The Art Student's War (51 page)

But Bianca didn’t
want
to squash anybody; she didn’t want to be
able
to squash anybody.

There was no disputing the degree to which Grant deferred to her. The household’s governing assumption was that she was more attuned to the world, and especially to the appearances of things, than he was. You might have thought Grant would concede this resentfully, but the opposite was true: he took authentic pride in her discrimination. And an odd pride in his own indifference. When he traveled away from home on business, which he rarely did, he enjoyed staying in fleabags, eating in greasy spoons … “After the Army,” he liked to say, “everything else is the Ritz.” He liked to play “street basketball” with Negroes. At baseball games, he preferred the bleachers. Though most of his legal work involved trusts and estates, he adored stories of criminals, particularly inept and ridiculous crimes.

Bianca was the house’s sole and unquestioned arbiter as to whether a stack of lunch meat had gone bad or a quart of milk had gone sour. It was appalling, really, what Grant would eat if left on his own—things any well-fed dog would turn up its nose at. At parties, he would happily lament the way Bianca had barred him from his favorite restaurant, a Chinese dive on Seven Mile where she’d found a fly in her fried rice.

Pitying once more that sobbing, shaken, shaking man in the car, the
one who had pierced her heart when he’d cried out that, if only she would take him back, he would never, ever, never, ever do anything like that again, Bianca reached over and laid a hand on his chest—his powerful heart pulsing slowly and contentedly under her palm—and felt herself, as she did so, subsiding gratefully into sleep.

CHAPTER XXVIII

“Am I speaking to Bianca?”

“Ronny!”

He laughed lightly. “Is my voice so identifiable?”

“Apparently so.”

“And how are you?”

“Fine, Ronny. But how are you?”

“I’m all right. Listen, the reason I’m calling—”

“You don’t need a reason to call me.”

“Thank you. Anyway, the reason I’m calling—”

“You wait for a reason to call me, more than a year goes by. Do you realize it’s more than a year since I last heard your voice?”

“The
reason
I’m calling is because I’m coming to town Saturday and I thought we might get together, however briefly, maybe go—”

“Or however
lengthily
. My day looks wide open. I see it right here on the kitchen calendar: SAILING! Grant’s befriended somebody who owns a boat and the male members of this household are looking forward to a full day of sunburn and seasickness.”

“I thought we might go,
if
you’ll let me finish a sentence—”

“Probably not.”

“To the DIA.”

“Love to. Sign me up.”

Yes, more than a year had elapsed since she’d spoken to Ronny, but it was as if the cadences continued to resound and their banter could begin in midflow. To converse with him for only a minute was to be reminded that she’d never known anyone else she so loved to interrupt, or to be interrupted by. There was nobody else she talked to in this particular way—and what better defined true friendship? Oh, she was
glad
he’d telephoned.

She said, “This is so wonderful you’d call now; these last few days, I’ve been thinking about you often.”

“Good things, I trust.”

“All good things. Listen, I went to Pierre’s.”

“Pierre’s?”

“The restaurant. You remember. Your mother took me a few times. Pierre has this pencil-thin moustache and he kisses—”

“I remember Pierre.”

“Anyway, Grant took me on Saturday.”

“Doesn’t sound like much fun. Pierre’s sort of this embarrassing—”

“It was
lots
of fun. An anniversary lunch—seven years! Anyway—I don’t
know!
—I’ve just been thinking constantly about the old days, your mother taking me to Pierre’s, and the Coral Club, and Professor Manhardt and Professor Ravenscroft—”

“He wore a toupee. You remember, I couldn’t bring myself to study under somebody who wore a toupee.”

“You said it was because he couldn’t draw.”

“It was the toupee, actually.” And Ronny laughed—that wonderful always ever so slightly and unexpectedly nervous laugh of his.

“Anyway, I’m so glad you called.” There was a pause. “How
is
your mother?” Bianca asked.

“Mother’s all right I guess.”

“Your father?”

“Oh he’s always the same. Business is tough and getting tougher. Tough and getting tougher. Only the strong survive. The rest of us become art professors.”

“Or the mothers of twin boys. Who now are six, I must tell you.”

“Six,” Ronny said.

So they arranged to meet at eleven, Saturday morning, in the lobby of the DIA.

She was going to meet Ronny Olsson at the DIA.

The plan turned out to be fine with Grant, as she knew it would. He had little interest in museums, and he was all too happy if she and that “old fruit,” Ronny Olsson, had a rendezvous at the DIA. This was something actually quite sweet about Grant: he was always encouraging her as an artist. He was glad she wasn’t “one of those wives,” as he put it. The phrase encompassed half the women they met socially—who were forever talking about their husband’s job at GM or Chrysler or Hudson Motor. As Grant often said, with a directness whose simplicity was touching: “You make things interesting.”

Of course Grant’s attitude toward art was more complicated than she sometimes made out. It would be easy for someone—for Ronny, say—to portray Grant as some sort of philistine. In fact, Grant had the good
sense and natural candor to see, when confronted with the DIA’s Italian galleries, say, that while their art spoke very little to him, it spoke volumes to his wife, which pleased him deeply. And was this so different, really, from the attraction she’d felt for poor Henry Vanden Akker? Part of Henry’s appeal was his air of being linked to another world—in his case, a mathematical world of which she scarcely caught sight.

And Grant had been far more than decent—he’d been admirable, he’d been wonderful—about Henry. It was at Grant’s insistence that in the little room off the kitchen she sometimes called her studio Henry’s face hung on the wall—the jungle portrait that had made Henry crow (she would never forget it)
It makes me look so brainy!
In Grant’s eyes, their duty was clear. Henry, already once wounded, had returned to the Pacific, and sacrificed his life for his country, and the least they could do in tribute was to hang his portrait prominently.

Grant seemed to savor the romance of it, actually, and over time Bianca had divulged a fair amount about Henry—probably more than she should, since Grant sometimes informed visitors that this was a portrait of “Bianca’s former fiancé.” And inevitably added: “His plane went down in the Pacific.” She’d told Grant that Henry hadn’t been her fiancé exactly—rather, her “near fiancé” or “almost fiancé”—but in the passion of her storytelling perhaps she hadn’t been altogether clear.

Saturday morning, after a few false starts, she donned a turquoise silk blouse from Himelhoch’s, a black skirt, and some quite “arty,” vaguely Southwestern Indian turquoise and silver earrings. She was meeting Ronny at the DIA.

What she hadn’t figured on, however, was that old moodiness of Ronny’s: you never knew quite where you stood. Oh, he was gallantry itself from the first moment: “Signorina—surely I can call you that—you’re enough to make me take up painting again.” She’d never known anyone else so debonair. And Ronny looked almost humorously handsome. She’d forgotten how, the last time she’d seen him, she’d detected a fleck of gray at his temples. Now the gray was unmistakable, and made him look not merely handsome but distinguished, too.

But, as soon became evident, there was an edge to his remarks.

“‘A painter is always mixing colors,’” Bianca quoted. “Now who said that?” They were standing in the white courtyard where the controversial Diego Rivera murals spanned the walls high overhead. The murals had never brought Ronny much pleasure.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Professor Manhardt.”

“That old fraud.”

“I think he helped me. He seemed so imposing. I was only eighteen,” Bianca said. “And you were twenty-one.”

“Twenty-one,” Ronny said.

“I took the advice to heart. I was mixing paint in my head when I went to sleep at night.”

“Back when we were going to be painters,” Ronny said.

The words felt cruel. Not inaccurate, perhaps—but cruel. Given how busy the twins kept her, and Grant kept her, and how rarely she actually sat down to work in her studio (where, more and more, Henry’s penetrating portrait carried a look of reproach), Bianca could hardly talk about pursuing art seriously. She might conceivably claim to be working on a still life in copper and silver—old pans and cutlery, all richly tarnished—since the easel was currently standing in a corner of the studio. But how many weeks had it been since she’d actually broken out the paints? She didn’t want to know exactly … Even so, why did Ronny seem to relish fatal pronouncements of this sort? Her life still lay ahead of her. She was sure of that: her life still lay ahead of her.

They looked at Jacopo Bassano’s
Madonna and Child
, at the incomparable Bellini
Madonna and Child
, at the Botticelli
Resurrected Christ
. Ronny spoke, she listened. He’d always known a great deal. And now he knew a great deal more.

They found their way to the astonishing Breughel
Wedding Dance
, and Bianca said, “How you used to embarrass me with this one! Contemplating it with such composure and sophistication, while all I could see were the outlandish codpieces.”

It wasn’t merely the codpieces. It was the fact that the men were so obviously, exaggeratedly aroused within them.

Bianca went on: “This was all quite shocking to a girl not long out of Eastern High.”

She did not say this flirtatiously—merely, at most, mock flirtatiously—but all the same Ronny’s reply seemed overly earnest. “Last year, I went to Vienna and I finally saw Breughel’s
Hunters in the Snow
and you know what? It’s a complete mess. And you know what else? It really is amazingly beautiful. I concluded that it’s the most beautiful mess anyone ever made.”

He’d always been a professor, of course, even back in those days when he couldn’t find a single professor worthy of his respect, but the
process of embodiment now seemed complete. Once, she’d loved to argue with Ronny Olsson. But there was something unchallengeable in his remarks now. The difference was subtle but enormous: he used to make observations, and now he made pronouncements.

They wandered here and there. Ronny went on making pronouncements. Bianca countered with observations. When they reached the medieval sculpture gallery—medieval art had become his specialty—Ronny was especially informative. Who else but Ronny would point out, as they stared at a crucifix, that its Jesus had been carved from a willow tree? After all, Ronny was the one who, on his first-ever visit to her home, had so impressed Papa by identifying the various woods in Stevie’s pull-toy rooster. If Ronny was an aesthete, he’d always had a very craftsmanlike grasp of how artworks got made. Still, there didn’t seem to be much pleasure today in their wandering. What in the world had happened to those two kids, mad about art, who used to race through this museum like children in Hudson’s twelfth-floor “toy kingdom”?

They wound up eventually in the Kresge Court, sipping cups of tea. “We could get some sandwiches,” Ronny said.

“That sounds convenient,” Bianca said.

“I mentioned
Hunters in the Snow
—have you seen it?”

“Only in reproductions.”

“You’ve never been to Vienna.”

“No, Ronny, I’ve never been to Vienna.” Her voice came out sharper-edged than she’d intended.

Ronny looked a little hurt and surprised, and Bianca recognized that look: he’d never taken her rare reproaches well.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I just meant—surely now you could afford to make the trip?”

“Ronny, I have two six-year-old boys. I swear, it would be easier to raise wolves or bears or tiger cubs. You know what Chip did the first
week
of kindergarten? He drilled a hole in a cabinet. With a
hand
drill, no less. I get a call from his school, Your boy drilled a hole in a cabinet. Drilled a
what
in a
what
, I say. And how in the world did Chip get his hands on a hand drill? Well you might ask. But you can be certain, if some janitor leaves a hand drill lying around, Chip’s got ahold of it in one minute. And the next minute he’s drilled a hole in a cabinet. I go off to Vienna? I’d come back and find there’s no
house
left.”

Though she still had more to say, somewhere in this spirited rebuttal all sense of indignation drained from her. She felt a little sorry for
Ronny actually, who was watching her with the forbearance of somebody receiving a merited rebuke. Presumably, Ronny would never have children. It was hard to believe he would marry again—though stranger things had happened. (The thing she had yet to say, and chose now not to say, was that she’d never been inside an airplane and—despite various generous offers from Uncle Dennis—probably never would. It seemed her maiden flight had gone down in the Pacific, many years ago, on an island called Majuro.) “Do you like teaching?” she asked him.

“Well enough.”

Ronny now lived in Ann Arbor and taught art history at the University. He added: “But I don’t much like the writing.”

“Then why do it?”

“It would smooth the way to tenure.”

As a doctoral student, also at the University, Ronny had raced through his classes in record time, and he’d done brilliantly. But it seemed the completing of a dissertation had been a torturous process.

“It’s peculiar,” Ronny went on. “I can say things, and believe them wholeheartedly, but more and more the moment I put them down on paper, they no longer look defensible. I suppose I prefer speaking to writing. And—though you’ll never believe this, you consider me such a windbag—”