Peter Heller - The Painter

She stopped.

“Yeah. Well. These kind of stories don’t just end,” I said.

“Telling me. Fuck. Fuck , Jim. I miss you. I mean. I know we only just—”

“I miss you too.”

I did. A lot. Especially right then, hearing the warmth and the rasp and the pain in her voice. Her voice was full of colors, like her eyes. It was a current that tugged and flowed with the force of her. I could have painted it. It would be a river full of fish, and red leaves fallen out of the woods, and this time she would be swimming alone with the grace of a mermaid but she would not have a tail she would be all woman, and there would be a big elk on the bank, a bull, his flank would be bloody and stuck with arrows but he wouldn’t care much and he would be lowering his head to drink in her water.

I had my elbow on the window frame and I pulled it in and rolled up the window so I wouldn’t have to strain to hear her.

“A lot of stuff happened,” I said. “I’ll tell you one day.”

Now she was crying openly. I didn’t interrupt her. It came in waves, the way crying does, and then it blew through.

“Sport found me at the coffee shop,” she said.

“Yeah? What did he say?”

“He’s so goddamn smooth. He was real concerned. For both of us. He bought me a dry double cappuccino which is creepy, I mean that he knew what I took, kinda like saying, Hey, I know a lot more about everything than you think I know—even though I told him no, I would definitely be buying my own, and then he sat down at my table and said that at some point, which was just about now, obstructing an investigation of homicide, which is withholding any knowledge of a homicide, becomes accessory to murder which is treated by the law the same as murder. He said that now was the time to come clean with any information, any at all, about Dellwood Siminoe’s death, and I would be treated, you know, as a witness, but that after this point it was accessory and that I could spend most of the rest of my life in jail. Which was not fun. Oh fuck.”

She collected herself, breathed. I could see her face as if she were in front of me, exasperated, with herself for weakness.

“Hold on,” she said.

I waited.

“Okay. He was smooth, Jim. I mean really really smooth. I couldn’t ask him to leave or leave myself like he had me in some kind of spell. He painted a picture for me of the daily routine at the women’s pen in Pueblo. The disgusting food, the stench, the fights. It went on and on. I was frigging transfixed. It was sickening, everything he was saying. Then he says, And that’s just one day. The lights don’t go out and you lie down in your concrete cell and you can’t sleep and then the next day is the same. And that’s two days. A week is an eternity. But the second week starts with a day like the first and the second and the third and then you are not done with the second week and the lights stay on and you only have twenty more years like that and you definitely go mad. A madness that is not even human. Why you can always tell a con from half a mile off, that thing in their eyes, that stare they try to cover up which is the madness of the first day becoming the second becoming the third. Jim, it worked on me like a spell, what he was saying, like I couldn’t move and kept listening like I was hypnotized. Which made me want to throw up. Which I refused to do because it seemed, well, self-incriminating, though it was touch and go for a minute and I indulged myself in an image of his nice clean hiking boots covered in my vomit.”

I felt nauseous just listening to her. I rolled the window down again. Sport may have been playing her but he had the prison thing pretty well nailed. Hearing her I remembered that I’d rather die than go back for another year. Years.

“Whew.” I took a deep breath.

“I forgot.”

“What?”

“That you did time in—”

“Yeah. I think you should talk to him,” I said.

“What?”

“Tell him what you know.”

“I don’t know anything!” She practically yelled it.

“Well.”

“You listen !” She was crying again. She was hysterical.

“Listen you big fat wonderful motherfucker, I don’t know a goddamn thing! What happened the night Dellwood died. I went to sleep. I remember you got up to pee, I woke up a little, and then I fell right back to sleep and that’s all I remember. I remember waking up with you in the morning! Do you hear me? What I told them, what I’m telling you!”

“I know I know.”

“I’m coming to Santa Fe.”

“Well.”

“Shut up, I’m coming. I need a vacation.”

“Well.”

“I miss the fuck out of you and I need a vacation.”

“Okay. That’d be good.”

“You are going to paint some big fat twenty thousand dollar canvases of yours truly naked and put some goddamn fish in the things somewhere and take me out to fancy dinners every night.”

“Well.”

“Say Yes. Just shut the fuck up and say Yes, dear.”

I started laughing. Man. That was the other thing about women. The great ones made me laugh and laugh.

“Okay. Yes.”

“Right. Good. I’m not coming for a couple of days. I have a life you know, stuff to do. You aren’t the center of the frigging universe!”

“Whoa!”

“I’ve got to get a restraining order on Dugar for one thing, I think. He keeps mooning around after me declaring a love for me that is deeper than human love, deeper even than sea elephant love. He wrote me a poem called ‘Mammal Amor’ in which I think a dolphin fucks a beaver. I don’t know I didn’t read it, just caught a few words as I crumpled it up.”

I was laughing. I told her I would get my money from Steve so I could take her out to Pasqual’s and The Compound every night. I hung up. Before I did she ordered me to write her number on the vinyl of the dashboard, if I lost my phone and her number along with it she would hunt me down and cut my nuts off. I swore I would. I did.

I drove south onto the high piñon plateau above Española. I felt almost okay again. As okay as a man can be who kills like a pro and has a sporty detective scaring the shit out of his—what? His lover. Don’t scare yourself, I said to myself. Be in the moment. Maybe find someplace to pull over and go fishing.

There was a spot just south of the Ojo Caliente hot springs, a long quiet shady run under ancient cottonwoods that looked cool and dark from the road. But when I got there it was Indian summer hot and midday and I knew the trout would be in a trance, so I drove on.

There are two paintings in the Tate Modern in London that I saw years ago and that together made a deep impression on me. One is by Paul Delvaux and it depicts a milky nude stretched on her back on a divan in a courtyard surrounded by classical stone buildings. The light is sepulchral and ominous. The palest things in the picture are the girl’s skin and the cold columns of the mute buildings. Around and above the square are the bulwarks and cliffs of a severe mountain scape, a scape of the dead. Nothing is living up there in the gloam, no bird or bush or forest, nothing but a waxing sliver of crescent moon that can barely sustain the weak light it breathes down on this silent scene. Around the girl on the divan are: an erect skeleton who seems to be walking toward her, in no hurry—why would he hurry?—a pretty young lady in a red hat, expressionless, who is walking at the viewer and seems to be about to walk out of the frame without noticing, and another imploring nude, who is at the head of the divan and raising one arm emphatically and about to step into it as if she were calling a rescuer. Our heroine by the way is perfect. Every time I look at the thing in the big catalogue book I bought at the gift store I get the stirrings of desire. Her skin is flawless, her hips round, her waist small, her full breasts lifted and spread by her arms which are folded up behind her head. And her exposed armpit is shadowed, cupped by her breast and the lovely smooth muscles of her shoulder and upper arm. Whatever light there is must be coming from the skinny wan moon, but it must be magnified on the way down. There has been no attempt to hide her pubis. The hair there is the same color as in her armpit. One leg is stretched straight, the other hanging off the near side of the bed, half bent. It’s a sexy pose.