The bell sounded on the door and I saw him wave across to the waitress and nod to the men. He had a palette knife sticking out of his shirt pocket.
— You look pale, honey.
— Nixon resigned, I said.
He smiled broadly as he leaned over the table and kissed me.
— Big swinging Dickey. Guess what? I found the paintings.
I shuddered.
— They’re far out, he said.
— What?
— They got left out in the rain the other night.
— I saw that.
— Utterly changed.
— I’m sorry.
— You’re sorry?
— Yeah, I’m sorry, Blaine, I’m sorry.
— Whoa, whoa.
— Whoa what, Blaine?
— Don’t you see? he said. You give it a different ending. It becomes new. You can’t see that?
I turned my face up to his, looked him square in the eye, and said, No, I didn’t see. I couldn’t see anything, not a goddamn thing.
— That girl was killed, I said.
— Oh, Christ. Not that again.
— Again? It was the day before yesterday, Blaine.
— How many times am I gonna have to tell you? Not our fault. Lighten up. And keep your fucking voice down, Lara, in here, for crying out loud.
He reached across and took my hand, his eyes narrow and intent: Not our fault, not our fault, not our fault.
It wasn’t as if he’d been speeding, he said, or had had an intention to go rear-end some asshole who couldn’t drive. Things happen. Things collide.
He speared a piece of my omelet. He held the fork out and half pointed it at me. He lowered his eyes, ate the food, chewed it slowly.
— I’ve just discovered something and you’re not listening.
It was like he wanted to prod me with a dumb joke.
— A moment of satori, he said.
— Is it about her?
— You have to stop, Lara. You have to pull yourself together. Listen to me.
— About Nixon?
— No, it’s not about Nixon. Fuck Nixon. History will take care of Nixon. Listen to me, please. You’re acting crazy.
— There was a dead girl.
— Enough already. Lighten the fuck up.
— He might be dead too, the guy.
— Shut. The. Fuck. It was just a tap, that’s all, nothing else. His brake lights weren’t working.
Just then the waitress came over and Blaine released my hand. He ordered himself a Trophy special with eggs, extra bacon, and venison sausage. The waitress backed away and he smiled at her, watched her go, the sway of her.
— Look, he said, it’s about time. When you think about it. They’re about time.
— What’s about time?
— The paintings. They’re a comment on time.
— Oh, Jesus, Blaine.
There was a shine in his eyes unlike any I’d seen in quite a while. He sliced open some packets of sugar, dumped them in his coffee. Some extra grains spilled out on the table.
— Listen. We made our twenties paintings, right? And we lived in that time, right? There’s a mastery there, I mean, they were steady-keeled, the paintings, you said so yourself. And they referred back to that time, right?
They maintained their formal manners. A stylistic armor about them, right? Even a monotony. They happened on purpose. We cultivated them. But did you see what the weather did to them?
— I saw, yeah.
— Well, I went out there this morning and the damn things floored me. But then I started looking through them. And they were beautiful and ruined. Don’t you see?
— No.
— What happens if we make a series of paintings and we leave them out in the weather? We allow the present to work on the past. We could do something radical here. Do the formal paintings in the style of the past and have the present destroy them. You let the weather become the imaginative force. The real world works on your art. So you give it a new ending. And then you reinterpret it. It’s perfect, dig?
— The girl died, Blaine.
— Give it over.
— No, I won’t give it over.
He threw up his hands and then slammed them down on the table. The solitary sugar grains jumped. Some men at the counter turned and flicked a look at us.
— Oh, fuck, he said. There’s no use talking to you.
His breakfast came and he ate it sullenly. He kept looking up at me, like I might suddenly change, become the beauty he had once married, but his eyes were blue and hateful. He ate the sausage with a sort of savagery, stabbed at it as if it angered him, this thing once alive. A little bit of egg stuck at the side of his mouth where he hadn’t shaved properly. He tried to talk of his new project, that a man could find meaning anywhere. His voice buzzed like a trapped fly. His desire for surety, for meaning. He needed me as part of his patterns. I felt the urge to tell Blaine that I had in fact spent my whole life really loving the Nixon boy in the wheelchair, and that it had all been pabulum since then, and juvenile, and useless, and tiresome, all of our art, all our projects, all our failures, it was just pure cast-off, and none of it mattered, but instead I just sat there, saying nothing, listening to the faint hum of voices from the counter, and the rattle of the forks against the plates.
— We’re finished here, he said.
Blaine snapped his fingers and the waitress came running. He left an extravagant tip and we stepped outside into the sunlight.
Blaine tipped a pair of giant sunglasses over his eyes, extended his stride, and walked toward the garage at the end of Main Street. I followed a couple of paces behind. He didn’t turn, didn’t wait.
— Hey, man, can you get a special order? he said to a pair of legs that were extended from underneath a car.
The mechanic wheeled himself out, stared upward, blinked.
— What can I get you, bud?
— A replacement headlight for a 1927 Pontiac. And a front fender.
— A what?
— Can you get them or not?
— This is America, chief.
— Get them, then.
— It takes time, man. And money.
— No problem, said Blaine. I got both.
The mechanic picked at his teeth, then grinned. He labored over toward a cluttered desk: files and pencil shavings and pinup calendar girls. Blaine’s hands were shaking, but he didn’t care; he was caught up on himself now and what he would do with his paintings once the car was fixed. As soon as the light and the fender could get repaired the whole matter would be forgotten and then he’d work. I had no idea how long this new obsession might last for him — an hour, another year, a lifetime?
— You coming? said Blaine as we stepped out of the garage.
— I’d rather walk.
— We should film this, he said. Y’know, how this new series gets painted and all. All from the very beginning. Make a document of it, don’t you think?
A ROW OF SMOKERS stood out in front of Metropolitan Hospital on Ninety-eighth and First Avenue. Each looked like his last cigarette, ashen and ready to fall. Through the swinging doors, the receiving room was full to capacity. Another cloud of smoke inside. Patches of blood on the floor. Junkies strung out along the benches. It was the type of hospital that looked like it needed a hospital.
I walked through the gauntlet. It was the fifth receiving room I had visited, and I had begun to think that perhaps both the driver and the young woman had been killed on impact and were taken immediately to a morgue.