“What on earth was he doing on Easter Island?” asked Alexander. “Apart from taunting mortality?”
“Good question,” said Rachel. “He probably just wanted to call people ‘buddy.’”
“Buddy?” said Alexander. “How very unlikely.”
“Divers call each other ‘buddy’ a lot,” said Miranda. “It’s like calling your lover ‘darling.’ Then you don’t have to remember his name.”
“Why does one go to Easter Island?” Alexander persisted, and then in response to his own query he continued, “I would imagine for the same reason one travels to Egypt to see the pyramids. Some people need to be confronted with things bigger than themselves. It’s a form of affirmation: you prove your own existence by witnessing works that have transcended the deaths of their makers, whose past existence is thereby indisputable even if your own is in doubt. Are there people on Easter Island, or is it only populated by giant heads?”
Miranda was slightly appalled by his presumptuous misreading of her partner’s existential needs, as well as by his ignorance about Easter Island.
“Morgan,” she said, “has no doubt about his existence — the fact of, if not the quality of — and yes, there are over four thousand islanders, called Rapanui. They call the island ‘Rapa Nui’ — two words — and they have a resounding history of triumph and doom. That’s what interested him, more than the statues, which aren’t heads, you know, but include torsos — although they’re often buried to the neck or decapitated — and they had a written script called Rongorongo, when no one else in all Polynesia had writing, and no other neolithic culture had writing. And now no one knows how to read it. The people faithfully reproduce tablets of Rongorongo for the tourist trade, but they can’t read what they’re writing.”
She realized much of her pedantic oration had been cribbed directly from Morgan, redeeming him, somehow, from the existential limbo assigned him by Alexander Pope.
“Sort of like calligraphy,” said Rachel. “The meaning is in doing it, not what it says.”
“That,” said Alexander, “is the most esoteric of the arts: to write someone else’s signature script and make it your own.”
Miranda continued, feeling Morgan had been given short shrift. “He loves to immerse himself in the details of a place, and let them swarm around him; he counts on them eventually falling into a comprehensible pattern. He’s the same with a case or a culture. Easter Island was an escape to someone else’s reality, a way to be himself in disguise.”
The other two said nothing, so she added, “He got a tattoo.”
“How unlikely,” said Alexander Pope. “A tattoo. How very odd for a grown man. Well, it takes all sorts.”
Miranda regretted her indiscretion, and seeing this, Rachel came to her aid. “I think it’s an adventurous thing to do.”
“Going to Easter Island?”
“Getting a tattoo. He doesn’t fit the demographic; that’s precisely why he would do it. I think it’s adventuresome.”
“The tattooist’s name was Tito,” said Miranda.
“There,” said Rachel. “Proves my point. Who else would know their tattooist’s name but rogues like Errol Flynn and David Morgan?”
“Errol Flynn died before you were born,” said Alexander. “Before any of us were born, even me.”
“He’s become his own name,” said Miranda. “Like Marilyn Monroe. Like the names of painters. Botticelli, for instance. Rachel thinks the faces in the frescoes look like Botticelli.”
“Does she?”
“I do,” said Rachel. “Some of them.”
“Tell us all about it,” said Alexander. Miranda winced, finding his tone condescending, as if he were asking a child to explain why she had coloured the sky orange and green. But Rachel did not seem bothered and, rising to the challenge, she responded with a brief exposition on Renaissance art, the Florentine neo-Platonists, and the achievement of Sandro Botticelli.
“And you think Sister Marie Celeste looks like Simonetta?” Alexander demanded in a quiet but authoritative voice
“Only in the first panel.”
Miranda interjected. “Who is Simonetta?”
“The beloved of Giuliano, brother of Lorenzo Medici… Lorenzo the Magnificent,” said Rachel.
“He wasn’t modest, was he?” Miranda observed.
“Who?”
“Magnificent Lorenzo. Who was Simonetta in her own right?”
“The model for Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, somewhat idealized, I would think,” said Alexander.
“She’s lovely, fragile, and vacuous,” said Rachel. “Appropriate for Venus arising, newborn but fully mature, generated from the cast-off testicles of a truculent god.”
“Uranus, I believe, at the hands of his son, Cronus the Titan.” Alexander spoke as if he were merely providing a reminder for a story he assumed everyone knew.
Miranda was astonished at the level of discourse. She had a general knowledge of art, gleaned mostly from reading Christmas gift-books like Sister Wendy’s The Story of Painting, but these two seemed comfortable with fifteenth-century aesthetics as a topic of casual conversation. She was especially surprised by Alexander. She knew Rachel had spent a summer studying in Florence, but how had Alexander managed to assimilate such knowledge into his capacious, undisciplined mind? No, she thought, that’s Morgan. Alexander’s mind is large, but it is quaint and orderly. She had vague recollections of him talking about art school, long before he took up reconstruction, reclamation, renovation, authentic reproduction, and the like.
Restoration. She added that to her list: art restoration. For his project in Beausoleil, Ontario, of course, he would have to know about plaster and painting in Renaissance Italy.
“Are you listening?” Rachel said, nudging Miranda out of her quizzical reverie. “I’m talkin’ here.”
“Yeah. Botticelli, Venus.”
“Right, but I think Sister Marie’s other faces come from ‘The Allegory of Springtime’ — the Primavera.”
“Do tell us,” said Alexander Pope, like a teacher examining a prodigal student.
“Okay,” she said in a voice suggesting she was fully prepared for the occasion. “Panel two, the annunciation imminent. The face is Flora in the Primavera, strangely lusty and fearful, gazing upward at the warm wind of spring. Picture the painting in your mind. Picture the frescoes. In the third panel there are two versions of Sister Marie; on one side she’s prostrate, her face turned away like the centre of Botticelli’s Three Graces, and on the other she’s enraptured, staring up at the Virgin Mary in wonder. She’s the Grace on the left, representing ecstatic desire. The fourth panel shows the face of Venus offering silent benediction. The final panel shows Sister Marie as Flora, again, now fecund with spring, an earth nymph transformed to goddess and the most beautiful, sensual face ever painted. What better way to arise into Heaven than satiated with sex and surrounded by flowers?”
Miranda turned to Alexander. “How’d she do?”
“Excellent,” he said. “I couldn’t have done better myself.”
Miranda looked from one to the other. Despite Rachel’s demand for Miranda’s attention, possibly Rachel had meant to impress Alexander Pope with her explication and Miranda was merely a witness. Rachel and Alexander sat quietly for a moment, eying each other, perhaps also trying to assess their relative roles in the rhetorical drama.
Alexander smiled, leaned across the table, and squeezed Rachel’s hand. She turned it over and responded with a brief squeeze of her own, then withdrew it. Miranda felt excluded again, and yet was impressed with them both. Rachel, for her casual erudition, and Alexander, for his forbearance. He, after all, had been listening to an interpretation of a monumental work of art that was as close to being his own creation as if he had painted the frescoes himself. chapter fifteen
Lakeshore Road
Morgan found himself behind the wheel of a police car in the small hours of early morning, driving east along Highway 401, without being quite certain why. He had awakened from a restless sleep in a cold sweat, at first thinking the telephone had been ringing and it must be Miranda. Out of the darkness the surge of a diffuse premonition that Miranda was in danger had taken hold. He had no idea why he was driving to Port Hope instead of Beausoleil or Penetanguishene, but he knew that somehow, in his sleep, apprehension for his partner’s safety had coalesced around Alexander Pope. It was no longer a matter of murders unsolved; there was an urgency to get inside the man’s mind. Where better for that than in the man’s home, especially when Pope wasn’t there?