Winter light is pale and sharp, adding a definitive edge to the profile of a stranger. The light is tinted with time and emotion even though to some it might just be the color of the stain glass sunset (sunrise?) hung in the window of the coffeehouse. The stranger is the son of my favorite professor. She and I spoke once or twice every month since I graduated. A lot of years to stay in touch. I was expecting to hear from her again, having already had a early-month exchange... instead I hear from him. She never told me she had cancer. She never told me her estate would pay off my school loans. And now her son has flown three thousand miles to tell me he hates me.
Richard (let's call him Richard) is all pressed linens, polished buttons, expensive shoes. He is a hard worker in the sense of hours and stress and mergers. His hands are long and tapered and groomed and graceless. He does not have his father's hands. Those large, open, welcome hands that met mine only once. They were callused and paint-speckled, his fingerprints always in relief from acrylics, from charcoals, from life. Nor does Richard have his mother's hands -- expressive, expansive, ethereal. He is a hybrid from both but of neither.
"When my father died, I thought my mother and I would finally connect. He always took up so much room in her life."
Richard's coffee is cold now, crude oil in his mug, but still it is warmer than his eyes as they pin me to my chair. I imagine that everyone in coffeehouse is wondering and watching to see if and when he'll leap across the table and kill me.
"We... she... would finally see our shared love of business. Our common ground."
I feel physical pain in my chest that a person -- an only child, an only son -- might know his own mother so little. Professor Montgomery cared more about pocket lint than about commerce of any kind. She believed in barter and trade and art being free. She taught and ran a gallery because of pure passion. Her all-consuming love of painting, raw, wild, explosive, just like she was. Richard is angry I was named in his mother's will. Richard is angry because he was only twenty-four when my only New York gallery show opened in his mother's gallery and the central piece was a woman he wanted to own but obviously did not even know.
"But she was just as gone... distant... absent. Maybe more then, than ever before. I tried to engage her in my graduate work but her... interest... was obviously held elsewhere."
I look past Richard's face. It is most likely a handsome face -- both Mr. and Professor Montgomery were handsome -- but not today. He cannot seem to uncurl his lips to cover his bared teeth. His snarl is almost stage dramatic. He seems incapable of stilling the vein throbbing between eyes so narrowed, only the pupils, wide and black, glint with malice.
He knows, of course. And he knows I know he knows.
I wonder, fleetingly, why Richard is so angry. Is it because of who and what I am? Who and what I was? Or is it that she wasn't in love with him instead? Why was it me -- right place, right time, right canvas, right colors -- instead of him? Doesn't Freud and Shakespeare argue that with the father dead, the son is rightful heir to his mother's heart?
"I've come here to give you this chance," Richard tells me. It is not an offer. "This is your chance to make so many wrongs right."
Richard leans back in his chair. His expression is neither hopeful or grateful. It is entitled. It is spiteful. It is resentful.
I think of Professor Montgomery. I think of how she looked in class and out on the town at a gallery not her own. I think of her standing in front of a piece she has never seen before. Her first emotions and responses and reactions bursting. I think of her face, lips parted, cheeks flushed, brows knit with the beauty of it all, with the beauty of each stroke so extreme they were almost too much for her to bear.
I painted only 5x5 back then. Wide and high. She was barely an inch taller than the canvas. She would look at my works in progress and trail the strokes in the thick paint, barely a quarter inch between her fingertips and the work. "It breathes," she would say. "Here is the pulse." Her reviews were like poetry of detail and technique. She could deconstruct three hundred hours of work in thirty minutes and I was a better artist because of it. Because of her.
I lean forward. Richard leans forward.
I read everything in his eyes. I realize that as much as he knew nothing of her in life, he knows no more of her in death. I wonder what happened to her journals. In his eyes I see a million things. In the pacing of his breath. His choice of cologne. He is consumed with his own thoughts.
"The most powerful thing one person can say to another..." I murmur, almost a whisper. His eyes burn cold. I continue, "More powerful than I love you... or I'll wait for you... or I'll never forget you...."
His left eye twitches.
"Even more powerful than I'm sorry...." And I stand up. Abruptly. Reined in. I look down at him without pity and without remorse. I am done wasting this day that God gave me. This day that started with his phone call. With the drive to the airport where I shook his hand, not understanding, and without letting go he told me so bluntly, 'My mother died Monday.' I am done sitting in shock and pain. I want to be walking in a sculpture garden. I want to be in a quiet gallery. I want to be somewhere remembering my friend. Anywhere but here worshiping at the alter of this monument of self-importance. I tell him, "I forgive you."
Richard jerks, startled. But not nearly as startled as when I add, "And so does Katrina."
I am almost to the door when he shakes off his shock and barks, "My mother's name was Kathrine!"
I don't bother to look back. "That's what you think."
