House of Windows Page 31

  Theo's book captivated Rudolph's imagination. His friends and acquaintances grew used to the sight of him tucked away in a corner, his uncle's book open on his lap, him studying it intently. Theo had had the volume printed and bound on the cheap, and it wasn't long before Rudolph's copy was falling apart. He taped the covers together with some kind of heavy-duty builder's tape, and wound the whole thing around with twine and rubber bands. When it came to who could look at the book, Rudolph was extremely guarded. Once the book was falling apart, this was easy enough to understand, but even before that, he would snap it closed whenever anyone approached. One person—a woman he tried to seduce after he'd emptied a couple of bottles of wine at a party—convinced him to let her have a peek—I can't imagine what she must have been wearing to make him agree, but agree he did. She said the pages he opened to were a mess. The margins were crammed full of Rudolph's handwriting and drawings. He had circled words and phrases in the text and drawn lines between them, as if he were constructing his own text within his uncle's. This woman said that, when she reached out to touch the book, Rudolph slammed it shut and stormed out of the party without another word. Seduction over.

  As was lunch. I left the dishes in the sink and headed back to the library. I couldn't bear the thought of a staring at myself in the monitor for the rest of the afternoon, so I scooped up the pile of print-outs and took them to the couch.

  Rudolph had always been productive. Under the influence of Theo's book, he exploded, tossing off completed paintings like there was no tomorrow. One critic said it was as if Rudolph knew he wasn't long for this world, and was trying to fit a lifetime's worth of work into a few years. Had he lived to be sixty, this still would have been a lot. Much of it's the same. In painting after painting, Rudolph illustrates his uncle's central conceit, going from the southern tip of Manhattan to the northern in the process. There are about a hundred of these paintings. They're executed in the same, quasi-abstract geometric style, some a little more abstract, some a little more concrete. They're sufficiently detailed for you to identify each painting's subject, and they're sufficiently stylized for you to pick up on the underlying shapes structuring each piece. There is something impressive about Rudolph's desire to show Theo's ideas playing out up and down the island—at least in theory. In reality, it's painting after painting of this building, then that building, then another building, all of them bleeding a gray-white fog that coalesces into cryptic shapes—Theo's city-avatars. One critic speculated that, if you were to place all of these canvases side by side, you'd see a vast shape—the soul of the city—forming out of them.

  Once he had completed this series, Rudolph began moving in other directions; specifically, he started to write. One of his acquaintances stapled together a bunch of mimeographed pages every other week or so that he called Dionysia: An Expression of Culture and tried to charge people a dime for. Rudolph gave him these short, one-to-two-page essays full of typos that the guy pretty much printed as is. The first one had the title "Locimancy," which I don't think is especially good Greek but which was supposed to mean "place magic." Eighteen more followed, all with the same name—the editor was the one who added a number to each to distinguish it from the previous essay. Rudolph was not what you would call a gifted prose-stylist. All that missed school came back to haunt him. He writes what we used to call "Engfish," that kind of English college freshmen tend to use when they're trying to sound smart enough for the rhetorical situation. He's positively eighteenth century in his use of capital letters. Not to mention, what he's trying to express sounds, by and large, insane.

  He spends the first couple of essays rehashing his uncle's book. Having laid out the basics of Theo's thought, Rudolph then spends three essays pointing out the flaws in those ideas. For him, there are two problems with Theo's book. One, it thinks too big. It doesn't realize that there's no need, as Rudolph puts it, "to lift our Eyes so High to witness such Grand Processes." Two, it scants artists, especially in their role as "Midwifes" of the Grand Process. Essays six through eighteen are a kind of speculative crash-course in how the artist can "Quicken" a place. They're a mix of circular logic and impossible mathematical formulae. The sentences say things like, "As they Give of themselfs to the Work, therefore shall the Work Give them back Themselfs." The math literally does not add up. I read someone who said that it's as if Rudolph is using the math symbols we know to express his own set of concepts, but my first impression was, the equations were the equivalent of Rudolph's style, attempts to make him seem smarter than he was. After all, who was going to call him on it? How many artists can do math? Or sorcery, for that matter?

  The last essay in the series is half-finished, or so the theory goes—it's even less coherent than the others. It's a warning about the ideas he's just outlined that seems to be trying to make the previous essays appear more important by stressing how dangerous they are. At the same time, Rudolph can't resist bragging about how there are places that demonstrate the truth of everything he's said and more. He warns his readers to avoid "the Crooked House" in Red Hook, and cautions against waiting alone at the Eighty-second Street subway platform.

  No one knows whether Thomas Belvedere read any or all of Rudolph's essays, but I'm willing to bet that, if Rudolph didn't send him copies with his letters, then the letters themselves expounded his ideas. What Belvedere did see was the first of Rudolph's paintings to come out of these essays, a piece Rudolph also called Locimancy. I gather the canvas is pretty big, about six feet high by eight long. On it, he painted a cross-section of the apartment he and his mother shared with her second-cousin, rearranging the space slightly so that the living room sits at the center of the picture. At the center of the center, there's a man, Rudolph's copy of da Vinci's Vitruvian Man—you know, the naked man with his arms and legs stretched out one way inside a circle, the other inside a square. Rudolph includes the circle and square with his copy, which is pretty faithful, except for the face, which he's replaced with his own. The figure is too big for the apartment; proportionally, he's a giant. Rudolph maintains the parchment color of da Vinci's drawing, inside the circle and square, so that you're looking at this reasonably cheerful mid-twentieth-century interior with a faded-yellow heart. The effect—it's as if Rudolph painted around da Vinci's original. There's one other change he makes to da Vinci. Where the figure's eyes and genitals should be, there are three black holes, as if he'd cut those sections out of the canvas.

  If you were willing to stretch the point, you could argue for similarities between a painting like this and what Magritte and Dali were doing, but Rudolph had almost nothing in common with the figures who were already dominating American art, Pollock and de Kooning, Motherwell. The only reason—well, not the only reason, but the principle reason Locimancy was included in the show where Belvedere first saw it was that the gallery owner had a thing for Rudolph's mother. Most of the contemporary reviews fail to mention the picture at all. The couple that do, dismiss it as an inexplicable lapse on the part of the organizer.

  All of which made it more interesting that Belvedere should have been so taken with the painting. With the exception of Rudolph de Castries's work, Thomas Belvedere's interests and influences are fairly conventional. He'd been infatuated with Picasso, only to reject him as too facile, unwilling to pursue any one style far enough to produce anything truly profound—the quality he claimed to find in Pollock's gigantic swirls. You get the impression, though, that Belvedere admired the quality more than he did the pieces he claimed to find them in. At heart, I think, he was uncomfortable with how far away from the figural Pollock and the other Abstract Expressionists strayed. In Rudolph's work, Belvedere must have seen not so much an answer, but the means to an answer.

  Nor did it hurt that, once Belvedere was in regular correspondence with Rudolph, Rudolph was advising him to leave the wife and kids who had become more of a burden than Belvedere had anticipated. There's nothing like being told exactly what you want to hear to cement a friendship, is there? If you
believed Viola, though, there was more to it than that. Something about Rudolph's ideas spoke to Belvedere. I guessed it was his artist-as-shaman bit—most artists are suckers for that kind of line. I also guessed that, over the summer Belvedere had spent in Huguenot, he had done his best to put Rudolph's ideas into practice.

  He would have learned how to do so in the sixth "Locimancy" essay, most of which is taken up with a diagram that sort of resembles the star you put on top of a Christmas tree—there are all these irregular points constructed in precise ratios to one another. Line A is two-thirds longer than Line B, which is three-fifths Line C, and so on. You graph this design onto the space you want to awaken—maybe I should say "into" the place. You work out all the necessary dimensions, then perform a number of gestures at each of the star's points. There's an order you're supposed to follow—first point 13, then point 3, etc.—and you're supposed to complete the ritual within twelve hours. At the end, you go to your easel—strategically positioned, of course—pick up your brush, and start painting. The gestures that are required at each of the star's thirty-one points—sip from a glass of red wine, bow to the left, the right, the earth, the heavens—were simple and repetitious enough to have the feel of the sacred. I could believe that, having gone through the entire process, you would approach your canvas like a priest approaching his altar.

  The problem with Rudolph's design is that there's no baseline. Although he tells you what relation the parts of his star must have to one another, he never specifies its proportions relative to the place it's supposed to be awakening. Do you construct it in one room, or do you use the entire building, or do you need the space around the building, too? It's completely self-referential. The "True Artist" will know what to do with the tools Rudolph has given him—which struck me as so much ass-covering. Thomas Belvedere lucked out—either that, or he was a True Artist.

  My headache, which had kept its distance for the better part of the afternoon, finally surrendered around the time I heard Roger pass the library on his way downstairs to order dinner. Funny—there was a time when the prospect of being able to order out for your meal every night would have struck me as the lap of luxury. Now, the prospect of another assortment of aluminum-foil dishes and white cardboard boxes seemed almost unbearably depressing. I left the library and hurried after Roger, but he was gone. He'd taken the car and gone to place his order in person. For a moment, I considered returning to the second floor to read more about Rudolph, then decided I had had enough of his over-heated prose for the time being. Instead, I poured myself a glass of white wine and went outside to sit on the front step and drink it.

  The evening was hot, the air tropically humid. Walking out the front door was like walking into a cloud of steam. As I passed through the doorway, there was another sensation—as if the doorway had been stretched tight with some kind of gauze. It was like when you're out walking and you blunder into a spiderweb. I brushed my arms, neck. There was nothing on them. The feeling that there was, however, that there was something all over me, persisted. More weirdness, I thought, terrific. The sensation wasn't as bad as it sounds—not quite—the heat and humidity definitely had the edge—but it wasn't pleasant, either. If I'd been claustrophobic, this would have been worse. As it was, I was mostly annoyed. No doubt the experience would cease the moment I walked back into the house, but I had come out here to sit and enjoy my drink, and by God, that was what I intended to do. I plopped myself down and raised the glass to my lips. I could still taste the wine, at least.

  There was one last wrinkle to Rudolph de Castries's story, and as the sweat raised itself through what now felt like a film all over me, I considered it. At the very end, about a month before he dropped dead, Rudolph made a series of strange—but given his theories, potentially significant—remarks. Most of them were to random strangers met at this or that party; although a couple were to a guy he was working with at a laundry. Only one was recorded reasonably soon after he spoke it—the young woman to whom Rudolph said, "Mirrors hold more than reflections. There are corners in them around which we do not—we dare not—see," recorded his remark in a letter to a friend the same night, so her report is considered fairly accurate. None of the others saw the light of day for almost another two decades, when the first biography was being researched, and questions remain about their authenticity. That said, apparently Rudolph told several people that he had not understood his own ideas. His co-worker from the laundry claimed Rudolph spent weeks talking about hidden folds and creases that concealed "relentless depths." That was Rudolph's word, the co-worker said, "relentless." It sounded pretty Freudian to me, and I was half-inclined to believe the critic who'd speculated that Rudolph's remarks hinted at an illicit relationship with his mother's second cousin. Other critics didn't give the statements nearly as much credence. Some wrote them off as essentially invented; while those who did accept them dismissed them as the products of a brain severely damaged by alcohol.

  It was those corners, those folds and creases and their depths, that concerned me as I drank my wine. Assuming you could believe the reports, in the weeks leading up to his death, Rudolph had learned something about his ideas. For reasons unknown, he'd seen them in a different light, understood new implications to them. If he'd been speaking metaphorically, that could have been the significance of the corners and creases, tropes for his own blindspots to his theories. The question I was interested in was, What if he hadn't been talking in code? What if what you saw was what you got?

  I found it hard to answer that question, however, because the sensation of something clinging to my skin was worsening. It had crept up on me as I was thinking. It was as if I were wrapped in fine plastic, my sweat pooling under it, my fingers cupping the wineglass through it. The feeling extended to my mouth—the tang of the wine seemed mixed with another taste, as if my teeth and tongue were coated with an oily film—even my eyes saw the lawn and street as if through a pair of dirty contacts. Everything had acquired a slight haze. Although I'd already done so without result, I wiped my hand on my arm, almost expecting to watch a layer of something like cling-film tear and come off on my fingers. Nothing. I could breathe, hear—though air and sound seemed delayed, as if they were coming from farther away.

  The house—my awareness of the house, the thousand threads that wove my nerves into its walls and windows, had changed. Instead of that sense of the house just beyond the edges of my skin, now it seemed to press against me.

  Not panicking was taking more of an effort. Everything in front of me, grass, trees, road, the house across the road, was surrounded by haze—a kind of mist shot through with rainbow streaks—the way things are when you're trying to see through a window that hasn't been cleaned properly. My skin was growing hot—hotter, as if the substance coating it were heating. Breathing was harder. The air seemed thick, almost liquid. Wineglass in hand, I struggled to my feet and walked down the front steps and out across the yard.

  I know. Why did I go that way? Why not turn around and run back inside? I don't know. That was just the direction my feet took me. No, that isn't right. It was more a case of when I stood, I had a momentary impression of—of weight, of tremendous heaviness on the other side of the membrane—inside the house. It was unlike anything I'd experienced before, and standing on the front step seemed like standing much too close to it.

  By the time I'd put fifty feet between myself and the front steps, I was sucking in air like an asthmatic in the middle of a bad attack. My skin was roasting, as if a great heat-lamp had been focused on me. And the haze—the haze had become clouds of color washing over the scene in front of me. The effect was most pronounced around the house, from which rivers, waterfalls, geysers of color streamed out. Scraps of rainbow chased one another up the walls, over the doors, across the windows. There was something else on the windows—there and gone so fast the only way to see it was to remember and slow down the memory. There, on the front parlor windows, Roger's face had been frozen in anger, the way it had been when
he'd cursed Ted. There, on the living room windows, had been Ted, in Afghan dress, carrying his rifle, walking down a dark street. The windows to the library had shown streets I didn't recognize, what might have been desert landscapes. The third-floor windows—I couldn't remember—my eyes traveled up the house, trying to catch another glimpse, and I saw the mountains.

  Towering over the house, the yard, steep, grooved slopes rising to stark crests—I'm not much good at estimating heights, but these things were huge. They weren't like the Ridge. These were more like the Catskills, enormous stone pyramids worn down by the millennia. With all the color loose in the air, it was hard to tell their exact shade, but I thought it was sand-colored, tawny. They were—you know how it is with mountains. They're there. They hold their space the way nothing else does—well, maybe the ocean. The late-afternoon sun cast shadows left to right across their slopes, highlighting the snow dusting their summits. I didn't forget to breathe, but for a long moment, that ever-more-difficult process was far away. I could feel them—not the same way I could the house—these were too much for one person to take in like that—but enough to know that they were alive. Or something—they were full of energy, humming with it like great dynamos. Whether they were mountains that were living, or something else that appeared as mountains, I couldn't say, but my apprehension that they were more than rock was completely wonderful and utterly terrifying. It was the feeling I'd had on that long-ago whale watch with my dad, only magnified ten times, fifty times. I couldn't run from them—where was there to run from things like this? I half-felt I should fall down and hide my head in reverence.