Authors: Elizabeth Brundage
The Doctor's Wife (32 page)
He knew a woman like her, like his mother, shackled with compromise. He had found her window; he knew the cherry walls of her room, the brass bars of her headboard. And the various men she’d entertain there. Their raging buttocks as they fucked her. The blue neon of the flashing sign, NUDE DANCERS! illuminating her common face.
Later that afternoon, when the sun was low and the windows of the buildings glowed orange, he decided to pay the woman a visit. He found the building without trouble and rang all of the buzzers at once and continued to ring until the lock on the door released. He climbed the stairs to the fourth floor, smelling the rife odors of tenement life, burnt grease and fried bananas, the piquant draft of curry and saffron. He had counted the floors to her apartment from the outside, watching her clients arrive at the fourth-floor landing through the small window in the hallway, how they’d straighten their ties and slick back their hair before knocking, and now that he was inside it was easy to estimate the location of her door. It was four o’clock in the afternoon, the time of day, he had observed, that she kept to herself. When she would wash her stockings, perhaps, and hang them over the shower railing to dry. Or when she would shave her calves, or the sensitive area around her pubis. Sometimes she would paint her nails by the window, listening to the radio, the Cuban station, her body rocking gently with the music. It made him a little sick, visiting her now; still, he knocked on her door. “I just want to talk,” he told her when she opened it.
She frowned. “What about? You a cop?”
“I’m a painter.”
“A what?”
“An artist. I was wondering . . .” He cleared his throat. “Would you be willing to sit for me?”
“To sit?”
“For a painting. A sketch or two. I’ll pay you, of course.”
“What are you, a pervert or something?”
He smiled and raised his hands. “I refuse to answer on the grounds I may be incriminated.”
This made her laugh. “You want to pay me just to sit there.”
“That’s right.”
She shook her head like she still wasn’t sure. She studied his face. “It’s your money,” she said finally, and invited him in with an extravagant wave of her hand.
“Splendid.”
She lit a cigarette and began to remove her clothes.
“Leave them on,” he said. He wanted the red kimono. He wanted the black ribbon around her neck.
“Suit yourself, da Vinci.” She dropped into an old wing chair with torn upholstery, bulging guts of yellow foam.
“Long day?” he asked, just making conversation, getting out his pad, his pastels.
“You kidding? I’m bright-eyed and fucking bushy-tailed.” She blew the smoke right at him. “How’d you find me, anyway?”
“You’re not easy to miss.”
She smiled slowly, flattered. She let him draw her for half an hour, then poured them each a glass of whiskey. The whiskey tasted good, and since he hadn’t eaten it warmed his belly.
“I’m just curious,” she said, wiping her mouth on her wrist. “Why me? Why aren’t you out there painting buildings and the fucking East River? Why waste your time on some old whore like me?”
He reached out and took her hand. He held it, the yellow skin, the chipped and bitten fingernails. Her thin, elegant wrists. “You interest me,” he said simply.
She looked at him strangely and tears came to her eyes. “You must be pretty hard up.”
“What’s your name?”
“Grace.”
“Grace,” he repeated. “That’s a beautiful name.”
The room was nearly dark now, the streets outside fluid with rush-hour traffic. She came to him quietly, kneeling between his legs, and kissed him. Her mouth tasted of whiskey and nicotine and he drank from it willingly. She went to the dresser and took out a small tin box that had once contained tea. She opened it and retrieved a tiny bag of white powder. She put out the lines on the shiny tin top and offered it to him and he accepted it. He’d been secretly hoping for this and he indulged in the ritual feverishly, desperately. They went to the bed. He was suddenly afraid of her. The pungent odor in the sheets and the soiled pillow smelling of hair tonic and cologne. She began to kiss him as her fingers wandered inside his pants.
“No,” he whispered, “that’s not necessary.”
But she did not stop. She wrapped her hand around him and worked him hard and harder and it hurt. He grabbed her wrists and held them down and she struggled and he took her brutally, watching her face twist in a kind of rapturous melancholy.
“You’re all the same,” she said bitterly. “Every last one of you.”
When he woke it was dark, and she was gone. He dressed in the strange blue light, imagining himself on the roof across the street, looking into this life, his own past, the whore, like his own mother, a willing victim of circumstance.
A month later, in the violent heat of August, Simon drove to Amsterdam, New York. His intentions were not entirely despicable. He hoped to finish the portrait of the girl and receive his payment, trusting, of course, that the girl’s father would be satisfied with the finished product. It was something he should have done long ago. He felt his stomach churning although there was nothing in it but the flat beer he’d drunk that morning from an open can somebody had left behind. He had a cigarette butt left, he’d smoked half of it the night before, and he lit it now, a tiny scrap of flaming tobacco singeing his hand. He looked at his reflection in the rearview mirror, wondering how he would appear to the girl and her father. He wondered if they would be able to see his condition for what it was and he hoped, of course, that they wouldn’t. At least he had the car, which was worth plenty under the circumstances.
He found the girl’s house with little trouble and turned down the long dirt lane. The house was dark, the shades pulled. It seemed neglected. The grass had become overgrown with weeds. He did not see anyone around. Two black crows sat on the porch railing and cawed at him when he got out of the car. Frightened, he charged toward them, waving his arms madly about, and they flew off shrieking. He had a strange feeling, then, like he should turn away. As if returning there had been a mistake. But he didn’t. He climbed the steps and knocked on the door. There was no answer. He peered through the dark dirty glass and saw the hallway and part of the dining room with all the shades and curtains drawn. He tried the knob, and the door opened. He had a peculiar sensation that he was being watched, but the house appeared to be empty and was nearly silent save for the buzzing of flies. There seemed to be a lot of them flying about and the air was close and smelled of spoiled food. Simon walked toward the back room, where the girl’s father had been on the day he’d started the portrait. The buzzing of the flies grew curiously louder and an odor permeated the walls, an awful rotten smell that he could not place but knew was the result of something repugnant. And when he entered the room, he nearly vomited from the ghastly sight.
The man had been dead for several days, his rigid corpse swarming with flies. Standing there over the body Simon felt the flies attacking his own skin and he could do little to get them off. He reeled out of the room, gasping, his eyes tearing, and ran to the sink in the kitchen to wash his face, which he did not bother drying. He climbed the stairs slowly, murmuring her name over and over, but he heard no reply and he wondered if he’d even spoken it.
He found the girl in her bed, nearly unconscious and apparently hallucinating. The room was stifling with the windows shut tight and he flung them open, angrily, using his body, sensing the power of it. The walls of the room had been papered with old news clippings, certain details of which had been circled with pen. “THREE DIE IN EXPLOSION,” “GIRL LEAPS TO HER DEATH,” “LOCAL GIRL FOUND IN RAVINE.” A furious rain fell from the sky and he lifted the girl and carried her downstairs and out into it. The rain fell hard, and he washed her with it, and she began to come around.
“I didn’t know what to do,” she said.
“It’s all right,” he told her. “I’m here now.”
“Don’t leave me,” she begged him, clutching his shoulders.
The house didn’t have a phone, so he drove up to the graveyard and found the caretaker’s cottage. The caretaker was a reasonable man and helped him at once. They put a pine casket in the back of the man’s truck and drove together to the old man’s house. The caretaker gave him a cigarette.
“She’ll have to go into the orphanage now,” he said. “Ain’t but fourteen.”
Simon Haas remained quiet.
“The world won’t be any sorrier without the old bastard, I can tell you that. I don’t imagine she’ll miss him much.” The caretaker passed him a knowing look. “She never forgave him for what he done to her mama.”
“What did he do?”
“She got around with men. Came down sick with something, something bad, and her husband wouldn’t let her see a doctor. Like a punishment, see. For betraying him. He kept her locked up inside that house till she died. The girl was just four or five, I don’t know which.”
The story affected Simon; he felt sorry for the girl.
“She don’t got no relations in town,” the caretaker went on. “Far as I can tell, she ain’t got no relations period.”
Simon got to thinking.
“You ain’t no relation, are you?” The caretaker squinted at him, waiting for an answer that Simon readily supplied.
“I am, in fact, a distant relation. There will be no need for any outside help.” He rolled down the window, tossing the cigarette out into the rain. “She’ll be in good hands with me.”
It had been a mistake, he realized that now. He’d been thinking only of himself, his art. That’s how he’d been taught. To be thoroughly consumed. To think of nothing else. Painting, the paint itself, the intoxicating odors, the colors, the light rushing through the windows—it was all part of the indulgence, for it was an indulgence, and he controlled every aspect of it. He did not know if it was Lydia who’d made him famous, or if it would have happened anyway, if he’d been painting landscapes, for example, like some of his classmates. He couldn’t help thinking it was her, the strange mystery of her face, her slim child’s body. He liked to think he had saved her, but, he supposed, that was indulgent as well. In truth, he was frightened of her. She’d been his muse, the embodiment of his perversions, but apart from that, apart from how he’d used her, she was a complete enigma to him.
Several months after he’d moved into her father’s house, he woke one night to find her down on the floor in a puddle of moonlight, crying hysterically and beating her fists into the wood. He would later paint her that way, in greasy black lines, a muddled green background save for the splash of ocher, like urine, all around her—it was one of the paintings that had made him famous. “Lydia,” he whispered, moving toward her, not wanting to frighten her. “Lydia, what is it?”
She wouldn’t speak and he went beside her and held her, rocked her, and she cried. “My father,” she said finally. “I killed him.”
She clung to him. Shaking, wet, she held him; she begged him not to tell.
“I couldn’t stand it anymore. I just put the TV on and closed the door. And then you came.”
Her fingertips were full of splinters. It took hours to remove them all. He wondered, to this day, if he had managed to get every last one.
27
“BASICALLY HE DIED of dehydration,” Simon explained. “She’d stopped feeding him. He would have died anyway; she just sped up the process.”
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