No Art Without Sin

Prologue

        He would have invented the aunt if he’d had to he tells her, and she laughs.

        This is four hours into the drive and they are just entering the Adirondacks, heading north. The landscape is so harshly beautiful, so starkly uninhabited, there is clearly no turning back. He would have stolen the car, he says. He would have made up the whole trip on the spot. And she says with a widening smile, Well, I’m glad you didn’t have to.

        She had been standing in front of the Ride Board dressed in overalls and a flannel shirt, as if debating between a day in the fields or floating down a river on a raft. In that first glimpse she looks like an adventure already underway. Her dark hair is curly and cut too short, turning her jaw stubborn and her nose into a dainty thumb. She is looking for her destination. Northeast. Far northeast. The map doesn’t really go that far; it stops with New York State. So she lets the label hover over the blank wastes of Ontario, and the boy says, “Oh. I wouldn’t go up there alone. It’s a wilderness.”

        Half-turning she smiles. This is all part of that moment in her life when everything is on the verge. “I’m not planning to go alone. I’m planning to find a ride.”

        “Well,” he says. “This could be your lucky day.”

        He doesn’t tell her he has only just arrived on campus. That he’s never done anything like this before. He has come halfway across the country to spend his junior year in upstate New York, not just for a new town but a new life. And here he is, suddenly, a completely different person.

         “How far are you going?” she asks.

        “All the way,” he says. “I’m visiting my aunt. She lives beyond All Expectations.”

        And now she eyes him appraisingly. “She sounds like a remarkable woman.”

        “It’s a town,” he says. “Up there.” And he lays a finger on the blank space north of the border, not so very far from hers.

        “Isn’t that something,” she says. And if there isn’t actually a smile on her lips, that certainly doesn’t detract from them.

        “And what is your destination?” he asks with a new touch of formality.

        “I’m heading beyond my wildest dreams. Do you think you can drive that far?”

        “I think maybe I can.”

        “It’s near a town called Pont-de-Galliard, Ontario. Ever hear of it?”

        And surely he can be forgiven for thinking he is simply putting himself in the hands of fate. “The very place,” he says. “I’ll introduce you to my aunt.”

        He has borrowed his landlords’ car, an ancient red Saab. He met them the week before—a brother and sister—and the town being empty, they have become friendly. “How long will you need it?” the sister asks.

        “Not long. A day or two.”

        They drive for seventeen hours through light and then darkness. They talk easily from the beginning, lapsing comfortably into silence. As the fatigue and caffeine kick in they grow punchy, laughing over nothing, and periodically they get out and stretch, walking among the trees and picnic tables as if they have never seen anything so primly beautiful. He never wants to stop. He’d have driven on forever, if he could; put everything but this behind him.

        They come to the border, and that, too, is a kind of omen—rising out of the darkness like a roadblock and then opening like a gate. The last stretch is down a gravel road winding through cedars and spruce. They follow little flashes of color painted on the tree trunks: a number 4 in a shade of blue made famous years before at the Venice Biennale with a painting called Blue Spruce Sunset—a graceful, self-absorbed woman climbing into a claw-footed tub while, through the wide window, a distant scrub tree catches the last of the light.

        “Four what?” he asks.

        “The Gang of Four. Don’t you know anything?” She speaks gaily, nervously, because they are coming to the end and because she, too, thinks her life is about to change.

        The edge of a lake. The headlights die away. Water shines pale as mercury through the black trees. Climbing out they stand vibrating from the road, the blank surface endless in all directions but one. In the middle distance the rounded hillside of an island lies perhaps a hundred yards off shore.

        There are no phones on the island. No electricity. No reception. She is glancing around. “There’s supposed to be a bell.”

        “There.”

        With a smile she reaches up and lifts a large copper cowbell from a broken branch. The night seems much too silent for such a thing. The breeze makes him aware of his skin, and then of hers—a sharp peppery scent after hours in the car. Almost without thought he steps behind her and gently slips his arms around her waist. Over the warm flannel shirt, beneath the loose bib of the overalls.

        “So that’s how it is,” she murmurs. “What are you going to do? Are you going to fuck me right here?”

        And, of course, he is undone, suddenly reduced to himself. All bluff and dry throat. “I would,” he says, “but you’re holding a cow bell.”

        “I could put it down.”

        It’s a joke, of course. Of course it is. Though the further he gets from that moment the more he wonders. The years will go by and he will imagine himself back there, again and again, replaying that moment. A different person with an entirely different life to follow.

        But now, with an instant’s hesitation that places all the burden of disappointment squarely on his timid, pounding heart, she laughs. And turning, she slips out from under his hands and rings the clanging, clamorous bell as if determined to wake an entire town….