Page 37 - WTP Vol. X #2

woods. During the last days, when he had despaired at his lostness, when his work wouldn’t come, she dared not ask, How’d it go?
The warm sun lit up the far-off dunes. She bit her thumb. Why did Christian have to court that ingénue near the end? She knew. A lovely face to soothe his washed-up, drunken soul. Vic had fled to Europe for two weeks, after they had become lovers, and told herself that it wouldn’t last.
Tired and hungry, Vic extended her hands out in front of her as if to clutch Christian and then reached for a cigarette. “I can’t stop missing you. You stupid blind fuck.”
She returned to the house to shower. Under the beading water, she summoned him. She picked dried paint off his neck. Christian pushed up against her and stroked her taut belly. “Vic, stop fussing,” he said. “You’re a mess too.”
Her wet chin-length hair flopped over her firm nose. “A mess that I clean up.”
Later, in the double bed upstairs, she spied a clot of paint on his groin. “Christian?”
His grin cracked across his wide face. “No time to wash up when I need to pee, Vic.”
2
Midafternoon, the gravel spat outside. A two-toned sedan, robin’s egg blue and white, rolled up the drive. Its headlights, perched up high, popped wide like an infant’s eyes. Vic laughed. What would the neighbor, just down the road, think of her visitor? “Show off,” she probably said. “Bad enough they got Life Maga- zine here to photograph her drunk husband painting in a barn meant for animals.”
Vic stood in her black shirt dress with hands on her hips. “What’s this?”
Alfred’s big body tilted out of the driver’s door. At 6’
4”, he dwarfed her.
“My Chevy’s in the shop,” He feigned self-reproach. The bald circle on his head caught the fading light as he stroked his bushy black beard. “My friend’s new Ford Fairlane.”
“Nice friend.”
Alfred’s big black eyes glowed as he kissed her cheek. “I just talked to the Sterling Gallery this morning.”
“Slow down, Alfred.”
Inside, at the round oak table, Vic uncapped Chris- tian’s bourbon and poured it into juice cups. Alfred lifted a bag of bagels with lox and cream cheese from his battered briefcase. Forever repelled by his im- migrant father’s stinginess, he brought gifts every- where.
Alfred stared at the kitchen. Christian had torn down its walls years ago so light would fill the first floor. “So neat. You cleaned it up for me?”
“For Grace.”
“Your old art school buddy?”
“Yep. She’s coming this weekend.” Grace, who created enormous vessels that sat on fields, finished her forms with purple and orange glazes as bold as Chris- tian’s paintings.
“How’s Ellen?” Vic asked.
“I’ll find out tonight.”
Vic took that to mean that his new young wife, his student, was out dallying in their “open marriage.” Like Vic, Alfred had been screwed in love. His former lover, an artist, had dumped him a few months before Christian died. Alfred had broken down. With a flushed face and damp palms, he had stayed on their red Victorian sofa for a week.
Alfred licked the salt off his forefinger. “Sterling would like to give you a fall opening. Are you good with that?”
Vic hesitated. She distrusted his sense of urgency. Alfred wanted a lot of things lately. Full access to Christian’s paintings was first. Organizing retrospec- tive shows for her posthumously hot husband was second. “A revolutionary,” Alfred had written in the leading journal, “dead at 48.” A champion of Chris-
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