“I don’t know,” Harold said. “How bad can it be?”
“Is Lincoln your son?” I asked.
Harold sighed and took a leisurely sip of wine before setting his glass down again. He was shaking his head slowly, though whether in denial or disbelief at my nosy questions it was hard to say.
I decided to ask another. “What happened to Eva Kent?” I took a long swallow of the wine he’d poured for me. It tasted expensive. I put the glass down and turned my knees toward him.
He leaned back and laid his arm across the back of the couch. “Well, Eva had that postpartum thing you were talking about. We all thought she’d snap out of it but she kept getting worse. I was giving her a solo show at the Gallery Gecko, a big deal. We got all excited about it — you know, hanging the paintings just right. Little Linc was maybe a year old.”
He chuckled, fondly, and sipped his wine, on the verge of another reverie.
I suspected this was a pose designed to keep me in his living room for as long as possible; it seemed less lecherous than desperate, and I wondered just how alone he was. “So then what?” I said.
“Right. Anyway, after this depression thing Eva’d been painting these crazy pictures. She thought she could see into the future. Her work was always real sexual, but after the baby it got kind of distorted, and people started freaking out. The pictures of her and the baby — well, they didn’t seem right. This only egged her on, of course. She liked controversy. Or at least the attention.”
“What happened to those paintings? Did you sell any?”
“No, I didn’t,” Harold said. “Because the night before the opening, after we finished hanging the show, she left Linc at home and burned the whole gallery down with a can of gasoline and a book of matches. She hated herself, I think that’s why, but of course nobody knows.”
“Jesus H. Christ,” I said. “So most of her work is gone?”
“I thought all of it was,” Harold said. “And I’m not sure how your dad got hold of the ones you have. But it really was tragic. She had talent, and everybody knew it. You could just tell she was working on a whole different level, if you—”
“I know what you mean,” I said sincerely.
“Anyway, they put her in some kind of home. First they’d tried letting her live on her own, but she stopped taking her drugs and ran away to California — which is when she sent me that picture you saw. Then they got her back and stuck her in a place in Albuquerque, and she never painted again. Not that I know of, anyway.”
“And Lincoln?”
“Farmed out to various relatives and whatnot. Under the circumstances, I don’t know how he grew up to be so normal. It must be all that yoga. I go to his classes all the time. I like to keep an eye on him. Sometimes we have lunch.”
“Are you his father?” I said.
Harold snorted. “God only knows. Well, God, and Eva.”
I stared at him in repulsion.
“Oh, come on,” he said. “I’m just kidding. I’m not his father.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, of course,” he said, staring down at his white carpet for another long moment. “I was doing a lot of stuff those days,” he finally said. “It was a time of experimentation, of pushing boundaries.”
I nodded. “Yes, I know. I study that period. Experimentation with sexual politics, a push to be frank and honest about the body’s functions and desires.”
“That’s not exactly what I meant,” Harold said wrily. “More like drugs and drinking. .” His voice trailed off as I kept looking at him; then he added, “You can imagine the effect of that kind of lifestyle.”
I had no idea what he was talking about: forgetfulness, or promiscuity, or sloppy personal hygiene? Then I did. If you do a lot of drugs and drinking, you can’t always follow through on the body’s functions and desires. From the darkness of his blush and the fact that he could not meet my eyes I understood that he was telling the truth, and that all his sexual bragging had been just that, an exaggerated fiction.
“I know what you mean,” I said gently, almost wanting to put a hand on his shoulder. But if Harold wasn’t the father, I thought, then who was? I pictured Eva in my mind, and the vision was nightmarish: she was dribbling a can of gasoline around a room, deranged and leering, insane, while fire trucks howled outside. Putting my father in that picture with her was impossible, and yet I couldn’t stop thinking about it, either. I felt a kind of energy building inside me, a force that swam through my blood like intuition. Fragments turned and spun in my head: the disorienting paintings; Eva’s strange, grinning face; my father, who owned her only surviving work. I remembered the serious and distracted look he always had after a long day at the office, and now in my imagination this look took on a deeper, more romantic cast. All my memories were changing, shifting their forms. I saw an almost logical progression from past to present, from him to me, that was confirmed by the paintings propped against my dresser. The reason I’d felt that jolt of electricity, that lightning-bolt sense of recognition when I’d seen them, had to do the persistence of objects, the power of physical things, which were how the dead could communicate with the living.
In The Ball and Chain there were slashes of paint on the woman’s body, all shades of red, thick as mayonnaise, raised and bumpy. Some reds had blue undertones, others yellow, some as dark as Daphne Michaelson’s red lipstick. I thought of the way she’d named colors, as if reciting a code. Light is what makes every color, she’d said, and can be both particle and wave — these were such weird statements coming out of her mouth, and not likely something she’d read about in the pages of Vogue.
It made me wish I’d deciphered my father’s book on the temporal dimension in physics, and I thought, then, of Daphne standing alone at the backyard party, watching my father at the grill, watching the other women from inside the house. It occurred to me that she was trying to tell me something about my parents. She was there, after all, and could’ve seen everything that went on between my father and Eva Kent, between my mother and her husband. She’d identified the slash of red across her own face with a purposeful tone that was difficult to ignore; it was as if she were invoking the slash of red on the face of the woman in The Wilderness Kiss. And that light can be both wave and particle — what did that have to do with lipstick? Maybe nothing. Or maybe she meant that a single person can have two natures — that the father I knew was also painted by Eva Kent.
“What institution is she in now?” I asked Harold.
“It’s right by the yoga studio,” he said. “Linc rented that studio so they’d be close. He’s a good kid, visits her all the time. Enchanted Mesa, I think they call it. Don’t know where they come up with these names. There’s nothing enchanted about the place, I’ll tell you.”
“Probably not.”
“I guess you’ll be going,” he said, “now that you know the story.”
He walked me to the door, looking defeated and sad. Before I could think too much about it, I leaned over and kissed his wine-sweetened lips. He accepted the kiss with a kind of stunned grace. “Thanks for your help, Harold,” I said. “I mean it.”
“You’re welcome,” he said calmly. As I drove away I could see him watching me and leaning, as if swooning, against his front door.
It was late afternoon when I got back to Albuquerque, the day windless and harsh. Children and dogs were splashing in pools, shirtless men bent over the hoods of their cars, joggers with skin tanned the color of chocolate milk. In a city park, under elm trees, an extended family was having a barbecue, heat from its coals funneling up through the air, and the bright trash of chip bags and soda bottles scattered around them. There was only one person I urgently needed to see.