Robert Stone - Children of Light

Maldonado resumed his seat across from Lu Anne. He and all the others at the table watched in silence as Walker guided himself into a chair beside her and she moved to steady him. When he was down beside her she took his hand and kissed it and put her arm around his neck.

“I want to explain myself,” Maldonado said. “I want to explain what I said against my painting.”

“There’s no need for that,” Miss Armitage said. “Everyone knows how wonderful you are. And everyone can see you’ve been drinking.”

The voice of Joy McIntyre rang again through the patio.

“The choreographer at the Sands is dead!” she bellowed. “The choreog—” She began the phrase again but was cut off in mid-word, somewhat disconcertingly.

“Why are people always saying that?” Lowndes asked.

“ ’Cause we’re in tinseltown,” Axelrod told him. “And they’re sending you a message, Dongan.”

“I want to speak about my painting,” Maldonado said. “This lady has challenged me and I dedicate my remarks to her.”

“The lady will excuse you,” Ann Armitage said firmly. “She knows there are things not to say in public. She understands that sometimes we say things that can hurt us in important ways.”

“All the same,” Maldonado said softly.

Walker finished the drink at his place.

“We are true artists here,” he explained, “we work without a net.”

Old Drogue came out of the darkness; there appeared to be dark welts on his neck. He made his way to the table to sit between his son and Patty.

When Charlie rose to welcome him, he raised his right hand in a kind of benediction and sat down.

“Yay, Pops,” Drogue junior said. Patty enfolded his arm in hers.

“I come from Colima,” Maldonado told them. “My people were dust. I went to school and studied art because art is prized in this country. My teacher had been a student of the American William Gropper, so he painted like Gropper and so did I. In Tepic I have a roomful of my early work — all very realistic and political.”

“Passionate,” Miss Armitage told the people at the table. “Fierce and full of rage. It’s wonderful work.”

“It resembles the cartoons of Mr. Magoo,” Maldonado said. “A Mr. Magoo passionate, fierce and full of rage.”

“He tortures himself,” Ann Armitage lamented.

“I torture myself by enduring banalities in silence. I wish on my mother’s grave I had never learned the English language.”

“You probably went too far,” Walker suggested. “You should have learned a little restaurant English. Enough to order flapjacks. Certainly not enough to understand Miss Armitage on the subject of Mexican painting.”

“What’s he doing here anyway?” Miss Armitage asked Charlie of Walker. “Why isn’t he somewhere chained to a hospital bed?”

Charlie muttered soothingly and looked at the table.

Maldonado turned to Lu Anne.

“Before you there should only be truth. Because of your eyes.”

“How serious everything’s become,” Lu Anne said. “First the choreographer at the Sands and now this.”

“You started it,” Walker pointed out to her. “Ask a tactless question and you get the long answer.”

“The choreographer at the Sands?” Lowndes asked.

“I’ve never spoken the truth in English,” Maldonado told them. “Is it possible?”

“Oh yes,” Lu Anne said. “But very Protestant.”

“I’ve taken to diving,” the artist told her. “I take pictures wherever there’s coral. Then from the pictures I paint. Can you imagine what it’s like to vulgarize the bottom of the ocean? The source of life? When you know the difference?”

“Courage,” Walker told the artist, “you’re talking to the right crowd. There are people at this table who can vulgarize pure light.”

“I want to tell you more,” Maldonado said. “More of the truth.”

“Isn’t he beautiful?” Lu Anne asked the people at the table.

“Great face,” old Drogue said. “Good bones.”

“Mr. Maldonado,” Lu Anne said, “if you were the god of good bones it wouldn’t matter what you told me. The truth is no concern of mine.”

“Can’t you see she’s crazy?” Miss Armitage asked her friend.

“Because I lie so well in your language,” Maldonado said, “and because I listen so well to lies, I’m successful. Perhaps also because I’m beautiful and have good bones. Now I have an arrangement with a very prestigious department store. They sell my paintings there and my prints. They also use my designs. So I can look forward to the day, Miss Verger, when my visions will be stamped on every shower curtain in America. In every swimming pool, Jacuzzi and bathtub. On the toilet wallpaper and in the toilet bowl. Wherever sanitation is honored — Maldonados. Standing tall.”

“Somebody’s got to do it,” young Drogue told him.

“Hey, man,” Patty said to her husband, “you know we own a lot of this guy’s stuff and he’s telling us it’s all crapola.”

“We can fix that tomorrow morning,” young Drogue said. “One phone call.”

“Do you want me to forgive you, Mr. Maldonado?” Lu Anne asked. “I would forgive you if I could.” The Long Friends gathered round her. “But I myself am no more than good bones. A rag, a hank of hair and good bones.”

“Just a minute,” Maldonado said. “We have a bargain. This is the time of truth among truth tellers. You people,” he told the people at the table, “you who know how good you are! Tell us!”

“Come off it, man,” Axelrod said.

“Yeah, man,” Dongan Lowndes said. “Come off it.” He seemed restored to full vigor and he was doing an imitation of Axelrod.

Axelrod looked at him pensively.

“I don’t want anyone to leave,” Maldonado said with a hint of menace. “I want everyone to explain themselves.”

Lowndes raised his glass, which contained tequila au naturel , in Charlie’s direction.

“Thank God it’s Freitag,” he declared.

“This is fun,” Walker said. “This is better than poker. Who opens?”

“What do we need?” Ann Armitage asked. “Do alcoholism and impotence make a pair?”

“Miss Armitage,” Walker announced, “was the only person in America actually hanged during the McCarthy period. She was strung up at the height of her career from the witching elm at the Hamilton horse trials.”

“You louse,” Ann Armitage said in her cultivated voice. “You eunuch.”

“Miss Armitage is a student of sexual prowess in males,” Walker continued, “and a major Mexican art critic. She combines in her single self the principal attributes of Eleonora Duse, Eleanor Roosevelt and Eleanor of Castile. Also Rosa Luxemburg, Sacco and Vanzetti. If a passing divine hadn’t noticed her dangling there during the dressage competition and recognized the visible manifestations of grace, her poor alcoholic impotent husband might be alive today. Pretty soon she’s going to write her memoirs and we’ll see a parade of virtue as long as Macy’s at Thanksgiving but with twice as much gas and imagination.”

“Everyone’s under a lot of strain,” Charlie Freitag said grimly.

“They’re all drunk, Charlie,” Axelrod explained. “That’s what it is.”

“Tell him about yourself, Gordon,” Walter Drogue junior said.

“Walter’s a wonderful dresser,” Walker told the Mexican, “and he’s a feminist and he’s not taking a writing credit on this movie because he hasn’t written it.”

“Watch it, buster,” Patty Drogue said.

“These are only insults,” Maldonado complained. “It’s childish to insult people for being only what they are. I want to hear about ability.”

“Laughter,” Lu Anne said. She looked radiant in the firelight and everyone watched her. “Ability and sighs.”