“So what’s the deal, Miss Lucy?” she said. “Where’s our guy?”
Lucy couldn’t answer at first, and took large swallows of her wine.
“I mean seriously,” Winona went on. “You don’t just miss this. You don’t miss your debut. Not in this city. Not with Winona George.”
Did he have stage fright? she wanted to know. Was he scared of all the people who are going to fall in complete love with him? Had he skipped town? Was he ill?
“I couldn’t tell you,” Lucy said, avoiding Winona’s eyes. But Lucy was a bad liar, and Winona was a bad person to lie to: like a predatory bird, she would peck the flesh until she hit the bone.
“An accident,” Lucy finally divulged after the pecking began to hurt, the word pushing like something spiky in her mouth. “There’s been an accident.”
“What kind of accident?” Winona flared. “Is everything all right?”
“Not really,” Lucy said.
Winona George, who Lucy had imagined would be very angry with her for pulling the wool over her eyes this whole week, was instead visibly excited. The mystery of the artist’s whereabouts would simply make everything more interesting. Tragedy was what art was about, Lucy could imagine Winona saying, in her high-brow, low-pitched voice. It took tragedy to be an artist in the first place, or at least a tragic heart, and anything on top of that was just a Van Gogh — style bonus, a chip off the old ear, and then eventually, when they died, a posthumous cash cow.
“If he died, though,” Winona actually did have the nerve to say, “I’ll need to know. Because there’s a whole other thing that goes on with that. We’ll need to do the finances differently. And I’ll need to know.”
“He didn’t die,” Lucy said softly, looking down at her heavy black boots, which had at one point seemed so important — she had bought them because she had seen Regina from the squat wearing similarly aggressive footwear — and now felt like a burden.
“Then what?” Winona was saying. “What happened? Lucy, you do need to tell me. You know that, don’t you?”
Just then a man walked up between them, his long nose inserting himself like a blinder between Winona and Lucy, blocking Winona’s interrogation. Lucy saw Winona’s face change, from frantic to cool, and then to mildly uncomfortable.
“Well if it isn’t James Bennett,” she said. “I’m so thrilled you’re here. And what do you think? Isn’t he fabulous? Can I show you around? I am happy to give you some sound bites for your piece…. This one here is called Chinatown, you’ll notice the juxtaposition of the physical and metaphysical, this deformed cheek and the unfinished piece here, this hole in the work….”
The man ignored Winona and looked straight, hard, direct at Lucy. His gaze was awful and invasive, and Lucy looked away, toward the wall beside her, the way you were supposed to when a man looked at you like that.
“It’s you,” the man said, still looking at her. His eyes were a clear, chaotic blue: eyes you could see through, the kind Lucy had never trusted, though she was aware that they were a direct reflection of her own.
“Ha! James!” Winona said quite loudly. “Always the odd duck, aren’t you, James?” She inserted her own nose between James’s and Lucy’s now, a little game of noses.
“It’s you!” he said again, his smile broadening to reveal a set of stained, amiable teeth. “You’re the girl in my painting!”
A strange feeling rushed up into Lucy at being recognized like this. It was a double recognition, first by this man (who had called her a girl, that delicious little word that tinkled from the mouth, half of the word from the postcard that had brought her here), and then by Engales, who seemed so far away from her now. She thought of that first night he had painted her, how strange and exciting it had felt to have someone look at her for that long. The itchy collar of her sequin shirt, the same one she wore now. His eyes moving up and down, up and down again, as he studied her lines and her colors. Lucy now looked up at this man, this man she didn’t know but who knew her, who was living with that very portrait.
“How do you have that painting?” Lucy asked, though right when she asked it she knew the answer. And you won’t believe who bought it. Let’s just say it’s someone with fantastic taste.
“Well because of me!” Winona breathed. “It was a Sotheby’s situation. Absurd, really, how much of a cut those people take. If I had known how much James was going to spend on that thing I would have sold it directly to him myself!”
But Winona’s voice began to dissolve into the noise of the room as the two of them, Lucy and James, looked at each other. And in that looking Lucy felt something shift inside her, though she couldn’t pinpoint quite what it was.
“You know I thought I saw you one night, before,” said the man with apparently fantastic taste, his voice drifting. “In the park.”
“In the park?” she said.
“Yes, in the park.”
“Oh,” she said. “I don’t remember being in the park.”
Something was definitely happening: a moment was happening. Winona, seeming to recognize it, held up her two hands, said Jesus Christ, and sunk away from them. But what was it? What was happening? It wasn’t attraction, surely, since this James person was not handsome in any way she could define or understand. And it was not recognition, not in the sense that she knew him, because she had never laid eyes on this man before. But there was recognition of the feeling itself, it was familiar to her, the sense that the whole landscape of her life was about to change, and that she could be the one to change it.
She could steal her mother’s turquoise beads from her dresser — the ones she had admired for so long and imagined swallowing like little candies or wearing them in the bath like a mermaid — and her mother would never know because she would bury them behind the house, cover them with a pile of pine needles.
She could find her high school art teacher — the one whose eyes looked right into her heart in class — at the school dance, in the bright hallway outside the bathroom. She could take him inside that bathroom, pull down his pants.
She could move to New York City, pierce her nose, bleach her hair, sleep with a painter. By sleeping with him, she could make him love her.
She could actively, viciously, if necessary, follow her heart, and in doing so, affect the hearts of others.
She could allow her stomach to grow hot, as this James Bennett’s eyes reached into some special, dark spot inside her.
“I didn’t approach you, well, because I wasn’t sure it was you!” James said then. “And also because it would have been odd.”
“And this isn’t?” she said, surprised to hear herself laugh quickly after she said it. She had not laughed in a week, since the accident.
“You’re right,” James said. “This is odd. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be odd. I just am. I am odd. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell people my whole life. I just am odd.”
Lucy laughed again. Why was she laughing? Who was this guy, whose hair was thin and getting thinner, whose ears were translucent and large, whose suit was dated and wrinkled and white? And why was he making her laugh, on a night when no one should be laughing, because a man, the man she loved, had gotten hurt, and would never do the thing he lived for again, and here they all were, celebrating in spite of that. All of it was a bad idea. She should really go, she thought, scanning the room for a clear path to the door. But then James Bennett said something, and she found herself tangled in it, unable to move her feet.