Losing Clementine (9 page)

I bought chili powder and coffee, pretending I wanted them to eat and to drink. What I really wanted was to slide my glass bottle down inside them when we crossed the border. There could be sniffer dogs. You never knew.

That night Richard and I had sex again, just once, and then fell asleep.

“Do I look okay?” Richard flipped down the visor and opened the mirror. The two lights on either side illuminated two inches worth of darkness. He smoothed his hair and checked his teeth, perhaps for pubic hair.

I could've said something, but I didn't. He looked vulnerable with his nose up against six square inches of low-grade reflecting glass, trying to see if
adulterer
was written across his forehead in invisible ink.

Our trip north had been uneventful. There had been no dogs. We simply walked through the processing building and stood in line with our blameless white skin and showed our passports to the agent. It was air-conditioned, which dried my nervous sweat. I tried to think boring thoughts. The agent asked no questions. Our bags were x-rayed and set off no alarms. My stomach relaxed. That was that. It was easy, really. Uneventful. I suppose smuggling always was until it wasn't, and it was my lucky day.

Now we were home. I had a pound of coffee and red chili powder for no reason, and Richard would go inside, and his girlfriend would be there. He would be unusually cheerful one minute and disparaging of me the next. He'd say I was miserable company, as all sick people are, except, in my case, much worse. He'd lay out a list of my annoyances and end it with “She's not like you.” He might even suggest that I smell funny, like bologna gone off. Then, when he was secure in her gullibility, he would excuse himself to shower. He would take an extra long time and be thorough, and I didn't begrudge him any of this. It was what he needed to do, and he'd earned a pass or two over the years.

“You look completely normal,” I said.

“Yeah?”

He looked up his nostrils.

“Yep.”

“Okay then.” He flipped up the visor. “Right.” He climbed out and opened the back door to fish around for his duffel bag. “I'll bring Chuckles out.”

I watched him walk toward our house. Dusk was hanging on by its toenails, nothing but a sliver of salmon-colored light on the edge of the world. His white T-shirt glowed in the near dark, and there were a dozen little lamps shoved into the ground along the pathway to the door, illuminating Richard's sneakers. The lights were new. That was something I never would've done.

When he unlocked the door with his key, I could see it was dark inside. I wondered what that meant. Maybe Sheila had gone to her own house. Maybe she was out back in the small shed that had been my studio for a year. That was as long as I could take the tiny space. It wasn't big enough to organize my supplies and store my work before sale. It was either too hot or too cold. It had terrible ventilation, and it made me feel claustrophobic. On my birthday at the end of that first year, I'd gone out and rented myself a work space, different from the one I have now. There was no kitchen, and it was smaller and zoned commercial. I didn't have Jenny then. My shelves were a mess, and no one made me sandwiches. There had been a fast-food restaurant around the corner. I walked there covered in paint and ate a lot of french fries and gained five pounds.

I found Chuckles on my way back one afternoon. I'd had a paper sack forming a whole Rorschach test worth of grease spots and saw him dart under an old blue pickup truck that had been parked seemingly unmoved next to the building for as long as I had been renting there. He was emaciated and not more than a couple of months old. Persian kittens look like dandelions gone to seed, and I was lonely in my studio all by myself all day. I got down on my hands and knees in my stained jeans and T-shirt and tore a piece off my chicken sandwich to lure him out. Half an hour later, I had him, and it wasn't until I gave him a bath and cut the mats out that I realized his fur wasn't supposed to be gray. I kept him and never bothered looking for an owner, even though Persians aren't known for their street cred.

Ten minutes later, Richard came out with Chuckles in his carrier. Chuckles was not going easy into the good night. Richard opened the back door and put the carrier on the seat, and I rolled down my window. He put one hand on the roof of the car and the other in his back pocket and stared off toward the neighbor's house and then down at his shoes, which was never a posture that foretold good things.

“I'm sorry, you know, about us. I just didn't know how to handle it. You were sad all the time, and I couldn't make it better.”

At first I thought he was talking about Mexico, and then I realized he wasn't.

“I know,” I told him. “It wasn't your fault.”

“You seem better now. I mean, you know, mentally.” He blew out a puff of air. “I guess it's not really fair, the timing, with the cancer and everything.”

I smiled through the windshield.

“Give Sheila my best.”

When I got home, Jenny was sitting on the floor in front of my door. Her hair was falling out of her ponytail, and there was a hole in the knee of her jeans. Chuckles yowled with joy and started to cough something up.

“How long have you been sitting here?”

I set the carrier down, and Jenny leaned over to open it and scoop Chuckles into her arms, which is not something other humans are allowed to do to him.

“Too long. Where have you been? Have you been to the Taylor?”

“Mexico. And no, why?”

I leaned over her to unlock the front door, and she followed me inside carrying the cat and my bag. She put both next to the unmade bed and started straightening the covers. What I really wanted was for her to make me dinner. I pulled one of the blue painted stools up to the counter that floats in the middle of the floor, marking the kitchen's boundary, and tried to look hungry. If she didn't mention her firing, neither would I.

“Elaine's stuff is up. She got the show before yours.”

“I'm not having a show. You want pancakes?”

“You don't know how to make pancakes.”

“That was sort of my point.”

“And what do you mean you're not having a show? Did they cancel? Is it because of Elaine, because I swear to God, she is a thief.”

“We can talk about it while you make pancakes.”

“You're not listening to me.” She stopped straightening and faced me.

“Yes, I am,” I said. “I'm listening now. Tell me.”

Chuckles hopped up on the half-made bed and lay down.

“Elaine stole your stuff, and it's hanging at the Taylor right now.”

I stopped caring about pancakes. “What are you talking about?”

“It's just like what you've been working on. The layers, the scale, the colors, the Americana themes. Everything.”

Elaine Sacks had been the Lex Luther to my Superman for years. We'd come up in the business at the same time, except I had talent and she had less but supplemented it with a few well-placed blow jobs, or so I'd heard. She was also a copycat. She showed at the same galleries I had after I'd established myself there. She'd moved to L.A. a year after I did. She took up mixed media after I'd switched from oils. It was like having a pesky younger sister who always wanted to borrow your clothes and get a ride to the mall with your friends. Except in this case she was also dipping into my client base. Because I'm above that sort of thing, I hadn't yet set her car on fire, but we had an understanding. She stayed away from me, and I wouldn't spit on her. That was generous on my part, I thought.

But this was too much. The twelve pieces I'd assembled for the show that wasn't going to happen were still there in my studio. I'd gone off on a subversive Grandma Moses track. All rolling farm landscapes and small towns with little houses and people and lots of red, white, and blue until you looked close and the cow has two heads and the guy working the hay barn is in slavery shackles and the milkmaids are getting it on. It was some of my best stuff. When I kicked it, it would be worth a fortune. Jenny would get a lot of that money, though she didn't know it yet.

“Show me,” I said.

It was black dark by then, and downtown was deserted except for clusters around the valet stands of bars and restaurants. The well-funded ones were still pushing through and hoping the promised gentrification, which had come to a fiery end in the real estate crash of '08, would find its feet again. The jury was still out on that. The homeless still owned huge tracts of the sidewalks, and the pull of the suburbs had not ceased. But the hipsters and galleries and nearby USC students were dug in. So maybe. Just maybe.

The Taylor Gallery was located on one of the quieter blocks. There were no bars and restaurants to keep people nearby after the offices closed at six o'clock. The gallery, too, was closed. It was open in the afternoons and by appointment, and most of my work sold on opening night anyway and sometimes before then to a few clients that John Taylor cultivated and called my patrons.

Jenny parked in a yellow loading zone. I climbed out first and walked up. The huge plate glass windows were dark, and the white lettering at chest level done in Times New Roman all caps glowed. ELAINE SACKS—HOMESTEAD. A large piece hung on a freestanding display wall a few feet behind the window. Grandma Moses redone.

It was like standing in a sensory deprivation tank. I couldn't hear the whoosh of traffic on Figueroa. I couldn't smell the old salami wafting out of the closed deli across the street.

The piece in front of me was larger than what I did. Sacks still operated like she was an unknown. A new artist's work is priced according to size. No one says that aloud, but it is. You don't know where the market will take the artist yet, so you buy the painting like any other commodity, like corn or chickens or industrial carpet. You paid by the square foot. The scale of her work felt a little desperate to me.

When Jenny touched my arm, I jumped. I hadn't heard the car door open and shut or her footsteps crunch on the dirty sidewalk. I'd have made for a fine mugging victim in that state.

“You didn't tell anyone about my work, did you?”

“No.” Her voice was level and firm. “I wouldn't do that.”

I took a rattled breath. “I know.”

“Can you sue?”

Maybe someone could sue on my behalf. I wasn't going to be around long enough for that. What I was around long enough for was for her to show before me, to establish this style as her own, to devalue my work, and to throw doubt on my integrity. I'd be dead and people would say crap things about my work, and it shouldn't matter but it did. It made me angry. It made me raging-bull, rip-your-guts-out, beat-you-to-death-with-a-metal baseball-bat angry.

The rage went in two directions. Elaine took half. Probably more than half. The other went to the gallery assistant. I didn't remember her name anymore. I hadn't remembered it the minute after she'd told me. She'd come by with a check. I was on her way home, she'd said, could she stop by? Jenny had already left for the night. The assistant had worn all black. I remembered because it was the required uniform of assistants, and it had told me what to think of her, which was nothing. Black leggings, black shoes, black top, black scarf, black bag. She'd had the check from my most recent sale, and I'd stuck it to the fridge with a magnet. Jenny would take it to the bank. The assistant had asked if she could look at what I was working on. I didn't see why not. It was right there out in the open. The piece in progress was on the easel. Others leaned up against the walls. She didn't even have to ask, but I said yes. She'd walked up to each. She'd made comments. I don't remember what. She was the only other person to see them. Elaine had already signed with the gallery. I knew that. She'd had a show there already that I hadn't attended.

“You should go home,” I said to Jenny.

“What are you going to do? How are you going to get back?”

“Don't worry about it.”

“I can help.”

Jenny looked like a half-grown Gerber Baby. She loved Jesus and knew in her heart that Jesus loved her. She knew how to make peach cobbler, and she said please and thank-you.

“No, you can't.”

“Are you going to break in?”

“Go home, Jenny.”

“I have paint in the car. House paint. My friend had it left over from her condo. I was going to do my bathroom.”

I looked at her, turning my head just slightly from the bloody accident in front of me. “What color?”

“Robin's egg blue.”

I crinkled my nose.

“I know,” she admitted. “I would've brought red if I'd known we were going to deface property.”

“Leave the paint.”

“Take the cannoli?”

I really loved that girl.

“I'm staying,” she said. “What's the plan?”

I looked through the window. I couldn't get close enough to see if the milkmaids were doing it, but her buildings weren't as detailed as mine. The colors weren't as well chosen. The piece lacked balance and flow. Your eye had no obvious place to land, no path to follow. A good artist took you on a tour, led you by the hand where she wanted you to go. I wasn't just being knocked off. I was being knocked off badly. The back of my neck was hot.