I was turning the bust of a headless Roman-looking figure around in my hands when Alicia called me over.
"This is a journalist friend of mine, Gordie Hatch. He works at the St. Louis Independent"
I shook hands with the couple.
"You might know a friend of mine, Marshall Holman," the man said. "I played football with him at Illinois."
"Sure, I know Marshall. He's one of our police reporters."
"Great guy. Damn funny guy." The man looked small to have played Division I football, with a neck no larger than mine. Maybe he was the kicker, I thought, or an overachieving walk-on.
"Marshall red-shirted his freshman year, then quit," he continued. "Strangest thing, because he was highly recruited." The man's wife smiled at him proudly. He obviously loved telling football stories. "He said he'd never be fast enough for the pro game, so he gave up his scholarship and started working for the Champaign paper."
Alicia had stepped away and now returned with two cups of coffee.
"What do you do at the Independent?" the man asked, taking a sip.
I looked at Alicia, with whom I'd not been entirely honest concerning the state of my career, and she smiled, a smile remarkably similar to that of the woman whose husband told his football story.
"I'm with the metro section. I do this and that, mostly general assignment work."
"You said your name is Hatch? I always read Metro. Best section in the paper, if you want my opinion."
So he wouldn't press me any further, I sat on the couch, bouncing on it a little. "Comfortable," I said. "How much for this piece?"
Alicia gave me a disappointed look. "He's so modest. He hates talking about himself. The truth is, Gordie's an investigative reporter, so you only see his articles a few times a year. But they're always blockbusters—five- and six-part series, the kind that get picked up nationally."
"Really?" the man said. "I love those investigative series. Which ones have you done?"
I named two recent series that the Independent had run, one about fraud surrounding the proposed riverboat casinos and the other, sanctioned ' y St. John, about a crack-addicted investment broker leading a double life.
"Oh yeah, I remember that second one," the football player said. "Tragic story, especially the part where his wife's giving birth and he's in the hospital bathroom getting loaded."
I shook my head, lifting the floor lamp to check its price tag. "Twenty-five dollars. That's a bargain," I said. "Can you set this one aside for me?"
As the living room filled with people, I left Alicia and the couple and went back to browsing.
Leaning against the wall were the paintings that before had been stacked next to the fireplace. There were five in all: the houses of parliament watercolor; a realistic still life of a bowl of fruit; a group of pelican-like birds, taken, I guessed, from an old zoological textbook; another watercolor of a wagon wheel in a field; plus a triptych that next to these others seemed incongruous: a reclining nude divided into three parts—head, torso, legs.
The first four paintings didn't interest me—I would have guessed that they were copies—but the nude was striking. Earlier in the day when Alicia had set it against the wall I had only glanced at it, noticing that it was larger in size and brighter than the rest. But now, something about the glassy, lifeless stare in the nude's eyes, her remarkably real flesh tones, the vibrant, almost pulsating fire-orange background, fascinated me.
"Do you think we could save this?" I asked Alicia on her way into the kitchen.
"Why that one?"
"I don't know. I like it," I said. "I can tell you it's worth a lot more than fifty dollars."
Alicia shrugged her shoulders. "If you want it, sure." She handed me three Sold stickers. I carried the painting in three trips to the pink room.
Margaret was outside on the patio. She must not have come through the house or I would have seen her.
"You're here," I said stupidly, because even though I had known she was coming, I was still unnerved.
She stood beside the fenced-in dog run. Joe was inside it, sitting on the packed dirt, nuzzling Gavin.
"Did you have to drive far?" I asked.
"I live less than a mile from here" was her curt reply.
I waved to Joe, and he nodded, stroking Gavin's face.
"Can I get you something to eat?" I asked Margaret. "I saw some zucchini bread and coffee in the kitchen."
"That would be nice." She was pulling dead blooms off the rhododendrons that grew alongside the dog run, stuffing them into her pocket. "Maybe a cup of coffee, black, and a piece of plain toast."
In the kitchen, Alicia was making a fresh pot.
"You can't be so shy with people," she said, rubbing my back. "You're an excellent reporter at one of the best papers in the country. Why diminish yourself?"
I put two pieces of bread in the toaster oven and took two cups off the shelf.
"Seriously, sweetheart. You have to get over this shyness."
"You're right," I said. "I'm just not used to telling people what I do."
The fact was, in the year since I'd moved to St. Louis I had met almost no one, had had no social life to speak of. My whole existence had been work and advancers.
"It's simple," she said. "You're an investigative reporter. Your articles come out only a few times a year. If they want to know more than that, you say, 'Sorry, I have to keep things quiet until we break the story.'"
With a quick glance over Alicia's shoulder toward the other room, I kissed her neck. "Thank you," I whispered.
"So tell me about this story you're writing on Arthur," Margaret said. I set her toast and coffee and a cloth napkin on the patio table and pulled up two chairs.
I repeated what I had told her at the funeral, that my feature stories tended to be community-oriented.
"What do you mean by community-oriented?" She unfolded her napkin, rubbed out the creases, laid the napkin neatly in her lap.
I told her there were hard-working people in the community who never got the recognition they deserved. "I've always wanted to be a promoter of unsung heroes," I explained.
She raised her eyebrows above her glasses, frowning, a look of doubt tinged with bemusement. "And how would you say Arthur was an unsung hero?"
In her gray dress, with her hollow, angular face and pale skin, she looked like someone who spent all day in artificial light. Her long arms and neck, her face in the bright sunshine, gave her an unsettling force.
"He was a man with high standards. He inspired great loyalty in his friends." I was able to think of only the most general praise.
She took small bites of her toast, holding it between her bony fingers.
Joe had found a dog brush and was combing Gavin's long brindle fur front to back, muttering to himself, paying no attention to our conversation.
The coffee tasted sour. I never drank it black, but for some reason I had wanted Margaret to think that we took our coffee the same way.
"There's something you're not telling me, Mr. Hatch." She crossed her arms over her chest. "If you're expecting honest answers, you should try to be direct."
"What do you mean?" I asked, stalling.
"I loved my brother very much, but he was not the kind of man anyone would bother to write a story about. He was a do-gooder, but for himself, not anything larger. He was an ordinary man." She put the coffee cup on the ground beside her. "You're not after Arthur's story, are you?" she asked.
I didn't know what to say. "I'm not sure." I hesitated, defensive.
"I think you have a pretty good idea," she said. "The story you're after is Alicia."
Margaret's dark eyes zeroed in on me, as if she were after my thoughts, and I decided the best move was to confess, not to everything, but at least to reveal a small truth. Something about her demanded a confession, a kind of omniscience that seemed to say, There's little I don't know or can't find out.
So when she asked, "What are you really doing at this estate sale?" I
broke down, first on Alicia's patio, then again and again in the weeks that would follow.
Without considering the implications, because, caught in a lie, I had to be honest about something, I said, "I'm not a reporter. I'm an obituary writer."
I told her how long I'd been on the desk and that I couldn't wait to break out, that I'd been looking for a good story to write and was frustrated until Alicia called.
"It was her idea to do the story on Arthur, not mine," I said. "I was curious, so I went along."
Had our conversation continued, I might have told her about the advancers or the ghouls or my mother's expectations. No telling how far I might have gone trying to explain, but behind me the screen door opened, and I turned around to see Alicia approaching our table.
"Hello, Margaret," she said in a flat, unfamiliar voice.
Margaret remained seated, holding her hands, palms together, in her lap.
Alicia pulled up a chair next to me, closer than I felt comfortable with. Aware of Margaret, I leaned away, resting my elbow on the chair arm.
Joe was standing up now, quietly closing the gate to the dog run, scratching Gavin's forehead through the chainlink fence. With a sidelong glance, he slunk into the house.
A cloud had drifted in front of the sun, bringing definition to Margaret's angular face. Her small mouth tensed, her eyes unblinking.
"Some of what you're selling today belonged to my mother," she said to Alicia.
Alicia looked away toward the dog run, where Gavin walked to a corner and lay down in the shade of a beech tree, resting his head on his extended paws. "I don't know why you feel that—" she began, before being interrupted by a loud crash inside the house.
We all jumped up to see what it was.
Joe Whiting stood next to the mantel over a broken Chinese vase. He was crying.
"What the hell's wrong with that guy?" one of the browsers asked, speaking to nobody in particular.
Joe was sobbing into his hands.
"No, Margaret. No. Don't be mad," he was saying.
"He just picked up that vase and threw it on the ground. Threw it! What the hell is wrong with that guy?"
Margaret took Joe's thick black glasses out of his hands, folded them, and placed them in her dress pocket. The estate sale browsers cleared a path, and with her arm around his waist, she led him back to the patio, closing the door behind her.
"He's my brother-in-law and he's limited. It was an accident," Alicia told the man who had complained. "Thank you for your help, but everything is under control now."
I went to get a dustpan and broom out of the kitchen and swept the vase into the trash. It was a lovely vase, white with orange and blue flowers and a gold band around the neck. The price was twenty-five dollars, though it must have been worth at least a couple of hundred.
"That was one of their mother's vases," Alicia said when we had both returned to the kitchen. "Joe gets incredibly tense whenever Margaret and I are in the same place. He can't stand it."
"Has it always been like that?" I asked.
"No, everything used to be fine."
"Well?" I prompted her.
"Well, Margaret used to live here. She and Arthur were roommates, I guess you could say, before Arthur and I married. She lived in the back bedroom, the pink one." Alicia sighed, as if she'd been over this too many times before. "I used to tell Arthur that bigamy was illegal in the state of Missouri, that he couldn't be married to both me and Margaret at the same time. He was never too amused by that."
"I thought you said everything used to be fine," I said.
"Fine until I insisted that she leave. She stayed on in the house for the first few months of our marriage before getting her own place nearby. I think she really believed that I was going to let her stay here." Alicia shook her head.
From the window, I watched Margaret open the passenger door of her small car and Joe lower his large frame into it. She reached across his lap to fasten the seat belt, then closed the door and walked around to the other side of the car. Without looking back, she settled into her seat, started the engine.
Joe had stopped crying and he stared straight ahead.
Margaret gave him back his glasses, which he put on with both hands, sitting up so that his head grazed the roof. She checked behind her, and as she turned the car around, putting on her blinker to make a left onto Kingshighway, Joe reached out and gripped the dashboard.
13
I HAD BEEN MEANING to move the triptych to my apartment—its walls were mostly bare, and I thought the painting would bring some life to my living room—but every night after work I'd go directly back to Alicia's house and every morning we'd get out of bed too late for me to swing by Soulard before nine o'clock. So the painting still sat in the pink room. I'd look at it twice a day as I passed by.
On the Wednesday morning after the estate sale I noticed something that I hadn't seen before. Mostly I had been looking at the nude's profile, the first third of the triptych—soft and ethereal, gazing out of the portrait as if half asleep. It was what had drawn me to the painting in the first place: the model's face, her lifelike skin, so real I wanted to touch the canvas, but with an eerily distant expression.
The night before, I had left a dustcloth hanging over the frame of the last third of the painting: the model's legs from the waist down. When I lifted the cloth off in the morning, I saw on the nude's inner thigh a triangular birthmark the size of a quarter.
My stomach dropped.
Alicia had a triangular birthmark on her inner thigh. She called it her "dolphin fin," a blue-gray triangle near the top of her left leg. I had kissed that dolphin fin.
I waited for Alicia to get out of the shower. Even as I sat on her bed, listening to the steady rush of water, I thought, This is a terrible idea. Everything has been perfect. Why ruin it now?
She walked into the bedroom.
"Can I ask you a question?"
"Of course, sweetheart." She unwrapped the towel that was around her hair.
"You know that painting I wanted, the one that's in the room with your things?"
The corners of my mouth felt heavy, my skin weighted down.
"That's you in the painting, isn't it?"
Her slim body glistened, back-lit by a naked bulb in the closet. Drops of water fell from her hair, catching her waist, streaming down her calves. I tried to capture this picture permanently in my mind, thinking, From this moment on, nothing will be the same.
"Yes, that's me in the painting." She slipped on a pair of yellow underwear.
"So you posed nude?"
"Yes." As if it were nothing. "I used to know a painter who was quite good. He did a number of portraits of me."
"Where are the other ones?" I felt nauseated—there were more.
"Oh, I don't know. He sold most of his stuff in New York and Washington, galleries on the East Coast. I only recently had that one framed. I don't know why."
She wiggled into her jeans and slipped a shirt over her head. Lately she hadn't been wearing a bra. I loved to come up behind her in the laundry room or at the kitchen sink and slide my hands under her shirt.
"Did you pose for other painters?"
"No, just Jerry. There weren't many painters in Tucson."
She sat at her dressing table, the only piece of furniture left in the room besides the bed, and turned on the blow dryer.
Miserable, fighting not to let it show on my face, I stood up and went to Margaret's old room to finish getting dressed.
I knew how irrational I could become, all the terrible scenarios that my jealousy might conjure. In the car I turned the radio way up and sang along, trying to erase the possibility from my mind that she'd been with more than one man before me.
At work, I stopped by Research and asked one of the librarians to do a Lexis-Nexis search for any articles out of Tucson in the last ten years about a local painter whose first name was Jerry.
"I won't even ask," the librarian said, smiling. "This one might tak
e a while."
Soon after I had sat down at my desk, Thea called.
We had spoken only twice in the past couple of weeks. The first time, I had halfheartedly offered to visit her father in the hospital, but he wasn't doing well so we postponed it. When I called back after that weekend, expecting her answering machine, she picked up, saying he had been transferred out of Intensive Care and might soon be headed home.
This time, she sounded upset.
"I tried you at home last night but couldn't reach you," she said. I could tell that she'd been crying. "I feel terrible asking you this, Gordie, but my father's having open-heart surgery this morning. I'm at the hospital."
Ritger arrived at his desk, setting down his briefcase loudly, and took off his trenchcoat and tweed cap. I hunched over the phone.
"I'm sorry," Thea said. "I thought I could handle it, but he had another heart attack. Now he's in the operating room."
"Where are you?" I asked.
"Still at the VA," she said.
"What floor?"
"I'm in the family waiting room next to Recovery. It's on the third floor."
"I'll be over as soon as I can."
I found Ritger down in the cafeteria, spooning sugar into his jumbo coffee mug.
"There's been an emergency and I'm going to need the day off," I said. I had never asked for a whole day off before, had only taken an occasional morning or afternoon, had a perfect sick record. "The person I was on the phone with is a good friend, and her father is having open-heart surgery. I'm sorry, but I have to go to the hospital."
Ritger stirred his coffee, then nodded his head.
The Veterans Hospital was surprisingly modern. I had expected to find a World War II-era building with pea-green walls and hulking equipment, but instead the place was bright and spacious, six stories high, with living plants and wide windows and young doctors striding around.
Thea was reading the Independent in the waiting room.
"You're here sooner than I thought." She looked surprised. Her eyes were red and swollen. "It's sweet of you to come, Gordie. I can't tell you what a wimp I am. Last night I went to bed telling myself, 'Don't call him. Please don't call. It's not fair to do this to him.'"
Obituary Writer (9780547691732) Page 12