“Naw. It’ll be okay.” He sat on a stool. “It’s just a three-minute throb, I can tell.”
One night, a year or so ago, Mark’d been nailing a pair of golf cleats — fangs — into a tin oval shaped like the mouth of a snake. Frederick was drinking with him that evening too, watching Mark work, relaxing in the pure, dumb wordlessness of someone else’s concentration. The tin warped under pressure; the snake struck. A cleat fired upwards like a bullet, hitting Mark in the left temple, knocking him cold to the floor. Panicked, Frederick had carried him, limp, beneath the willows, all the way through Griffith Park to the medical center.
He hadn’t prayed since childhood, forced to kneel on cold chapel floors by his Jesuit teachers. Now, his pleas to God for Mark’s recovery sounded to him thin and insupportable.
For three days after regaining consciousness, Mark could answer only “Paraguay” to any question put to him. Frederick explained to the doctors that maps of Paraguay lined Mark’s studio. “He has an old lover from there.”
“Do you know who you are?”
“Paraguay.”
“Where do you live?”
“Paraguay.”
“Does this hurt?”
“Para … Paraguay.”
The whole time, an insane smile, almost angelic, fixed his face. “Brain trauma” was all the doctors said. On the fourth day Mark recovered full speech. He had no memory of the accident. “I feel fine,” he insisted; tests proved him fit.
Later, to Frederick, he confided a mild depression. “At first I was frustrated when I couldn’t speak,” he said. “But then … it was like the world fell away without any words to glue it in place.”
“What do you mean?”
“No Pay the following amount, no Reserved Parking. I don’t know … I was free, unencumbered except for that sound. Paraguay. Like living in a bell, in the ringing of that word. No worries. No deadlines. I tell you, man, it was bliss. The perfection I’m always chasing in my work. I miss it.”
Ever since, his already prodigious drinking had increased, and Frederick joined him most nights, searching for the beauty of “brain trauma,” the bleaching out of the harsh, heavy world. Ex-wives. Dying neighborhoods. Bills. But drunkenness didn’t deliver Frederick from worry, from the evils of a lonely apartment, a time-bomb stove. “Still,” Mark said, clattering and banging through junk — his way of thinking out loud — “it’s what we have.”
Now, Mark strained a painful smile, gripped his hammered thumb. “So. Painting?” he said.
Frederick shook his head. “I’ve already shipped most of my materials to New York. Just trying to wrap things up here — and finish your preface.”
“I really appreciate it, man. I’m going to miss you.”
“Me too.” He raised his glass. “Better now?”
“Some. How’s Robbie?”
“I’ll see him tomorrow.”
“Ruthie’s still —?”
“Stone.”
“Hey, you gotta do what’s best for the work,” Mark said.
Frederick nodded. Above the bench, Mark’s largest, most colorful map of Paraguay curled in the heat. Moths ticked against the great, wide plains, the sand-like spires of Asunción. “How’s your friend?” Frederick asked.
“Saucy as ever. Called me last night.”
He’d met Serena a couple of years ago, in a bar, when she was visiting a cousin here in the States. “Another saucy señorita,” Mark had said at the time. “I’m telling you, they know how to package the goods down south.” Now he said, “If I sell some pieces at the show, maybe I can afford to go see her. Frolics and bliss, man, the moon and the stars. Fellow can’t labor all the time. Remember that when you get to the Apple.”
On a silver hook in the wall, Mark’s tin snake coiled around a radiator cap. He’d finished the piece last year, soon after leaving the hospital. The old altar boy in Frederick, long dormant, revived whenever he saw it. It reminded him of Bible illustrations he’d seen as a kid of the serpent of temptation, locked around the limb of a tree.
Its body was a garden hose painted silver. Slowly, Frederick edged away from it. “Need a cat?” he asked.
“Hoffmann? Sure. Leave that tiger with me,” Mark said.
“I’m not sure I know what I’m doing.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean the move.”
“You’re joking.”
“No.”
Mark picked up the screwdriver. “Freddie, you just told me you’d shipped your stuff. The magazine’s waiting for you, right? The editors?”
“Yep.”
“Ballsiest thing you ever did, man, flying out there. I couldn’t believe it. Ruth thought you were — what — zipping up to Dallas that week?”
“To meet a gallery owner who’d liked my work.” Actually, he’d seen an ad in Art-News, phoned, and arranged an interview in the Village with the magazine’s founding editors. “She was very excited for me. Always supportive.”
“It’s not her support you need.”
In the last year, she’d had no idea how completely he’d left her already. Desire in me — ambition — is stronger than self-sacrifice, Frederick thought. He felt clammy.
“All the art world’s there. It’s your chance, man. No choice.” Mark licked his ravaged thumb. “Freddie, you’re too good to wither away here in Texas. Houstonians, they don’t know Picasso from Pecos Bill.”
“The sin of pride.”
“Hm?”
“A biggie back in Catholic school. A real land mine. Did I ever tell you, the Jesuits — ”
“Oh Christ, man, let it go. You’ve found steady work in the only city that matters for a painter. You won’t get another shot like this, I guarantee it. It’s your career, man.”
“I’m abandoning my kid.”
“He’s a kid. Right. That’s the point. I’ve told you this. He’ll adjust. Nothing’s fixed in his world. He’ll grow up not knowing any better.”
“Schizophrenia,” Frederick said.
“Are you still in love with Ruth?”
“Yes. No.”
Mark lifted the bottle. The snake hung, ready to spring. “I’ll be waiting for that cat,” he said.
Kennedy claimed that the entire southern quarter of the United States, including Texas, could be vaporized by nuclear attack if the Russians got a foothold in Cuba.
Robbie watched the jumpy television screen. His eyes wouldn’t leave the president’s face, even while Frederick knelt beside him on the living-room floor, tugging a T-shirt over his pale little arms. Kennedy’s eyes looked puffy, Frederick thought. He wondered how much Robbie understood. To Robbie, the Leader of the Free World was probably just another cartoon; after all, the man’s charming good looks, the huge white house he lived in, were larger than life. Even Frederick found them hard to believe.
Now Khrushchev was Wile E. Coyote, scheming to capture the world’s freedoms. A furry finger on a button. Beep beep.
“It’s too small,” Ruth said from the doorway into the kitchen. She leaned against the jamb in a yellow cotton dress that stirred companionable feelings in Frederick. He guessed she’d worn it one night to a wonderful dinner, or prior to making love, back in the days before their own awful fallout.
Finger on a button, indeed.
It hadn’t taken much gentle stroking to set her off, when she was just a blushing young bride. Frederick remembered simmering nights with the shades up and the sheets in a desperate bedside tussle.
Now, she wouldn’t hold his gaze.
He checked the shirt’s torn package. “How can it be too small?” he said. “This is the same size I bought him before.”