The Girl in the Face of the Clock

by Charles Mathes

  “Very interesting,” said Jane diplomatically.

  “I call it Burden of Capitalism in New York, Number Three,” said Imre, giving his creation a few miscellaneous whacks with the large hammer he was holding.

  “So you sold the first two? That’s great.”

  “There are no first two,” said Imre. “I’m starting at number three.”

  “Are you allowed to do that?”

  Imre looked over at her as if she were out of her mind.

  “I am artist,” he declared, indignant. “I can do anything I want.”

  Jane smiled and felt herself relax a bit. It had been a horrendous afternoon.

  As if her father’s funeral and quitting her job with Perry hadn’t been enough, she’d then had to endure the shock of having her apartment violated, deal with the police about the break-in, and wait three hours for a locksmith to come and fix her door. The burglar had used a crowbar. The repaired doorframe and door now sported eighteen-inch steel anti-jimmy guards and a new deadbolt lock.

  After phoning 911, Jane had called the number on the business card Detective Folly had given her. A police operator had patched her through to his cellular. Could this have something to do with her father’s murder? she had asked, shaken. Why had this happened now?

  Folly had been surprisingly kind. Apparently, it wasn’t uncommon for burglars to go through the obituaries and hit apartments when they knew people would be off at funeral services. The detective assured her that it was just coincidence and said not to worry.

  He must have spoken with the two uniformed officers who had shown up shortly thereafter because they treated her with a gentleness and tact that Jane didn’t usually associate with the NYPD. They were puzzled, however, by the fact that nothing appeared to have been taken.

  Probably this was because she had nothing worth stealing, Jane had said, but she began to wonder herself when the officers went through the apartment pointing out all the things that plugged into the wall. The television. The CD player. Even the answering machine. This was precisely the kind of stuff that a crackhead could sell quickly for cash. If the thief had been looking for money so desperately—her little flowered sugar bowl had been smashed and even the back of the sofa bed had been slit open—why hadn’t he taken her gizmos and appliances?

  “I’m glad you come for visit,” declared Imre, dropping his hammer and walking over to a table piled high with what looked like junk. “You want coffee?”

  “Thanks. That would be nice.”

  Imre pushed aside various bicycle fenders, wire spools, and sheet metal until he found a blowtorch and a battered old coffeepot. He took the pot over to a sink behind Burden of Capitalism in New York, Number Three and filled it with water, then lit the blowtorch and directed the flame at the pot.

  “Real nice funeral today, yes?” he said.

  “Yes,” said Jane. She hadn’t told him about the break-in, only asked if she could come down. Imre had been right about what he had said this morning. It wasn’t good to be alone on a day like this.

  Imre Carpathian’s loft on Broome Street was a vast, industrial-looking space with grimy windows and high ceilings broken up by cast-iron pillars and unpainted dry wall.

  Jane had grown up in a similar space a few blocks away from here, but Aaron Sailor had finished their loft with the skill of the cabinetmaker’s son that he was, and Jane’s mother had filled it with beauty, music, and love—for the first years of Jane’s life, at least. Imre’s home looked like one of those hangars where they reassembled pieces of crashed airplanes. He had gotten the loft when SoHo was a desert of abandoned warehouses and factories, not the fashionable district it had become. Artists like Imre couldn’t possibly make enough sales to afford places like this now. Looking around at his work, Jane wondered if he made any sales at all.

  “So you going to take nice vacation now, yes?” asked Imre. “This is what Imre would do. Get away from city. Travel. Leave your sorrow behind.”

  “No,” said Jane. “I couldn’t.”

  “Why not? You got passport?”

  “Yes, but …”

  “You don’t got no money?”

  “That’s not it,” she said. Jane had been working since she’d gotten out of college and had a fair amount saved.

  “So what’s the big deal?” demanded Imre. “When was last time you give yourself vacation?”

  “Do times when I was collecting unemployment insurance between assignments count?”

  “No,” barked Imre, opening the top of the coffeepot to see how the water was doing. “You have no excuses. I say, get out of town. Get out of the country, if you can. You getting hungry maybe? What time is it?”

  Jane looked at her watch.

  “Almost seven,” she said, surprised. How had it gotten so late? Jane suddenly realized she hadn’t eaten anything all day.

  “Dinnertime already,” declared Imre, reading her mind. “Come, hold this.”

  Jane walked over and took over blowtorch duty while Imre walked back to a cabinet and ruffled through paint tubes and chisels until he produced a menu from a Chinese restaurant.

  An hour later, they were sitting in Imre’s front living area on unmatched battered couches. Empty white cartons of chow mei fun, tai chen chicken, and shrimp with garlic sauce littered the orange-crate coffee table. They had switched from coffee to beer and Imre was telling stories about Aaron Sailor. Jane was laughing for the first time in several days.

  “… and then there was the time Aaron did portrait of this Park Avenue lady, new wife of big real estate fellow. She’s born in trailer park in Tennessee but already she’s worked up through two millionaire husbands. Then she steals this guy from his wife. He is the real big time, worth megabucks. Aaron, though, he is sick of portrait game, is sick of being liar with his paint, making rich ladies look like they want to look—more thin, more pretty, and like they have more brains. ‘What they need is better plastic surgeon, not artist,’ he would say, and I would tell him, ‘When are you going to be real artist, Aaron? When are you going to tell the truth?’ So this day he finally does. He paints the lady’s portrait, but instead of eyeballs, he paints big dollar signs.”

  “You’re kidding,” said Jane, putting a hand over her mouth to supress a giggle.

  “Honest to Pete,” said Imre, solemnly holding up his right hand. “He delivers painting and woman goes crazy, and rich husband don’t pay Aaron, tells him to go jump in East River. So Aaron takes painting and is walking down Park Avenue, when who should be walking up the other way but woman’s first husband. He sees painting under Aaron’s arm and recognizes ex-wife immediately from her dollar-sign eyeballs. Buys painting on spot for twice what first man was going to pay. This is how Aaron decides that maybe he can make living being real artist.”

  “That’s a marvelous story, Imre,” said Jane, taking another swig from her bottle of Samuel Adams. “I’ve never heard that. Why didn’t my father ever tell it to me?”

  “Maybe because I leave out part where Aaron is sleeping with lady while doing portrait.”

  “Oh.”

  “Ladies all like him a lot,” said Imre, finishing his own beer. “He was lonesome for your mother. God rest her beautiful soul.”

  Jane’s hand went instinctively to the dragonfly on the ribbon around her neck. She hadn’t bothered to take it off since the funeral this morning.

  “So Aaron became real artist after that, though still liar,” Imre went on. “The paint is liar when things look like things, this is what I try to tell him—Aaron and me, we argue about this all the time. But at least he finally paints what he wants, not be whore for commissions. Too bad nobody wants Realism then.”

  “Did you see his one-man show?” asked Jane.

  Imre nodded and made a face.

  “Uptown gallery,” he snorted, taking an angry chug from his beer. “All dealers are pigs, but uptown dealers are the worst. Greed on legs, I tell him when he wants to sign contract with that woman, but Aaron wouldn’t
listen. He found out.”

  “What did he find out?”

  “She was a pig.”

  “Elinore King,” said Jane.

  Imre nodded.

  “Only interested in money, like she wasn’t rich already. Lived in big apartment on Central Park West with big-money art on her wall. Aaron told me all about it. Rauschenberg. Jasper Johns. Cy Twombly. You know how much this shit costs? Millions! It’s obscene. But still this pig woman needs to cheat artists out of every dime, make them pay for their own shows, steals the bread out of their mouths. Anything they sell, she takes it all. What a crook.”

  Imre seemed to be looking around for a place to spit, but thankfully decided against it. The floor already had enough problems. It probably hadn’t been refinished in a hundred years.

  “Do you remember a big painting of a naked woman sitting on the stairs of Dad’s loft with a handless clock between her legs?” asked Jane, her thoughts turning back to Perry Mannerback and his unconvincing denials.

  “Yeah,” grunted Imre. “Best painting in show, the only one they sell, I think.”

  “Do you have any idea who the model was?”

  “Sure,” said Imre. “Is Leila Peach.”

  Jane sat up.

  “Leila Peach,” she repeated. “Who was she?”

  “Oh, Leila, Leila,” said Imre, his face softening. “You don’t remember Leila? No, I guess you were away at college then. She was subletting loft downstairs from Aaron, on second floor.”

  “What was she like? Tell me about her.”

  “Leila was pretty crazy girl,” said Imre knowingly. “Or maybe not so crazy. Leila knew what she wanted. She posed for everybody.”

  “She was a professional model?”

  “Leila did it for sport, not money, though I suppose she could use the bucks. She wanted to be part of the scene, you know? Her thing was sleeping with artists. She was shtupping half the artists in SoHo. Modeling was her ticket, easy way for her to get into their studios naked. She was involved with Aaron for a while, but then she dumped him for some rich guy.”

  Jane was totally alert now.

  “What rich guy?”

  “Some big rich guy, I don’t know,” said Imre. “Had something to do with buttons or something.”

  Jane’s heart sank. Perry Mannerback. Of course it had been Perry Mannerback. Jane didn’t know why she should be disappointed or surprised, but somehow she was both.

  “Where’s this Leila Peach now?” she asked. “What happened to her?”

  “She left town right after Aaron had his accident,” answered Imre, after draining the last of his beer and rising to get another bottle. “Moved to England.”

  “Do you have a phone number for her?”

  “No, but I give you her address if you want. She still sends me card every Christmas. Crazy girl, but sentimental that way. Always remembers nice big Hungarian genius, and why not?” His craggy face broke into a smile. “For a while there, I was shtupping her, too.”

  It was well after ten p.m. when Jane got back to the apartment after the long subway ride up from SoHo. She turned the knob on the new deadbolt and locked herself in. At least the apartment was pretty much back together. She had straightened up while waiting for the locksmith. Yet everything seemed different somehow. Colder. The place was not the safe little haven it had always been.

  Jane poured herself a glass of water—the Chinese food at Imre’s had been too salty. Then she sat down next to the answering machine and listened to a series of condolence messages from acquaintances. The last message on the tape was an unexpected one.

  “Hi, Jane, it’s Valentine Treves,” said a gentle British voice.

  For a moment the name didn’t register, so lost was Jane in thoughts of burglary and death and Leila Peach. She took a quick breath. Valentine from the plane to Seattle. Her goofy poet.

  “I read about your father in the paper. I’m very sorry. I’m about to go out of town again, but I wanted you to know that I was thinking of you. If there’s anything I can do to help, please let me know. My telephone number is …”

  Jane got a pencil, replayed the message, and looked around for something to scribble down the number on. The only thing she could find was the back of the scrap of paper that Imre had given her with Leila Peach’s most recent address in London. Apparently, Leila moved around a lot. Jane sat chewing the eraser of her pencil for a minute, then dialed.

  “Hello,” said Valentine Treves.

  “Hi, Valentine. It’s Jane Sailor. I wanted to thank you for your call. I’m not phoning too late, am I?”

  “No, not at all,” he said in a soft but strangely remote voice. “I’m delighted to hear from you. You may ring me up in the middle of the night if you like. I’m sorry about your father.”

  “Thanks,” said Jane.

  “I know how difficult it must have been for you. I lost my own father when I was sixteen.”

  “Then you do know.”

  “To be honest,” he said, “I had wanted to ask you to dinner this week, but obviously this isn’t the right time. I didn’t want you to think that I had forgotten.”

  “Thanks,” said Jane. “You said on your message that you were going out of town. Where are you going?”

  “To London. On business. May I call you when I get back?”

  “Yes,” said Jane. “I’d like that.”

  “I would, too.”

  They were silent for a moment.

  “You know, your father’s work really is quite striking,” said Valentine finally. “What I saw of it in the magazine article, that is.”

  “They’re having a show of his work at the Fyfe Museum in San Francisco right now,” said Jane.

  “Yes, so I gathered. Is the painting that was in the magazine in the show? The nude on the staircase?”

  “No,” said Jane. “That was one of the few things he actually sold.”

  “How interesting,” said Valentine. “It’s a wonderful piece, very evocative. And that clock without the hands, what was the story with that? I wonder. Did your father use an actual piece he owned as a prop?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “No reason. Just curiosity. Well, that’s it, then. I’m very glad you called. I’ll ring you up when I get back to town. Again, I’m very sorry about your father.”

  Jane said good-bye and put down the phone. Far from cheering her up, talking to Valentine Treves had just unsettled her more, though she was not sure why.

  Wearily, Jane opened the ruined sofa bed, wondering how much it would cost to have it reupholstered. This day had been too much, but at least the leering nude in Perry’s painting had a name now. Leila Peach.

  Jane took off her shoes, slipped under the bedcovers fully clothed, and closed her eyes. Images of her father flooded her mind. Aaron Sailor painting in the old loft. Holding her hand after she had her tonsils removed. Babbling mindlessly in the the nursing home. After five minutes, she opened her eyes and spoke aloud to the ceiling.

  “So, Daddy, if you’re going to keep me up all night, why don’t we talk about what happened eight years ago? Did you fall down the stairs? Or did Perry push you?”

  Aaron Sailor didn’t answer. Neither did the ceiling. Nevertheless. Jane felt a little better. Before, when she talked to her father, she was sure nobody was listening. Maybe now he could hear her, wherever he was.

  “Were you and Perry arguing about Leila Peach?” Jane went on. “She looks like the kind of woman who might enjoy having men fight over her. And obviously she made a pretty powerful impression on Perry, considering that he won’t even admit he knew her all these years later.”

  A siren wailed in the distance. On Broadway, horns were honking.

  “Why were you saying, ‘Don’t do it, Perry,’ in the nursing home, Daddy?” Jane asked softly. “What did Perry do? Did he do it with Leila Peach?”

  There was no answer. Jane closed her eyes. The image of Grandmother Sylvie’s handless clock suddenly appeared in her mind’s e
ye and wouldn’t go away. It took her a long time to fall asleep.

  Eleven

  The next morning. Jane put the dragontly cross around her neck again and went over to a coffeeshop on Broadway. She ordered a big breakfast but found she could eat hardly anything. She sat in the booth for the better part of an hour, drinking coffee and watching people pass by the window.

  The restaurant was busy, but the waiters had seen her before and didn’t hurry her out, sensing that she needed the table more than they did. Jane tried to think of theatres that she could send résumés to and directors she could call, but her thoughts kept returning to Grandmother Sylvie’s clock—the exact point where the lives of Aaron Sailor, Perry Mannerback, and Leila Peach all intersected with her own.

  It was a little before eleven when she got back to her apartment building. Instead of going up the stairs, she unlocked the basement door and went down to her storage cubicle. Again she took down the heavy box with Grandmother Sylvie’s clock.

  This time, she carefully pulled out the heavy ceramic. It looked exactly the way Aaron Sailor had painted it between Leila Peach’s legs and was no less horrible than Jane remembered. The colors were impossibly loud and the lack of hands gave it an odd, broken look somehow.

  “I must be missing something,” she muttered, turning the clock upside down for the first time, and nearly dropped it in surprise.

  “What the hell?”

  Jane stared in amazement. In the center of the clock’s slightly rounded bottom was a stylized cross in deep blue glaze. It was exactly the same as Jane’s mother’s dragonfly cross: a flat angular head, tapering tail, crosspiece made to look like joined wings. Below the cross was an inscription, also in deep blue glaze: Zalman Rosengolts et fils, Antwerpen.

  Jane sat down on one of the plastic milk crates, her thoughts racing. Her father had always told her that the cross he had given Ellen Sailor was a family heirloom. Naturally, Jane had assumed it was passed down from his Catholic father’s side of the family. Here, however, was proof that the dragonfly cross must have originally belonged to Aaron Sailor’s Jewish mother, and that it, too, had some relationship to the ceramic clock.