Kate stared into her coffee.
Grieve for what?
For her failure to get answers; for a husband whom she possibly never knew, for his death, her loss? What exactly? Kate arranged her features into a cool mask. “Well, it looks like I will be getting away. Early retirement, I guess you could call it.” She forced a smile, but Freeman did not return it.
A
ntiseptic smells failed to mask the odor of human waste and disease, doors ajar, split-second glimpses of the sick and recovering, some, the lucky ones, with visitors trying to entertain them, others left alone in their beds, waiting for overworked nurses who might never get to them.
No place Kate liked less than a hospital. She headed quickly down the corridor, not quite sure why she felt compelled to visit Noreen Stokes or what she would say. What propelled herguilt, or her nagging desire to find the shred of the truth that kept eluding her? Probably both. Plus the fact that she would be denied police access if she waited even a couple of hours longer.
Just as Kate had anticipated, a uniform was posted at the door. After all, Noreen Stokes had been witness to a mob murder.
Kate flashed her temporary shield, thankful Brown had forgotten to take it back.
The uniform gave Kate a perfunctory glance as she pushed through the door.
The blinds were drawn, the fluorescents casting a sickly greenish tint over everything.
Noreen Stokes was half propped up in bed, arms on top of the sheet that was pulled up to her neck, IV in one arm snaking up to a pole with a dangling bag of clear liquid, half empty, her pale skin only a shade darker than the sheet.
She turned her head as Kate entered, eyes registering surprise, then squeezed them shut, as if the act would make Kate disappear.
Kate edged a bit closer to the bed. “How are you doing?”
Noreen did not answer, but her lids twitched, and Kate was once again struck by the network of veins under her translucent skin, even more noticeable now, the delicate skin like a veil.
“I’m sorry.”
Noreen’s eyes blinked open like a doll’s. “Are you?”
“Yes.”
“You lead a man to kill my husband and you’re…
sorry
?” Her voice was little more than a hoarse whisper, but filled with loathing.
“Baldoni was following
you,
not me, Noreen.” Kate hoped what she said was true. She wasn’t entirely sure.
“That’s your way of saying you’re sorry?”
“I simply wanted to talk, Noreen. To you, and Andy. I just wantedI needed to get a few answers, to find out what happened.”
“What
happened
? I’ll tell you what happened. Your husband condemned Andy to death, and
you
helped execute him.”
“That’s not true, I”
“You asked me for answers. Well, I’ll give them to you.” Noreen Stokes inhaled a breath, her fragile hand, black and blue from the IV’s needle, twitched on the sheet. “Your husband racked up debts, terrible debts. He put the firm in jeopardy. Andy was only trying to help…” She took another breath, her face almost colorless except for the purplish veins pulsing beneath her almost transparent flesh. “Baldoni owed Andy a favor because Andy had successfully defended his uncle. So Baldoni got Richard the money he needed to keep the firm from crumbling.”
Kate listened to the words as if they were a foreign language that she had to interpret:
Richard so in debt that he turned to mobsters?
“Richard promised to pay it all back, but he didn’t. He knew the consequences”
That word again:
consequences…
“but he didn’t heed them. And now…now they’re both dead.”
“Richard wouldn’t have, he…How do you know this?”
“Andy told me everything. How Richard came to him, begging, and Andy just wanted to help.” Noreen took a deep breath. “After Richard was killed, Andy knew he’d be next. Naturally he couldn’t come up with the money. He had to get away.” Her eyes caught Kate’s, angry, sad. “It wasn’t enough that your husband got himself killed, you had to make sure Andy went with him. You didn’t want the truth.”
“I did.” Thoughts were buzzing inside Kate’s brain like mosquitoes. Had she really wanted the truth? “You’re wrong. None of what you’re saying is true. Richard would have told me”
“Andy told me not to listen to you, not to speak to you. That you’d only defend your husbandthat you would believe him no matter what.”
Would she? Did she still? Kate’s fingers unconsciously slid along the gold chain at her neck until they found Richard’s wedding band. She tried to focus her thoughts. “Did Andy know a young woman named Suzie White?”
“Who?”
“She was murdered, and”
“Now you’re saying that Andy was a murderer.”
“I didn’t say that. I simply asked if he knew her.”
“How would I know that?”
“I know this isn’t easy, Noreen, for either of us, but the apartment where Andy was staying, it belonged to a man named Lamar Black, a drug dealer, and a pimp, and Suzie White worked for him, for Black. She was a prostitute. And I think Andy knew her.”
“How dare you.” The words came out flat and hard.
“I’m sorry. But you once hired a detective…” Kate hesitated. She knew these statements would sting. “…to follow your husband, and”
Noreen Stokes began to take fast gulps of air.
“According to the medical examiner, Andy had heroin and cocaine in his system, and”
Noreen Stokes jerked up in the bed so fast her IV went flying, blood spurting from her hand, the IV tube whipping around like a snake spitting pale liquid poison. “Get out! Get out of here!”
“I just want the truth, Noreen. Don’t you?”
“The
truth
? You don’t want to know the truth. Just get out.” She grabbed hold of the nurses’ call button and pressed it over and over.
“Noreen”
“Get out!”
Kate was about to speak when a nurse bolted into the room, the uniform just behind her. He got a hand around Kate’s arm and led her out. When she looked back from the hall, through the half-open door, a nurse was trying to find a decent vein in Noreen’s bruised hand, and except for the rise and fall of Noreen’s chest, the woman was lying so still she could have been dead.
H
e’s got a bag of Cheese Doodles, two packages of Hostess Twinkies, a liter-sized plastic bottle of Coke, all spread out in front of him, ready. He has been waiting, thinking about this for days in between painting, so much that no matter how many drops he puts in his eyes, they sting. Six new paintings that he thinks are really good, several brushes scrubbed almost to shreds in the process, a dozen pencils worn down to stubs creating his frames, writing the names over and over, excited this time by the new addition. He’s ready to show them to her. But how? And where?
“Hey, Tony, it’s about to start. Donna, you gonna watch? C’mon. Hurry!” He calls out into the dark, nods and smiles as his friends curl onto the couch with him, believes he can feel the warmth of their bodies surround him. “What about Brandon and Brenda?”
“Brandon’s working, and Brenda
says
she’s got a headache,” he says in his falsetto Donna-voice, “but I think she’s lying because she’s jealous.”
“Girls,” he whispers, elbowing an imaginary Tony the Tiger.
“They’re grrrrrrrrrreat.”
“Yeah, sure. Sometimes.”
He leans forward, plays with the rabbit ears to adjust the picture. “Okay, everybody. Shut up.” He twitches with excitement.
Titles and credits are replaced by buildings, cafés, and stores as the camera follows a handsome heavyset man ambling down the street. A street sign:
MULBERRY STREET
.
Oh, just like the color.
He writes the name in his sketchbook with a bold black marker. Now the man comes to a door, then a close-up of keys in the lock, and a quick cut as the man tugs an old metal gate across a large industrial elevator. A view from below of the elevator ascending. Another cuta huge studio filled with paintings, light streaming in from enormous windows. The picture goes black for a split second, then Kate’s face fills the screen, and he is overjoyed to see not only that he was right, that her hair
is
chestnut and her eyes blue, but that it is still happening, this most amazing of miracles. “See, Donna? What did I tell you?”
“Yeah,” he answers in his Donna-voice, though in his mind the debate continues: Kate’s eyes may
not
be blue; he can’t remember, always gets it wrong; but what does Donna know; why is she right and he wrong? No, he’s right; no, she’s right. “Shut up!”
“Tonight,” says Kate, “a rare treat. A visit with one of the art world’s best-known and most accomplished painters, Boyd Werther.” The camera pans the artist’s impressive studio, first a long, wide shot of the huge colorful canvases leaning against paint-splattered walls, then traveling along the floor through a maze of turpentine cans, bottles of varnish and oil, the occasional housepainter’s brush resting on an open tin of thick paint, a few oil tubes scattered about as though they have been dropped or flung in some moment of creative fury, when in fact the artist’s assistants had carefully arranged everything according to the artist’s detailed instruction just moments before Kate’s TV crew arrived. Now the camera moves in close, creeps up and down the surface of one painting, then another, while Kate’s disembodied voice provides commentary. “
Art News
has said that Boyd Werther’s paintings mix the refinement of Japanese scrollwork with the energy of abstract expressionism.”
He strains to see what she is talking about, but to him they are just simple abstractions, and then the screen goes gray. Everything gray. No more chestnut hair, the color totally gone now, as if it has leached out the bottom of the set. He checks the floor just beneath it, half expects to see puddles of actual color lying there. Is it because of those awful paintings?
“Tony, do you get those paintings?”
“They’re grrrrrrrrrreat!”
Are they?
He can’t imagine why Tony thinks so, though lately he’s begun to suspect that Tony says the same thing about everything.
In between Werther’s abstractions, other pictures flash on the screena Kandinsky
Improvisation,
fragments of wall paintings from the caves at Lascauxnothing familiar to himwhile Kate continues to narrate: “…all of these influences come together in Werther’s work…”
He grabs handfuls of Cheese Doodles, fingers picking up acidic orange dye that he cannot see, excitement and frustration merging as he stuffs them into his mouth, chomps and chews as if he were gnawing away at every word the art
her-story-n
offers.
New scene: Kate, seated in the studio with the handsome heavyset man who now wears loose-fitting clothes that look like pajamas, the large canvases arranged around them. Kate says, “I’m here with New York artist Boyd Werther in his NoLIta studio…”
With his bold black marker he writes “No Lee Ta” just below where he has written “Mulberry Street,” in his sketchbook.
Kate talks. Werther talks more. Paintings flash on the small screen. Soon the Cheese Doodles are gone and he is tearing open the Hostess Twinkies and trying to memorize the conversation, words like
deconstruction,
and statements such as “formal versus antiformal,” and “modern versus postmodern,” his brain reeling from all the new information, and only once is he rewarded with a flash of brilliant greenKate’s sweatereither forest or pine green, he isn’t sure and it’s gone so quickly, and then Boyd Werther is scratching his big belly, and saying: “Why bother to paint if you’re not going to make use of color, its most seductive tool?”
“Yes, yes,” he says to the screen. “I agree. And I want to.”
“A painter who doesn’t know his color is wasting his time.”
“But I’m
trying
to learn.” He leans even closer to the small screen. “Really I am.”
“As for me,” says Werther, “I eat, sleep, and dream color.”
Dream color.
Yes, he has dreamed in color. Hasn’t he? Or is that gone too? He can’t recall. He holds his head, which has begun to ache. A wave of nausea tagging along with the pain, and an imagea man and woman on a bed, the flash of a knife, red to black, black to red.
The artist is gesturing at the large canvases leaning against the studio walls. “Look what color, real color, can achieve. A miracle, no?”
A miracle. Yes.
“Please.” He squints at the TV screen, sees nothing but gray paintings, shouts“Where the fuck is
my
miracle?!”and as the camera switches to Kate, he receives it, his miracle, Kate’s luscious hair shimmering golden brown, her green sweater as precious as jade. Now he understands.
It’s her. Only she can deliver the miracle.
He flicks his tongue against the TV screen, believes he can actually taste the refreshing minty flavor of her green sweater.
“Watch,” says the artist, and pulling himself out of his chair, he struts toward a large table littered with tubes of oil and containers of pigment. He holds up a glass jar filled with dark powder. The camera zooms in for a close-up.
“It looks black, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, yes,” he says, sitting on the edge of the sofa, face only inches from the screen, rapt.
Werther uncaps the jar and spills an anthill of powder onto his glass palette. “Raw pigment,” he says. “Paint before it is paint.” Now he unscrews the cap of a metal tin, adding droplets of a slightly unctuous liquid to the pigment. “Linseed oil,” he says. And with a flat palette knife begins to mix until the two form a thick sparkling paste. Werther plucks a brush out of a coffee can, dips it into the newly mixed oil paint and lays a long stroke of paint across a blank canvas. “Like magic, isn’t it?” he says. “Phthalo blue.”
Blue?
He doesn’t think so. It still looks black.
“Of course the raw pigment and linseed should be ground with a mortar and pestle, for an ideal blend,” says Werther assuming his seat beside Kate. “But you can see how the pigment comes alive with the oil.”
“Indeed,” says Kate. “Beautiful.”
Is it? Why?
“Oil painting is such an old technique,” says Werther. “But for me, numero uno.”
“Yes,” says Kate, assuming a professorial tone as the camera focuses on her. “It was invented by the Dutch, possibly the great Master of Flémalle, or the brothers Hubert and Jan van Eyck, sometime in the early-or mid-fourteen hundreds. Oil paint allowed for smoother tones and subtle blending, which painters before them could not achieve with their quick-drying egg temperas or labor-intensive frescoes.”
“Painting’s greatest achievement,” says Werther.
“So, what would you say to painters who limit their palette, or use no color at all, simply black and white?” asks Kate.
“I’d say why bother? Look at Franz Kline. He’s already done itand as good as it’s ever going to be done. Nowadays, it’s just a big bore. I’d never do that. Never. Fact is,” says Werther, “I’d kill myself without color.”
The words play over and over in his mind:
Kill myself without color…Kill myself without color…Kill myself without color…
The screen pans Werther’s paint table.
Oh, how he wants to learnto mix his own color like the artist just did, to improve, to understand everything.
He wants the artist to teach him.
“Next time,” says Kate. “A rare treat. The Rothko Chapel, in Houston, one of the great testimonies to art.” She smiles warmly. “And don’t forget to see the WLK Hand show opening at the Vincent Petrycoff Gallery in Chelsea.” One last smile before her face fades and the credits begin to roll.
In his sketchbook, where he has written “No Lee Ta” and “Mulberry Street,” he writes, “WLK Hand, Vin-Sent Petreecof gallery, Chel-see,” then pulls himself up from the couch and checks to make sure that his paintings are dry, his hands trembling with excitement as he covers each one loosely with plastic, then tapes them all together. From the back wall, he carefully removes a few of the pictures from his pantheon of greatsthe Francis Bacon of the gray couple, one of Soutine’s
Carcass
paintings, and a Jasper Johns. He has decided that he would like the artist’s opinion on them. And if it works out well, he might even consider giving them to him as a gift, a token of mutual respect.
He stops a moment to consider what else, goes through his backpack, notes his usual supplies, and removes his brushes. There will be plenty there he can use.
A conversation: artist-to-artist. He trembles with excitement.
Now, with the New York City subway map spread out in front of him, he runs his magnifying glass over it until he finds Mulberry Street and a subway stop close by. He shuts his eyes, replays the beginning of the show, the man ambling down the street, some of the stores he passed, the door he came to with his keys, and sees it perfectlythe numbers on the door, 302.