Most often now when he saw a woman he found attractive, the effect was the same as looking through the windows of the Beverly Hills stores he walked by on his way to work. The paintings at the L.A. County Art Museum, the fossils in the tar pits behind it — these he felt closer to having. Sex had become a solo operation.
One evening about a week after he’d first arrived, he and Ted had met a client at a bar of the client’s choosing, and Eli had noticed that the women were younger than the men in suits, better-looking, more available than they should have been. While the client was in the bathroom, Ted told Eli what should have been obvious to him but that, in his new naïveté, he’d missed entirely: “They’re hookers, albeit of varying levels of formality.”
A few nights later Eli had dressed in one of his two new suits, knotted his tie the best way, and gone back to that bar alone. The place was empty of women and almost of men. Eli ordered a beer, realizing that he was more relieved than disappointed. What would he have done, he wondered, if a woman had been there, available for the asking, for the paying? The mechanics of it all were beyond him: broaching the subject of money, settling on a number, choosing a place, protecting himself against disease and against theft. Even once the transaction was settled he would have been lost, unsure whether he would be expected to kiss the woman or cut to the chase, whether she would fawn over him or dispense with the pretense of liking him at all, whether he got to choose the position or was expected to take what he got. It was the same in taxis, even: He never knew whether he’d bought the ride or rented the space, whether it was within his rights to ask that the radio station be changed, the volume lowered, the window rolled down, the cigarette extinguished.
And he thought of how awful the sex itself might be: the uncovering of bruises with worrisome origins, the revelation of objectionable tattoos or piercings, the enacting of theatrical orgasms. After the one beer, he went home and hung the suit on its hanger, amused and embarrassed by his folly. Even comedy and shame, it seemed, were now solo operations.
But California was as good as anywhere; he felt at home nowhere. He’d spent the three weeks between release and the start of his new job visiting the places of his past, standing outside apartment buildings in Chicago, in Harlem, in the Bronx. He flew from LaGuardia to San Juan on a large plane full of tourists and Ricans visiting family. He circled the island clockwise in a rental car, finding that oldest home an amalgamation of the worst the United States and Latin America had to offer with the virtues of neither. In Fajardo, his visit with his parents and much younger sister was pleasant but formal. His father stared at him when he thought Eli wasn’t looking but talked mostly about weather and sports, eager to agree with Eli’s views on both topics. His mother was warm at first but retreated into harmless gossip about distant relatives. His sister, busy planning a large wedding, stayed only a couple of hours.
Friends in Ponce from the hard-core old days threw him a party — perhaps toasting his incarceration more than its ending — but even they were more interested in talking about remodeling their kitchens than about Independence. The wife of one, an advocate of statehood and visibly drunk, asked Eli how it felt to have given up twelve years of his life for a cause that was now obsolete.
“Okay,” he whispered. “It feels okay.”
The next morning he rose earlier than his hangover to complete the circle. In Rincón he sat on a small cliff, the wind in his face, and watched novice surfers smeared over and over by waves. He did not drive by the house where the only woman he’d ever met that he thought he could live with either lived or had once lived — he didn’t know which. When he stopped at a gas station even though he had half a tank left, he recognized the small hope that he would run into her, chided himself, and continued his drive without topping off.
Only back in San Juan did he feel something that approximated closure enough to call it that. Two of his paintings hung in the Museo de Arte. One was the canvas he’d been arrested for stealing from a small Brooklyn museum — a work subsequently repatriated to Puerto Rico, which had been his mission in the first place. He’d been a different kind of naive back then and had never considered that there might have been other solutions to the problem than breaking and entering. He let his eyes pass over it only briefly, not because of that memory but because of part of its subject matter, because of the dark-haired woman lounging in the foreground.
The other painting was a self-portrait he admired but barely recognized and couldn’t remember painting.
The plaque between the two works held his name, noted his place and date of birth, and identified him as “celebrated visual artist and Puerto Rican nationalist.” He was grateful that the summation left out the nuances, the truth of what those things had meant for his life, the fact that he was no longer either.
Afterward he had a beer and sorullitos near the Mercado Santurce, eavesdropping on the conversations around him, happy to hear that they were in Spanish. Familiar but not home.
So maybe Los Angeles was better: unfamiliar and not home. No chance for mistaking his situation.
The manila folder Ted had left with him included descriptions and photographs of three paintings by Eugeen van Mieghem. All were on the small side, according to the dimensions recorded, and all were portraits of emigrants waiting to leave Antwerp by ship. The two that had been found were of a man and of a family. Despite the often wistful brushstrokes and liberal use of red, the overwhelming mood of the paintings was bleak. The sad helplessness of hope: people waiting to find out whether their lives would change for the better, the answer only marginally in their control. The painting that had not been recovered was of a young woman, maybe a teenage girl, gazing at the ocean she waited to cross, hoped to cross. The Belgian artist had painted it in 1926.
An online search revealed recent renewed interest in Van Mieghem, including the opening of a small dedicated museum in the artist’s hometown. Still, given the size and simplicity of the paintings that had been recovered, and of the one still missing, they would fetch only a few thousand dollars apiece at auction. Real money, to be sure, but not what a man like Ted would ordinarily call big.
Unlike the case files Ted usually assembled, this one said nothing about ownership or the details of the theft beyond the date and the city: Brussels, 1993. It was unclear who the client was — whom the paintings had been stolen from, who wanted the missing painting found, to whom it might be returned, who was paying the bills on this job. Ted hadn’t mentioned what had happened to the two paintings that had been recovered.
Dirty provenance, Eli guessed, which — given the location and when the painting had been done — probably meant it had run through Nazi fingers, fascist banks. The artist had died in 1930; it was unlikely that the painting would have left Western Europe before the war unless the owner had left and then returned.
Eli hoped he was being hired on behalf of the rightful owner because that was the person he planned to give the painting to if he found it. As always, he would depend on his own definition of rightful.