Obituary Writer (9780547691732) (17 page)

If she couldn't remember what had triggered my unhappiness, how she had casually replaced me with the garden clerk, I wasn't going to indulge her professed confusion.

"It wasn't fair of me," I said. "But I was eighteen and you never think of consequences at that age."

A silence hung in the air. The waiting room door opened and the white-haired woman returned. She picked up her book and moved to the seats closer to us.

"I should probably use the phone again." I got up. "My editor was away last time I called."

Thea shrugged. She hadn't believed a word.

It was getting past two o'clock, and still Alicia hadn't come home. Jerry the painter, the possibility that he was now living in St. Louis, entered my mind.

She'd been completely nude. God knows how many paintings she had posed for. Ten, twenty, fifty nudes on living room walls up and down the East Coast. How many people had walked into those houses and admired Alicia's body? Perhaps thousands.

And who was Jerry the painter? She said this morning he was the only one she had posed for. If she'd been a professional model, that would have been one thing—granted, I would've hated it—but posing only for Jerry made it so much worse. They must have been lovers.

I called Research.

"This is Gordon Hatch, the guy with the strange request." I tried to laugh. "Did you happen to find anything?"

"Actually, we have had some luck. We're still looking, but I've put four articles in your box from the
Tucson Register
," the librarian said. "Three are reviews of gallery openings and one is a feature. The painter's full name is Jerry Savage."

I thanked the librarian and hung up.

Jerry Savage. What kind of a name was that?

As I approached the waiting room, I could hear Thea talking about me.

"He's not my boyfriend," she was saying. "He's a friend."

I waited outside the door so as not to embarrass her.

"You must have a boyfriend, as pretty as you are," someone said.

"I've been working toward medical school. There isn't really time for boyfriends," Thea said. "I do have a cadaver named Elliot, but communication has been a definite problem." They laughed.

"This is my friend Gordie," Thea introduced me as I walked in, and the woman stood up to say hello.

"Listen, Thea, I hate to do this," I said, "but we're short-staffed today and things are getting pretty busy at the office. I think I probably ought to get back."

She seemed to force a smile. "It's okay. You were good to come."

"I'll call and see how everything went," I said. "Your dad's a soldier. He's going to be fine." I kissed Thea on the cheek. "Are you sure it's okay to go?"

"Go," she said. "Seriously. Thank you." She gave a small wave and looked away.

I was careful not to let Ritger see me as I picked up what had now grown to seven articles about Jerry Savage before leaving the office. Alicia's painter friend was fairly successful. His oils brought anywhere from five to fifteen thousand dollars. A New Yorker who had initially settled in Santa Fe, he'd found too many painters there and moved to the more workaday town of Tucson, where it was clear from the articles that he had achieved a kind of local celebrity.

Reviewers of his shows had nothing but praise. "If Francis Bacon had worked in the American desert and put his subjects not in locked rooms but out under the scorching sun," one reviewer wrote, "the result would very much resemble the work of Jerry Savage—haunting, intense, desolate."

Several reviewers remarked on what had caught my eye: his impressively real flesh tones. I read along with a perverse curiosity, expecting at any moment to come across a show called "Alicia," but was relieved to find nothing related, until the final article, dated August 2, 1985:

SAVAGE PROTÉGÉ OPENS AT THE FREEBOURNE
by Elisabeth Hall
Register Staff Writer

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Jerry Savage must be feeling quite good about himself after the first showing of his young protégé Alicia Steele at the Freebourne Gallery on Cantilever Road.

This exhibit of twenty new paintings is pure Savage.

Take "Desert I-VI," a series of landscape tableaus combining bright orange and purple hues with dusty reds and tans that made this reviewer swear Savage himself had mixed the palette. Or "Navajo: A Triptych," at 20 x 40 the largest work in the exhibit, which uses a classic Savage thematic technique: physical fragmentation of a canvas mirroring a subject's psychic and emotional disfigurement. In "Shoulders," Steele patently copies one of Savage's best-known body-as-landscape paintings, "Burden of the World." Look at the stone-gray eyes and the skin pigments and you'll surely ask yourself, "Haven't I seen this somewhere before?"

The good news is if you're going to imitate someone, it may as well be a first-rate artist, and Jerry Savage, with his national reputation, is as close to first rate as the area has to offer. Unfortunately, the paintings collected here are a pale imitation: devoid of the force, the surprise, the technical skill, the startling contradictions, and most egregiously, the originality, that this newcomer's mentor has made his reputation on.

"Alicia Steele: Mirages" runs through September 15.

Driving out to St. Charles, I became increasingly agitated. Alicia and this painter had obviously been together. It seemed odd that she had never talked about her show. I wondered whether this opening, this review even, had marked the beginning and end of her artistic career.

I considered calling Jerry Savage. At least I could look up his number and carry it around.
I have a few questions, if you don't mind. It's her jealous lover calling...

I turned onto Kingshighway thinking I would bring up my discovery with
Alicia,
ask her the essentials, put everything out in the open. So she has an ex-boyfriend. Women have ex-boyfriends. Does it have to mean the end of the world?

But she wasn't there—and suddenly all reason abandoned me.

Two weeks ago she had given me an old tarnished key with a faded yellow sticker. For the first time I thought,
This must be Arthur's.
Of course it was his. It had to be. I'd make a new key tomorrow, throw this one in the garbage.

Inside the house, I double-locked the front door to buy myself more time in case Alicia came home. I went straight to the pink room, pulled down the shades, switched on the overhead light. I stared at the painting—head, torso, legs—and sat on the floor. Along the line of Alicia's calf was the painter's signature,
SAVAGE,
in sturdy capital letters, which I had never noticed before. I took a last look and did what I had wanted to do nearly a week ago: I opened the "Letters" box.

The journals were in order. Number 23, through this January, was still on top.

I wasn't the type to nose around or cross the boundary into people's private lives, even those closest to me, but now I was furious. Four notebooks from the top, I found what I was looking for:

JOURNAL
NO.
19
JUNE
1985–
APRIL
1986

I flipped to August 2, the day of her art show opening, and began reading back in time.

August 2

I'm through with Jerry. Tonight. Tomorrow. Soon.

This morning at the breakfast table when he read that review, I knew I had to leave. He'll let me. That's the good thing. There's nothing worse than a dinger. He'll miss having someone around to bitch to, that's for sure, about the Philistine buyers, how he's misunderstood, how he suffers for going it alone. He'll miss the sex that he thinks he's good at and someone other than himself to blame, because the light's not right in the gallery, the day slips by too fast, don't shower so long we're low on water. Where did you put my Naples red? You know my reds are off limits.

The door will be open. I'll be free to go. He doesn't care and he never did. Boo hoo.

I don't know what happened, how I ever landed here. Why do I always catch men on the downslope? A climber would be nice for a change. Jerry was going down. Whatever Elisabeth Hall, Miss Small-Time High-Culture America, says, he's a washed-up has-been. Didn't know it then, but I know it now. I fell for his paintings, not him. That was it. All the life that those paintings promised was gone in the day-to-day. He must have painted the soul right out of himself. Splatter! Splat! Now there's nothing.

This morning he looks up from his cereal. Grape Nuts three times a day. It's all he eats. He says to me, "Jeez. You're not going to like this." I reach for the newspaper and he's sort of holding it against his chest, with a stupid little frown, a cock of the head, a look on his face: I'm-only-trying-to-protect-you.

"They reviewed my show?" I ask.

And this is what I see: his face (what you can make of it behind the Castro beard) has only a thin film of sympathy. It isn't even sympathy. It's the show of sympathy. Beneath it, brimming from head to toe, is a sick satisfaction.

"Maybe we should throw this away," he says.

He's too comfortable, that's the problem. People around here love him because there's nobody else. He's the only thing going. That's why he's married to Tucson. He had no competition before I came around.

It wasn't until this morning that I realized it was a competition. Had been from the first canvas he gave me. Amazing after more than a year that I had no idea. Now all those green-eyed looks come back to me—"Sneer, Scoff, Snicker, Sneeze," montage by Jerry Savage.

I couldn't help myself; I had to read more, go even further into the past.

October 16, 1982

Why is it I'm only shy around men my age?

Kyle, Rodeo Kyle, comes into the store and I lean back on the stairs, a blushing wallflower.

I never much went for the rodeo boys growing up. In Dallas there were just too many of them—we'd tease them behind their tight Wranglers—but out here I see I must have had a secret fondness all along for the saddle riders of Weatherford.

He strides in, not cocky, and picks up his mail every day between 1:30 and 2, lays his letters on the counter. Why? So I can see who they're from: just bill collectors. Is that it? He goes around to the coolers for a bottle of cream soda. Every day, a cream soda. He puts down his money without a word, then he's gone.

I turned the page, disbelieving. Had I not known about Jerry Savage or been able to recognize Alicia's handwriting, I would have sworn that these were written by a different person. This was the voice of an experienced woman, someone who had been around.

Her entries were sporadic. Sometimes a week or two would pass, sometimes a day; some entries would be a line long—"Saw a six-foot bull snake slither out of the shed" or "Thinking about the city again"; some entries would go on for pages. Enough was enough, but one word caught my eye.

Sex with Kyle is the best ever.

Is it cliché that he's a rodeo cowboy? Somehow too staged? Where does he get that giddyup at the end of a working day? He says just looking at me. We fit like (name your simile).

I closed the notebook. Her life was at the extension of my arm. For a price, a terrible price that I sensed I was already beginning to pay, I could know exactly who she was.

At eight o'clock Alicia came home with a bag of groceries.

I had calmed myself down, pacing about, cleaning the kitchen and sweeping dust out of corners where the furniture had been.

"I don't know why I went to the grocery store," she said. "We're not going to be here for a couple of days."

"What do you mean?"

"The painters are coming tomorrow. We'll have to go to your place."

Alicia had never been to my apartment. I'd been back myself only a couple of times in the past two weeks.

"For how long? You know it's really small."

"They said it won't be more than two days, plus another to air the place out." She put the groceries on the counter: milk, coffee, essentials. "They're sending a big team."

We hadn't talked much about Alicia's future plans. She knew she wanted to put the house on the market, which had pleased me considerably—it would be her final act of looking past Arthur.

But now Arthur was only one of who knew how many men Alicia was looking past. Selling the house seemed less urgent, even less sensible now.

"I saw the realtor today and took Arthur's clothes to Goodwill," she said. "It was such a relief giving them away. You know what happens to widows who keep their husbands' clothing in the closet? They keep going back in there looking for memories. Movie stubs in blazer pockets. Little notes and lost dollar bills.

"I'm not going to be one of those widows," she said. "It's terrible what they do to themselves. And they can't help it—standing in closets and closing their eyes, breathing the scent on the collars of those shirts. Every scent a memory of something."

I thought of Margaret, imagined how upset she would be if she found out about Arthur's clothes.

Alicia put the milk in the refrigerator.

"I can't wait to be finished with all these errands," she said. "It's time to get focused."

I couldn't think of a thing to say.

"I also got the papers." She brightened. "The Berlin Wall is coming down by the weekend. Mark my words."

I decided now wasn't the time to confront her about Jerry. I'd head back to my apartment to clean up before she came over a few hours later.

"What should we do about dinner?" I asked finally.

"I've already eaten."

The heat rose in me again as I thought,
With whom?

"You have?"

"I was hungry." She shrugged.

I drew a rough map from St. Charles to my apartment in Soulard for her and said I'd see her at ten.

"Goodbye, sweetheart." She kissed me.

On the road to St. Louis,
Sex with Kyle is the best ever
darted around my brain. Black ink in Alicia's own hand.

I pulled off I-70 to Highway 40 and found an all-night, all-everything store. I bought a dozen votive candles, a bar of oatmeal soap, a tape of Patsy Cline's greatest hits, two bottles of fifteen-dollar French wine, even a bouquet of cut flowers, still reasonably fresh.