The Last Family

6

Laura Masterson stood at the far side of the ballroom where couples had once turned in elegant circles beneath a crystal chandelier imported from France. In this very room smooth-faced boys in dress gray bowed to giggling girls in sweeping hoop skirts, and string quartets played sweet waltzes. Meanwhile a nation divided against itself prepared to trade minie balls and cannon shot. This room had served as a hospice where yellow-fever victims had lain on mats, ministered to by a parish priest and women in white linen. Laura was surrounded by old ghosts, but she stared straight through them as she critiqued her latest painting.

She was leaning against the jamb of the tall pocket doors that were open to the home’s wide hallway, called a gallery. From fifty feet away the face on the canvas looked as detailed as a Vermeer, while up close it was all tiny swirls, short slashes, and dots of oil. The face in the painting was partially destroyed, or partially incomplete, the right eye missing, plucked from the angry socket by an all but angelic vulture. She sipped her coffee and contemplated the image. In her mind the face, like all of her images, was a thing of beauty, but as one critic had said, her figures were “disturbing visages that haunt the viewer while seducing them.”

“This one won’t be seducing anyone,” she said to the coffee. She was far from pleased with the image, but that was true of all of her paintings. If she was pleased, she might lose the edge, whatever that was. She had no idea where her gift-though she would never call it that-came from. She had never shown any more talent at art than friends who were involved in painting. She had come to it late, but it had consumed her with a passion that she had never dreamed possible. The brushes seemed to know what they were after. There was a surety of line and, as her mind commanded, her hand followed. Before she had discovered these images trapped inside her mind, she had been another person altogether. She had been called the Anne Rice of oils, and it had less to do with their shared hometown than with their perspective.

She thought of the reviews from her last show, which her daughter had insisted on reading aloud at the breakfast table. “The subjects get in close, mesmerize, and then tear you to pieces,” Roger Wold had written in the Times-Picayune… “They are images of angels… modern martyrs… exciting to some for that very reason. Classically erotic… This is art that may just turn on you as time passes.” Some people wanted art to move them, and if the work could keep moving them as time passed, all the better. That was worth money, and the flow of money allowed Laura to live in a house built in 1840 and paint in a ballroom where Jefferson Davis had once danced and refrain from dipping into her principal.

This particular painting was of Paul Masterson as he existed in her heart. Physically wounded, emotionally terrified, alone and packed to bursting with guilt. A lot of her work centered on Paul because he had left her filled with pain and confusion, and she was trying to resolve the conflicts in her heart on canvas. Even when she had other subjects in mind, when she began a painting he would often invade the work by appearing in part as he did in this large canvas. The set of Paul’s jaw, the line of his ears, the bright blue of his single eye, the angle of the mouth, the attitude of the head, a shape, a frown or a ghost of a smile, might take form. Consciously she thought she had her feelings for him licked; subconsciously, every time she thought about him, it was as though someone stumbling around inside her head had kicked over a bucket of electric eels.

Some of the people who had purchased her early paintings had sold them to get rid of them, possibly because the owners had become irritated with them or had decided to change the style of their art as part of a redecoration. To their delight there had been a ready market for the pieces, and profits were made. The kind of people who enjoyed being bothered, or who wanted their walls to have personality and their collections to appreciate, snapped up Laura Masterson paintings as fast as they became available. She had been forced to hire an agent to compile a waiting list and negotiate prices. The bidding for the privilege of being seduced and disturbed had driven her prices from two thousand dollars for the first canvas, completed five years ago, to forty thousand in four short years. Now Laura showed at prestigious galleries in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and in a few months’ time would launch a show in Berlin. Her work was perfect for the German market, Lily Turner, her agent, had said. “The sausage eaters”-Lily called the Germans that-“will devour them happily at one hundred thou a pop.”

Laura wandered back to the table, dropped a brush into the baby-food jar filled with thinner, and watched as it influenced the turpentine to a cloudy rose. She let the brush become saturated and then cleaned it carefully, squeezing the bristles in folds of soft cloth until the damp spots were clear of hue. After she had cleaned all of the brushes and her hands, she dropped the bits of turpentine-saturated cotton cloth into the lidded rubbish can. She looked at her watch. It was three A.M.

She glanced at the chair across the studio where Reid Dietrich, her boyfriend, often sat and either read or simply studied her as she worked. He was a perceptive critic, and having him there was always a comfort. Tonight he had gone off to her bed upstairs to await her retirement. Sometimes he did that; tonight he had not spoken but had simply disappeared from the studio. She had been so wrapped up in her painting that she hadn’t taken direct notice of his disappearance-she couldn’t recall the specific act of his leaving, but she knew that he had kissed her cheek; he always did that when he left her alone. Often when she worked she lost hours and sometimes an entire day. During those times she might agree to some request from her children and not recall having spoken to them at all.

Laura Masterson often worked well into the night, passing through the hour of the wolf. Sometimes the golden rays of morning sun would break through the tall windows as she worked-covered to the elbows in paint flecks. The rays would come through the beveled glass and echo the rainbow on the walls and burn long orange waves across the floorboards. But no matter what, she was the one who awakened her children in the mornings, fed them, watched over them, hugged and kissed them and put them to bed. For Laura the desire to be a mother to her children was far stronger and more important than the desire to paint. I can paint after they are in their own lives and I am here alone. She had not had to make a choice between her career or her family, as some did.

Laura’s house had been constructed in a time when craftsmen bundled their hand tools in canvas bags and roamed the country like soldiers, spreading the doctrine of hand-carved moldings, bright murals that brought the wonders of nature indoors, decorative masonry, form-fitted and wood-pegged cypress-beam skeletons with oak floors as solid as chopping block. The house was located off St. Charles in the Garden District, built by people who had every reason to imagine the house would stand forever, a monument to grace, form, and function.

The structure had been mauled and divided in the 1950s when an owner’s heir had decided the property had to generate capital. The house was made into seven separate apartments. It was all but abandoned to the elements when she had come across it.

Laura had never painted for money. She had inherited a lot of money from her father, who had been a tax attorney and had sat on the board of the Whitney Bank. She had used some of that money as leverage to buy and restore the house to its original floor plan, but she had taken her time furnishing it. The kitchen was large and open and modern, the rest of the house filled with antiques.

The lot on which the house sat was just under two acres, encased in a six-foot wall of stuccoed brick. Sections of the yard had been allowed to develop a will of their own, and at the rear of the property the paths had become a thick tangle of angry vegetation armed with cruel teeth, barbs, and razor edges that challenged passage of all but the most feral of varmints.

The house itself was two stories, and the first-floor joists stood four feet from the ground. Wide wooden steps led up to the wraparound porch with its large columns. Laura had added a swimming pool with living bamboo walls on three sides and liked to sit there by the water and think.

The dog, Wolf, shook his body and followed Laura up the wide staircase to the second floor. She always looked in on the children before she went to sleep, whatever the time.

Reb, who had selected the nickname himself at an early age, having decided that the name Adam lacked something crucial, was nine. He was slight of frame, with his mother’s light-red hair and pale skin, and he slept twisted up in a yellow-and-red nylon sleeping bag winter, summer, spring, and fall. Laura referred to the bag as Reb’s cocoon. His room was in constant turmoil, with toys scattered, a hamster cage with one occupant, a gray cockatiel named Biscuit, and comic books layering the rug like scales. Laura made a mental note to make him straighten up on Saturday. She didn’t mind letting him express himself by living in disorder, but she wanted him to learn some discipline. The dog walked in, looked at the sleeping bundle of bird, sniffed the hamster, which was running inside the wheel, and then curled up beside the boy’s bed. He would stay there unless Laura passed by going back downstairs.

Erin’s room was the opposing camp in more ways than one. She was fifteen and had inherited her father’s finely chiseled features, blond hair, and the single-minded drive he’d had before the infamous Miami massacre. Erin made straight A’s, was businesslike and precise, and was at the age where she had no patience with her mother and most especially her little brother. She found her mother’s art disconcerting and tasteless and objected to her leaving any of her paintings on any wall, outside the studio, for more than a couple of days. She called it showing off. Reb, on the other hand, loved his mother’s work and often painted with her in her studio. For nine he was advanced and possessed a remarkable feel for color, balance, and design.

Laura loved both her children, equally if such is possible, but Erin could take care of herself, and usually did, so her son received the portion of his mother’s affection that Erin turned back unused. Erin remembered her father as a flesh-and-blood reality. To Reb he was an album of pictures, two letters a year-tucked into the Christmas and birthday gifts that arrived in the mail. He dreamed about the man in the pictures, and sometimes in his mind they had a real relationship. He clipped photographs of Montana-looking mountains out of magazines and pasted them in a sketch book he kept under his bed. Casting a fly out into the rapids in the cold blue shadow of mountain walls was his fondest fantasy of all. Laura knew all about it and felt powerless to help either of them find the other. She had tried. She had tried and failed. When she thought of Paul hiding from his children, she bristled-a flame burned beside those feelings. It was the closest she could come to hating the man she had once loved more than anything on earth.

Laura’s bedroom, with its fourteen-foot ceilings, was located directly over the ballroom and was half as long. She entered the room and crossed to the bed where Reid Dietrich slept curled in on himself, still in his clothing. The four-poster was shrouded in sheer netting, which made Reid look like someone stuck in a dream. She had thought long and hard some months earlier before she invited him into her bed with her children in residence. There had been no ill effects from it. She and Reid stayed private with their intimacy. He was never there before the children went to sleep and was always out of her bed and into his own, in the guest room, before they awoke, for appearances’ sake. No one was fooled, but it made Laura feel better and the kids never mentioned it. They seemed to know that loneliness was worse than whatever else was involved.

The children had grown accustomed to Reid, and the influence of a man in their lives again had been positive. They never suggested including him but, on the other hand, never seemed to mind his inclusion either.

When Reid Dietrich was in town, he split his time between Laura’s house, his own in the French Quarter, and his sailboat on the lakefront. He kept clothes in the closet of Laura’s guest room and had a toothbrush in the bathroom.

Laura studied his face for a few moments and then kissed him on the cheek. He smiled and looked up at her through the fog of faraway dreams.

“You ran out on me,” she said, a mocking chastisement. “You, sir, is a very bad boy.”

“I got tired. What are you gonna do, spank me?” he said.

“Don’t you wish?”

“What time is it?”

“After three.”

“I came up just after midnight.”

“I thought maybe you didn’t like me anymore.”

“Don’t be silly. Who else would I let ignore me for hours at a time and then come to bed smelling like Pine Sol?”

“Turpentine.” She creased her brow. “Poor baby, do I ignore you?” She undid his buttons and slid her hand down his smooth chest and over the solid stomach. Then she unzipped his pants, and her hand traveled farther down, into his pubic hair. She ran a fingertip the length of his member, which had stirred to life.

“Now look what you’ve done,” he said. “You have to put him back to bed.”

“Hold that thought,” she said. “I’ll be right back after a quick shower to get the Pine Sol off.”

She moved a few feet, unzipped her baggy jeans and dropped them to the floor, removed her sweatshirt, and stopped in the door of the bathroom to allow him a side view. Laura was thirty-eight years old, had a perfect helmet of straight light-red hair in which veins of silver had lately appeared here and there, and a wholesome, beautifully balanced face. There were the faintest whispers of crow’s-feet at the corners of her cornflower-blue eyes. Despite having two children, she had a well-toned body that caused men to smile to themselves as the fire of wickedness played behind their eyes. Then she peeled her panties off, twirled them in her hand, shot them out into the bedroom, and disappeared into the bathroom, laughing. She turned on the shower and climbed in, the granite floor cold under her feet, and let the needles of hot water wash over her. She was standing with her back to the nozzle and her hands against the wall, her head bowed, when the door to the shower opened and Reid entered. He moved up to her and put his arms around her, interrupting the spray.

“That striptease has my little friend wide-awake,” he said, looking down.

“Up indeed,” she said, laughing. “That’s a little friend?”

She didn’t mind the intrusion or the sudden pressure against her leg. She turned into him, pressing her body against his, and ran her hands down his back, stopping at the muscle-tight buttocks. He ran his tongue down her neck, over her breasts, pausing to tweak the rose nipples with his teeth, and then tracing a line through her belly button and down with his kisses. Using his tongue, he traced letters in the soft hair over the pubic cleft.

“Oh, Reid. That’s good. Oh, and I really like that,” she said playfully. He put his tongue through the patch of pubic hair to the place where the valley began. “Oh, but that’s the best of all.”

She threw her head back as he brought her to the slippery edge of an orgasm. She put her hands on either side of his head and pulled him up. Then she brought her right leg up until it was caught at the top of his pelvis, opening herself to him, and helped him inside with her hand. She brought the other leg up and locked her ankles behind him and, using him as a fulcrum, rocked them into an orgasm.

Later when they were lying in bed locked together like a pair of spoons, she studied the back of his head in the glow from the open bathroom door. She had always insisted on sleeping with a night light in the bathroom and that door cracked. She claimed it was so she could get to the children faster if they cried out, but the truth was she had always had a fear of the darkness. She ran her hand over the line of his shoulder, to the center of his chest, and hugged him tight. She felt safe and secure when they were together.

Laura was very fond of Reid-maybe she even loved him-but she hadn’t felt the same release of control she had experienced with Paul. She reasoned that she was older now, more experienced-not the schoolgirl she’d been when she found Paul. But she never revealed herself, her deepest thoughts, to Reid. She’d done that once.

Found Paul-no, discovered Paul. She thought about that phrase. Yes, she had found him and savored every minute they’d been together in the early days. They had lived a perfect love in those early days of their relationship, and then they had fallen into complacency, routine. But she had remained in love with him, and there had always been electricity when he touched her. She could admit that he had been less giving, but given the whole of their relationship, he had been so much more. Why was that? Reid was more handsome-more her type. He loved the same things she loved and had a remarkable body that fit with hers as though they had been designed as a set. Paul, on the other hand, had been self-absorbed; he had made decisions that affected them both without discussing them with her. He had been a magnificent consuming soul as a lover, but outside the bedroom he had been pensive and distant and didn’t need to be touched as she did. He had been dedicated to his work, often staying in the field weeks at a time, calling only sporadically. But they had been in love, and there was no doubting that. Even after the children were born and inhabited their lives, he had been like a lover at the beginning of a torrid affair. But that was then and this was…

Reid Dietrich was thirty-nine but looked ten years younger. Laura had met him at an opening of her work a year before at the Arthur Maxwell Gallery on Magazine Street. He had been staring at a particular painting when she arrived, and fifteen minutes later he was still staring at it. She had studied him as he studied her work. Reid was almost six feet tall, thin but muscular, and wore his light hair combed back over his ears. His features were delicate but masculine, sensual. His eyes were like children’s marbles with light-gray circular swirls beneath the surface. She had never before seen eyes the shade of his. She had been mesmerized by them, lost in the absolute depth of them from the moment she saw them. It was artistic interest at the beginning.

“God, he’s gorgeous.” Lily had spotted him first and pointed him out. Laura had finally wandered over and stood beside him as he’d stared at the painting of St. Sebastian.

In the painting of Sebastian, the martyr had dark locks cascading over his shoulders, and a pale halo. His skin was translucent, the veins tracks of deep blue. Most of Sebastian’s blood had been leeched out by the five arrows, which were all heeled with purple fletches. The blood that dribbled from the arrow shafts was being licked away by a pair of ewes. In the darkness of the tree limbs above there were sinister black birds watching, obviously waiting for their turn at the saint-to-be. Despite the inconvenience of being lashed to a tree, despite the arrows and the birds waiting for his eyes and sweetmeats, Sebastian was smiling at the sheep who cleansed his body. What Laura had thought she was painting had altered itself as she’d worked-a move of the brush, a moment when something unexpected happened, something outside her control, and St. Sebastian was at peace. Reb’s comment had been, “I didn’t know sheeps ate blood.”

“Ouww, gross, Mother,” Erin had added. “Like someone would stand still for that!”

“It’s an amazing piece,” Reid had said even before he turned to look at Laura. “A truly unique interpretation… of the death… of St. Sebastian. The degree of pain a man can feel and remain at peace with his inner self… his God, or his soul. It touches me in a place I’ve never been touched.” Laura thought he was serious until he laughed. “Who did shoot St. Sebastian?”

“I should know,” she said. “Martyr makers, I’d imagine.”

“I am considering it for my house, but…”

“But?”

“It’s a lot of money,” he’d said. “Fourteen thousand for an unknown.”

She had looked him over. A solid-gold Cartier, a designer suit with the cuffs breaking on a pair of obviously expensive loafers.

“Come, now. I’ll bet you paid that much for your watch. What does any watch do but intrude on your thoughts and divide your day like a drill sergeant? ‘It’s ten-twenty-oh gosh, I have to go-it’s almost time to shower…’ A slave driver in eighteen-carat gold. Attractive slave driver, but, still, the ticking is merely the cracking of the whip.”

He had looked at her and studied her for a few seconds, his eyes crystal points of interest. “Maybe the artist would trade me for this watch?” He smiled. “I could kill two birds with one Cartier. I’d have the painting to keep me company, and I’d be free of this tyrant on my wrist.”

She studied him for a few long seconds. “You’d trade your watch for that canvas?”

“In a moment,” he said, smiling. “Do you work here?”

“No, but I know the owner.” She had looked around and caught the gallery owner’s eye. He walked over. “Arthur, this is…”

“Reid Dietrich,” Arthur said, smiling his wolfish smile. “Mr. Dietrich is newly arrived in New Orleans and a client of the gallery.”

“He wants to trade his watch for this painting,” she said.

“Well, it’s okay. But there’s the question of how you’d pay me the gallery’s commission.” He stretched up on his tiptoes and crossed his arms. “Possibly the band?”

Reid had blushed. “Your painting? Oh, you’re Laura Masterson? This is embarrassing.”

“No relation to Bat.”

“Dietrich. No relation to Marlene, either.”

They’d both laughed.

“I’ll just pay for the painting. Your husband must be terribly proud of you. Such work is truly amazing.”

“I’m divorced.”

“But the wedding band?”

“Keeps me from having to spend time being chased by men I’d rather avoid. Those awkward moments in the grocery store. I have two children.”

“I’m a widower.” He had fixed his eyes on hers and then touched her hand. “Please excuse me so I can conduct my business with Arthur before someone snatches my St. Sebastian from the wall.”

“I could always paint you another,” she’d said, surprising herself. She realized that she was flirting with Reid and was suddenly embarrassed. He had held her eyes for a few seconds longer and smiled what was, as far as she could discern, a perfect smile.

“Who was the model?” he had asked.

“My ex-husband,” she said.

“Have you considered the subliminal implications?”

“Believe it.”

Reid had written Arthur a check for the fourteen thousand dollars, and a red dot had appeared beside the title placard, signifying that the work had been purchased. Reid often commented that the painting had appreciated three hundred percent since he’d bought it, while the watch had not.

Laura had not been able to talk to him any more that evening because there were so many other people she had to greet and he had disappeared shortly after writing the check. Later in the week she had quizzed Arthur about him. He told her that Reid, a recent New York transplant, was a partner in a company that sold hightech, high-dollar diagnostic machines to hospitals. He was interested in Louisiana artists, came from an old Atlanta family, had a large sailboat on Lake Pontchartrain, and lived in the French Quarter. Most important, he wasn’t gay, though Arthur deemed that a shame.

Weeks later Arthur called her to ask if she would accompany him to Reid’s home and oversee the hanging of the painting, as Mr. Dietrich had requested. His house on Dumaine was four thousand square feet on three floors and filled with antiques and artwork. The house had a private courtyard protected by tall brick walls, and servants’ quarters that he used strictly for storage. The art movers hung St. Sebastian over the carved-marble fireplace in the living room.

She and Arthur had been met at the door by a casually dressed Reid.

In the living room there was a haunting egg-tempera portrait of a woman, painted in a style similar to that of Andrew Wyeth. Arthur said she was the dead wife. “Car wreck,” Arthur had whispered as they passed. “Decapitated,” he added, raising his blond eyebrows for emphasis.

Reid had insisted they stay for sandwiches, but Arthur begged off. Laura had needed to go, too, but when she looked at her watch with the intention of making an excuse, Reid had looked into her eyes and said, “Your drill sergeant?”

They had reclined on the Oriental, eaten pastrami sandwiches, and sipped dry red wine. They had struck up a friendship almost at once, and as if to make a wonderful dinner perfect, the clouds had opened and driving rain had covered the courtyard. He had built a fire below St. Sebastian to chase the damp chill from the room.

They had all but lived together for the past six months, each assuming that they would spend nights in each other’s company unless there was some reason not to. Reid, if not perfection, was as close as men came, to her way of thinking. And available just enough. And love grows.

Reid didn’t talk about the details of his wife’s death, and Laura didn’t ask. He had a way of changing the subject with unequaled grace when conversation strolled too close to something he didn’t care to discuss.

After five years of life without Paul she still dreamed sometimes that he was beside her in bed. She was very fond of Reid, but her soul had been pledged to Paul, and it remained with him despite her attempts to forget him and move forward. She knew she would never remarry strictly for love. Luckily there were enough other reasons so that she might decide to marry. But there was no hurry. Her life was full enough.