A Book of American Martyrs(159)

“Please sit, ‘Naomi Voorhees’! Wherever you wish. Just push those books aside.” Kinch’s tone was both mocking and tender.

They were slender books of poetry with stiff, slightly warped hardbound covers that gave off an odor of mold. Not in a language Naomi recognized.

She sat. The sofa was of well-worn leather though seemingly of high quality like other furnishings in the room. How strange it was in this airless place! Very little light was allowed here. All was dim as if undersea. The very reverse of Madelena’s high-rise apartment with floor-to-ceiling windows rarely shaded from the sun. Madelena had said that Kinch’s eyes were sensitive to light. He could not watch television, he could not go outdoors—during the day the sun’s rays were too bright, even if the sky was overcast; at night, streetlights and neon lighting gave him migraine headaches. He could not work with the shimmering screen of a computer that affected his sensitive brain but had to write by hand, or type manuscripts on an old-fashioned manual typewriter, though such typing required muscular coordination of a kind he could no longer depend upon. So Madelena had reported, with a curious sort of detachment.

Naomi felt something beneath her foot on the carpet—a cigarette butt? She was noticing ashtrays on tables, with a look of having been hastily cleaned with a paper towel; and on each table, a book of matches formally displayed.

Madelena didn’t smoke, of course; she would never have allowed anyone to smoke in her apartment. Most of her friends whom Naomi had met did not smoke nor was smoking allowed in any restaurant in the city. How bizarre, that the invalid Kinch should smoke . . .

“Naomi, don’t worry! No one will force you to smoke in this den of iniquity.”

With a wheezing sound Kinch laughed as if he’d said something very witty, intended to annoy his dignified silver-haired visitor.

“I realize it isn’t very ‘fresh’ in here—I can’t open any window, unfortunately. The noise—the drafty cold—would annihilate me. And I have to keep the damn drapes closed most of the time. In my quarantine life it’s always a kind of pre-dusk—as in a painting of Hopper—that wan, fading light, the mannequin-people who seem scarcely to be breathing, the melancholy clumsiness of the world from which there is no escape since that is the world.”

Kinch spoke eloquently, sadly. Yet his sensuous, damp-looking lips quivered as if he were about to burst into an irreverent smile.

To spare Naomi the awkwardness of a reply Madelena deftly intervened. “Hopper is ‘clumsy’—set beside painters like Whistler and Homer who can replicate the world so precisely. Yet when you’re looking at Hopper’s paintings you are utterly persuaded, you don’t feel that ‘clumsiness’ at all.”

Kinch made a derisive snorting sound. “You may not, Professor Kein. More discerning others do.”

With a vague naive hope of aligning herself with her grandmother who was looking vexed, and making some statement of her own, for surely it was time for her to speak, Naomi remarked that Madelena had taken her to the Whitney Museum the other day where they’d seen paintings by Hopper she had never seen before in reproductions and these she’d thought very “beautiful,” “haunting” . . .

“Of course you did, Naomi. ‘Beautiful’—‘haunting.’”

Was Kinch speaking ironically? Was he laughing at her? Yet he seemed kindly, and not at all malicious.

Dour-faced Sonia approached asking if their guests would like something to drink? Tea, sparkling water, wine . . . With some fuss she set down a tray containing several cheeses, a scattering of pale crackers, shriveled-looking olives.

Tea for Madelena, sparkling water for Naomi. “Nothing for me just now”—Kinch said primly.

“Ah, before I forget—here. Your favorites.”

Madelena handed the little bag of mangoes to Kinch who accepted it with a childish sort of delight, all but smacking his lips.

“Take these away, Sonia, will you?—and prepare a little dish for us.”

Dour-faced Sonia took away the mangoes without a word.

Madelena inquired after a new medication Kinch had begun taking, and what progress he was making on a composition commissioned by the Juilliard String Quartet; Kinch inquired after “your old Laslov.”

A gruff sort of intimacy existed between the two. Each appeared to be just slightly critical of the other, or bemused; yet affectionate, even proud. Especially, Madelena glanced at Naomi to see how she was taking Kinch’s provocative manner, that was always on the edge of rudeness. Madelena was the more gracious of the two, speaking of “we”—“Naomi and me”—who’d been seeing such interesting exhibits in the city, and such an excellent performance of Les Contes d’Hoffmann.

“Really! The review in the Times wasn’t so enthusiastic, I think.”

“I thought it was very enthusiastic.”

“Not if you know how to decode that critic’s ‘enthusiasm.’ If you read between the lines . . .”

“The Picasso exhibit is really quite extraordinary . . .”

“No. Not possible. Nothing in Picasso is extraordinary any longer. An artist with just two modes—naive-primitive, and prurient. Both are outworn in the twenty-first century.”

As they spoke together in their quasi-flirtatious banter Naomi glanced about the room. She was becoming accustomed to the acrid smell, and her eyes were adjusting to the diminished light. Through a doorway she saw, in an adjoining room, that had formerly been a dining room she supposed, an article of furniture that must have been a mobile desk, with sliding parts; on the desk-top were an old-fashioned manual typewriter, neatly stacked sheets of paper, journals, books. The desk was somewhat lower to the floor than an ordinary desk, ideal for one in a wheelchair. Against a wall was a “baby grand” piano outfitted with crane-necked lights.