”

  “When I have to.”

  “Oh god. Tell me you haven’t played in Detroit.”

  “One of my best commissions came out of golf. You would have liked it, a house with a secret passageway. The guy paid me extra to draw up a false blueprint.

  “Where did it lead to?”

  “Can’t say.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “A secret’s not a secret if it’s told.”

  She’s never thought about secrets that way; the whole point is finding the right person to share them with.

  “I love this,” he says, unwrapping her painting, “I really do.” It looks different than in her studio, elegant and deliberate, hardly the haphazard, organic surprise that it was. She remembers working on it, that intense feeling of rediscovering time, the streets of the town popping up so clearly. Something nags at her. The name of the town, perhaps? But if she remembered, she’d have to change the title, and she likes Map of X.

  He asks her to hold it in position and walks backward, squinting. “A little up,” he says.

  “What do you think about going back in time?” she asks.

  “A little to the right.”

  “If you could get into a time machine—”

  “That’s it. Keep it there.”

  “My arm hurts.”

  Philip takes a pencil from his pocket and marks the wall. “All right, you can put it down.”

  “Aren’t you going to answer my question?”

  “Going back in time? What’s the point?” He hammers in the nail. It only takes two blows. She’s impressed; she’s terrible at hammering.

  “It’s never over,” she says. “What about that woman at the funeral, Miss Merriweather, still in love with Conningsby after sixty years?”

  “Proof of her insanity.”

  “You were more charitable at the time.”

  Philip hangs the painting, then rubs his hands together, evidently pleased.

  “It guess it’s not that dark,” she says.

  “I’ll install a light, and you’ll be happy.”

  “Whatever. It’s your painting.”

  “Mine?”

  “For the time being.”

  “You know what? I’ll get you a frame for it.”

  “You’ve already gotten champagne,” she says, looking around for the bottle they brought with them.

  He grabs something from his desk, not the champagne but a toy truck that he puts in the palm of her hand. It’s a model of an antique ambulance with a canvas top and white wagon wheels.

  “Speaking of the past,” he says, “this is the kind of ambulance that Conningsby used to drive.” The tiny back door opens with a click. The interior walls are lined with stretchers, three on each side. “See? They carried six stretchers, and see the pulleys? The Ford ambulances had pulleys—that way the wounded got less jostled. They were the
envy of the French doctors.”

  He wheels the ambulance down the pad of his palm then up along a deeply grooved line, his lifeline. Sarah recognizes it from Maya’s fortunetellers.

  “He was just seventeen. He was trying to get out of Terre Haute. You can’t blame him for that.”

  “What did Conningsby tell you about the war?”

  Philip squints self-critically, as if he’s not sure he should have started this. “He wasn’t proud of it.”

  “I know. What happened? Please tell me. I loved Conningsby.”

  Philip rubs the underbelly of the ambulance with his thumb. She doesn’t think he’s going to speak, but then he does: “Not long after he got over there, they put him on the night shift, transporting wounded between the Verdun and a place called Bar-le-Duc. The ambulances were driven with their headlights off so the Germans couldn’t see them, a method that worked as long as there wasn’t snow and a full moon. But one night there was snow and a full moon, and Conningsby’s ambulance got hit. The force of the explosion threw him out of the cab. The snow worked as a cushion, saving his life, but his knee got bent the wrong way. He couldn’t move. A couple of the men he was transporting, still strapped to their stretchers, flew out the back and slid down the hill. Conningsby said that for a split second they looked like bloody mummies strapped to toboggans. The others were trapped in the burning ambulance. Conningsby lay there, listening to them yell. After a while he heard soldiers speaking German. He crawled away, dragging his bad leg behind him, and kept crawling all night. Finally he passed out. When he woke, he was in a farm field with a boy standing over him.

  “The boy couldn’t speak. He was a deaf mute. He led Conningsby to the ruins of a little stone village. It had been shelled, and some of the buildings were only half standing, but it was better than nothing. There was a store of potatoes and onions in one of the basements. Conningsby and the boy stayed there, living in the most complete house, making fires with broken furniture and roof beams. Later, when Conningsby’s leg got better, they set traps for rabbits, and in the spring they collected shards of stained glass from the church windows. The idea was to piece them back together, like a mosaic … Then the kid tripped over a mine wire.”

  Sarah grimaces.

  “Yeah,” says Philip.

  “I don’t understand,” says Sarah. “Why would Conningsby be ashamed of that story?”

  Philip looks surprised. “When his ambulance was shelled, he just lay there. The guys he was responsible for burned to death—”

  “He couldn’t move.”

  “He moved when he heard the soldiers.”

  “Oh for god’s sake, you’re being too hard on him—”

  “I’m not being hard on him. He was the one who was ashamed. And then he went AWOL. When his leg got better, he could have taken the kid to an orphanage and returned to his post.”

  “He was a volunteer. He was sixteen.”

  “Seventeen.”

  Sarah snorts.

  “All I’m saying is that Conningsby didn’t feel good about it—he blamed himself for the kid’s death.” He wanders back over to Sarah and runs the ambulance up her arm. The wheels plow up goose bumps. “It gets me going when I’m stuck,” he says.

  “The ambulance?”

  “Yes. I wheel it along my notes, and I think of Conningsby and me in the basement, working on that model, and sometimes something clicks. That’s why I wanted your painting—it’s another reconstruction of a French village. I’ve never been to France, but for some reason these French villages keep coming up.”

  Sarah is lost.

  “I’m sorry,” he continues. “I thought I told you. The model in Conningsby’s basement—remember, the one that he and I worked on?—it was a model of the village he and the kid stayed in.”

  “The model was of a shelled village?”

  “Yes, but in the model it wasn’t shelled. I think he was returning to his original project, you know, of piecing together the church windows, but with me instead of the deaf mute. He was so patient with me, and he didn’t have that kind of reputation. People were afraid of him. That’s why my parents sent me to boarding school. They thought I was hanging out with a kook.” Philip misreads Sarah’s smile. “Okay, but he was a great kook.”

  “No, not that,” Sarah says. “I was smiling because you said before that you didn’t give a flying fuck about the past—”

  “I don’t believe those were my exact words.”

  “That ambulance is your time machine.”

  “It’s a sentimental weakness.” He touches her hair. “I love your hair.”

  “It’s my father’s hair. Oh my god.” The ground seems to shift.

  “What?” says Philip, concerned.

  “I just realized why I painted that painting. It wasn’t an ordinary day at all. We were on tour, Maya’s first European tour, and my father had a fit. He hardly ever had fits. It must have been being back in Europe—it was the first time since the war, and he was also sick. He was standing in the middle of the road, shouting. He wasn’t shouting at me, he was shouting at, I don’t know, his parents, the people who had killed them, I don’t know—but he was shouting insanely, in a language I didn’t understand. It was terrifying. Ma had a doctor’s note. It was probably for Valium, lithium, some medicine, and I was running through the streets, looking for a pharmacy. That’s why I remembered the layout of the streets.” She stops, unsteady.

  “And your father, did he get his medicine?”

  Yes. She had turned down the last alley, and there was the green cross of a pharmacy, not yet lit, but she’d banged on the gate and got the pharmacist.

  Philip strokes her hair. “Bravo.”

  “Ptchinka.”

  “What?”

  “That was Max’s name for me. That’s what he said afterward. “Thank you, ptchinka.”

  A tear rolls down her cheek. He leans down and kisses it.

  *

  They take a walk. The storm has cleared but for a soft rain. They enter Central Park. The paths are shiny wet, twisting and turning for them alone. The twigs have big droplets clinging to them and the leaves are sopping and scattered everywhere. She twirls Philip’s umbrella and its reflection flashes back in a puddle.

  “You’ll get your hair wet,” he says.

  “I don’t care.”

  He draws her off the path, the earth squishing, giving way below them, toward a thick-trunked tree with soft, mossy bark. She leans against it, and the wetness seeps through her jacket. Philip leans into her, his warmth balancing the coldness of the tree. She imagines the tree leering. They can’t stop kissing. A squirrel chatters at them, throws acorns.

  They wobble back to his apartment, weak-kneed, giggling like teenagers, although she’d never felt quite so innocent as a teenager. They go straight and finally to bed.

  She had been a little nervous that he would be twitchy and virginal. But he isn’t. He is as free and easy as that Nureyev on the basketball court. “It’s like bicycle riding,” he says. “You never forget.” They stay there for two days and two nights, Philip intent on making up for lost time. They could easily stay there longer, ignoring their growling stomachs and ever-sorer limbs, but Philip has a meeting and Sarah has a shift.

  They part with promises to see each other the next day, and Sarah takes the subway home, grinning stupidly at everyone in the car. At her apartment she gets into the shower, grateful for Conningsby, for Tori, for Clyde Bandersnatch, for Gus for putting the basketball hoop in the studio, for the planet for rotating, for the bed for squeaking, for the soap for bubbling in such a perfect way all over her skin. She shouldn’t use soap, it’ll wash off his scent. But it will be back. This is what is making her so happy. She will smell like him over and over and over again. This luxury of slowness and repetition, this knowledge that she doesn’t need to reveal herself completely, for they will have time to reveal themselves—ah, she’s delirious. Shampoo gets in her eye and she laughs at the sting.

  C
hapter 9

  Connecticut, October 1997

  The basement was too disgusting to face at the moment. And the mop was probably so moldy it wouldn’t work anyway. She got an old towel from the closet and began sopping up the water on her hands and knees. The dishwasher sat there inert, apparently suctioned to the floor, cobwebby tubes coming out the back of it. She toweled around it. The train rumbled by. God, she wanted a cigarette. She poured herself another glass of wine and was shocked to see that the bottle was now empty. She leaned against the dishwasher, sipping her last glass and contemplating the linoleum. She had nothing to apologize for. Yes, he had been writing to “a black hole,” as one of his letters put it, but how else could it be? The only thing she cared about was Max, and as she was not going to play the Max card, what was she supposed to write? Ah, how the sparrows sing in the trees? Silence at least had some dignity.

  She crawled to the stack of newspapers piled high in the corner of the dining room. Why was she crawling? She’d only had a bottle of wine—a lot, yes, but not unheard of. She flipped through the papers, looking to see if there was a mention of the sort of conference that Philip might be speaking at. Refugee Situation? International Peace? What had changed that he could now land in New York, stand behind a podium, enunciate his words before a sea of people? She reread his letter, more slowly this time, poring over each sentence. I would like to talk with you … I gather you do not want to see me … I feel I have the right … Of course he had the right. She smoothed the letter against her chest, knowing better than to believe it. And yet, wasn’t it possible that he meant by those words what she wanted them to mean? They had once thought in the same ways. She sobbed, the wish so big inside of her.

  “Mom?”

  “Max! I thought you were in bed.”

  “I forgot. Sensei said I had to wash my gi.” He stood in the doorway, holding his bundled-up karate uniform, taking in the newspapers scattered over the floor, her wet face.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Organizing.”

  “Where should I put it?” Max held out the gi, his expression stubborn, inquisitive. Could he see the paper she held to her chest? She thought about handing it over right then. But she wanted to be alone with it a little more.