Nicola Griffith - Always

I don’t know how long I stood before the third painting. At some point Dornan came and stood by my shoulder. Neither of us spoke for a while.

A woman in a silk robe leaned back in a chair and looked straight out. She formed a diagonal slash across the square canvas. Behind her was an antique dressing table, with beads piled on the distressed wood. The colors—her face, the robe, the slant of light across the floor, the jewels piled thickly on the dressing table, the table itself, the chair—were all the same palette: pinks, greens, and browns. I had no idea how he had done that. The pigment was brushed, and layered, and slathered—even, here and there, troweled. There were two places where it looked as though he had smeared it so forcefully he had cut through the canvas. But the woman was serene, a Chinese-American Mona Lisa. There was nothing to hint at the time period. It could have been the nineteenth century, or the twentieth, or the twenty-first. The woman could have been sixteen or twenty-five. She could have been a prostitute, staring into space after servicing a client, an actress who had just left the stage after a particularly fine performance, a young girl dreaming of her love. A face of many stories, some finished, some beginning.

Antique Dressing Table, 2002.

“She reminds me of Kick,” I said.

“Yes?” he said. “She is beautiful.”

Silence. “Do you like her?”

“Oh, yes, very much.”

“No. Dornan, do you like her?”

He met my gaze. His eyes were very blue. “I like her very much.”

“Will you—” I dropped my gaze, turned back to the painting. “Is it the kind of thing you would buy, do you think?”

“I couldn’t say. It would be a big decision, with many things to weigh carefully. Look now, look at this.” He tapped the price placard. “That’s more than I paid for my house six years ago.”

I struggled on doggedly. “But you like her.”

“I do. Though I wonder if she might look ridiculous on my wall. Maybe she’d be better suited to a glittering palace, to a great and terrible queen whose eyes are as pale as diamonds, who drinks bloodred wine, and trails a cloak of dark glamour.”

I didn’t know what to make of this fey mood. He was the one who was supposed to make conversations easier. “You could change your house.”

“Ah, but maybe I don’t want to change my house. Maybe I like it just as it is. Maybe when I come home at night I want comfort and the smell of coffee and to feel safe. But I’m not sure yet.”

“Maybe you’ll find out tonight.”

“Maybe I will.”

We stared at the painting. So beautiful but so flimsy, just daubs of oil on thin canvas. How did one keep such a fragile thing safe?

I dropped Dornan at his hotel, and then drove around for a while to find a video rental store. I talked to a pimply, concave-chested clerk about movie stunts and all-time best performances, and left with six DVDs, four of them featuring Kick.

I RERAN INslow motion a scene of Kick dropping from a ninth-story window in what was meant to be London’s financial district but looked more like Chicago. Her face had been digitally erased and replaced by the star’s, but I would have recognized anywhere those shoulders and tight waist, the way she turned like an eel thrown through the air, as though she had all the time in the world.

I paused the film, and called my mother. She answered on the second ring. The sound quality was awful. I could hear traffic.

“Where are you?” I said.

“Just about to get into the car to drive to Redmond.”

“What’s on the agenda today?”

“More of the same. Security concerns. Details on limited source code sharing. Licensing.” Noise. Movement: the car.

“Yes,” I said. Traffic noise, cutting in and out as she started to move. She’d be sitting in the back, her driver in the front. “When you move back to Norway, won’t you have to drive yourself?”

Pause. “Aud? Are you all right?”

“Mor, when did you know?” Mor. Mother.

Noise. “Aud?”

But I knew the answer: you never knew. Love wasn’t a state change. Romance might be, and lust, and like, but they were just the preconditions. Love was the choice you made; day in, day out. I could choose no.

“Never mind. The night the police took me to Harborview. I assume you pulled some strings to keep my name from news reports.”

Traffic noise. “Yes.”

“I assume this was just reflex. I assume you wouldn’t mind if I correct the press’s lack of information?”

“No.” Noise. Muffled conversation. A suddenly better connection: she had asked the driver to pull over, so that we stayed on one cell. “You are an adult. You must feel free to tell them anything you think necessary. As always, though, I recommend caution.” Pause. “Are you all right?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

Silence.

“Yes. Yes, I’m fine. It’s just… There’s been some fallout for a woman who isn’t… I just want to make sure that no one else suffers who doesn’t have to.”

“I see. Aud, I’m busy for the next two hours, but would you like to join me for dinner?”

“And Eric?”

A longer silence. “No. Just you and me. You can tell me what you’ve been up to for the last couple of days, and we can talk some more about the newspapers. I might be able to be of some help.”

“Dinner, yes.” Help, no.

MINDY LEPTKEhad a large corner cubicle, with a window view. She looked like a stoat: small and bright-eyed and probably vicious when cornered.

“I usually get the quirky stories, the ones where no one gets hurt and there’s some heartwarming moral at the end that makes everyone feel good while they swallow their last mouthful of coffee.”

I wondered how many of her readers that morning had paused, coffee hot in their mouths—did it taste just a little odd?—and got up to spit in the sink.

“But I persuaded the editor to let me go for it this time.” She tapped the issue of the Seattle Times with the page-three headline, “TV Pilot Poisoner, ” and its lurid tale of vomit and madness, followed the next day by an update on chemical analysis of the drugs, and a no-holds-barred graphics sidebar of just what happened to brain cells under that kind of toxic load.

“Excellent piece,” I said.

She nodded in satisfaction. “Espresso sales were down for nearly sixty hours.” She looked at the clock, no doubt wanting to go home. Everyone else had.

“But you didn’t get all of it.”

She shrugged. “You never do.”

“I want you to do a follow-up,” I said.

“There’s nothing to say.”

“What about a political exposé, tying together Seattle real estate developers, the influence of foreign governments on the media”—I hoped my mother would forgive me—“the film industry, and corrupt city and county councillors?”

“Your proof? No, wait, don’t tell me. You want me to find that, right?”

“No. I will.”

“Right.” She rolled her eyes. When I didn’t wither under her cynicism, she said, “What’s your interest in the matter?”

“I was one of the people who drank the coffee that day. Those people drugged me.”

“They drugged a lot of people.”

“I own the warehouse where it happened.”

She turned to her keyboard. Tap tap tap. “And you are?”

“Aud Torvingen.”

“Torvingen… Torvingen… Not seeing your name.” She fished a spiral notebook from the bag hanging over the back of her chair, flipped back a few pages, flipped forward one or two. “Nope. Some corporation owns the warehouse.”

“I own the corporation.”

“Can you prove that?”

“Yes.”