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  The seamlessness of her performance, the longer it went on, only deepened his bewilderment. He stripped with haste and pounced, hoping to slow the process, even reverse it. It worked at first. Sex grounds. But quickly her perfection in bed was manifest and impossible to ignore. He started to drift again, and as he did, the urge drifted too.

  It wasn’t long before he found himself slapping her breasts, hard, then very hard. From behind, he did the same to her ass, her ribs, her thighs. Her twitches and cries took on a new ring of truth, breaking the illusion so troublingly convincing up to now. With that revelation, his desire, the species of it he needed, returned.

  He got her on top and, using her neck as a grip, threw her down onto his cock. She accepted this, mouth open, eyes closed. He tried to take her bobbing breast in his mouth but found it just out of reach. His hands tightened around her throat as he stilled her body. He pulled her up, toward him, and found the nipple as a rasping escaped her. Her hands clutched the backs of his, prying at them, scratching at his fingers, as his teeth came together around her nipple. Her chest jerked away from him, her fingernails dug into his face. She coughed as his hands convulsed from the pain, and as they did her own sprung from his face back to her neck.

  He threw her off him. Her nipple swelled, and blood didn’t look far off. She kept both her hands around her neck, as if she were wringing it herself. In language he would never deign to use, she cursed him. He knew it was there, beneath the veneer. Reality seeped back into their exchange. Lewis had made it happen.

  In stiff cadences he apologized, thought an outsize tip would prove he meant it. Sullen and silent but not teary, she dressed and left, leaving the door ajar and him to wonder whether there would be trouble from Life.

  Everything was over in half an hour. He sat in the chair, feet up on the bed, taming the fifth of scotch two fingers at a time, swigging from the tumbler and a miniature can of macadamia nuts in alternation. By the time he left the hotel, at two in the morning, he wasn’t sure what he’d meant. He felt less sorry. He hadn’t come. In the back of the cab, Lewis weighed the glint of the watch, the drape of the dress, against the dinginess of his life, and with purpose, lost himself in the brake lights of passing cars.

  ■■■

  This was a year ago. His profile had grown since. Or that of his deeds had, which was better, and what mattered. Lewis’s person remained opaque, or multiple, which came to the same. The sketches were various: a raven-haired man abundantly goateed, a mustachioed blonde in aviators, a brunet longhair with beard untended, witnessed only under low light. Twice he’d come ski-masked. Twice he’d managed entirely in the dark.

  Locations too were diverse: hotel rooms, cars, deserted parking lots, the bathrooms of failing restaurants, the smaller subway stations, far into the night, and once, just as the sun peaked, at the site of a partly razed building. He would arrive by bus or train or otherwise car—a Corolla with a missing bumper, an Audi gleaming white, a windowless cargo van—all rented or with out-of-state plates. For its purity, though, he preferred, when possible, to come on foot.

  Eleven girls in Easton and Henning, not counting the two he let go, judging them self-correctors. There were limits to masquerade and he was exceeding them. But between the spells of panic and the unleavened reaches of despair he would sometimes find an affectless calm. He struggled to worry about his fate then, felt it frivolous to do so, even pretentious. A kind of absolute selflessness, as he saw it, would follow. It was then that he made his “interventions.”

  From each woman he would extract a biography. The inquiries all began from certain generic angles of attack, there being only so many to a conversation, but from there, each rapidly became its own, and the path forward had to be improvised.

  Occasionally matters were simple and quick. In minutes they would begin releasing their histories. These, he supposed, were the women who weighed their stories, or whose stories weighed on them, perpetually or nearly so. There was no introspection called for, the tale was always at the ready, for better or worse.

  Sometimes he suspected deceit. They were too quick to share, the narratives were too neat, either brimming with pathos or a frosty insouciance about their past and present both. But even their fictions, if they were fictions, could suffice. He would take these stories both ways, once as truth and once as lie. In all but one case, his conclusion was the same. If you told certain sorts of fictions about yourself, you might warrant the same treatment as those for whom those fictions were facts.

  More often, though, unlocking their tongues took a fine probing; it could take hours, a half-dozen tacks, to find it, the key. But he had yet to fail. The accumulated detail could be extravagant, but he had little choice. He had to see the shape of each case, the precise trajectory of descent.

  The eleven cases remained with him vividly—his memory was prodigious—so that when it came to them he had no use for pen and paper. He held them all in his mind, calling them up as he pleased. But on late drives home, like tonight, to Janice, or Janus, his preferred endearment (not hers), the stories would start to mingle.

  He imagined that there might be, even must be, women in the world whose stories matched these permutations. As they all shared an endpoint, it was not always clear to him what difference it made how exactly they fell—whether from drama society walk-ons or orphans, state-school freshman or dressage champions—or what to make of the minutia of their lives, the many blind alleys.

  But though the inputs were clear enough, the calculus itself was only partly conscious. At the moment of decision, when he would gather all he had been told before him, perhaps these trifling details were not so trifling. There may have been borderline cases, he thought, where everything turned on the girl’s mother being Jewish and the father not, or on her preference for ketchup not Tabasco with her eggs. He couldn’t say. All the same he felt his judgment unerring.

  Beyond the histories, his mind held snapshots of the girls, before and after, along with ones of lower resolution, during. Like the histories, they would start to mix, and he often wondered then what one would have to do to turn one woman’s before into another woman’s after, what the intermediate stages would look like, how far he would have to denature them before finding the highest common factor. The lowest was easy; matches and gasoline sufficed. But that sort of reduction didn’t exercise the mind.

  The most luminous images were the after-after ones, the women returned to a finer state. (Except for one case, which, if her unthinkable account was true, marked not so much a return as a first ascent.) Though these images weren’t stamped on him by the world, as memories were, they were clearest, most vivid, perhaps as only unmoored idealities can be.

  The girls were never subjects for him—artistic subjects. He found the notion morbid. There was simply no art about what he was doing, nor should there have been. He hadn’t painted anything in months. Some charcoal line drawings were all he’d managed, of Janice on the fire escape or in the kitchen, and even those were more for her benefit than for his. He’d left art behind for life.

  He had in fact descended too, like the girls. His father, Leo Eldern, had invested much of his personal assets in far more aggressive ways than the money he managed for a midsize hedge fund. Most of his fortune was lost this way, shorting the currency markets. The fund itself performed well, though, frequently surpassing the market by meaningful margins, sometimes very large ones. There were very few truly poor years.

  Had he approached his own investments as he did his fund’s, he would still be beyond wealthy, given the size of the inheritance that had come to him from his mother, the lone child of a Midwestern auto-parts magnate.

  Instead he was reduced to his salary at the fund, for a year or so, anyway, until several investors who ran in his circles couldn’t help but note the sharp contraction of his prodigality.

  As he was being dismissed, he protested that he’d never subjected them to his personal risks. They granted that that might be true; the fund’s
long-run success was sterling evidence. Still, they were unwilling to stay with him, not believing a bifurcation of character could be absolute. Leo’s life, with his son’s, was recast. All the money in his name was a play portfolio Leo had given him, perhaps to entice him into the trade, worth several hundred thousand dollars.

  Early on Lewis had plumped for the impractical life, one in the arts. He’d wanted to fill it with the kinds of meaning his father’s, by his own admission, lacked: moral, aesthetic, intellectual. Moral most of all. Politics seized him even before college. He’d sensed the early signs of rot everywhere in Halsley, the kinds his urbane friends mostly ignored or felt at some remove from, though it was happening right in front of them, to them, to everyone.

  But Lewis’s unease was shapeless. He could convince no one of the problem, nor offer any real explanation as to what had gone wrong. At least he noticed. Brilliant wealth seemed not to blind him. That was a talent. Since some things can only be achieved through brilliant wealth, all the better if you could see too.

  It was Kames who first gave form to Lewis’s intuitions. Lewis attended a Wintry lecture on literature and politics simply to accompany a friend whose father was close to Kames. After the meeting, Lewis felt more himself, and it was through someone else’s words. Here was a man, self-effacing, unpretentious yet bold of idea, who might help him arrange his thoughts. In this sense Kames was an architect.

  He spoke that day of the mythologies of a pat secularism; the seductions of the managerial state, of taking ways of life for lifestyles and ethics for a mostly private affair, which was in truth impossible. Ethics implicated the collective, it couldn’t be cordoned off, and political morality was quietly, sometimes silently, at work in the functioning of every public institution. The only question was of its truth, not its existence. Could we do better, once we gave up the fool’s errand of collapsing the domain of “ought” in the world to a private sphere? Was that narrowing of the concept the very reason for the slow loss of credibility that every modern republic had experienced?

  Remarkably, all of this was extracted from a critical reading of A Farewell to Arms and The Crying of Lot 49. His friend didn’t seem to take much from the night, but Lewis was invigorated, by Kames and his manner especially, though he grasped only some of what he’d heard. A slew of Wintry lectures over the next years fixed this. His sense of the political grew as rich as his feeling for art, painting, in particular. He got his father, Leo, to come along to some of these talks, which pleased them both, for different reasons. After a time they got to know Kames, to the extent he was willing to be known. He’d been bred the same way they had, but in an intellectual register, not a commercial one. Leo, who was roughly his age and in fact had friends in common, admired, even envied Kames. There couldn’t have been a shortage of meaning in his life, he thought.

  There were other shortages, though. Like the liquidity to extend the recently founded Wintry Institute beyond Halsley (the endowment was still tied up by its executors). It was the sort of thing Kames wouldn’t canvass people about, for fear of tainting the institution’s intellectual credibility. But friends were another matter. Here Leo could do something for Kames, and more important, something for his son. Lewis headed off to Brown and RISD and Leo financed a Providence chapter of the Wintry. Kames even came up to lecture there occasionally, and Lewis helped organize speakers from the nearby universities: sculptors, biologists, philosophers, anyone with a heterodox point of view.

  Lewis would take degrees in political science and visual art, but halfway through college it became obvious that art was his real strength. It was where his natural capacity for invention lay. He was best off filtering his political imagination through his paintings, he thought, as many an artist had. So, with some reluctance, he abandoned plans of a senior thesis in government.

  He also stopped attending lectures at the Wintry. He’d learned a lot through Kames and the Institute, but after a point, there was no use in talking, thinking, politics anymore. You had to do something, whatever it was. He felt that was the implicit point of the Wintry as well.

  What Lewis knew how to do was paint, so that’s what he did. His senior show consisted of a dozen diptychs of B- and C-list actors on unprimed canvas, in which the expressions on each of a pair of faces was balanced against the other in peculiar ways. Uneasy resonances resulted. Partly this was because the expressions were ones never seen on those particular actors’ faces before: a pneumatic bimbo looking scholarly, a sitcom comedian looking noble and detached. But a kind of interaction was also present, though the actors occupied separate spaces and looked out from the canvas only toward the viewer, not each other. Somehow, you could read Hollywood’s schizophrenia off these pairs, Janice said. Lewis’s mentors in the art department agreed. His show received a distinction.

  And then his father fell into ruin. Since Lewis was no longer financially assured, Leo urged him to reconsider his chosen vocation, transform it into an avocation, and use his A.B. in politics, coupled with the value of his portfolio, as a stepping stone to a career in business or law.

  Lewis balked. Unlike his set, which treated work in the arts or at the nonprofits as luxury pursuits to be quietly set aside when capital, the life-giver, the buffer and balm too, waned, he had always thought (and declaimed) that art couldn’t properly be a hobby or diversion, whatever the change in circumstances. If it was art, it was life.

  His father’s financial collapse would be the test of his conviction. Lewis was determined to pass. After graduation, he nursed his portfolio, living only as the interest allowed, so he might devote his energies to painting as completely as possible. He moved in to a tumbledown apartment in Halsley with Janice, who’d transferred out of RISD and graduated from the culinary-arts school at Johnson & Wales after finding that her real talent was with food not paint. At the time, she might have been even more impractical than he was, though nothing in her background entitled her to it. They made sense to each other, together.

  Leo eventually found a place at another fund, but he refused on principle to grant Lewis any support after he’d set a course so reckless. In fact it took only a few years for his father to grow quite wealthy again. But there was no thaw. Lewis spoke to him only cursorily now, though without hostility or open resentment. He refused to ask for anything more from him.

  Lewis’s mother was gentler toward him, and it was her affection that underwrote a future reconciliation between father and son. But Lewis felt the affection was sustainable only for being generic, blood-fueled. She had little understanding of his projects, being mostly consumed by her role on the board of a charter-school fund and not something in the arts. He didn’t hold this against her, though. He barely understood them himself anymore, and he doubted whether working with the museums, say, would have helped her with this.

  He’d been living this way now for a decade, in an aging, under-furnished apartment, in a manner entirely at odds with how he might have lived had he been willing to seek rapprochement with Leo. The only virtue of the place was its fourteen-foot ceilings. He and Janice had converted the second bedroom into a studio for him, and the correspondingly tall windows ensured that his canvases would be awash each day in the creamy light of late afternoon he liked to work in.

  Besides Matisse, his early hero had been Paul Klee, that painter with few ancestors and fewer descendants. In college, he flirted with Bacon, whose canvases, though formally rich and possessed of a cultural resonance that was unlikely soon to fade, struck him as indefensibly sunless. There were fewer ideas in them, and less feeling, than they at first seemed to hold.

  Lately, though, it was the work of Denis Peterson that occupied him. He was taken first by the hyperrealist paintings, where signage dwarfed subject. But it was the homelessness series that reshaped him, through its moral demands, the urgency Peterson brought to his subjects, though in a peculiarly clear-eyed way. The series lived at the nexus of pathos and precision: compassionate, yet insulated against all sentimentality
by its exactitude.

  Up until now Lewis had been trying to find room for abstraction within a hyperrealist frame. He liked unprimed canvas, a holdover from his Baconian phase originally, but now a useful means of sending the faintest ripples through realism. It just slightly materialized the image, degrading its resolution much more finely than Warhol’s Marilyns. Keeping one foot in each realm, the technique yielded artifacts—canvases—that appeared literally stained by reality. And one way or another, in everything he did, reality was what Lewis was after.

  The painting that sat on his easel now, long unworked, was of this sort. It depicted a heavily tattooed bike messenger standing on the pedals, sideswiping a hansom cab pulling onto an avenue next to a grand city park. The bike’s rear wheel is elevating and the messenger is taking flight over the handlebars, just as a postal tube is falling down between the spokes of the cab’s wheel and the bike. The cab driver, a bushy-haired Arab, has his head swiveled into a bunch of crassly arranged flowers. He looks irked rather than surprised. The horse, still unaware, remains placid.

  The last painting Lewis actually finished was a truck-stop bathroom that imperceptibly merged with a slightly abstracted woman in yellow rubber gloves, kneeling and cleaning the toilet. Only inspection revealed figure to be less tangible than ground.

  He had found his way into some noteworthy group shows, both in America and in Europe, and had two shows of his own, with small but generous write-ups in the art journals. But the biennials eluded him, and it pained him to acknowledge that this was not unjust.

  By now he’d imagined he would have made some sort of aesthetic breakthrough, if not in the art world, then at least in his own mind. The world could catch up later. But no, the world was spot on. His canvases hinted at something they didn’t quite deliver, even he saw that.