“It sounds very beautiful from the way you describe it.”
He waited, hoping the discomfort of silence would lead her to give something away, but she simply sat, not touching her drink or tucking her hair. No tics or tells, either because she had something to hide or because she had nothing to hide.
Finally she spoke: “You said you used to steal paintings to give them to the person, or the country, they really belong to. Does the painting you are looking for belong to the person you will give it to if you find it?”
Eli sipped his beer as though she had not just named his greatest worry about his job, as though he did not find her instincts uncanny. “Are you asking me to consider that whoever stole this painting might have done so because it really belonged to them?” His tongue tripped just a moment before them, intentionally avoiding saying him or her.
Johanna shrugged, another movement that seemed rote rather than instinctual — a gesture consciously acquired. “I would have no idea, of course, but I guess I would answer you by agreeing with you that there are a lot of different ways to define belong. So maybe the first question is about the person you are searching on behalf of. Who is that person?”
He felt a small shame that he didn’t know the answer to her question. “I typically don’t meet my clients directly. I work for the Register and report to a boss. He’s usually the one to meet with clients.”
Johanna leaned forward now, which was something he’d never seen her do before. Usually she maintained distance, either sitting erect or even pulling her carriage back slightly. “So maybe your boss can tell you who hired him.” She pulled back now, enough to notice. “I only mean, so that you can judge for yourself. Since this is an important consideration for you.”
Eli’s intuition failed him — not because he was wrong about something but because he had no idea at all. All he knew for sure was that he wanted Johanna to be innocent, because she was either unconnected to the whole business or just not at fault. But she couldn’t possibly be interested enough in his personal integrity to push such a statement if she weren’t connected at all. His best hope was that she was connected but innocent. The beer expanded in his stomach, and he felt a circle of nausea in the middle of his forehead.
“So you’ll let me know if you hear of the painting? If someone brings it in to be worked on?” he asked, knowing that he was failing, that there was some question he could ask that would move everything forward instead of backward.
Her beautiful face was a cloak now, again. And again he experienced her as a person capable of violence, either in her past or her future — a distinction that unsettled him. She nodded but did not answer.
He hesitated before signaling to the bartender for the bill, which he paid. As he tucked his wallet into his back pocket, he said, “Maybe I’ll see you at the Halloween parade. Or maybe we could even plan to meet there. No costumes.”
Her look was placid. “No costumes,” she said. “Why don’t we meet at my studio? We could even watch through the window.”
“I think the noise is part of the appeal,” he said as they stood.
“Yes, that makes sense, so then not through the window.”
Unable to think of any reason to prolong their conversation, Eli found himself exiting the bar before Johanna, afraid to turn back around to see if she followed. The elation he felt over her suggestion that they meet again collapsed into anxiety over why she had done so. Surely it wasn’t for the reason he hoped it was. As his eyes adjusted to the brighter light outside, the broadened peripheral vision that came with stepping out of the narrow bar onto the open street, Eli treaded the understanding that he was part of something larger than he realized. Heavy at the bottom of his stomach was another stone of knowledge: Johanna was part of something larger than he realized. She would not see him again because she liked him. Perhaps that was an emotion even alien to her in a general way; he saw now the abstraction and coldness. She would see him again because she wanted to know who had hired him, quite possibly because she had stolen the missing painting. That this might make her a murderer as well as a thief was a realization he came close to before rearing away.
Marion
Marion gently squeezed her oils, making small indentations in the colored metal. It was something she had always done: make her tubes look used to lower the intimidation factor of brand-new paint. Perhaps it had been easier in the old days, back when artists had to grind their own pigments, mix them with oil. The ritual of it appealed to her: a way to begin that was known before you start. And it had to be repeated every day, though artists had devised ways to save their paints for future use or to carry with them. Glass syringes, sometimes, but the longest-lived method was to store the paint in a pig’s bladder. So maybe the old days weren’t better, but there was an appeal to starting each day and working to finish before the colors you mixed were gone and could never be perfectly duplicated.
Yet she knew that people always think other people have it easier or better. “I wouldn’t want to be really poor,” her mother had once said, “but there are people who are good at it. It’s better for them. They prefer a simple life.” Her brother had stormed out of the house yet again — indignation being the only form of energy he could ever seem to muster after he’d discovered video games and pot.
She’d heard customers at Molly’s say that some of those living in FEMA trailers preferred them, which she doubted, and one say that most black people have a more utilitarian relationship with their pets and so don’t suffer as much when they have to leave behind a dog. Marion remembered a television image of a National Guardsman taking a fluffy white dog away from a nearly hysterical child before allowing the boy to board an evacuation bus. She hadn’t said anything to the customer who’d stated the offending falsehood, but she had walked away and been slow to serve him for the rest of the evening. Everyone at the bar knew how to do that: discourage unwanted repeat business. She could see its usefulness in all her lines of work.
Probably it had sucked to be a painter in the seventeenth century, and she wouldn’t have made it for five minutes. She wouldn’t have even got to try, most likely, being a girl.
She squeezed the sides of the tube of titanium white symmetrically at the middle, pushing past indentation to distortion, wondering at what point the tube would give, spew small, thick streams of white. She raised her sight to the new canvas. Also white.
She set down the paint, deciding to feel satisfied that she was now ready to start, that she would start tomorrow, or maybe even in a few hours. Twenty minutes later she was locking her bike to a street-sign pole in front of Eddie’s place.
Eddie’s look had changed. He’d shaved off miscellaneous bits of facial hair, and the hair on his head had grown a bit longer, a bit shaggier. The semi — cholo uniform was gone except for the black boots, which he now wore with plain faded jeans and a thick white T-shirt. She saw him almost as a silhouette against the dark green screen separating his entryway from his work space. He found her eyes and held them, which to her surprise did not make her uncomfortable.
He stuck his hands in his pockets, a gesture that expanded his chest, spread his T-shirt taut. “Come to ask me out?”
She shook her head but did not look down or away. “Draw on me,” she said. “Whatever you want.”
He looked at her for what felt like a long time and then cocked his head. “Follow me.”
In the back he gave her a glass of orange juice and a thick spoonful of peanut butter. “A precaution against fainting.”