The Largesse of the Sea Maiden Read online

  I headed home.

  WIDOW

  I was having lunch one day with my friend Tom Ellis, a journalist—just catching up. He said he was writing a two-act drama based on interviews he’d taped while gathering material for an article on the death penalty, two interviews in particular.

  First he’d spent an afternoon with a death row inmate in Virginia, the murderer William Donald Mason, a name not at all famous here in California, and I don’t know why I remember it. Mason was scheduled to die the next day, twelve years after killing a guard he’d taken hostage during a bank robbery.

  Other than his last meal of steak, green beans, and a baked potato, which would be served to him the following noon, Mason knew of no future outcomes to worry about and seemed relaxed and content. Ellis quizzed him about his life before his arrest, his routine there at the prison, his views on the death penalty—Mason was against it—and his opinion as to an afterlife—Mason was for it.

  The prisoner talked with admiration about his wife, whom he’d met and married some years after landing on death row. She was the cousin of a fellow inmate. She waited tables in a sports bar—great tips. She liked reading, and she’d introduced her murderer husband to the works of Charles Dickens and Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway. She was studying for a realtor’s license.

  Mason had already said goodbye to his wife. The couple had agreed to get it all out of the way a full week ahead of the execution, to spend several happy hours together and part company well out of the shadow of Mason’s last day.

  Ellis said he’d felt a fierce, unexpected kinship with this man so close to the end because, as Mason himself pointed out, this was the last time Mason would be introduced to a stranger, except for the people who would arrange him on the gurney the next day and set him up for his injection. Tom Ellis was the last new person he’d meet, in other words, who wasn’t about to kill him. The next day everything proceeded according to the schedule, and about eighteen hours after Ellis talked with him, William Mason was dead.

  A week later Ellis interviewed the new widow, Mrs. Mason, and learned that much of what she’d told her husband was false.

  Ellis located her in Norfolk, working not in any kind of sports bar, but instead in a basement sex emporium near the waterfront, in a one-on-one peep show. In order to talk to her Ellis had to pay twenty dollars and descend a narrow stairway lit with purple bulbs and sit in a chair before a curtained window. He was shocked when the curtain vanished upward to reveal the woman already completely nude, sitting on a stool in a padded booth. Then it was her turn to be shocked when Ellis introduced himself as a man who’d shared an hour or two of her husband’s last full day on earth. Together they spoke of the prisoner’s wishes and dreams, his happiest memories and his childhood grief, the kinds of things a man shares only with his wife. Her face, though severe, was pretty, and she displayed her parts to Tom unselfconsciously, yet without the protection of anonymity. She wept, she laughed, she shouted, she whispered, all of this into a telephone handset she held to her head while her free hand gestured in the air or touched the glass between them.

  As for having told so many lies to the man she’d married—that was one of the things she laughed about. She seemed to assume anybody else would have done the same. In addition to her bogus employment and her imaginary studies in real estate, she’d endowed herself with a religious soul and joined the membership of a nonexistent church. Thanks to all her fabrications, William Donald Mason had died a proud and happy husband.

  And just as he’d been surprised by a sudden intimacy with the condemned killer, my friend felt very close to the widow because they were talking with each other about life and death while she displayed her nakedness before him, sitting on the stool with her red, spike-heeled pumps planted wide apart on the floor. I asked him if they’d ended up making love, and he said no, but he’d wanted to, he certainly had, and he was convinced the naked widow had felt the same, though you weren’t allowed to touch the women in those places, and this dialogue, and for that matter both of them—the death row interview and the interview with the naked widow—had taken place through glass partitions made to withstand any kind of passionate assault.

  At the time, the idea of telling her what he wanted had seemed terrible. Now Tom regretted his shyness. In the play, as he described it for me, the second act would end differently.

  Before long we wandered into a discussion of the difference between repentance and regret. You repent the things you’ve done, and regret the chances you let get away. Then, as sometimes happens in a San Diego café—more often than you’d think—we were interrupted by a beautiful young woman selling roses.

  ORPHAN

  The lunch with Tom Ellis took place a couple of years ago. I don’t suppose he ever wrote the play; it was just a notion he was telling me about. It came to mind today because this afternoon I attended the memorial service of an artist friend of mine, a painter named Tony Fido, who once told me about a similar experience.

  Tony found a cellphone on the ground near his home in National City, just south of here. He told me about this the last time I saw him, a couple of months before he disappeared, or went out of communication. First he went out of communication, then he was deceased. But when he told me this story there was no hint of any of that.

  Tony noticed the cellphone lying under an oleander bush as he walked around his neighborhood. He picked it up and continued his stroll and before long felt it vibrating in his pocket. When he answered, he found himself talking to the wife of the owner—the owner’s widow, actually, who explained she’d been calling the number every thirty minutes or so since her husband’s death not twenty-four hours before.

  Her husband had been killed the previous afternoon in an accident at the intersection where Tony had found the cellphone. An old woman in a Cadillac had run him down. At the moment of impact, the device had been torn from his hand.

  The police said they hadn’t noticed any phone around the scene. It hadn’t been among the belongings she’d collected at the morgue. “I knew he lost it right there,” she told Tony, “because he was talking to me at the very second when it happened.”

  Tony offered to get in his car and deliver the phone to her personally, and she gave him her address in Lemon Grove nine miles distant. When he got there he discovered that the woman was only twenty-two and quite attractive, and that she and her husband had been going through a divorce.

  At this point in the telling, I thought I knew where his story was headed.

  “She came after me. I told her, ‘You’re either from Heaven or from Hell.’ It turned out she was from Hell.”

  Whenever he talked, Tony kept his hands moving—grabbing and rearranging small things on the tabletop—while his head rocked from side to side and back and forth. Sometimes he referred to a “force of rhythm” in his paintings. He often spoke of “motion” in the work.

  I didn’t know much about Tony’s background. I can say he was in his late forties but seemed younger. I’d met him at the Balboa Park museum, where he appeared at my shoulder while I looked at an Edward Hopper painting of a Cape Cod gas station. Tony offered his critique, which was lengthy, meticulous, and scathing—and which was focused on technique, only on technique—and spoke of his contempt for all painters, and finished by saying, “I wish Picasso was alive, I’d challenge him—he could do one of mine and I could do one of his.”

  “You’re a painter yourself.”

  “A better painter than this guy,” he said of Edward Hopper.

  “Well, whose work would you say is any good?”

  “The only painter I admire is God. He’s my biggest influence.”

  We began having coffee together two or three times a month, always, I have to admit, at Tony’s initiation. Usually I drove to his lively disheveled Hispanic neighborhood to see him, there in National City. I like primitive art, and I like folk tales, so I enjoyed visiting his rambling old home, where he lived surrounded by his paintings like an orpha
n king in a cluttered castle.

  The house had been in his family since 1939. For a while it was a boardinghouse—a dozen bedrooms, each with its own sink. “Damn place has a jinx or whammy: First Spiro—Spiro watched it till he died. Mom watched it till she died. My sister watched it till she died. Now I’ll be here till I die,” he said, hosting me shirtless, his hairy torso dabbed all over with paint, talking so fast I could rarely follow. He did seem deranged. But blessed, decidedly so, with a self-deprecating and self-orienting humor the genuinely mad seem to have misplaced. What to make of somebody like that? “Richards, in The Washington Post,” he once said, “compared me to Melville.” I have no idea who Richards was. Or who Spiro was.

  Tony never tired of his voluble explanations, his self-exegesis—the works almost coded, as if to fool or distract the unworthy. They weren’t the child-drawings of your usual schizophrenic outsider artist, but efforts a little more skillful, on the order of tattoo art, oil on canvases around four by six feet in size, crowded with images but highly organized, all on Biblical themes, mostly dire and apocalyptic, and all with the titles printed neatly right on them. One of his works, for instance—three panels depicting the end of the world and the advent of heaven—was called “MYSTERY BABYLON MOTHER OF HARLOTS REVELATION 17:1–7.”

  This period when I was seeing a bit of Tony Fido coincided with an era in the world of my unconscious, an era when I was troubled by the dreams I had at night. They were long and epic, detailed and violent and colorful. They exhausted me. I couldn’t account for them. The only medication I took was something to bring down my blood pressure, and it wasn’t new. I made sure I didn’t take food just before going to bed; I avoided sleeping on my back, steered clear of disturbing novels and TV shows. For a month, maybe six weeks, I dreaded sleep. Once I dreamed of Tony—I defended him against an angry mob, keeping the seething throng at bay with a butcher knife. Often I woke up short of breath, shaking, my heartbeat rattling my ribs, and I cured my nerves with a solitary walk, no matter the hour. And once—maybe the night I dreamed about Tony, I don’t remember—I had the kind of moment or visitation I treasure, when the flow of life twists and untwists, all in a blink—think of a taut ribbon flashing: I heard a young man’s voice in the parking lot of the Mormon church in the dark night telling someone, “I didn’t bark. That wasn’t me. I didn’t bark.”

  I never found out how things turned out between Tony and the freshly widowed twenty-two-year-old. I’m pretty sure it went no farther, and there was no second encounter, certainly no ongoing affair—because he more than once complained, “I can’t find a woman, none, I’m under some kind of a damn spell.” He believed in spells and whammies and such, in angels and mermaids, omens, sorcery, wind-borne voices, in messages and patterns. All through his house were scattered twigs and feathers possessing a mysterious significance, rocks that had spoken to him, stumps of driftwood whose faces he recognized. And in any direction, his canvases like windows opening onto lightning and smoke, ranks of crimson demons and flying angels, gravestones on fire, and scrolls, chalices, torches, swords.

  Last week a woman named Rebecca Stamos, somebody I’d never heard of, called me to say our mutual friend Tony Fido was no more. He’d killed himself. As she put it, “He took his life.”

  For two seconds the phrase meant nothing to me. “Took it,” I said…Then, “Oh, my goodness.”

  “Yes, I’m afraid he committed suicide.”

  “I don’t want to know how. Don’t tell me how.” Honestly, I can’t imagine why I said that.

  MEMORIAL

  A week ago Friday—nine days ago—the eccentric religious painter Tony Fido stopped his car on Interstate 8 about sixty miles east of San Diego, on a bridge above a deep, deep ravine, and climbed over the railing and stepped into the air. He mailed a letter beforehand to Rebecca Stamos, not to explain himself, but only to say goodbye and pass along the phone numbers of some friends.

  Sunday I attended Tony’s memorial service, for which Rebecca Stamos had reserved the band room of the middle school where she teaches. We sat in a circle with cups and saucers on our laps, in a tiny grove of music stands, and volunteered, one by one, our memories of Tony Fido. There were only five of us: Our hostess Rebecca, plain and stout, in a sleeveless blouse and a skirt that reached down to her white tennis shoes; myself in the raiment of my order, the blue blazer, khaki chinos, tasseled loafers; two middle-aged women of the sort to own a couple of small obnoxious dogs—they called Tony “Anthony”; a chubby young man in a green oversuit—some kind of mechanic—sweating. Tony’s neighbors? Family? None.

  Only the pair of ladies who’d arrived together actually knew each other. None of the rest of us had ever met before. These were friendships, or acquaintances, that Tony had kept one by one. He’d met us all the same way—he’d materialized beside us at an art museum, an outdoor market, a doctor’s waiting room, and he’d begun to talk. I was the only one of us even aware he devoted all his time to painting canvases. The others thought he owned some kind of business—plumbing or exterminating or looking after private swimming pools. One believed he came from Greece, others assumed Mexico, but I’m sure his family was Armenian, long established in San Diego County. Rather than memorializing him, we found ourselves asking, “Who the hell was this guy?”

  Rebecca had this much about him: While he was still in his teens, Tony’s mother had killed herself. “He mentioned her death more than once,” Rebecca said. “It was always on his mind.” To the rest of us this came as new information.

  Of course it troubled us to learn that his mother had taken her own life too. Had she jumped? Tony hadn’t told, and Rebecca hadn’t asked.

  With little to offer about Tony in the way of biography, I shared some remarks of his that had stuck in my thoughts. “I couldn’t get into ritzy art schools,” he told me once. “Best thing that ever happened to me. It’s dangerous to be taught art.” And he said, “On my twenty-sixth birthday, I quit signing my work. Anybody who can paint like that, have at it, and take the credit.” He got a kick out of showing me a passage in his hefty black Bible—first book of Samuel, chapter 6?—where the idolatry of the Philistines earns them a plague of hemorrhoids. “Don’t tell me God doesn’t have a sense of humor.”

  And another of his insights, one he shared with me several times: “We live in a catastrophic universe—not a universe of gradualism.”

  That one had always gone right past me. Now it sounded ominous, prophetic. Had I missed a message? A warning?

  The man in the green jumpsuit, the garage mechanic, reported that Tony had plunged from our nation’s highest concrete-beam bridge down into Pine Valley Creek, a flight of 440 feet. The span, completed in 1974 and named the Nello Irwin Greer Memorial Bridge, was the first in the United States to be built using, according to the mechanic, “the cast-in-place segmental balanced cantilever method.” I wrote it down on a memo pad. I can’t recall the mechanic’s name. His breast-tag said “Ted,” but he introduced himself as someone else.

  Anne and her friend, whose name also slipped past me—the pair of women—cornered me afterward. They seemed to think I should be the one to take final possession of a three-ring binder full of recipes that Tony had loaned them—the collected recipes of Tony’s mother. I determined I would give it to Elaine. She’s a wonderful cook, but not as a regular thing, because nobody likes to cook for two. Too much work and too many leftovers. I told them she’d be glad to get the book.

  The binder was too big for any of my pockets. I thought of asking for a bag, but I failed to ask. I didn’t know what to do with it but carry it home in my hands and deliver it to my wife.

  Elaine was sitting at the kitchen table, before her a cup of black coffee and half a sandwich on a plate.

  I set the notebook on the table next to her snack. She stared at it. “Oh,” she said, “from your painter.” She sat me down beside her and we went through the notebook page by page, side by side.

  Elaine: She’s petite, lithe, quit
e smart; short gray hair, no makeup. A good companion. At any moment—the very next second—she could be dead.

  I want to depict this book carefully, so imagine holding it in your hands, a three-ring binder of bright red plastic weighing about the same as a full dinner plate, and now setting it in front of you on the table. As you open it you find the pink title page, “Recipes. Caesarina Fido,” covering a two-inch thickness of white college-ruled three-hole paper, the first inch or so the usual, the casseroles and pies and salad dressings, every aspect of breakfast, lunch, and supper, all written with a blue ballpoint. Halfway through the collection, Tony’s mother introduces ink in many colors, mostly green, red, and purple, but also pink, and a yellow somewhat hard to make out; and as these colors come along her penmanship enters a kind of havoc, the letters swell and shrink, several pages big and loopy, leaning to the right, and then for the next many pages leaning to the left, then back the other way; and here, where these wars and changes begin, and for better than a hundred pages, all the way to the last page, the recipes are only for cocktails. Every kind of cocktail.

  Earlier that afternoon, as Anne handed the binder over to me at Tony’s memorial, she made a curious remark. “Anthony spoke very highly of you. He said you were his best friend.” I thought it was a joke, but Anne meant this seriously.

  Tony’s best friend? I was confused. I’m still confused. I hardly knew him.

  CASANOVA

  When I returned to New York City to pick up my prize at The American Advertisers Awards, I’m not sure I expected to enjoy myself. But on the second day, killing time before the ceremony, walking north through midtown in my dark ceremonial suit and trench coat, skirting the park, strolling south again, feeling the pulse and listening to the traffic noise rising among high buildings, I had a homecoming. The day was sunny, fine for walking, brisk, and getting brisker—and in fact, as I cut a diagonal through a little plaza somewhere above Fortieth Street, the last autumn leaves leapt up from the pavement and swirled around our heads, and a sudden misty quality in the atmosphere above seemed to solidify into a ceiling both dark and luminous, and the passersby hunched into their collars, and two minutes later the gusts had settled into a wind, not hard, but steady and cold, and my hands dove into my coat pockets. A bit of rain speckled the pavement. Random snowflakes spiraled in the air. All around me, people seemed to be evacuating the scene, while across the square a vendor shouted that he was closing his cart and you could have his wares for practically nothing, and for no reason I could have named I bought two of his rat-dogs with everything and a cup of doubtful coffee and then learned the reason—they were wonderful. I nearly ate the napkin. New York!