have permitted him the one strike. In-
stead, he just said, “You really believe
those numbers?” At times he felt so
clear about his rightness and other
people’s dishonesty that he could
scarcely breathe.
He and Valente remembered the
aftermath of Jonah’s expulsion differ-
ently as well. Valente seemed to believe
that some sort of popular movement
had arisen to reinstate him. Jack re-
called nothing of the sort. He remem-
bered jokes about Valente, and the sense,
if not the outright suggestion, that it
was just as well, what had happened,
since there was clearly something off
about their former classmate. Mythol-
ogies about Valente sprang up in his
absence, as predictable as they were un-
likely, but mostly he was forgotten.
Jack and Valente were sitting out-
side under a pergola heavy with potato
vine and clematis. Jack had built a fire
in the fire pit, and the wood crackled
and sparked, dashing the flowers and
vines in a shifting light. Valente said
that he was rereading his favorite bi-
ography of van Gogh, and that the art-
ist, who claimed to find the darkness
more colorful and vivid than the day,
had painted at night with lighted can-
dles in the brim of his straw hat. “A
great fire burns in me, but no one stops
to warm himself,” he recited. “They
pass by and see only the wisps of smoke.”
That was van Gogh. Valente leaned
back and tilted his head to the sky. He
had lost bulk since college and now
was almost thin, carved in intense re-
lief. The light and shadow accentuated
the bones and hollows of his face. He
told Jack he was saving up for a sum-
mer program in France, a painting
course. Not the usual bullshit, he said.
You studied with some real masters.
And they took you to all the famous
spots: Auvers, Arles, Saint-Rémy. But
it was expensive, and he couldn’t save
enough unless he lived with his mom.
Was he showing work? Jack wanted to
know. There was a café in Rock Basin,
Valente said. It wasn’t much, but it had
a little gallery and he had some work
up there. He told Jack that van Gogh’s
first public exhibition had been in the
window of an art supplier, a man he
owed money to in The Hague. Van
Gogh talked the guy into putting up a
few of his paintings; if they sold, he
said, he would use the money to pay
off the debt. Well, they didn’t sell, and
the dealers who saw them in the win-
dow didn’t like them, either. Valente
laughed. “It just shows you,” he said,
smiling at nothing but the dark. “Ev-
eryone has to start somewhere.”“
D
ude, what’s in the middle of your
house?”
This was how Valente greeted Jack
on his third visit.
Jack handed him a beer and retrieved
another for himself from the fridge.
“What do you mean, the middle?”
Valente explained that he had awo-
ken in the night with a strange intu-
ition that there was something wrong
with Jack’s house. “I kept walking around
it in my head. Like circling the down-
stairs. Then I realized there’s an area
that’s not part of any room.”
Jack shook his head; he didn’t un-
derstand. Valente said he would show
him and led Jack to the closed-off sec-
tion of the house, demonstrating how,
approaching it from any of the six ad-
joining rooms, you wouldn’t notice any-
thing odd and might even confuse it
for part of the stair column. It was
smaller than a room and could, he con-
jectured, be a sealed-in linen closet or
pantry, or perhaps a disused chimney
shaft—though when they walked above
and below the area on the second floorand in the basement, no vertical ele-
ment carried through.
Valente asked Jack for a tape mea-
sure and a pen and paper and set about
sketching a rough floor plan. He drew
with surprising efficiency and ease. Jack
watched him. The low sun barrelled
through the west-facing windows, pen-
etrating the colored glass jars along the
windowsill and painting forms like wa-
tercolor blotches on the wall. Valente
guessed that the sealed-off area wasn’t
much bigger than three feet by six. To
know more, he’d have to go through
the wall. But Jack had just finished re-
painting the walls. So there was a hol-
low, so what?
They moved out into the warm,
silken dusk. A golden light crested the
hill, attaching to the drifts of pollen
and follicles of grass flower that rose
and trembled in the air. Valente gazed
into the setting sun.
He spoke at times in a way that made
Jack think of a boulder tripping down
a hill—slow, inexorable, always in dan-
ger of veering perilously off course.
“When you said moving here was
‘Sophie’s choice,’ were you quoting that
movie?” he asked.
“It’s a book,” Jack said. “Or it was a
book first.”
“About the Holocaust.”
“So they say.”
Valente squinted in perplexity. “What“There’s got to be an easier way to find a girlfriend.”