Picture This

by Tobsha Learner

  Dropping to her knees, she took him into her mouth, wanting to please, wanting to make him cry out, plead for release, the scent of the curly black hair of his cock and balls a delicious aphrodisiac to her as she sucked slowly, curling her tongue under and around the tip, now her fingers playing his arse, her fingers cupping his taut buttocks, deeper and deeper into her throat until she could hear him somewhere far above groaning in pleasure. He was close, she could feel it. Suddenly he pulled away.

  ‘Do you know how long I’ve wanted you?’ he whispered.

  Before she had a chance to answer, he lifted her leg over his hip and entered her, the length and thickness of him filling her with intense pleasure.

  ‘No,’ she whispered, so close she could hardly talk.

  ‘The longest I’ve ever wanted anyone,’ he told her breathlessly.

  Faster and faster he took her, their pleasure climbing, then he paused, teasingly, before beginning the climb again, both of them struggling to stay quiet. The ecstasy was so intense it teetered between pleasure and pain.

  ‘You’re lying,’ she whispered.

  ‘Yes, I’m lying,’ he whispered back, then came, clutching her tightly, burying his face in her hair, his orgasm triggering her own in a silent tsunami that rippled through her body.

  *

  Ten minutes later, clothing adjusted, hair smoothed down, they stepped out of the cupboard to the amazement of a waiter and a security guard, who stopped talking mid-sentence.

  ‘Fantastic show, gentlemen,’ Felix remarked as they walked primly toward the exit.

  Chapter Eight

  The first thing Susie did when she got back to the apartment was to run a bath. As the water was running she went back into the open-plan living area and stared down into the glass tank in which Winnie, the tarantula Felix had given her, lived. The white mouse she’d put into the tank as feed a day ago was still alive, cowering in a corner. The tarantula, a reddish-brown mass of silent poise, squatted frozen in anticipation, two arms held up in the air.

  ‘You like toying with your prey, don’t you, Winnie? I suspect the hunt is probably more satisfying than the kill for you, just like someone else I know,’ she told the animal, feeling a certain wry affection for something so monstrous, hairy and female. Then, remembering that the bath was filling, she returned to the bathroom.

  After stripping her clothes off she leaned against the slate-covered wall, uptown New York a shimmering sliver through the long vertical window. She still smelt of him. She touched herself and sniffed her fingers. The two of them together was a pungent chemistry; it made her instantly want him again. She groaned out loud and didn’t recognise the noise she made. It was both exhilarating and wrong; it was also the most consciously unprofessional thing she’d ever done. It was her one rule: don’t mess with the gatekeepers, especially one who’s arguably the most powerful in the contemporary art market – and an inveterate womaniser. Was she that self-destructive? She knew Felix Baum was a vulture, a bone-picker. He could not help himself; he was hard-wired for conquest and able to take anybody down with him.

  She turned the taps off as the bath was about to overflow, then stepped out into the bedroom to collect her dressing gown. As she did, she noticed that the window leading out onto the fire escape had been left open. Shivering, she walked over to close it. As she turned back to the bedroom she saw them: a pair of slippers – pale green, distinctively individual, worn, their soft leather echoing the shape of a small woman’s foot – placed neatly under her bed on the right side, the side her ex-lover would always sleep on. Susie recognised them instantly.

  She stood there paralysed, waiting for Maxine herself – slipper-encased foot first, then the ankles, then the legs, torso, neck… then finally the face, Maxine’s eyes narrowed in that familiar accusatory expression Susie had both loved and dreaded. But there was nothing but emptiness and the distant shriek of a fire engine heading down Ninth Avenue.

  She closed her eyes, then opened them again. The slippers were still there. Last time she’d seen them, they’d been under her bed back in Bow, London, over a year ago – the night before Maxine had left her. How had they got here? She picked them up gingerly, her heart pounding against her ribcage, convinced now that Maxine’s ghost would materialise. There was nothing, only the faint scent of a familiar skin cream that took her back to Maxine and their lovemaking.

  *

  Felix took all his clothes off, folding his trousers and shirt methodically and carefully hanging them over the edge of the chair for his housekeeper to deal with in the morning. He then stood in front of the full-length mirror that was set in the door of his dresser. He hadn’t washed and the scent of their lovemaking rose up in waves from his body. He could smell Susie on his face, penis and fingers and he had no intention of washing her off. Not yet. He liked it; there was something in the musky smell that took him back to his adolescence, to a time when there was a furtive excitement in such couplings – as if they held the promise of a whole new future, a transport out of his then-dreary existence.

  He studied his reflection in the mirror, the five sessions a week with his trainer evident in his lean physique, the muscled shoulders and upper chest. His legs athletic and long, the thick black pubic hair feathering up toward his belly button; his penis, heavy and flaccid, fell to one side, still sticky with her. He touched it for good luck, then checked his neck and chest for love bites or bruises. There were none, but his nipples (large for a man) were a little red from when she had bitten them, and he made a note to avoid starched shirts for a while. He looked good for 38; perhaps the torso was a little long, his legs a little short but at six foot three it was barely evident. For a moment he conjured up the image of her on her knees, him in her mouth, and he stiffened immediately. I have had her. I have had Susie Thomas.

  He walked, naked, back to the bed, the sheets already turned down for him. He would go to bed as he was, drenched in the cloud of them, the odour triggering flashbacks: snippets of lovemaking, a petit mal of the cock and heart. Sighing, Felix slipped between the cool, crisp clean sheets and lifted a thick catalogue from the bedside table.

  It was from one of Susie Thomas’s exhibitions at the White Cube gallery in London, entitled Sexualising/My Time/Your Time. He opened it to the first page, a black-and-white photograph of the artist as a younger woman, standing in her studio in the East End of London, her arms crossed defensively, staring straight out at the viewer. An introduction ran beside it:

  I remember the first day Susie Thomas walked into the lecture room at Guildhall. I was giving a lecture on Russian constructivism and she was 20 minutes late. She turned up, her long red hair up and artfully constructed around what appeared to be an old birdcage, the singing canary perched within interrupting my lecture at least ten times that afternoon. I would say it was love at first sight… What was more interesting was that the birdcage, on closer inspection, was in fact a model of the Russian constructivist Tatlin’s Tower, which led to a whole new discussion on the topic. The woman is a genius… and has an innate gift for both visualisation and the notion of the artist as the art. Of all the Young British Artists, she lives it the most.

  *

  Felix ran his finger down the outline of this younger, unknown version of the woman he’d just made love to. She appeared so adolescent, that funny juxtaposition of sheer bravado, confidence and vulnerability, at the crossroads of fate. He lifted the page and sniffed the image; his fingertips had left a trace of her scent on the page. Time folded against time, past, present… And future, he completed the sentence. I am your future, even if you don’t know it.

  He flicked through the rest of the catalogue; her early work had been exceptional, displaying a conceptual wit beyond her years. Even then, he noted, she had the craft to immortalise the work in a way that was lacking in her peers. If Susie wanted to draw like Goya, she could; if she wanted to self-parody like Cindy Sherman, she could. Her psychological commentary on gender and sexuality was the most original he
’d encountered. In his mind, he started composing the catalogue notes for the next show: the aphrodisiac of celebrity – could there be a more seductive potion?

  It was then that his gaze fell on the pillow on the other side of the bed for the first time that evening. A long blonde lock of hair lay neatly on top of it – damp, a water stain spreading through the silk. He stared down, his mind not quite able to assimilate the reality of its presence. He picked it up delicately and sniffed it; it smelt musky, of river, the East River. The next moment it hit him.

  Horrified, he leapt out of the bed. The vision of Maxine’s long blonde hair floating like a halo around her dead, blank face flashed into his mind. Leaning over, he retched, then, not wanting to touch the hair directly, he grabbed a couple of tissues and carefully picked it up from the pillow (a damp stain left behind like an accusation) and carried it into the bathroom. It took two flushes of the toilet to get rid of it. But who had put it there? Who had known enough to break into his apartment and plant such incriminating evidence?

  *

  Latisha collapsed against the back of her front door, then stumbled her way to the bathroom. Fighting dizziness, she managed to get her insulin pen from the cabinet and inject herself while sitting on the edge of the bath. As she waited for the insulin to flood through her body she thought about the day. She’d made it. It was now past midnight and she knew both of them would have found the messages she’d left. Did they now feel judgement like the icy fingers of the drowned woman herself? Latisha hoped so.

  *

  Susie sat at the edge of the bed and rocked herself. She’d placed the slippers into an old shoebox and then locked them in the safe that was built into the cupboard. As if someone would steal them back, as if they might evaporate into the ether as soundlessly as they had appeared. It was a frightening possibility. She needed them as evidence she wasn’t losing her sanity. Now that Maxine had insinuated herself back into Susie’s life, the shape of Felix still resonating in her body felt like a betrayal, as if she had been unfaithful. Infidelity to a ghost, to a memory? It was an absurd thought, she concluded, staring up at the nightshades that shifted with the light from the street outside.

  ‘You left me, Maxine, not the other way around,’ she said, her voice echoing against the polished concrete floor and bare walls. There was no answer. Tomorrow, Susie thought. Tomorrow I’ll go to Maxine’s last address, see if I can find someone who knew her in her final days.

  Outside, the sound of laughter floated up from the apartment below.

  *

  In the morning she took the slippers out of the safe. In daylight they were even more recognisable: as faded and moulded to the shape of her dead lover’s feet as she remembered.

  Susie started to flick through the old emails from Maxine.

  Chapter Nine

  It had been an interesting day. A day of the high and mighties, her grandmother would have described it, meaning she’d gone out searching for some high-and-mighty knowledge and she’d found it. Latisha had gone down to Fifth Avenue and into the New York Public Library, a building she had been fond of ever since her grandma had taken her there as a six-year-old, telling her the two stone lions at the entrance were there to stop the books from running away, the ones that had got sad and droopy because no one was opening them up and reading them. Them books like people, Latisha. They need to be heard, otherwise they die of loneliness.

  Latisha had used the place as a retreat ever since, sometimes just to sit in the warm reading room with its huge arched windows running either side and the grand high ceilings with those paintings that Latisha liked to think of as paintings of heaven. It was also a good place to find information. She’d looked up Felix Baum in their index and had pulled up several references that were interesting. In a Time magazine article about Edward Hopper, she’d seen a painting in the same style she’d last seen in the back office of his gallery. It was the night of the exhibition and she’d trailed after Maxine looking for another glass of that nice red wine. The painting – of a woman sitting on the edge of her bed staring out of the window at the Manhattan sky – had spoken to Latisha immediately. An angular square of flat yellow sunlight falling across the floor had particularly caught her attention; it seemed to embody all those long summer days she now felt she had wasted in longing, the dense yellow grabbing at the back of her eyes, drilling into her memory. She knew that feeling of displacement, of floating above the bed, wondering what anchored her to the world. Struck by the beauty of the work, she’d stopped stock-still before it, released only when Maxine had told her who the painter was, a great American – Edward Hopper.

  Now, as she stared down at the other paintings in the magazine, Hopper’s work spoke to her again. One, Hotel Lobby – painted in 1943 – seemed to her to capture the way every hotel lobby must have looked in those years, with three folk ignoring each other, marooned in their own islands of loneliness like rich white folk often are. She found herself wondering whether this wasn’t the lobby of the Washington Square Plaza Hotel, where in those years her grandmother used to clean in the early hours of the dawn; after that her mother did the same job, and then Latisha herself. And so she sat there, staring down at Hopper’s painting, putting herself into the skin of the young blonde reading in a blue dress, the space above and around her icy somehow. The lady reminded Latisha of Maxine, and this saddened her, made her want to tell the blonde girl trapped in the frame to run from that lobby right now, run for her life before it was stolen from her.

  There was another Hopper painting beside it, the same one that hung in Felix Baum’s office. There was a description printed underneath:

  Girl in Yellow Square of Light. This painting is one of several early works of Hopper’s, circa 1924, that have recently surfaced after an anonymous collector contacted the gallerist Felix Baum. The discovery has caused great excitement in the art world and among Hopper enthusiasts.

  But the painting signified something else, something between Maxine and Baum. Why else would the sculptor have left a photocopy of Girl in Yellow Square of Light, with an address and a name stapled on it, in the hidden box she’d asked Latisha to take care of if something happened to her?

  Latisha gazed down, remembering the photocopy and the name and the address pinned to it. The neighbourhood was one she knew well, only four subway stops from her own. She could go see this man, find out more. Maybe he would have some answers.

  For the second time that day she felt Maxine’s ghost settling beside her, her small hand reaching out and nestling into the crook of her own massive forearm. It was good to know she was not alone.

  *

  The morning after seducing Susie Thomas, Felix cornered his housekeeper and questioned her on whether she’d let anyone into the apartment uninvited. Maria, normally the soul of discretion, flushed at his uncharacteristic anxiety.

  ‘No one, Mr Baum. No one came in. All day. Only the pizza guy you sent around at seven.’

  ‘Pizza guy? I never organised a pizza delivery.’

  ‘Mi dios! It must have been him, but it was those Gourmet Pizza guys you use all the time. I thought it had been arranged. I was folding laundry in the back so he offered to put the pizza in the kitchen. Maybe he stole something as well?’

  ‘Calm down, Maria; nothing’s been taken. What did this guy look like?’

  ‘Black, young, tall… I cannot remember anything else. But you know what was really bad? I tipped him five dollars. If only I’d known! I am so sorry, Mr Baum.’

  After Maria had left the room, Felix phoned the pizza company. They had no record of the delivery. He put the phone down and turned slowly in the entrance hall. Now he didn’t feel so safe. He pulled out his mobile and dialled another number: one that he’d made sure existed only in his memory. There was a long bleep before the ringtone set in, indicating that the person at the other end of the line was overseas. Finally a young male voice answered, sleepy, as if he’d just woken up.

  ‘You out of the country as we
arranged?’ Felix kept his voice low.

  There was a reply – more a grunt than a clear confirmation, but the meaning was obvious.

  ‘Good. Stay there, until I say otherwise,’ Felix instructed, then clicked off.

  Chapter Ten

  Latisha got out at 33rd Street and started walking down towards Koreatown. The paper with the address burned a hole in her pocket, felt like it was trailing smoke as she lumbered her way through the bustling sidewalks, street peddlers touting their wares in a cacophony of noise, her crutch supporting her weight like the stick of a prophet. She was far taller than most of the Koreans and they fell back, intimidated by her size, the crowds parting before her as if she were royalty.

  Maxine’s ghost had left her somewhere between the Rockefeller Center and West Fourth Street, extinguished by the stream of working humanity that flowed through the subway like dirty oil in a pipe. Latisha herself generally had little time for other people – except at church, and some family, like her nephew – but the artist had changed her, made her think there might be some goodness left under the folds of unhappiness and indifference she saw in the passing faces.