Peter Heller - The Painter

In the Stern-Gallietta someone was making hay with massive watercolors of trees in fog. I kind of liked them until I put my face against the door and saw an entire room full of them. I had thought about the art market way too much to be healthy. And why wasn’t my anger clearing up the vaguely seasick feeling of not knowing what time it was or what day or what year? Which of course I knew, just felt like I didn’t.

At the top of the street I stepped into El Farol, the low ceilinged tapas and music joint. I had told myself I wouldn’t but I wanted a drink badly and knew I could settle for a nonalcoholic beer, it would help. As soon as I opened the door I was hit with the heat of a crowd and food smells and electric flamenco. I almost stepped back out, it was a little sickening. The bar was in the back and I scanned it for a seat and saw a young couple with salted margarita glasses leaning into each other and laughing, and they looked happy and in love and uncomplicated, and for some reason it clenched my heart. The possibility of simple happiness.

Cristine and I used to come here when we were first dating, and we enjoyed dancing, we were good together, and the nights we didn’t get totally shitfaced, the nights I remembered, we’d had fun.

Further down the bar a tall honey blonde in a tight skirt and stilettos perched on a stool and I recognized Celia Anson. I moved toward the bar and then stopped. A man was leaning into her, a broad shouldered cleanshaven darkly handsome dude in a polo shirt, he was saying something insinuating it looked to me, and gesturing at the bartender at the same time, and she was waving his offer away, and he leaned in closer, right to her temple and she stiffened and picked up her keys on the bar and made to stand. His hand came down on her shoulder. She shrugged it off. He straightened tall with an angry half smile, looked down at her once like she was a recalcitrant caged bird who had maybe just struck and drawn blood and he stepped quickly behind her and out the front door. My hackles rose, those ones I never know I have. She didn’t seem to notice. She stood a little wobbly on her heels and took a deep breath, smiled and waved at the bartender and made her way through the tables and sound toward me and the door. Damn. She hadn’t seen me yet and if nothing bad was about to happen, the last thing I wanted right now was to get into a conversation with Celia. Let it play out, I told myself, see what happens. I knew this place well. I had been coming here for twenty years. I stepped quickly to my right into the dining room and made my way fast to where the bathrooms were in the back and out a service door just shy of the kitchen, pushed through it into the gravel alley at the side of the building where I used to go sometimes for a smoke. I could read it all without thought the way a fisherman reads the water. He would be watching the front door. He was. I saw his car, a silver Lexus parked in the back of the dirt lot across the street, under a big cottonwood in the deepest shadow, waiting. That heat in my blood: I had no doubt that wasn’t an accident. Mr. Polo Shirt liked to park in the shadows just in case. Then I heard the jingle of her bracelets and the tap tap of her stilettos on the wood steps and she came into view walking with a mission, a little unsteady, but with a will to get the fuck home, another quiet drink that didn’t work out, get me home. She crossed the narrow street, hardly looked for traffic and tottered down into the dirt lot, her long legs scissoring pale in the streetlight. Her car was toward the back, a new Toyota Highlander, also silver, three spaces to his right. When she got to it, she leaned into the driver door for a second, back to the other cars, and then looked down and sorted her keys with both hands, feeling for the right end of the opener and at the same time he was out of his car and moving fast and closing the distance with a practiced grace. He came around the front of the cars, his eyes locked onto Celia. Then his hand was on her right shoulder, not the touch of a friend but a stealthy grab and his back was to me. Okay, now .

I came across. Angled to my right to stay at his back and crossed the street in two seconds and came through the cars using them as a screen, fast and pretty quiet and as he pulled her around I was two steps back. She was turning, startled— huh? —and he said Hey, I just wanted to and his other hand came around toward the back of her head. At the same instant she saw me and her eyes widened, he couldn’t have read it, I clenched my right fist in left hand and from full height slam . At the base of his skull. His grunt, his hands released her and he collapsed to the dirt like an ox shot in the head. Even then, even as she cried out, pressed back into her car in horror and her face crumpled into tears and she fell into my arms and sobbed, sobbed violently, even then I knew that it was the same fucking move as with Dell, the same strategy and timing like a practiced signature, parking lot vs. creek, but this time it was clean and right and somehow as I squeezed her tight in both arms and let her cry, somehow something balanced, something bad was balanced and countered with—I can’t say good. With something necessary.

I made sure he was on his knees, grunting, working his way to standing, and then I drove Celia home, it was only blocks away. On the way her crying subsided and her hand came onto my thigh and she said, “He was an old boyfriend, Jim. You shouldn’t have done that.”

I turned to ice.

“He’s an asshole and he gets crazy, you never know what’s going to happen, so I appreciate the gesture, Jim, but.” She had a Kleenex at her eyes and she began to cry again. She leaned and then keeled into my lap and cried. It was hard to drive like that. I went numb. I’d just gone berserk on one of her boyfriends. What the fuck? What the fuck , Jim? You are losing it, buddy. Who are you?

At her big house on Camino Santander she kissed me hard on the mouth and asked me in and I said I had a big day ahead of me, sorry, sorry for everything, and I was, and then I walked back to the hotel. Miserable. The bone misery like when you hit bottom drinking. It was cold enough to see my breath which was a little reassuring.

The horse and the crow were having a conversation when I fell into the room. The longest day on record. Weeks and weeks long. I went over to the painting and looked closely. It had changed in my absence, something paintings liked to do.

The crow was now telling the horse that he, the crow, never had to make a choice about jumping off of any cliffs because he had wings. He never had to worry about leaping off of anything. He told the Indian pony that there was a horse once that had wings, too, and never had to worry about such a choice. And the horse in the picture painted all over with red and blue fish, my horse, was all ears. The crow had his full attention. The crow said the horse with the wings was named Pegasus and that he was the horse of gods and a god himself. The crow began to tell the horse the story and the horse put his ears forward, he was interested, then in thrall, and he forgot to be frightened about the cliff or anything else. He began to be like any horse listening to a great story. That’s what it looked like to me, anyway.

I lay down on the big plush down pillows and fell asleep, sound and deep, a sleep of the gods, the gods that are always in trouble.