Mr. Bones by Paul Theroux Page B

praised—overpraised—the artist, a man who collected and exhibited used footwear, mainly the shoes of industrial workers.
    This is perhaps the place to say that the art she promoted always needed an explanation: you had to be educated in the circumstances of the artist’s life, the jobs, the peculiarities, the miseries. You felt no solitary aesthetic satisfaction in her gallery; instead you were possessed by a faint dizziness of bewilderment. J.M.W. Turner’s long, eccentric life is unknown to the average museumgoer, yet none of Mrs. Everest’s artists could be appreciated until an immense amount of biographical information was supplied as context, something Mrs. Everest was eager to offer, as in, “His lover weighed 175 pounds.” People gathered around the works, discussing the minutiae of the artist’s life.
    My paintings were praised for their impartial realism, but not by Mrs. Everest, who regarded my portraits and landscapes as so self-explanatory as to be banal, the instant gratification of the human face or a cluttered room. My life was not public, my wife’s weight was her secret. I often painted portraits, but my self-portraits I kept to myself. Every picture I’ve done has a history, but I intended each one as complete in itself. Why would you need to know more?
    She smiled at the idea that I was still using a paintbrush, and I suspected she believed that my work lacked depth. She could be severe with people she disapproved of. “I have a mental list of people I want to kill,” Mrs. Everest used to say, and her gargling old-actress voice made her sound more murderous. “Not die a natural death—I want to deal the fatal blow.” She would then name the wished-for victims: a talk-show host, a celebrity humanitarian, a new neighbor, an art dealer—one of her competitors, usually a woman. “Quite a long list. I keep adding to it.”
    We always encouraged her with our laughter. Isabel and I were among her best friends. In the beginning we thought it was a joke, and later it became too awkward to say anything.
    â€œI’m putting him on my list,” she’d say at a party, and friends like us always knew what she meant.
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    We were summer people on the island. When our house was finished and we moved from the mainland, someone said, “Mrs. Everest wants to meet you.” The implication was that I was lucky she was taking an interest. She was prominent on the island, where she spent the season in a house built by one of her ex-husbands—“the third or fourth,” people said. I was told that she thought highly of my work. “Thought highly” was intended as a kind of catnip. Mrs. Everest was a well-known collector, and art dealer. I had never met her. Though I had been successful in my work, I was on the periphery. Her gallery was busy, the openings always packed with people. Until then I had not been exhibited in her gallery nor invited to any parties.
    I knew she dealt in whatever was in vogue in New York City, installations, giant photographs, acrylic artifacts, rusted hubcaps, even color-coded condoms arranged in menacing mandalas. All of this was a far cry from my monoprint etchings and the portraits of, for example, the people who had worked on my house—the carpenters, electrician, plumber, roofers, plasterers—my
Workmen
series. No one mentioned these pieces; they talked about Mrs. Everest.
    Whispers tend to enlarge the unmet person. She was one of those people who was preceded by an enthusiastic prologue of buildup, someone whom everyone spoke about and quoted—quotes always delivered with force, but so unmemorable you suspect the enthusiast to be somehow in thrall to the person. “You mean you haven’t met her yet?” And then you meet the person and she never quite matches the talk, but you find so much else that no one mentioned, perhaps didn’t notice, and you wonder why, because