Mr. Bones: Twenty Stories

Mrs. Everest

ALTHOUGH I WAS not prepared for it — but how could anyone be? — Mrs. Everest introduced me to the work of the artist Felix Gonzales-Torres, specifically a piece composed of about nine dollars’ worth of light fixtures: two bulbs on extension cords twisted together, hung against a bare wall, and plugged into a socket at the baseboard. I expected her to say, “It’s supposed to make you angry.” But Mrs. Everest called it an eloquent depiction of grief.

“As an artist yourself, you can appreciate the depth of meaning here.”

I said, “This means absolutely nothing to me”—the wrong answer, because she then told me that she was negotiating to exhibit this genius’s work at her gallery, and I’d been hoping that she’d show my work too.

Instead of changing the subject, she reminded me of how little I knew by describing another of his works, this one consisting of 175 pounds of wrapped candy heaped against a wall. When I smiled, trying to imagine this, she said, as though to a child, “It represents his friend Ross, who died. That’s how much he weighed. Gallerygoers eat the candy and make him thinner. See?”

And the extension cords, Untitled (March 5th) #2, one of a series, was said to depict the two men, Gonzales-Torres and his lover, entwined. Mrs. Everest showed me the catalogue entry from a museum where the installation was on view.

The work is open to a wide range of interpretations — naked and vulnerable, or poignant and warm. The implicit romanticism of the work’s metaphor of two luminous bodies, tempered by the knowledge that at any second one of the bulbs could burn out, with the other left to shine on alone.

“When I think of luminous bodies, Andy Wyeth’s Helga paintings come to mind.”

I dared say this because many of my paintings have been compared to those of Andy, who was my friend.

Pretending to be deaf is a conventional form of passive aggression — Mrs. Everest claimed she could not hear any of my comments, squinted when I repeated them, and instead of answering merely shrugged, implying that they were too banal to address. In what I realized later was her belittling my work, she talked in her odd chewing way about an upcoming show at her gallery, praised — overpraised — the artist, a man who collected and exhibited used footwear, mainly the shoes of industrial workers.

This is perhaps the place to say that the art she promoted always needed an explanation: you had to be educated in the circumstances of the artist’s life, the jobs, the peculiarities, the miseries. You felt no solitary aesthetic satisfaction in her gallery; instead you were possessed by a faint dizziness of bewilderment. J.M.W. Turner’s long, eccentric life is unknown to the average museumgoer, yet none of Mrs. Everest’s artists could be appreciated until an immense amount of biographical information was supplied as context, something Mrs. Everest was eager to offer, as in, “His lover weighed 175 pounds.” People gathered around the works, discussing the minutiae of the artist’s life.

My paintings were praised for their impartial realism, but not by Mrs. Everest, who regarded my portraits and landscapes as so self-explanatory as to be banal, the instant gratification of the human face or a cluttered room. My life was not public, my wife’s weight was her secret. I often painted portraits, but my self-portraits I kept to myself. Every picture I’ve done has a history, but I intended each one as complete in itself. Why would you need to know more?

She smiled at the idea that I was still using a paintbrush, and I suspected she believed that my work lacked depth. She could be severe with people she disapproved of. “I have a mental list of people I want to kill,” Mrs. Everest used to say, and her gargling old-actress voice made her sound more murderous. “Not die a natural death — I want to deal the fatal blow.” She would then name the wished-for victims: a talk-show host, a celebrity humanitarian, a new neighbor, an art dealer — one of her competitors, usually a woman. “Quite a long list. I keep adding to it.”

We always encouraged her with our laughter. Isabel and I were among her best friends. In the beginning we thought it was a joke, and later it became too awkward to say anything.

“I’m putting him on my list,” she’d say at a party, and friends like us always knew what she meant.

We were summer people on the island. When our house was finished and we moved from the mainland, someone said, “Mrs. Everest wants to meet you.” The implication was that I was lucky she was taking an interest. She was prominent on the island, where she spent the season in a house built by one of her ex-husbands—“the third or fourth,” people said. I was told that she thought highly of my work. “Thought highly” was intended as a kind of catnip. Mrs. Everest was a well-known collector, and art dealer. I had never met her. Though I had been successful in my work, I was on the periphery. Her gallery was busy, the openings always packed with people. Until then I had not been exhibited in her gallery nor invited to any parties.

I knew she dealt in whatever was in vogue in New York City, installations, giant photographs, acrylic artifacts, rusted hubcaps, even color-coded condoms arranged in menacing mandalas. All of this was a far cry from my monoprint etchings and the portraits of, for example, the people who had worked on my house — the carpenters, electrician, plumber, roofers, plasterers — my Workmen series. No one mentioned these pieces; they talked about Mrs. Everest.

Whispers tend to enlarge the unmet person. She was one of those people who was preceded by an enthusiastic prologue of buildup, someone whom everyone spoke about and quoted — quotes always delivered with force, but so unmemorable you suspect the enthusiast to be somehow in thrall to the person. “You mean you haven’t met her yet?” And then you meet the person and she never quite matches the talk, but you find so much else that no one mentioned, perhaps didn’t notice, and you wonder why, because it doesn’t seem like the same person at all.

In the case of Mrs. Everest, the quotes were slight but always repeated with gusto, usually how she had been sharp with someone, teased them or dispatched them with a word, the rudeness repeated with a shiver of approval. “She has a list of people she wants to kill.” I smiled and said I couldn’t wait to meet her, but I was also thinking, I don’t get it.

Then the party came — the Callanders, her friends, a room full of people, a table of food, waiters offering filled wine glasses from trays. A lull in the conversation and glances at the entryway meant that she had arrived. She was greeted by Biff Callander and his wife, Lara. She took a glass of champagne, but didn’t drink — it was an accessory — and she was shown my way.

No one had said how tiny she was, and misshapen, slightly bent over, almost hunchbacked — probably her age, some sort of fused vertebrae or twisted spine. She was ugly in a startling way, an ugliness that gave her authority, the ruined face, the staring, wide-open blue eyes, the elderly fingers, the walnut-sized rings, putty-like makeup and heavy jewelry, ropes of beads, dangly earrings. She looked like a crone from a folktale — untidy, her hair tousled, her battered suede jacket a poor fit, and she limped a little. No one had mentioned that she was doddery and uncertain, pawing the air as she shuffled along, or that she tried to make this oddness into a kind of majesty.

I felt a bit sorry for her. She knew she wasn’t beautiful, was no longer young, was noticeably frail.

The first thing anyone said about her was the predictable reference to her mountainous name. “One of her husbands” was the explanation — at least four of them, all of them out of the picture. You didn’t think of Mrs. Everest with a man. Her best friends called her “Dickie,” though no one asked how she got that name.

By way of greeting, in that first meeting at the Callanders’, she snatched up a platter and said, “Walter Rainbird! Have some cheese!”

This disarmed me and made me laugh.

“You’re so much bigger than I expected. I wish I could have you in my gallery.”

Some people are blunt because they’re shy. Shyness can even turn them into shouters, if sufficiently riled. Then I thought about her forthright remark, and it became ambiguous: Did she mean that she wanted me, or that she couldn’t possibly exhibit my work? Perhaps she was not so blunt after all.

No one could tell me where Mrs. Everest came from, or her true age, or what her real name was, or how she’d spent her first thirty or so years. She must have been attractive long ago, and being small, still had the pursed lips of a flirt. In the beginning, I asked about her — just wondering aloud. No one would say more than “I really don’t know.”

I was struck by her defiant opinions. Her confidence extended to her business activities: her gallery with its looks-like-art was a success, and was a vortex for the best parties. She knew her own mind, so I thought, and never hesitated to damn something. “I hate it,” she would often say of anything she regarded as conventional. I guessed that she hated my work. Yet I represented money to her, and though she had perhaps a smaller net worth than her clients, she had the big investor’s sense of insecurity, the wealthy person’s fear that without warning she might lose it all.

She respected my financial success more than (if I may say so) my artistic achievement. This was the point: I seldom had shows because my pieces were spoken for in advance, not commissioned but sought-after. Always on the lookout for buyers, she habitually cultivated the rich. She tolerated my wife, Isabel; she never mentioned my work. This was a common occurrence in my life: the way my fame made me a magnet for philistines. People wanted to know me for my success rather than my paintings, because I was good at something and made money off it. As time passed I knew fewer and fewer people who were passionate about art, and more and more socialites, many of them Izzy’s friends, as I smiled in the role of a preoccupied spouse, not a painter at all but rather like someone with a secret vice or a private income.

Though we had no friends on the island, I knew a handful of artists. I made the mistake of introducing Mrs. Everest to two of them. Morrie, who was a sculptor, showed her his studio and then said, “I’ve got some more pieces out back.” She said, “I’ve seen enough.” She was offhand with Marsha, an etcher. I asked her what she thought of Marsha’s work. She said, “Lipstick lesbian.” After this, Morrie and Marsha were cooler toward me. I didn’t blame them.

When she went about wooing me, I was struck with self-conscious fascination, realizing that this little woman, being obvious — but offering attention, grand meals, glittering occasions — was actually succeeding. I saw myself succumbing and wanting more — and getting it; and then I was in her orbit. In ignoring my work, she seemed to imply that she was making an exception in liking me, and that I should be grateful for that. Meals were central to our relationship, food was important, cheese was a theme.

“What they do, no one has ever done before,” Mrs. Everest said of a husband and wife whose photographs she exhibited. Each was a transvestite. They photographed themselves in costume. “That is the proof they are artists.”

At this early stage of my knowing Mrs. Everest, I did not examine this remark. It seemed debatable. My paintings had never been done before. Yet I decided that I liked her conviction. I wanted her to say things like this about me. She didn’t, yet my credentials — the ones that mattered to Mrs. Everest — were soon established.

It happened this way. One weekend in our second year on the island, my wife and I were visited by Andy Wyeth, with Helga Testorf in tow, stopping off on their annual early-summer migration from Pennsylvania to Maine. He flew into our small airport in a private plane. This quickly became news on the island. Where was he staying? What was he doing? Whom was he with? Mrs. Everest had the news early, but it was not until Andy left — he hated socializing — that I revealed to her that he had stayed with us, that I was putting the finishing touches to a portrait of him that I had begun the year before in Port Clyde, Maine. Mrs. Everest only wanted to know about the Helga detail. She said she hated Christina’s World.

“What about Betsy, his wife?” Mrs. Everest asked.

“There’s Betsy’s world and Helga’s world, and Andy proceeds from one to the other,” I said. “Think of it as a kind of informal polygamy.”

This complex shuttling romance bewitched Mrs. Everest, who had the old coquette’s weakness for steamy gossip.

She wanted to see my painting of him, his lined, deeply tanned face like a landscape, his kindly smile, his luminous eyes. In the foreground, one of his hands was lifted, his delicate fingers crooked in the manner of a painter gripping a brush. He had the leathery look of a sportsman, and although he was in his eighties at the time, he seemed much younger — his smile gave him everything, youth and intelligence and confidence. I posed him standing at a window, his sloping meadow and the harbor just visible beyond.

“Why didn’t you give a party for him?”

“He doesn’t go to parties,” I said.

“Helga was so beautiful in those pictures,” Mrs. Everest said. “She must be really old now. Is she fat?”

When I said that Helga was lovely Mrs. Everest took it as a rebuke. I mentioned that Andy had a painting with him, of a cataract on a woodland stream, he called The Carry. He had showed it to me, saying, “I fell in,” and he pointed to the place where, as he had stood painting, he’d stumbled into the water. The picture was real to him, the experience a vivid piece of his history; but he had made it, not installed it.

She wasn’t interested in that, and she frowned at my portrait of Andy, as though concealing her reaction, like a wine snob swilling a sip. They were not the sort of pictures that she would ever exhibit. Yet I had been given face, in the Chinese manner, by this visit by the master of my school of painting. I tried to explain to Mrs. Everest that to me much of Wyeth’s work, especially the later landscapes and coastal scenes, verged on abstract expressionism, or were studies in color. But she wasn’t listening. She cocked her head at my portrait and looked closely, asked more questions about Helga and the Wyeth marriage, and seemed annoyed by my upbeat replies. But this was a turning point for me, my validation, the Wyeth visit.

Confident of her friendship, I saw more of Mrs. Everest, nearly always in the ritualistic restaurant-going way, and the paradox was always her ordering three courses and seldom eating anything. Junior’s restaurant, where we often met, was a casual place, with excellent food, that was nicknamed “the kitchen” because the old-time islanders gathered there. In the summer, no one made lunch at home, and the islanders were sociable, so it was always lunch at Junior’s.

A meal in most societies on earth represents a peacemaking gesture. But you have to eat something — anything, a nibble is enough. Mrs. Everest seldom swallowed. I took this to be hostile. A concentrated thought darkened her face, and she used her fork and knife as though she was killing and mutilating the food on her plate, lingering over it, always with her mouth open, seeming to utter a curse. And then at last the slow, disgusted way she ate, masticating it like a gum chewer, not swallowing. She had a habit of spitting food onto her plate, turning her whole meal into dog food. No one mentioned this, perhaps because, like me, they stopped looking. And here is the irony: she once said to me, “I hate watching people eat. And I can’t stand to see them laughing.”

My wife was off-island for the day. I was sitting with Mrs. Everest, and we were about to order, when I saw at a nearby table a man I had met in England on one of my trips, an American Foreign Service officer, Harry Platt. He’d kept in touch as he’d been moved from one post to another, and over six years or so he’d been to three countries in the Middle East, Turkey the most recent.

Seeing Harry Platt’s face from far off in our local seafront restaurant made him seem gaudily familiar, like an apparition. He must have felt the same about seeing me, because he smiled broadly and got up. He was with an older woman, who stared but did not rise from her chair.

“Well met!” The pretentious expression was not pretentious the way he said it, but suited his old-fashioned Ivy League manner. “How great to see you. What brings you to the island?”

“My wife and I have had a place here for a few years. She’s away at the moment.”

He explained that he was catching the ferry in the morning, and then he became self-conscious and nodded at the older woman at his table.

“Will you join us? This is my mother.”

I glanced at Mrs. Everest, who had been eyeing the other woman, perhaps sizing her up. She said, “Absolutely not.”

Harry Platt was an experienced diplomat, a charming man in his late fifties. He had been helpful to me, putting me in touch with various people, once helping with a visa, another time explaining a tricky piece of foreign policy. He knew presidents, he had sat with prime ministers. But hearing Mrs. Everest’s rebuff (and his mother had heard too), he became flustered, his face reddening, his eyes frantic, as though he’d been slapped. His mother looked furious and chalky-faced.

“Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said.

“We’re leaving at seven,” he said with a desperate smile.

At that, his mother got up and went to the door, and Harry seemed to lose his balance, actually to topple, as if yielding to the gravitational pull of his mother in her heaving herself out. Harry’s embarrassment made him fumble his farewell, and I saw, just a flicker — the glint in his eyes, the set of his mouth — that he was enraged.

Mrs. Everest said, “I think I’ll have the peekytoe crab salad. You should have the lobster mac and cheese — it’s one of Junior’s specialities.”

She did not allude to Harry or his mother, but the whole encounter upset me so badly I couldn’t eat.

There were the men she called “the boys.” Tony was an antiques dealer and a stickler for decorum. “Dickie’s such a goddess. She served a raw ahi amuse-bouche without putting out fish knives.” He was a name-dropper — Jackie this, Gloria that — but a reliable friend to Mrs. Everest, and like her, a gossip.

Tony fed her stories. She was in general not a listener, except to malicious tattle, and then she was all ears, smiling in anticipation, her mouth half open like a dog awaiting a treat. It might be something simple. The Callanders, for example. Biff had been in the State Department, and Mrs. Everest liked to say, “He was in the CIA.” She said this with an admiring whisper when they’d been on speaking terms, and when she rejected him she said it as blame, revealing his disgrace — the spy as sneak — taking away his power by stating the fact: I know his secret.

But Tony had a better piece of gossip. Biff’s wife was Peruvian. At one of the dinner parties Tony was seated next to Lara, being charming, asking all the right questions, mentioning how he had gone to Cuzco and loved Machu Picchu, letting Lara talk, refilling her glass, smiling, probably a bit of “Jackie once told me…” and the question he asked all couples, pure hostility masked as genial inquiry, “You must tell me how you met.” That had to have come up, because afterward he had a present for Mrs. Everest: “Guess who was a flight attendant before she married James Bond?”

Another of Mrs. Everest’s boys was Sanford — Sandy — whom no one liked. Even Tony was afraid, always steering clear of him, and he warned me to be careful of Sandy.

Sandy was small like Mrs. Everest, very thin, rather vain in his choice of shoes (“I have hundreds of pairs”), stylish in his clothes — expensive black suit with black T-shirt — and his skin was a strange color, possibly the result of a tanning salon that over the years had turned him a shade of purple, or maybe he had poor kidney function.

He had a hostile habit of starting sentences, “Don’t take this the wrong way,” and then following it with something insulting. In his talk he was much noisier than Tony, and he won the gossip competition. If Tony knew a mild scandal about someone, Sandy knew a disgrace. This disposed Mrs. Everest to Sandy, who was in his sixties but had the look — skinny, pouting, bug-eyed, small — of a bad boy. When I saw him with Mrs. Everest, he put me in mind of Iago, his purply face twisted in telling a story, his hands contorted and shielding his features like a mask of claws. I thought of the expression “motiveless malignancy.” I did a sketch of Sandy, which I titled I Am Not the Man I Am.

Perhaps there was a motive, and it might have been Iago’s motive too. Mrs. Everest was Sandy’s only source of income. He was no better at his installations (hand-fired bricks) than anyone else she exhibited, but he was a far more malevolent gossip, and that was something that delighted Mrs. Everest. Like Tony and some of her other boys, he acted as her formal male companion, her walker. Even so, she was outrageously disloyal. After one party she said, “He was at it all night with that young waiter, dropping hairpins.”

Knowing that Sandy would quote me, I was wary when I spoke to him. I made a point of praising Mrs. Everest’s taste, her hospitality, her humor, her food. I spoke approvingly of Tony, because in those days Tony was in Mrs. Everest’s good graces.

And why was I part of her circle? Perhaps it was my success: other people — important people, Andy Wyeth — cared about my work. And she had something to give, lunches, the dinners, the parties, with us in attendance. We were glad to belong, and then — knowing her better, becoming uncertain, seeing how she cut or dropped people — we were even better behaved.

I said to Izzy, “She’s awful, but that’s not the worst of it. My fear is that to keep her friendship we’ll become just like her.”

Even after all my travels I realized that I’d never known anyone like her. On an impulse, just doodling, I roughed out in pencil a sketch of her, with Tony and Sandy and some of the others, a capriccio of faces. But when I added some emphasis in ink, I got scared and tossed it.

Perhaps to purge it of memories, she had gutted her house near the harbor and at great expense redecorated it to display her art collection: Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg, Louis, Olitski, and some installations. Her friends, especially Tony and Sandy and Amadeo, raved about it, praised her for keeping the shell and rebuilding the interior, as a kind of museum, where my work was not welcome.

“That house has great bones,” Tony said.

But with obvious secrecy she never invited anyone into the house. Whenever she was picked up by a car, she met the person in the driveway or stepped outside before the driver knocked. No one was allowed inside. Once, meeting her to give her a lift, I saw her kitchen through the window. A pile of laundry had been stacked, unsorted, on the stove, and her cat was asleep on the kitchen table in the sunshine, the cat’s bowl near it. That said everything about Mrs. Everest’s eating arrangements.

“I used to be a gourmet cook,” she said. “I gave lavish dinner parties.”

Was this true? No one I knew had ever eaten her food or been to a dinner party she’d given. She only ate in restaurants, presiding over the table. She ordered three courses and picked at them, hardly eating, never finishing. But in those rare moments when she chewed some food, a hidden part of her personality became apparent — a wolfish energy and appetite, her yellow teeth champing, her turned-down mouth working, an alertness the whole time, her gaze widened as though to ward off an intruder. Then she spat. After that, she’d pass a knuckle across the crumbs on her lips, push the plate aside, and say to the waitress, “Take this away.”

She was always offhand with menials, and her brusque manner made them excessively polite.

“Yes, right away, madam. Shall I wrap it up for you?”

“Absolutely not.”

At the end of the meal she would suggest another meal — dinner tomorrow night, lunch the following day, Sunday brunch. She only saw people for meals; she was unavailable at any other time. She went out occasionally, to movies, to see friends, to shop, but was covert about it, and generally huddled inside her grand house, except at mealtimes or gallery openings.

Her friends, especially those shrieking men, praised her sense of style, and yet she only wore the old suede jacket and junk jewelry. No one remarked on how rumpled she looked; on the contrary, her shabbiness was regarded as a sort of defiant fashion.

She had the big-city habit, which was like a vice to me, of going to the movies in the afternoon, even on the sunniest day. Although her house was by the harbor, she never went near the water, did not swim or go sailing.

Speaking of an adulterous woman on the island, she asked me what I thought. I said, “Emma Bovary,” and she corrected me: “No, her name is Alice.” Other instances like this convinced me that she had no education, but her coterie saw this as a virtue. “Dickie dropped out of high school!” This was more praise, but it was clear to me that she was unlettered: all she knew was from talk, from something she’d been told, from anecdote and chat. But she taught me that no one could be more condescending than a high school dropout. Books put her to sleep, print was a soporific to her. She loved big bold paintings of stripes, the oversize archery targets that were in vogue in the sixties, the grotesque photos in tabloids. Anything less bored her. Her gallery reflected this tendency. I remember one show with car crashes and crime scenes, forensic photos, bloody bandages.

Sooner than I realized it, because I did not dare to dislike Mrs. Everest, she made me doubt myself. I did not lose faith in my work, yet I felt browbeaten and stupid because of her. Just being with her, a whole lunchtime, say, would turn me into a dope. I’d learned not to contradict her or put in a friendly mitigating word for the woman she disparaged or the man she maligned.

Having listened in silence to Mrs. Everest’s venomous remarks, I always felt ashamed after one of these meals, avoiding the front window as I left the restaurant, turning away from the reflection of my face. We were, as I say, summer people. Had I fallen foul of her and been ostracized, we would have had nothing — no parties, no society. Yes, I see that I was cowardly and deluded, but I was fascinated too. Ethical satisfaction is not the same as aesthetic satisfaction, or plain curiosity. I studied her and did sketches, compulsively planning her portrait.

It never occurred to me that, out of my hearing, she might be disparaging me. That was strange: she was disloyal to everyone I knew, yet I believed she would be loyal to my wife and me.

When this thought occurred to me, I saw my naïveté, but of course by then it was too late.

Someone Mrs. Everest had fallen out with — had in fact rejected — said to me one day, “She’s an alcoholic, you know,” as though this (if it were true) explained everything.

Perhaps it explained her famished stare, her fuss and obsessiveness, her bleak moods — little eclipses when she darkened and became impossible to please. Perhaps it explained her sweet tooth, which dry drunks are supposed to have, and her conspicuous regard for holding a glass — not drinking it but treating alcohol as if it were a magic potion, forbidden, tempting, poisonous, transformative. In her mood swings, which were frequent, she could turn on a person and, blinking, bare her teeth and deliver a sudden insult.

But a history of alcoholism could not account for the pleasure she took in someone’s downfall, her love of bad news. The alcoholics I had known who’d taken the pledge were humbled, always haltingly explaining their weakness, or in a low-grade fever of atonement, constantly treading the tightrope of sobriety.

Not Mrs. Everest. She looked thirsty and pitiless, and on many occasions, clapping her hands like a child on hearing something disgraceful, relentless in her ill will, she was triumphant, reckless, and often wore the delirious expression of a predator, eyes aglow, as though she wanted to feast on her victim — had indeed already weakened the prey and would wait until the poor creature fell flat so that she could straddle the corpse and take a big bite from the haunch.

People do not fail without an element of struggle, but when it happens their failure is often undramatic. Failure comes in stages, like illness, a prolonged weakening, and finally a decline, with a whisper of extinction that is indistinguishable from death. This slowness and delay, the resilience in the human condition, the dying fall rather than the sudden plunge, is the reason I suspect tyrants, impatient for triumph, become murderers; why they carry out pogroms, persecutions, mass starvations; why they promote famine or reduce their enemies to slavery or captivity.

It is not enough to rejoice over the natural death of your enemies; their end must be hastened. Impatience is one of the besetting sins of the tyrant, an effect of blood lust; it is impatience that turns the conventionally cruel leader into a mass murderer.

And in order to be satisfied, Mrs. Everest wanted to have had a hand in it. “I want to kill them with my bare hands,” she’d say, pretending to be joking. And the person must fail completely, be rendered naked, homeless, ruined, exposed, the house burned down, the dog lying dead in the driveway.

Hearing stories of people she’d destroyed, I studied the look on her face — her glittering, slightly drunken eyes, her nostrils flared, her lips apart, her teeth showing, her tongue thickening with hunger. I should have been warned, but Izzy and I remained on her guest list, fascinated, and also fearful. On this island we were isolated in the true sense of the word. One of the stipulations of Mrs. Everest’s friendship was that her friends were mine, and her enemies too.

Some people, not many, received financial help from her. They were always wounded, a bit lost, abjectly grateful. Just as she could be cruel to some people who were vulnerable, she could take others under her wing and protect them. That was part of her paradox, that — so hardhearted — she knew how to offer help. She fed stray animals; she gave money to a ranch in Idaho that cared for horses rescued from circuses.

There was a woman who cleaned for her, to whom she’d given a car (not a new car, but serviceable) and paid someone to sort out her taxes; an old feeble gay handyman whose partner had died and who was indigent; an alcoholic chef who was just out of rehab and was trying to put his life back together (“I can start him off with a little restaurant”). They were all lost souls, they were no threat to her, and in truth she could not have been kinder to them; though each of these people served a purpose — the cleaner, the handyman, the chef.

She had no children, so I suppose all her maternal feelings were directed toward abused animals and these sad people who, in their tentative dependent lives, were like children, who also performed chores for her with some ability.

She was entirely self-invented. This is not a simple trick of the ego; it takes work, persuasion, money, boldness, willpower, and imagination. You have to admire it. And so, because of my portraits, my giving these images life, I began to find her of much greater interest, hideously compelling at times, for the way she had made herself, the life and the pretenses she had created, all her fictions.

Just as she could whip around and turn cruel or unfeeling, with “She is hideous” or “Lipstick lesbian,” or might laugh like a witch at someone’s bad luck, she could be unexpectedly concerned, sympathetic, even deeply moved at the plight of an unfortunate person, such as one small girl, Selma, the stepdaughter of a Brazilian roofer. The child disappeared from the island. It was not known whether she was with the man’s estranged wife. The roofer was evasive and then he too disappeared.

“I’m worried sick,” Mrs. Everest said. And she looked sick — gaunt, hollow-eyed, desperate.

“She might turn up,” I said. I could only offer platitudes.

“You don’t know,” she said to me. “That man has done something with her. I know he’s abused her, and I don’t mean ‘touched inappropriately’—I hate that expression. What does he care? She’s not his natural daughter.”

As I write this, about her kindness, I realize that I tend to revert to her cruelty, that I find it hard to believe that she had a soft spot. That cynicism is the influence of the woman herself on me, that I have difficulty bringing myself to believe in her kindness because she had taught me to be cynical. She made it impossible for me to believe in her.

She was a collector, an accumulator, a significant trait of the very wealthy, hoarding as investing — property, paintings, even people if they were powerful enough, stacking them up, displaying them as trophies — from the group photograph (“class picture,” she called it) that was always taken of the guests at her annual summer party, to the objects on the shelves in her office. “That’s scrimshaw, they’re all whales’ teeth,” she’d say, reminding me that there is no pedant like an ignoramus.

Any person’s collection of chosen objects is a glimpse into her mind. I liked Mrs. Everest better when I saw some folk art she’d collected, because folk art is innocent-looking and highly colored, purposeful, inventive, always seeming to evoke what is happiest in childhood. It was also the opposite of the hideola that she exhibited.

Another lunch at Junior’s, a fondue this time. As always, she led the conversation. She was excited about the art scene, she said; she wanted to go in a completely new direction. It occurred to me that she was going to ask me to show my work at her gallery. But no, she began to speak about a man who worked in sand.

Thinking I had misheard, asking her to repeat this (sand?), she detected the incredulity in my tone and took it for hauteur. She said, “No one has ever done what he’s doing.”

She chewed, she spat, she made garbage of the fondue, and at the end she patted her food-splashed mouth and said, “I have a feeling. When I have a feeling about something, I’m invariably right.”

“Tell me,” I said.

“I have a feeling that you’re going to do my portrait.”

This teasing statement was typical of Mrs. Everest. She wasn’t commissioning a portrait; she wasn’t asking a favor of me. She was mentioning a rapture she’d had, that I was going to paint her picture.

She turned to look out the front window of the restaurant. But she was listening, tremulous with attention.

“Wouldn’t it be marvelous if your portrait showed me holding a bouquet of flowers?” She was persistent. “Each flower with its traditional meaning — daisies for innocence, pansies for loving thoughts, tiger lilies, and so forth. A whole message in blossoms.”

I did not say that one could not improve on a Henry William Pickersgill masterpiece. I did not say no. No one said no to her. But she did not hear yes, and my silence meant I wasn’t interested. My pride would not allow me to do a portrait of someone who thought so little of my work that she refused to show it in her gallery. Or perhaps I was rebelling against her taste for installations and looks-like-art.

Long before she suggested that I do her portrait, I made a short and bitter ink sketch of her, rather dark, a mushroom on a dunghill, but close-up it was a little twisted woman on a money box, rendered perfectly. Her hatred of figurative painting was an inspiration to me, the sort of contempt that turned my every brushstroke into a calculated phrase. And it made me resist her.

A passerby glancing through the restaurant window at the three of us — Izzy was also there — would have assumed we were old friends having an intimate meal together, never guessing that this was a ritual of farewell. The passerby would not have noticed that Mrs. Everest had asked me nothing about my painting, nothing about our plans, our travel, our health. That she did not meet my gaze or even look my way.

After her monologue about the new show she didn’t mention meeting again — nothing about the future, not even next week, never mind next month. She didn’t eat a mouthful of the salad she had ordered. She poked the crab cakes apart, scattered the lettuce, punctured and pushed the cherry tomatoes, mashed the avocado. She ordered a glass of Prosecco, but without taking a sip, her eyes brimmed with gluey reproachful tears.

In the most low-key way, just chatting, making small talk, she conveyed indifference with the slightly perturbed and preoccupied air of someone who couldn’t linger, with an unmistakable suggestion that, though she might see us again, we no longer mattered to her.

This invitation had been Mrs. Everest’s idea. She wanted a portrait from me. She had even described it: Mrs. Everest posed in a sun-drenched window among symbolic flowers. All that remained was for it to be hung. And listening, just smiling, I had sent a message of disapproval, which was like a foul smell.

When the check for the meal came, the immensely wealthy Mrs. Everest frowned and turned away from it.

“I must run,” she said. “Don’t get up. Leonard is outside.”

Leonard, her driver, greeted her with a groveling smile and a little bow, and then he helped this old lady into the car.

And when they drove away, Izzy said, “She seemed in a funny mood.”

I saw Mrs. Everest one more time. This was at Sandy’s house on the bay. He had invited us, but said nothing about Mrs. Everest’s proposal that I should paint her portrait.

She was standing in her usual posture, as I would have painted her: old suede jacket, tousled hair, a glass in her hand, the elderly face of a wicked child.

She hadn’t expected me to say hello, and seemed startled by my small talk. I was enthusing about the plants I had bought, annuals for the summer, enumerating them, describing their colors — dahlias, delphiniums, Shasta daisies.

“Verbena,” I said. “Zinnias.”

“I hate verbena, I hate zinnias,” Mrs. Everest said, and frowned and coughed a little, like a cat choking on a mouthful of fur, and I translated that cough as I’m through with you.

After a short spell of being ashamed I had ever known her, I began to wonder why I’d endured her for so long. People say, “It’s all good,” and “I have no regrets,” and “It was a learning experience.” But I do have regrets. I want years back, I want days back, I want the hours back that I spent sitting over meals with Mrs. Everest. I regret knowing her. I didn’t hate her; I felt sorry for her having to drag her damaged soul through life. I hated myself for knowing her, for pitying her. I hated myself for my appetite.

Have some cheese! she said the first time we met. That was the beginning of many meals that ended in my refusing to do her portrait. And I had wanted to do her portrait!

I mentioned this when I complained about her to her friend Sandy, because I knew he’d tell her everything. He listened with his fanatical stare, then said, “Don’t take this the wrong way,” and sounding like Mrs. Everest, added, “The only free cheese is in a mousetrap.”