By Ben Greenman
From A Circle is a Balloon and Compass Both
Boden made the wealthy look good; more to the point, he made them look as they imagined they actually looked. He did not feel as though he was failing as an artist by leaving off with the real. His interest lay in solving problems of light and color he set to himself. He painted Mrs. John Avary, the wife of the university president, standing on a balcony at sunset; the lantern on the table beneath her cast its glow along her neck and jaw line. If he refined her features slightly or returned her figure to what it had been a decade before, what of it? A woman should love the way she looks on a canvas.
The men were no different. When Alex Shawcross, the conductor of the symphony, sat for Boden, he stared straight ahead, as if being interrogated, and in his right hand he clutched a biography of Debussy. Boden eliminated the book and in its place put spectacles; Shawcross usually wore them but had removed them for the sitting out of vanity. The sleight, which was minor, had major consequences; the canvas, which could have been a portrait of an uneasy man affecting wisdom, showed a wise man at ease.
Boden was only twenty-nine, but he had practiced for years at this kind of improvement. He was a big man with loose skin and one heavy lid, but if you asked those people who had met him what he looked like, they would remember a man of ordinary size and even gaze. It had to do with how he carried himself, deliberate and in a way aloft. He had devised a meditation in which he imagined that all his insecurities—his doubt regarding his talent, his conviction that he was fundamentally unintelligent—filled him and lifted him so that the ground fell away at his feet. What diminished him enlarged him. It was a simple inversion of the truth but it had an irresistible logic to it. He had tried to teach this technique to Shawcross, who he quite liked despite the man’s reputation as a martinet, but Shawcross merely crimped his smile and gripped the book tighter.
It was as a result of these paintings that Boden came to Landesman, or rather that Landesman came to Boden. Boden’s dealer, an eager young man named Meredith who was always apologizing that he could not do more with an artist of Boden’s abilities, told him that a rich businessman had called inquiring after a painting. He did not say how rich, which was just as well. As much as Boden wished to separate what he did and what he was paid to do it—the two had never been unacquainted, utterly, but rather held apart from one another—he had always had a weakness for the numbers. A man’s worth swayed him. Boden not only saw clearly that he could be blinded by wealth; he also saw that he could be blinded, as it were, by seeing, and for that reason he refused to meet a prospective client until he had agreed on terms for a portrait. Meredith, as usual, set up a telephone interview with the interested party; Boden stood by and waited for the call.
On the phone, Landesman’s voice was a comfortable thing, deep and soft, with more than a little care in it. He was curious about Boden, which was a rarity; no sooner had preliminaries been exchanged than he asked after Boden’s accent. “I am a German who just missed being a German,” Boden said, as he always said when asked this question. He had lived in the city his whole life, but he also had lived much of that time at home with his mother, who had fled Konstanz when she was not yet twenty. In departing she packed in haste and took, along with the child she carried, more of the German language than she might have otherwise. Boden grew up speaking an English that was not broken but rather overbuilt, with words piled on top of one another and protruding from the smooth plane of American phrases. When he spoke to his mother, who had since moved back to Germany to care for her elderly parents, he heard the misuse of language in each of her sentences, though he could not hear it in his own. She loved him solidly and even sent a little money every month, along with notes that were written in a rush, as if she were fearful of embarrassing him. Boden visited her once a year, though she was sad it could not be more. She was all alone in Germany, as she told all her friends, and oftentimes had no good idea about what to do with herself. When her son came to see her, she could be useful again, and so she spent much of her time trying to convince him to come. Boden did not tell Landesman all of this, but he told him enough. Then the throttle of the conversation sputtered out and Boden, foundering a bit, moved on to the matter of the commission. At this, Landesman became brusque. A lifetime of negotiations in the boardroom had cast him firm. “You’ll come on Saturday,” he said, named a time, and hung up.
The grandeur of Landesman’s apartment building was best understood not only by the numbers of men who staffed the place but by the caliber of those men, all of whom possessed a superior sense of ceremony and civility. Boden met them in a series of pulses, the outer doorman, the inner doorman, the lobby attendant. Each introduced himself, shook Boden’s hand, and made account of the exchange through brief but robust eye contact, so that Boden felt that these were the finest men he had ever met, and he was fine among them. Only the elevator operator was an exception; as Boden rode up in the small, elegant cab, the tiny crabbed figure, who wore a gray cap and had a stem watch stuffed haphazardly into his vest pocket, kept complaining about the weather, and his wife, and arthritis, and the cupidity of certain millionaires. Boden reached Landesman’s floor and hopped out quickly, glad to be done with the man. He had expected to be greeted by a butler, or at the very least to be kept waiting, but he had only to ring the bell once and the door opened. A broad-faced, altogether pleasant looking man stepped out and said, “Hello. I’m George Landesman.” Then he turned and was back inside the doorway. Boden stood there for a moment, looking into the apartment. His eye passed over everything but settled on nothing. There was too much to take in. He followed the man out of simple terror.
The place was cavernous. They went down a long hallway, past rooms with antique furniture, rooms with chandeliers, one room with a massive gilt-wood mirror that ran from floor to ceiling. Boden even thought he saw a Degas out of the corner of his eye: a flash of tulle, a pointed toe. Landesman did not stop in any of these rooms. Instead, he went straight to the end of the hall, where there was a modest den that was not so different from Boden’s own. Landesman sat down on a green brocade chair and Boden noticed what he had not noticed before: Landesman was immensely fat. His coat, as green as the chair, was buttoned over his stomach but barely; the thread mooring the lowest button was being practically put to the test. Boden began figuring the portrait; he could not eliminate the man’s girth, no more than he could eliminate his own. It was everything about the man, a perfect summary of his being: he could not move in the chair easily and he could not move out of it. Boden moved to the window to check the light; the view took the park in a single swoop.
“I realized that on the telephone I didn’t tell you why I want this portrait,” Landesman said. There was a confidence in his tone and also concern, as if he knew he would be marked out forever by the process and wanted to have his say on it while there was still time. Despite that, he had lost none of his pleasant bearing. Much of the credit for his composure went to his face, which was smooth and pink and seemed never to have been whiskered. It lifted him away slightly from his obvious body and all that it implied. If you took time with his face you found yourself thinking of a man who had it all ahead of him still. He did not look young but he looked new.
He told Boden how he had recently divorced and moved back into in the city. His things had needed to come with him, or had at any rate not been permitted to remain behind. The one conspicuous exception was a portrait he had sat for years before with his wife and his children. Now, he wanted a portrait of himself. “I may well die this way,” Landesman said, “alone. So I want a preview of what it’ll look like.” He gave a respectable cough. “I had the idea that I’d like you to paint me working. It’s what I do, more than any other thing, and I think any admirably honest portrait would show me at it.” Boden expected that they would move to another room, but Landesman stayed in the chair. “I do much of my work from here. It’s my office. I have meetings, but when I don’t have them, it’s all decisions and all on the telephone. I’ve never been big on the desk.” He gave a laugh that was sharp, and also soft. “Though I’m big behind it,” he said, patting his stomach. “If you can call it big.”
They then got quickly to the sketching. Landesman gave sidelong glances, handled the phone one way and then another. Boden was conscious of the fact that he was watching a performance. This struck him, really, as his introduction to things. He tried above all else to have at the man’s hands. As cumbersome as the rest of him was, his hands were surprisingly delicate. He was thinking of Sargent’s painting of Paul Helleu on the riverbank, the way the hands seemed guided by a separate intelligence to completion of their task. Then he moved up to the head. There was something about it that carried the sketch immensely into authority. What he was seeking in it was the drive of the idea.
After an hour, Boden stood to leave. Landesman cupped a hand over the telephone. “Going?” he said.
“For the day,” Boden said. In fact it was for good. He did not want any more. It would be too much. Upon leaving, he could remember little of the afternoon, except for the sense that it had been excellent for him. He stood downstairs, in the lobby, and thought about the man and what he already had come to mean. Usually at this point in the process, Boden had to push himself forward into a painting—eventually he’d get there, but the early stages were filled with negotiation. He had to tell himself, somewhat paternally, that money was not necessarily corrupt, that even an artist needed to survive, and that more to the point it was a form of criticism: those who saw his talent also saw clear to pay for it. With Landesman, Boden had no such ambivalence. He had asked to be painted and Boden, upon visiting his apartment, had felt the strength of it, of both the meeting and the man. Though Boden knew he would paint Landesman in his chair, as he had requested, he could not erase the final image of the afternoon, when Landesman rose and took Boden’s hand in his own with a strength that somehow still suggested restraint. There was clearly more in reserve.
Next door to Landesman’s apartment building there was a restaurant, rather deluxe: Boden took a seat at the bar and did what he always did: he read philosophy. He read not to understand, or not only, but to be understood; he hoped that a fragment of the work would, shaken out, illuminate him. He brought a different book with him each time; now, it was Poincare on mathematics, and Boden, speeding through, felt straightened logically. His head cleared by degrees, and settled, as it always did, on the hope that he would not, after he primed the linen to medium value, washed off his brushes, and mixed his paints, miss the mark entirely. The job, as it were, was to both fix Landesman’s character and allow it to range freely over the canvas. And that character, fiercely contemporary, posed a formidable challenge. Boden had read, not in the Poincare but elsewhere, that in the modern era, subtlety of thought had grown at the expense of stability of soul, and he rose thrillingly to the prospect that Landesman might essentially disprove this notion.
Boden looked around the bar. There were a number of couples trading whispers, a few men, all wonderers and starers, and a handful of women he could make out as unescorted, including a richly blonde woman seated down the way. Her beauty was a thing of the past, though not so remotely, but she would not meet his eye, no matter how many times he forced himself down into the Poincare and looked up in an imitation, he admitted to himself, of contemplation. She withdrew a slim telephone from her handbag, made one call and then another, and it occurred to Boden that she might in fact be waiting for a companion. Presently his suspicion was confirmed with the arrival of a second blonde. She kissed the first woman quickly on the cheek, sat down, and ordered a drink for herself, all in one fluid motion that was like the unspooling of a ribbon. She was younger, less done up than the first and even more to look at, especially in her smooth broad brow and her bright level gaze. Boden would have redoubled his effort, for there was every reason to, but before he could close up his book, the two women were upright and away, out into the night.
The next morning, he took it right to the portrait. It was four feet square. They all were. In other cases, he had used the space on either side of the subject to display an array of personal effects, or to paint a window through which a bit of natural beauty might be glimpsed. Landesman, filling his green brocade chair, filled the frame, and Boden put so little space around him, superficially, that his corpulence showed on the canvas in an extraordinary fashion. Landesman did not just suggest reassurance; he was, in short, a demonstration of it. He practiced a fleetness and kept the black out for the most part; he needed to keep his conception of the man as light as possible, and he knew that the image should, as it were, rise to the middle of the canvas. Boden worked through the day and cleaned his brushes and stepped back and, looking at the whole of it, felt certain that he had painted a man.
Landesman was delighted by the result. “I said it to Meredith and I’ll say it again,” he said. Then, after a pause, “Come by Thursday for dinner.” Boden assumed it would be a grand party. He didn’t have a specific idea of glamour but rather a general one, in which champagne went around on round silver trays and the city’s finest, the Avarys and Shawcrosses among them, looked at one another with a mix of approval and contempt. He assumed they would have cocktails in the room with the chandelier and then dine in the room with the giltwood mirror. After-dinner drinks in the room with the tree would follow, and maybe he would even see the Degas, if that’s what it was. But when he got to the apartment, his only good suit jacket buttoned high to cover a stain on his only good tie, Landesman again came to the door himself, wearing the same green jacket and the same expression of jollity. “Andreas,” he said. He was virtually alone in his use of the first name“ Come in. We’re having sandwiches.”
Boden laughed, but it was true. The two of them went down the hall to the same room as before, where Landesman touched a panel on the wall. It slid to reveal a television set, and the two of them ate roast beef and turkey sandwiches and watched football and talked.
Landesman had many things on his mind; if he had been reticent the first time, he was equally voluble now. He spoke about his daughter, a Seattle schoolteacher who had also recently divorced. He spoke about his son, who, after trying to strike out on his own, had rejoined the family business and was in Europe discussing the purchase of some manufacturing facilities. He spoke about his father, who had been a small-town lawyer. Then, and at the greatest length, he spoke about his grandfather, who had been a barnstormer in the twenties, and then built airplanes for a living. It was the source of the family money. “My father was a wonderful man, but he kept to himself. My grandfather taught me most of what I know,” Landesman said. “I look like him: he was thin when he was young, when he flew, but by the time I knew him, he was almost round. He’s the one who got me started on planes.”
“Started how?”
Landesman turned the sound down on the television. “Oh,” he said. “I haven’t told you about the Air Room, have I?” As a young man, Landesman began to collect airplane models, books, and magazines about early aviation, and rare letters in the field, and over the years he had assembled one of the largest private collections in the world on early aviation. The papers and objects, which had been housed in the suburbs, had recently arrived at his apartment, and he had hired a man to create special cabinets and shelves for the books and models. “His name is Red Hyde. Top designer for this kind of thing. What we’re going for is a world-class library.”
“How big is the room?”
“It’s big. You could fit three or four of this room inside it. I’d show it to you, but there’s nothing to see yet, and lots of exposed wiring and sharp tools scattered around. You can see it the next time, maybe.” Boden was surprised to hear that there would be a next time; the information brought him to his feet as if he were being dismissed.
“Wait,” Landesman said, pointing to an envelope on an end table. “Take that.”
“What is it?”
“It’s your payment for the painting. I adjusted it as I saw fit. Generally, I like to pay the price I’m sure I should pay.”
“I understand,” Boden said, though he could not imagine that he did.
“You look worried,” Landesman said. “Don’t be. It’s higher than you think. But I want to ask you something. I have been thinking about painting, about what it must take.” His large pink face had come expressly into its own with regard for his own curiosity. “It occurs to me, the more I let it, that this must be very lonely work.” Boden waited for the question, but none came. He folded Landesman’s check and turned to leave the room: ten feet separated the two men and then forty, and then he was on the street below, looking up at the high window. He went to the same bar as before, and it was mostly empty, and he populated it with thoughts of his good fortune. Before Landesman, it had been a strange and average year, with many people acting in disappointing fashion, and now and again a reprieve. But then he had met a man who, in a single glance, took him in. When the two men had first met, Boden had not been on the same level as Landesman. How could he have been? But the care with which the older man placed his faith in Boden served as a sort of elevation. He rode the elevator down. He stood in the street and looked back up the side of the building. Boden understood the whole thing, or meant to.
What Landesman had said that second afternoon was true enough. There was always in Boden a loneliness so profound that he did not even try to take a measure of its depths. When he made new friends, he put himself through a regimen of interest and gratitude, though he had no thought of maintaining any contact closer than acquaintanceship; when he met a woman his mind was already moving past her to try to understand the moment when he would be without her. He did not know why he was this way, only that he had never been otherwise. When his mother put him on the train for his first year of university, he had kissed her on the cheek and taken his seat quite secure in the knowledge that he would never see her again. The arrival of a letter from her four days later shocked him. But in placing in the strongest light on the darkest of his attributes, Landesman had somehow taken hold of Boden’s spirits and lifted them. Boden had not seen the man since he had eaten with him, but he had no doubts that he would see him again, and in fact he could not remember a time when the man had not been vividly present to him.
Boden had also been thinking about the young woman he had seen when he left Landesman’s, and that in turn led him to thinking about bars, not the philosophy of them but the fact. It was a simple trigger and a foolish one, but the shot came off, and he started to spend his evenings downtown, with the clear purpose of vodka set before him. As he sat there, the idea came to him that he should paint the scene, or, at the minimum, try his hand at something other than his portraits. The thought had come to him before: pleased as he was of his work, he could not boast of a following, and he wanted to. In a way, the success of the portraits ensured this particular failure, for each time he delivered a painting it worked to make a connection with a single subject, and as a result failed to connect with the larger public. But executing another type of painting, particularly a crowd scene, was no small task; if Boden was not paid to do so, he noticed very little about other people. He was practically ignorant of their posture, their gestures, and their expressions. The notion that a large group might come clear to him was distant, at best. But he was determined to stay afloat in this idea, and Landesman’s confidence buoyed him.
One night, through a he took his sketch pad along with him. The hour was not yet late, and the bar not yet crowded, and so he took the corner stool at the bar, set his pad in front of him, next to the slim volume of photographs of portraits that he always carried, in case he ran across a prospective patron, and began to draw. At once he saw into the scene. Though the countertop positively shone, there was a dinginess to the rest of the place: the people seemed tired, at the end of something. He moved along briskly, capturing the bend in a waiter’s arm when he set a plate, the bartender at full liberty with both her interest and her scorn. He drew himself out to a great extent, but when he glanced down at the pad what he saw surprised him. It was a drawing predominantly of one woman, a porcelain brunette about his age who sat as a balance, directly opposite him at the bar, with a lit cigarette moving slowly in her hand, like a considered commentary, and an empty seat beside her. She saw him looking and looked back, ticking her eyebrows upward just a bit. She had the sense of someone waiting her turn.
“What are you drinking?” he said after he had packed up his things and gone across the way. Upon closer inspection, the stool didn’t look as if it would bear his weight; instead he stood and leaned.
“I have been drinking rum,” she said. “Quite a lot of it, in fact.” Her voice was steady, unlike her eyes. She wore a gold shift dress, metallic, with a rhinestone trim around the collar that looked, upon closer inspection, like hundreds of tiny crowns.
“Would you like one more?” he said. “I’ll buy.”
“Now why would you do something like that?”
“Why wouldn’t I?” he said. As a younger man he had a barbaric habit of pouring himself out to everybody, especially women. He would open his mouth and it was if he had sprung a leak: his history, his dreams, his desires would get away from him, invisibly and immeasurably. But time had made him into a different type. “I have been sketching here at the bar, and you’re in at least one sketch. So I figure that you deserve some kind of reward.”
“Oh,” she said. “And are you a professional at this drawing business?”
“I am.”
“What type of artist?”
“Portrait painter by trade.”
“That’s very old-fashioned,” she said. “How did you get into it?”
“I was always interested in drawing and painting, but I had serious difficulty seeing people.”
“Seeing that they were there?”
“I mean really seeing them. I got into portraits to bring it all into focus.”
He brought out the book of photographs to give her a sense of it, and while he could not bear to show her the Landesman—it was in every way too close—he opened to the Shawcross, which faced on the Avary. “Nice,” she said, and went back to her rum.
“And what do you do?” he said.
“These days I drink,” she said. “I am an actress by trade.” She stubbed out her cigarette and absently reached for another; she had the sense of not wanting to wait her turn.
“Film?”
“No. On the stage. I have done a film here and there, but there’s nothing to it. The ones I do don’t have the right money in them, and they have too much else. I’m sure you know what I mean.” She didn’t turn to look at his dishonest nod. “But now that you mention it, it’s a film that has me here.”
“Oh,” he said.
“I was in London for the summer filming and I met a man. An actor.” They had been chemists working together for the Allies, in the film, and they fell in love, entirely out of the film. “Up until last month he was doing all right,” she said. “Then his letters and calls died right off. So that’s what brings me here, all by myself, in the middle of the winter. I have taken up drinking and given up on love.”
Boden leaned in further. His belly bumped against the woman’s leg. “Have you ever collected pottery, or vases, or known anyone who has?” he said.
“No.”
“Don’t you think of love that way when it goes wrong? It’s a vase on a shelf that has, after a tremor, fallen and shattered. Would you take all the vases down, or would you leave them on the shelf and bet against a major earthquake?”
“But you assume it’s the vases that are shattered,” she said, veering a little in tone. “It’s not: it’s the collector.” She spoke so brilliantly that Boden felt certain she was dull.
Boden had come to the bar, of course, to step away from portraiture and inhabit, if only for a moment, a different location within himself. But the more he spoke to the woman, the more he found himself slipping away from that new place. He felt it as a prospect, and so went down the slope, aided by drink, and when he finally did regain his footing he found himself on thoroughly different ground—her knee was beneath his hand, which was re-ascending.
By this time, he had put away both his sketch book and the photographs of his portraits, and all that remained of them was a vapor of anecdote, which he navigated through swiftly and cruelly: he lampooned Mrs. Avary’s stiff posture and fondness for toy dogs; he imitated Shawcross’s gentle lisp; and in short he made sport of his subjects in a manner that was as perfect a betrayal of his true feelings as he could have imagined. He kept off Landesman but only barely.
“Well,” she said, when they had gone the length of the conversation, turned, and come back. “So.” The results, as they were, settled in between them.
They took the shortest cut across the remaining business: to the door, to a taxi, to her place. He sketched her in the gold shift and out of it, made short work of himself even before he made it to her bed. What was thickened by the evening hours thinned out in the morning, and he left without waking her, both because she was most beautiful when silent and because he simply had nothing more to say.
The next week, Boden was back at the same bar, taking in the neck, shoulders, and hair of a woman who was in the dining area. She was facing away from him, occasionally checking her watch; her décolletage, he deduced from the slow pace of the waiters passing by her table, must have been remarkable. He knew, the more he looked, who she was: the younger of the two women he had admired the day he had delivered the painting to Landesman. But when he took a step toward her, he knew at once that he had not taken a step toward her. This woman was fainter in figure and in feature; still, the match was high. Boden went back to his spot at the bar. Went back to watch, that is, because she was even more beautiful from afar, especially in the neck and shoulders. Her eyes, too, had something to them; they were green and gray at once. At length, she brightened to something she saw across the room. It was her companion. She gave a faultless wave. Boden followed the line of her devotion and saw Landesman.
He was, as if a point was being made, wearing the same green jacket he had worn in the portrait, and he came powerfully through the dining room and rested a hand on the woman’s shoulder. She bent toward him florally and his other hand implicated, if only briefly, her outer thigh. Both of them were brilliant, and it was because of them that Boden left. He departed, in something that was not quite fear, down the street to another bar, trying to make sense of the light rain against his neck. There he sketched what was conclusively a younger crowd, including a woman with a black, strapped dress who spoke continuously in broken French. Then he was outside again, waiting in the mist with his arm outstretched for a taxicab, when a hard jab came at his back. “Give me your wallet,” a man’s voice said. It was Landesman.
“They meet again,” Landesman said. “The painted and the painter.”
“What are you doing in this part of town?”
“Having a dinner with a young lady,” he said. “I just put her into a taxi.” He had been drinking, and he brushed off his sleeves with a bit too much industry and then took Boden’s arm heavily at the elbow; there was in his grip a connection, positively insistent, to something. “And now I am off to elsewhere. Can I interest you in sharing a cab?”
They stood there on the curb, and though neither man thought to raise his arm to hail a passing taxi, there must have been something about them that was persuasive, for a cab slowed for them. It was not a yellow cab, but a gypsy, and Boden would not have taken it, would not have inflicted it upon Landesman, were it not for the fact that it had a precarious cleanliness, even down to a neatly hand-lettered sign that read, “Leave No Stray Papers Please Thank You.” “I’m going uptown,” Landesman said. “And then you’ll be taking this young gentleman on to wherever he tells you.”
They swung out to the highway; Landesman’s back was straight. A plane went by overhead. “What’s that?” he said. “Looks like a 757 coming out of Kennedy.” He was looking away from Boden, and there seemed to be no possibility that he was talking to him. “‘The world can never be mastered for more than a few brief moments.’ Do you know who said that?” He didn’t wait for Boden to answer. “It was Louis Bleriot. You must know about Bleriot, don’t you? First man to cross the English Channel in a plane. He took off at dawn, lost himself at sea in fog, couldn’t even tell which way was up. Then he caught sight of the British coast and had to bring himself down quick. Tore up the belly of the thing on landing, but he made it. A few years ago, I bought a painting about that flight: it’s a Robert Delaunay from the start of the First World War, Homage to Bleriot. Do you know it? Very different from your stuff: it’s an abstract, mostly.” Landesman was flushed now, taken with the progress of his own thoughts. “You know,” he said, “Red Hyde came out to start work on the Air Room the other day. Four thousand volumes, all told. Right now they’re just a bunch of boxes stacked against the wall. Crates. Tubes with aviation maps. It’s going to be magnificent. I’m going to have the shelves covered with black baize so that covers and spines aren’t marked up when books are removed. Red also found me a set of floor lamps that look like birds in flight. I even found a company that solves the fire-water problem.”
“What’s that?” Boden said.
“Books are sensitive creatures. They die by fire but also by water. I have sprinklers that spray Halon gas.”
Something reached Boden: the man’s expansiveness, perhaps. “I didn’t know my father,” Boden said, wanting to rise to the level of the conversation. “He died a few months before I was born. He was from Friedrichshafen.”
“Where?”
“The Hindenburg was constructed and assembled there before it was launched over Lake Constance.”
“Oh.” It was the only time that Boden had heard Landesman employ a tone of anything approaching contempt. “I won’t have any balloons or zeppelins in the place. No Montgolfier, no Blanchard. This room is for airplanes only.” Landesman knew that he had wounded Boden with his unkindness,, and he sighed heavily. “You’re very talented, as a painter. Even a man like me can see that.”
“A man like you?”
“A philistine. A man who makes money and little else. You must look down on a businessman.” Boden shook his head. “I never sought this out, you know. Something comes along, a deal is made, and before you know it you have everything.” He was still ramrod-straight in his seat. “And you must see what you do. So why do you act as though you have failed?” The spot Landesman had touched was tender, yet the feeling when it was pressed down upon was one of pleasure and not pain. “I don’t mean to offend you,” Landesman continued, “but I feel safe asking. I think you trust me.”
Boden had no reply, or nothing that was not meaningless, and he remained silent. Finally the driver pulled to the side of the road and Landesman left his seat with surprising lightness, walking around to the driver’s window to press a large bill into the man’s hand. The interior of the cab had been capacious so long as he was there; now that he was gone, Boden felt cramped and he set his head against the window and passed into doubtful rest.
A few days later, Boden was still in bed when the phone jangled in his ear. He lifted it and Meredith’s voice came at him through the wire. “I may have something for you,” he said.
“What is it?”
“Landesman called. He wants you for a job for his private library. Does that sound familiar to you?”
“The Air Room?”
“Yes. That’s it. Can you be there Saturday?”
Boden could, at ten, and he waited at the door for what seemed like an eternity. The elevator operator, who had dropped him off with squinty disregard, fell past the floor from whatever higher floor he had visited, and rose again, all as Boden stood there patiently. It was not like Landesman, and in fact, when the door finally swung open, it was not Landesman. Instead, there was a woman. “Hello,” she said. “I’m Sarah. George told me you’d be by.” She was directly beautiful, with hair as blonde as it was straight, wide emerald eyes, and a face of perfect roundness with pips of healthy pink upon each cheek. “I’m to show you the room.” He shook her hand, took in the cut of her green blouse, felt her take him by the knob of his elbow, but it wasn’t until she turned and gave him the back of her neck that he recognized her as Landesman’s dining companion from the night the two of them had ridden home together. She went down the hall without a doubt, and Boden did his best to follow. Her black leather ankle boots—for that’s what Boden had been watching—came to a halt, militarily, one alongside the other, and Sarah leaned into a small white door of half-width that he had taken to be a closet or a bathroom. They were in the Air Room.
It was, as Landesman had said, a library: floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lined all four walls, and there was a large shelf in the center that served as a room divider. But the designer had really done a number on it. Nothing much happened near the ground; the furniture, a quartet of heavy leather chairs, was arranged around small circular tables, and each chair was partnered with an ottoman. The lower shelves, which held oversize books and maps, were constructed as cabinets, with hinged doors that concealed their contents. But in its higher reaches, where the walls gave way to a symphony of arches, the room flourished. Model planes hung by wires in front of framed maps. Instrument panels were set into the mahogany walls. The overhead lamps topping each bookcase offered penniform proof of Landesman’s obsession. And, over a fireplace was the Delaunay, a riot of color in circles and, circling them, Bleriot’s plane, red radiating orange.
“This is it,” Sarah said. “Pretty impressive, I think.”
“Very,” Boden said. “This all came together over the last few months?”
“Few weeks, really. Do you have any questions?”
Boden took the thing that was closest at hand. “What about this plane?”
“You mean that model right over you? I’m glad you asked. That’s a one-sixteenth scale model of a Sopwith 5F1 Dolphin, which was used in combat in World War I. They were powered by a Hispano Suiza 200-horsepower engine, and outfitted with two Vickers machine guns and two Lewis machine guns.” She made a quarter-turn, as if winding her presentation, and then continued. “The Dolphins had open cockpits, which model builders like, because they can get more detail that way.”
Now Boden began to feel dizzy, as if he was at a great height, and he found his way to the largest of the chairs, a leather throne in rust, and he lowered himself into it. “And what about that one?” he said, indicating a smaller triplane threading a spandrel.
“Oh, that’s why I was glad you asked about the Dolphin,” Sarah said. “It’s the only plane I know anything about, and that’s only because I pointed right at it when George asked me the same question.” She laughed broadly. “But I sound pretty convincing as an expert, don’t I? And here, on your right, you’ll see a series of miniatures by the renowned portraitist Andreas Boden.”
“Is that what he wants from me? Miniatures?”
“It is.” She went to the shelves—they were not lined in baize, but rather painted matte black, like the cabinet doors beneath them—and withdrew a folder from between books. A sheaf of notes came out. “He left instructions, which I’ll just read: ‘Andreas: Twenty small circular paintings of the earliest pioneers of flight to line upper edge of bookcase in middle of room. See list of names below.’ Then the names: Bleriot, Chanute, on and on.”
“When did he say he’ll need them by?”
“He didn’t. But he’s going to be in Italy for a while, and he said you could have the run of the place until he gets back. He said you did a wonderful portrait of him and he doesn’t see why you wouldn’t do the same for these people.”
“I’m sorry to hear he won’t be here. Have you seen the portrait?”
“No. He hasn’t shown it to me.” She glanced at her watch. “You can stay and look around and sketch. George set aside one book that you can even take with you—it’s not a rare volume. Is today a good day to start?”
“It is. Will you be staying here with me?”
A smile exploded on Sarah’s face and left behind a faint glow. “Oh no,” she said, glancing at her watch again. “I have to go. I’m meeting a client. Red Hyde will be by in a few hours, and he has keys to lock up afterwards. Call me if you need anything else.” She clipped a business card to the papers.
When Sarah had gone, Boden settled down with Landesman’s notes. Landesman had, on a copy of a photograph, marked the spots where he thought the miniatures should go, ten on each side of the central bookcase, assuming six-inch diameters, although Boden thought he could go even smaller if necessary. Holbein’s had been half that size. And while Landesman wanted the paintings to be arranged chronologically, like Presidential portraits from Washington on, Boden saw that the effect of them would be wholly improved if they had a sense of chance about them. As for the pioneers themselves, the book that Landesman had set aside for him proved to be both poorly written and incomparably gripping: men were always climbing into contraptions they hardly understood, hurtling briefly skyward, and then crashing back to earth with the full force of their noncomprehension. He got something out of Lilienthal, Chanute, and Ades, and was starting to figure the line on Pilcher, when he fell asleep, thinking as he went that he was experiencing not exactly a loss of altitude from the waking world but the opposite, an ascension to a level that was altogether more empyrean. What woke him was the sound of Red Hyde coming into the room.
Hyde was an inaccuracy. It was not his hide that was red, but rather his hair. Otherwise, he was a stout plug of a man with all the subtlety of a bulldog; when he spoke it was as if Boden was a small, rough patch and he was going over him. “Oh, you’re the painter,” he said. “Look, if you’re going to be in the room, you should know how to be in the room. First of all, the light. The curtains are open now to help dry some of the surfaces, but they really should be kept shut.” He glanced at Boden and clucked. “Also, I wish you would sit somewhere other than that chair. I had it built with Mr. Landesman in mind, and I hadn’t intended for it to carry a different frame. Maybe the couch for you.” He swept his hand wide in summary judgment. “The room has noble proportions; they have to be respected.” Boden was coming to his feet and collecting his things, but not quickly enough for Hyde, who reached in his bag and withdrew something in the fashion of a weapon. “I have to take some measurements,” Hyde said. “I think it might be easier if I went it alone.”
The next day, he called Sarah to ask if he might have keys to the apartment. “I’m not sure that I get along with Hyde,” he said.
“How could you?” she said. “He’s awful. I’m sorry I inflicted him on you even the once, but I was running late. Can we meet for coffee and I’ll give you a set?”
In the coffee shop her eyes were aqua in the coffee shop; it was their third color. “How do you know Landesman?” he said.
“Oh,” she said. “I was sure he’d said. His son Peter is my husband.” She offered no more than this, and Boden’s curiosity held.
“And you’re managing the place for him while he’s gone?”
“Managing? You can make servitude sound like the best deal going. I watch the place for him, yes. This is an important trip for George. He’s in Europe indefinitely. There’s something there that’s costing him.”
“And why isn’t your husband helping?”
“He is.” Her brow crinkled. “Oh, you mean with the apartment? No, Peter’s in business with his father. He’s over there helping with the deal. Has been since the fall.”
“Have you visited?”
“I went over once. Stayed in the penthouse of a beautiful hotel, ate the finest food, and wanted the whole time to leap out the window.”
“You don’t like to travel?”
“It’s not the travel. It’s what happens—or rather what doesn’t happen—after I get there.” She shifted in her seat, and for a second the pattern of light on her face was perfect. “Did you know George before you did his portrait?”
“Oh, no. Not at all. How would I have? But I regret not meeting him earlier.”
“Why?”
“I quite like the man. There’s something extraordinary about him.”
“That there is. To be honest with you, I live in terror of him—I fear that he will one day treat me fairly.” She looked so grave he was certain she was joking. “And then what will become of me? On any particular day I might be given up.” She turned to face Boden. “You’re lucky so far.”
“How do you mean?”
“Beginning as an ally. That’s one of his talents, making it safe to be on his side, and in such a way that the menace of the alternative isn’t immediately apparent. It comes on slowly like color through water.” She saw quite clearly that Boden had balked at “menace.” “Well, he is, above all else, a businessman,” she said. “When he’s challenged, when he’s pricked by something, his anger doesn’t leak out but rather swells in him. It’s a talent. On the other hand, he likes you. There’s no mistaking that.”
Boden was seized by a sudden fear that if they paused, if they allowed air to be introduced into the conversation. “I have a question,” he said.
“Of course.”
“What’s in the other rooms? Apart from the Air Room.”
“Everything is in them. He’s into everything. He buys what he wants to buy. As he likes, to say, that’s the condition if not the definition of the wealthy. And the wealthy need to feel defined. I have seen plenty of bad weather, but I have never seen anything like the look that comes over him when he doesn’t get what he wants.”
Boden painted. It was what he did. He set up a small drop cloth on the library table, arranged a line of turpentines, and put down Lawrence Hargrave, Glenn Curtiss, and Samuel Pierpont Langley. Sometimes the going was easy: he loved working out Bleriot, who was a smear of moustache topped by lively eyes and a tight leather helmet, or Wilbur Wright with his trademark flat cap. But other subjects eluded him. Octave Chanute, whose goatee and bald pate gave him the look of an community-theater player appearing as Prospero—or worse, “Shakespeare” himself, arrived onstage for a second epilogue—was nothing to Boden, and he could not make headway with the vaguely dashing Henri Farman. Stuck for days on Grahame-White, working only from a tiny photograph in the seam of the Encyclopedia of Flight, he cheated with a surreptitious sketch of Red Hyde, who had come to check the levels on the side tables. One afternoon, he wrote to Landesman to ask if he might be permitted to add in a portrait of Bessie Coleman, who had proven irresistible as a figure ever since he had seen a photograph of her in a tight cap that made her look like a nut in its shell. Landesman agreed: “Excellent idea,” he e-mailed in reply. “Also Harriet Quimby.”
The next day, Landesman sent a message to Boden. “Hyde has written to ask my advice on the uppermost bookshelves,” he wrote. “He wants to do them in blue. I think it is better, in a way, to work against that: there is already a ‘vault of heaven’ with the arches and the light, and I think black is a nicer touch. I have told him this, on the phone and in writing, but I would appreciate it if you would say so, too.” Boden promised he would, and he did, though Hyde simply sniffed and looked disparagingly at Boden’s shoes.
As the number of miniatures mounted, Boden had a sense that the room might be best served by adding, under the Delaunay, an international assembly of early pilots, arranged to look like the set of zoned clocks in an airport. Landesman rapidly agreed to the cost of the setting and the frame. “For the American I say Beachey,” he wrote. “Not a major figure, but one of the most fascinating minor fliers.” Boden replied with the utmost brevity, “Russian: Sikorsky?” but he was hardly able to contain his delight with the correspondence. It kept Landesman present, for starters. Though the man was all around him, in a sense, his removal to Europe had wounded Boden somewhat. On days when he knew Hyde would not be in the apartment, Boden sat in the big leather chair and made the most of it.
He quickly developed a fondness for Sarah. It was not simply the presence of Landesman in her, but the absence of anything that was not somehow of him. On her own, she was fine enough to talk to, even more wonderful to see, and she seemed to take to him as well; she liked to marvel at his skill and the modesty with which he wielded it. And yet Boden was forced to admit that there was something about her that was frankly impossible, unknowable rather than simply unknown, without the additional information that she was, chiefly, Landesman’s. Before he met her, he had thought of her as an extension of his grand patron, and even after he had met her, as he could glance after her as she left one of their meetings and admire her a posteriori, as it were, he still felt as though he had not known her in even the narrowest sense apart from this fact. Still he was deeply with the girl. What remained fresh to him was, if not his impulse, at least the reason for it. And so, in short order, the two of them became, in the only way they could, a pair.
He was not capable of much with her, really, for the betrayal would have been absolute, but he liked the moments when he glanced down and saw her red wine, half gone, alongside his nearly empty gin. The two of them also attached others to the course of their evenings. One night, for example, they met a woman who was also a painter; Boden remembered her from a party in the distant past. Sarah had expanded beyond her normal bound and spoke signally about what Boden was doing. What put the point to him was her flattery: she made the miniatures sound as if they were as ambitious as a cathedral ceiling. The three of them ended up taking a cab back to Landesman’s apartment, and Sarah led their new acquaintance through a ten-minute tour; more than a bit tipsy, the woman made a show of her own obedience, counting down the last thirty seconds of her visitation and then leaping out of the room as time expired. The following week, they repeated the exercise with a young magazine writer, who mused aloud at the ostentation of it all and then, optimistically, gave both Sarah and Boden his business card. Boden took to these viewings with a vitality that surprised him. The third sojourn brought back a lordly, graying gallery owner and his new girlfriend, an astonishing redhead who had just graduated college. Boden found both his spirits and his courage aloft, and he even managed to embrace the young woman in the hallway while the gallery owner, inside the Air Room with Sarah, held forth on insectiform flying machines in Bosch. After the couple gathered up their things and departed, Boden, elated, gave gratitude to Sarah, though silently he thanked Landesman; he had not often been social, but, more so, he had not often had anything he wanted to show to others. The room was restoring him.
One evening, at the end of a particularly productive week in which Boden had finally cracked Farman and added Edward Huffaker—a Tennessee glider pilot who came credentialed to Kitty Hawk and was cashiered by the Wrights as a result of poor personal hygiene—Sarah announced over drinks that she was going away for a little while. He assumed it was to visit her husband, if not Landesman, and he began to adjust his sympathies accordingly, but it turned out that she was off to see her mother in California. “She’s having a little surgery,” she said. “Nothing serious but I’d rather be there.” She grasped at his hand; her touch did not linger but he did not withdraw. The next day, Hyde came by early, while Boden was still cleaning his brushes, and after looking askance at Boden’s work—he had never said a kind word about it—boasted that that he had been hired to design furnishings for a new luxury hotel in Las Vegas, and would be leaving in the morning on the developer’s private jet. Boden took a deep breath, filling himself with restraint but also with possibility. With both Hyde and Sarah gone, he could, at last, appropriately repay Landesman.
The next morning he was up early and sitting in the leather throne in the Air Room by nine. For lunch, he took a sandwich into the television room where he had sat with Landesman and ate it ceremoniously. Then, his heart leaping up, he returned to the Air Room, dipped a tiny brush in white paint, and, beautifully, represented on the front of one of the hinged bookcase doors a scene of Otto Lilienthal, in 1894, standing atop a rise in the earth, a glider-wing strapped to either arm. The next day he used the same reverse-scrimshaw technique to apply to the adjoining door a tableau of Sir Hiram Maxim’s enormous biplane, held down by double rails and powered by steam engine, hurtling forward in its ill-fated maiden voyage. Later that week, he added a clutch of scenes: Charles Manly attempting to lift off in Langley’s mammoth aerodrome; Alberto Santos-Dumont perching atop his box-kite aircraft, forward rudder protruding like an oversize proboscis; and Henri Fabre successfully essaying a tail-first takeoff from water. Having filled all available door space on one set of cabinets, he went on to the next. The scenes brought the entire room up, a sense that Boden confirmed by inviting back the gallery owner and his girlfriend, who was, this time, even more enthusiastic about the room if, sadly, no more amorous outside it. The fact that he had not yet, as such, contacted Landesman about the additions struck him as an errant note, out of keeping with the larger harmony, and so he ignored it.
One day, in an otherwise uneventful e-mail, Landesman reported an ankle injury that he had suffered while stepping from a yacht; Boden expressed his condolences. But evidently Landesman’s intent was not to communicate the injury so much as to check on the progress of the room. “Is it safe,” he wrote, “to assume that the miniatures are all painted and in place?” Boden was high enough in his thoughts of the room that he replied with a puckish tone that he knew at once represented an error in judgment. “Though you can not prepare for a surprise, you should,” he wrote, and Landesman’s single-word response, “Surprise?” provoked a longer explanation, somewhat more sober, in which Boden noted that he had executed a few small pen-and-ink drawings of aircraft, including a particularly beautiful Curtiss Model D Headless Pusher, that he thought might be well-suited for bookplates. Bookplates: what could be more innocuous? They expressed ownership and pride. Still, the very notion seemed to send Landesman into a state and he took up a rumor he had heard from Red Hyde concerning Boden’s habit of showing the Air Room to visitors: it was not the visitors as such that rankled him, but the fact that he had learned from one of them that the room had changed almost entirely. “I am not sure what Red Hyde has heard,” Boden wrote back, “but the room is only itself, and that’s the best thing you can say for a room. It will please you as it has pleased whoever has seen it.” He added, after some deliberation, “I do need another five thousand.”
Then came a pause that lasted a few days only but seemed like weeks—the rapid passage of messages to and from had a way of overtaking the clock. Boden waited and worried. He had some other visitors over who agreed with him that the room was coming along like no other room ever had. He checked the mail again and again, finding nothing, and finally, when he was nearly beaten down by silence, saw a message from Landesman pop up in his inbox. It was a single line without greeting or salutation or even the courtesy of punctuation: “Not another report has come in with more specific intelligence and I have to say I am concerned”. Two days later, an amplification followed, a quartet of long, impassioned sentences that were clearly the result of a mood of some sort. Landesman, in them, flailed. Across the distance and the wire, he seemed to raise his voice, which Boden would have thought impossible. He could only ignore the tone and note in reply that four business days had elapsed with no sign of additional funds.
Landesman’s next message arrived so quickly that Boden wondered if it had already been written: “I do not know precisely what you wish me to pay for,” he wrote. “Is it these large aviation scenes that I have heard so much about? All I can say on that score is that I did not request them and I do not think you should have involved me in such a large expenditure without previously telling me of it. Do not live in such rare air.”
“Do not live in such rare air.” That Boden understand as an irony. But what of living in an agreement? He directed this question to Landesman, who had his company draw up a check for eighteen thousand, two hundred dollars. “I consider that this will complete our agreement,” he wrote.
Boden staged a light protest of a few paragraphs, but it seemed that Landesman was done with him, or at the very least, done answering, and so Boden went harder. He stayed up one night drafting and redrafting a defense of his room, and the message that he sent out in the morning had the feel of a manifesto about it. “You must,” he wrote, “see the room and judge it for yourself, and then you will know for certain that your investment is not only justified but a considerable bargain given the wonderful work you have received, which will be something to treasure in perpetuity. You are wrong to treat me as someone who is not presenting you with a gift that would be the envy of any man living. It has been done with the utmost respect and even a tenderness. I should point out that I have not cashed the check for $18,200. As for that payment, I have just noticed a certain slight: on earlier checks, you noted them as payments for ‘artwork.’ On this, you have written, ‘service rendered.’ I point this out without comment.”
When this letter, too, was ignored, Boden made one last attempt at repair. “I was looking at the shelves and think that maybe you are right. Maybe the entire room should be returned to what it was. It would take black paint only. If this has been ridiculous folly I apologize. I am optimistic that we will once again breathe the air of friendship.”
This did manage to inspire a reply, but Landesman pulled himself up only to push Boden back down again. He had, it seemed, spoken to Sarah, and she had defended Boden, though she had confessed that she had not seen the room in its present state. Landesman was “as appalled as disappointed” that Boden had chosen to enlist Sarah in his defense, and he felt certain that another part of the agreement had been violated. “At this point I do not know what we have between us any longer,” he wrote. “I see that you have cashed the check at last. I feel that is wise.”
Until the correspondence stiffened, Boden had been generally in a condition of assurance, and, he told himself, not wrong for it. At first Landesman had brought a wonderful accusation against him, that of arrogance, and Boden could not rouse himself to fight it with too much passion. But then Landesman had shifted the indictment toward fraudulence, and that changed Boden’s plan if not his mind. Whereas he had become accustomed to spending his mornings walking around the city, the early exchanges with Landesman put him in the Air Room for long days, where he sat quietly. Boden began to see the room as a site of dire exposure, to live in fear that he would return to the apartment to find Hyde there, importantly supervising a crew in the replacing of cabinets and the repainting of doors. Boden fed on his regret. He wrote Landesman a message that he did not send: it was an e-mail, but he wanted an old-fashioned letter, capable of truly drawing blood, and so he printed it out and read it to himself. “I said that we were bound by honor, but now I see that you have none. Hiding behind skirts, or the elevator operator’s intelligence, these are both acts of rather comical cowardice. It is loathsome for me to look at this wonderful room now. It is a beautiful achievement, one that towers over anything else I—indeed, many men—have ever achieved. The man who owns this room will be a kind of prince, but I see now that it has been made for the benefit of an ingrate. Once you said that you worried that I considered you a Philistine. I did not. Now I see how wrong I was. You are that, and worse.” He had no real thought of sending it, but he liked to imagine Landesman deflating with each piercing word. He read it over and over again, sitting in Landesman’s large chair. Newly awakened to the to the notion that Landesman was a man of precarious character—that, perhaps, both of them were—Boden gripped both armrests at once and wondered at how the turn had come.
Sarah, who had returned from California, had been careful at first, and Boden careful in return. But as the week put out its long knives he decided to call.
“Well, hello,” Sarah said. “Very nice to hear from you. Have you been busy?”
“I have been,” he said.
“And do you have any time for me?” she said, throwing off the implication that he might not. He could not fix on whether her tone was setting the table of the conversation or clearing it.
“Of course,” he said. “Come by.”
Boden arranged the miniature portraits in a cluster on top of the main reading-table in the library, leaned the extras against spines in the topmost shelves of the low central bookcase, turned on all the lights in library and all the lights in the hallway, and was sitting on the bench just inside the front door when he heard the scrape of the elevator opening. He stood and opened the door even before Sarah reached it. “Come in,” he said, “and follow me. I’d like to show you something.” He went briskly down the hall.
“Oh,” she said, her voice brightening at his back; his own shadow was visible to him on either side. “You did something to the room?”
“Top secret,” he said. “I can’t say until you see it. And even then, I’m not sure that I could say.” This bit of sprezzatura was the only deception required of him, and for that he was thankful: his heart was chugging in his chest. He opened the library door with a flourish and waved her through. She went, but not all the way. She stood blocking the doorway, taking it all in: the array of miniatures on the table, the extras atop the central case, the cabinet tableaus. “I never imagined that...” she said, and said no more. Boden had prepared himself to plead an excellent case, but the library was its own best defense. The silence drew out between them, stretched to a thinness that was transparent—he could see her motives through it. Then she spoke again. “Oh,” she said, and hung at the end of a long exhale. The room filled, slowly, with her breath.
Boden knew from his own portraits that clothing was often a finer second skin that improved people. Sarah gave that theory the lie. When she undid her boots, the thrill was already in the air. Her hair came down around her ears. She guided him to the couch, dug her knees into the cushion on either side of him, and unbuttoned whatever was buttoned. By the time she was out of her dress, she was opulent, almost too much for him, but he took in what he could.
They were together the next night, and the night after that. Boden did not know exactly what he felt, but he knew that he felt it powerfully. The fourth morning, she reminded him of a bit of news—“George will be here Saturday”— and the effect was to inflame and puncture him all at once.
His hair still wet from the shower, he went over to the Air Room. While Sarah had held his face in her hands, while she had murmured his name, he had become clearer on the absolute necessity of a plan. Now he intended to execute it with the same perfection that he had given to the paintings, to the room, to the portrait of Landesman. He began by gathering up his miniatures in a pouched drop cloth and carrying them out of the library. He hid one beneath a cushion in the TV room. He hid one in a closet between leather shoes. He hid one behind the Degas, which turned out to be every bit the thing. He went until the drop cloth was empty, and then returned to the library and stood looking at the Delaunay. Steadying himself against the fireplace, he slipped a putty knife into one corner of the frame and leaned his bulk into it. When the corner gave way he felt a freedom that he had not known before. He victimized the other corners in quick succession, turned the stretcher and dug out the tacks with the blade, and then rolled up the canvas, which went into the closet with the shoes, into the arm of a coat he doubted Landesman ever wore.
Boden, fully in it now, lined up the turpentines again and laid out the brushes. He needed, and took, the whole of the tabletop to stretch and pin a new canvas, and delivered to the top right corner a bright red stroke. A bright green stroke went beside it. Each became, with time, a blimp. He painted a city around them and, most importantly, beneath them, but the scale of the blimps remained the very point of the painting. They dwarfed the buildings below, and people were so small as to be invisible. The first day, the two airships were separated by a narrow gulf: the second day he painted, the space between then disappeared. The nose of one bumped the nose of the other. The colors were spectacular.
The jet roared to life, he was pressed back into his seat, the city growing fainter beneath him, and then he was in Germany, where his mother served him lunch in her apartment and took him out to dinner at a new restaurant down the street. Though she talked constantly, about her neighbors, and her hair, and the pains in her foot, Boden did not listen to her until he asked her a question: “Can you tell me where father is buried?”
The following morning, Boden borrowed her car and set out for the cemetery. He prepared himself for tears, but when he got there, he broke into laughter. The name on the headstone was like the punch line to a joke he had never heard: it was colorless to him, distant, would have meant the same backwards or upside-down. If this was his father, then he was truly fatherless. Boden got back in the car but could not stop himself from laughing. It was in his lungs. It lifted him.
A few days later, an envelope arrived from Meredith and he tore it open greedily. Inside there was a magazine article about the Air Room. Boden spread it out on his mother’s kitchen table. All of his disarrangement had been undone: the miniatures were back in place, the tableaus were untouched. And yet, at the same time, his work was nowhere to be seen: over the fireplace, where the blimp painting had been, hung the Delaunay, a mockery in rectangle. There was a caption under the picture, which he read aloud: “The room, designed by Red Hyde, includes contributions from several local artists.” Beneath that, there was another article, with pictures of Landesman and Hyde. Beneath that, there was yet another, with a picture of Landesman, Hyde, and Sarah. They stood in a row, arms around each other.
He had brought to Germany, in the inside pocket of his coat, the last letter he had written to Landesman, the one that he had never mailed. He spread it out on his mother’s table and recopied it by hand, changing only a few words here and there. His signature at the end was a tremendous florid thing, both filled with space and occupying all available space.
He put the letter in an envelope and drove along the edge of a storm to the post office, where he smiled hollowly at the clerk, bought a stamp, affixed it. The postbox just inside the door was locked, and the one out in front overstuffed. But the letter had to go. He shoved it into the slot. It went in, but something else came out: an airmail stamp. He could not say for certain whether or not it had come from his letter, only that it fluttered a short distance and landed on the pavement, where the rain came down upon it and, at length, pressed it down.
