The Art Student's War (52 page)

“Ronny, I do
not.”

“I often prefer silence to speaking.”

In any case, a silence descended on their little table.

“Getting hungry?” Ronny said.

“If you are. I’ll freshen up first.” She placed her hands on the table, and stood.

Ronny laid a hand upon her hand, urgently: “Bianca, may I ask you something very personal?” Those unpaintable eyes of his held a glitter she hadn’t seen in quite a while.

“Anything you want, Ronny.”

“You aren’t—forgive me for asking. It’s just a wild shot in the dark. Not that you look it or anything. But you aren’t by any chance pregnant, are you?”

Her mouth dropped open. For a second or two, she couldn’t say anything. “Ronald Olsson, how … on
… earth
did you know? I mean,
I
don’t even know—know for sure. That is, I’m seeing the doctor on Tuesday.” Bianca sat back down.

“Well—it was the way you moved. The way you got up from the table. As if you were—carrying something delicate?”

“You are—incredible. You do realize that, don’t you, Ronny Olsson? That you are—incredible?” He was grinning, and she went on: “A one-of-a-kind? A nonesuch? A nonpareil?”

He was grinning from ear to ear now—jubilant in a way she hadn’t seen for ages. His face so rarely opened into a full, unqualified smile. “Maybe it’s not so incredible?” he said. “After all, I’ve known you a long time, Bianca.”

But his expression belied his humble words. Oh, he looked exultant. It was possible that not even Grant, on first hearing the news, had exhibited greater pleasure.

“Yes, you have known me a long time, and you know what? You’re still amazing.
I’m
supposed to be the one with second sight.”

“You know what?” Ronny said, adopting her tone. Suddenly, he was a changed man. “We’re not going to eat around here.”

“We’re not?”

“It isn’t good enough for the likes of us amazing folks. I’m going to drive you downtown to Jason’s. Have you been to Jason’s?” “I haven’t. Grant has. He’s always out lunching with clients.”

“Who?”

“Grant. My husband.”

“Who?”

“Oh never mind. I’ve never known anyone who’s been to Jason’s.”

“It’s actually far more decent than any restaurant named Jason’s has any right to be.”

There was a moment, on first stepping into Ronny’s car (which was a beautiful little foreign sports car, a green convertible), when Bianca’s heart misgave her. It was one thing to meet Ronny at the DIA. That was precisely the sort of thing expected of her as an artist, or at least a former art student: meeting an art professor at the city museum. After all, she wasn’t “one of those wives.” But it was another thing, maybe, to be heading to Jason’s. Bianca wasn’t in the habit of lunching at fancy restaurants with men other than her husband—particularly with extraordinarily good-looking divorced men who drove green convertibles. But in that moment when Ronny actually helped her into the car, whose door opened backward—hinged on what she thought of as the wrong side—and came around and climbed into the driver’s seat, most of her misgivings vanished. This was the most natural thing in the world. The engine started with a tidy, comforting roar. Ronny was driving and
she was trying to entertain him, trying to be bright and amusing and complimentary and maybe even insightful.

“Nice green,” she said. “The car.”

“It’s called British racing green.”

“The car’s an MG?”

“An MGTD. It’s a 1950. The year they first got it right.”

“I didn’t know you had such a taste for cars.”

“I have a taste for beauty. As my present company indicates.”

“Oh Ronny, honestly,” Bianca said, and laughed, fully at ease now. She’d always loved this particular verbal game: a kind of competitively complimentary banter.

Jason’s turned out to be not quite what she expected: darker and more masculinely solemn. The maître d’ recognized Ronny, or recognized him as the sort of person he ought to recognize, and within moments they were seated in a plush maroon-colored booth. Ronny, who might well have chosen to sit at a reserved distance across the table, sat catercorner. To any stranger who happened into Jason’s today, the art professor and the housewife might look very much like two people on a date.

“A glass of wine?” Ronny said.

“I’d love a glass of wine.”

“It’s all right?” He glanced down at the nonexistent bulge in her belly.

“If I’m correct, or I suppose I should say if
you’re
correct, in just a few days I’ll find out I’m with child and it’ll be no more wine for a year or so. And no more cigarettes. Did you know I smoke?”

“I didn’t know you smoke.”

“I do. And before this lunch is over, I shall have smoked at least two and probably three cigarettes. These are my last days of vice, Ronny.”

“I’m told that’s what all the girls say …”

“No, really. And I’ve been terrible all week. Drinking like an absolute fish.”

“No you haven’t,” Ronny said. “Hey, I know fish.”

“How are your parents?”

Bianca instantly regretted the question, which sounded tactless. Ronny didn’t seem to mind, though. “I think it’s been hard for Mother, Bea,” he said. Ronny almost never called her Bea and it sounded peculiarly intimate—just as it had sounded intimate when, back in the days when she’d been Bea, he’d insisted on calling her Bianca.

“What’s hard?”

“Being the world’s most beautiful woman after you’ve hit fifty. Let’s face it. I mean, what are you supposed to
do
, exactly? Other than preserve yourself? Which is a mug’s game, as old Professor Manhardt might have said. I mean, you can only lose in the end.”

Yes, Mrs. Olsson was in her fifties now. It was hard to picture …

When the waiter came over, Ronny ordered a bottle of wine. Bianca didn’t hear what it was, but she hadn’t a doubt in the world she was going to enjoy it.

“Now tell me about the Middle Ages,” Bianca said.

“I like them,” Ronny said.

“I mean the art.”

“I like it. Not to bring up a painful topic—Vienna—but it occurred to me when I finally went to the Kunsthistorisches: painting was essentially over by the time Breughel got going. He was a sort of last gasp.”

This was still Ronny being professorial, but with all the difference in the world. That old sense of fun had entered in, a collusive diversion in which Bianca’s task was to goad him into broader and broader, wilder and wilder pronouncements. Ronny was going to look at art—
all
of art, the whole of its history—and redraw its outlines, just the way (he hadn’t been able to resist, even back then) he’d corrected a drawing of hers on the very day they first met.

“And Vermeer? Not a real painter?”

“Hey, I’d hang the
View of Delft
on my living-room wall. Gladly. But is it so impossible, in the development of any art form, that things go radically, fundamentally awry? Two roads diverge and everybody takes the wrong one?”

“You used to like the Pre-Raphaelites.”

“You know, I think I still
do
. How can you not like an artistic movement that says, Oops, let’s start over, because one big colossal mistake was made?”

“And Ingres? You always admired Ingres. You taught me how to pronounce his name.”

“Well we can surely agree—can’t we?—that it’s almost cruel to set an Ingres beside a Renoir, say. Or crueler still, beside a Gauguin. I mean, could anyone deny French painting went downhill in the nineteenth century?”

The wine arrived, a white wine. It was from France and—whatever decline the country had been suffering in general—it was delicious.

Ronny said, “But look—I mean really
look
at a painting by Memling. To say nothing of Rogier van der Weyden, whose
Deposition
in the
Prado has to be the most beautiful painting anybody ever painted. The colors. The brushwork. The proportions, not just large to medium, but medium to small, small to minuscule. The, excuse the expression, grandeur. Isn’t it possible that everything else is a falling off?

“I’m not a religious person,” Ronny went on, “and I don’t suppose you are.”

“I guess not. I suppose the test is what you do with your children, and we do very little. It’s partly not knowing what I would be if I
were
religious. Mamma’s either Presbyterian or Lutheran, depending whether she’s feeling more Scottish or German. Papa’s Catholic, until they tell his sister-in-law Aunt Grace she can’t marry Uncle Dennis, and Mom Ives is Episcopalian, the snootier the better, and—”

Ronny was looking just a little impatient.

“No,” Bianca said. “I don’t suppose I’m religious.”

“Nor am I,” Ronny said, “but I’ve come to the conclusion that the phrase ‘secular painting’ is self-contradictory. Painting’s a holy business, Bianca, or it’s nothing.”

Bianca almost wished he hadn’t spoken this way. The words were a reproach, somehow, to herself, to the dearly beloved (and now defunct) Institute Midwest, even to Donald Doobly, the Negro boy, whose worldly hopes of getting ahead, by way of his art, had been so palpable and so touching.

“But that isn’t so, Ronny.” She wasn’t sure, exactly, what she wanted to say, but she knew it was something her whole soul embraced. “To look at an onion, and see only an onion, and go ahead and paint an onion, no angels hovering in the background, no
anything
in the background, only the layers on layers of onion—that’s a noble undertaking.”

“That van der Weyden
Deposition?
There’s not an extraneous detail. Nine figures, and nothing extraneous. I want purity, Bianca.”

The words evoked a distant echo—so faraway that if she hadn’t finished most of her glass of wine she might never have retrieved it: “You know who you sound just like? Like your father, Ronny.”

“My father?”

Ronny’s face registered more than disappointment. He looked unnerved.

“That’s exactly what he said to me. Or almost exactly. That night at the Coral Club. Remember? The night when your mother—when she made that extraordinary speech about courage, and Jews and Negroes, although she didn’t call them Jews and Negroes—”

“I remember. But what are you saying, Bianca?”

“That’s what your father said. ‘I believe in purity.’ Or words very much like them. We’d been dancing.”

“It figures.”

“And when the music stopped—I remember the song was ‘Skylark,’ incidentally—he held me by the upper arms and looked me in the eye and said, ‘I believe in purity.’”

“That’s quite rich, coming from him. So maybe it’s time at last to ask: did he ever proposition you, Bianca?”

“What a thing to say! Of course not.”

“Then you’re a rarity among the girls I went out with.”

“Ronny, you mustn’t say such—What are you saying?”

“Look, I don’t know, I have no proof the man ever actually”—there was a pregnant pause—“bedded any of them. But he did always have to go and sort of—make his statement.”

“But your father isn’t
like
that,” Bianca protested. “No. Mr. Ives, my father-in-law, he’s like that. He’s had this terrible stroke, he can’t really walk, but still he’s got to let you know you’re always in his sights. The whole time, in his sights. A little poke here, a pinch there. In comparison, your father’s a gentleman. And a pussycat.”

But this final observation wasn’t right. No, Mr. Olsson was a lynx. At bottom, Mr. Ives’s wheelchair-bound appetites were a joke—a feeble joke in extremely bad taste, but a joke nonetheless. But there was nothing humorous in the feral hungers of the man who used to pace that vast shadowed mansion in Arden Park, when he wasn’t down in his gym, pummeling a leather punching bag.

“Even poor Elizabeth,” Ronny said. “He wouldn’t leave her alone.”

“Who?”

Ronny looked a little affronted. “My ex-wife.”

“Yes. Libby. Of course. You know, I knew her in grade school.”

Ronny had pretended, minutes ago, not to recognize Grant’s name. But Bianca just now hadn’t been pretending. Elizabeth who? Libby who? It made Bianca feel peculiar to think of Ronny actually standing at some altar and solemnly taking this girlhood classmate of hers as his lawfully wedded wife. It hardly seemed
right
—and not for the reasons that someone like Grant might suppose.

“And you found my father attractive,” Ronny said.

“If
I did, it would never have occurred to me to put it in those terms. Not back then.”

“But you found him attractive.”

“I suppose in a way I did. I mean, he was good-looking, and charming, and gallant, always complimenting me, and he was this great man, running half the war committees in the city.”

She’d thought she could get away with this sort of candor with Ronny, who had always allowed her greater forthrightness than other men allowed. But she’d gone a step too far and hurt him. And—a twin realization—she still owed Ronny a duty to lift his mood at such times. It was this duty that induced her to say what she wouldn’t otherwise have said: “But I wasn’t attracted to him the way I was attracted to this gorgeous boy in my still-life class who was
very
handsome in his camel’s hair coat and tawny suede hat and who drew like an angel. My God, do you know how overwhelmed I was? I’d never seen anything like you.”

“I wish you hadn’t mentioned the hat.” He shook his head in feigned dismay.

“Hey, at least you didn’t go around in a red Hungarian beret. Boy, was I
young.”
And she’d said just the right thing. Feelings were smoothed and their lunch could resume …

She loved the wine and she took Ronny’s advice in everything. Both ordered duck à l’orange and green salads and they both had a second glass of wine. And Bianca had a cigarette. “Is it a boy or a girl?” Ronny said.

For just a moment her brain played a weird trick and she honestly didn’t know what he was talking about. Then she said, “A girl.”

“And her name?”

Bianca didn’t know she had a name prepared but it turned out she did. She exhaled the lofty syllables on a balmy cloud of cigarette smoke: “Maria.”

“Why Maria?”

It turned out, too, she had a solid explanation. “With sons named Matt and Chip? Maybe it’s time to pay some Italian dues. And won’t Papa be pleased?”