Monterey Bay(7)

The phone rang. She looked at the empty beer crate and then at her sketch on the wall.

“Another drink for courage,” he insisted.

She waited until the phone stopped ringing. Then she drank. To confess herself was not a possibility. Too pathetic. Too risky. Furthermore, there was no chance a man like this would understand the stakes, which was why, when she started talking, she knew the liquor had already done its work: summoning the words, doling them out with an almost magnanimous ease. She described their arrival in the Philippines, their occupation of a condemned colonial manor on Manila’s outskirts. She outlined their newest and most ambitious project to date: the acquisition of nearly a thousand acres of mango orchards and their subsequent transformation into tobacco fields. She had been doing this sort of work, she assured the biologist, almost since birth. She knew exactly how to assist her father in his industrial transformations, which meant everything went precisely as it should have until the night he fell ill. At first, it didn’t seem like much: just a moderate fever, an aching in the joints, chills that made his limbs tremble but not shake. By morning, however, his skin was blazing and his eyes were dull, his arms and legs thrashing, his mouth spouting foamy green bile, his slender torso coiled desperately around the expulsions.

Later that night, he slipped into a coma. The next day, she took the helm. It wasn’t something she had attempted before: this total assumption of responsibility, this mimicry of experience and knowledge. But she had been raised to believe she was not only capable of such things but destined for them, and in this moment of decision, belief seemed tantamount to proof. She paced the mango orchards with the tobacco farmers and considered their advice on fertilizing with wood ash versus powdered horse manure. She debated with the local politicians as to which nearby village should be used to obtain the children who would lay the screens of protective cheesecloth across the delicate seedlings. She traveled to the city by mule-drawn cart and answered the banker’s questions with a succinct, merciless professionalism. For the next three months, she triumphed. The venture proceeded exactly as planned; success floated before her eyes like an opalescent sphere, a bubble that contained both the promise of the future and the substance of past. But then the bubble burst. Without warning or reason, the farmers began to mislead her. The children returned to their villages and wouldn’t be coaxed back to the fields. The banker claimed she needed to refile forms she had already filed twice. No matter how hard she worked, she couldn’t stem the tide. Each day seemed to drag her further down failure’s depressive, unpaved spiral, until it was clear to her and everyone else that she couldn’t manage it on her own.

On the day she finally gave up, she didn’t tell her father. He had regained consciousness a week earlier, but he was still delirious with fever, and her shame was too great. So instead of confessing herself or trying to put things right, she roamed the manor that for the past several months they had called home. Since their arrival, she hadn’t had either the time or the inclination to explore it fully. Now she made a point of examining every room. In most ways, she was unmoved. It was just like all the other residences her father tended to favor: intact enough to ensure basic human comforts, yet squalid enough to invoke a sort of ethical high ground. The rooms were large and humid, all of them frilled with elaborately carved teak and ravaged by the twin stresses of abandonment and equatorial proximity. The only thing that seemed unusual was the almost biblical sense of loss, one that went above and beyond human haunting. She didn’t know why this was the case until she noticed the large, pale stamps on the walls where paintings had once hung, which led her, on instinct, to the root cellar. And there, stacked in the blue darkness among the piles of yucca and taro and sweet potatoes, she found the stash: hundreds of framed forgeries of well-known masterpieces. The sight was unexpectedly compelling, so she began to dig through the canvases. She didn’t know what she was looking for. All she knew was that, as she searched and studied, she could forget her recent failure, she could forget her father moaning and perspiring upstairs, she could forget there were things in life that evaded direct translation. She worked quickly. With the help of some books in the mansion’s library, she decided which artists were the most skilled and upsetting. She learned whom to emulate and whom to dismiss. When she had narrowed it down to a solid two dozen, she bought a sketchbook and charcoal pencil and a small leather satchel from a woman at the local market and allowed herself only an hour of immersion per day, two if she felt decadent, but it was among the most efficient and satisfactory learning she had ever done. She made copies of the copies, and then, when copying no longer seemed productive, she began to choose her own subject matter, her fingers clenched hard around the pencil as she made meticulous record of things she had witnessed both in the countryside and on the Manila streets. She tried out different styles, different methods of expression and organization: Fra Angelico, Holbein the Younger, Holbein the Elder, Rivera, Modigliani, Memling. The root cellar deepened itself: darker, wetter, colder, a realm of lawlessness and foreign language, much like being fathoms underwater. And it was in this way that a full six months passed, the Philippines taking on the characteristics of a place she loved, not because it felt comfortable, not because it felt safe, but because it showed the clearest and most direct route to what she had begun to believe was her destiny: a life of solitude, a life of work—hers, not her father’s—rising up around her like walls.