Losing Clementine (19 page)

The kid fumbled with my wallet like zippers were new to him before getting it open and my driver's license out. He squinted at it and then held it up for the others to see. There I was at the DMV two years before, looking a little haggard and pissed off, probably a lot like right then. My name and address were right next to the photo, clear as a California day.

I thought I felt the field level out, but that could've been my imagination.

“Is she really Clementine Pritchard?” the woman asked.

The guard on my left scowled at her and didn't answer. I tried to blow a piece of hair out of my face.

“What do we do?” Junior asked.

“We follow protocol. This doesn't change anything.”

“She is Clementine Pritchard!” the woman exclaimed. “Oh, I just love your paintings. I have been here three times this week.”

Without closing it up, the kid shoved my wallet back in the bag. “We should call the director.”

“Fine.” The two guys behind me shoved, and I skittered forward.

I wanted the hair out of my face, so I could see. But the guards were too busy giving me Indian burns on both wrists to let me do any grooming. Through the veil of black tresses, I saw the kid in the gay scarf flash me a thumbs-up. I gave him a chin bob back.

“I'm sorry I called you a vandal!” the woman shouted as they steered me out of the exhibit.

“This is a very unusual situation.”

The museum's director was wearing a dark gray suit, a white shirt, and a light gray tie. When they say everyone looks better in black-and-white, they mean photos. He looked a little sallow, nothing a blue sweater couldn't have fixed.

I didn't know what to say to that. Things had been pretty unusual around me for a while. It sort of depended on your perspective.

“I called the Shipleys, who kindly loaned us the painting.”

I had told the creep it was a loan.

“And they've been very understanding. They've decided to accept your”—he paused and made a flittering hand gesture—“touch-ups as an improvement by the artist.”

“They are. It was fading. You should tell them to stop hanging it by the window.”

He gave me a closed-lip smile as if he were indulging a child. “I think I'll let them make their own call on that one.”

He leaned back in his chair behind the long, shallow blond wood desk. It was entirely free of ornament and clutter, an homage to modernism if I ever saw one. I leaned back, too, and laced my fingers across my stomach. Larry, Moe, and Curly had long since been dismissed. The whole thing had taken several hours, during which I'd been locked alone inside the employee break room. They'd taken my bag, so I didn't have any change for the candy machine, which sucked.

I hadn't been invited up to the office on the third floor until my identity was verified and several phone calls had been made, one of which was to the Shipleys on their window-filled estate.

No harm, no foul, I thought. I was starting to wonder why we were both still sitting there, eyeing each other with polite interest.

He leaned forward. I didn't. His hair was thick and full and the sort of dark brown they always show on do-it-yourself hair color commercials. It was so perfect, in fact, that it made me wonder if it wasn't a very, very good wig.

“I'd like to turn a negative into a positive here.”

I bounced a knee. I feel about corporate-speak the way I feel about authority. Bitey.

“I'd like,” he went on, “to add a nice footnote to tomorrow's news story.”

Ah. That's why I hadn't been turned out on my keester.

The brat in me didn't want to play ball, but the grown-up considered the circumstances. It would, after all, be my last show. I sucked on the inside of my cheek.

“We can get you some supplies,” he said.

“I don't work on an empty stomach,” I told him.

A secretary brought me a menu from one of the octopus salad places nearby and then went to call Jenny, who, it was reported back to me, would come with everything I asked for. I asked if she'd seemed surprised.

“Not really.”

I ordered half a chopped salad and grilled prawns, which each turned out to be the size of a baby's arm. I got my bag back and fed quarters into the machine for a diet soda, and by the time I'd polished off the side of toasted bread, Jenny was there with brown paper grocery sacks in either arm.

“I was on a date,” she said.

“And I feel bad about that. You want dinner?” I asked, pushing the menu toward her.

“I ate on the way.”

I took a swig of diet soda. “Would I have approved of him?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“He's an artist.”

“A species not to be trusted,” I agreed. I dunked the last bite of bread into the leftover salad dressing and shoved it into my mouth and, before chewing, said, “Let's do this.”

The museum had been closed for over an hour. The sun had set while I'd been held up inside. The grid of streets below had quieted. When red turned to green, there was no one waiting to go. Jenny and I walked alone back to the exhibition space. A guard stood out front. I didn't recognize him, which was nice for both of us.

He showed us to the final room of the exhibit, two rooms past where I'd made it. There was a large blank wall that had been freshly skinned, a process museums use to allow artists to paint directly onto it. The guard stepped away, and Jenny and I stood in front of it. It was bigger and whiter than I'd thought. Even I felt small.

Jenny sat the bags down, and the clatter echoed in the empty room.

“Why are we doing this again?” Her normal voice sounded like a shout bouncing around the hard planes.

“I forget.”

“Maybe we can just leave.” She'd dropped down to a golf whisper.

“A soldier doesn't flee the battlefield,” I golf-whispered back.

“It's called desertion. Happens all the time. If it didn't, there wouldn't be a word for it.”

“Aren't you supposed to be inspiring me to have confidence?”

“Sorry.”

“It's okay.”

“You're going to rock this.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You're the man.”

Was it my imagination or was the wall getting whiter and bigger the longer we stood there?

“Desertion, you say?”

“You're a soldier. This is a battlefield.”

“Did you bring everything?”

She looked down into the bags at her feet. “I think so.”

I held out my hand, and she handed me a charcoal pencil like I was a surgeon being handed her scalpel. And like the first cut, I touched the lead to the wall, took a breath, and started to sketch. It wasn't long before I had to send Jenny in search of the guard and the guard in search of a ladder.

When she came back, she sat down cross-legged on the floor, cutting out leaves from all the clippings I'd saved over the years, every bit of press I'd ever received. I'd kept them the way a mother would, stashed in a shoe box that became two that became three that eventually became a plastic filing box when Jenny brought some order.

There are some artists who do little of their own work, who have assistants who paint and draw and sculpt for them. You might purchase a piece by Tom, and all he did was spout some babble at the beginning and sign it at the end. Those artists run their studios like businesses. They are the CEOs of Artist, Inc. They work the press to keep their brand solid, they work patrons like stock investors, and they work their assistants like assembly-line workers trying to keep up with the demand created by the first two.

That would be fine except it's shit.

When you buy my piece, you buy my piece. Mine. I did it. Jenny and all my assistants before her—a proud lineage of recent art school graduates with poor job prospects—stretched and treated my canvases, mixed my paints, and washed my brushes. They answered my mail, bought my groceries, and generally tried to keep me from collapsing in on myself too often. Some were more successful than others. Some lasted longer than others. But not a damn one ever painted a stroke. Frankly, it made me a shitty boss, but it made me a good artist, even if I was a slow one. So fuck the rest of that shit.

Until that night.

I only had one night. Tomorrow, I'd already told the museum, I had plans. So I was selling out like William Shatner. Jenny was cutting, and I was drawing. And her name wouldn't be anywhere on it.

I climbed down off the ladder, having finished adding a series of lizards that morphed into birds as they rose higher.

“Come here.”

She looked up. Her hair really was as blond and as flyaway limp as a woodland fairy's. As always, it was falling out of the ponytail and hanging in her face, and it made me say what my mother had always said to me:

“How do you see like that?”

“Like what?”

“With your hair in your face.”

She shrugged and tucked a particularly problematic lock behind her ear.

“Come take this,” I said, holding out the charcoal pencil.

She stood up and brushed small slivers of newspaper trimmings off her shorts before taking it and starting to put it back in one of the bags.

“No,” I said and pointed at the bottom of the weeping willow—a long, dangling, melting, abstract version of a weeping willow that I had drawn eight feet tall, leaning so far to the left it looked like it might fall. It wrapped inside the corner of the wall so it folded in half like a book on its way to closing. “Sign it.”

Jenny froze as if I'd handed her a gun and told her to shoot a whole litter of golden retrievers. Who were all Seeing Eye dogs. For disadvantaged children. She looked at the wall and then at me and for a second I thought she was going to cry and run away, which would've been a big problem considering all the paper leaves I needed her to cut out.

“I can't,” she said finally and tried to hand the pencil back to me.

I wouldn't take it.

“Yes, you can.”

“But it's not right.”

“You're doing the work.”

“Assistants don't sign things.”

I opened my mouth to argue the point, to make clear logical statements as to why that was twenty-seven kinds of utter bullshit, but all I really managed to do was sigh, because some things are so obvious that you can't explain them without tripping over your own words. So I did what any good authority figure would do. I dictated.

“Sign it,” I said. “I command you.”

She stood there, unsure.

“Go on,” I said. “Time is wasting.”

She took a step toward the wall, crouched down on one knee, touched the lead to the paint, and looked up at me one last time just to make sure before signing her name in clear schoolgirl loops very different from mine.

She took a step back and looked at it.

“Now get back to work,” I said, deliberately avoiding any sort of hugging moment that might have led to swelling orchestral music. “Those leaves aren't going to cut themselves.”

Twenty minutes later, just as I was dipping my brush into a muddy green and brown mixture of paints and touching the bristles to the wall for the first time, a reporter and a photographer walked in. Both were wearing jeans and looked like they'd been pulled away from a family dinner or a child's T-Ball game, which they probably had.

It was five o'clock in the morning by the time Jenny and I finished. We were stupid with tiredness, jittery and almost nervous from lack of sleep. The guard let us into the break room—or as I thought of it, my cell—and we bought packages of powdered sugar doughnuts and Bugles with our pocket change.

I waited until she had white powder on her cheek to bring it up.

“You called that reporter at the
Times,
didn't you?”

She took a swig of Sprite, the morning soda of choice, to wash down the masticated carbs. “Yes. Are you mad at me?”

“I might be if I thought about it more, which I haven't.”

“I guess I should've asked your permission first.”

She wadded up a wrapper and held it in her hand.

“You should have.”

She looked up at me. Her hair was no longer in a ponytail so much as in a general mess that suggested a ponytail might have once existed there.

“I'm sorry.”

“Okay.”

“That's it?”

“That's it.”

The ad on a classic car enthusiasts' Web site was for a canary yellow '56 T-Bird with pale green upholstery. There was a photo taken on a grassy field and a red banner across the ad that said
SOLD
. It listed a contact phone number. I called it.