The Painter: A Novel (8 page)

“There you are! Smoking away your breakfast.”

“How do you know I haven’t already eaten a stack of pancakes? Were you raised in a barn?”

She pulled over the other chair, just scraped it over the rough rock, plopped down beside me. Tossed her curly hair off her face.

“You mean not knocking? I’m always hoping I’ll catch you—what’s that Latin—
in flagrante delicto
.”

“With whom?”

“A muse. An angel maybe.”

“You should knock.” And I thought to myself: If I were in a better mood that would be my next painting. Me in the arms of a muse. A dangerous proposition. I mean getting that close to the one who brings the gifts.

She turned bodily in the chair and looked at me. Then prodded my calf with the toes of her sandaled foot. “You’re serious today,” she said. “What’s the matter?”

I let out a breath, stubbed the cheroot on the stone. “I got in a fight. Sort of.”

“Yeah? Like the Jim of old? The violent felon I’ve heard about?”

“Kind of.”

“Sorry. I don’t mean to joke. If you got in a fight you must have been really mad.”

“I guess. I was blind. The way you get.”

She shook her head.

“Everything goes dark at the edges. Kind of tunnels down to the target. A good fighter, a real brawler has to open up that vision. Use the anger but open up the field of view and stay relaxed. My friend Nacho used to tell me that. Don’t just charge in swinging like a crazed bull, Jesus, compa, you are going to get yourself killed. That was never me. I was the one rolling around in the spit on the floor.”

“Wow.”

“That’s what happened yesterday.”

“It did? Jeez.”

I told her. The whole thing: Dell beating the mare, the rolling wet in the ditch, bloodying Dell’s nose, my talk with Bob. I told her and we watched a harrier, a big hawk fluttering low over the sage, beating its wings over a bush, lift then glide, scaring up the mice, methodically hunting.

When I was done she was looking at the mountain. A flash of blue and four small birds tore by the edge of the porch and down past the pond. Mountain bluebirds. Early to be here, maybe they just stayed all summer. When I was done I lit another cheroot. She didn’t say anything.

“Don’t you want to kill the bastard,” she said at last.

“It had occurred to me. Mostly I just want to get his stench out of my nose.”

“No kidding. Fuck. I’m not even a violent felon and I want to tie him to a post and shoot him. How do people even get like that? Like a stain.”

We sat side by side, watched the big hawk. It had a white rump that flashed as it rose. A cool morning, the sky over the mountains washed clean. Something touched my arm below the rolled up sleeve. Her hand. Her small fingers. Brushed the skin lightly and lay over my forearm. Don’t know why it surprised me. I watched them, her fingers, the way I had just been watching the bird, happy to see them there, a little awed.

Her fingers migrated down toward my hand, rested on a scab of dried green paint, picked at it, moved on, covered my paint spackled knuckles, one finger sliding down over the stub end of my half finger. Resting there a second, pushing on the end.

Slipping to the side, onto my thigh. I was wearing baggy khaki shorts, enjoying the chill, and her warm fingers wriggled under the hem and her touch on my bare thigh raised instant goosebumps. We were both watching the transit of her hand as if it were another animal. She stopped, let it rest and curl on top of my leg.

“You see me naked all the time,” she said. “Does that do anything for you?”

I lay the half cheroot down across a lip of flagstone for later. She was very pretty. Head tipped downward, quarter profile. The length of her eyelashes. Maybe the prettiest angle for a human head, a woman.

“Yes.”

“What?”

Didn’t answer.

“What?”

“Sometimes I get— When you were a mermaid. Arching backwards and all.”

“You get a boner.” She lifted her head and smiled at me, open, guileless, her eyes suddenly as faceted and sparkly as gems.

I nodded.

“You have a boyfriend,” I said lamely.

She pursed and twisted her soft lips, like: That is really stupid.

“Dugar is a certified airhead. The official documents just arrived. He wants to go live with sea cows or whatever they are. Plus, I have suspected for a while that he’s been banging the hippy girl from the orchard and now I know. I told him we were coasting, just coasting, no more gas. He asked me if he could use that in a poem.”

Her hand stirred, woke up. Crept stealthily up under the loose leg of the shorts, worked inward, found me. I don’t wear underwear unless it’s like some formal event.

My dick was as surprised as I was. Kind of embarrassed. She brushed it with the curled backs of her fingers then pounced. Squeezed and tapped. Amazing how fast an embarrassed cock, one with ethics, social sensibilities and all sorts of reasons to just stay home, amazing how fast it can forget everything and lunge for the prize at a hundred miles an hour. Must be how a venerable, canny trout feels when it triggers on an elk hair caddis—somewhere in its pea brain it knows,
knows
, this is probably not a good idea, but Fuck it.
Bang!
Also, she was—what? Ten years older than Alce would be, but still, she was young. I shuddered. She— It wasn’t right. Any of it.

“Uhh,” I said.

“I want you to see me naked. No painting. A person seeing another person.”

“Uhh,” I said. “I haven’t had much luck lately.”

“You don’t need luck, dummy. I just want you to look at me. C’mere.”

She gave the head one more friendly squeeze and took my hand and led me through the screen door into the bedroom.

Context is funny. How things hit you. Like on one planet there is gravity and you are walking along, then there is no gravity and you are airborne, sort of flying in slow parabolic leaps. I had seen Sofia undress probably a dozen times. Had seen her stretch out naked. Had paid attention to the curves and the colors and living heat of her body, the potential for movement there, and rhythm, even when she was very still. She was never still. Even immobile she had the sprung tautness, the restrained leap of a deer, one at dusk who lifts her head from the grass and is—listening. For threat I suppose.

With Sofia it was as if her body were listening, but it was for some inner laughter. That’s how it seemed when I painted her. That thing where color and form become almost like a music, something rhythmic and flowing, and somewhere in there I lose myself. When I am really painting, when I am painting well. I lose myself and may not wake up for hours, for most of a day. What I loved was how Sofia understood that and gently took her leave. And in that, when I was really painting and in it, and if she was modeling for me, I would see her and not see her. I would not see her as a young woman, naked, open, waiting for me to make love to her. I would not see her as a nude girl coyly, just barely covering, enticing the next move in the game. It was not a game, ever, it was completely, wonderfully serious, and it was never about sex. The boner thing was when I needed a break, got hungry, snapped out of it.

As she tugged me into the bedroom the screen door clapped behind me. I thought: Punctuation. A period on the last long paragraph of my life.

“You look like you are being led to slaughter,” she said.

She turned and pulled off her thin jersey blouse, unclipped the bra from the front and loosed her generous breasts. Wriggled out of her cutoff shorts, let them fall. Pushed down on the elastic of her little thong and worked it down to her knees where it relinquished itself also to the floor. She smiled up at me, as open and guileless as before. Her eyes about five different colors, blues, grays, greens, warm browns. Then she took my hands as she had before, hers small and warm and assured, and she placed them open on her collarbones, still smiling, and stood straight and still and closed her eyes. Something about that gesture. So simple, so joyful, so trusting. I felt a surge of something simple and clean, something like happiness. Felt myself rouse and reach with a sympathetic attention. I was up against her, my dick was touching her belly and she reached and pushed it down so that it was against her, her crack, sort of sprung against it, and I could feel the brush of her curly hair, the pressure where she clamped me there. And we stood. And we looked at each other and laughed. And my hands moved along her collarbones, the delicate birdlike architecture. And down over her breasts and back up to her slender neck, the perfect ears. Over her strong shoulders. And her hands down over my hips, around to the front, stroking and pressing me into her, up against her. I lost myself again. But this time it was to a euphoria with a different gravity. I think I was laughing. She pulled me toward the bed and fell backward and suddenly all the angles were right and she was moist and open and I was in her and it was that shock. The shock that never dulls. Of being inside another. And her laughter was overtaken by breath and we rocked together in a pure and simple delight. That’s what I remember: the simplicity, the lightness.

How often is anything that simple?

We lay in the coolness from the open door. I could hear the burble of the water running through cattails down into the pond. A cricket warming to the morning on the ramada. Her head was in the crook of my arm and I thought she might be asleep. This much peace vouchsafed to any one man. The luck of it. That’s what I thought. Drifting in it. And as I drifted I was open and careless in my thoughts and I bumped up against something barnacle sharp and ugly. Dellwood Siminoe, swinging the club against the little mare like she was a piñata. The candy spilling, and I knew the candy for him was the pain and terror of the other. Clotted and dribbling, then pouring onto the road in a shiny gush. How many terrified horses like that? Enough to make a business of shipping those broken to Arizona. What Bob told me.

Fuck it. I pushed it away. Pushed my nose into the warm mass of Sofia’s dark hair, breathed it, pushed everything else away.

I made omelets and we shared a trout, fried in butter with a little salt and pepper, lemon. Made another pot of coffee. Sat on the ramada.