In the house Vaun waved her upstairs to the studio and went off to the kitchen for cold drinks. The house seemed like something from a distant childhood, Kate thought, dimly remembered but immensely evocative, and she climbed the stairs in mild anticipation of the tidy airiness of Vaun's work space. When she cleared the stairs she had a considerable shock.
The large room was a swirl of color, a frozen moment of intense, urgent activity. The long tables were piled precariously with pads, torn-out sheets of paper scribbled with half-finished sketches, tubes and tubs, brushes, congealed coffee cups, the stubs of ancient sandwiches, brown and mushy apple cores, two bowls with spoons and unrecognizable scum in the bottom. A length of dried orange peel trailed from one work top and disappeared into a closed drawer. Balled-up sheets of thick white paper spilled in a drift from an overflowing waste basket, and there seemed to be at least three palettes currently in use, and four easels.
And the paintings.
All around the walls, two and three deep, the paintings leaned, pulsated, reached out and grabbed the viewer and shouted. Huge paintings, in size as well as temperament— essential, stripped down, powerful faces and bodies, and more than half of them were Andy Lewis. Andy Lewis as Tony Dodson, with Angie. Andy Lewis naked in front of a mirror, meeting the viewer's eyes in the reflection and looking proud and scornful and as sinuous as the tattooed dragon writhing on his arm. Andy Lewis with a beard, looking down with aloof speculation at a child with blond braids. Andy Lewis in a cold rage, a dangerous killing animal that made the flesh creep and the eyes wince away. And finally, on an easel, Andy Lewis with a gun, mocked as a cowboy and acknowledged as a murderer.
Somehow there was a cold glass in her hand, and she realized that Vaun was standing next to her.
"You've… been busy," she said weakly. Vaun seemed not to hear her but stood with critical eyes on the naked Andy Lewis.
"He did love me, you know," Vaun mused. "In that he was speaking the plain truth. And he was right too in saying that I never loved him. The only man I've ever loved is doubly safe—both married and my therapist. Perhaps I am saved by my inability to love," she said in consideration, as if Kate were not in the room. "I've never understood how men, and women too, can carry on tumultuous love affairs and still paint. Affection, yes, and lust certainly. Those I understand. But not love."
"You paint it," protested Kate. Vaun glanced at her, then back at the painting.
"Not often, no. When I have, it's usually been one part of something else; loss, or threat. Although recently, I have been trying." They stood for a long minute.
"I wanted him to kill me," she said abruptly. "That night. It was crazy, but it just swept over me, a lust, like sex but stronger. When he came through your door, it seemed right. Not good, but just the only possible way for it all to end. I knew that after all those years he'd come to finish it, and I so wanted it to end, to be taken out of my hands. I wanted him to kill me," she repeated.
"I'm very glad he did not," said Kate quietly.
Vaun sighed and looked at her glass.
"Yes. I have days now when I begin to feel the same." She smiled. "Tell me about Lee."
So Kate told her about Lee, about the surgeries and the slow recovery, about Lee's mind and spirit, about their friends, about her own decision to return to the work that had nearly cost her lover's life. They sat in the hot stillness of Vaun's deck until the afternoon brought a movement of cool air from off the sea, and eventually they went back inside. Kate stopped in front of one of the canvases that was not of Andy Lewis but rather of a young girl with short brown hair and a missing front tooth.
"Jemma Brand?" she asked.
Vaun nodded, paused, and seemed to come to a decision. She tipped the picture forward and reached for the painting in back of it, and when she slid it out, Lee was in the room, Lee standing on legs that were whole and strong at the railing of the Alcatraz ferry, Lee half-turned to look over her shoulder with the laughter spilling out of her, her mouth poised for speech, her tawny hair tumbling about her face in the wind, the whole brilliant light of her blazing out of her eyes. To a stranger it would be a dazzling portrait; to Kate it sent a jolt through every nerve in her body and left her stunned and speechless.
She turned to Vaun, eyes wide and filling, mouth moving helplessly, and then she was crying against Vaun's bony shoulder, feeling the painter's strong arms around her and hearing the age-old litany of comfort.
"It's all right, Kate, it's all right now."
And though she knew that it was not all right, would never be completely all right, she felt, for the first time, that perhaps it might be.