Starship Summer

FOUR

The Matt Sommers private viewing was held in the low-slung dome of the community centre on the southern headland of the bay. The mounted works of art, the knots of well-dressed connoisseurs drifting from piece to piece amid a hum of polite conversation, brought back memories of the times I had attended similar events with my wife.

As happens on these occasions, my memories seemed to refer to another, long gone life, and I half doubted that they were real. Why is it that recollections of past happiness are so evanescent, while remembrance of tragedy is so stark and real?

The exhibition consisted of two separate sets of Matt Sommers’ work: the emotion crystals for which he was famous, and his more recent paintings. These latter were no mere graphic representations of visual subjects, but abstract pieces created from memory plastic, so that the picture within the frame changed constantly, consecutive scenes linked thematically to the last.

An increased buzz of chatter heralded the arrival of the artist. He stepped into the dome flanked by two officious-looking individuals: a suited silver-haired man in his sixties who was the mayor of Magenta, and a tall woman who carried her glamour with a distant, disdainful hauteur.

Between them, Sommers appeared reassuringly ordinary: he was an artist, and had nothing to prove by power-dressing or putting on a pose. He wore baggy trousers spattered with flecks of memory plastic, and an old shirt open at the chest to reveal a mat of unkempt grey hair.

Sommers was in his early seventies, a big, strong man with an open face and curly hair gone grey. He looked around the group and nodded to friends as the woman struck her champagne glass with a stylus.

When silence descended, she said, “Magenta has been privileged for many years now to be the home of the Expansion’s finest artist, who needs no introduction from me. The Arts Bureau of Chalcedony is proud to be staging this exhibition, Matt’s first in two years, the highlight of which is the series of graphics entitled Towards Infinity. I hope you will enjoy…”

Conversation resumed; people milled around the exhibits; Sommers was surrounded by admiring guests.

The crystals were arrayed on two long tables in the centre of the dome, while the graphics were displayed on free-standing dividers around the periphery.

I took a glass of champagne from a passing waiter and looked around for a familiar face, but saw neither Hawk nor Maddie. I moved around the tables in the middle of the dome, laying hands on the emotion crystals. I was familiar with them from Vancouver, but the examples of Sommers’ work I had experienced there had been copies only, pale imitations of the real thing. Now, as I caressed crystal after crystal, vicariously experiencing a slew of emotions as raw and real as my own, I came to see why Sommers was regarded as one of the very best artists in the Expansion.

Not only did the emotions invested in each crystal hit me with a clarity that was almost shocking, but the integrity of these emotions spoke to something deep inside me. I had experienced other artists’ crystals in the past, but those had been meretricious gee-gaws, done quickly and cynically to communicate emotions as universal as love and hate, happiness and joy.

With Sommers it was different.

He had created the crystals sparingly, releasing items only when he felt he had something relevant to impart. Now I experienced the emotion of love in its true ambiguity, the consuming passion that is often tinged with anger and frustration; I felt Sommers’ anger too, but an anger that acknowledged its origin in the artist’s own self-doubt and uncertainty—the ambivalence that is at the core of all of us.

I came away from the display deeply moved; it felt as though, briefly, I had been made privy to emotions I recognised but which, until now, I’d never had the insight to acknowledge.

The visuals were another matter. They were his latest work, the centre-piece of the exhibition, and were therefore attracting much attention. However much I tried to appreciate the vast rectangular designs, I was unable to comprehend what they were attempting to communicate. After the crystals they seemed shallow, mere abstract designs with little or no emotional content—pretty patterns that most of us, with technical coaching, would have been able to produce. Which, I told myself, was the reaction of the philistine: the fault was my own, an inability to appreciate the language of the form.

Then I saw Maddie, and my pleasure at glimpsing a familiar face was soon replaced by puzzlement. She was moving along the display of crystals, pausing before each one and touching it, but only briefly. This in itself was not unusual, but what made the scene so bizarre was that she was wearing on her right hand what looked like an oven glove.

“Maddie?” I said, coming up beside her.

She beamed at me. “Mr Conway,” she said, slipping the glove into her shoulder bag.

“Less of the formality,” I said, pretending I hadn’t noticed her sleight of hand. “I’ll answer to nothing but David. What do you think of the exhibition?”

“The crystals are so… powerful, don’t you think? They put you in touch with what it is to be human.”

Someone appeared at our side. “Which is what art is all about.” It was Hawk, smiling at the catalogue he was holding up before him. “Or so it states in here. According to our illustrious Arts governor, Hermione Venus, ‘Sommers communicates his vital essence in a powerful range of unsurpassed works of genius’.”

Maddie tut-tutted. To me she said, “Hawk had a fling with Hermione last year. He’s yet to get over the experience.”

Hawk grunted. “Venus swanned into the yard looking for scrap which she wanted to turn into art. She was everything I disliked in a person: vanity, pretension and a breathtaking egotism.”

“So Hawk tried to cure her in the only way he knows.”

“That’s unfair, and you know it,” he remonstrated. “Venus threw herself at me, and I was stupid enough to respond. Which, I think, is understandable. I mean, look at her, Conway. Admit it, she’s beautiful.”

Venus stood before a nearby graphic, a contemplative finger to her lips. Six feet tall, slim as a ballerina, she had elegance and poise and—Hawk was right—an undeniable Latin beauty.

I nodded. “And she knows it.”

Maddie said, “Would you be smitten, David?”

I shook my head. “Not my type.”

Hawk defended himself. “I was low, hadn’t had an affair for months, and then Venus decides she wants to slum it with a barbarian. I mean, who am I to refuse?”

“You’re so gallant, darling,” Maddie mocked.

“What is it with you two?” I said, glancing from Hawk to Maddie.

Hawk laughed. “We love each other, really.” He stopped and looked across the dome to the bar. Hermione Venus had moved from the exhibition and had cornered Matt Sommers who was gripping a bottle of beer and trying to appear politely interested in what Venus had to say.

“Come on,” Hawk said. “Matt looks like he needs rescuing.”

As we moved to the bar, I hung back to observe the reaction of Venus to Hawk’s sudden appearance. She was laying a hand on Sommers’ sleeve with cloying familiarity, and stopped talking suddenly when she saw Hawk.

“Oh, Hawksworth. This is an awkward time—Matt and I were just discussing the possibility of an exhibition in MacIntyre.”

Sommers smiled diplomatically, but I sensed his relief at Hawk’s arrival. “It’ll do some other time, Hermione. Look, why don’t you come over to my place next week, and we’ll discuss it then?”

“Why, that’s so kind of you, Matthew. I’ll hold you to that.” And she swept away, giving Hawk an icy smile en passant.

“Just in time,” Sommers said. “I could have been here for hours. What are you drinking?”

Sommers bought a round of beers and Maddie introduced me. “A friend of ours, just moved to Magenta. David Conway.”

“Welcome to Magenta, David,” Sommers said, taking my hand in a strong grip. He spoke with a slow, confiding Alabama drawl, his every word accompanied by a smile.

I mentioned that I was from Vancouver, and that my wife had stocked some of his reproductions.

Sommers shook his head, as if in wonder. “Know something, David? I still find it hard to appreciate that people across the Expansion buy my work.” The sentiment was, I thought, genuine, and not false modesty.

“I like the crystals,” I said.

“But the graphics do nothing for you?”

I hesitated. “Well… To be honest, compared to the crystals—” He saved me further embarrassment. “I know. They’re weak. They don’t work.”

“Matt,” Maddie said, “I don’t know about that. They have something…”

“But not what I wanted to say,” Sommers went on. “They’re third rate. I wasn’t trying. I turned them out because I mistakenly thought that producing something was better than producing nothing. I should have scrapped the lot.”

“You’re too harsh on yourself,” Maddie said. Behind her, Hawk winked at me.

Sommers said, “Not harsh. Honest. I’ll ceremonially burn the graphics when the exhibition’s over. Why don’t you all come along? We’ll have a party.”

I thought I caught something in his tone, a bitterness at odds with his easy-going manner.

We chatted amongst ourselves for fifteen minutes; when Sommers asked what had brought me to Chalcedony, I made something up along the lines that I’d always wanted to visit the planet, that it had seemed a suitably quiet place to retire to.

Sommers looked up. Someone was signalling to him from the exhibition area: the Mayor, gesturing with a microphone.

“Christ,” Sommers said. “They want me to say a few words.

What’s the fascination with artists’ words, for godsake? Don’t the pieces say all there is to say?”

“The price of fame,” Hawk quipped.

“Yeah, you can keep it,” Sommers said. “Look, this place closes in an hour, but the bar upstairs is open till midnight. I’ll sneak off and meet you there at ten, okay?”

“Lovely!” Maddie said.

“Catch you later,” Sommers said, and strode off towards the gesticulating mayor.

While Matt Sommers murmured platitudes into the microphone, Hawk bought a round. Maddie was looking unhappy. “What is it?” I asked.

“Matt,” she said. “He isn’t himself lately. For as long as I’ve known him he’s been optimistic. Now he’s… I don’t know. He seems increasingly bitter these days.”

“You know artists,” Hawk said. “They go through these phases. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

“I know Matt,” Maddie replied tersely. “And I know there’s something wrong.”

She hurried from the bar and stood at the front of the gathering in the main dome, listening to what the artist was saying.

Hawk shrugged. “She lets things get to her, Conway. And there’s absolutely nothing she can do about it.”

I looked at him, expecting an explanation. He fell silent, so I said, “I’ve noticed… well, what she wears, and she never touches things with her bare hands. She even wore something like oven mitts when she touched the crystals.”

Hawk looked at me, as if assessing whether or not to tell me something. “Maddie’s special, Conway. Look, it isn’t my place to tell you about her. She once made me promise that I wouldn’t try to explain to anyone about her condition. She’ll tell you about it in her own time, believe me.”

I nodded, more than a little intrigued. “You’re close to Maddie, despite all the sparring.”

He just nodded, his eyes far away as he regarded his drink. “Very close,” he said in little more than a whisper.

Sommers wound up his speech and the guests slowly made their way from the dome. Hawk gestured over to Maddie and mimed that we should make our way upstairs. Minutes later we were ensconced in a quiet bar in the apex of the dome, with a three hundred and sixty degree view of the star-filled sky and the Ring of Tharssos streaking overhead.

Minutes later we were joined by the artist, who pantomimed wiping sweat from his brow as if in relief at a near escape.

“That damned woman grabbed me again,” he said as he sat down. “She’s insisting on staging an exhibition down at MacIntyre. I told her I’ve nothing to show.”

“What about taking this one along?” Maddie asked.

Sommers sighed. “Maddie… Look, this exhibition is a mixture of old work and crap. To be brutally frank.”

“Old work? You mean the crystals aren’t…?”

He was shaking his head. “I did them years ago—and the irony is, I rejected them then. I judged they weren’t good enough for the Paris show. I was right. They might pass muster on a backwater colony planet, but not on Earth.”

“I thought they were pretty damned powerful,” I said.

Sommers smiled. He could have said something cruel then, but merely murmured, “Thanks. But only I know when I’ve produced good work.”

Maddie insisted, “But surely it’s up to other people to judge; your public, critics…”

The artist looked frustrated. “Maddie, what do you know about the creative process?” It could have been said with rancour, but Sommers’ gentle demeanour softened the implicit criticism.

“Not much, I admit.”

Sommers took a quick swallow of whisky. I could tell by the unsteadiness of his hand that he’d had a few. “When I create,” he said, “I put everything into the process. It’s what I am. It’s the only thing that makes existence meaningful. I dig deep into myself, what I feel and think, and out it comes—and the catharsis, the sense of accomplishment, is blissful… just so long as I know in my heart that I’ve been true to myself.”

“Are you trying to say—”

“Of course I am,” he said with infinite weariness. “I’ve been turning out lies for a couple of years now. If I quantify personal satisfaction by the quality of the work I produce, then I honestly don’t know why I go on.”

Maddie shook her head, shocked. “Go on creating your art?”

He stared at her, and I was suddenly uncomfortable. “Go on living,” he said.

A silence sealed over his words, a lengthening awkwardness not one of us knew how to break.

Then Sommers said. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to get all maudlin.” “But Matt,” Maddie said, “your work is far, far better than most artists working today.”

“That doesn’t make it good. I can do far better.”

Maddie reached out, her pale hand hovering over his. But she remembered herself, and quickly withdrew. “I think you’re being needlessly harsh—” she began.

“If you think I’m lying to you, Maddie, then go on—touch me. Go on, take my hand. You’ll see then, won’t you?” There was bitterness in his voice, a challenge in his eyes.

Maddie winced and looked away.

I just stared at them both, mystified. I wondered if the alcohol had affected me, and I had missed something vital that would have made the exchange comprehensible.

Sommers whispered, “I’m sorry.”

Maddie stood up quickly and strode to the curving cover of the dome, staring up at the Ring.

“Dammit!” Sommers swore under his breath.

He banged down his empty glass and lurched from his seat. For a second I thought he was about to cross to Maddie, apologise. Instead he headed for the spiral staircase and stumbled down, gripping the central rail and almost sliding down and around.

When he was gone, I said to Hawk, “What the hell was all that about?”

Hawk shrugged. “You know artists…”

“No, I mean about Maddie touching him?”

“Ask Maddie when she’s in a better mood, David.” To Maddie he called, “Okay, Mad? Look, come and finish your drink. Matt’ll get over it. He’s going through a lean period. Next time you see him, he’ll be all smiles and optimism.”

Maddie turned and stared at us bleakly. “You really think so?”

“Sure,” Hawk said, far from convincingly.

Maddie returned to the table and took up her mug. “I don’t know. I’ve never seen him this low. You heard what he said about going on living.”

“He was exaggerating for effect. He was drunk, for chrissake.”

She looked at Hawk. “But you don’t know him as well as I do.You don’t know what happened before he came to Chalcedony.” She stopped there, as if she had said too much.

Hawk said, “What was that, Maddie?”

She shook her head, but ignored the question. She took a long swallow of gin. “Christ, I’m drunk. What a mess, what a bloody awful mess it all is! I’m going home!” And she stood unsteadily and weaved her way between the tables.

We hurried after her, down the stairs and out into the clement, scented night.

We walked along the sea-front, around the bay.

“I’ll give you a lift, Maddie,” Hawk said.

She murmured a thank you.

I said, “I’m having a house-warming in a few days. Or should that be a ship-warming? Why don’t you both come along for dinner?”

Maddie looked at me. “Would you invite Matt, too?”

“Of course, if you think he’d accept.”

“I’m sure he would.”

I watched Maddie climb into Hawk’s battered roadster: she made sure that no part of her flesh touched the seat.

The car lifted and wafted off into the night, and I hurried around the bay towards the waiting Mantis.

I was a little drunk, but not sufficiently to ward off the nightmares. When I reached home I sat in the lounge with a bottle of imported scotch and stared out across the silvered waters of the bay, admiring the view and going over the events of the evening.