“Come on, city boy,” Tom said. “You have to meet Jesse.”
William heard a voice before the door opened. It was a woman arguing playfully with someone — someone on the telephone, it turned out. She pulled the door open with her free hand and waved them in.
When she saw Tom her eyes widened, in either joy or misgiving. “Gotta go,” she said, and hung up the phone. She was darker than Kenneth, with a tiny frame and nearly perfect features. She could have been a teenager except for the weariness in her eyes.
“This is Jesse,” Tom said. “She was a student of mine. One of the first, in fact.”
“That dates me,” Jesse said.
“That’s what Tom does,” Kenneth said. “He dates you. Or at least he did. All those nights I had to stand on the porch with a shotgun.” Kenneth, William was coming to understand, was Jesse’s father.
“By ‘shotgun,’ I think you mean ‘paintbrush,’” Tom said. “Before Kenneth got into the inn business, he dabbled as an artist.”
“Dabbled?” Kenneth said. “I taught you everything you know.”
“Which is, about painting, exactly zero,” Tom said. “Nice work.”
“While the banter is flying, let me give you a tour of the place,” Jesse said to William. She and Tom still hadn’t really looked at each other.
The tour led through the whole of the house, which was hardly anything, only a living room, a bedroom, and a small yard, but there were careful details everywhere that attested to the vibrancy of the place. The wooden chairs had been carved with a story that went up one arm and came down the other, continuing on the chair beside it. Each of the lampshades had been dyed a subtly different shade. “Sit here,” Jesse said, directing William to a brown leather couch. It was draped in green fabric, like a young woman trying to conceal her beauty or an old woman trying to conceal its absence. A few other guests milled about in the room: two women who appeared to be a couple, two women who did not.
On either side of the front door were two vast canvases, almost floor-to-ceiling, depicting roughly the same scene, an Old West desert with scrub brush in the foreground and distant cliffs. In one, an Indian sat proudly astride a horse, and everything about him was done in vivid color, from the red tips on the feathers of his headdress to the blue squares on his buckskin pants. The other canvas was nearly identical — same desert, same scrub, same horse — but in the Indian’s place was a white man in modern business dress. William wondered if these were the paintings Tom had wanted him to see.
Jesse passed three jelly jars filled with gin to William, who passed the first along to another guest but kept the other two. He felt certain that the real party was on its way, that at some point the front door would fly open and dozens of artists would pour into the house. There would be young men in high spirits and young women pretending at first to resist those high spirits. But the doors never flew open, and William grew more and more drunk, there on the brown couch with the green fabric draped over it. He spoke to a young woman with a shock of orange hair who didn’t complain when he put his hand on her leg. “A cousin,” she said, though he didn’t know whether she was saying that she was Jesse’s cousin, asking if he was Tom’s, or introducing another detail altogether.
The stereo was singing about dancing and good times. Tom passed through the room, whispering, with Jesse at his side. William pulled himself to his feet and followed them, at a distance, into the backyard. They had different music out there, wordless, slower. Kenneth was sitting in a chair talking to a girl who was wearing a beaded vest. She was laughing. Tom and Jesse were in the near corner of the yard, talking closely, and then Tom leaned on the fence and drew his hand back sharply. William saw a line on his palm, a red rivulet. Kenneth stood and produced a handkerchief, which he held out to Tom in a courtly manner.
William went back inside to sit with the cousin on the couch. She was talking about God now. More gin was brought his way.
The last thing he remembered was standing with the cousin in the yard. She was still on God, and he was marveling at the way the black lace of brassiere overlaid the brown skin of breast. Tom and Jesse were at the corner of the fence again. Now they were standing at a distance from each other, and she was talking excitedly, pointing at the ground. William thought he saw tears on her cheeks, and Tom’s hands were in the shape of a cage, as if he were protecting a seed.
“And so,” Tom said, swinging his arm over Kenneth’s shoulder the next morning, “I make my good escape. I thank you for your hospitality. Sometimes I don’t know what you see in me.” They had been offered breakfast, declined, accepted coffee in its stead.
“Whatever it is, I don’t want to see it around here much longer.” Kenneth laughed and embraced Tom. “I am sorry that you didn’t get what you came for,” he said more softly.
Kenneth had already loaded their bags in the trunk. Tom told William to drive off, but about a minute later, he told him to pull over. “Pop the trunk,” he said. On top of their bags were two large flat rectangles wrapped in cloth.
William peeled back a corner and saw that they were paintings. “Take them out,” Tom said, and then he shut the trunk and unwrapped them so William could see. The first was a landscape of a placid little town, where two children played in the street and a short, dark woman with long hair stared into a store window at a blue dress pinned to a white backing. The second showed a red boat in a harbor and a man tying a rope around a brown piling. In both, the framing was off center and the colors were subtle but forceful. Tom moved his hand over the face of the woman in the second painting. “What do you think she’s thinking?”
“That she wants the dress?” Like the man in the other painting, the woman wore an expression of casual concentration.
“Exactly,” Tom said. “But the title is Mexican Village, One Minute Before Earthquake. The other one is Florida Town, One Week Before Hurricane. That’s what’s makes these painting so great. They are acts of colossal misdirection.” William looked at the woman’s face again, tried to retrieve her thoughts about the dress, if that’s even what she was looking at. Would she buy it? Would she ever get to wear it? The questions were a close circle around him.
“These are Jesse’s?”
“She only paints Indians,” Tom said. “These are Kenneth’s. And now they’re mine. I bought them with the money from my book advance.” He shut the trunk. “Supporting him is the least I can do. You know what they say about talent: if you don’t have it, help it.”
“You don’t have it?”
“Not like Kenneth. I have a way of seeing that’s unshared by most people, and then a way of seeing my seeing. I look at things the wrong way and then stubbornly insist it’s the right way, all along holding out hope that I’ll make a few converts. When I do, it’ll help the idea that the things I’ve made are art. But talent?” He shook his head. “I don’t think so. When I see paintings like this, when I really start to feel what they’re doing, I get weak. And not the kind of weak when you look in the mirror after a bad haircut. Serious weak, soul weak, like there’s something in the universe that can make you better but that you don’t possess, and won’t ever.” He tapped the car with two fingers, as if he were telling a driver to take off.