by Larry Watson
Jake stirred and packed the tobacco in the bowl of his pipe with a kitchen match. He scraped the match into flame on the underside of the table and relit his pipe. “I sign a contract.”
Weaver stood and, taking the poker from the rack, pushed and rearranged the logs to allow more air into the fire. When one of the logs threatened to roll from the grate, Weaver shoved it back with the toe of his boot. He had a brief impulse to hold his foot in the fire to impress Jake with the seriousness of the matter at hand. Instead, he sat back down, leaning forward as if he were speaking to the rising flames and not to the man at his side.
“I need a new model,” Weaver said. “Someone who has a face and a body I can find stories in.”
“Are you sure you’re not confusing the muse with fresh pussy?”
Weaver turned to his friend. “Are you sure they’re supposed to be separate?”
Before Jake could answer, from behind the bar Frankie Rawling, the owner’s wife, called out to the two men, “Hey! Either of you want a baked potato? I got an oven full of them, and I’m going to have to throw them out otherwise.”
“Baked potatoes?” Weaver and Jake Bram asked in unison.
Frankie approached them carrying a bottle of brandy. “I don’t know what the hell happened,” she said. “I miscounted or something. I ran out of prime rib early last night, but I got all these goddamn baked potatoes left over.”
Without a request from either man, she poured brandy into their glasses.
“Frankie,” Jake said, “do us a favor. Stand over there by the fire.”
She seemed to know instinctively that she was being asked to pose, for she positioned herself in front of the mantel, faced the two men, held the bottle in one hand, and with the other balanced an imaginary tray. She cocked her head to one side and smiled.
“What about it?” Jake asked Weaver. “Feeling inspired?”
Frankie was Owen Rawling’s second wife, and she waited on tables and tended bar both before and after her marriage to the owner. She was younger than her husband, and the rumors about her as an adulteress were both numerous and specific: She took many lovers but only one at a time, and after she wore a man out, she’d move on to another and never go back. These men had to be of her choosing; walking into the Top Deck and making a pass at Frankie Rawling would get you nowhere. She favored men who lived in the county, but occasionally she would select a summer tourist if she knew he would be around for at least a week.
“I don’t know if it’s inspiration,” Weaver said, “but I’m definitely feeling something.”
Frankie had black hair, wide hips, large breasts, and a face that looked a little pushed in. She was a woman you might not look twice at were it not for the fact that she carried herself with the unapologetic confidence of someone sure of her attributes. Then, when you looked again, she returned your gaze directly, and the dark of her eyes held out promise of more darkness and directness.
“Make up your mind,” Frankie said. “And decide about the potatoes too. If I don’t get any takers I’ll start chucking them into the snow.”
“Patience,” Jake said. “Some things can’t be rushed.”
“Mind telling me what part I’m up for here?” she asked. “I’m not exactly dressed for the audition.” She wore a man’s white shirt, stained from her work in the kitchen, and a pair of stiff dark blue dungarees turned up at the cuff.
“This role you’d undoubtedly undress for,” Jake told her. “You’re being appraised by Mr. Ned Weaver himself, and he is in search of a model, a muse.”
“All right,” Weaver said softly to his friend. “Enough.”
“Yeah?” Frankie said to Weaver. “I thought you only painted landscapes.”
“Those,” Jake said, “are his lesser efforts.”
“I almost bought one—the church in the snow?—but the price! Jesus, you aren’t shy, are you?”
“Perhaps an arrangement can be made,” suggested Jake. “In return for inspiration, Mr. Weaver here might give you one of those watercolors you admire. Or perhaps he might paint one especially for you.”
“Jesus,” Weaver said, “are you my business manager now?”
At this moment, Owen Rawling came out of the kitchen to see his wife standing in front of the fireplace while two men stared at her. “Do them two want any of the goddamn potatoes?”
With the brandy bottle still in hand, Frankie made hurrying gestures to the two men. “Well?”
“Are they hot?”
“Hot? You’re fussy, aren’t you? No, they’re not hot. They’re leftovers, for Christ’s sake.”
“Tell you what,” Weaver said. “Bring us a platter of those potatoes, along with some butter and salt, and we’ll see how much damage we can do. And draw us a pitcher of beer.”
As Frankie scurried off to fill their order, she said to her husband, “Step to it. A pitcher—and it’s on the house. Small price if we can unload those potatoes. Nothing I hate more than seeing food go to waste.”
“I told you,” Owen said. “We could take those over to Kirking’s tonight.”
Frankie’s laugh sounded as though it could take at least two inches off a man’s height. “Now, what the hell do you think they’d say if we showed up with potatoes?”
Jake waited until both Frankie and Owen were in the kitchen. “Well?”
“That hair . . . Who’s that supposed to be in imitation of? Jane Russell? Ava Gardner?”
“Don’t evade the issue. You think you could do anything with her? Because she’d sure as hell do it.”
Weaver shook another cigarette from the pack, put a match to it, and inhaled deeply.
“Too zaftig?” Jake asked. “You looking for something that lives closer to the bone?”
“No mystery,” Weaver said.
“By God, she was right. You are fussy.”
Weaver hadn’t told the entire truth. On this subzero day, Frankie Rawling still had a touch of summer tan. She was likely one of those women who lay out for hours under the sun, baking until her skin was as dark as saddle leather, and Weaver was mildly curious to know whether she sunbathed in the nude or if her body was striped with flesh as pale as the soles of her feet.
“It’s not that I don’t appreciate your efforts,” Weaver said. “But I already have a candidate in mind.”
Jake tilted back in his chair, balancing like one of the western marshals he wrote about. “And here I’ve been working my ass off on your behalf.”
“I was thinking of Caroline,” Weaver said. Caroline was Jake Bram’s young wife.
Jake continued to teeter back and forth. “I don’t know if I should be amused or offended.”
“Why not flattered?”
“Maybe because I know your track record with your models. Has there been one yet you’ve failed to fuck?”
“That’s not the kind of count a man is supposed to keep, is it?”
Jake’s pipe had gone out again, and he took it from between his teeth and stared into the bowl. “You wouldn’t mind if I sat in on the sessions, would you?”
“Hell, yes, I’d mind. How would you like it if I looked over your shoulder while you wrote?”
“You could sit on my fucking lap, for all I care.”
Frankie returned from the kitchen, and the two men stopped talking and turned in her direction. She pulled the tap and expertly filled a pitcher with a minimum of foam. She brought the beer, along with two glasses, to the small table. “I know I’m fascinating to watch, but you two don’t have to stop talking every time I walk into the room.”
“We’re struck dumb by your beauty,” Weaver said. He watched her closely for a trace of blush, but he saw none. Perhaps she caught the trace of irony he couldn’t keep out of his voice.
“I’ll believe half that.” She poured beer into each glass. “Owen will bring the potatoes in a few minutes.”
Both men continued to watch Frankie as she walked away. The January wind that had cut short their trek gusted hard, tremblin
g the window in its casement. A sudden draft of air found its way down the chimney, and for an instant, the fire raised its voice above a murmur.
Weaver crushed out his half-smoked cigarette, and when he began to speak, he directed his remarks to the ashtray. “So let’s see if I have this right: You’ll offer up Frankie Rawling because you’re sure she’s slut enough to take off her clothes for any man. It would never occur to you I’d want a model for any other reason. Just as it wouldn’t occur to you that your wife might pose for me but choose not to disrobe. Or that I might not ask her to. Or that she might not choose to sleep with me. Or that she has any choice at all in any of these matters. My God, you have a low opinion of the woman you married. And it’s no wonder you’re a hack. You have absolutely no goddamn understanding of art or artistry whatsoever.”
Without disturbing the position of his chair, Weaver stood slowly. “Don’t get up,” he said to Jake Bram. “You sit there. Sit there and eat potatoes until they come out your ass.”
Weaver did not count this quarrel with his friend as the second failure of the day. That occurred later, after dark, when the wind finally subsided, and Weaver strapped on his snowshoes again. With the aid of a flashlight, and by cutting through the windswept corridors of an apple orchard, he made his slow, high-stepping way back to the Top Deck. He hoped that Frankie Rawling might be there alone, that her husband had taken the leftover potatoes and fulfilled their social obligation without his wife.
The Top Deck’s windows, however, were dark, both in the first-floor business establishment and in the second-floor apartment where the Rawlings lived. Weaver knocked on the door anyway, by that time thinking as much about the fireplace as Frankie Rawling’s combustible nature. There was no answer. Halfway home, the batteries in his flashlight flickered, grew faint, and finally gave out, but he had no trouble following his own trail of darker indentations in the dark snow.
Weaver’s friendship with Jake Bram was restored within the month when Jake came to visit and brought with him, as a goodwill offering, his wife, Caroline, who expressed her eagerness to pose for Weaver.
As it turned out, she was not the model he had been hoping for. She had about her certain physical features—an especially elongated philtrum and a waist unusually thick for a woman so boyishly slender—so that when Weaver tried to render her, first in pencil and then in pastel, the resulting image seemed to be a mistake, an artist’s failure of proportion. When Weaver tried to correct these anomalies, a different, even more unsatisfactory distortion occurred—he was prettying up reality, rounding its corners, smoothing its rough edges, and that was something he refused to do in his art.
A physical relationship between artist and model did not eventuate until Weaver persuaded Caroline to run off to Chicago with him. They phoned their spouses and told them that Weaver had found himself unable to paint, so they decided to drive to Chicago in hopes of finding inspiration in one of the city’s museums. They would have returned that night, but a snowstorm suddenly skidded in across Lake Michigan trapping them in the city.
The two of them toured the Art Institute, ate jaeger schnitzel and drank dark beer at Berghoff ’s, and then checked into the Drake. That evening they went for a walk, and Weaver showed Caroline Bram where his father was run over and killed. Later, they made love in a room so high above Michigan Avenue the sounds of traffic could barely reach them.
Making love to Caroline Bram was a singular experience, for in her Weaver found a body eerily similar to his own in size and shape. Hence, his every move—every squeeze, flex, thrust, and roll, every push and every pull—found an almost synchronous response, as if her body was answering his mind rather than his physical being. For the night, Weaver could not get enough of Caroline Bram, yet when they checked out of the hotel the following day, he had no regrets about driving her back to her home and her husband. Weaver was finished with her as both model and lover.
The only painting of consequence to come out of this set of circumstances was “Another New Year.” In it, half of a snowshoe is visible, as its wearer would see it looking down. The painting somehow captures motion, as if we are glimpsing a booted, bound, webbed foot just before it strides off the canvas.
The details, as they so often are in a Ned Weaver work, are uncannily precise: the snow curling and scattering over the edge and tip of the snowshoe; the cracks in the leather binding; the bent and sere grasses poking through the snow. It’s apparent that this walker in the snow is following in the tracks that another—or the walker himself—earlier made: In front of the snowshoe is a cavity in the snow that could only have been formed by another snowshoe. These footprints, along with the painting’s “tired” title, inclined one critic to interpret the work as “an indication that the artist has come to a dead end and has no other path available but to return to the subjects and styles which have served him in the past.”
Harriet was already in bed when the telephone rang.
When she answered, Jake Bram asked, as if he were continuing an earlier conversation, “What do you think? Any reason we should drink alone tonight?”
“You’ll have to come here,” Harriet said. “It’s too late for me to go out.” The sleeping pill had already taken effect, and she wasn’t entirely sure she was responding correctly to his question.
“You have the requisite supplies?”
“I believe we’re adequately equipped.”
“If I’m not there in half an hour, call out the dogs.”
Harriet did not get dressed, not exactly. She did, however, take off her flannel nightgown and instead put on the silk peignoir set she’d bought at Bergdorf ’s the last time Ned invited her to go to New York with him. She brushed her hair and applied a little lipstick and rouge. Her plan was quickly conceived and only dimly outlined—perhaps she wouldn’t go through with it—but she wanted to make the necessary preparations just in case. Then she poured herself a drink—she knew Jake would be well ahead of her. She was smoking her second cigarette and watching from an upstairs window when headlights loomed at the base of the long driveway. She hurried down so she could be standing in the open doorway when he arrived.
As soon as Jake stepped onto the porch, he reached into his coat pocket, pulled out a bottle of Martini & Rossi, and held it aloft. Under the porch light, the green glass glinted icily in the night air. He took his pipe from between his teeth. “I know, I know,” he said. “But I have a new drink of choice, and I couldn’t take a chance on being left high and dry.”
“Oh ye of little faith.”
He followed her into the house. “You got that? High and dry?”
“I got it. Come along. Let’s see to your needs.”
They were sitting in the darkened living room, each working on a second martini, before the name of either missing spouse was spoken, and it was Jake who hung the name Ned Weaver in the air between them.
“I swear to God,” Jake said, “there are days when I think I’m the luckiest man in the world to count Ned Weaver as my friend. Other days it’s all I can do to keep track of the ways I’d like to kill the son of a bitch.”
Harriet reached over and touched the rim of Jake’s glass with her own. “Congratulations. You’re now a full member of the Ned Weaver Fan Club with all attendant rights and privileges.”
“Yeah? What finally got me in? Turning my wife over to him?”
“If it were only that simple.” She finished her drink. “No, no. You have to go further than that. You must actually contemplate bringing on his demise.”
Jake jumped up from the couch and took Harriet’s glass from her hand. “Let’s get to it, then! I’ll refill these, and we can begin plotting!”
Alone on the couch, Harriet closed her eyes and clasped her hands over her stomach, the tip of each index finger touching her navel. She always assumed this position when she began to get drunk. She thought she could steady herself by locating her body’s center. She silently said the word equilibrium three times, confident she could say
it aloud without difficulty.
When Jake returned with Harriet’s drink, he sat closer to her than before. “Tell me what you think of this,” he said. “Ned told me he sometimes uses his own saliva when he’s doing a watercolor. Now, if someone could get ahold of one of his brushes, they could dip the hairs in poison, and when he puts it in his mouth—”
Before he finished, Harriet was shaking her head. “I believe he spits on the palette. Besides, isn’t that a little iffy? You don’t want to sacrifice certainty for the sake of ingenuity.”
“Hmmm. Then you’ll probably put the kibosh on the elaborate set of tubing through which carbon monoxide is piped back into the car while he’s driving?”
“How can you be sure I won’t be in the car that day?”
Jake’s pipe made a slurping sound as he drew on it. “Potentially the same problem with draining the brake fluid . . .”
Harriet put her hand on Jake’s wrist. The span and knob of bone felt large and hard, but then she was comparing him to Ned, whose underpinnings always reminded her of a bird’s. “Simplify, simplify,” Harriet said. “See if you can’t figure out a way to get the job done without so much . . . engineering.”
Jake leaned back but made no move to pull his hand out from under hers. “You’re right. We’re not plotting a novel here, are we?”
She moved her fingers around, feeling for Jake’s pulse. Her father had been a doctor who practiced out of an office in their home, and one summer he hired Harriet to be his assistant, to answer the phone, greet patients, and conduct a few of a routine examination’s simplest tasks. He hoped his daughter might follow him into a career in medicine, yet this hope soon faded. Harriet could never find the pulse in any man, woman, or child. She could not locate Jake’s either, but it didn’t matter. If his heartbeat seemed to quicken, she wouldn’t know if it was from her touch or from planning the murder of her husband.
Jake put a finger in the air as if he were checking the wind’s direction. “I think I’ve got it. It’ll take a little time, but if we can be patient, this will work. Guaranteed. Okay, we wait until hunting season—deer hunting— and when he goes out for his daily walk, we line him up in the crosshairs of a high-powered rifle and—boom. Looks like an accident. A stray bullet from a hunter’s gun. Happens all the time.”