I rummaged around for a while until I found my voice, one that sounded strange in my ears. I said, “I was painting the royal family. I am the greatest painter of the age.”
“Look at me,” she ordered. “You know who I am.”
I said, “You look like Lotte. Is this real?” and I laughed, a horrible sound. Lunatics are always depicted as laughing; we speak of maniacal laughter, and this is why. When the ground of reality is stripped away, when meaning itself takes a walk, what’s left is this monstrous hilarity.
And tears. I wept and she held me, and perhaps the reality of the familiar body, the smell of her hair, her perfume, worked on a brain level below the one that was screwed up so badly, and I calmed a little. She spoke slowly and gently as she often did to the children, about being summoned, about Krebs arranging everything, how he thought the presence of my family would help get me through this crisis.
And into my mind then, in the midst of the most extreme existential terror, came the thought that now my only course was to cleave to the wisdom of the sages and the bumper stickers and simply abandon all memory as unreliable, to discard the past and the future and simply try to exist moment to moment and see what happened. So, whoever this nice woman was, I was not going to ask her to confirm or deny anything about my past or about who Krebs was; I was just going to let her take the lead, and follow.
I said, “My memory is all scrambled.”
“But you remember me, yes? And the children?”
“Yes. How are the kids?”
“Oh, you know, all excited, the plane ride, this place. It’s quite lovely. There’s a little farm attached to it. They were down there all morning, ducks and goats and so on. Did I tell you, I’ve found a marvelous clinic in Geneva for Milo? They think they can really do something for him.”
I said that sounded great, I said I was fine, not to worry. So, I made myself move like one of those robots controlled by a little remote, press one button for out of bed, another for the shower, and so on. I got dressed, greeted the world, and life, of a sort, resumed.
It was my daughter, Rose, who made the difference. I fell upon her with an intensity that amazed both of us, hugs and kisses and foolish talk. I spent unaccustomed hours with her over the next days, I’m not busy anymore, all the time in the world. She was the only person in my life who didn’t think I was crazy, she accepted me at face value, not caring for what the world thought. Could build your life on a kid, many people do, although it’s unfair as hell to the kid-they’re supposed to build on you. We walked through the woodlands, dabbled in streams, did little art projects. She found a shredder somewhere and made a big sheet of collage, the farm and its animals, but didn’t have enough pink for the pigs.
We were much at the farm, always accompanied by Franco. It’s where the Bienekes live, and there are some workers who actually do the farm work, very feudal arrangements hereabouts, the guys actually wearing lederhosen. This time of year we have young animals; Rose is entranced, it’s like her Richard Scarry animal book coming to life. Fine weather, fluffy clouds, a Constable painting, felicity surrounds us, except for our son dying in his room, but here’s the great part of being in the now: it doesn’t matter what’s going to happen or what has happened.
I believe I was as pleasant to others as I have ever been, a little shallow maybe, but no one seemed to mind. Lotte treated me very gently, like a live bomb, or no, more like she’s always treated Milo, like somebody who might disappear at any moment. Milo himself was stiff and formal with me, he’s at the age when insanity in a parent is particularly distressing. For my part, I avoided him as much as I could. I couldn’t bear the expression on his face when he looked at me.
At the farm one morning Rose brought me a little duckling and I was able to focus my full attention on the squirming golden ball, and on my girl’s delight in the duck, and on the day, which seemed to last an amazingly long time, like summer days in childhood. Rose was able to drag me uncomplaining around the farm like a large rolling toy.
We entered the sheep barn. There were young lambs. As we inspected them, I knelt and said softly to my daughter, “Could I ask you a question?”
“Yes. Is this a game?”
“Uh-huh. I’m pretending I don’t know anything and you have to tell me stuff, okay?”
“What stuff?”
“Like what’s my name?”
“It’s Chaz. That’s a shortcut for Charles.”
“Very good! And where do I live?”
“In your loft.”
“And where do you and Mommy and Milo live?”
“In our house. It’s 134 Congress Street, Brooklyn, New York. I know our phone number too.”
I hugged her tight. “I bet you do, honey. Thank you.”
“Is this all of the game?”
“Yes, for now,” I said.
What a wonderful day!
It got better. We had lunch at the farm with the workers, big sweaty blondes who made much of my daughter and wife in German. Rose is bilingual in French and was delighted to discover that there was another language in which people can be sweet to her, and she was able to communicate a little, with Lotte supplying phrases both amusing and useful. Such hearty laughter!
But after lunch it occurred to me that I might have hallucinated Rose’s answers. I was angry with myself for even thinking of such a stupid ploy, and in this mood I slipped down to the kitchen, chatted with the girls and Frau Bonner. They were making cakes, and busy, and I had no problem easing a six-inch chef ’s knife out of a drawer and up my sleeve. It was old and black and the wooden handle was cracked, so they probably don’t use it much and won’t miss it. Still razor sharp, though. It made me feel good to have a weapon. I thought that if I ever figured out who my real enemies were I would use it on them. I tested it on my own wrists too, just scratches. That was also a possibility that came to mind.
That evening we were having dinner with his excellency the evil magician, and we were asked to dress for it. Lotte thought it was a lovely idea, to dress up for dinner. I wore my Venice suit; she fetched out a wonderful sheath dress in a Naples-yellow fabric that sparkled. She looked terrific in the formal dining room too, along with the crystal and the polished mahogany and the silver champagne bucket and Krebs smiling in his white dinner jacket like Reichsmarschal Göring, but not as fat.
A nice dinner too, or would’ve been if I hadn’t had so much to drink. I’d forgotten that booze knocked you out of that state of just being, which is why drunks are always going on about the past and making promises about the future, and why AA is always preaching one day at a time. Anyway, we’d just finished the boar with red cabbage, and Krebs and Lotte were deep in a conversation about what was showing in New York, and Lotte was telling him about Rudolf Stingel, who apparently uses chipped Styrofoam panels and linoleum and industrial carpeting distressed in various ways and hung on the wall to make people forget beauty and really experience the fact that everything is just total shit, and who was having his one-man at the Whitney, and Lotte turned to Krebs and said in a clear voice something about my own one-man show at the Whitney.
Krebs listened affably to this while my blood chilled, and then Lotte looked me right in the eye with a hesitant half smile and said, “It was a wonderful show.”
Yes, my Lotte.
Before anyone could stop me, I jumped up and ran out of the dining room and down the hall to Krebs’s office, where I entered and locked the door behind me. I started searching, I’m not sure for what, some evidence, some physical object that I could use to defend my memories of my life as an impoverished commercial hack, and funny, isn’t it, I hated it while I was living it, but in retrospect it seemed to be the most precious thing in the world; how we love what we take to be our true selves. And so much did I not want to be the painter of those sexy Teflon nudes that I looked for such an item. I looked a little roughly, I have to say; I think I broke some nice things in there. I used my knife on some of Krebs’s possessions.