He pointed at an oil still life she’d just finished work on. “Who painted that?”
She shrugged. “A customer’s mother or father or aunt, I forgot which. Nobody you would ever have heard of, I’m sure.”
“Do you ever clean paintings by well-known artists?” He had stayed very still since they’d come back inside, not taking a step in any direction or even shifting his weight or moving his hands to his pockets. His arms hung at his sides in a way that might have seemed casual at first glance but ultimately seemed awkward: a man who didn’t know what to do with his body. This softened her opinion of him as a person, but his question made her more wary of his intentions in whatever capacity he stood before her.
“No Rembrandts,” she said, “but I sometimes do some work for the auction galleries — mostly cleaning a painting ahead of an auction, though now there will be more work, as people will want to sell paintings that have been damaged. And maybe also buy replacements for others.”
“What’s the most-well-known artist you’ve worked on?”
Johanna tried to read his face but could not. He struck her as a man who was not so much dishonest as accustomed to hiding — a man who could evacuate his own face, a man whose soul could never be stolen by a camera. This they had in common, which was another cause for worry. She said, “May I ask why you’re asking? Are you looking for a restorer for an important work?”
He continued to stand still, arms hanging uncomfortably, and it took him a long time to answer. Finally he said, “I might be.”
“Then I’d be happy to go over my credentials with you if you would like to make an appointment, and I can recommend people in the region with more expertise in highly valuable works if I’m not what you are looking for.” She nearly said that she needed to walk the dog, but since he had helped her unload the van, she worried that he might offer to go with her. “Right now I must get to work,” she said. “Good luck.” She wrote down her phone number but not her name on a piece of scrap paper. “I never got around to business cards.”
At the door he turned back, his hand on the knob, and held eye contact. “Your accent, is it Polish?”
She nearly said that it wasn’t, but she stuck to her policy of offering only necessary or directly requested information and shook her head. The trip to the artists’ house had her worried that she was giving too much of herself away when all she wanted was to be self-contained and do her work and abide by the routines that were the life of her making.
He nodded, patient, and asked her if not Polish, then what.
“I’m from the Balkans,” she said quietly, wondering if he knew that no one from that region would use the generality except to evade other questions.
From the slight squint of his eye, she figured he did indeed know that, but he let it go in a gesture or omission that felt like human respect.
“But I don’t really believe in nationality,” she said in case he was about to change his mind. “We are all the same, or at least different in the same ways.”
He laughed at this, genuinely it seemed, and she saw his white teeth, that his tongue was smaller and more pointed than most men’s. “The problem, of course, is that most other people do believe in nationality. Makes it a little hard to hold out, but of course if you’re from the Balkans, you would know that.”
She nodded and lifted a few fingers as a sort of good-bye. The string of bells fell against the doorjamb as he stepped out, a small collapse of sound.
Just because she hadn’t chosen a life that included romance didn’t mean she was impervious to attraction. And so what she felt when the man left her studio was relief — even more than her usual relief at returning to solitude after having to talk to someone — but there was another feeling mixed in. He was a handsome man, and it was probably just that: a simple formula of the molecular, of pheromones, of genetic distance. Pop psychology might predict that she would be averse to sex, but she liked the physical act well enough — even very well — when it was on her own terms.
She had read a novel once in which the middle-aged male narrator had solved what he called the “problem of sex” with regular but not terribly frequent visits to a prostitute he found pleasant enough. Knowing that prostitution is rarely genuinely voluntary, Johanna distrusted the author’s easy assumption that this was satisfactory. Yet her solution was similar in some of its terms, including frequency and level of intimacy. Over her years in New Orleans, she had had a few lovers, men she liked well enough so long as she did not see them more than once every week or few.
In the novel she had read, the protagonist had ruined his calibrated solution by falling in love — not with his prostitute but with a younger woman when he least expected it. Johanna was never so careless, and the day one of her lovers pushed for more — to see her the next day, to hear of her childhood, to introduce her to his friends — was the day she severed the relationship. Some would attribute this trait to her past, but she saw it more as an inheritance, as likely biological as not, from her father, who had dragged his feet into a late marriage in order to have the child he wanted and to placate his family but who experienced his wife’s doting as sandpaper and his wife’s intellect as inferior.
Johanna had understood immediately that Clay was to be rebuffed, not only because he was soon enough in love with her but because, despite his brief heroism, he was not a good person. Not that she would have tolerated love and adoration from a good man, either. Pedestals are for museums and brothels.
Unless the man who had visited — Elizam was the too-pretty name he had given — turned out to have a painting she very much wanted to work on, she would avoid him in the future. If he did turn out to possess such a painting, she would be careful about what she allowed herself to feel. Most likely, she decided, she would never see him again. If there was any disappointment in this recognition, then that was only more proof that never seeing him again was a good thing.
Later, though, as she walked the little dog along the river, she recognized again her first impression: that the man might pose a different kind of threat. If he knew Ladislav, then he was a threat. But if that were true, he also represented an opportunity: If he knew Ladislav, then he likely knew people whom Ladislav had known. While she thought of it less and less frequently, allowing it to disappear in the darkened part of her mind that was during Belgium, she had never given up completely on the idea that revenge was possible or the faith that it would be worth anything she had to give up for it.
Clay
He had put in a good morning’s work. The drawing came easily after he pushed through the initial resistance, the desire for distraction. This new book would be different from the three that had come before — more social in its comment yet also more personal in vision. That’s what a reviewer would say, and he could be that reviewer if need be. He’d even thought of a name for her. But he pressed thoughts of reception from his mind and tried to work for work’s sake.
For a little more than three hours, he produced drawings of the discovery of the child/protagonist in a cave of recently departed wolves. He sketched several studies of the child, some close-ups and others at removed angles. His favorite drawing of the morning was a landscape with a single wolf looking back over its shoulder in a way that might suggest longing or sadness. After he completed it, he recognized the signs of psychic exhaustion. He’d never been able to work more than several hours at a stretch, and often not that. His stamina was down, too, having spent most of his time during and after the storm concentrating on his other projects. His computers blinked for attention in his peripheral vision, but now he felt bored by them.