An Aversion to Ladders 24

THE CHILD, Part One

The friends returned to the house, and Omar, never one to dally, left Michael waving at the curb. The resident contemplated painting before his intended rendezvous, though was struck by the perverse irony of it: Emma inspired him to be creative, even as the very idea of her undermined his powers of concentration. Indeed, her beauty threatened more than tears—it threatened irreversible distraction. Yet somewhere between Schubert’s wistful D664 piano sonata and his majestic D960, he picked up a brush.

The process of artistic creation was unfathomable to the painter, emerging as it did from a part of the brain not entirely visible to light. Painting was largely a perceptual undertaking, and the more one bore down into the bare bolts of seeing, the more miraculous the mundane was sure to be. Omar once gave Michael a quote from Schopenhauer to illuminate the phenomenon:

"To have original, extraordinary, and perhaps even immortal ideas, one has but to isolate oneself from the world for a few moments so completely that the most commonplace happenings appear to be new and unfamiliar, and in this way reveal their true essence."

This notwithstanding, much of Michael's conscious brain was left un-tasked in his labor and thus free to float into remote regions of thought and memory. These excursions often curiously resembled acts of self-flagellation, like a tongue drawn to a mouth ulcer over and over. Regrets invariably surfaced while at the easel: some fresh, some thought long forgotten. Perhaps such contrition was essential to “empty the vessel” for work, or, expanding on Schopenhauer’s idea, “to isolate oneself from one’s ego.” Regardless, on this occasion the artist was thinking about Brae and his neglect of her in recent self-absorbed days. It was, after all, Halloween Eve, and there had been a pledge to take the child trick-or-treating.

Prodded more by penitence than a need for holiday preparedness, he walked up the street to the Quickmart after putting away his brushes to buy a bag of Halloween candy. There he ran into Jacques’ undergraduate assistant, who asked the painter if he would be attending the memorial later; Michael said yes.

“I have something to give you,” the young man told him. “Something Jacques left in his studio.”

“Oh?”

“I got to Arbor Hall before the police carted everything away, so I could gather up footage for the tribute. He left a package for you there.”

Michael used the occasion to probe. “The videotape,” he began awkwardly, “the one Jacques stole…”

“The one of Seth Bowles?”

“Then it was Seth’s?”

The assistant was free with the sordidness. “Professor Bowles has apparently been videotaping his sexual escapades with undergrads for years. But now the shit’s hit the fan, and I’ve heard he’s been suspended pending a full inquiry by the ethics committee.”

Michael could hardly be sympathetic.

The young man passed to the door with a wave, leaving the painter in line at the register with his bag of candy corn.

With a little time left before phoning Emma, Michael’s days-long tiredness caught up with him at last. He put his head down on the pillow, but would not nap for fear of oversleeping. Facing the open door, he studied the painting in the darkening hall floor. The late afternoon light was on the other side of the house, and the edgy shadows mirrored his anxiousness. His eyes were notorious for playing tricks on him in half-light, but he was certain, after several torturous minutes of study, that a mouse along the baseboard was sniffing at the frame of the painting in the hall floor. With a mind to shoo it, he gestured forward on the bed with a shoulder. Just when he did, the rodent latched onto the corner of the artwork in an unnatural way and began tugging at it. The improbability of this action did not completely sink in before the frame fell face down on the floor with a jolting smack. The petrified man watched the mouse drag the heavy object toward the unseen staircase, then realized what he was looking at was not a rodent at all but a hand: a child’s hand…

Thump. The backend of the painting dropped down the first stair step…

Thump. The second stair step…

Thump. The third…

Thump. The fourth…

Thump. The fifth…

Thump. The sixth…

Thump. The seventh…

“Brae…?” he called out.

The painting stopped its descent.

Michael finally tore free of his paralysis and bounded to the doorway. A figure was crouching halfway down the shadowy stairs. Rope, trailing away below him, was taut and looped once around the banister post at the bottom; the other end disappeared somewhere in the living room.

“How do you keep getting in here?” the resident demanded to know.

Jacques did not reply.

“There’s a second passageway, isn’t there? Is that where you’ve hidden her?”

The dwarf, pulling tight against his noose, stood up and made the post below him crack with stress.

“Where is she?” Michael pleaded.

The intruder at last answered, “Where do you think?”

No painting was at his feet.

Just as Michael turned to see the artwork still resting against the baseboard, the phone rang. He thought to dash back and get it, but found it was an easier reach from his reclined posture on the bed.

“You were suppose to call me at four-thirty,” Emma reminded him.

The man stared groggily at his wristwatch; it was four forty-five.

With the all clear, Michael drove over to the young woman’s apartment. On finding the front door ajar, and no lights on, he poked his way through to the bedroom; Emma was lying on her bed and wrapped up sleepily in his sweater.

“Did your friend leave?” she asked.

He stepped closer, wondering what may have played out in the room before he arrived. Emma slithered over the spread with an expandable backbone, folding her arms around his legs and burying her face in a thigh with a yawn. Her voice was thin and tired. “What did you and your friend talk about?”

Michael, needing something to say, drew her into some details. “Omar thinks my inheritance is part of a reality TV show.”

“A reality TV show?” she echoed. “That sounds farfetched, don’t you think?”

“But it makes sense.” (Michael was not sure it did, but felt compelled to defend the idea.)

“And you believe it? Simply because he tells you it’s the truth?”

“Yes.” He jumped in further. “Is there something wrong with that?”

“It’s just that you have to be your own man at some point.”

Michael went prickly in her embrace. “Omar is more than a friend.”

“And so am I.”

He reeled at her gall, grunting, “Yes. You’re a friend with privileges.”

She peered up along his long body. “Why do you say that with such sarcasm?”

His rare candor left him exposed, but he would not expand on the complaint.

Emma planted her head against his stomach with a plaintive sigh. “I told Evan I would drive out after seven.”

Michael glanced at his wristwatch, as if he could see it in the dark. “We should go then.”

She giggled. “I don’t want to go to the memorial service, silly.”

He was confused.

She took his hand, letting her wet words pour through his fingers. “We’ve got a two hours together. I don’t want to waste a second of it.”

Michael could feel the bony protrusions under his skull as his brain did cartwheels. This is surely what he wanted: to be the kept man. Yet he was resisting her attempt to melt his body like an ice cube over the bed.

She crawled up to mirror his torso, letting the ends of the sweater open to reveal bra and panties underneath. His fingers were again squeezed in a controlling way as she panted inside his shirt collar. At first he thought it was more of her shameless acting, but he could not help but think about what Omar said back at the coffeehouse. There was something stilted in Emma’s sexual manner. He had seen it briefly during their invasion of the seedy motel room, and then again during their lovemaking the night before. Michael was no expert in these things, but knew from his limited dating of women in graduate school how cloistered and inexperienced they could be. Instead of being emboldened by his opportunity, he felt strangely resentful, even cuckolded. It was like he was being used in some comparative test. The room smelled of Glade’s baby powder air freshener, undoubtedly slathered over the bed to clean her palate of one lover while she prepared to sample the other. He pulled away from her arms.

“I have to go to the service,” he announced flatly. “I told Jacques’ assistant I would go.”

She squatted in the middle of the bed, pouting as she had done that morning. “You can blow him off.”

“But I told him I would go.”

Emma, seeing he was not in the mood, pulled the ends of the sweater tight around her. “Then we’ll go.”

The pall of a late overcast sky made for reflective company on the car ride over to the chapel, and even prompted the streetlights to turn on early. Light rain commenced once the couple pulled up onto the church lot, but a small crowd meant they did not have to park too far away from the doors.

The few people who had assembled for the service included professor-types who probably had not been not on the best of terms with the performance artist. Michael and Emma slid into the pew near the front, although there was more frostiness in the air than what they had brought in with them. The painter looked around to see how they appeared to be an item of peculiar interest. Most eyes fell on Emma, but it was fair to say they were eyes that judged him as well, and the two of them together. These departmental people had doubtless met her fiancé, and Michael was remiss in realizing he had exposed the young woman to rumor by insisting they come; the photographer, however, did not seem to feel the stares.

The video tribute started playing on a large, flat-panel TV screen at the front of the church, redirecting everyone’s attention. It was a montage of some of Jacques’ statuesque performances in people’s yards. No sound was in them, and given there was no action outside of the occasional disgruntled homeowner, or some kid throwing a rock, the dwarf mostly resembled a premature headstone to his own grave.

The performance artist’s painful repose forced the painter to face what was his own hopeless predicament. If the key to life was not to know it too well, then both Jacques and he had failed that test. Perhaps Michael had more talent than the graduate student: had more internal resources to distract himself from his loneliness. But it was no less real or heart wrenching. It was only on these rare occasions when the painter’s happiness was unwittingly tied to something other than his own diversion he felt any frailty at all. A few people of his acquaintance admired his life choices—admired how he had stuck to his values and endured poverty and neglect for his art. But Michael saw little virtue in anything he ever did. Three motivating forces lay at the root of his talents: cowardice, selfishness, and resentment. His one saving grace, he thought, was he always gave all because he always believed in all he did, even if what he chose to believe in invariably isolated him. Despite his insatiable need to be surrounded by complete strangers in coffeehouses, the painter needed others too little, and was poorer for it. He had never learned duty from family, or patience from a child, or grace from a friend. His creative endeavors were more than a testament to an indomitable Don Quixote spirit. They were the resourceful means by which one man had saved himself from his own impoverished company.

Michael gradually drifted back into the film, although there was a tether he was slow to acknowledge. It was an accumulative impression, but unmistakably intended by Jacques. In the background of each of his frozen poses, concealed distantly among trees or in a yard dissolved in glare, a little girl was playing by herself. Little more than a mote, she was the only thing ever in motion. The painter could not say with certainty it was Brae, but the child’s presence drew him back to his napping dream on the stairs, and to the two nightmares revolving around the dwarf’s videos. He had sensed her near on those occasions, and wondered if all of the performance artist’s tapes were in some perverse or obsessive way secretly about the child.

Emma, for her part, was clearly distraught by the film, even weeping as she watched the little man who had either intentionally or unintentionally embroiled her in his death; Michael could not fathom her emotion. He looked around in the chapel to find only dry eyes.

One set belonged to a solemn Erica, who was sitting alone on a backbench.