Peter Heller - The Painter

He was not in a hilarious frame of mind. He grabbed my arm and refused to meet my eyes and ushered me briskly into his back office. I felt like a bridegroom who had shown up late at the church.

“My God!” he whispered when the door had clicked shut. “Jesus, Jim, the police were here!”

He was right next to me. He stepped back. He wanted to hug me, I could tell. He didn’t know where to be. I fought off a moment of panic: the police were already here. Why? Did they come to arrest me?

“Apparently you are a suspect in a murder !” Steve continued breathlessly. “And the Pantelas thought you would be here yesterday! The girls had their hair done!”

Amazing with Steve, how the two things, the more universal and the purely self-interested, could be thrown onto the same level of importance. I found myself very glad to see him.

He finally looked at me, but wincing, glancing, as if he were looking into the sun.

“It’s good to see you,” I said.

“It is?” he stammered. He seemed surprised.

“Yup. Despite all my best instincts. I’m not a suspect in a murder. I am a person of interest.”

“I see, these are fine distinctions. I’m just an art dealer not a lawyer. A very nice fat detective came in two hours ago and asked where you were. He said you were supposed to be here and where were you? How should I know? I said, I’m his dealer not his mother. It seems that this morning I am not many things. I am not the artist’s manager who feels wonderful about calling Pim and telling him that his homely daughters can take out the bobby pins in their hair. What the hell Jim, what have you gotten your hairy self into? I just know you didn’t kill anyone, I mean we both agreed you’d gotten past that part.”

He let out a long breath, sucked in another. Apparently he was not finished.

I thought: Why are the cops looking for me here? Now? Did they find something damning and new? Bits of brain?

“If you did,” Steve went on. “I mean kill some sad sonofabitch, it could destroy you. The art I mean. The prices. Many examples. The establishment washes its hands of you in disgust with a We told you so. We tolerated Jim Stegner because he was brilliant and dangerous but now he’s over the top, now he’s just repulsive. It’s fickle fickle fickle, Jim, like a pickle.”

He loved to say that. I had no idea what it meant. Except that in his mind I was sure the pickle was a big fickle penis. Jesus, Steve was a trip. I would let him yammer all morning if he wanted to. Except that I wasn’t sure what to do about the cop. What could I do? Running was out of the question. I’d be like one of those hangdog idiots who always got caught just over whatever state line, buying a six of beer in a convenience store with his Wanted poster plastered all over the wall. I shivered.

He heaved, collapsed in his bright teal ergonomic swivel chair. Steve’s desk was a bean shaped spaceship sort of console made from materials not of this earth. The phone was the only thing on it aside from a razor-slim screen and keyboard, and it, the phone, was titanium gray and shaped, come to think of it, like a pickle. One afternoon I came in with my kit and I painted blackbirds all over it, the desk, New Mexican kitsch—which I started, by the way. Now you can’t buy a stick of furniture between Santa Fe and Taos that doesn’t have a magpie or a coyote painted on it. Steve threw a fit. He was so mad he couldn’t get the words out, a real feat for him. But an hour later Severin Ricefield came in to settle a purchase and just about screamed at how delightful. The mix of Danish space futurism and manito folk, it just about stretched the universe out taut between its two poles, didn’t it, Steve? How marvelous. Severin was a woman, an extremely erudite, also rich socialite who was one of the few in town, it seemed to me, who had more money than God and also had read and thought deeply about more than, say, landscaping. And had great taste in clothes, and cheese. I knew, I had been to many receptions and parties at her institutional sized adobe on Ravens Ridge. I mean the house was the size of a regional art museum, which I guess in its way is what it was. I was always very honored when she bought one of my paintings, and honored again when I saw it hung in a coveted and prominent spot on her wall.

Still, Steve hired a specialist to strip the blackbirds off his desk.

“ Did you murder someone?” He looked up at me, very serious, face exhausted and wiped clean of expression, a very rare moment for him. A desert landscape washed after storm.

I thought about that. I couldn’t really answer him. His honesty of expression seemed to require an honest answer. Which I wasn’t sure how to give. The more I waited the more an idea seemed to intrude on the wonderful clean country of his face, like the shadow of the next storm.

“You—You didn’t murder anyone, did you?” A little desperate.

“No, Steve no, I didn’t murder anyone.”

It was the compassionate thing to say. After all, he had just had to let the father of two little girls know that they had had their hair done in vain.

Not sure if he believed me. He looked relieved if still uncertain.

“Well, good. Good good good. Great. Three goods make a great.”

I knew he was going to say that. I mouthed the whole sentence along with him.

“So I can call Pim and tell him that one of your always unreliable cars broke down in the desert but you are safe now, thank God, and here and ready to paint his beautiful spawn tomorrow.” He reached for the phone which was his way of saying, Right? Daring me to challenge him.

“Right,” I said.

“Okay, good. I’ve put you up at the St. Francis. Pim has. He’s being extraordinarily generous about this whole thing. And anyway, we’d love to have you with us, but our guesthouse is being renovated.”

That was a lie. He said it every time I came to town and my behavior for one reason or another frightened him. Which was more than half the time.

“Don’t even think about killing anyone while you’re here,” he demanded as he turned his attention to the voice that was now answering the phone. He offered me one last wispy wave, like a passenger fluttering a handkerchief at the rail of an ocean liner.

I like the St. Francis. I have stayed here often and I am known. I walked across the broad streetside porch and the door was pulled open by a smiling young man in green tails with brass buttons. I hitched my tattered self to the front desk and the pretty Chicana behind the desk lit up—“Mr. Stegner! How wonderful to see you again”—and I thought she truly meant it. Well, the whole experience of the St. Francis is scented with memory. Steve always gets me the same room when someone else is paying for it. It’s called the Artist Suite, has a little brass plaque by the door proclaiming it. Two rooms about as big as my cabin in Paonia. Distinguished by prints of Georgia O’Keeffe’s least suggestive flowers, and by a slew of Rauschenbergs, go figure, I suppose because they are bright and active and only faintly suggestive of the end of the world as we know it. Seems like a half crazy curatorial choice, but I have to admit I like it. Makes me want to paint, if only to help rectify the tippy imbalance. And I have to think that in a cage fight between these two almost perfectly opposing artists there would be some parity of energy and weight. I had left almost everything in the back of my truck, had never had a single problem with theft in the hotel’s back lot, and now threw the one small duffel on the big Mexican four-poster.

Mexican furniture must be built for earthquakes, or civil wars. A stray bullet would not even traumatize this ten ton ship of sleep. Stray bullet. I shivered. I needed a bath. I went straight to the oversize bathroom, to the whirlpool tub. There were scented candles in screwed down sconces at the head of the tub, little lighthouses, I mean they were made to look like lighthouses, set in a blue tile sea where even a pyromaniac child couldn’t light anything on fire. Smart, I thought, in a world full of arsonists. I turned the hot tap, tossed my cap in the corner, began to strip off my shirt, stopped, pulled it back down. Fuck it. I needed more than a bath. I needed Ten Thousand Waves spa and hot spring.