Restoration Read Free Page A

day without having to reduce my observations to eighteen column inches of wit and jocularity. I’d had it with wit and jocularity.
    To show its gratitude for my dedicated service, the paper’s management threw a going-away/early-retirement party in my honor at a pasta restaurant out by the interstate. Attended primarily by my department’s lower-echelon support staff, I sat and listened as copy aides and summer interns lifted toasts wishing me well in my every future endeavor. Except for Isabel, who wept delivering an obscenity-laced send-off, there were no staff heavyweights in attendance. Come to think of it, even the middleweights stayed away—the writers and editors with whom I’d worked for nearly one-third of my life. At last there came thebright tapping of flatware against wineglasses, and shouts for me to speak. I shoved my chair out from under me and confronted them at last. “Thank you for your kindness,” I said, “and good luck to all of you as well. I’m moved not only by your presence here tonight but by your generous and heartfelt sentiments. I apologize for not knowing more of you by name. You seem so nice and I recognize the possibility that, given more time, you might have become dear to me. No hard feelings, anyone, but I’m off to do something altogether historic. That is, I’m off to see if I can arrange to take a nap each afternoon for the rest of my life. Isabel, I’m sorry, darling, you have every right, as you said in your very moving remarks, to hate me and wish catastrophic ruin on me…. Anyway, well, drink up everyone. And good-bye.”
    The party lasted until the restaurant closed its doors at 2:00 A.M., and then I found myself alone with Isabel in the cold backseat of a cab. I loved the taste of smoke and whiskey on her mouth, and she felt truly amazing when I slipped a hand under her skirt, but Isabel was married and all that sort of thing was behind me now. I kept hearing my father’s desperate, labored breathing and my own voice as it had sounded when I read to him. Now Isabel was sneaking her hand down my skivvies, and I forced my eyes open and pushed her to the other side of the car. “Pull over. Cabbie, pull over.”
    “We’re on the interstate,” he protested, meeting my eyes in the rearview.
    “Pull over anyway.”
    Isabel was screaming at me when I threw a fist of cash at the driver and scrambled out of the car, but she’d screamed at me before and better the verbal abuse in the short term than the specter of her soft, ravaged form in my morning bed. It took me more than an hour to walk home and once there I sat out on the front stoop and drank from a carafe of day-old coffee and waited for paper delivery. When it came I read each section from front to back, thrilled beyond telling that I was nowhere in it.
    Some days after the sale of my father’s collection I returned to the auction house to retrieve those paintings that had failed to attract buyers.There were only a few of them, and as I was loading the trunk of my car the company’s consignment director came outside and regaled me with stories about other Drysdale collectors in town. If I bothered to park one night in front of Roger Houston Ogden’s house on Broadway and look in his windows, she said, I might see paintings by the artist hanging on the walls. Other big Drysdale collectors were Gig and Mabel Jones in Lakeview. They owned sixty bayou landscapes, all of them similar in appearance, and once when a plumber finished work in their home he looked around and said, “Mr. Jones, I like your painting.” Yet another Drysdale collector, and perhaps the most renowned in the city, was someone named Lowenstein who lived in a spooky old house at Bayou Saint John. Lowenstein was a shut-in, the woman told me, and no one knew exactly how many Drysdales he owned, but estimates put the number at no less than a hundred.
    As it happened, I was living only about a mile away from the Lowenstein house, in a rented cottage