76 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER29, 2021
does the Holocaust have to do with
moving here?”
“Nothing,” Jack said. “It’s just a bad
joke.”
Valente paused and frowned like a
mime feigning thought. “When the
Gestapo came to Picasso’s studio during
the Occupation, there was a photo of
‘Guernica’ lying around. They asked
him, ‘Did you do this?’ and he said, ‘No,
you did!’”
Jack looked at him. “Is that true?”
Valente shrugged. “I don’t know.
That’s what they say. Picasso said art
is a lie that makes us see the truth.”
Jack didn’t respond, and Valente
closed his eyes. In the distance, the sun-
light caught a window on the toolshed
and burned a liquid, blinding gold.
Valente’s face had folds and pleats like
an accordion. He’s aged more than the
rest of us, Jack thought.
“There’s a water tower in Rock
Basin,” Valente said, “just like in Trevi.”
His eyes were still closed as he spoke.
“For years, Rope Man and I talked about
climbing up one night and painting it.
Probably we were going to paint some
bullshit—something lewd, you know.
But now I think I’d just paint big let-
ters that say ‘You are free.’”
The wrens made their evening call—
jiminy, jiminy, jiminy.
“Rope Man?” Jack said.
“Friend from high school.” Valente
opened his eyes. “We called him Rope
Man because he had this Polish last name
no one could pronounce. It
started with ‘rope.’”
“What’s Rope Man up
to now?”
“He’s dead.” Valente’s
voice was flat and he stared
straight ahead at the chicken
coop with its busted-up lath
buried in honeysuckle.
“What happened?”
For a second, Jack thought
he saw a savage fire in Va-
lente’s eyes, then the fire blinked, settling
into mildness, like a star.
“When van Gogh’s cousin wouldn’t
marry him, he put his hand in a lamp
f lame,” Valente said. “Her family
wouldn’t let him see her, and he
said, ‘Let me see her for as long as I
can keep my hand in the f lame.’ I
guess it was something like that with
Rope Man.”
“I don’t know what that means,” Jack
said.
Valente picked at the grass where
his fingers hung. “Nobody noticed he
was burning up.”
“And what happened with van
Gogh?”
“They blew out the lamp,” Valente
said. The sun had gone mostly behind
the hill. A single ray wavered above the
ridge like a filament of glass. “Van Gogh
didn’t kill himself, you know. Everyone
thinks he did, but it was some teen-
agers that liked to prank him. They
shot him—probably by accident.”
“I never heard that.”
“Look it up.”
Jack closed his eyes. A faint residue
of red or orange seeped through his
eyelids. “Tell me more about van Gogh,”
he said.
And Valente spoke, of wheat fields
and flowers and crows and turbulent
skies, of painting loneliness and sorrow
and anguish, of moments when the veil
of time and of inevitability (to use the
painter’s own words) seems to open for
the blink of an eye, of boats in storms,
and boats pulling other boats—towing
them, tugging them—and how one
boat sometimes pulls another, while
that second, helpless boat prepares to
reverse roles someday and pull the first
boat through a storm, or a time of spe-
cial need. Valente described an impos-
sible person, a scoundrel, a tramp, dif-
ficult and gruff, prone to fighting,
taking up with prostitutes,
rejected by everyone, repul-
sive even to his parents, un-
lovable, homeless, driven
by inexpressible love, or love
that was expressible only in
a particular form that did
not allow it to be shared
between two people, and
that was therefore cursed,
a love that was refused
while he was alive, and only,
when this cretin, this parasite, offen-
sive to every standard of good taste, was
gone, did everyone see how much they
did want his peculiar, displaced, and
overripe love, and the same respectable
people who had found him so revolt-
ing now clutched him to their breast
with the fiercest longing, because a cer-
tain intensity of color reminded them,
or so Valente said in his own way, ofintimations of such intensity in mo-
ments of their own that they had for-
gotten or suppressed.J
ack had intended to get past the hol-
low, but he found that he couldn’t.
At night, before falling asleep, or hav-
ing awoken to darkness, he felt the
eerie, mystical nearness of it, and this
unsettled him. He started, without re-
alizing it at first, to orient himself in
the house and on the property in rela-
tion to the hollow. “Like Mecca, or Je-
rusalem,” he said, chuckling to himself
as if the joke would rob the hollow of
its power. Inspecting the walls, he found
no crack or crease; the paint and plas-
ter ran flawlessly to the corners, the
ceiling, the baseboards—there was no
easy way in. He began to feel angry
with the sellers. Surely they had known
about this secret hollow and said noth-
ing. Maybe they had even closed it up.
Spring break ended, and Valente
returned to coaching. Jack saw less of
him. Jack did not miss seeing him, but
not seeing anyone presented its own
problem; namely, what to do with him-
self. He felt a great restlessness grow-
ing inside him, something vast and
formless. He lay in the sunlit grass on
the hill, watching the leaves migrate
in the breeze. The fields and orchards
in the distance appeared overexposed,
gilded on one side with seams of light.
The days were blending together into
one composite day. He was drinking too
much, but what else was there to do?
He kept thinking about a concert in the
city that he and Sophie had gone to
over the holidays. It was at a church up-
town, somewhere on the East Side. Dark,
heavy stones composed the walls and
vault of the church—an intimate, tall,
solid space. He no longer remembered
what the concert was—a mixed pro-
gram of canonical and newer pieces,
played by a spare, shifting ensemble.
The church was small, and attendance
was sparse. What he remembered was
the sound of trucks, garbage trucks, on
the street outside, heavy, vibrating, ac-
celerating, braking, letting out hisses of
compressed air, and the complaints of
their straining engines as they stopped
and started along their route. The sound
of the trucks, low and sonorous through
the stone walls, had made the music
more beautiful somehow, accentuating