at the paddock. By now the pair of you were softly drunk, taking it in turns to feed vegetables to the donkey you had recently rescued from one of the farms, where his age deemed him ready to be made into animal feed or glue. The wonder of this as yet unnamed pet illuminated your face. Ben’s too. You were as timid as children as you patted him and stroked his face. Other men, similarly inebriated, would have taken it in turns to ride him or some other juvenile cruelty. But you were both cowed by its docile nature and the depth of feeling that seemed to emanate from its lowered eyes. The beast, still wary but sated, moved his head away from the carrots, radishes and celery after a time, preferring instead to nuzzle your fingers. As you turned with delight to share this with Ben, the light hit the side of your face and your neck. You were bronzed and smooth, flaxen and happy; it was as if the last days of young manhood were making themselves known. I was blinded by the beauty of it, from the way you smiled to the trail of mosquito bites on your lower arm and the redness of your lips from all the beer. Ben was boyishly loud in his exclamations, vital and alive. I wanted to shout at you both to hold your pose because something from that moment needed to be kept. You were perfect. But I held my voice, because to explain it would be to kill your naturalness. You did not need to be made aware of how the sun had blessed that seemingly random moment and made it golden. Maybe you were both aware that something special had occurred, that had nothing to do with light or Art, but only with friendship. My visions of your impending age were not to be shared; wishing for crow’s feet to form and a coarseness in your hair’s texture to emerge so that I would have more to work with; that in my impatience for your youth to fade I was willing your decay. It was left to Vishni, whose voice carried overhead, calling us to the table while berating the boys for feeding the vermin what had been set aside for the salad.
THOUGH BEN AND I spoke regularly, we had not seen each other for over three years. I was not ready to hold another show and he had other artists to attend. The Thanksgiving parties we held at the house were a thing of the past, and neither you nor I were particularly keen to spend the summer roasting in his clapboard house in Provincetown. Your remark after one of Ben’s many invitations arrived (Independence Day gathering, Memorial Day gathering; an endless list) never left me.
– Beach parties hold nothing for you. Me neither. I can’t see you wearing funny hats and sipping on Rob Roys with sand up your ass. The fire will be the only thing that keeps you there; how it moves and what it shares.
You could be overly protective then, taking pains to avoid those social events where I might be expected to sing for my supper. Ben’s entertaining never quite fell into that category, but his address book was a varied one and even in the most informal setting, an expectation to perform could still be felt. Your smart-aleck comment perfectly described my feelings toward seasonal laziness, though something in what you said only rang half-true. You were born and raised on the banks of the Hudson. When you felt suffocated and near violence, from arguing parents and the high, airless rooms of your cramped apartment, you jumped the subway to the Ellis Island ferry, where you looked out at the Atlantic. Being close to expanses of water, ocean waves rolling and crashing far beyond the horizon, rebalanced your shaken equilibrium and helped to make sense of your half-formed world. But you rarely spoke of it. They were stories that occasionally came out while I was painting; fragments of a past life that were left for me to piece together. A father, a brother in the navy; connected stories told years apart. When we traveled to London for my first retrospective over twenty years ago, we took almost all our meals at a restaurant you found near Chelsea Bridge. I took for granted that you wanted to look across the river at the landmarks, not realizing your interests were more localized than that; the trail of solitary rowers that passed, the water lapping the bank at our feet. Back home, the stream wasn’t directly in sight from the porch, a meadow and a dip in the hill away, but we could hear its gentle rushing as we ate; opened our windows and allowed it into our bedrooms at night, its hypnotic quality more powerful than the ticking clock in lulling us to sleep. In London, your anxiety was such that, at your instigation, we changed hotel rooms several times and then finally the hotel itself, until we found one that gave the view of the water that you desired. At the time, your basis for complaint was due to noise, how you didn’t want my sleep disturbed by the roar of traffic and passers-by. I had several important meetings with museum trustees, interviews with newspapers and dinners with long-standing patrons cultivated through Ben. You wanted me to be as relaxed as I could be under the circumstances. But now I see how agitated not being near the water made you. You were on edge for much of the trip. We argued constantly. Could I have taken the sting out of our frozen winters by accepting some or all of Ben’s invitations? What internal development was halted by keeping you away from the sea? What was it about these things that you cannot bring yourself to explain?
– You look tired. Have you not been to bed?
I feel Ben’s moisturizer rub off on my cheek as we kiss. The scent of something tropical lies thickly between us, the bitter intensity of lemongrass, mixed with citric acidity. As ever, he is immaculate; although he looks after artists, he is not interested in looking like one. This never brings out any self-consciousness about my own appearance, only a reminder that a more refined presentation exists for those that have the energy to invest in it. If anything, his narrow-fitting suit tailored in New York by English expatriates and shirts with their thick navy stripes, his pastel linen shorts cut above the knee and Breton tops are another kind of uniform. Your clothes were different, far removed from city fashion; most often an overcoat one of the farmers gave you. Yet the two of you together still look like kin.
He tries again, his eyes gentle with teasing:
– Getting a little old for all-nighters, aren’t we? Seventy-five is when you start to behave.
– I was old when I did them first time around. Now I’m a fossil with a paintbrush.
– Vishni’s making her chicken and potatoes with saffron. I forgot how the living’s good in the country.
– So long as we can still afford saffron. The kitchen will fall into a slump otherwise.
– John’s out, I hear?
– I sent him into town for paint. I think he had some other errands too. He lets things accumulate.
– You should have let me know. I could have brought whatever you needed from the city.
– Almost everything we need is here.
– Let me rephrase that: I would have asked you if there was anything you wanted had I been able to get through on the phone. After two days of getting the busy signal I actually called the phone company to check whether there was a fault on your line. When they told me that it was more likely that you had disconnected the phone I didn’t know what to think. It’s never bothered you before, has it? And considering so few people have your number; I couldn’t understand the reasoning behind it.
His eyes shine with no let up. His lips redden, making the promise of their rosebud shape real; then the red spreads across his cheeks, as the blood rises through his face. The wisps of air that trail his last sentences suggest an exhalation of something that had been saved up since that time: frustration, bewilderment, worry. Ben is Manhattan-bred, used to having his questions answered. An open-ended mystery is fine for the work, but outside of that, there needs to be a concrete order of things. The artists he best represents are those who do not live their lives in total chaos; itself an exaggeration left for those of poorer talent who are only appropriating the role.
– I thought about sending a telegram but was wary of its theatricality. Drawing you out from wherever you were with the painting. A four-word missive from New York, designed to jolt you to your senses. A joke and a nuisance rolled into one, delivered by a sweet-natured, breathless boy, whom you would have to tip handsomely for cycling all this way. I knew you would despise the rigmarole as much as me. That you would hold it against me once the paintings were finished. So the easiest thing was simply to take the train and deliver
