by Jen Beagin
Ginger climbed out of the pool and stood dripping in her red skirted swimsuit and matching bathing cap.
“I made a pork roast,” Woody announced to them both. “And homemade applesauce.”
“Yum,” Mona said.
“You and your pork,” Ginger said. “Honest to God.”
Woody offered Ginger a towel.
“You’re my favorite mermaid,” he said to Ginger, but he was looking at Mona.
“You’re a piece of work, mister,” Ginger said, and snatched the towel out of his hands.
“Let me dry your back, dear,” he said.
“Buzz off,” she said, and stepped away from him.
Mona watched her walk away, her wet feet slapping the concrete. She looked at Woody’s face, expecting to see anger or sadness there, but he was still staring at Mona and smiling. “Well, you like pork, don’t you?”
She didn’t like the way he was looking at her then, which was confusing. His gaze had always been a kind of corrective lens—it brought everything into instant focus. She could even hear better when he was watching, and he was always watching—in the pool, in the mirror, at the kitchen counter, at the organ, behind the bar. He even stared at her when she was doing something that wasn’t particularly interesting, like reading a book, peeing, sleeping.
But now her ears felt like they had water in them and she fumbled with the towel and then dropped it.
“Let’s go inside,” Woody said. “You’re shivering.”
She felt his eyes on her as she picked up the towel and walked toward the apartment, stubbing her toe on a chaise lounge.
* * *
“YOU LOOK TIRED,” PAUL SUDDENLY said from the ladder.
“I think I just figured out why I hate apples,” Mona said.
“Let’s eat lunch,” Paul said.
Well, this was a first—he never ate lunch with her. She climbed out of the tub and saw that her torso and legs were bottle green.
“Oh,” Paul said. “I didn’t think of that.”
“Is it dye?”
“Food coloring,” he said. “It will come out eventually.”
“Shaving cream will get it off,” she said.
Terry would have been extremely impressed with that information, but Paul said nothing. He brought her a towel and held her kimono while she dried herself off. “I like this,” he said. It was a new one, hand-painted with a peacock motif. She realized now that she’d bought it for Lena, not herself. He helped her put it on. “I always wonder why you wear this during the breaks. Are you embarrassed?”
“I don’t know,” Mona said. “Yes?”
“Don’t waste your youth hating your body,” he said. “You will regret it, believe me.”
“What do you want me to do—eat lunch naked?”
“Why not?”
They ate leftover Thai in the dining room. She was happy to see the lopsided plates again. There was an open bottle of wine on the table. She peered at the label, which had a picture of an angry bull on it.
“Bull’s Blood,” she read out loud.
“It’s Hungarian,” he said. “From a small town in the north called Eger, where I grew up. My parents were winemakers.”
“Is there blood in it?”
He shook his head. “Eger was invaded by the Turks in the fifteen hundreds. The Turks had an army of one hundred fifty thousand, but the people of Eger—the Hungarians—managed to fend them off, even though there were only two thousand of them. The Hungarians drank so much wine that their beards and armor looked bloodstained. They were ferocious fighters. The Turks, who were very superstitious, thought that they must have been drinking the blood of bulls, and retreated like a bunch of wuzzies.”
“Wussies,” Mona corrected him.
“Or . . . pussies?” Paul offered.
“That works, too,” she said, and smiled.
He poured them each a glass and they drank in silence for a few minutes. Then she asked him why he’d left Hungary all those years ago.
“Hitler,” he said.
She didn’t ask him to elaborate.
“May I ask how old you are?” Mona asked.
“Older than you think,” he said, and topped off her glass. “May I ask why you clean houses?”
She sipped her wine and tried to think of something smart to say. Nothing came to mind. “I like how cut-and-dry it is,” she finally said. “How black and white.”
“You don’t make it black and white,” he said. “You make it complicated and dangerous.”
“Dangerous?” she coughed.
“You’re like my wife,” he said. “You don’t have any boundaries.”
“I don’t take my work home with me,” she said. “That’s all I meant.”
“Of course you do,” he said. “You take photographs.”
“But only in secret,” she said. “I don’t share them with anyone. I live in my own world, trust me. I’m very isolated.”
“You like your own company,” he said, “but, in your art, you put yourself onstage. You don’t want to be invisible. You want to be seen.”
He seemed to search her face for a reaction. She felt herself blush and looked at the napkin in her lap.
“It’s okay to want those things,” he said.
“Did Lena have a chance to look at my book?”
He blinked at her.
“The portfolio I left for her,” she said.
“Oh yes,” he said after a pause. “In fact, she took it with her to New York.”
New York. She pictured Lena wandering around the Village, the portfolio tucked under her arm. Did she appreciate the quality of the leather? Did she smell it? Did she approve of Mona’s color choice? Now she thought of Lena sitting in the sunny office of a gallery, meeting with other curators, and Mona’s portfolio was on the table. Was it getting warm in the sun?
“Was Lena one of your students? Is that how you met?”
He sipped his wine and looked past her out the window. “She was my model,” he said. “I stole her away from a famous painter. I wooed her very heavily. It was a lot of work. And then we had Rain.”
“Rain?” Mona said.
“Our daughter,” Paul said.
They named their kid after the weather? Her confusion must have shown on her face, because he said, “ ‘Rain’ is short for ‘Rainer.’ It’s a boy’s name, but it suited her. We named her after Lena’s grandfather, who was German.”
“Where is she?” Mona asked. “New York?”
“Not anymore,” Paul said. “She drowned herself.”
Before she could respond, he stood up and walked into the kitchen. She looked at the boat sculpture out the sliding glass door. Lena had made it because she missed Rain, not rain, and it was Rain she prayed for. Not rain.
Rain.
Not . . . rain, you fucking idiot.
Paul returned carrying a paper sack. “You don’t look well,” he said. “Did Lena not tell you?”
“Nope,” Mona said.
“You remind her very much of Rainer,” he said. “Maybe that’s why.”
“You don’t keep any photographs of her,” Mona said. “On the walls, I mean.”
“She’s all over the house,” Paul said. “Her drawings and paintings, the photographs she took. We scattered most of her ashes in the sea. The rest are in the coffee table.”
“What?” Mona said.
“The table you said you dream about,” he said. “We put some of her ashes in with the gold leaves. Lena’s idea.” He opened the paper sack and handed her a large chocolate truffle. “It’s from Budapest. You’re going to want to bite it, but don’t. Just let it melt in your mouth.”
He put one in his mouth, too, and they sat there, not speaking, waiting for the chocolate to melt. It was the kindest way she’d ever been told to shut up.
She got dressed and he walked her to the door—another first—and handed her two hundred-dollar bills and a bottle of Bull’s Blood.
* * *
&n
bsp; SHE STILL COVETED THE COFFEE table, even though it was essentially a coffin. How strange to place the remains of your only child in an object you rested your feet on. Strange and creepy. She was comfortable with creepy, though, and they knew it. Wasn’t that why they’d let her into their lives?
Creepy Woody, that’s what they’d called him. She’d overheard two women talking about him by the pool one day. Natalie and Tina, the grown daughters of one of the tenants, staying with their parents for the weekend. They talked at length about his staring problem, and how goddamn creepy it was, and how they avoided contact with him altogether.
“Remember his son?” Tina said. “He was a little creep, too.”
“Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” Natalie said.
Mona climbed out of the shallow end and scurried into the apartment dripping wet, where Woody was waiting for her with a butter and sugar sandwich, but she ran past him and into the bathroom, closing the door behind her and locking it. She got out of her wet bathing suit and wrapped a towel around herself and stood there shaking, humiliated, and Woody knocked on the door and asked what the matter was, and why was the door closed?
She couldn’t say what was bothering her, but she felt contaminated somehow. “It’s not the snake bite that kills you,” Woody had told her once, “but the venom.” That’s what she felt like—full of poison. Her family was creepy. It was something people talked about. Woody had given her father the creepy gene and now she wondered if she was creepy, too.
* * *
AT HOME, SHE SLATHERED HERSELF with shaving cream and stepped into the shower. The green stain faded but didn’t disappear. She wrapped herself in a towel and then slid Ginger’s package out from under the bed and opened it with a box cutter. She saw the back of the canvas first. As usual, he’d written his initials and the date, W.B. 1983, but there was also a thick manila envelope wedged into one of the corner braces. She removed it and turned it over in her hands. It was addressed to no one, but she knew before opening it that it was money and that it was meant for her. For the first time in her life, she looked at the ceiling and prayed for thousand-dollar bills.
No such luck. They weren’t hundreds, either. Or even twenties, for that matter.
“Christ, Woody, what’s the obsession with two-dollar bills?” she remembered Ginger saying. “They’re worthless, ding-a-ling!”
“Actually, dear, they’re not worthless,” he’d said patiently. “They’re worth two dollars.”
She wondered if it had been Woody or Ginger who’d put the money there. No way of knowing now. She stood up and turned the canvas over, laid it flat on the floor.
There it was, the same composition as always: an exhausted-looking bullfighter on one side of the canvas, the fallen horse with its blood and intestines spilling into the dirt on the other side of the canvas, and the bull, also bleeding, in the middle. It was a gory picture, but it wasn’t the blood that made the painting compelling, it was the bull’s eyes. They were brown, bloodshot, watchful, and painted to look human. They were her grandfather’s eyes.
She rested the painting against the wall and picked up the bundle of money again. The bills were crisp, brand-new, and ordered by serial number. The bull watched her count it. One thousand dollars in two-dollar bills.
“What the fuck do you want me to do with this?” she asked the bull.
His eyes followed her to the dresser, where she stuck the money in her sock drawer, and continued watching her as she let the towel fall to the floor. The bull seemed to stare at her ass. She turned the painting to face the wall.
* * *
PAUL MET HER AT THE front door on the following Saturday. His hair was still wet from the shower, and he’d trimmed his beard. He was also wearing real pants for once. Or apple-green cords, if those counted as real pants.
“I want to show you something,” he said.
She followed him to the basement. She’d never been down here before. They came to a closed door and he pulled out a key and opened it.
“I want you to see this,” he said.
The room was empty of furniture and lit with track lights. A series of large canvases hung on the walls. She saw the Schiele from the doorway. She’d never seen an original. She walked up to it and took a good look. Paul stayed near the door. It was an erotic painting featuring a bony, black-haired woman in a supine position, holding herself open with both hands. He’d used the same pink for the nipples and the rouge on her cheeks, and the same orangey color for both sets of lips, and the woman’s hair and pubes were customarily blurry looking while everything else was in extra-sharp focus. If it had belonged to her it would have been hanging over her bed.
“Well, I can see why you keep this locked up,” she said, and looked over her shoulder at him. He was standing a few feet behind her now. “Must be worth millions.”
He laughed. “It’s worth a lot to me,” he said. “I painted it a long time ago.”
“Oh,” she said, and looked again. So, it was a knockoff. So what. Counterfeit or not, she still loved it and wished it were hers.
“Do you recognize the woman?” he asked.
“Anjelica Huston,” she said. “Duh.”
He smiled. “Lena,” he said. “Thirty years ago.”
She looked at the other canvases. Lena was everywhere, doing all kinds of things: bent over, touching herself, wrestling with a scary blonde woman, examining her own nipple, bound, blindfolded, smiling.
Her punci was everywhere, too. Sometimes it was small and demure looking; more often it was engorged, exaggerated, the lips rudely parted. It seemed to want to be looked at and admired. Explored.
“A swollen door doesn’t close properly,” she remembered Woody saying once.
“What makes it swollen?” she’d asked.
“Moisture,” he’d said. “It’s been humid this summer, so all the doors are warping.” He brushed a strand of hair out of her face. “Wood shrinks and swells,” he said.
She’d wedged a chair under her doorknob that night, but when she woke up Woody was there, sitting in the chair, staring at her.
So was Paul. “These paintings are older than you are,” he said. “They’re from another life.”
“She’s beautiful,” Mona said. “Truly. I can see why she inspired you, why you fell so hard for her.”
“She was very good in the spotlight, on my stage,” he said.
There was a silence.
He cleared his throat. “I’ve been commissioned to make a painting like one of these,” he said. “Would you be . . . interested?”
So, this was why he’d brought her here. Or why he’d hired her in the first place?
“We’d have to start today,” he said. “The painting is due in two weeks.”
“Oh,” she said.
He shook his head. “It’s okay if you’re not comfortable. I wouldn’t want you to do it if you didn’t feel . . . good about it.”
“Would Nadine have done it?” she asked. “Your previous model?”
“Perhaps,” he said. “If she’d had enough to drink.”
“What about Lena?” Mona said. “Why not her?”
“Lena doesn’t make herself available to me,” he said. “Not in this way, not anymore.”
* * *
HE GAVE HER A PAIR of Lena’s thigh-high stockings, a matching garter she’d never seen before, and a pair of designer stilettos, maroon leather with bright red bottoms, heels she’d worn for her own photographs, as she liked the way they looked with her safari apron. They were half a size too small, however, so she had to stuff her feet into them. She looked at her reflection in the window and decided she looked like a hooker—an expensive hooker.
He wanted her on her back with her legs spread. “Bring your right knee toward your chin. Try and hug it to your chest with your right arm,” he said. “Now bring your left arm up and over your head. Like that. Arch your back a little. Look at me.”
“How long?” she asked.
He look
ed at his watch. “Fifty minutes,” he said. “Then you can take a break.”
Allergy Rescue. The bottle was still in her bag, which was behind the shoji screen, but she was too lazy to make a fuss.
“Can I close my eyes?”
“For now, yes.”
She listened to his pencil scratch the canvas, and then his knife. Outside, the aspens were being their usual hypersensitive selves. She heard applause in their leaves and saw herself standing in a gallery in New York City. The walls were lined with her photographs, blown up and framed, and the floor was crowded with people—it was an opening—and there was Tom Waits talking to Jim Jarmusch, and Sophie Calle drinking champagne with Lena, and Laurie Anderson wearing a suit and holding a small dog, and Terry Gross, live and in person, standing next to the self-portrait of her in the Bach home, wearing lederhosen and sitting next to Pork Chop, the family terrier—
She felt Paul’s weight on the platform. The wood creaked and she could hear him breathing through his nose. She opened her eyes. He was crouched between her legs, holding the Polaroid. He brought the camera to his face, pushed the button. She heard herself gasp.
“Wait,” he said, looking at her crotch. “You have something—”
“What?”
He squinted at it. “Something black.”
“Where?”
“On your—” he said. “Wait, don’t move.” He stepped off the platform and handed her a small mirror.
“It’s just your weird toilet paper,” she said, and picked it off. She pinched it between her fingers and he took another Polaroid.
“Touch yourself,” he said drily. “Like you would if you were alone.”
“Like this?” she said.
“Yes,” he said.
“This isn’t how I touch myself,” she said, and took her hand away.
What a fool. The way women touched themselves when they were alone: rarely photogenic. Wasn’t he old enough to know that?
* * *
AN HOUR LATER, HE ASKED her to stand with her feet wide apart. “Good,” he said. “Now, bend over and hug your left knee.”