This is not an isolated fling of imagination in viewing Eva Vaughn's work, for emotions are her forte, particularly the dark and disconcerting ones. It is no accident that the structure of Troll Bridge echoes Edvard Munch's The Scream, but in this case the androgynous figure is caught in an innocuous, sunny stretch of bridge, with a normal couple approaching along an everyday bit of roadway. The woman/man has obviously been seized by a fit of insanity. Or is there something dark lurking under the bridge, something the couple has yet to see? Or, worse yet, that they are a part of?
Is there any style this painter has not mastered, any field she will not enter? Well, yes. She will have nothing to do with Abstract Expressionism; and she is not a Romantic. Romanticism is emotion for its own sake, and leads nowhere outside the frame that surrounds the canvas. Eva Vaughn fascinates, disconcerts, lays a hand on the hearts and minds of her viewers. That, after all, is what art is meant to do. She employs the light of Vermeer, the vigor of Caravaggio, the massive, sculptural drama of Michelangelo, and the eyes—no one since Rembrandt has painted eyes like this, eyes the depth and breadth and fullness of the human soul, of devastating honesty.
Objections to her art abound, and valid objections they are. She is naive, and she does largely ignore everything art has said over the past century. She is a painter of immense power, yet she is curiously passive. The agony and passion she paints, the menace she evokes, the madness and the sheer impossibility of life belong to others. She sees agony; she paints passion; whether she lives them or not cannot even be guessed.
It is this sense of distance, of noninvolvement, that may keep Eva Vaughn from joining the ranks of the truly great. She is young, true, but inhibitions and formalities have a way of becoming more ingrained with age, not less. A great artist leaves one with no doubt—he (and the pronoun is used advisedly) has borne the sufferings and ecstasies of his subject, himself, alone and without relief. When Eva Vaughn finally decides to paint herself with her pigments, then we shall see if we have here the greatest artist of the post-Picasso age. Even—say it quietly—of the century.
Tired as she was, this man's personal and authoritative analysis of the woman she had met as Vaun Adams kept Kate from sleep, kept her from noticing the storm building outside her window until she closed the magazine, when she suddenly noticed the rattling windows and gushing downspouts. She fell asleep as soon as she heard Lee come in, and her dreams were of strawberries.
11
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Across town Hawkin worked late in his office and eventually had himself driven home. He poured himself a drink and sat in the darkened living room of his rented house, watching the rain slant down in buckets like some B film of a storm at sea. At eleven o'clock the streetlights flickered, dimmed, and strengthened again, and the low hum of the aquarium pumps behind him hesitated, then clicked back on. In San Jose a huge area of the grid went abruptly black, and a thousand newcomers to Silicon Valley cursed and cracked their shins on the furniture as they searched blindly for flashlights and the stubs of Christmas candles. Old-timers just went to bed and told each other that it would be all over in the morning.
The storm center massed from Eureka to Santa Barbara, and the force of it was immense, incomprehensible. At one o'clock a homeless woman in an alleyway off Market Street died of exposure. At one-thirty another seven thousand homes across the Bay were suddenly without power; electric blankets went cold, and seldom-used fireplaces were stuffed with paper and lit. At two o'clock fire crews fought to save a burning house for its shivering owners, winds gusted to nearly a hundred miles per hour, and the bridges across the Bay were shut down. The gale ripped up trees by their roots, threw satellite dishes about like Frisbees, blew out the windows of office buildings. Before the night was out the storm would kill five people in the Bay counties: the woman in the alley; an old man whose heart stopped when a garbage can lid sailed through his bedroom window; a young mother who was standing in the wrong place when the wind plucked the neighbor's badly mounted solar panels from the roof; and two young men who were returning early from a liquid party, swerved to miss a falling branch, and went off the road into a madly swollen river.
At two-thirty a redwood tree died. One of hundreds that went down that night, this was a youngster, barely two centuries old, and its characteristic lack of a taproot made it vulnerable to the combination of near-liquid soil and hard gusts from the Pacific. Six of its cousins already lay across Tyler's Road, but this one fell directly upstream of one of the junctions of road and creek, washed top-first downstream, and inserted itself like a cork into one culvert with its roots blocking the mouth of the second. Watery fingers pried at the road bed.
At three o'clock the pent-up waters lifted the two four-foot-deep, fifteen-foot-long iron drainage pipes like a couple of straws and hurled them downhill, madly gobbling up huge pieces of the road and hillside as it passed. At three-thirty the winds faltered, very slightly. At four-ten the sodden hillside above the spot where Tina Merrill had been found abruptly let go and dumped several hundred thousand tons of mud and rock onto the upper end of Tyler's Road. At four-thirty the storm suddenly gave up and moved on to see what it could do with real mountains. By five o'clock silence descended, broken only by the pervasive sound of running water.
Light seemed to come earlier than usual that morning, as if the sun were anxious to see what its clever child had accomplished during the night. All over Northern California life slowly dug itself out and ventured into the changed world. For hundreds of miles the ground was carpeted with branches and trees, broken glass, tangled wires, drowned birds, billboards, mudslides, roof shingles. Anything and everything that could be lifted and moved by wind or water had been. The world took a shaky breath, grateful birds began to sing, and the sun rose in clear blue skies to give its blessing to this humbling of creation.
At six-thirty Kate jerked awake and wondered why the telephone had not yet rung. Then she came fully awake and laughed to realize that she had come to assume, after only three days, that the day began with a call from Hawkin. She stretched hard like a cat and turned over to kiss the sleep-soft mouth next to her. The phone rang.
"Martinelli," she answered through clenched jaws.
"Look, Trujillo just called to say the Road's out, and it'll be some time before anyone can even walk up it, so I thought we'd spend the morning here, trying to put a few things together."
"Good morning, Inspector Hawkin."
"What? Oh, good morning. Is this too early to call?"
"What time do you get up, anyway?"
"I don't. Get here when you can."
"Seven-thirty." She dropped the receiver down hard onto the base and hoped it hurt his ear.
At seven-fifteen she found him in his office, and at first glance she thought the wind had gotten in during the night. She pushed aside the drift of scraps, set a white paper bag on the corner of the desk, and drew out a whole-wheat croissant. Hawkin looked up from the pages he was pinning on the wall.
"What's that?"
"Breakfast. There's one for you, if you want it."
"Did you bring me a coffee?" He eyed the foamy top of her double cappuccino.
"You have a machine."
"I'm out."
She sighed, and poured some off for him into a chipped white mug with a thick brown glaze in the bottom.
"Al, I should tell you that these are the days when even the lowly secretary takes her boss to court when he expects her to make him coffee."
"Aren't you glad you're not a secretary? No sugar?"
"Aren't you glad it's not goat's milk? No sugar."