The Fortress of Solitude (50 page)

“That’s all you have?” said Abraham, looking at my bag. He seemed disappointed. “You’re staying the night?”

“Of course.”

“You’re registered already,” said Francesca. “Zelmo took care of everything.” She scrabbled in her purse as we moved through the lobby. “Here’s for your room. It works like a credit card—you
swipe
. The key’s for the minibar.”

“I’ll be hitting it hard,” I joked, taking the keys.

“Oh, you won’t have time,” said Francesca. “Zelmo Swift, the committee chair, is taking us to dinner.” She goggled her eyes at the honor.

“He knows you’re coming,” added Abraham. “I asked and was told it’s fine.”

“You’re being foolish, darling,” said Francesca. “You’re the guest of honor, why wouldn’t your family be invited?”

“It’s an extra body at dinner. I asked.” He turned to me. “We’ll talk there if Zelmo lets us get in a word. Now I have to do this thing. I hope you won’t mind sitting.”

“Mind?” said Francesca, taking my arm. “He’ll be proud!”

My father had lived alone for fourteen years after I left Dean Street for college in Vermont. Little changed in those years—he’d gone on painting paperback-book art to cover his mortgage and shopping, and gone on pouring every spare hour on the clock and spare ounce of energy in his frame into his epic, endless, unseen film. In 1989, at last granting the absurdity of having three floors to himself, he’d converted the brownstone to two duplexes, adding a small kitchen to the second floor and renting out the parlor level, with the basement, to a young family. What remained untouched was the upstairs studio, the monk’s quarters where he daubed out days in black paint on celluloid. The neighborhood, in fits and starts, gentrified around him, Isabel Vendle’s curse or blessing realized in lag time. For Abraham it was primarily a matter of raised property taxes. He’d never asked what the rental market would bear—the duplex was always leased at a bargain.

There were never women, that I heard of. If Abraham knew how to seek for that part of his life, after Rachel, he didn’t know how to mention it. Then he’d come to the attention of Francesca Cassini, a fifty-eight-year-old receptionist working in the offices of Ballantine Books. This man slumping into the offices with his latest jacket art tucked into a pebbly black pressed-board portfolio tied together with black laces, this man slumping from the elevator dressed humbly, in his Art Students League proletarian garb, fingertips slightly stained with paint, his demeanor mordant, as ever—this man had caught the eye of the fresh widow from Bay Ridge. A woman who, despite her immigrant’s name, had lived all her life among the postwar generation of New York Jews, Francesca spoke in their manner and recognized them as one recognizes oneself. She’d lost a Jewish husband six months earlier, a career accountant, a man bent, I imagined, over a lifelong column of figures likely as dear to him as the world’s longest abstract film in progress was to my father. Abraham, jacket-art celebrity, butt of corridor jokes for his Bartelbyesque mien, didn’t stand a chance. If ever a man cried for Francesca’s salvaging, here he was. She’d announced herself. She’d attached herself. One winter I visited Brooklyn and there she was, moved into the Dean Street house. I couldn’t complain. Francesca organized my father, and she seemed, in a peculiar way, to make him happy. She made him visible to himself, by her contrast.

The greenroom had been set up in a small conference room off the lobby, guarded from the ordinary public by a volunteer at the door. In breathless tones Francesca explained we were a guest of honor’s entourage, and we were allowed into the sanctum. It held two urns containing coffee and water for tea, and a sectioned plastic dish full of cubed cheddar and Triscuits. A pair of volunteers sat behind a tray of blank badges and their plastic holders. From them Francesca demanded a pass “for Abraham Ebdus’s son,” then clipped the result to my shirt pocket.

It wasn’t clear what we were waiting for. My father stood, stalled in consternation, in the center of the room, while Francesca dithered around the edges.

“Mr. Ebdus?” ventured a volunteer.

“Yes?”

“The other program participants went upstairs. For your panel. I think it’s beginning now.”

“
Without
him?” said Francesca.

“The Nebraska Room, I think. Nebraska West.”

We hurried out. “I told you we could go direct,” said Abraham to Francesca as we went up the wide central stair to the mezzanine.

“Zelmo said meet at the greenroom.”

Abraham just shook his head.

Everyone moved awkwardly in this space, drifting as though rudderless, then abruptly accelerating, in explosions of tiny steps. Crossing paths they’d glare, mutter, wait for apologies. Through this fitful human sea we made our way to Nebraska Ballroom West. A sign taped to the door announced the program as “The Career of Abraham Ebdus,” as though this were self-explanatory. I supposed it was, or would be by the time the panel accomplished its work.

We entered at the back of the room. At the front, four figures already occupied the elevated dais, behind table microphones and sweating pitchers of ice water. The dais was covered in maroon bunting which matched the acoustic padding of the ballroom’s walls and the thin upholstery of the stackable chairs that were arranged in rows, wall to wall. A crowd of perhaps fifty or sixty sat, attentive and respectful, scratching, coughing, crossing and uncrossing legs, wrinkling papers.

“Good of Abraham to honor us with his presence,” said one of the panelists into his microphone, with heavy sarcasm. It drew a burst of relieved laughter from the audience, then a scattering of applause.

“Up,” egged Francesca, and my father obeyed. She and I took seats at the aisle, Francesca clutching my arm in her excitement.

The moderator, who’d wisecracked at our entry into the room, was a balding, sixtyish man, distinguishable at this distance from Abraham himself primarily by a garish blue ascot. He introduced himself as Sidney Blumlein, formerly art director for Ballantine, and if not exactly Abraham Ebdus’s discoverer then at least his main employer and patron during what he called
the crucial first decade
of my father’s work. “I’ve also been his apologist for longer than he’d want me to remind you,” Blumlein continued. “I’m not ashamed to say I protected his art from editorial meddling a dozen times, two dozen. And I talked Abe out of refusing his first Hugo.” Another warm chuckle from the crowd. “But truly, it was always an honor.”

The others introduced themselves: first Buddy Green, who blinked through thick glasses and couldn’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen, editor of an on-line zine called
Ebdus Collector
, dedicated to the purchase of the rare original painted boards of my father’s designs. I’d blundered across Green’s Web site a few times, Googling the name Ebdus to search my own archived journalism. Next was R. Fred Vundane, a tiny, withered man in a Vandyke beard and mad-scientist glasses, author of twenty-eight novels, including
Neural Circus
, the very first for which my father had painted a jacket. Then Paul Pflug, another paperback painter, a fiftyish biker-type, fat in leather pants, with a blond ponytail and eyes concealed by dark wraparounds. Pflug seated himself at the far edge of the dais, leaving an empty chair and unfilled water glass between himself and Vundane.

The tributes and anecdotes weren’t so terribly interesting that I couldn’t mostly study my father and his reactions. I didn’t recall ever seeing him this way, onstage, at a distance, held in a collective gaze. The result was a kind of nakedness I realized now he’d always avoided. Green spoke gushingly in a high whine, claiming Ebdus as the successor in a line of science-fiction illustrators from Virgil Finlay through Richard Powers—names which meant less than nothing to me—and it was evident Abraham took pleasure in it, however masochistically. Vundane spoke with aggrieved vanity—perhaps he yearned for a panel on “The Works of Vundane”—about Ebdus’s deep and uncommon insight into the surrealist nature of his, Vundane’s, writing. And when Pflug’s turn came he reminisced, gruffly, about meeting my father at the beginning of his career, and claimed Abraham’s seriousness, his regard for standards, as an example which had altered the course of his, Pflug’s, career.

Abraham didn’t speak, just nodded as the others alternated on the microphones. But his distaste for whatever it was Vundane and Pflug had accomplished—or failed to—was painfully obvious. For that matter, it was unmistakable that
nobody
on the dais liked Pflug. I wondered how he’d come to be invited.

“I’ve told this story many times,” said Buddy Green. “I was trying to trace the provenance of the original art for the Belmont Specials—his first seventeen paintings. They weren’t in the hands of any of the major collectors. They weren’t in the hands of any of the minor collectors. Unfortunately, they weren’t in
my
hands. I kept writing to the Belmont people and they said they didn’t know what I was talking about. I thought they were
stonewalling
. So, being a little slow on the uptake, it finally occurred to me to ask Abraham. And he explained, like it was no big deal, that he
destroyed
them. He couldn’t imagine anyone cared.”

Abraham’s eyes scoured the crowd, looking for me, I permitted myself to imagine. I wondered how it felt to hear those called
his first seventeen paintings
.

“It’s true,” said Sidney Blumlein, with great avuncular gusto. “When I hired him away from Belmont, Abe was
systematically
destroying the work.”

This drew oohs and aahs, a kind of titillated awe from the crowd.

“This man is the only one your father respects,” whispered Francesca. “None of the others. Not even Zelmo.”

“Zelmo?”

“The chair. I mean, of the whole convention. You’ll meet him at dinner. He’s a very important lawyer.”

“Ah.”

Now the microphone was retaken by Blumlein, whom Francesca had claimed as Abraham’s only friend on the panel. Being moderator, Blumlein took it upon himself to prize open the jaws of the clam—to find a way to force Abraham Ebdus to acknowledge and address his admirers.

“For more than two decades Abe has graced our field, and I do mean graced. All well and good. But at this time of celebration there’s no reason to pussyfoot around the question—he’s done so at a remove. His background isn’t science fiction, and in that he’s an exception from the vast majority of professionals at this gathering, at
any
gathering in our field. We’re fans, our interests begin in the pulp-magazine tradition, however we might like to hope we’ve elevated it.”

Pflug sneered. Vundane took a pitcher and topped off his untouched glass.

The audience was stilled, silenced from its murmurs of approval and recognition, perhaps less certain now that everything they were hearing fell safely in the vein of an Elk Lodge testimonial dinner.

“Abraham Ebdus, let’s not kid ourselves, had no interest in
elevating
it. He was looking to make a buck to support his art—what he regarded as his real art. As perhaps some of you, perhaps
many
of you may know, Abe is a filmmaker, an
experimental
filmmaker, of terrific seriousness and devotion. This is how he spends his days, when he’s not painting jackets for books. It has nothing to do with science fiction. What’s miraculous—what we’re all here to celebrate—is that being a
real
artist, one of depth and profundity, Abe brought to the books a visionary intensity that
did
elevate. That contained beauty and strangeness. Because he couldn’t help himself.”

I saw how well Sidney Blumlein knew my father. He was urging Abraham into the weird light of this roomful of celebrants, baiting him with the possibility of an audience
worth
addressing. I didn’t know whether I wanted him to succeed.

“This is what, Abe? Only your fifth or sixth time at a convention?”

My father hunched, seeming to wish he could reply with his shoulders. Finally he leaned into the microphone and said, “I haven’t counted.”

“I first dragged you to a LunaCon, in New York, in the early eighties. You weren’t happy.”

“No, it wasn’t to my taste,” said Abraham reluctantly.

The crowd tittered.

“And wouldn’t it be fair to say, Abe, you rarely if ever read the books under your jackets?”

Now a collective gasp.

“Oh, I’ve never done,” said Abraham. “I say it without apology. Mr. Vundane, your book, what was the title?”

“
Neural Circus
,” supplied R. Fred Vundane, his jaw so clenched it mashed the vowels.

“Yes,
Neural Circus
. I was always stopped by that title. It seemed, I’m sorry, vaguely distasteful to me. You speak of surrealists—I suppose you mean the poets. It feels a very poor shade of symbolist imagery, actually. Rimbaud, maybe? No, I was asked to envision other worlds, and I did. Any congruence with the work is happenstance.”

I’d read R. Fred’s book. I recalled a troupe of genetically altered acrobats residing in a hollowed asteroid.

Blumlein rode in to the rescue now, perhaps pitying Vundane, who’d shrunk even smaller in his chair. “This is just an example, I think, of the wider context, the
erudition
, that Abe brings to what he touches. In our field he’s a comet streaking past, whom we’ve managed to lure into our orbit. A fellow traveler, like a Stanley Kubrick or a Stanislaw Lem. He disdains our vocabulary even as he reinvents it to suit his own impulses.”

“I have to interrupt, Sidney, to say you’re overstating the value of what I do.” Here was a subject to rouse Abraham’s passion. “You throw names, Kubrick, Lem. And Mr. Green, god bless him, throws Virgil Finlay, whom I’ve never had the good fortune to encounter. Let
me
throw a few names. Ernst, Tanquy, Matta, Kandinsky. Once in a while, the early Pollock or Rothko. If I’ve accomplished one thing, it’s been to give a rough education in contemporary painting, or what was contemporary painting in 1950. The intersection of late surrealism and early abstract expressionism. Period. It’s derivative, every last brushstroke. All quoted. Nothing to do with outer space, nothing
remotely
. Honestly, if you people hadn’t put such a seal on yourselves, if you’d visit a museum even once, you’d know you’re celebrating a second-rate
thief
.”