Frame Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 5) (14 page)

“Probably a little later in the week.”

“Wonderful! I may not be here by then…have to leave early tomorrow, busy schedule and all…but could you send me a picture of the work? I would definitely be interested in bidding on it.”

Bidding on it.

BIDDING ON IT!

“I’ll be happy to. If you’ll just give me an address…”

“Of course, of course! Also my email address and my cell phone number. Now, you must tell me: where are your other works to be seen?”

My deck.

“They’re not really available now.”

“No museums at all?”

“No,” Nina said, meekly.

“Then perhaps I shall be able to act as your purchasing agent. I do know a number of people with excellent taste. There’s nothing more exciting than discovering new talent. You may expect more buyers to be dropping around. Now, I’m a bit rushed, so if I may pay for this with a credit card…”

“Of course, of course.”

The paying process was taken care of.

Old Red Lighthouse #6 was carefully taken down and wrapped.

Goodbyes were said and congratulations were given (Nina being congratulated for transcending primitivism, the woman congratulated for finding out that Nina was transcending primitivism.)

The woman left, ringing the little tinkling bell above the door as she did so.

And Nina, left alone, raised both her arms straight in the air, shouting:

“YES!”

She was a painter, after all!

Within ten minutes, she’d locked Elementals for the rest of the day, unchained and started up her Vespa, and backed out of her parking place.

She did not really need the vehicle, of course.

She could have floated over the city.

She headed out onto Breakers Boulevard and navigated not toward home—although she looked forward to getting there—but to the most disreputable side of Bay St. Lucy.

She watched as the pets grew scruffier, the buildings more disreputable, the old cars in weed-grown lots more rusted and undriveable, and the air heavier with the scent of stale tobacco and unpaid bills.

Finally she came to the hovel of Tom Broussard.

Be here, Tom. Be here, Tom.

She knew he spent evenings with Penelope and afternoons here, drinking beer and writing his latest novel, whatever that happened to be.

She looked up, saw the empty porch, heard several dogs howling from an indeterminate distance away, and hoped that they were not unleashed.

But no, what was she thinking? Of course, they were unleashed.

What could she hope for, then?

That they were not rabid was about the best she could think of.

“Tom?”

Noise from within the house.

And then Tom Broussard himself, clad in a sweat-through undershirt, his chest arms cheeks legs feet and furniture all sprouting black hair that had never been combed, a can of beer in his hand, stumbled out onto the porch.

“Nina! Nice to see you! Come on up!”

She did so, wondering if the stairs leading up to Tom’s porch were any ricketier than her own.

It was, she thought, holding onto the bannister in the silly hope that it might not fall to pieces before the stairs, a dead draw.

“Tom, how’s Penn?”

He raised high the can of beer and let a smile whiten the otherwise totally black mass that was his head.

“She’s great! All she needed was to talk to you.”

“Well, I’m glad I could help.”

“She’s knitting booties.”

“I can’t believe that.”

“Well, she is. And we’ve talked the whole thing through. In some ways we might not appear to be the most conventional parents…”

She made her way into the porch, stepping on piles of toxic clothing and kicking aside sixteen to twenty beer cans.

“I don’t know what makes you say that.”

“Well, we’re a little different. No house. No dog.”

“Tom, there are a dozen dogs just hanging out underneath your house here. I’m sure they’re all very nice. Just grab one, put a collar on him, and feed him raw meat.”

“You know what I mean, Nina. We’re not exactly PTA material. Penn’s out fishing all the time and I’m here in this shack writing dirty novels. It might be better if I had a real job.”

“Oh? How much money did you make last year, Tom?”

“Two and a quarter million dollars. Something like that. But I think we’re supposed to pay taxes so it may turn out to be less.”

“So what job would you rather have?”

“Maybe I could teach.”

“Don’t be absurd.”

“Naw, you’re right. Anyway, though, a couple of nights ago, after you left, we went over all the problems. And there were a lot of bad things, of course. But we had one good thing going for us.”

“Which was?”

“We just asked ourselves, ‘Who’s gonna mess with our kid?’ And then it all seemed ok.”

“See? Now that’s what good parenting is all about.”

“Yeah, maybe it is. So come in, sit down.”

She did and she did, always glad to find a chair in Tom’s main writing room, where she could sit and be absolutely motionless, so that something would not see her and attack her.

“Want a beer?”

“No, thanks. By the way, I pretty much have your baby shower planned. Mid-August at Elementals. Do you have any toys already?”

“We have fishing nets and harpoon gaffes that the kid might want to play with when he’s older.”

“You know he’s going to be a boy?”

“Look at Penn; look at me. How could it be a girl?”

“Well, I guess that’s one way of looking at it. Tom, I wanted to come see you because...”

She paused.

How could she say this?

She still did not exactly know; but she knew that, however it got said, Tom Broussard would have to be the first to hear it.

“Tom, do you remember how it felt, when you sold your first novel?”

He had smiled slightly before, but now the sun exploded in his face, causing a seismic grin so cosmic and nuclear in force that she felt its heat.

“Do I? Oh, Nina. A writer always remembers that.”

“Tell me about it.”

“I was living here. Had just gotten out of jail. I’d started writing when I was behind bars. The other guys gave me a hard time about that, of course. I got in a few fights a week.”

“Must have been tough.”

“The writing was tough. I didn’t really know what I was doing.”

“I mean the fights.”

He shook his head:

“Actually the fights were the only fun I had. Without them, I might have gone crazy. But they kept me going. Anyway, by the time I’d been here a month, I had collected twenty or so rejection slips from New York and LA. They weren’t really ‘slips.’ They were just cards saying they were overwhelmed with other submissions and couldn’t look at my manuscript. They wished me every success, though, in what seemed a promising young career.”

“But you kept on.”

“Yeah, you have to do that. Finally—it was late one summer day, and the sun was going down. I was hung over, of course, and hadn’t gotten up in time to check the mail when it arrived. I remember there was a phone bill, an electric bill, and a letter of some kind. I thought at first it was from some law firm telling me I was sued and had to go back to jail. I didn’t want to open it. Finally I did, thinking that I might have to get out of the country, and, if I did, it would be better to do it that night.”

“But it wasn’t from a law firm.”

“No. It was from a publisher based in New York. Croft and Sons. Small company, but…well, your first kiss might come from a small girl but you aren’t complaining.”

“No, I guess not.”

“The first line read, ‘Congratulations, Mr. Broussard.’ I just hung fire there for a while, not believing it. It went on, ‘We here at Croft and Sons have had a chance to review your manuscript, and we are highly impressed, both with your command of plot and your use of language.’”

“You remember it, word for word?”

“Oh, you never forget it. No real writer ever forgets the first acceptance.”

“What was the novel?”

“It was a different kind of thing than what I’m turning out now. A lot more idea-oriented, intellectual stuff.”

“The name?”

“
The Entrails Trail
.”

“Oh, yes. I remember that. I was very proud of you, being one of my old students. I remember thinking it was the dirtiest book I’d ever read. I still think that.”

“Well, you’ve always encouraged me. And believed in me.”

“Yes, I guess I have. Anyway, I got some news today, Tom. And I wanted you to be the first person I told the news to.”

“What news?”

“Tom, I sold a painting.”

“You what?”

“I sold a painting.”

“Oh, my God.”

“Yes. Isn’t it unbelievable?”

He rose, crossed the room, and embraced her.

“Nina, I’m so proud of you! And Penn will be, too!”

“I’m just…I’m just still blown away. The woman who bought it—well, I can remember her words, exactly, just like you can remember your acceptance letter. She said, ‘It masquerades as a primitive, but I think it has a modularity that is paradigmatic of vascularity.’ Then she said, ‘The interchange of color and structure envisages something Dovanesque,’ and she said it had a scintillating aura of abstract clarity and then she thought better and said it really had a quality of perfuntoriness and then she went on to say it had scintillating viscera.”

“Do you know what any of those words mean?”

“No.”

“What was the painting?”

“An old lighthouse.”

“You painted a lighthouse that was paradigmatic of vascularity?”

“Well, it was a
red
lighthouse. Maybe that’s what she meant. She didn’t even mind the dog being too big.”

“How much did she pay for the thing?”

“Three hundred and fifty dollars.”

“Wow!”

“I know, isn’t it wonderful?”

“Nina, you have to go out and celebrate!”

“But I don’t know how to celebrate! I’ve never had anything to celebrate before!”