Abby asked, “What is he doing?”
Jimmy pulled Bern’s review from the pocket he had crumpled it into and smoothed the paper and read it silently in the city skyglow.
Did I betray collectors who invested in Camerano’s pictures? No. They are adults, and will likely continue to see beauty in their acquisitions. The best among them will wax philosophical: after all, in the dark of a sleepless night, what true art lover dwells on the cash value of his collection? But I will admit to artists and collectors alike, I was wrong. A stench wafts from Camerano’s latest exhibition at the Whitlock SoHo—the stench of a rubber factory devoted to retreading used tires. (I used the word latest to mean “same as last show and show before that, etc.”) If Camerano will never change—or at least try to grow—that’s his business. But is it too much to ask him to stop pillaging Clyfford Still?
Bern Horne had set him up from the beginning. From the very beginning, he set him up to destroy him. And he’d been stupid enough to listen to him.
“What is Clyff doing?” Abby asked again.
Jimmy had already seen it in a glance. “He’s painting a horse. He said the street needed a horse, so he’s painting a horse. What I can’t figure out is how’s he going to deal with that car?”
The way the horse was taking shape, the line of the perfectly proportioned animal that stretched curb to curb, would stop abruptly where the single parked car blocked it.
“Why did I listen to Bern? Why did I throw away all my new stuff and go back to imitating Still?”
“You don’t imitate,” Abby said firmly. “Never say that.”
“I didn’t, at first. Later I did. That’s why I had to change—Bern tricked me. But after eight years, I mean, Abby, how long . . . ?” His voice trailed off, his gaze fell to the street.
Abby tried to capture his attention with an up-from-under smile that asked, Wouldn’t you remember me for eight years? But Jimmy was watching with quickening interest the closer Still got to the car. Suddenly his face lighted.
“Oh—that’s what he’s doing!”
Clyfford Still put a curl in the horse’s tail so it swept over its back and all of a sudden it was cantering with joy. He perched the empty paint can and brush on an overflowing garbage can, fumbled keys from his pocket, climbed into the car, and drove away.
Abby reached over the parapet and laid her hand on Jimmy’s shoulder. “You don’t imitate.”
“I enjoyed being liked. I got addicted to it.”
“Who doesn’t?”
Jimmy pointed at the horse. “Still doesn’t.”
“Good. Let’s get a drink.”
“What do you mean ‘good?’”
“You got Still’s message.”
Jimmy Camerano turned to Abby Whitlock, but did not move from the ledge. “If I stopped painting, would you stay with me?”
“If I were blind, would I walk in traffic without a Seeing Eye dog? No. I wouldn’t stay with you.”
“If I didn’t stop painting, but left New York to paint more, and better, would you leave New York with me?”
“No. I have two galleries and fifty crazy painters counting on me.”
“Would you visit?”
She touched his face. “So often that you won’t regret leaving.”
Jimmy Camerano looked down at the horse. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, and he never could have painted it. He braced his hands on the ledge. “What if I just step into the air?”
“Art will have lost a great painting for no good reason.”
“Only one?”
“In the time that Clyfford Still wasted driving up from Maryland, tonight, he could have painted a great painting. Don’t you owe it to him—and me—to get off the roof and back to work?” She flashed him the Abby smile and he thought, Still is right. I’ve never gone wrong going my own way.
“JUMP!”
Jimmy leaned forward to look down. Bern Horne was standing on the sidewalk, shouting through cupped hands. That’s who Clyfford Still had telephoned, hoping Bern could help Abby talk him off the ledge if his horse didn’t, but without a clue that Bern had his own agenda.
“JUMP!”
Leaning forward, Jimmy started to lose his balance.
“JUMP OR I’LL KILL YOUR NEXT SHOW TOO.”
Jimmy Camerano threw his arms around the gargoyle. It tipped from the ledge, immensely heavy. He had a hundredth of a second to let go before it took him with it. But in that hundredth he saw another way. He pushed against the massive weight of the gargoyle, which lifted him back onto the ledge and altered its course, slightly, before it hurtled down.
What would his father shout to Berne?
“CATCH!”
SARAH WEINMAN is the editor of Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s (Library of America) and Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Stories from the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense (Penguin). Her fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and several anthologies, while her journalism and essays have appeared most recently in the New York Times, the Guardian, and the New Republic, as well as the anthology Anatomy of Innocence: Testimonies of the Wrongfully Convicted (Liveright). Weinman's book about the real-life abduction that inspired the novel Lolita is forthcoming from Ecco.
Nude in the Studio by Lilias Torrance Newton
THE BIG TOWN
BY SARAH WEINMAN
You don’t expect to see a portrait of your mother hanging on the wall of your gangster boyfriend’s living room. Especially when that portrait shows your mother without a stitch of clothing on but for a pair of green heels.
“Where did you get that painting?” I asked, my voice more querulous than I wished. It was my first time in his house. I hesitated about a return visit even before seeing the portrait, but now I knew. I would not be back.
He turned to face the portrait. I looked at his back, the white collared shirt barely covering darkly matted hair. I’d run my hands through that broad, fleshy forest the few afternoons we’d fucked in a Ritz-Carlton hotel suite. Again I remembered what I found attractive about him: power, status, money. And what I found ugly: body, face, manner.
He turned around. “Bought it at an estate sale,” he said, the Russian accent adding a nasal quality. “She reminded me of my wife.”
A wave of nausea roiled my stomach. I wasn’t sure if it was for my mother or for his wife.
“She’s beautiful,” I murmured.
“A lot more beautiful than Rosalie. Why am I talking about my wife? She’s not here and you are.”
He reached for my waist. I let him. And later, when he took me from behind on his king-size four-poster bed, I buried my face into the duvet and tried not to think that he was really thinking of the woman in the painting. My mother.
In that moment I changed my mind.
I would be back, but not to see him. I needed that portrait.
When I tell you about my mother it’s from what others told me. She died a month after I was born. The stories varied: my father said it was a blood infection. His mother said it was a curse. My stepmother got a pained look in her eye if the subject ever came up. Which is to say, what little I knew amounted to nothing at all.
I didn’t miss her until I was fifteen. I was too busy cooking, cleaning, ironing, looking after my younger siblings (we didn’t speak of halves) and anything considered domestic work. I left school at twelve. It’s what girls my age did. At fifteen my father and his wife wanted to marry me off to some local farmhand. He was nice enough. But the thought of bearing any of his children, let alone over a dozen, as was the custom in the small town of my youth, once caused me to bring up my dinner in an inconvenient setting. The other option, becoming a nun, was out of the question. Taking vows seemed even more repellent than marrying a farmer boy.
So I made my way to Montreal instead. That, too, was what girls my age did. But I also went because she did the same.
I didn’t find her t
here, of course. She was dead. I found trouble instead. Just another Sugar-Puss on Dorchester Street, sleeping in SROs and walking the streets and hopping from nightclub to nightclub in search of men with money. Sometimes they congregated at the Chez Parée ready to throw dollar bills at the garter of Gypsy Rose Lee. Sometimes they haunted the Casa Loma hoping Duke or Miles might battle each other in a late-night jam session. Always they prowled, and I counted as prey.
The gangster I met in a different way. My newest flatmate was three days fresh into Montreal and looking for something silly to do one weekday afternoon. We went to the bowling alley on Sainte-Catherine, where you could get a lane for a dollar an hour. Halfway through our first game we realized the lane was hot. Or at least I did when I saw the gangster, mutiny flashing in his eye.
“You took our lane,” he said. His accent wasn’t as thick back then.
“We paid for it.”
“That’s always our lane.”
“This time it isn’t.”
“Then we’ll pay for it anyway.” He waved over some other men dressed like him. He spoke words in his mother tongue and then, switching back to English, told me, “You better bowl good. There’s money on you.”
Sweat beaded on my flatmate’s forehead. “There’s what—”
“Shut up and bowl, Marie-Eve.” She opened her mouth to try again and caught my glare. Her mouth closed shut.
We bowled. They bet. We were terrible. They howled with laughter. I cannot remember who won or lost. Afterward the men took us to the Crystal Palace and paid for every single one of our drinks. Marie-Eve moved out a week later, spooked by the experience. The same night I fucked the gangster for the first time.
I carried on this way for a while. Why not? It thrilled me to be seedy. So far removed from the little town of Tadoussac. There a future lacked any pleasure. Here the present was all pleasure. But the present never lasts. I wasn’t even twenty and could feel the rot setting in.
There it remained until I saw my mother’s portrait. I knew it was her from the single photograph I possessed, which I carried everywhere I went. Well-worn creases couldn’t mask the life force of this woman, who couldn’t have been more than twenty-two at the time. She, my mother, burned with future.
A future my birth snuffed out.
The oil portrait undid me as much for the surprise as for the expression. She looked hesitant. In-between. Vulnerable, not only because she was nude. I had spent my whole life knowing her to be an unsolved riddle. This clue, hanging in my boyfriend’s house, gummed things up some more.
It added more variables to her story. And to mine. It made the rot inside me grow smaller and the shame grow larger.
I couldn’t find my mother. But at the same time, I could.
He was gone when I woke. A note lay beside me: Leave by ten. The grandfather clock struck nine. Was this tacit permission, or carelessness? I shook off the thought. Of course he was careless, if he fucked his mistress in the bed he shared with his wife.
Broad daylight did me no favors, but a time window was a time window. How careless could I be, to snatch this painting off the wall? Could I be bold, but not too bold? I put on last evening’s clothes, pretending not to care at my disheveled, cheap state, and went out into the main room.
Where I found I was not alone.
“Mademoiselle Cléa,” said a voice I didn’t recognize. Low. Deep. The barest trace of an Anglophone accent.
My name wasn’t Cléa. My mother’s was Clothilde. Close enough?
I said nothing, took in the stranger’s appearance. Medium height, trim bearing, fedora loosely atop his medium brown hair. Bright green eyes compensated for the overall medium boil. The eyes made him, if not exactly attractive, more distinct.
He shook his head as if to erase a memory. “C’est ma faute,” he said. “You cannot be her. And yet—” he flicked his head toward the painting.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I blustered.
The man’s answering smile was vulpine, a word I never even knew existed until I moved to Montreal, seeing wolves in fancy clothing all across the city. “Of course you do. The resemblance is remarkable. Did Andrei realize this when he took you as a lover?”
There were many things I could say, none polite, most obscene, so I opted for silence.
“I was there, you know. At the bowling alley.”
I felt the room temperature fall.
“He should have chosen the other girl, but he was drawn to you,” the man continued, switching back to French. “Now I see why.”
“I don’t,” I cut in. “Why does he have this portrait?” I hugged my arms around my chest. The dressing gown covered me fully and yet I felt stripped.
“Revenge,” said the man. He took off his hat and placed it on the mantel near the painting. His hairline, to my surprise, did not recede but showed off corkscrew curls. As I stared, a flush went through his cheeks. “I don’t usually take off my hat,” he muttered.
“Why revenge?” I pressed.
“Because he wanted the artist and couldn’t get her.”
“The artist. Not the subject.”
Back came the smile. “Well, you are correct. But mostly, the artist.”
I looked again at the portrait of my mother. Clothilde. Hesitant, but I observed it differently now. In a manner that made me feel most uncomfortable. I dared not contemplate these thoughts. I shut them out.
But the man, whose name I still did not know, could read my roiling reveries. He could pluck them out of my mind and place them in between us, where they could live, smolder, ignite.
“Dis-moi,” I whispered.
His voice went deeper, lower. “It is nearly ten. We must both leave.”
“You must tell me!” I snapped in English.
“Apparently I must,” he agreed. He grabbed my left arm. The shock of it jolted us both. A current went up to my shoulder, and I stared up at him, startled.
Realization dawned. “You were here for this, too. The painting.” I stared directly at him. “Who was she to you?”
He said no more. He grabbed my arm again and I let him. I shut my eyes and when I opened them we were in his car. Both in the back seat. Someone else driving.
And then he spoke of the artist and her subject. The painter and my mother.
The words were his. The story is hers.
History repeated itself in my mother. Clothilde. She, too, had been a country girl—from Saint Rivière, two towns over from Tadoussac—looking for something beyond the limited borders of the small town. She, too, had run away from a prospective marriage for adventure in the Big Town. It hopped and skipped in a different way the generation before, embers from the stock market crash making the miserable seek pleasure with desperation. It was, perhaps, more dangerous than now.
But she didn’t get in trouble. Not exactly. Not right away. She worked hard cleaning houses, scrubbing floors, mopping kitchens, whatever it took to pay her way and send the rest back to the family. They were disappointed she didn’t stay but eager to take her money, the only reason for contact. If she missed her parents and many brothers and sisters, Clothilde never let on. Supporting them was simply her duty.
One of her employers was not much older than herself. A woman, a mother, but not a housewife. She’d tried it out but her skills were wasted on a husband who didn’t appreciate them. He was too busy spending money faster than they both earned. Their marriage ended with the crash. He left, broke and chastened, but she had a new mouth to feed: their little boy, born seven months later, whom he never saw and never supported.
So the woman recovered her best skills. Nothing to do with house chores. She didn’t paint houses, she painted people. She’d done so before her marriage, and her subjects thought well of her work. A few paintings appeared in exhibitions, and other people bought them. The country was in a depression, like all the other countries around the world. But this woman did all right. Not well, because an artist struggles even when there is money
coming in, but enough that she didn’t worry too much about putting food on her little boy’s table. Enough that she could hire someone else to do the chores.
She found Clothilde through a friend of a friend. Hired her the very next day. For nearly a year they barely spoke other than to give and receive instructions. One in particular: the woman wasn’t to be disturbed while painting. Clothilde saw no problem. She felt nervous around the woman’s portraits. They conveyed things she wasn’t sure she liked. A keen way about the world. Secrets revealed, unbidden.
Clothilde felt her secrets might spill out if she became the woman’s subject.
Then one morning, as Clothilde finished scrubbing the kitchen floors, she heard the woman scream. Worried, she breached the inner sanctum. The woman flashed angry eyes at first but then found her calm.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have reacted that way.”
“What’s wrong, madame?”
The woman shook her head. “It’s nothing, really . . . oh, damn.” Tears welled up in the woman’s eyes. “It’s not nothing. I’m about to lose a big commission. The person I was supposed to paint said no.”
Clothilde said nothing, though she wanted to say everything. But better to let the woman go on when she was ready.
“It’s daring, I know, to ask something like this of anyone, but when a commission like this comes in and I have my boy to take care of, I must do it—”
“I’ll do it,” Clothilde blurted out.
The woman stopped. She took in Clothilde, all of her. A gleam caught in her eye as she began to look at her entire figure. “Hmm” was all the woman said at first.
“If you don’t want—”
“But I do. She looked a little like you. I think this will work. Do you realize what I want?”
“To stand in front of you for hours every day for days on end?” Clothilde may have been banned from the studio, but she had worked long enough to see the stream of subjects pour in on a near-daily basis.
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