At ten of one she threw on her coat and went downstairs. The truth was, it felt good to be writing again. She remembered her days in the city during graduate school when, with the help of her father’s connections, she’d gotten an internship at the Times. She had fond memories of her tiny studio apartment, living on coffee and cigarettes and the happy hour chicken wings they served at her neighborhood bar. Thirsty like a vampire when it came to her work, hunting down victims, winning their trust, then biting them in the throat. She’d given it up when Henry was born and they’d moved to Albany for Michael’s fellowship. Motherhood had changed her; she had lost her fangs and had never thought she’d want them back. Until now.
The black path was thick with yellow leaves. Some of the students had gathered an enormous pile of them and were jumping in them like children. They called out to someone—it was Simon—and he said something and they all laughed. Everybody liked him, she realized. They all looked up to him even though he was enigmatic as a Hollywood icon. People liked the mystery, she thought, and he liked it, too. He did little to enlighten them.
Now he was coming toward her in his lumberman’s coat, a black watch cap pulled over his ears, his violet scarf around his neck. Whenever she saw him her heart began to thump. “Who’s the girl with the voice?”
“That would be Susannah. My secretary. Used to do phone sex. Amazing what a voice can do. Conjures up all sorts of exciting images. You’re thinking tight sweater, short skirt, right? Couldn’t be further from the truth. Stop by sometime and take a look. I don’t think the scale goes up that high.”
“You have your very own secretary? How’d you pull that off?”
“Lots of red tape. Stopped handing in grades, evaluations, et cetera. The following Monday Susannah was there.” He smiled, thoroughly pleased with himself. They crossed the yard and headed toward the parking lot in the direction of his car. “She’s my, how do you say, my conservator.”
“Is your car actually running?”
“Yes, but be careful, she’s very sensitive.”
An old VW Bug, the pale orange color of acorn squash, pulled out of a spot and came toward them. The driver was Jack Spaull, smoking a pipe. He rolled his window down. “Afternoon, Simon. Annie.”
“We’re getting some lunch together,” Annie offered. “Want to join us?”
“She’s lying, Jack. I’m going to ravage her body as soon as I get the chance.”
“That’s marvelous. Couldn’t think of a better way to spend the afternoon.”
They all laughed.
“I’ve encouraged you to get to know each other better,” Jack said. “Who knows, you may inspire each other.”
“No doubt,” Simon said.
Jack frowned playfully. “Drive safely, Simon.”
“Always.”
They watched him drive away.
“Shall we?” Simon opened the door dramatically, bowing as she entered, and closed it with the finesse of a valet. The car grumbled to a start and the radio came on, Aerosmith smashing the silence. Simon shut it off, grinning sheepishly. “Sorry.”
“I didn’t know you were into heavy metal.”
“I’m into heavy, basically. Heavy is good. Heavy is really good.”
“I bet you sing when you’re alone.”
“I do a lot of interesting things when I’m alone.” He raised his eyebrows mysteriously.
“Let’s hear a little melody.”
“No, I couldn’t. I’m very shy about my singing.”
“Do you sing in the shower, too?”
“I sing opera in the shower, of course.”
“Now, that I’d like to hear. I’m an opera enthusiast.”
“An opera enthusiast? Well, now, I’m impressed.”
“My mother loved opera. You’d hear it all through our house growing up.”
“How sweet. How positively cultured.”
“When I was home, that is.”
“Oh yes, I nearly forgot. Little Annie’s away at school. Miss Porker’s, was it?”
“Very funny, Simon. Porter’s. Of course La Bohème is my favorite.”
“I expected that. Romantic that you are.”
“I could cry when I listen to it.” She looked out the window. Her heart felt tight suddenly. She didn’t want to be talking about this right now. Not with him. “This is a wonderful car.”
“It was my father’s car. He won it in a game of cards. Only thing he ever gave me. One day he goes down into the cellar and hangs himself on a water pipe. Leaves me a note and the keys to his car.”
“That’s horrible, Simon. What did the note say?”
“‘So long, sucker.’”
“My God, that’s awful.”
“Yeah, well. He wasn’t Mr. Sensitive.”
“And that’s it?”
“He wrote a postscript with instructions about the car. Told me to change the oil every three thousand miles and check the brake fluid from time to time.”
Her heart broke for him. “That must have been very difficult for you.”
“Difficult? No. I hated the son of a bitch.”
They were on the interstate, heading north toward Albany. He put the top down and it became too loud to talk. They drove side by side with the wind in their faces. The wet sun stretched over the rising city, its row houses, government buildings, and The Egg, where on several occasions she and Michael had gone to the theater. Simon got off the interstate at Arbor Hill and made his way through traffic to South Pearl Street. He parked outside of a tavern where a group of men had convened in a circle of ripped vinyl chairs to play pinochle. Simon took her hand and led her toward the adjoining walk-up, an orange brick row house, late nineteenth century, where they climbed up the stoop and went inside. “I have a studio here. On the third floor. I thought you’d like to see it.”
The building was silent, desolate. Light poured in like milk from the old window in the roof. Pigeons were cooing, loud as rain. They went up, their footsteps echoing on the worn marble steps. His door was at the end. He took out a ring of keys. “I haven’t been back here for a long time,” he told her. “The truth is, I didn’t want to come here alone.”
Surprising herself, she touched his back, wanting him to know that she was happy to be there with him, even though she wasn’t able to tell him this just now.
It was a large empty space with tall windows and scuffed wood floors. Several blank canvases leaned against the wall. He went to a cabinet and found a bottle of wine and two glasses. “I’ll show you the terrace,” he said, presenting the fire escape. They sat out in the sun and drank the wine, looking out on the Hudson, the port of Albany. “It’s not such a bad town,” he said. “I’ve been worse places.”
“Where did you grow up?”
“The Bowery. My father was a crook.”
“Where’s your mother now?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know.” He looked out at the landscape. “Out there somewhere.”
She sensed he wasn’t telling her the whole truth. “Here in Albany?”
“We lost track of each other.”
“What was she like?”
“My mother? She was pathetic.”
“How so?” she pressed.
He looked at her fiercely. “She walked into one of those traps. Like a squirrel, bleeding all over herself, but couldn’t do a damn thing about it.”
Annie went quiet. She didn’t want to ask him too many questions at once. The fact that he had arranged for her to write the article meant that he wanted her to know about certain aspects of his life, perhaps he was willing to tell her, but it would be on his terms, she was well aware of that. “When did you start painting?”
“I don’t remember starting. It was just something I always did. I was good at it. My father hated that. He wasn’t good at anything. He wasn’t even a good thief.”
“What did he steal?”
“Things. All kinds of useless things.” He looked at her. “My mother.”
The sun was lowering itself behind the dark buildings. Less than a half mile away, her husband was racing through the corridors of St. Vincent’s. “I need to go soon,” Annie said.
“Yes, I know.”
“Why don’t you paint this?” She gestured to the cityscape before them.
He smiled. “I suppose I could, couldn’t I? But anyone could paint this. Even you.”
She laughed. “No. I could not paint this.”
He stood up, pulled her to her feet. The wine had made her light-headed. “It’s not about rendering it. Just that word, rendering. Like something dead in the road. It’s about much more than that. It’s not what’s there that matters. It’s what you don’t see. It’s what the mind creates behind the closed door.”
“What do you see when you look out there?”
He squinted out at the buildings, crammed together like crooked teeth. To Annie it was a downtrodden city, blighted by poverty and bureaucratic complacency. To Simon, she supposed, it was myriad shapes and colors. “I see dark rooms with yellow shades. Dirty windows that poor, snot-nosed children scratch their names into. Fat ladies with swollen feet. Fake teeth. Smoke.” He took her hand and turned her toward him. “I see a woman standing on a fire escape with the sun in her eyes.”
“Why did you stop painting?” she asked softly, and he didn’t answer her. “Was it because of your wife?”
He shook his head, as though he didn’t want to get into it. And then he said, “My wife is a dangerous woman. Like one of those bullets. She gets under your skin and rips you up in places you never knew existed.”
“How can that be, Simon? She’s young, she’s practically a teenager.”
“Oh, no.” He grinned bitterly, shaking his head. “She was never that.”
26
“I WAS A STUDENT when I met her,” he told Annie. “At the Art Students League. I was living in Manhattan.” They were sharing a booth in a small restaurant in south Troy. He’d brought her there because the place was far away from the college and it was unlikely that they would see anybody they knew. She’d ordered a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich and he was having beer and onion rings. A couple of cops sat on stools at the counter, and another table was occupied by a group of women who might have been employees of the bank next door. Their table was in the back, where they had the smoking section all to themselves.
“Truthfully, I was an arrogant son of a bitch.” Simon finished off his beer and ordered another one, and then he lit a cigarette. “Do you want the long version or the short one?”
“Unabridged,” she said.
“Promise me you won’t hate me.”
“Why would I hate you?”
“It’s a nasty story.”
She reached out and took his hand. “I could never hate you.”
Although he did not believe her, he began. “People called it a gift, my art, but I saw it as an affliction, a kind of tedious deformity.” Even during the years of his youth, his extreme sensitivity had been a burden that often embarrassed him. As a young man, he had few friends, and so he focused on his work. At first, the canvas provided him with the ultimate escape, and like many of the notable painters before him, he painted pastoral landscapes and scenes of the hunt. For months he explored the small rural enclaves in upstate New York, flawlessly rendering cows and horses, stone walls, wide fields stippled with shadows and slender black trees. And then, on one of his journeys, something changed. He felt inexplicably drawn to the mystery of the back roads, the rusty trailers and flimsy shacks, the acres of grubby brown land. The lost yellow fields strewn with busted car parts. He saw the poverty he had known as a boy, the loss it caused, the emotional blight.
It’s where she came from, his wife.
He first saw her in cutoff shorts and a man’s work shirt, hanging sheets on the line behind her father’s house. He hadn’t been sure of her age; he had little experience with girls. He parked on the road and walked through the woods behind the house, where he could watch her without being seen. In the shade of the pine trees, he sketched her all afternoon. When she had finished the laundry she mowed the lawn, then sat on the back steps and drank a bottle of orange soda, a black cat twisting through her legs. It was almost dusk when he knocked on the front door. She opened it, looking at him curiously. She stood there, behind the screen, waiting. Up close, she was younger, and there were pimples on her cheeks.
“Portraits for sale,” he said.
“Who is it?” a voice bellowed from inside the house.
The girl looked at him. “He wants to know who you are.”
Simon walked in, toward the sound of the voice, and entered a small parlor where an old man lay on a couch under a wool blanket. The room smelled of sickness and stale cigarettes, and there were several medicines on the table at his side. The old man looked him over. “Whatever you’re selling, we’re not interested.”
“How about a portrait of your daughter?” Simon said.
The girl’s father was thin as a skeleton, wearing a worn green cardigan with holes in the sleeves. His hands were huge and yellow, like the claws of a buzzard. “Turn that damn thing off,” he said, wagging his finger at the TV. The girl turned it off at once and stood by her father’s side. The old man pulled himself up, and she propped the pillows behind him. “What is it you’re selling?”
“Portraits, sir. I’m an artist.”
The old man squinted at him with a sour smile. “Well, tickle me pink. An artist. Let me see something you’ve painted.”
He could have shown the man the sketches he’d done that afternoon, but he said, “I don’t have anything to show you. You’re my first client of the day.”
“First client of the day! Well, isn’t that lush. It’s nearly four o’clock.”
“I’ve been roaming the countryside,” he told him.
Her father scoffed. “Looking for a sucker like me?”
“Daddy, please,” the girl said softly.
“How am I supposed to know if you’re any good?”
“You’ll have to take my word for it. You’ll have to trust me.”
The old man laughed. “Now, look, boy. I may be poor, but I ain’t stupid.”
“He has an honest face,” the girl offered.
“An honest face,” her father repeated with a grunt. “They’re the worst kind. But you’re too stupid to know that yet.” He took a noisy drink of water and wiped his mouth. “If it’s money you want, you won’t find any here. We’re factory people around here. You go down south, that’s where you’ll find your suckers.”
“It’s not the money, sir.”
The old man laughed. “Can’t take your eyes off her, can you?”
“Sir?”