“Thanks.” Marion tried a smile.
“Hey, want to get a drink with me sometime soon? I have a mad crush on a bartender across the way. I’m dying to see what’s there, but I don’t want to come on too strong or have him think I’m the kind of girl who drinks alone in the afternoon. Come with me — maybe one day next week?”
It had been years since Marion had had a girlfriend and a long time since she’d had a friend at all unless she counted Clay or Eddie. She was starting to think she could count Eddie, but it would be nice to have a friend who didn’t want to go out with her. “Yeah, that sounds good.” Later she wished she’d said fun or great or something more enthusiastic than good, but she’d done the best she could for a girl whose only brother might be dead. Maybe she’d follow up by reminding Suzette about the drink or even getting her phone number. Eddie had made a calculation when he’d made himself 7 on her speed dial, but that had been generous. There was no one at all between him and 1, which was nothing but her voice mail.
Eli
He imagined, perhaps even planned, a painting of a city block containing an apartment building with the facade missing to reveal the rooms. In the middle of that building was a room containing him, Johanna, a bed, a table, books, flowers. The other rooms, indeed the whole rest of the city, would not be detailed. Those nearest them would be suggested in brushstrokes, while those farthest away would be only smears. An unfinished world, containing only them and the things they touched. This represented how he felt when he was alone with Johanna, the rest of the world pushed away. Or, more accurately, they were the whole of the world, or at least the only part of it that signified. In the painting, the flowers near the bed would be bright — the only yellow in the whole painting.
This vision and the feeling that came with it had allowed him to avoid thinking about Ted and Ted’s request, but after Johanna had left for her meeting, that darkness cloaked him. It turned chilling when his phone rang. Though he expected the call to be from Ted, he was not surprised to see the Puerto Rican phone number. When bad news is coming, it often arrives from multiple directions. His sister, presumably, or some other relative, calling to tell him that his mother or father had died or was in the hospital dying. He’d never thought about it consciously, but he realized when he saw the glowing numbers that it was a call he always expected, perhaps because it was the call he’d most feared in prison: the call for help when you are helpless to offer any.
The voice on the other end was not his sister’s. It was soft and low and had the same stirring effect on him it always had. He pictured again the contrast of black curls against a pale collarbone, the near-fatal shape of perfect lips.
“I’m calling because I’m worried about you,” she said.
His pause was long. “More than decade in prison and not one visit, not one call, not one letter. And now you call.”
“You told me that was the better way, but the point now is that no one called me while you were in prison to voice their concern about your well-being. I do care about that, no matter what you believe.”
“And now someone has called you.” He sat back on the bed, stretched his legs out on the floral bedspread, and leaned back against the wall. “To say what?”
“To say that you’re distracted, to say that you might make a bad decision because you’re distracted.”
“And the solution was for you to call, as though that’s not distracting?”
The stir in his loins that had always been automatic at the sound of her voice quelled. He would not have believed this was possible, not for the stretch of time before he was convicted or his first several years in. He realized that he was going to hang up on her and made himself delay, made himself first say good-bye and wish her well.
“Wait,” she said. “Do you still care about me?”
“I don’t know.” He sighed. “That painting — the one of you, the one I stole—”
“I’ve hardly forgotten.”
Her call was poorly thought out, but he doubted it was poorly intended, not by her. Instead it was merely casual in its concern. She wouldn’t board a plane, but she’d dial a few numbers. “Well, I wouldn’t know whether or not you’ve forgotten, now, would I? What I’m trying to say is that you’re like that painting now. It once meant a lot, and I invested a fuckload of time into it, so I have to still care. But it’s in a frame I didn’t pick out, in a museum far away, and I like the idea of it being there.”
“What I’m trying to say is that if you still care about me at all, and if you care about yourself, then you should just do what you’re supposed to do to stay out of prison.”
“And your interest in this is what?”
“Don’t you think I felt like shit the whole time you were in? When you finally got out, I decided I could stop feeling guilty and get on with my life.”
“And now I might be inconveniencing your plans?”
“I know you’re not an asshole, Elizam, so stop pretending to be one.”
“Good-bye,” he said. “I wish you well. If they call you back, tell them to go fuck themselves.”
“Stay out of trouble, Eli. If they send you back, it’s not on me this time.”
Now he did hang up on her, but she wasn’t the person he was mad at. Her call had had the effect Ted no doubt wanted, though: It had alarmed him. Ted had gone to at least some trouble to track down her name, or maybe he’d had that little trick in his pocket from the beginning, just in case his new employee didn’t conform to expectations.
Eli didn’t know what he was going to do, so he decided to maintain appearances, keep to his schedule. He had just enough time to shower and make the auction Felicia Pontalba had invited him to attend.
This time Eli had better taxi luck; the driver stayed awake at all traffic lights and delivered him to the front door of the auction gallery. Felicia met him just inside and walked him past a man who seemed to be some combination of greeter and bouncer.
“The lot is small today, which is good news for your time, but perhaps less interesting for you.”
She was packaged well in a dark blue tailored dress and heels, minimal makeup. Her hair had dried curly this time but was pinned back. Again Eli saw beauty in occasional glimpses and angles, but mostly he saw affability, affirming his first impression of her.
“Now, you’ve met the Broussards already, if I recall correctly.” A bit more Southern accent slanted into her voice with the standard politenesses.
“Characters, the both of them,” Eli said, returning to the platitudes that Felicia enabled and that had seemed to satisfy her before.
“This city has a knack for that. Anyway, they’re probably the only folks on the list I gave you who will be here today, since it was mostly a painting-related list. The Broussards are unusually catholic in their acquisitions, so they come to a lot of the smaller estate sales. They’re here today for a lot that will be mostly silver, and they’ll return Friday for porcelain.”
She escorted Eli to a refreshment table at the far end of the foyer and served a ladle of some sort of punch into a plastic cup. “For the larger auctions, we serve champagne — actually a knockoff, prosecco or cava or whatever’s on sale in quantity — but today I’m afraid all we have is punch. It does have a bit of a kick, though.” She winked as she said kick.
Eli thanked her and took a sip, the carbonation of some ingredient slightly stinging his upper lip. “Tasty,” he said, though it was nearly awful.
Felicia smiled. “Actually, I lied to you. Well, not technically, because he wasn’t on the list, but his father was.”