Excerpt from the book Transgressions

"Benjamin"

On his flight to the West Coast, lunch has just been served (Benjamin, who is ninety, has been quick to ask for the last slice of pizza, leaving the more abundant grizzled chicken salad to his seatmate), and the intercom is announcing that all uneaten food items should be set aside for the homeless.

The intercom adds, with unction, that this airline has instituted a new program, to cut down on waste and serve the less fortunate; with the side of his fork, Benjamin mashes his uneaten triangle of dark-berried pie.

"Please don't give this to the homeless," he says as he hands his tray to the flight attendant, whom in his mind he still calls a stewardess.

She glances at the mashed pie, makes a smile. "Oh, Mr. Price! I was just reading about your mural in that homeless center—where is it?"

"Detroit." He sets his lips. Now his seatmate is listening. "They have a big wall there. I had something I wanted to paint on a big wall." He does not treat the two women to a description of the squabble that followed when the center people refused to string a rope in front of his mural. Benjamin can imagine the effect of dispossessed shoulders and hands on his chalky rendition of the famous naked picnic, featuring local magnates—which had caused less stir than he had anticipated.

The flight attendant, clucking her refusal to be dismayed, moves on; she knows her celebrities, their disposition to the difficult. Nothing Benjamin can say or do, short of murder, will dim the glow she takes away from the encounter.

Benjamin's seatmate, a blond woman wearing snail-shaped gold earrings (she laid aside a roll, he's noticed, for the dispensation) glances at him uneasily.

"I don't believe in the poor," he says in his high, ratcheting voice. "I've always been poor—until very recently; it's a decent, serviceable condition. ‘The poor are always with you,'" he quotes, betting she won't get it. "Why should we work against the Gospels?"

The woman looks at him sheepishly, as though she has a moral responsibility to upbraid him but can't think of the necessary words. Possibly she is sheepish because she doesn't recognize him. "My mother used to volunteer in a shelter," she offers.

"Either she was a fool or she had nothing better to do or both."

She turns the fixed jaw of pained dismay and looks determinedly at her magazine.

Missing her response, Benjamin remembers the years when Ida sat beside him and fended off the not-always unwelcome advances of strangers. Sometimes he'd take an aisle seat, leaving Ida the window, in order to engage in unauthorized talk with the person across the way. Especially if it was a woman. Ida was robust and charmless, a personal assistant addicted to the personal (she cleaned his ears with Q-tips, bought his boxer shorts in packages of six) who never aspired to the status such intimacy presumably confers. Which was why he'd kept her for eleven years until, tearful over her wasted youth, she insisted on departing; at that point Benjamin decided to make do with a grad student two afternoons a week.

In spite of all the commissions, his mail is decreasing, his phone rings less, and he is beginning to suspect his spectacular age is losing its ability to draw attention to his work. But he has all the mechanisms of avoidance in place: the answering machine, the fax, the computer with its self-satisfied digestion of unwanted data. He plans never to figure that one out.

Now the intercom announces that they are about to land in Los Angeles. His seatmate takes two styrofoam cups from her enormous bag and sticks the open ends over her ears. All the way down to the ground, Benjamin watches as she shrinks into herself, closing her eyes and hunkering over her knees.

"What's with the cups?" he asks when they're taxying and she's taken them down.

"I have earaches," she tells him with a dismissive shrug. "Terrible earaches! This way I create a vacuum."

Now the jetway is rolling out like a serpent bound to devour its prey and Benjamin feels the shortness of time.

"But what about the air already inside the cups?" he asks. When she looks startled, he explains, "You can't suck the air out that's already in there, so how can you create a vacuum?"

She continues to look distressed, so Benjamin whips out his salvaged paper napkin and begins to draw one of her ears, in ink. The ear is clutching its earring. He signs the drawing, then passes it to her; she takes it gingerly, between two fingers, as though it might be infected. "Send that to Sotheby's if you're ever short of money."

"I thought you were somebody," she says, folding the drawing carefully and stowing it in a zippered compartment of her bag.

Then Benjamin follows her out of the plane, noting with pleasure that her butt is more shapely than her face has led him to expect.

She disappears into the crowd as the usual contingent comes forward to meet him. Benjamin leans away from the introductions, trying not to hear. Lately he's let the word go round that he's going deaf, yet refuses to wear one of those navel-colored hearing aids. In fact his hearing, like his eyesight, is uncomfortably keen.

They herd him through collecting his baggage and into a car.

He notices that the girl driving has a pretty neck, tendrilled with dark hair. From the back seat (he has insisted on sitting there, claiming it makes him feel safer), he traces each tendril with his forefinger.

The girl reaches up as though to slap a fly; her boss, the museum director, shakes his head and she drops her hand. Benjamin can tell from the set of her shoulders that she is expecting the attention to go on—they'll be saying he's senile, next, giving him still more room to play—but he has become absorbed in watching the light change in the oily water running down the gutters. Apparently it has just stopped raining.

He finds the obscure tablet that opens the window and breathes the moist, fetid air. "I love the sheer unhealthiness of cities," he says, and has to put up with the museum director's comfortable chuckle.

Years ago, in his early eighties, with his first fame, his first money, Benjamin tried to explain that what he said, no matter how outrageous, was not said for effect. It made no difference how he scowled, or growled. He has become an old, harmless painter of great and safe distinction, a kind of greeting card, he thinks, offered to artists on the threshold of age. "Hold on a while longer and this is what you'll get."

The museum director, an affable smiling blond man, whom Benjamin would have guessed scarcely out of his twenties if his title did not confer more age, lets him out at an old downtown hotel, a rookery refurbished now that the neighborhood is becoming prosperous. "For the atmosphere," the young man explains, hoisting Benjamin's suitcase out of the trunk. "All the old Hollywood stars used to stay here." He sees Benjamin through the signing-in process and the bestowal of the card that passes for a room key while the girl waits in the car.

"I like that young girl of yours," Benjamin says as the director is ushering him into a gilded elevator.

"She's not mine," the man says, handing him his suitcase.

"Then the museum's. I'm hoping she'll be at dinner tonight."

"The whole staff will," the young man says without emphasis. They are back on the flat ground of arrangements where, Benjamin thinks as the elevator glides up, no passion or appetite ever raises its head.

In his room, he lies down on a snake-colored bedspread and stares at the painting on the wall: a vast, naked-looking melon, poised like a threat over some harmless cherries. He remembers when he was grateful for such a sale, did not even wince when the hotel asked him to hang the piece, for free; remembers going into rooms like this, dank with emptiness, smelling in those days of the last inhabitant's cigarettes, scrabbling his hand along the wall for the light switch, blinking in the glare at the bald gray or green walls. Where to put the child of his invention, the hapless orphan of an eyeless world? He falls asleep studying the strange shine on the sides of the cherries. A sort of feverish, fruity glow.

Up in time to shave, again—he lets the fact that he still needs to shave twice a day provide the meaning he needs—shower, and dress for the performance. His evening clothes, folded haphazardly, are wrinkled, and he thinks briefly of muscling the ironing board out of the closet, then abandons the notion. He likes his fluted purple dress shirt and polka-dot bow tie, and spit-polishes his patent-leather pumps with the tassels. Of course no one wears such clothes anymore, even to honorary dinners. Then he goes down to the lobby.

His old life returns as he waits in an armchair placed at an angle to a distressed-looking potted palm. In his twenties, he was night clerk in a hotel such as this one was a few years ago: plunging down into flophousehood. He'd been glad for the job, and turned it into a playground for his drawings of the inhabitants, which he kept on a sketchpad on his knees.

Then one night a distraught-looking man signed in late, and some instinct warned Benjamin of trouble; he went up to check and found smoke spiraling from under the door and the man half-conscious on his lit bed. It took a while for the local fire department to rouse its members. Meanwhile Benjamin doused the man and the bed with water from a paper cup, the only receptacle at hand. The man remained comatose, although not badly burned, and was hauled off to the local hospital; when Benjamin visited him there, a few days later, more out of curiosity—he had begun to draw him—than any regard for his welfare, the man told him with shame about the usual progression: a divorce, a job set-back, the alienation of some minor children.

Well, it is always the same in the end, Benjamin thinks as his host came through the entrance with a carnation in his buttonhole and another, the old painter knows, in the white box he is carrying; in the end heartbreak, even death, boils down to a few inevitable details: desertion, disappointment, all on the human scale.

He allows the young man to fasten the carnation in his buttonhole, noticing that his is red while the director's is white. "Red as the blood in my veins," he jokes as the young man holds open the door and scoops his hand under his elbow to help him into the car, then feels, unexpectedly, foolish: it is all too obvious. But the young man has scarcely heard and feels no need to reply. This time, he is driving.

In the vast hotel ballroom—another hotel; this time, one of a noxious chain—Benjamin looks around for the girl but does not see her at first. He pantomimes extreme deafness and distraction, holding his hand to his ear as a bevy of museum supporters is led forward and introduced.

They are all middle-aged women, handsomely dressed, and he knows how vital their support is to the museum, and how heavily their support depends on the success of events like this one. He believes these women have forgotten what it was like to ward off a man's advances, and he feels for them, briefly, and wishes that aging flesh, no matter how well-preserved, did not ignite his uncontrollable disgust. He is a man of his times, after all.

Then he sees the girl in a becoming black cocktail dress, seated at the other end of the table—she is minor personnel, after all, and it would have taken a cosmopolitan imagination to place her near him. He waves his napkin and smiles, striking his dinner companion dumb; she has been carrying on about a trip somewhere, the art she has seen and absorbed, Benjamin imagines, as a great sea-going turtle absorbs the green contents of a wave. She is handsome as a sea-turtle, too, in her smart green scaly dress, but he is beyond being polite and fixes his eyes, instead, on the discreet hint of bare breast the girl is displaying in her decolletage. She wears one of the official white carnations, pinned where it will draw attention to her charms.

She's conscious, then, he thinks with pleasure, of what her femininity can do, or could do, given the proper stage, which she assuredly lacks, and he is off at once, seeing her in silk lounging pajamas on the veranda of some gracious Tuscan villa, or striding out into the foam on a Caribbean beach. In his earlier days, women went for that kind of exchange, knowing that the less than satisfactory lover was likely to be replaced with the more satisfactory at a plumy resort; accepting, he thinks, even now, after all the changes, that there was a fairness in spreading one's beautiful and accommodating legs in return for opportunities that were not wholly—never wholly—financial. But a young girl would be ashamed to consider that, now.

His companion has struck up her talk again—it appears that Rome, and Paris, too, are still to be got through—and he leans toward her with the transparent fatigue of the elderly. She sees this at once and pats his shoulder consolingly. They are both in the same shallow canoe, hurrying down a darkening river. But he will reach the end long before she.

He notices the big diamond on her finger, and interrupts her soliloquy to ask about its purchaser.

While she details the well-memorized glories of her marriage, ended by the husband's death long enough ago to allow for the powers of reinvention, Benjamin doesn't take his eyes off the young girl. The swine on either side have not even bothered to notice her, being taken up with more important if less comely partners. Benjamin swallows his nearly-raw steak, bit by bit, and imagines opportunities.

The after-dinner toasts pass rapidly and he is only required to nod and smile, not to respond—another advantage of his age. It is presumed that he is exhausted from the long flight and the change in time, which in fact he has scarcely noticed. He allows waves of congratulation to pass over him while he drinks his coffee, well-laced with sugar and heavy cream. He has scornfully turned down someone's kindly suggestion that he might prefer decaf.

Now he feels his heart pounding, as it will do in spite of all his efforts to avoid noticing it, at the end of the day, after a lot of food and drink. (The champagne is a good French vintage and he has not stopped at his usual two glasses, even rising to clink and say something foolish about the honor.) As he pushes his chair back from the table, he feels his heart leaping like a demon under his purple shirt and stops to steady the leap with his palm.

Immediately the young director has his hand under his elbow and is suggesting a swift trip back to the rookery, and rest.

Benjamin shakes him off and makes a beeline across the room to the girl, chatting colorlessly with another woman.

She feels his approach as one might feel, Benjamin thinks, the approach of a heat-sensitive missile and turns, her hand already up, palm out. He takes that as the greeting it is not and places his own palm against hers. How warm her skin is, how limpid.

"Drive me back to that hellish place and I'll buy you a drink," he says, hearing the thickness he hasn't felt on his tongue.

She glances at her boss, across the room, who must be nodding approval, or even insistence, then makes her manners to the various functionaries and tells Benjamin she will meet him at the front door.

Still he is not sure of her—they are slippery, these girls—and while the director is helping him into his overcoat and outlining the next day's heavy schedule, Benjamin is thinking of various face-saving devices. But then she is there, outside, sitting a little bowed in what is apparently her own car, a tiny red coupe, so low Benjamin has to double himself to get in. Once seated he straightens and fastens the belt as though he is girding on a sword.

At the click, the girl begins to drive, her pretty profile pointed forward like the figurehead on a small, stately yacht.

"I like you," he says, at once—there is no time left, in the whole world, it has run out to the last few grains in the hourglass—and without anticipating her response, he reaches over and fondles her breast. "I was admiring you all through that ghastly dinner, in that low-cut dress."

She has her instructions, and although she is not responsive, she does not shrug his hand away. He wonders, suddenly, if she is ambitious. Her black dress might suggest as much.

Then he feels her nipple harden under his fingers—ambitious, for sure; she is not wearing a bra—and crows his delight.

Of course she can't help it, she is driving, and also under instruction of some kind. Still he lets his fingers nuzzle the stiffness, and feels, to his amazement, a corresponding liveliness in his crotch. This is so rare now as to provide another crow of delight.

He keeps his hand on her nipple as she turns and glides the car through the downtown streets. When she draws up in front of his hotel, she does not cut the motor but remains staring fixedly straight ahead. "Come upstairs with me," he says, adding, "I'm a harmless old man, there isn't much I can do."

"I doubt that," she says, still staring straight ahead.

"Well, there may be a little, with your help. Have pity on a fellow sufferer," he adds, kissing her cheek. Her skin has the texture and taste of a slightly green apricot; it will be a few years before she reaches her full bloom. At the thought of her perhaps near-virginhood, he is aware of resources at the bottom of his spine he thought long ago dried up. "It isn't so often these days I can get this, just from touching a pretty girl's breast," he says, loosening her right hand from the steering wheel and guiding it to his crotch.

To his amazement, to his eternal delight, she turns, smiling slightly, and says she will go upstairs with him.

Later, in the grim light from the bedside lamp—she has wanted the dark, but he needs to peruse her—he is unable to remain hard long enough to enter her and lies, finally, on her frail, subsiding body, sobbing. His tears fall into the hollow at the base of her neck.

"I'm a stupid old goat," he tells her later as she is dressing, and tries to think of a way to cheer her. "You'll have so many men in your life—so many accomplished, adoring lovers. You'll forget this unfortunate business right away."

"But you're a great artist," she says, pulling up her hideous panty hose. How they disfigure her hips and distort her ass as she turns around to step into her shoes.

He laughs then, at the thought that she has imagined a great artist as a great lover. "I expect you'll have another great artist," he reassures her, "one young enough to satisfy your expectations."

"You could have used your mouth," she says, with a glance.

He sees in her glance everything he has ever wanted. It is only an instant, and then she is gone, closing the door with a nurse's dispatch.

His sleep that night is both deep, and deeply disturbed. In the morning, in spite of a fierce headache, he goes out into the street to look for a fancy jeweler, but the neighborhood is only slowly emerging from decades of decay and the shop he finds specializes in pawn.

He goes in, but the grimy rhinestones and battered turquoise express a despair that sends him fleeing.

Then it is time for the luncheon, and the unveiling of his painting.

Somehow he makes it through the smoked salmon and capers, through the vichyssoise and crab cakes; he is waiting to see if the girl will reappear. But this is a select group of big donors, and she is not high enough on the totem pole to be included.

Then, staggering a little from the wine and the coffee, he is escorted into the throne room, as it were, of the museum: the glacial marble gallery where his painting is hanging, hidden under a piece of golden damask.

He manages not to hear a word that is spoken and to fend off the looks of concern that are beginning to wing his way; he knows he is very pale, and he wipes his forehead on his sleeve. His perspiration feels cold as it dries, a clamminess that alarms him. But he will make it through, somehow; the girl is standing at the edge of the group. He is able to notice her Chanel knock-off, her neat navy bow.

Then a heavy gold tassel is placed in his hand, and he knows he must pull. He doubts that he has the strength, but the gold curtain is flimsily attached and comes down with a single tug.

And there it is, the painting of his prime.

First, he is shocked by the display of mastery—the fireworks of the painting itself—as thought (and this he would prefer not to believe) he has never until now believed in his ability. The painting dazzles him as, apparently, it dazzles the others; there is a moment of silence, and then a gasp. He feels his own breath filling out the gasp and says, under his breath, "How did I know that much about how to...?"

Someone asks, avidly, for the end of the sentence, but he is beyond finding it. The maze of the past is winding its web around him—the jeweled streets of his youth spun now to spidery gold.

He steps closer, peers. The others draw in. He realizes for the first time that he can't see as clearly as he supposed; the vermillions and greiges swim as the oily water in the gutters swam on the drive from the airport.

He takes another step and realizes his nose is only inches from the painting's surface.

Now someone is at his elbow, subtly resisting his forward lunge. But he shakes the fellow off—is it the blond young director?—and closes the gap.

His eyes float across the surface of the painting which he has not seen or thought much about in thirty years, and he relishes each detail, each successful brush stroke, as though a fundamental doubt about his life is being resolved.

But when he steps back, finally—and he senses a sort of relief blooming around him, knows his reputation as a wrecker has preceded him and at least one person has feared he will actually harm his own work—he sees the painting as a whole, and whispers, "She never wanted me to paint her."

Now the girl is nearby—he can smell her light lemony fragrance—and he turns blindly in her direction. "She told me if I painted her, it would be the end," he says. "I didn't care much—I wanted the painting. I wanted the painting a good deal more than I wanted her, even at the beginning," he admits, with a dry laugh. "I don't think she knew that."

"I expect she did," the girl says, cupping his elbow.

He would like to shake off her unneeded support but cannot summon the strength. His elbow squats like a toad in her warm palm. He continues to examine the portrait, noting the details of the gilded lace fichu—Madeleine had insisted, once she'd finally agreed to the sitting, on dressing herself as a turn-of-the-century Philadelphia heiress—the sparkler attached to the red velvet over her small breast. Seeing that, he shapes his crabbed hand to the memory of that breast, its responsive nipple. Even when she was sobbing, or excoriating him for some imagined or real misbehavior, he could rouse her nipple with a single touch. "I liked her breasts," he tells the girl—the other people seem to have drawn away, or else he is simply, now, freed of being aware of them. "Her breasts were the best things about her."

"Were they," the girls says.

"Her breasts, and her hair," Benjamin goes on, squinting through the reeling darkness at Madeleine's black, piled hair. A stray curl is arranged, carefully, over her temple. He can't see her face—that wistful smile; her features are, mercifully, blotted out by a flesh-colored cloud. "And she had nice skin. Dead and gone these many years.

"These are pearls that were her eyes," he says, looking at the dazzler that tops her puffed hair; a sumptuous diamond, as large as an egg yolk. "She was very proud of that diamond," he says. "Her second husband. I heard she kept it, after the divorce. She was between the marriages when I met her," he adds.

"What was her name?"

As he turns to answer her—proud that he remembers, proud, that he has known her name all his life—Benjamin feels something tear. It is as though the fabric that has bound him tightly for so many years has at last given way. He hears the rent, feels something entering.

"Madeleine," he says, hoarding his breath so that he can say more. For he knows what must come next: he must tell the girl how he looked for a jewel, for her. He must ask her name, so he can remember.