Where to, Miss… I didn’t get your name.
Yevchenko.
Reaction shot on Robinson’s shock and then bemusement.
My husband, she explains. And then adds, proudly, disdainfully, as if he, an American, could never hope to understand: I’m a communist. Turn here.
They enter a narrow twisting alley of overhanging balconies and strung laundry. Enigmatic Oriental faces peer from windows. A rickshaw squeezes past, knocking into them. Robinson ducks, spins, grips her wrist—the pistol falls and he catches it before it hits the ground. Advantage USA! He yanks her close. They stand chest to chest. He studies her; she glares her defiance. Will they kiss? He sneers, nostrils wide as if she bears the odour of Bolshevism. You’re coming with me, Mrs. Yevchenko. But not so fast. She stomps his toe. He yelps and staggers. She snatches her gun and puts the barrel to the forehead of this Imperialist stooge.
What’s your real name? he asks.
Flanagan. Her English suddenly flat and American. San Francisco. And with that she makes her escape into the labyrinthine alleys of the Forbidden City.
Cyril watched the episode to the end but Connie didn’t show again.
He returned to the kitchen and considered two of the Stalin-as-dervishes.
As he was leaving with the two newly framed drawings, Cyril spotted the cat on a gravestone, his father’s, a slab of black marble set flush to the ground. Stepping back into the kitchen he got the opera glasses and studied it: smoke-grey hair, a nick from one of its ears, looking supremely indifferent sitting there with such composed self-containment. Cyril poured cream into a saucer and set it on the porch then got going.
A substantial woman of about sixty, straight sandy-grey hair stylishly cut at a slant, her lips a deep red, earrings white. Standing outside on the sidewalk looking through the gallery window, Cyril couldn’t see much more, yet there was Novak parting the crowd like a ship and making a show of kissing the woman’s hand. She pretended to slap his face. He pretended to be shocked. People laughed and applauded.
Gallery goers pushed past Cyril to get inside. He stepped back to protect the two framed drawings under his arm. It was warm. He was sweating. Head down, he plunged on in and headed straight for his corner, removed two graves, replaced them with the Stalins, and went back to his van. Had anyone even noticed? Returning minutes later, he went to the drinks table where a young woman in a white shirt and black bow tie was dispensing wine. Perhaps she saw the fear in his eyes because she filled his glass to the brim. Determined not to obsess over the attitudes of the people in front of his work, he turned in the opposite direction and began a circuit of the gallery. There was the woman who’d pretended to slap Novak in front of Richard’s crabs, her head cocked as though looking through the lower half of bifocals.
Novak collared him. “Gravestones. Who would want to look at such things? Who would want to draw such things? Well-adjusted people are attracted to the sun, to the light. But artists are not well-adjusted. That’s their strength. Don’t do therapy. Don’t untie your knots—tie them tighter!” His breath was acrid with wine and his hair a mess. “Very textural, these headstones of yours. The grass, the granite, the skin.” He moved closer to Cyril’s pictures and with his glass of red wine pointed at the nude-as-headstone. “I want to lick her spine. And that’s good. I should want to lick her spine. Everyone who sees this picture should want to lick her spine. If you don’t want to lick her spine you’ve failed.”
“I’d lick her spine,” said the woman who had mock-slapped Novak.
“Good.” Novak wrapped his arm around Cyril’s neck and growled, “Death. Defeat. Dirt. The Trinity.”
“Are you going to introduce us?” she asked.
“Pamela Jean Preston, it is my great honour and privilege to present to you the one and only and all too humble Cyril Andrachuk.”
They shook hands. Hers was cool; his was sweating.
“You don’t like colour?” Preston asked, noting that Cyril’s pictures were all in graphite.
“It’s A-OK and okey-dokey and hunky-dory to listen to the grey voice,” said Novak, whose English seemed to be growing loopier with every drink.
“Occasionally I venture into red,” said Cyril.
“I’ve been shot in the fucking heart,” observed Novak, who had missed his mouth with his glass and spilled wine down his white shirt. Cyril watched him go. Apparently Novak was so drunk he hadn’t even noticed Cyril’s late substitution of Stalins for gravestones.
Pamela asked, “Do you have a death obsession?”
“I grew up across from a cemetery.”
“Was that depressing?”
“I’m not sure. It’s just what it was.”
“My father owned a cemetery. Or was the director. One or the other. Maybe both.” Plucked eyebrows coming together, she frowned in a moment of genuine confusion. “He owned so much it’s hard to keep track.”
Cyril knew of her. Eldest daughter of Jerry Preston, evangelical millionaire who had made his fortune in used cars and billboards. “Was that depressing?”
“Hell, no. I had everything. Horses, holidays. You name it.” She wore a dress of crinkly black fabric that hugged her fulsome figure, an ivory locket in the form of a heart, white bracelets, and carried a small cream purse. “Is this your first showing?” she asked.
Cyril lied and nodded.
She placed her palm flat to his chest as if to calm his heart and said, “Relax. Breathe.”
He breathed. She smelled like gin and milk.
Winking, she said, “Try to enjoy yourself,” and glided away.
He felt curiously relieved, as though having been blessed by a minor saint.
As Pamela slid off through the crowd, Cyril noted two other women, older, in their seventies, perambulating the gallery arm-in-arm, heads tilted as though to share scandal. They were elegant and animated, the very opposite of his mother. She should be here. Gloom draped him. The image of her corpse in the coffin in the ground drove itself like a stake into his heart. Novak passed carrying two glasses sloshing with wine, sipping alternately from one then the other. A cluster of people gathered in front of Cyril’s work and he gave in to deciphering their body language. Mocking? Mild interest? Genuine fascination? They wheeled away, laughing. Was it sneering laughter or delighted laughter? One had rolled their eyes, he was sure of it. He raised his glass but it was empty. He got a refill and held it like a protective crucifix.
The crowd parted long enough for Cyril to spot Richard accepting a business card from one of the elderly matrons who had been touring the room. A kid in a Mohawk passed Cyril’s picture, belching as he entered the washroom; when he came back out he made a great performance of yawning. Cyril went to the washroom himself and splashed cold water on his face. Leaning on the sink he stared at himself: five hundred and one dollars. Was he mad?
When he emerged he stood to one side watching the crowd. Half recognized faces spun past, but one snagged his attention like a burr. Was it? It was. Cyril couldn’t remember the man’s name but knew his face, older, greyer, fatter, but definitely the nasty one from his art school interview all those years ago. The guy carried his head high and kept his mouth shut as though holding his breath against a rising stench. Hands clasped behind his back and chin out like the prow of a royal yacht, he sailed through the crowd and hove to before Cyril’s work. His eyebrows jumped in what appeared to be alarm, went down in what appeared to be disapproval, then his lips pooched out as he exercised patience, stretched wide in skepticism, and finally he flinched as though grit had been spat into his eyes. He looked around in horror. Had he recognized the Stalins? Was he searching for the scurrilous Cyril who had managed to sneak past him? Was he about to complain? Wheeling to his right he launched himself toward the toilet as though to be sick. As far as Cyril could tell he never emerged.