Paul Theroux - Mr. Bones - Twenty Stories

Perhaps to purge it of memories, she had gutted her house near the harbor and at great expense redecorated it to display her art collection: Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg, Louis, Olitski, and some installations. Her friends, especially Tony and Sandy and Amadeo, raved about it, praised her for keeping the shell and rebuilding the interior, as a kind of museum, where my work was not welcome.

“That house has great bones,” Tony said.

But with obvious secrecy she never invited anyone into the house. Whenever she was picked up by a car, she met the person in the driveway or stepped outside before the driver knocked. No one was allowed inside. Once, meeting her to give her a lift, I saw her kitchen through the window. A pile of laundry had been stacked, unsorted, on the stove, and her cat was asleep on the kitchen table in the sunshine, the cat’s bowl near it. That said everything about Mrs. Everest’s eating arrangements.

“I used to be a gourmet cook,” she said. “I gave lavish dinner parties.”

Was this true? No one I knew had ever eaten her food or been to a dinner party she’d given. She only ate in restaurants, presiding over the table. She ordered three courses and picked at them, hardly eating, never finishing. But in those rare moments when she chewed some food, a hidden part of her personality became apparent — a wolfish energy and appetite, her yellow teeth champing, her turned-down mouth working, an alertness the whole time, her gaze widened as though to ward off an intruder. Then she spat. After that, she’d pass a knuckle across the crumbs on her lips, push the plate aside, and say to the waitress, “Take this away.”

She was always offhand with menials, and her brusque manner made them excessively polite.

“Yes, right away, madam. Shall I wrap it up for you?”

“Absolutely not.”

At the end of the meal she would suggest another meal — dinner tomorrow night, lunch the following day, Sunday brunch. She only saw people for meals; she was unavailable at any other time. She went out occasionally, to movies, to see friends, to shop, but was covert about it, and generally huddled inside her grand house, except at mealtimes or gallery openings.

Her friends, especially those shrieking men, praised her sense of style, and yet she only wore the old suede jacket and junk jewelry. No one remarked on how rumpled she looked; on the contrary, her shabbiness was regarded as a sort of defiant fashion.

She had the big-city habit, which was like a vice to me, of going to the movies in the afternoon, even on the sunniest day. Although her house was by the harbor, she never went near the water, did not swim or go sailing.

Speaking of an adulterous woman on the island, she asked me what I thought. I said, “Emma Bovary,” and she corrected me: “No, her name is Alice.” Other instances like this convinced me that she had no education, but her coterie saw this as a virtue. “Dickie dropped out of high school!” This was more praise, but it was clear to me that she was unlettered: all she knew was from talk, from something she’d been told, from anecdote and chat. But she taught me that no one could be more condescending than a high school dropout. Books put her to sleep, print was a soporific to her. She loved big bold paintings of stripes, the oversize archery targets that were in vogue in the sixties, the grotesque photos in tabloids. Anything less bored her. Her gallery reflected this tendency. I remember one show with car crashes and crime scenes, forensic photos, bloody bandages.

Sooner than I realized it, because I did not dare to dislike Mrs. Everest, she made me doubt myself. I did not lose faith in my work, yet I felt browbeaten and stupid because of her. Just being with her, a whole lunchtime, say, would turn me into a dope. I’d learned not to contradict her or put in a friendly mitigating word for the woman she disparaged or the man she maligned.

Having listened in silence to Mrs. Everest’s venomous remarks, I always felt ashamed after one of these meals, avoiding the front window as I left the restaurant, turning away from the reflection of my face. We were, as I say, summer people. Had I fallen foul of her and been ostracized, we would have had nothing — no parties, no society. Yes, I see that I was cowardly and deluded, but I was fascinated too. Ethical satisfaction is not the same as aesthetic satisfaction, or plain curiosity. I studied her and did sketches, compulsively planning her portrait.

It never occurred to me that, out of my hearing, she might be disparaging me. That was strange: she was disloyal to everyone I knew, yet I believed she would be loyal to my wife and me.

When this thought occurred to me, I saw my naïveté, but of course by then it was too late.

Someone Mrs. Everest had fallen out with — had in fact rejected — said to me one day, “She’s an alcoholic, you know,” as though this (if it were true) explained everything.

Perhaps it explained her famished stare, her fuss and obsessiveness, her bleak moods — little eclipses when she darkened and became impossible to please. Perhaps it explained her sweet tooth, which dry drunks are supposed to have, and her conspicuous regard for holding a glass — not drinking it but treating alcohol as if it were a magic potion, forbidden, tempting, poisonous, transformative. In her mood swings, which were frequent, she could turn on a person and, blinking, bare her teeth and deliver a sudden insult.

But a history of alcoholism could not account for the pleasure she took in someone’s downfall, her love of bad news. The alcoholics I had known who’d taken the pledge were humbled, always haltingly explaining their weakness, or in a low-grade fever of atonement, constantly treading the tightrope of sobriety.

Not Mrs. Everest. She looked thirsty and pitiless, and on many occasions, clapping her hands like a child on hearing something disgraceful, relentless in her ill will, she was triumphant, reckless, and often wore the delirious expression of a predator, eyes aglow, as though she wanted to feast on her victim — had indeed already weakened the prey and would wait until the poor creature fell flat so that she could straddle the corpse and take a big bite from the haunch.

People do not fail without an element of struggle, but when it happens their failure is often undramatic. Failure comes in stages, like illness, a prolonged weakening, and finally a decline, with a whisper of extinction that is indistinguishable from death. This slowness and delay, the resilience in the human condition, the dying fall rather than the sudden plunge, is the reason I suspect tyrants, impatient for triumph, become murderers; why they carry out pogroms, persecutions, mass starvations; why they promote famine or reduce their enemies to slavery or captivity.

It is not enough to rejoice over the natural death of your enemies; their end must be hastened. Impatience is one of the besetting sins of the tyrant, an effect of blood lust; it is impatience that turns the conventionally cruel leader into a mass murderer.

And in order to be satisfied, Mrs. Everest wanted to have had a hand in it. “I want to kill them with my bare hands,” she’d say, pretending to be joking. And the person must fail completely, be rendered naked, homeless, ruined, exposed, the house burned down, the dog lying dead in the driveway.

Hearing stories of people she’d destroyed, I studied the look on her face — her glittering, slightly drunken eyes, her nostrils flared, her lips apart, her teeth showing, her tongue thickening with hunger. I should have been warned, but Izzy and I remained on her guest list, fascinated, and also fearful. On this island we were isolated in the true sense of the word. One of the stipulations of Mrs. Everest’s friendship was that her friends were mine, and her enemies too.