“I came a long way,” I add, talking to his back. “From California. Specifically to meet him.”
“He’s giving you this,” says Meer, pointing at the ocean. “Inviting you here. He wants you to see it, I think. And be here, now that your mom is away. He wants you to stay in our house. To get to know us.”
“How does he know my mom left?”
Meer shrugs. “Instagram, maybe.”
“He told you that?”
“Maybe he talks to your mother. I don’t know.”
“He doesn’t.” I look out at the infinite stretch of the sea. “What time is his flight?”
“I dunno. He went to see a client about a painting. These collectors, they like to meet the artist, but Kingsley doesn’t like studio visits. He shows them photographs of the art and lets them buy him expensive meals while they decide what they want. I think he’s in Boston? Or maybe New York.”
“But he said tomorrow?” I persist.
“He doesn’t like schedules and commitments and timetables. He’s very unconstrained.”
I understand now. “You don’t know when he’s coming back,” I say.
“He did say tomorrow. But it might not be.”
“He invited me here, and promised me a painting, and then he just went on a trip?”
“It’s not like that.”
“What’s it like, then?”
“Kingsley isn’t a regular person. He’s an artist.”
“So?”
“He makes his own schedule. And that’s essential to him being what he is, for the genius to be channeled through him.” Meer begins walking along the beach, still in the water.
I stop and roll my jeans to my knees, then catch up. “You think he’s a genius?”
“Sure. He keeps separate from the world. We keep separatefrom the world, too, mostly, here at Hidden Beach. The idea is that if you eat when you feel hungry and sleep when you’re tired, and you listen to what’s inside you, then you’re giving the muse a chance to show up. Kingsley lives like that. He leaves himself open for the muse.”
I could answer Meer by saying that Kingsley is the kind of man who abandons a woman he got pregnant.
I could say: “He soldPersephonefor millions and never paid my mother.”
I could say: “In his forties he slept with a nineteen-year-old.”
I have thought these things about Kingsley Cello, when I read all those articles and while my mother was telling me what happened, but the truth is that for all his faults and even crimes, I want my father to see me.
To redeem me.
To help me find my place in the world, when I have always been on the move.
To help me understand my own mind,
how I go so deep into games that the rest of the world falls away,
how I am so full of rage and want
and righteousness and loss,
