Don't I Know You? Page 11

Again with the all-black wardrobe, the almost mousy hair, the basilisk gaze. A face that teetered provocatively on the fulcrum between youth and age. The Band-Aid was still visible on one heel.

  I lingered in the lobby, brandishing my presence, then went out into the sunlight and headed along the boardwalk of the Croisette, walking slowly. The sunbathers were out in force and the noon light dazzled on the sea. I stopped beside the golden Cannes carousel, where the ticket seller was a Jayne Mansfield lookalike, except that her one arm had been amputated below the elbow. The arm was neatly rounded at the end like a sausage. She could still swing a smart handbag from it though. I watched the carousel turn, empty except for two teenage girls. I could feel Charlotte close behind me. We were tethered.

  That night Eric’s screening seemed to go over well, but it’s impossible to judge reactions at Cannes, where the audiences are either jaded or overly partisan. Rob Lowe was fantastic as the slick American colonizer, and people leaped up to clap at the end. That might have been as much for Aipalovik as anything else—he was irresistible on-screen. Eric sat rigidly beside me. His nerves made it impossible for me to fall under the spell of the story, but the images of the polar seas and pewter skies were still ravishing. The more the world behaves like a blockbuster action movie, the more I long for silence and space on the screen. Watching the film also told me something new about Eric, his passion for this subtle landscape. It’s always a surprising act of intimacy to see things through his eyes.

  Afterward Eric’s distributor hosted a reception in the Cannes apartment he rents during the festival. The Canadians all came out to support Eric and Aipalovik, some young French filmmakers crashed the party, a few critics floated by scarfing up the appetizers, and at midnight everyone went out onto the balcony to wait for the fireworks to begin. The nightly display is always artful and protracted, like dinner in a Cannes restaurant.

  When I went back in to fetch Eric there she was, talking to him. She must have slipped into the screening unnoticed. But why would she want to see a little Canadian film about the high Arctic?

  This time her black dress exposed the tops of her shoulders and had a single row of jet beads. A DJ was playing loud disco, so she was bending in close to listen to him. Her hand rested on his upper arm. I stood back and watched Eric, who was flushed, animated, eager to please. I should have gone up to them but a curious passivity overcame me. Finally they gave each other European double-cheek kisses and they parted.

  I crossed the room to my husband.

  “Wasn’t that Charlotte Rampling?”

  “Yes,” he said, still rosy-faced. “And she loved the film! She adored it. She called it a master class in stillness.”

  “Well, it’s certainly a far cry from The Night Porter.”

  “She said she’d love to work with me sometime. Her agent’s going to send me a screenplay she’s been working on, with the guy who wrote the biopic about Rodin’s mistress, what’s her name…”

  “Camille Claudel.”

  “They’ve got their investors all lined up, and now they’re looking for a director. Someone under the radar, she said. Can you believe it? Charlotte Rampling!” His face shone like a child’s.

  My reaction was intensely physical. The blood roared into my head until the music seemed to come from some room far away. I drained my glass.

  “I’m sorry, but working with her is out of the question,” I heard myself say in a firm unspousal voice. Outside, the fireworks had begun, pillowy explosions.

  “What are you talking about?” Eric said, taking the glass out of my hand as a waiter swam by with a fresh bottle. “Why not?”

  “It’s just—I’ve been watching her operate. She’s trouble, Eric. You’ve never been good with trouble.”

  “Really? I ran into the director of that chimpanzee movie she was in, and he had nothing but good things to say.”

  He looked at me then with an expression of confusion and concern but my words were already there between us, irredeemable. Aipo will back me up, I thought. Aipo gets it.

  Then our host came over with an American producer who wanted to congratulate Eric. I left them and joined the others on the balcony. Charlotte stood at the rail with her young man, watching the lights burst against the blackness of the sky, outshining the stars. Pink, silver, blue, then blinding flashbulb bursts of white, with gunshot sounds. A paparazzi dazzle. The display seemed to go on forever, then escalated into a final thunderous salvo as the people around me exclaimed and applauded. It really was a spectacular show.

  I clapped too. But inside my head it was absolutely quiet and still, like her.

  Jimi and Agnes

  “My son came across this online,” Rose said to her editor at the Star. “It’s amazing how some people spend their time.” She showed Ellen a video of three men sitting around a Ouija board in London, England. They were trying to have a conversation with Jimi Hendrix but the spirit world wasn’t cooperating. “Maybe that means he’s still alive,” one of them joked. The marker immediately scooted over to YES. “So where is he living now?” they asked. The heart-shaped marker, gliding on its three felt-tipped legs, searchingly spelled out the word T-A-O-S. Taos, New Mexico.

  “Now, take a look at this.”

  Rose opened up a fansite called Where’s Jimi???? featuring many photographs of black men with Afros who bore little resemblance to the legendary guitarist. But one picture stood out. It was a snapshot of a thin, dark-skinned figure with a corona of gray hair getting into the passenger seat of a car driven by a mannish-looking old woman. In the parking lot of a Winn-Dixie near Albuquerque.

  “What are you suggesting,” said Ellen, who had a weakness for some of Rose’s crazier story ideas, “that you jump on a plane to New Mexico and try to track down Jimi Hendrix?” Both of them were thinking about the story Rose had written about the academic who had “proven” that the lost city of Atlantis once flourished off the coast of a small Bahamian island. Unsurprisingly this turned out not to be the case, but Rose’s story became the second-most-popular feature in the paper that year.

  People no longer read the news in search of what’s true, Rose concluded. They’d rather have an opportunity to believe in something.

  Ellen was studying a budget sheet on her laptop. “If you come up with a Plan B for another story when this one turns out to be a hoax, and how can it not be, I’ll talk to Ken about it. He’s a huge Hendrix fan, as you know.”

  Ken was the newspaper’s publisher, and Ellen’s ex-husband. They had a bantering Bogart-and-Bacall relationship that Rose liked to be around. Ken also took pleasure in assigning stories to Rose that she had absolutely no interest in or knowledge about, like Brazilian soccer scandals. But sometimes she would come back with fresh perspectives on these mysterious subjects. He would read her copy, chuckle, and say things like, “How can you not know that about the world?”

  Rose felt lucky to have landed somewhere with friendly editors who indulged her ideas and still cared about commas. But it wouldn’t last. A job in print journalism was soon going to be like working as a blacksmith, or a calligrapher. Sixty people had been laid off at the paper only the month before. Finding Jimi Hendrix alive could save her neck.

  What she hadn’t mentioned to Ellen or Ken was her hunch about the identity of the old woman driving the car. Very few people could have recognized her, but Rose was sure she did—it was the distinctive profile of the minimalist painter Agnes Martin. Born in Saskatchewan, now in her late eighties, Martin had spent much of her life in seclusion, living in the New Mexican desert, although her work continued to attract international attention.

  Ever since Rose had seen an exhibit of Martin’s work in the Whitney she had developed a peculiar attachment to her paintings, which are nearly all the same: pale luminous canvases, like windows, empty of narrative and covered in a faint grid of pencil lines. They have a powerful, wordless presence and are almost impossible to reproduce.

  The polar opposite of journalism.

 
* * *

  The house was a plain white adobe affair out in the desert with a rodent’s skull for a doorknocker. Rose lifted the little head and let it fall several times. When Agnes Martin had refused to answer her emails, she decided to just fly there and show up. A gallery in Taos had given her directions. If worse came to worst, Rose thought, she could always write a piece about the “energy healing fields” near Sedona, Arizona. Someone had recently died there in a peyote ceremony.

  It was dusk, abruptly cool. In the distance, lavender light still pulsed above the mountaintops. The door opened and an “oh” escaped Rose. She had expected someone taller than the man who stood there, ash-haired, slightly stooped, wearing an emerald-green brocade jacket over the frill of a white shirt. His long fingers were covered in silver and turquoise rings, and a bone cuff circled one wrist. It was Jimi Hendrix.

  He showed no surprise at this unexpected visitor, said nothing whatsoever, and led Rose through a velvet curtain into a room where Agnes Martin sat with her legs planted at the end of a long wooden table. Large and squarish, she wore black robes with men’s oxfords. Her thinning silver hair was gathered in a little bundle of braids at the back of her neck. She looked like some strange Shakespearean king.

  “I didn’t say yes,” Agnes said coldly, referring to Rose’s letters. “I didn’t say anything at all.”

  “I know. I decided to take a chance and come anyway. Sooner or later the story about the two of you is going to get out there, after the Winn-Dixie photo. Better my paper than the British tabs, perhaps.”

  Agnes and Jimi exchanged a sorrowful look.

  The two of them had just finished a meal and were drinking mescal from thumb-sized clay cups as the last smudge of mauve faded in the sky. One wall of the room was entirely glass. Jimi lit a line of votive candles at the bottom of it and poured some mescal for Rose. They were sorry to see her, they explained, but since she was here, she could sleep in the paint shed and they would talk in the morning. The cot was made up, and there was a chamber pot underneath.

  Then they both stood.

  “Good night, Ms. McEwan,” Agnes said. “We get up at six a.m.”

  * * *

  The altitude gave her dreams, mostly anxious scenes involving airport lineups and slamming taxi doors. She dreamed that she and Eric were still together, going somewhere in a car, and between them on the seat was the rodent-skull door knocker. Rose was flipping through the CD wallet as Eric drove and the road unspooled ahead. She played some old Bob Marley and things felt all right between them. Then a rooster crowed, a real rooster. She woke up shivering with one sheet wrapped around her in a room full of paint tins, dog food, and garden tools.

  She took a jacket out of her suitcase, and in the pocket was the letter from Eric, still unopened. Her address on the front in gold print. Probably the invitation; her stepson and daughter had already received theirs.

  When the sky began to lighten she got up and went outside. A white El Dorado she hadn’t noticed the night before was parked in the yard, like a big grazing animal. A dog asleep on a nest of blankets whumped its tail but did not stir. She looked at the horizon, an undulating line of soft mountains, like ground-down molars—nothing like the straight lines of Martin’s paintings. Rose felt her gaze moving out and out, a neglected muscle stretching.

  At the end of the yard was another adobe structure, with a skylight. She peered through the windows. There on scaffoldings and easels were Martin’s paintings. With a trespasser’s glance toward the house, Rose pushed the door open and stepped inside. There was something erotic about entering rooms like these, where private people did their work.

  A large canvas stood on a table against one wall. A third of it was covered with faint horizontal pencil lines under a wash of yellow. These paintings about nothing, Rose realized, apparently made of nothing, still had to cross the line between half-imagined and finished. Despite its emptiness the canvas still gave the impression of being cluttered.

  Rose went over to a stack of paintings in the corner and flipped through them like record albums in a rack. Gray, gray, blue, cream. Fields of color, they revealed little. Perhaps she was too close to them, too greedy for their meaning. It was like peering into the folds of a brain to find the location of a particular memory.

  “That is old work,” said Agnes, blotting out the light at the door. “I use the canvas backs for sketching.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t want to disturb you.”

  “Well, there are no secrets here anyway. It is all simply looking and doing, and looking again.”

  “This one—can you tell me about it?” Rose flipped to the half-finished canvas.

  “There is nothing to tell,” Agnes said, waving the question away. She was wearing a man’s blue denim shirt and a long Mexican-looking skirt with embroidery along the hem.

  “But I don’t associate you with yellow.”

  Agnes went over to the splayed canvases and shut them like a book.

  “I often begin with yellow. That is a secret, I suppose.”

  “Do you paint directly from the landscape, or do you use photographs?”

  “Jimi and I may drive up into the hills and I will either paint or sketch. I sometimes draw the mountains, work on the rest, then take away the mountains altogether. Only light interests me in the end.”

  Behind the door was a small canvas distinct from the others, painted in thick strokes of black, purple, and white. It seemed to represent two swirling figures. Rose went over to it and held it up.

  “That one is Jimi’s,” Agnes said.

  “Of the two of you?”

  “Yes. I’m fond of it. James could paint, if he chose to.”

  “Well, he’s quite accomplished as it is.”

  “Yes. I wish he thought so.”

  “He doesn’t?”

  “No. All that media nonsense overtook him near the end and he tends to dwell on that.” A rooster crowed again from the yard.

  “But he likes to cook,” she said, walking out of the studio, “and breakfast must be ready.” Rose followed her. The dog came up and sniffed Martin’s skirt. It was seven a.m. and already hot.

  * * *

  After breakfast the three of them took the El Dorado into town for supplies—eggs, bread, mineral spirits, more mescal and wine, and many small hot peppers. The shopkeepers greeted Jimi by name and gave Rose a warning look that said Yes, he’s safe with us. Then they drove up into the hills, left the main road, and turned onto a trail of two hard-baked ruts. “We’re going to do some work,” they said.

  The sky there seemed to behave like a lens that overfocused everything; Rose found the effect almost hallucinatory. She sat in the back (like a dog, she felt, although not unhappily) and said nothing. Jimi drove. Agnes was beside him, wearing a fisherman’s canvas hat. Jimi played a CD—“Caldonia” by Louis Armstrong. He sang along with it, his frayed, slouchy voice full of space like Armstrong’s.

  Caldonia—Caldonia—why won’t you be mine …

  Utterly absorbed, Agnes looked out her window at—what? Rose saw only empty sky and featureless desert. Her eyes wanted to close.

  They came to a stony, gently ascending riverbed and turned into it.

  “Our cobbled road,” Agnes said with a rare smile.

  The riverbed took them up to a flat, high pinnacle of land—a mesa—where they stopped. Silence, and suffocating heat. Agnes looked pleased and put her hand on Jimi’s arm. Rose got out of the car and stood looking at the 360-degree view. It made her dizzy, as if the horizon far away were the lip of a great waterfall. The light was merciless, the heat pressed upon them, and Rose felt a stirring of panic. There was nowhere to shelter here, only this old car and this strange couple. For a moment she wondered if she were still asleep on the plane and dreaming. Sometimes being a reporter felt like being a criminal on the lam.

  “If you look carefully you can see the ranch,” Agnes said, pointing. Rose squinted and saw nothing.

  “Ah yes,” she said.


  “Did you bring the hard-boiled eggs, James?” Agnes said. “I’m hungry.”

  Agnes erected a folding easel and put a small canvas on it. She snapped open an old-fashioned doctor’s satchel and began to take out pencils, brushes, and crumpled tubes of paint. Jimi came back from the car with a cloth-covered basket and a saltshaker.

  “Have you ever seen anything like the color of that yolk?” Agnes said, holding out the shelled egg she had just bitten into. “But nothing I could work with.”

  Rose wandered about, feeling disoriented. She put one of Agnes’s clean paint rags under her hat to protect her neck from the sun. She was used to being rooted in her mind, on the screen and in her sentences. This was too much.

  “Play for us, Jimi,” Agnes commanded. He had taken out his guitar, a nail-polish-red Gibson Les Paul. Unamplified, the guitar sounded loose and tinny, like music coming from another room. He sang “Little Red House” in a smoky absentminded way, humming through some of the lyrics as Agnes stood at her easel with a pencil, her head moving from horizon to canvas and back again.

  As she sat on top of the cooler listening to Jimi Hendrix sing, Rose felt she really should be making notes. This story would be big. She took out a notebook and uncapped her pen. “V. hot,” she wrote. “Little Red House.” Then she closed the notebook and lay down on the ground, draping the cloth from the egg basket over her face. She listened.

  Jimi’s voice, pitched a bit lower than in the old days, was so all of him, all at once, in every note. Like the bluest of blue on a canvas. Like a true pencil line. Rose lay there remembering the first time, long ago, she had heard that backward-sounding song “Manic Depression.” She was in the bed of a man she hardly knew. Kevin? Kevin something. He was drunk and playing all his Janis Joplin and Hendrix records for her, letting the needle fall too hard. Then they had sex and fell asleep. A not so unusual night in those days. But the off-kilter surge of “Manic Depression,” its churning plea, and the nakedness of Jimi’s voice had made Rose get up out of Kevin’s bed (carefully, so as not to wake him) and walk back home alone.