He wanted to stay still, just as he was, to watch her for hours or forever, but he was afraid she would turn and catch him, would misunderstand and think he was something he wasn’t. Or that he would attract attention from neighboring establishments in an area where it was fine to stumble around drunk but possibly suspicious to stand sober in one place.
The bells jangled as he pushed the door open, but she’d startled even before the sound. In the moment in which she turned toward him, he saw her face momentarily unguarded, sensed something essential about her in her unpracticed expression. But she recovered quickly, her eyes shuttering, her lips closing. Either way, unguarded or posed, she was beautiful. Genuinely beautiful and undeniably so. It was not a matter of taste, he understood; no one would say that she was not beautiful.
“You’ve come back.” Her words were toneless, presumably also a practiced occlusion.
On the walk over and then again at the bar where he’d used the restroom, he’d meant to figure out what he was going to say to her, but he’d failed and then just forgotten. Forgotten, he knew from experience, was a word that glossed a wide set of shortcomings that included avoidance and denial and parts of himself he didn’t have names for. Perhaps one of them was noble: He didn’t like to lie to people and so wasn’t very good at it.
At this point, the truth seemed like the best option, which might well have been his mind’s unconscious plan. Yet he knew also that truth was dangerous, knew that Johanna might well be a murderer as well as a thief — or at least know people who were these things. He forced himself to acknowledge that her beauty made this more likely rather than less, and he reminded himself that this wouldn’t mean they were of a feather. He was a thief but only a certain kind of thief. He had never injured anyone, except for a few guys back in grade school and later in prison, but even then never badly and never except as a response to a punch that had sailed his way first.
He chose a condensed version of the truth: “I should have just asked you the other day. I don’t really know why I didn’t, but I’m looking for a missing painting and thought it might have crossed your path.”
She stared at him, cleaning cloth loose in one hand, an utter cipher.
It didn’t seem that she planned to speak at all, so he continued, “I’m asking people in your line of work, among others, whether they’ve seen the painting or heard of it coming through town. It’s possible that the person who has it wanted it worked on.”
“Was it damaged during the storm?” she asked flatly. “A lot of paintings have come through here since then.”
“It’s possible that it needed to be cleaned.”
“If you don’t know, then it is not yours.” She leaned back against the table she’d been working on, lifted her chin. “If it is not yours, then why are you looking for it?”
He had a fantasy, brief as in a dream that happens in two seconds even if it takes ten minutes to explain, of her as damsel in possession of stolen goods through no fault of her own, with him as her savior. He’d return the painting but keep her name out of it.
“I’ve been asked to help return it to its rightful owner,” he said, his stomach twitching slightly at the word rightful even as he hoped it was the correct term.
“‘Rightful owner,’” she repeated, and for a second he thought he heard something bitter in her voice, confirming his suspicions — both the one about her and the one about whoever had hired him through Ted. A second later he determined that he’d imagined it. Most likely she had nothing to do with any of it, and her shop’s location was a coincidence. But then there was her obviously European accent, on top of his personal conviction that coincidences are rare, that things appear to be coincidences only because you don’t have enough information to know that they aren’t.
“Do you speak French?” he asked.
“Not very well, not that I see what that would have to do with anything. All the paintings I’m working on now are in here. Everything is out but some works on yupo — the ones you helped to carry in — and those were in the house of the artist. Have a look for your painting if you want, but then please let me return to work.”
He made a small show of skirting the tall worktables that lined the room’s three windowless walls, though he knew he would not find the Van Mieghem. He turned back to her with the idea of describing the missing painting while measuring her reaction, but he was startled by the bells hanging on the door. Across the threshold stepped the petite, pissed-off bartender from down the street.
“You’ll excuse me, please,” the restorer said to him. “I seem to have a client.”
He nodded and awkwardly moved for her hand, grabbing her left hand with his left instead of reaching across for a proper handshake. He squeezed her fingers lightly and gave a little shake. “I can’t remember if I introduced myself correctly,” he lied. “My name is Elizam, though most people just call me Eli.”
She didn’t offer her name this time, either, and so he asked. Her look was suspicious enough that he didn’t know whether to believe her when she said, “Johanna,” pronouncing it as “Yohanna.” Later he would look at Felicia Pontalba’s list and see if there was a Johanna on it and so perhaps learn her last name. For now he resigned himself to having failed again and was surprised when she stopped him.
“I’m working all day today, but I have some time tomorrow. I have lunch across the street every day at half past noon. You could find me there then or here after. I don’t know if I can help you, but maybe you could show me a picture of the painting you are looking for, or at least tell me about it, just in case it did come through here. I could even ask around some.”
He wanted to hear what the bartender said — he felt a momentary paranoia that she had followed him from the bar — but there was no excuse to linger.
“À demain,” he said. Regretting his choice of language, he tried again with “Hasta mañana,” but by then no one was listening to him.
PART TWO. Water Damage Johanna
During her first weeks in New Orleans, Johanna had bristled when Clay had spoken of the city’s history, of his great-grandfather, who had been mayor until ousted by Long family fiat. She’d thought of herself then as a person without a real history, at least not one that she wanted to claim, and she didn’t need to be reminded of that fact through negative comparison. The old buildings she walked by held no particular interest for her, and she thought often, in those early days, of choosing a newer city as soon as she could free herself of her dependence on Clay. She would perfect her English, finalize her legal status, save her money, and start over out west, perhaps in a planned community whose apartment buildings and houses had all been built in the last twenty years, whose stores showed identical facades. She and everyone she encountered would live in an eternal present, every day new and unconnected to the days that preceded it.
How the change had occurred she could not have articulated if pressed, but across time, mostly gradually and unconsciously but occasionally with moments of leap and clarity, she began to feel as if she was part of the city — an anonymous part and so perhaps an even more integral one. This nourished an understanding that a history can be adopted, that the history of the city could be her history and that she could become part of its history, regardless of where she’d been born or how recently she’d arrived. After all, that was what New Orleans had always been: a receiver of outsiders and immigrants, a blender, a granter of new identities, a place where you could disappear and then resurface under new terms. There were people like the Fontenots, yes, but there were many more like her.