In the last scene of Carla Abdala-Diggs’s musical Federal Agent, set in fictional Argos, Ohio, the local undertaker is turned away from the home of the town’s beloved mayor. A former intelligence analyst with the FBI, the mayor has recently dropped dead of an apparent heart attack. It’s a shocking turn in a complicated story in which the mayor’s history-professor daughter squeezes confessions out of him about some shady tactics the agency used in the Filiberto Ojeda Ríos case. When the undertaker arrives at the mayor’s house to collect the body, the mayor’s wife and daughter refuse him with the heart-wrenching duet “Too Soon.” Afterward, the undertaker turns his back to the door just slammed in his face, peers out at the audience, shrugs, and sings, “There’s going to be / a terrible / stench in this town.” He moves downstage with his hands in his pockets, shrugs again, and adds, “But in a few days / it’ll fade away.”
Jacob Carson saw Federal Agent in November 2019, in Minneapolis, where he was attending a three-day academic conference called “Art and Social Justice.” At the school where Carson taught in southern Vermont, the art department had what was called a “rotating chair,” which, despite its intriguing name, simply meant that each faculty member had to do a yearlong stint running things. Carson believed that the English language suffered regular abuse at the hands of academics. At the conference in Minneapolis, he’d learned, among other things, how to balance his claim to his “arts practitioner identity” with the “lived realities” of his “circumambient community.”
He knew Carla Abdala-Diggs—who wrote the book and the music for Federal Agent—to be the daughter of the painter Mason Diggs, an old college buddy. Carson and Diggs had been at The New School together in the ’80s, shared an apartment on Perry Street their senior year, and took studio classes with Herman Rose. They’d kept in contact after graduation—attended each other’s weddings, sent Christmas cards with photos of their children—but as Diggs went on to become famous, they only sporadically got in touch. When Carson saw Carla’s show, he and Diggs hadn’t spoken or written for nearly seven years. For Carson, the ball was in Diggs’s court—Carson had been the one to send the last email. If that made Carson seem petty, he imagined there were other forces at work, having to do with Diggs’s being famous and Carson’s being relatively unknown.
Carla was the only child from Diggs’s first marriage, to the fashion model Ana Abdala, which ended in divorce when Carla was only two. Carson had read in Time Out that Federal Agent was her third work, the first to receive a major production, and though it had got uniformly good reviews and a successful limited run in an East Village theater, it was evidently considered too difficult for Broadway. When Carson saw it, he understood. It was one of the most ingenious things he’d ever seen on stage, and as the house lights came up, he realized he wasn’t the only one who had been moved to tears. But a good bit of Carla’s inventiveness rested in a number of clever, wordy, rapid-fire songs on a variety of tricky subjects: the credibility of information, how our interactions with data are inevitably influenced by cognitive bias, and the role of sunlight in remote sensing. He could see why the average Broadway fan might stay away.
In his hotel room after the show, he got into bed and read Carla’s bio in Playbill, in which she was quoted as saying that her relationship with her father had been one of her main inspirations. That was all, no elaboration, and at first he thought she meant that her father had been a positive influence, which irritated him in some vaguely demoralizing way. His flight the next morning was at 8:30, and he needed to get to sleep, but after switching off the lamp, he just lay there in the dark with his eyes open, mulling over the question of inspiration, and he soon saw that the daughter’s mission in Federal Agent was to expose her father for who he really was, behind the mask of his popular public persona. Carson thought it likely that Carla, who’d grown up in her mother’s house, had struggled to really know her father. And like the beloved mayor in the show, Diggs had enjoyed a good deal of public adulation. Besides his extraordinary commercial success, he was among the first Black artists to sit on important arts foundation boards and to represent the United States in any number of international exhibitions. He’d also won a genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation.
Carson reached for his phone and called his wife, Linda, hoping she would still be awake.
“I wondered if I might hear from you tonight,” she said. “How was the show?”
“It was okay,” he said, surprising himself.
“Just okay?” she said.
“Actually, it was remarkable,” he said. “Actually, it was really good. I don’t know why I said that. Actually, I do know why I said it.”
“Hmm,” said Linda, “let me guess. The show was really good, and despite the fact that both our own kids are entirely successful professionals, it’s Mason’s child who grew up to be an artist. Music. Lights. Velvet curtains. Applause.”
“I’m ashamed to admit it,” he said, “but yes. That about sums it up.”
“Well, I don’t think you need to be ashamed,” she said. “It’s not like you did anything. You only felt something.”
“Yeah, I know,” he said. “It’s just so stupid and childish. And depressing.”
“You need to get in touch with him,” she said. “You need to go see him. It’s the only remedy.”
“You think?”
“I do. You need to see him up close.”
“Rather than from faraway,” he said. “Maybe.”
“Speaking of Mason,” she said, “do you think it’s strange that so many people around here have put a Black Lives Matter sign in their yard when there’s hardly a Black life anywhere to be found? I saw another one today, in front of Richard and Hannah’s place.”
“I guess it’s the thought that counts,” he said.
He heard her sigh, and he thought he could smell the mint-scented facial cream she usually put on at bedtime.
“Linda,” he said.
“What?”
“I love our children. And I’m proud of them. You know that, right?
“Yes,” she said. “I know that.”
In the ’90s, Diggs’s blue bowl paintings became popular with the moneyed class that bought serious art. You could hardly go to any fundraiser in a private home in Manhattan without a canvas of an enormous blue bowl looming over you. By the turn of the century, their popularity had waned somewhat, but their value continued to climb. In 2005, a bowl painting could have been found in the collections of the Whitney, the Tate, and the National Gallery, as well as in museums in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Fort Worth. Two others were among a group of works given by an American family in 2009 to the Guggenheim in Venice.
In Carson’s humble opinion, the paintings were absurdly uniform: against a variety of backgrounds—a beach, a cityscape, any number of domestic interiors, but most often merely a solid color—rested a blue bowl, so enormously in the foreground, the total effect was almost abstract. The paintings drew their titles from the shade of blue used, followed by a number: Cyan #8, Cobalt #12, Teal #4, and the like. Carson had never been able to understand how Diggs could do the same painting again and again. How could he restrict himself to this one idea? Did it reflect a lack of imagination, or a subtlety of variation that required more imagination than Carson had? In Carson’s experience, you exhausted an idea and then moved on. You had to, if for no other reason than to keep from boring yourself to death. He thought Diggs continued replicating the bowl paintings for the same reason performers kept reenacting The Phantom of the Opera night after night—because audiences continued showing up. But every time Carson found himself disparaging Diggs’s work—silently, to himself; aloud, to Linda—he was put in his place by the fact of Diggs’s renown, whereas his own fame extended only from one side of southern Vermont to the other. He regularly exhibited in local shows, and he’d sold a lot of work over the years, but his prices topped out at around $3,000. He’d never managed to earn a living as a painter, and soon, he’d turned to teaching. At this stage of the game, he was reduced to doing almost nothing but portraits. He couldn’t help judging himself against Diggs’s achievement—a tired Salieri-Mozart construct that had the power to make him feel a nebulous disappointment. And the real burr in this ugly saddle was that while he wanted to hate the bowl paintings, one after another, he found them breathtaking.
About a month after seeing Carla’s show in Minneapolis, Carson picked up the Sunday Times to find a piece in the arts section about Diggs and how he was combatting the decline of creativity that often came with old age. For starters, he’d married again—not surprisingly, a woman little more than half his age, a software heiress who headed up a “philanthropic, investment and social advocacy entity”—and fathered another child, a boy named Michael. With his new wife’s help, he was about to open a gallery and studio space complex in Harlem with the aim of supporting young artists. “Creativity comes in many guises,” he was quoted as saying, a notion that Carson later described to Linda as both mysterious and indisputable.
A few weeks later, a UPS truck came roaring up their long gravel driveway, and two young men in brown uniforms delivered to their door an unexpected cargo. Linda’s mother had died nearly two years before, but only now had the execution of the estate finally been completed. Linda, it turned out, had inherited various furnishings from the house out in Rancho Mirage: a Tabriz rug with a border of gold monkeys; 14 Raynaud-Ceralene dinner plates; a sea captain’s chest made of Japanese elm wood; and a 6′-by-8′ blue bowl painting by Mason Diggs.
They hadn’t known Linda’s mother owned Azure White #2, and when they carried it out to the barn and got it uncrated, Linda said, “Oh, my,” by which she meant that the painting was stunningly beautiful.
The almost-white bowl in the foreground, which appeared to be ironstone, featured highlights as if sunlight were striking it through a nearby window, and Diggs had further displayed his white-on-white chops by placing the bowl on a table covered with a white tablecloth and set with white china, white napkins, silverware, and crystal goblets.
Carson shook his head and said, “Okay, I’m just going to go shoot myself now.”
“Oh, don’t do that,” said Linda, laying her arm across his shoulders. “You don’t want to miss all the fun, do you?”
“What fun?” he asked.
“Well, obviously, we’re going to sell it,” she said. “I can buy a new car. You can finally retire. We’ll get a sweet little pied-à-terre in Brooklyn close to the kids. We can set up an education fund for our future grandkids and still have enough left over to give to our favorite charities. We can spend a month or two in Italy and go back to the Scrovegni Chapel … I really think you’re going to want to be around for all that.”
That night, Carson dreamed he was crossing West 72nd Street at the corner of Central Park West when he was stopped in his tracks by the sight of a blurry Mason Diggs bowl painting, swathed in bubble wrap, being maneuvered out from under the arched entrance of the Dakota. Two men wearing brown coveralls carried the canvas to the curb and started loading it into a white van. By the time he got to the back of the van, the movers, shockingly elderly, were strapping the painting to the wooden slats on one side of the cargo bed. He called up to them, “I know the artist who did that.”
Without looking up, one of the men said, “Bully for you, buddy.”
“Do you mind if I ask where it’s going?” Carson asked.
The man looked down at him with the face of a monster, gnarled and malevolent. “None of your damn business,” he said. “That’s where.”
The next morning, Carson emailed Mason and asked if he might like to meet up for a long overdue reunion.
Diggs wrote back a day later and said he was in Paris for the holidays and in London for most of January. He wouldn’t be back in New York until the beginning of February, when he would be tied up for weeks with the Harlem studio project. How would the first week of March do? He didn’t imagine he would have time to drive all the way up to Vermont, but he would love for Carson to see the brownstone he’d just bought in Fort Greene. He would grill them a couple of nice big steaks.
Carson wrote back that the first week of March would be fine, that he would love to see the new brownstone, and that he was a vegetarian.
But by the time March rolled around, the pandemic had hit, and they had to revise the plan. They decided to meet on a Monday afternoon, at Diggs’s “farm” in Columbia County. The temperature was supposed to reach 70, and Diggs said they could sit outside and watch the snow melt. Carson suggested they meet at 1:30, after lunch, so no food or drink would need be involved. On the drive down to Upstate New York, Carson listened to a podcast about a book called Great Legumes of History, in which momentous historical events—the construction of the Suez Canal, for example—were reimagined as being enacted by mung beans, jicama, Scotch broom, and the like. It all made so little sense to him that he thought he might be having a stroke. (He’d once known somebody who suffered a stroke while watching PBS NewsHour, and afterward said she knew she was having a stroke because suddenly nothing on the television made any sense.) As soon as Carson turned the podcast off, he found himself swamped by an uneasy reluctance about seeing Diggs. The shyness, if that was the right word, wasn’t about seeing him, but about being seen by him. Carson decided he would set a very low bar, a small and simple goal for the visit: he wanted not to let his mixed feelings show.
He’d been to the place once before, long ago. It was still called a farm, despite the fact that it hadn’t been used for any agricultural purpose for more than 75 years. He recalled being surprised and disappointed that it sat so close to a busy road, recalled that the barn was bigger than the old farmhouse and that he’d envied the enormous, high-vaulted barn loft that Diggs had converted into a painting studio. He and Linda had a barn, too, but a small one, more of an oversize garage really, with a stove-heated room at the back that he used as a studio.
When he arrived, on time, Diggs emerged from the barn and greeted him in the driveway. Carson quickly got his mask in place, and they bumped elbows.
“Is this some crazy dystopian shit or what?” said Diggs.
“It sure is,” said Carson, noting that he was somehow comforted by the fact that their faces were partially covered and that the obligation to hug had been eliminated.
“Look at your beautiful white hair,” said Diggs. Then, “Come.” He motioned with his whole arm, and led the way to a deck on the side of the barn.
Diggs looked much the way Carson remembered him, tall and substantial but not the least bit overweight, his hair (salt-and-pepper now) long enough to bind in a short ponytail near the crown of his head. He wore faded jeans, a burgundy cable-knit sweater, and sandals with wool socks. The air was still and loamy. As it happened, there wasn’t much snow left on the ground, only small patches beneath the arbor vitae that lined the property near the road. They sat in Adirondack chairs, six feet apart, and gazed out at a valley of gold fallow fields and rolling hills beyond. A mown path wove through a grove of barren paper birches to the top of the hill from which the place derived its name: Birch Hill Farm.
“First tell me how Linda’s doing,” said Diggs.
“She’s good,” answered Carson. “Writing every day, making her herbal tinctures. She’d been giving classes at our local library until all that got shut down.”
“I read her last book of poems,” he said. “Woman’s Best Friend?”
“Yes,” said Carson. “Or How My Dog Helped Me Land Safely on the Moon.”
“That’s right,” said Diggs, laughing. “You’d think it was a collection of light verse, but then it turns out to be these deep, beautiful, musical poems about grief and fear, and love and art and spirituality. The great mysteries of the universe. Honestly, it blew me away.”
Carson might have asked why Diggs hadn’t written Linda about the book, but he said, “I’ll tell her you said that.”
“And what about you? What have you been up to?”
“Well, right now I’m trying to learn how to teach art on Zoom. Trying to get my own kids to hurry up and get married and make some babies so I’ll be able to visit with my grandchildren before I’m in my wheelchair.”
“But you’re still painting, aren’t you?”
“Oh, yes,” said Carson. “Portraits mostly.”
“Portraits?” said Diggs. “Ilya Repin or Alice Neel?”
“I’d say more along the lines of Balthus,” said Carson.
“Aha. You’ll have to send me some pictures.”
“Okay. What about you?”
“I haven’t actually gotten back to painting yet,” he answered. “What with all the travel and the Harlem project.”
“I read that you got married again.”
“I did, yes,” he said.
“Congratulations.”
“Thanks. It was a small civil ceremony. In Paris. You know if it had been a regulation wedding, here in the States, we would’ve wanted you and Linda there.”
“Of course. I understand. You know, Mason, it’s also been a pretty long time.”
“Yeah, why is that?”
“You mean why has it been so long since we saw each other?”
“Yeah. What happened?”
Carson did not say, You never replied to my last email—precisely because of how petty it would have sounded. He said, “I don’t think anything happened. It’s just how things go sometimes. People lose touch. But you have a new baby, too.”
“That’s right. One and a half years old. Michael Diggs, most beautiful of all babies.”
A crow flew overhead and drew Carson’s attention to the sky, which was oddly crosshatched with bars of white clouds. They fell silent for a moment, and when Carson looked at Diggs—judging only by his eyes and the lines in his brow—he thought, though he seemed so much the same, something had in fact changed about his old friend; there was a new softness or sadness or resignation of some kind. Then Diggs turned and glanced up at the white barn directly behind them. “Look,” he said. “I’ve got all four doors wide open up in the loft. Would you feel okay about coming inside and seeing what I’m going to be doing?”
“Sure,” said Carson. “I’m wearing my trusty mask.”
“I love that mask,” said Diggs. “It’s like a miniature patchwork quilt. I’m guessing Linda made that for you.”
“You’re guessing correctly,” said Carson.
As he followed Diggs up the exterior staircase, he braced himself for the possibility that he would have to feign admiration for a new series of bowl paintings. Then he realized he hadn’t mentioned that he and Linda had acquired one of their own. If he said something now, they’d never be able to sell it.
It took a moment for Carson’s eyes to adjust to the semidarkness of the loft. Diggs strode over to the far wall and a panel of switches, and suddenly the whole interior glowed bright from lights in the high rafters. Leaning against the other side of the loft rested three enormous canvases, end to end. Diggs said, “They’re not finished. There’ll be a lot more color when they’re done. And depth, I hope.”
Carson drew to within about eight feet of the canvases and slowly walked the length of them, speechless. They looked almost like stains, with hundreds of vertical lines, like vines, originating at the top, where there was a dense, pendulant network of limbs and leaves, all in grays and pale greens. When he moved nearer to one of the canvases, there was a sense, up close, of being lost in a forest.
“It’s a banyan tree,” said Diggs. “I saw it a few years ago when I was in Goa. It’s all one tree, spread over the three canvases. I painted it the way it would’ve naturally grown, out from the center and putting down new aerial roots from its branches. I envision the painting expanding over time—again, just the way the actual tree does in nature. There might be 15 canvases altogether that conceivably could be reassembled into one giant painting. What do you think?”
At last, Carson said, “I’m simply in awe. They’re amazing.”
Diggs, standing near the middle of the loft, dropped his head. Then, after a moment, he said, softly, “Come, let’s sit over here in the door. We can dangle our legs. We’ll be almost six feet apart.”
Once they were seated on the floor, they looked out onto the birch trees and a nearby stand of hemlocks. Carson said, “They’re really astonishing, Mason.”
But Diggs didn’t respond. Apparently, he’d moved in his mind onto a different subject. “I was at a party last week in Manhattan, where I met a young woman who was a palmist. She practically insisted on reading my palm, and she told me that Michael would grow up to be a trailblazer. A real mountain, she called him. She said he would be an artist whose work would shock the world. She saw people flocking to it in droves, astounded, singing and crying.”
“Wow,” said Carson.
“I know, that’s what I said.” Diggs paused for a moment, looking down at his own lap. “I might as well just tell you: Sheila took Michael and left me right after New Year’s.”
“Gosh,” said Carson, “I’m so sorry.”
“I feel like Willy Loman, talking to his brother Ben,” he said. “You know, the fella who walked into the jungle at 17 and walked out rich at 21. But, you know, how’d you do it, Jacob? What’s the answer?”
Carson didn’t know what to say. He shrugged.
“I went out on one date with Linda, back in the day,” said Diggs. “Things didn’t click for us, I introduced her to you, and the rest is history. I mean, you and Linda have been together for, what? Thirty years or something?”
“Thirty-four,” Carson said.
“Thirty-four,” said Diggs. “Thirty-four. I bet you’re close to your kids, too.”
Carson shrugged again. “But Mason,” he said. “I could never have done anything like what you’ve done. Look at me. I’m a teacher.”
“You’re saying I put my work first, before everything else, to the neglect of the people I loved.”
“Well, that’s not what I meant to say.”
“But it’s what you think.”
“I have no idea, Mason. I wasn’t there.”
A silence ensued, in which Carson looked at Diggs and then, after a long moment, Diggs looked meaningfully at Carson. And now there were tears in his eyes.
Carson said, “What?”
“You think I’ve had the success I’ve had because I’m Black.”
“I don’t.”
“Yes, you do. And you think I should’ve painted more like a Black painter. You think my work is the work of a white artist. You think that’s the secret of my success. The work is white, the artist is Black.”
“For God’s sake, Mason, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I have to take a leak,” Diggs said, and stood up. He walked over to the other side of the barn and peed out the loft door over there.
Carson sat still, wondering what he should say, but mostly wondering how he might contrive to leave as soon as possible.
When Diggs returned, he sat down as before. He said, “I’ve been diagnosed with prostrate cancer.”
“Fuck,” said Carson. “What a year you’re having so far.”
“You could say that,” said Diggs. “I guess this is going to be another story in which the Black guy dies first.”
“Fuck,” Carson repeated.
“I just wish …”
“What?”
“I wish that over the years, you could’ve been happy for me.”
Again, Carson couldn’t think what to say.
“Don’t say you were happy for me,” said Diggs. “I don’t want to hear that.”
Carson, overwhelmed, said, “I’ve been a fool, Mason. And a jerk. It’s why I’m here now. It’s why I got in touch. Because I don’t want to be a fool and a jerk anymore.”
Diggs nodded. “Do you feel like walking up to the top of the hill?”
When they reached the top, five minutes later, Diggs moved away quickly to pee again. Carson took a seat at one end of a long wooden bench next to a cold fire pit. Diggs returned and sat next to him. Carson said, “So what’s your prognosis, seriously?”
“This is no time for being in the hospital,” said Diggs. “The doctor says otherwise he would probably recommend surgery right away. But I’m borderline enough that we’re going to do active surveillance and try to wait out the virus. I’ll go back for retesting in July.”
Carson crossed the fingers of both his hands and held them up in Diggs’s direction, but regrettably, the gesture seemed as if he was holding up two imaginary pistols. He said, “I didn’t tell you: I saw Carla’s show last year, in Minneapolis.”
“You’re kidding,” said Diggs. “What were you doing in Minneapolis?”
“A conference,” he answered. “I thought the show was wonderful.”
Diggs nodded pensively, as if to say he agreed, with certain unnamed reservations. At last he said, “I thought she got one thing right for sure. It was clever of her to let the undertaker have the last word.”
A wind swept into the lowest-lying pastures, bending the tall amber grasses. For a moment it felt to Carson, as he and Diggs sat six feet apart on the bench, gazing out over the vista, that they were in some crude steampunk conveyance, and they might soon sail away. He said, “Is there anything I can do for you?”
“Yeah,” said Diggs.
“Tell me.”
“Well, if you really mean it, you can paint my portrait.”
That night, Carson was already in bed when his son, Tom, called from Brooklyn.
“Hey, Dad, sorry to call so late,” he said. “I have a quick question.”
“It’s okay,” said Carson. “What’s up?”
“You know those bamboo folding chairs we used to have a long time ago? The ones with the kind of like woven backs?”
“I think so,” said Carson. “If they’re the ones I think you mean, your sister has them now.”
“Oh, okay,” Tom said. “I was just wondering what happened to them.”
“You called me at 10 o’clock to ask what happened to the bamboo folding chairs.”
“Yeah, I just saw some just like them in a movie I was watching.”
“Tom,” said Carson. “Are you stoned?”
“A little. But what am I supposed to do? Go out to a bar? See friends?”
“Of course not. But if you have any more questions, write them down and call me tomorrow.”
“Okay, good idea. Sleep well. Love you.”
Linda came into the room, smelling of mint.
“Who were you talking to?” she asked.
“Tom. He called to ask me what happened to our bamboo folding chairs.”
“Oh, lord,” she said. “I’m afraid he’s smoking too much weed these days, trapped inside his apartment.”
“Yeah,” said Carson, “no kidding.”
She climbed into the bed and lay flat like a mummy with her arms on top of the covers, pressed tightly to her sides. This meant she was thinking about everything Carson had told her a few minutes before, about the visit with Diggs.
At last she said, “So, how did you leave things? What did you say when he asked you to paint his portrait?”
“I said I would be honored, which was the truth.”
“But I can’t see Mason coming up here and sitting for you.”
“No,” said Carson, “he’s going to send me photographs.”
“And you didn’t tell him about the painting my mother left us.”
“No.”
“So he basically accused you of thinking everything he himself fears might be true about himself.”
“Yeah,” said Carson.
“Christ,” she said, “he sounds so heartbroken. I hope he survives.”
“Yeah, me too,” said Carson, turning to switch off his bedside lamp.
Normally, she would stay awake reading while he fell asleep, but now, to his surprise, she turned off her lamp, too. They lay like that for a minute, side by side, in the dark.
“The thing is,” said Carson, stopped suddenly by a familiar malfunction of his vocal cords.
“What?”
“Nothing,” said Carson. “Never mind.”
“Tell me,” she said. “What is it?”
“No, really,” he said. “Nothing … I don’t know what I was going to say.”
She moved close to him, put her head next to his on the pillow, and laid her arm over his chest. An indeterminate amount of time passed, in which he soon found himself thinking of the ballad “Too Soon,” from the last scene of Federal Agent. It had been so long, but these lines had stayed with him: “When we had time and world enough / We allowed our hearts to stray …”
Just as he was falling asleep, he heard Linda say softly, “We’re not going to sell the painting, are we.”
He looked up at her, where she lay astride a long gray limb of the banyan tree, and smiled, shaking his head, loving her for being right as usual.
Early the next morning he stood in his hooded rain jacket, in the barn, staring at Azure White #2, which leaned against a window in such a way that a rectangle of dim light filtered through the canvas from behind. Though he couldn’t recall any of his dreams, he awoke with a sense that they’d been relentless and exhausting, full of challenges and obstacles. Now he marveled at how some of the flatware and the edges of several of the white plates in Diggs’s painting were seen through the water in the goblets, refracted and blurred with absolute persuasiveness. He could never have executed such a thing with anywhere near that precision.
He shivered. The barn had baseboard heating, but they kept the thermostat at 60 degrees to save on propane. He moved to the studio at the back of the barn and set about starting a fire in the little wood stove. He knelt on the square of protective slate on the floor, stuffed the firebox with wadded newspaper, some kindling, and a couple of small pieces of wood. He struck a kitchen match on the slate and lit the newspaper in three places. He closed the door and watched the mounting fire through the glass. He thought of painting Diggs’s portrait, and felt the kind of foggy knee-weakening doubt he associated with his time in Little League, standing at the plate and facing a particularly menacing pitcher. Soon, against the backdrop of the flames in the stove, he imagined himself building a bonfire at the edge of the meadow, hauling out the stack of unsold paintings in the corner of the studio, and tossing them onto the fire, one by one.
Inside the house, Linda stands at the kitchen range. She has put on the tea kettle and waits with her hand resting on the handle, its warmth filling her with a pervasive gratitude for her life. She looks out the windows of the breakfast nook at the drizzle that’s bejeweling the still-brown lawn and the bare limbs of the five honey locust trees she and Jacob planted more than 20 years ago. She loves her husband, she has remarkably good health, her children have found their way in the world, and she has the enormous luxury of spending most of her days doing the things she most enjoys. Even a pandemic brings to her a minimum of troubles, since sheltering-in-place is pretty much a way of life in the Vermont countryside. The kettle has become too hot, and just as she removes her hand from the handle, she hears Jacob stamping his feet in the mudroom.
Oddly, he looks as if he has been crying. He closes the door and stands for a moment without moving or saying anything. “What?” she says at last.
As if no time has passed since their conversation in bed last night, he says, “What if he dies? I will have stupidly wasted all this time, when we could’ve continued being friends.”
“Maybe he won’t die,” she says. “It’s at least possible that he won’t.”
“He would probably like it if you could make him a mask. Like the ones you made us and the kids.”
“Okay.”
The kettle whistles, and she asks him if he has had tea yet. He says no, and she prepares two cups, then pours the steamy water. When she’s done, she sees that he still hasn’t moved.
“I did think all those things,” he says. “I did think he had the success he had because he’s Black. That his art isn’t as Black as it ought to be. That he sacrificed everything to his art, at the expense of his personal life. I did think all those things.”
She goes to him and puts her arms around him. “Well, now you don’t have to think those things anymore,” she says.
“I really want to believe that,” he says softly.
He releases her and adds, “He’s put so much beauty in the world. Isn’t that what we should all be doing? Putting beauty in the world?”
“Yes,” she answers. “I think so.”
