“When we bought this place, I told him to see to that well. I told him it was dangerous.”
“You were right,” Hannah says, watching the grass, the softly pulsing cloud of green light hanging above it. The light is still only about as big as a basketball. Later, it’ll get a lot bigger. She can hear the music now, pipes and drums and fiddles, like a song from one of her father’s albums of folk music.
“Hannah, have you seen your sister?”
Hannah turns and stares defiantly back at her mother’s glowing, accusing eyes.
“That makes three, Mom. Now you have to leave. Sorry, but them’s the rules,” and her mother does leave, that obedient phantom fading slowly away with a sigh, a flicker, a half second when the darkness seems to bend back upon itself, and she takes the burning leaves smell with her.
The light floating above the backyard grows brighter, reflecting dully off the windowpane, off Hannah’s skin and the room’s white walls. The music rises to meet the light’s challenge.
Peter’s standing beside her now, and she wants to hold his hand, but doesn’t, because she’s never quite sure if he’s supposed to be in this dream.
“I am the Green Fairy,” he says, sounding tired and older than he is, sounding sad. “My robe is the color of despair.”
“No,” she says. “You’re only Peter Mulligan. You write books about places you’ve never been and people who will never be born.”
“You shouldn’t keep coming here,” he whispers, the light from the backyard shining in his grey eyes, tinting them to moss and ivy.
“Nobody else does. Nobody else ever could.”
“That doesn’t mean—”
But he stops and stares speechlessly at the backyard.
“I should try to find Judith,” Hannah says. “She shouldn’t be out so late on a school night.”
“That painting you did last winter,” Peter mumbles, mumbling like he’s drunk or only half awake. “The pigeons on your windowsill, looking in.”
“That wasn’t me. You’re thinking of someone else.”
“I hated that damned painting. I was glad when you sold it.”
“So was I,” Hannah says. “I should try to find her now, Peter. My sister. It’s almost time for dinner.”
“I am ruin and sorrow,” he whispers.
And now the green light is spinning very fast, throwing off gleaming flecks of itself to take up the dance, to swirl about their mother star, little worlds newborn, whole universes, and she could hold them all in the palm of her right hand.
“What I need,” Peter says, “is blood, red and hot, the palpitating flesh of my victims.”
“Jesus, Peter, that’s purple even for you,” and Hannah reaches out and lets her fingers brush the glass. It’s warm, like the spring evening, like her mother’s glowing eyes.
“I didn’t write it,” he says.
“And I never painted pigeons.”
She presses her fingers against the glass and isn’t surprised when it shatters, explodes, and the sparkling diamond blast is blown inward, tearing her apart, shredding the dream until it’s only unconscious, fitful sleep.
7
“I wasn’t in the mood for this,” Hannah says and sets the paper saucer with three greasy, uneaten cubes of orange cheese and a couple of Ritz crackers down on one corner of a convenient table. The table is crowded with fliers about other shows, other openings at other galleries. She glances at Peter and then at the long white room and the canvases on the walls.
“I thought it would do you good to get out. You never go anywhere anymore.”
“I come to see you.”
“My point exactly, dear.”
Hannah sips at her plastic cup of warm merlot, wishing she had a beer instead.
“And you said that you liked Perrault’s work.”
“Yeah,” she says. “I’m just not sure I’m up for it tonight. I’ve been feeling pretty morbid lately, all on my own.”
“That’s generally what happens to people who swear off sex.”
“Peter, I didn’t swear off anything.”
And she follows him on their first slow circuit around the room, small talk with people that she hardly knows or doesn’t want to know at all, people who know Peter better than they know her, people whose opinions matter and people whom she wishes she’d never met. She smiles and nods her head, sips her wine, and tries not to look too long at any of the huge, dark canvases spaced out like oil and acrylic windows on a train.
“He’s trying to bring us down, down to the very core of those old stories,” a woman named Rose tells Peter. She owns a gallery somewhere uptown, the sort of place where Hannah’s paintings will never hang. “‘Little Red Riding Hood,’ ‘Snow White,’ ‘Hansel and Gretel,’ all those old fairy tales,” Rose says. “It’s a very post-Freudian approach.”
“Indeed,” Peter says. As if he agrees, Hannah thinks, as if he even cares, when she knows damn well he doesn’t.
“How’s the new novel coming along?” Rose asks him.
“Like a mouthful of salted thumbtacks,” he replies, and she laughs.
Hannah turns and looks at the nearest painting, because it’s easier than listening to the woman and Peter pretend to enjoy one another’s company. A somber storm of blacks and reds and greys, dappled chaos struggling to resolve itself into images, images stalled at the very edge of perception. She thinks she remembers having seen a photo of this canvas in Artforum.
A small beige card on the wall to the right of the painting identifies it as Night in the Forest. There isn’t a price, because none of Perrault’s paintings are ever for sale. She’s heard rumors that he’s turned down millions, tens of millions, but suspects that’s all exaggeration and PR. Urban legends for modern artists, and from the other things that she’s heard he doesn’t need the money, anyway.
Rose says something about the exploration of possibility and fairy tales and children using them to avoid any real danger, something that Hannah’s pretty sure she’s lifted directly from Bruno Bettelheim.
“Me, I was always rooting for the wolf,” Peter says, “or the wicked witch or the three bears or whatever. I never much saw the point in rooting for silly girls too thick not to go wandering about alone in the woods.”
Hannah laughs softly, laughing to herself, and takes a step back from the painting, squinting at it. A moonless sky pressing cruelly down upon a tangled, writhing forest, a path and something waiting in the shadows, stooped shoulders, ribsy, a calculated smudge of scarlet that could be its eyes. There’s no one on the path, but the implication is clear—there will be, soon enough, and the thing crouched beneath the trees is patient.
“Have you seen the stones yet?” Rose asks and no, Peter replies, no we haven’t.
“They’re a new direction for him,” she says. “This is only the second time they’ve been exhibited.”
If I could paint like that, Hannah thinks, I could tell Dr. Valloton to kiss my ass. If I could paint like that, it would be an exorcism.