Gould nailed it to his wall that day. Bolling died a week or two later, and a year after that the painting fell off Gould’s wall and he tried nailing it back up and it fell again with even more plaster coming off, and he tried to stick it up with duct tape but the painting was too heavy and he didn’t want to put more tape on because the painting’s paint came off with it, so he rolled it up and stuck it in a closet. When Sally and he got married and moved to Baltimore four years later, she said she wanted to get the painting framed. He said maybe they could just nail it to the wall — his New York apartment walls weren’t made out of the right kind of plaster for that and there were already nail holes in the painting’s corners — but she said, “You’ll see. It’ll look better stretched and with a relatively simple wood frame. It’ll also be good for the painting: fewer creases and cracks, things like that.”
The painting’s of the sea, sky, mountains, and a huge waterfall, or that’s what the plunging blue and white looks like, of one of the Balearic Islands. Or one of the Canaries. He’d have to look at an atlas. But how could he find which group of islands it is if he also doesn’t know the island’s name or the name of the town the scene was painted from? It starts with an N, the town, or a D, and he thinks it ends with an A. It’s the one Robert Graves lived on for many years. So he supposes he could get the names of the island and the town from a book about Graves. Anyway, Bolling lived there with his wife for two years, same time Graves did but he didn’t know him, he said, small as the town was, or know him enough to say more than a passing hello when he saw him out walking or in a store or café, “and by then the man may have been demented, or that’s what some people said, though he was living with, and no doubt screwing — because you could see by his swagger and look what a lusty guy he was — some young attractive American gal. So of course all the expatriate male writers on the island, no matter what nationality or how they felt towards him, wanted to screw her too because she’d done it with Graves. And if he won a Nobel, which some literary chiefs were predicting, an even greater feather in your cap and maybe more luck in your writing….
“One story, though, I can tell you firsthand,” Bolling said, a few weeks before he died, when Gould was wheeling him across Central Park to the Met. “It’s a good example of the moronic, worshipful following Graves had attracted to the town and which ruined it for us, to tell you the truth, even if most of them had got there before us. We came for artistic stimulation and intelligent communality (besides cheap living), but these louts just hung around, drinking and soaking up the sun and waiting for some new sign from the great man or duty to do for him, like accompanying him to the local bar. They never produced art or letters the way Graves had and which he was still doing in abundance. I know from the island’s telegrapher that he was sending out reviews and articles once a week, so how demented could he have been? Now it’s too late, but why didn’t I think that then and say something to those loafers and spongers who claimed he was addled? But this neighbor of ours came running into our little cottage, waving a pair of men’s Jockey briefs. You guessed it: ‘They belong to Graves,’ he said. ‘I was walking past his house, peered through his bedroom window, hoping to catch him humping his newest concubine, and saw these lying on his bed. I climbed through the window and swiped them. One day they’ll be worth a bundle. They even have R.R.G. written on the label in laundry marker. You’ll see, a collector will buy this from me and frame it behind glass and hang it on his most visible library wall. Bob had probably taken them off,’ this guy goes on, ‘tossed them on the bed, and put on a fresh pair before he left the house, or maybe he took them off to put on swimming trunks. I’m thinking if I should wash them, since they have a shit stain on them’—toilet paper was a precious commodity on the island, I want you to know—‘or keep them as is,’ he continued, ‘because they’d be more of-the-person and so more valuable that way.’ I told him to get them back to the bedroom without Graves knowing they’d been stolen, but he wouldn’t hear of it. Of course this idiot probably forgot whose underpants they were a week later and either put them on himself without washing them or his wife, after wondering where they had come from, used them to swab the kitchen floor.”
Fifteen years after Gould was given the painting, he says to his wife, “This thing’s really grown on me since you got it framed. And Bolling had a lot of them, and I’m sure his wife—” and she says, “You want to buy one?” and he says, “If it’s all right with you, since you’ll have to live with it too,” and she says, “I like the idea, so long as it doesn’t cost a fortune.” “No chance. They were very fair and modest-living and ungreedy people. It’s even possible she’ll want me to have it for nothing because of what I did for them then, but which I won’t let her do. Anyway, good, settled, I’m about to purchase a painting for the first time in my life; before, they were always given to me by the artist, and that lobsterman drawing from you,” and she says, “Won’t it be odd, though, phoning her after so many years, but to buy something rather than to ask about her and her son and maybe even, after so long, to invite her out for lunch?” and he says, “How do you think I know she’s still in the city in her old apartment? When I’ve gone up to see my mother — same neighborhood — so I bumped into her on the street a number of times.” “You never told me,” and he says, “I’m sure I have. Or else I forgot by the time I got back or didn’t think it worth mentioning, since you never met her,” and she says, “Of course I have. In a restaurant once, when we were with your mother, or right outside it on the street, and then at the memorial for Bolling a year after he died,” and he says, “Six months,” and she says, “Six months, not that she’d remember me from that, she was so distraught,” and he says, “Funny, but I can’t remember her as ever being even a little emotionally upset,” and she says, “Crying her eyes out. Just crying them out. Though you were pretty shaken up too,” and he says, “That I think I recall, which I guess is why I don’t remember how she was at that particular event.”