* * *
Lake spent the next day trying to forget his nightmare.
To rid himself of its cloying atmosphere, he left his apartment—but not before receiving a stern lecture from Dame Truff on how loud noises after midnight showed no consideration for other tenants, while behind her a few neighbors, who had not come to his aid but obviously had heard his screams, gave him curious stares.
Then, punishment over, he made his way through the crowded streets to the Gallery of Hidden Fascinations, portfolio under one arm. The portfolio contained two new paintings, both of his father’s hands, as he remembered them, open wide like wings as a cornucopia of insects—velvet ants, cicadas, moths, butterflies, walking sticks, praying mantises—crawled over them. It was a study he had been working on for years. His father had beautifully ruined hands, bitten and stung countless times, but as polished, as smooth, as white marble.
The gallery owner, Janice Shriek, greeted him at the door; she was a severe, hunched woman with calculating, cold blue eyes. This morning she had thrown on foppishly male trousers, and a jacket over a white shirt, the sleeves of which ended in cuffs that looked as if they had been made from doilies. Shriek rose up on tiptoe to plant a ceremonial kiss on his cheek while explaining that the short, portly gentleman currently casting his round shadow over the far end of the gallery had expressed interest in one of Lake’s pieces, how fortunate that he had stopped by, and that while she continued to enflame that interest—she actually said “enflamed,” much to Lake’s amazement; was he to be some artistic gigolo now?—Lake should set down his portfolio and, after a decent interval, walk over and introduce himself, that was a dear—and back she scamper-lurched to the potential customer, leaving Lake rather breathless on her behalf. No one could ever say Janice Shriek lacked energy.
Lake placed his portfolio on a nearby table, the art of his countless rivals glaring down at him from the walls. The only good art (besides Lake’s, of course) was a miniature entitled “Amber in the City” by Shriek’s great find, Roger Mandible, who, unbeknownst to Shriek, had created his subtle amber shades from the earwax of a well-known diva who had had the misfortune to fall asleep at a café table where Mandible was mixing his paints. It made Lake snicker every time he saw it.
After a moment, Lake walked over to Shriek and the gentleman and engaged in the kind of obsequious small talk that nauseated him.
“Yes, I’m the artist.”
“Maxwell Bibble. A pleasure to meet you.”
“Likewise … Bibble. It is exceedingly rare to meet a true lover of art.”
Bibble stank of beets. Lake could not get over it. Bibble stank of beets. He had difficulty not saying Bibble imbibes bottled beets beautifully …
“Well, you do … you do so well with, er, colors,” Bibble said.
“How discerning you are. Did you hear what he said, Janice,” Lake said.
Shriek nodded nervously, said, “Mr. Bibble’s a businessman, but he has always wanted to be a—” Beet? thought Lake; but no: “… a critic of the arts,” Shriek finished.
“Yes, marvelous colors,” Bibble said, this time with more confidence.
“It is nothing. The true artiste can bend even the most stubborn light to his will,” Lake said.
“I imagine so. I thought this piece might look good in the kitchen, next to the wife’s needlepoint.”
“‘In the kitchen, next to the wife’s needlepoint,’” Lake echoed blankly, and then put on a frozen smile.
“But I’m wondering if maybe it is too big…”
“It’s smaller than it looks,” Shriek offered, somewhat pathetically, Lake thought.
“Perhaps I could have it altered, cut down to size,” Lake said, glaring at Shriek.
Bibble nodded, putting a hand to his chin in rapt contemplation of the possibilities.
“Or maybe I should just saw it in fourths and you can take the fourth you like best,” Lake said. “Or maybe eighths would be more to your liking?”
Bibble stared blankly at him for a moment, before Shriek stepped in with, “Artists! Always joking! You know, I really don’t think it will be too large. You could always buy it and if it doesn’t fit, return it—not that I could refund your money, but you could pick something else.”
Enough! Lake thought, and disengaged himself from the conversation. Leaving Shriek to ramble on convincingly about the cunning strength of his brushstrokes, a slick blather of nonsense that Lake despised and admired all at once. He could not complain that Shriek neglected to promote him—she was the only one who would take his work—but he hated the way she appropriated his art, speaking at times almost as if she herself had created it. A failed painter and a budding art historian, Shriek had started the gallery through the largesse of her famous brother, the historian Duncan Shriek, who had also procured for her many of her first and best clients. Lake felt that her drive to push, push, push was linked to a certain guilt at not having had to start at the bottom like everyone else.
Eventually, as Lake gave a thin-lipped smile, Bibble, still reeking of beets, announced that he couldn’t possibly commit at the moment, but would come back later. Definitely, he would be back—and what a pleasure to meet the artist.
To which Lake said, and was sorry even as the words left his mouth, “It is a pleasure to be the artist.”
A nervous laugh from Shriek. An unpleasant laugh from the almost-buyer, whose hand Lake tried his best to crush as they shook goodbye.
After Bibble had left, Shriek turned to him and said, “That was wonderful!”
“What was wonderful?”
Shriek’s eyes became colder than usual. “That smug, arrogant, better-than-thou artist’s demeanor. They like that, you know—it makes them feel they’ve bought the work of a budding genius.”
“Well haven’t they?” Lake said. Was she being sarcastic? He’d pretend otherwise.
Shriek patted him on the back. “Whatever it is, keep it up. Now, let’s take a look at the new paintings.”
Lake bit his lip to stop himself from committing career suicide, walked over to the table, and retrieved the two canvases. He spread them out with an awkward flourish.
Shriek stared at them, a quizzical look on her face.
“Well?” Lake finally said, Raffe’s words from the night before buzzing in his ears. “Do you like them?”
“Hmm?” Shriek said, looking up from the paintings as if her thoughts had been far away.
Lake experienced a truth viscerally in that moment which he had only ever realized intellectually before: he was the least of Shriek’s many prospects, and he was boring her.
Nonetheless, he pressed on, braced for further humiliation: “Do you like them?”
“Oh! The paintings?”
“No—the…” The earwax on your walls? he thought. The beets? “Yes, the paintings.”
Shriek’s brows furrowed and she put a hand to her chin in unconscious mimicry of the departed Bibble. “They’re very … interesting.”
Interesting.
“They’re of my father’s hands,” Lake said, aware that he was about to launch into a confession both unseemly and useless, as if he could help make the paintings more appealing to her by saying this happened, this is a person I know, it is real therefore it is good. But he had no choice—he plunged forward: “He is a startlingly nonverbal man, my father, as most insect catchers are, but there was one way he felt comfortable communicating with me, Janice—by coming home with his hands closed—and when he’d open them, there would be some living jewel, some rare wonder of the insect world—sparkling black, red, or green—and his eyes would sparkle too. He’d name them all for me in his soft, stumbling voice—lovingly so; how they were all so very different from one another, how although he killed them and we often ate them in hard times, how it must be with respect and out of knowledge.” Lake looked at the floor. “He wanted me to be an insect catcher too, but I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. I had to become an artist.” He remembered the way the joy had shriveled up inside his father when he realized his son would not be following in his footsteps. It had hurt Lake to see his father so alone, trapped by his reticence and his solitary profession, but he knew it hurt his father more. He missed his father; it was an ache in his chest.