Lake Life

by David James Poissant

  He has to have it. A painting can’t rewrite the past two months, but it’s something. This painting says I know you deserve better, and I’ll try harder to deserve your love. And, if this painting doesn’t say that, at least it says I care. I pay attention. I know what you like.

  “I noticed you admiring this one.”

  The man is back. His jacket pocket, Michael’s just noticed, sports a yellow pocket square. Michael wears sneakers, jeans, and a T-shirt, and feels, suddenly, very underdressed.

  “Your head,” the man says, looking for all the world like someone who speaks with an English accent, someone whose name should be Gerald.

  “My horse,” Michael says, trying on his best English accent. Fuck it. He’ll never see this guy again.

  “Your… horse?”

  “He has a mighty kick,” Michael says, his voice as British as he can get it.

  “Oh dear.”

  “It’s all right,” Michael says. “You should see what I did to the horse.”

  The man’s eyes widen, and Michael moves closer to the landscape that Diane would like.

  “This is Iceland too?” Michael asks.

  The man nods.

  “I thought so. The wife and I were driving through the Icelandic countryside this spring, and I’m quite certain we passed these very hills.”

  He clears his throat. The man brightens. Perhaps he disbelieves the accent, the story of the horse, but he believes in Michael’s money, and that’s enough.

  “It’s a lovely print,” the man says. “My favorite in the series.”

  Michael is confused. He looks closer. The landscape looks like a painting to him. “This isn’t a painting?”

  “It’s a g-clay.”

  “I’m sorry,” Michael says. “I don’t believe we have those in London.”

  “My apologies,” the man says, spelling out the word. “The giclée process is the best high-resolution inkjet reproduction method there is. Better than screen printing. Better than lasers.”

  How badly he wants to run a finger over the canvas, just to feel. “This isn’t paint?”

  “It’s ink, but pigment-based. No dyes. And light-fast, a fifty-year guarantee against fading. Better than paint, really. It won’t chip, won’t crack, won’t craze. Why, would you believe that some insects have been known to eat paint?”

  “Except the artist didn’t paint this,” Michael says.

  “The artist painted this landscape, yes.”

  “But the artist didn’t paint this one.”

  The gallery owner appears put out. How many times a week does he have this talk? How often must he defend the work he sells?

  “The artist didn’t paint this one,” the man says, “but he signed and numbered it. The signature—his signature is paint.”

  “The kind of paint that insects eat?”

  The owner studies his wingtips, and already Michael can see it: Michael is the story this man will tell his spouse tonight. They’ll shake their heads. They’ll laugh at his expense. For dinner, they’ll eat the fancy food that Highlands people eat. They’ll listen to music on their phonograph, or whatever Highlands people play their music on. The man with the fake English accent and the bandaged head will be a dinner party anecdote for years.

  “You mentioned an original?” Michael says.

  “Just one in the series,” the man says. “The portrait of Reykjavík.”

  Michael moves to the second of the two pieces the woman put on hold. He looks close. To his surprise, Reykjavík looks about as much like a capital city as Ithaca, where he grew up. The buildings are boxy, small. A single concrete church rises above the rest.

  Michael likes the bright landscape better. Diane would like the landscape better. But he can’t get over the fact that it’s a canvas some fancy machine spit ink onto. No, this gift, to mean something, it needs to be paint. It needs to be real.

  Michael looks closer, and the man asks him to take a step back. The paint on this one is real, all right, textured, layered thick. A bristle nestles the edge of a building. He steps away. The gallery owner removes a handkerchief from his back pocket and blows his nose.

  “How much?” Michael asks.

  “I’m sorry?” the man says, returning the handkerchief to his pocket, and Michael wonders whether he’s doing this wrong. He’s never bought real art before.

  “The painting. What’s the price?”

  “Well, it is an original.”

  “Not just the signature?”

  “Sir, I assure you, this painting was painted by the artist. It’s priced at six thousand dollars.”

  Michael takes another step back from the wall. He was not prepared for that. The painting is no bigger than a shoebox lid. “Six grand? For this?”

  “Yes, sir, though as you may have overheard, this one is on reserve for one of our best customers. I can’t let it go until this time tomorrow.”

  He gives Michael a look that says You clearly have no money, go away, a look Michael finds infuriating. Sure, he’s mishandled his finances. Sure, he’s facing potential foreclosure and crippling credit card debt. But those aren’t things this pompous ass can tell just by looking at him. Michael could have money. If he’d been a little wiser. If he hadn’t made them house-poor. If he’d known better how interest rates work, how credit cards work, how adjustable rate mortgages tend to play out. If they’d known that, by 2018, their house wouldn’t be worth what they paid in 2007. If he’d known then what he knows now, hell, he might be a wealthy man.

  “I’ll pay you seven,” Michael says.

  The gallery owner’s eyebrows lift. “I’m sorry, sir, but Mrs. Lynn is one of our dearest—”

  “Eight. Eight grand.”

  The owner chuckles. “Extremely flattering, but I’m afraid—”

  “Nine,” Michael says. “I won’t go higher. That painting’s overvalued as it is.”

  Overvalued. It’s not a word he’s used before, but it’s a word he’s heard Jake toss around.

  The owner reaches for the painting before his hand falls to his side.

  “You drive a hard bargain,” Michael says.

  He’s dropped the phony accent entirely. He doesn’t care. He’s wiped the smug look off this fucker’s face.

  “Twelve thousand,” Michael says. “Twice what it’s worth. I’ll even write two checks. Six grand to the gallery. Six grand to you.”

  The owner will not look at him.

  “Or to a charitable organization of your choosing,” Michael says. He likes that. It sounds like the kind of thing a rich person might say.

  “I wish I could,” the owner says.

  “Come on.”

  “We could use the revenue.”

  “Take the money.”

  The owner shuts his eyes. It’s once he’s opened them that Michael knows he’s won. The man pulls the painting from the wall, and Michael follows him to a desk near the front door.

  “One last thing,” Michael says. “I need you to call her.”

  “Call… whom?”

  “The buyer with the painting on reserve. Call Mrs. Lynn.”

  “I don’t think that will be necessary.” The man is agitated, sweating. He pulls his hankie from his pocket and pats his brow. “The way these things go, she may not want the painting after all. No need to upset her unless—”

  “It’s necessary,” Michael says. “I can’t in good conscience make this deal until I’m sure the previous agreement has been terminated. I will not be in business with someone who isn’t honest.”

  The owner offers another nervous chuckle, but Michael isn’t laughing.

  Church bells ring beyond the gallery walls. It’s noon.

  The man stands behind the desk. A landline telephone sits beside a glass dish stuffed with mints. Michael unwraps a mint and pops it in his mouth. He lets the wrapper fall to the floor.

  “I really don’t see why this is necessary,” the man says.

  “I’ve given you my terms.” His throat bu
rns. He’s overdue for a drink.

  From a desk drawer, the man retrieves a small, leather-bound notebook. He flips several pages, then lifts the phone’s receiver. But he doesn’t dial. He stares at Michael, and Michael can’t tell, by his expression, whether the man pities him or fears him, whether he suspects him eccentric or insane. But the man wants the money. That much he can tell.

  “Your call,” Michael says.

  The man hesitates, then dials.

  What happens next is hard to listen to. Over the phone, the gallery owner tells his customer that the painting is no longer hers. This development does not go over well, and the man is on the phone a while, begging the woman not to cry, promising her she’s still his favorite customer. By the time the call is over, he’s pale. He wipes his eyes. There’s spittle at the corners of his mouth. He won’t look at Michael.

  “The painting’s yours,” he says.

  On the desk, beside the bowl of mints, Reykjavík glitters silver green in the night sky.

  “Sorry,” Michael says. “I changed my mind.”

  27.

  Highlands Comics and Collectibles is not what Lisa expected.

  She expected a darkened cave, cobwebbed and wet. She expected the stench of a used bookstore—mildew and dust, book pages yellowed by time. She expected teenage boys in glasses, braces stapled to their teeth. What she gets, instead, is a woman, late twenties, in a blue and red Supergirl tee.

  The woman’s hair is brown, waist-length, the way Lisa’s was in college, but hers is bathed in purple-pink highlights. She reads a Spider-Man comic behind a register. Beneath the register, a glass case displays row upon row of comic books and action figures.

  The rest of the store is clean and orderly. Colors assault the senses. Merchandise fills every corner and hangs on every wall, sculptures and posters, capes and hoods. Tables capped with narrow boxes make an island at the center of the store. The boxes are bloated with comic books, the comics sealed in Mylar bags with cardboard backs to keep the paper stiff.

  She doesn’t know whether Thad still collects comics or concentrates solely on his poetry, whether he wants his old books back to read again or merely for the memories they hold. She doesn’t know Thad the way she once did, and that’s a loss. Parents don’t have favorites, though, if they did, her favorite would be Thad.

  For years she couldn’t get him to read. She tried sci-fi, westerns, Richard’s mysteries, biographies, supermarket magazines. She loved reading, and, as a mother, it disturbed her that her son did not. She thought she might trick him into reading through comic books slipped into his backpack and under his bedroom door. Batman. Fantastic Four. The Hulk. But nothing stuck. Until X-Men.

  Looking back, the comic was a perfect fit. A team of mutants whose powers manifested, unbidden, at puberty? Unlike other heroes, the X-Men were misunderstood, feared and hated for who they were, how they were born. The metaphor wasn’t exactly subtle, but the books got Thad through middle school, then high school, where he felt comfortable coming out.

  It was a great-aunt who gave Thad a book of verse as a high school graduation present. In all of Lisa’s years of pushing books, she’d never thought to offer poetry. But who would have guessed that the kid who grew up hating books would grow up to be a poet? Home from college, Thad left his books in piles around the house, slim volumes with Pulitzer Prize stickers on the covers and authors’ names she didn’t recognize. She tried reading them, to have something to talk about with her son, but she found the books impenetrable, most of them, the poems bewildering and dark and sad. She hoped they weren’t making his depression worse. She hopes this still.

  He has a big brain, her boy. He only needs the drive to match. She knows he writes. She sees him scribble in a notebook now and then. But he’s never shared his work with her, and she’s afraid to ask to see. It would hurt too much if he said no.

  The woman at the register slides Spider-Man into a Mylar bag.

  Thad did this too, reading each comic with care, bagging it, slipping the cardboard in, and taping the bag shut. What was Lisa thinking, even in her hurry to clean out the house? How, how, how could she have thrown his X-Men out?

  The woman steps back from the register. “How may I help you?”

  “I’m looking for some comics. Except, I’m not sure what I’m looking for.”

  “That’s okay. I’m Maya. I’m here to help.”

  In the display case, three monsters recline side by side. All are the slug from Star Wars, the one Leia strangles with her chain. For no reason Lisa is able to ascertain, each is tagged with a different price.

  “I’m here for my son,” Lisa says.

  “What age is your son?” Maya’s nails are red and blue to match her shirt, colors alternating with every finger. They click the display case above the slugs.

  “He’s thirty. He likes the X-Men. Or, he used to. He might still. I don’t know.”

  “I’m sure he does,” Maya says. “X-Men fans are pretty ride or die.”

  At Cornell, Lisa dreaded each visit to the IT guy. Say she had a file she couldn’t unzip. She’d ask her question, and the man would do three things. First, he’d laugh to let her know just how pedestrian her question was. Next, he’d ask a question he knew she couldn’t answer. (Are the files encrypted? Have you extracted the folder yet?) Finally, he’d sigh and perform the task himself without teaching her how it was done.

  Lisa feared similar treatment visiting a comic shop, but Maya is not the IT guy. That is, until Lisa says what she must say next.

  “What happened,” she says, “is that I kind of threw his comics out.”

  Maya laughs. She looks at Lisa. She stops laughing. “Wait, you’re serious?”

  Outside, a car honks. Across the street, people line up at a popular pizza spot.

  “I’m sorry,” Maya says. “Stay put for one second.”

  She hurries across the store, disappears behind a curtain at the back, and returns with another employee. This man wears a Superman shirt, but he’s not pulling it off in quite the way that Maya is, the shirt a size or two too small. But he’s handsome, clear skin, dark eyes. He’s in his twenties, black, hair in an Afro.

  “This is Ken,” Maya says. “Will you tell Ken what you just told me?”

  Lisa doesn’t feel good about this. “I threw away my son’s comic books.”

  Ken covers his mouth, and this is not mock horror. The man is horrified.

  “Oh, shit,” he says. “How many?”

  Lisa gestures toward the tables at the center of the store. The boxes come in two sizes, and she knows which size she dragged to the curb. “The shorter ones. How many comic books would fit in two of those?”

  “Three hundred,” Ken says. “Maybe four.”

  “Three or four hundred, then,” Lisa says.

  “Fuck,” Ken says.

  Maya shakes her head.

  “Hang on,” Ken says.

  He heads to the back, then returns with a third employee. Which begs the question, how many people can one tiny comic shop employ?

  This man is older than the others—fifty, maybe. He has a thick gray beard, and instead of Superman, he wears a button-up Hawaiian shirt. An inflatable red rubber fish hangs from his belt, like one of those Swedish candies in the blue and yellow box. The fish hangs waist to knee.

  “Sorry,” Ken says, “just one more time.”

  But Lisa doesn’t want to play this game anymore. If they make her say it again, she’ll cry. And the man in the Hawaiian shirt must sense this because, soon, he’s leading her to the back of the store, past the curtain, to a folding chair, and offering her a cup of tea.

  “I’m really sorry,” he says.

  A card table faces the folding chair, and he sets the mug down. Tea leaves float in a wire basket in the shape of the Batman logo, the bat’s wing clipped to the lip of the mug. Steam rises from the water. The tea steeps.

  “I’m sorry too,” Maya says. “It’s just, we’ve been waiting for this day for yea
rs. The mom who throws her kid’s comic books out. The cautionary tale. You’re a legend.”

  “You’re the ’98 Pikachu Illustrator card of moms,” Ken says.

  The older man, the storeowner whose name turns out to be Matthew, clears his throat. “What they mean to say is that we’re pleased to meet you. We’ve never had the chance to reassemble a lost collection. It’s kind of the Holy Grail of this job.”

  They join her, pulling chairs up to the table. The tabletop is littered with playing cards. Except the cards aren’t kings and queens, they’re creatures. Beneath each creature are numbers, like baseball stats, but the statistics are indecipherable.

  “You picked a good day to come in,” Maya says. “We only sort inventory a few times a year, which is why you’ve got all three of us.”

  The back room is how Lisa imagined the front would be: poorly lit, linoleum floor weirdly sticky on her shoes. Comics lean in plastic-bagged piles everywhere, and everywhere loiter those white boxes—some full, some half-full, some with lids and some without.

  Lisa sips her tea, which is too hot and still too watery. The Batman infuser clicks against her teeth.

  “So,” Ken says, “what titles are we talking?”

  “X-Men,” Lisa says. “All of them.”

  “Easy,” Ken says. “What years?”

  “Around 2000 to 2010. But just the summers. The rest he has. The summer issues he kept here.”

  Matthew studies the ceiling. “That would be Whedon, Casey, Austen, Claremont, Brubaker, and… Fraction.”

  “Don’t forget Grant Morrison,” Ken says.

  Maya picks up a card, studies the stats, and returns it to the table. “Grant Morrison fucked everything up.”

  “What are you talking about?” Ken says. “Grant Morrison’s awesome.”

  “He had Magneto pretend to be Chinese for two years! Imagine you’re a Chinese reader. You’re like, cool, a Chinese X-Man! Then it’s like, nope, that was Magneto the whole time.”

  “That was—”

  “Racist,” Maya says. “The word you’re looking for is racist.”

  Ken shakes his head. “Are you seriously lecturing me on race?”

  “Are you seriously mansplaining identity politics to a lesbian?”