Pravda Page 17

  What to say, though? What to write?

  Never mind—see how it goes. Let's just get this done. She could always store whatever she typed in Draft and come back to it tomorrow.

  The first rope lashed at her face just as she ducked inside the store advertising free coffee, magazines, and Internet. Perhaps it was the thought of Sasha, the cramp and claustrophobia of the apartment, of his childish neediness; the lack of personal space. But she knew that she could not do this at home, and work was likewise out of the question. Whatever the question, she had noticed, work was always out of it.

  "One." She nodded in the direction of the back room. "Please."

  The guy behind the till was talking on his cell. She guessed he was from Yemen or Saudi Arabia. He made a note of the time in his book, held up five fingers, and pointed to the second bank of terminals. She wondered what he was making of the American Dream.

  Ignoring the coffee stand, she went over and sat down at the computer. The place was busy and smelled of cheap damp carpet. She shoved her bulging bag under her feet, slipped off her shoes, double-clicked, and waited for the sluggish connection. The young Muslim guy to her left—beard barely grown—was surfing what looked like soft porn in a double agony of pseudo-jocularity and not wanting to be seen; she could feel the waves of his embarrassment. The woman to her right, desperately out of condition and with her asthma inhaler beside her keyboard, was playing online poker with melodramatic intensity. Isabella typed in her password and clicked.

  The woman broke off suddenly and made as if to throttle an invisible neck just in front of her screen. "Bitch. Bitch. Bitch." She looked over, shaking her head. "Another bad beat. How's your luck holding up?"

  Isabella screwed up her nose. "Luck's okay. But my decisions suck."

  The woman nodded.

  "Where you from?" "London."

  "Wanna play a hand for me? Can't do any worse than I'm doing. My ass is being beaten all over the planet by people I don't even know."

  "Sorry. Not today." Isabella smiled sympathetically. "Gotta ask my dad if he killed my mum."

  The woman nodded slowly. "Yeah, well, I need a fried chicken cool-me-down." She swiveled her chair around and looked directly at Isabella, taking a slow toke on her inhaler as if it were the last cigar before the shootout. "My advice: gets to the river and looks like there's some shit might be going on, then walk away. Walk right away. First lesson of life: walk away." And with that she stood up, put on a huge pair of sunglasses, and walked away.

  Isabella's in box asked her if she needed a bigger dick and then offered her a loan to finance it.

  All day she had sat through meeting after meeting, frustrated, irritated, exasperated, and finally bored beyond the realization of boredom. There was nothing quite so depressing, she had thought, as the slow November darkening of the stale-aired office afternoon.

  Media Therapy had been attempting to seduce new clients, and the achingly pedestrian attempts of the men from the client firm to show off were matched only by the tedious duplicity of Marissa and Jo (her immediate boss and junior, respectively) in hoping to be desired. And then, of course, when eventually the men finally read the signals and began to come on to them a little, Isabella had been forced to suffer her colleagues' restroom pretense of being insulted and outraged, when in fact they were—Marissa and Jo both—very obviously brimming with satisfaction, affirmation, whatever it was they needed from men. Finally, at seven, concealing her indifference behind an expression of concern, she had closed the door behind her and taken the offered chair for the long-awaited one-to-one (conducted nonetheless for his part in the first-person plural, she noticed) with the head of the department, Timothy Robe—straight blond hair, expensive open-necked shirt, the smug manner of an exclusive tennis coach, ex-professional, ladies a specialty.

  "We'll come straight to it, Isabella—we're worried about your attitude, especially in front of the clients. At the moment this is probably a perception problem. But maybe we also have aptitude issues to address in the short term and performance issues going forward. So, to be frank—I know you appreciate candor in..."

  Robe was one of those people who found himself insightful because he considered the human emotions as if they were a range of competing brands, honesty being his proud brand of choice. And yet there was something about the word "frank," she always thought, that vociferously signaled its opposite.

  "...We just wanted to see if there's maybe something we should be doing. That we are not doing. From our side. Maybe there is a way we can all work together to try and help you get your focus back ... It is a focus thing, right?"

  She hadn't told them the whole story—i.e., death. She had left it at "ill" and come back without changing the news much beyond an upgrade (as Robe might say) to "seriously ill." As far as she was concerned, her mother wasn't the issue. Or rather, she was, but not in a way that could be unraveled for these people.

  To the question of focus, therefore, Isabella bit her tongue and tried to think of something appropriate to say, some complaint that maybe Robe might have come across in one of his management "away days." She settled on the word "unchallenged," since she had heard Robe himself use it during some hideous life-insulting inanity of a presentation. And sure enough, "unchallenged" did the trick. Robe hit his stride almost immediately and talked thenceforward without the need for any further reciprocation.

  Meanwhile she absented herself entirely from the situation and returned to the troubled Kremlin of her mind ... remembering a phrase of her father's that had not made sense to her before (delivered in a rare good mood after one of his innumerable firings from some magazine or other): "Watch out for the clichés, Izzy. They're not lazy, they're malicious—they're out to get you." Something to that effect. Only now did she realize he was talking about the clichés of life rather than those of speech. And how strange, she thought with a jolt, that so many apparently random things that her parents had said to her (and that she did not remember for years), how strange that they came back like this. Her mother too, in the midst of one of her ludicrous anti-West rants, delivered (she now recalled) with punctual timing on receipt of the news of Isabella's acceptance to the Harvard MBA course: "One day they may just about persuade you to believe that business is the engine and money the fuel, Izzy, but whatever they say, you can be absolutely certain that neither is the journey and neither is the view. Remember that. Who would you rather be listening to on your deathbed, Bach or the chief executive?"

  At first she had thought that nothing had changed, that the death of her mother was having next to no effect on her. Indeed, for the first few days she had entertained the view that maybe she was just one of those ascetics who didn't (or couldn't) respond to loss—or, for that matter, anything. Emotionally cauterized, to use one of her brother's less glib phrases.

  Not that she was entirely fooled by herself: she was wise enough to recognize shock for what it was, and she saw too that it must eventually wear off. So regardless of the temporarily blank screens, she had been monitoring herself with close attention ever since arriving back in New York. But it was the stealth with which shock slipped away and the disguise in which grief arrived that had caught her out. Because of all grief's many masks, she had not expected anger.

  It had begun as an almost friendly perplexity at her own numbness, which had increased somehow to impatience with herself, increased again to resentment against her mother—for the cryptic distancing, the idiotic, adolescent, unnecessary attempts to manipulate and pose with those bloody letters when, oh God, she must have known that she was seriously ill; until finally, yesterday, it had become the tumultuous fury from which she was now suffering. And yet only this lunchtime, during an e-mail exchange with Susan, her oldest friend back in London, had she realized—bang!—that this was it: that fury was the reaction. At last. And only later (while smoking on the fire escape to get away from the Jimmy Choo chat) had she recognized her error, that the precise opposite of that which she had imagined was
in fact true: when a parent passes away, the family demons do not retreat but rise from their sarcophagi and move out across the borders of the mind, swearing in their puppet regimes as they pass. And from here on in, it would be frontline, hand-to-hand: her against them. You think that your journey from birth to death is a journey away from the clutches of your parents, but in fact it's the reverse. Life is a journey toward mother, father. Because as a child, though you live by their hands, you understand not a single one of their decisions, not a single action, not a single response. But each year that passes, through adolescence and beyond, you begin to grasp more and more, you grow a little closer, start to see what they see, think what they think, realize what they have realized, believe what they have believed. Am I right, Mum? Am I right, Dad? And don't it make you sick.

  The Internet café continued its very global and yet simultaneously very local existence. She curled and uncurled her toes. Then she clicked on Compose—a button designed to flatter if ever there was one—and began to type, careful to avoid the greeting because she knew that she would not know how to start, deliberately trying not to think, aiming only to communicate the essence of what she wanted to say.

  I just wanted to let you know that the funeral went okay. Some people from the consulate turned up. You know this, of course. Gabe is okay, I think. I'm in New York at the moment —surviving. E-mail to this address if you ever intend to visit Petersburg. I'll give you the details—it's the Smolensky cemetery. Is.

  It was the work of less than two minutes. And it was all she could muster. Her face was burning with the thought of betraying her brother. And she could feel her heart beating against the unforgiving conscience of her sternum. An image of her father careened into her mind—his face livid with the drunken discovery of her and Gabriel trespassing in his office, trying his locked drawer.

  She forced herself to return to the top of the screen. For five further minutes she typed one greeting after another, deleting the words as quickly as she entered them: "Dear Dad"; "Hey Dad"; "Dear Nicholas"; "Dad—"; "Hello Nicholas"; "Hello Dad"...Nothing felt right. But nothing had ever felt right. After all the years of silence, she simply did not know what to call the man. She remembered that once, when he had hit her so hard that she could not hear, she had called him a "shoevanist pig."

  In the end, fearful that she would lose her courage (or fury, or the need of a child to know, or whatever the hell it was that was driving this), she just left it blank. No greeting at all. Feverishly, she picked up her bag, rummaged until she found the e-mail address that Julian Avery had given her (and what a conversation that had been), and typed it in ... And then, for a few seconds, she allowed herself the costly luxury of the truth—that it was actually communication itself that she wanted to establish. That the content was merely a means. And that in this subterfuge she was ... She was just like her mother. And that her father, the cleverest man she had ever met, would see through it as surely as if she were made of glass. But—shallow breathing—maybe that didn't matter anymore. Banish thought. Banish games. Banish play. (Another image—of her father swimming with Francis, his friend, in the men's pond on Hampstead Heath while she and her brother stood by the railings, scared of dogs.) The point was to get the journey started. Take the bastard on. Do it. Send.

  20 An Old Master

  Why, in the name of heaven's fat white rolling arse, is everything I attempt so utterly wretched? Were I one fraction less indolent, then I might improve. Were I one fraction less idealistic about my endeavors, then I might be content. Were I one fraction less intelligent, then I might fool myself into thinking I was better than I am. Instead, I am triply cursed. And still, after all this cursing, the fact remains: I am bloody awful at portraiture, Chloe. I stand before you as beside the point as a businessman in an orchestra pit."

  The pure white canvas had become a wretched oozing swamp. Nicholas had long ago lost sight of the painting itself, so cleanly sketched and proportioned in a deft burnt umber only two hours ago. But now even the local details on which he had fixated were disappearing; his representation of the nose, for example, had turned to sludge; whole patches of the picture were swimming in paint, and the only colors he could conjure were tertiary. He simply could not place his brush with any kind of precision; it was all too slippery and oily. And all the while, nature continued to mock him from where it lay, propped up on its little lilac pillow, feminine beauty indifferent as ever to the effort of man.

  In the first few weeks he had felt anxious, dislocated, shaken, and saddened by turn, but these reactions had soon given way to an indistinct but abiding sense of annoyance with everything, and most of all with himself. As if he had been consistently putting off an important job or failing to give up smoking day after day. These feelings were familiar to him, of course—he had suffered from something similar for most of his life, but in recent years he had managed to block it out, to beguile time with such single-minded commitment to his own amusement and pleasure that the days had not been able to round on him. This was the peace deal he had negotiated with himself and he'd grown accustomed to living contentedly under its terms: in return for a program of unstinting indulgence, he had promised to stop the self-antagonizing. Now, though, even his most tested techniques (of which painting was one) were failing him: distraction, denial, diversion—nothing was working. Life had reneged. Death had interfered. And hostilities with himself were resumed. He saw now what a flimsy little sham of a deal it had been all along.

  He suspected that his blood pressure was higher than normal today—whatever normal was. He turned to glance out of the great window behind. Even the light refused to be precise—the morning's watery sun had given way to heavy, sullen cloud, as if Paris were about to enter one of its long winter sulks. The traffic on the opposite bank rushing on, endlessly urgent. But the heavy Seine between was a sluggish thing this afternoon, a sluggish thing of surliness and sullage.

  He returned his eyes to the room—or rather, his studio-study (as he called it)—and they carried slowly across the ephemera therein: his stack of canvases in one corner, the desk he never used, magazines and papers, articles unread or unwritten, rags and paintbox, his easel; too small to be a studio, really, and the only thing he had ever studied in here was failure. He held up his brush and squinted. He wanted to scrape the whole head off with his knife, except that long experience had taught him that scraping never worked quite well enough and that at this stage the only thing to do was to wait until the paint stiffened and became compliant. Or start again.

  Start again.

  How many times must he start again? Blood and sand: surely it was possible to paint what he saw, at least. Those pretty toes pointed toward him, one leg up and bent, her arm above her head, the other arm loosely across her hips, a sort of lying-down contrapposto ... The canvas should smell of her naked body. Instead, foreshortening had defeated him—even the basic proportions now seemed wrong, making her look freakish, steatopygous, when she was anything but. And then there was the big problem of the perspective of her face—totally counterintuitive, since her eyes in this pose were almost lower than her nose, itself an odd triangle of nostrils and nothing else. He had found himself transforming the never-ending wonder of animate human features into an ungainly and geometric thing in order to map it doggedly onto the slimy mulch of his canvas. He shut his eyes completely. All hope of capturing the intoxicating mingle of her expressions had now vanished.

  If nothing more, Nicholas was honest with himself on the subject of art: he knew rubbish when he saw or heard it (as he did, often); he could recognize genuine talent even when it was confusing itself; and he saw mediocrity clearly for what it was. His own first and foremost. But like everything else he had done in the past forty years, Nicholas was doing this entirely for himself, so the success or failure of the work didn't matter beyond his own struggle with it, and the fact that he was a profoundly mediocre painter might not have bothered him at all except ... Except that every time he closed his eyes,
he could see quite clearly what it was that he wanted to achieve. Except that he did possess artistic vision. And—here, today, again—it was the very fact of this vision that made his abiding lack of skill or talent or stamina (or whatever it was that was needed to render artistic vision into reality) so infuriating, so demeaning. Worse still: this problem was an old problem. Indeed, he sometimes thought it was the defining problem of his life. The artist's vision without the accompanying artistry: the cruelest curse of the gods.

  The only way forward was to stop. The only way to stop was to escape. And the only way to escape was to lose himself—physically lose himself—in the very body that was evading him artistically. There was one distraction left to him that never failed.

  He addressed his model in French, which, curiously, still included the occasional suggestion of a Russian accent, an echo of the much heavier intonations of his private tutor during those long confined Moscow summers of his childhood.

  "Chloe, I think we'll leave it there for today. I am making a mess of it. The paint is too wet. I need to let it dry." He stepped back from his easel, as much for effect as anything. "We can carry on next week. Or in another lifetime, when I have learned how to paint."

  "Are you sure?"

  "Yes, I think so."

  "Okay, you are the artist."

  "I wish that were true. Unfortunately, I am merely yet another commonplace toiler in the mud."

  Then the old magic began to happen: as she sat up, she disappeared altogether as a model and became Chloe Martin once again—sometime actress, sometime real estate agent, once a little famous, twice divorced, an auburn-haired bob cut woman of a flat-chested forty-three, wide-wide mouth, all gum and marching molars when she smiled, freckles, crow's feet, translucent skin (which she ill-advisedly exposed to sun whenever she could), and eyes as green as pale nephrite. And watching her rise, he felt desire surging back to reassert its hegemony over his emotions.