The Painter: A Novel (41 page)

The painting, under a drop cloth, was at the other end of the red carpet that was not red but blue, another Central Asian runner, maybe Kirghiz, woven with geometric green birds. The painting was on one of my easels against the big windows with the big view of the valley and the wooded ridges, and the light was already going graciously to dusk so as not to backlight the canvas.

A tray passed, balanced by a waiter, Knob Creek bourbon and water—my favorite, how did they know?—the bottle on the tray, and I took one without thinking and downed half the glass before I realized that I’d just thrown away almost three years of sobriety, every day hard earned as a day at the mills. I mean if you are into counting days and years. It was a moment of horror. Does that count? One slug? Yes.

Suddenly I felt I was in a nightmare. Did I just do that? Holy shit. The full impact hitting me at the same time as the sweet warm unutterably delicious booze, hitting my gut and then my blood and brain like the all smothering and transporting kiss of an old and favorite lover. Oh Jesus. In a panic I grabbed Sofia by the arm, hard.

“What?” she whispered.

“Don’t let me do that again. I mean it.”

“What?”

“I just tossed back a whiskey, oh fuck.”

I felt something like panic zing through her. We had talked about my fitful dance with booze, how nothing good could happen for me when I drank.

She reached for my hand. “You’re okay, it was a mistake. Reflex. You didn’t even know. Don’t worry.” She squeezed. “Really. Forget it.”

I glanced at her. She was smiling. Okay. I shuddered. Somehow I believed her.

Pim made a toast. He stood by the easel, held out his cut glass tumbler, someone else rapped the crystal of a wineglass with a spoon. He wore an alpaca vest with silver buttons, jeans. Ruddy tan, salt and pepper full hair, boyish, bushy eyebrows, hunter’s clear gray eyes and the lined drawn cheeks of an endurance athlete. Easy in a crowd. Could it be that most of the people who loved him also envied him so much they hated him? I thought probably so. Maybe my biggest collector.

“Some of you have champagne? Good. Good for a toast. I can’t drink it, it makes me giddy and I’m giddy enough already.”

Murmur of laughter.

“Julia, are you—? Ah, here.”

She appeared by his side, raised a glass of white wine to the crowd, smiled—Here I am, you knew I’d be here, I’m always a little late, aren’t I? I love you all and you love me always anyway. What her smile said. It struck me that Pim was running for something, for office. Julia, too. What was it? King and Queen of Santa Fe? Art Mavens of the American Southwest? And my paintings, one after another, my paintings in their aggregate were crucial to their winning. With my sudden fame their accession was a lock. This was a coronation as well as an unveiling. That was suddenly clear to me. The sense of nightmare was morphing into another kind of dream, something compounded of dread and excitement.

What I mean is: you get this pressure, this internal pressure that builds like a swelling lake and you paint. It’s all you want to do, all you know how to do. And if you focus in the right way, a way you had to learn, you let yourself go. You lose yourself and just about vanish and the painting asserts and fills and flows over the dam and down into the streambed of everything you have ever experienced and thought, and carries you both on a current that takes you into a country that neither of you have ever seen. Where you have never been.

And then what? You go through this journey of losing everything, this vertiginous process and create this somehow magical thing and you wake up and remember your name and dip your small brush and sign it, which is odd when you think about how you got there, and then maybe you have a dealer and a way to make a living doing it again and again, and the dealer sells it to Pim, and he displays it and maybe loves it, but is not at all equivocal about how it fits into the swelling pile of his net worth, nor into the marvelously
growing balance of his prestige and status. And then you kill two men. And the rich get richer.

It’s kind of a long train of thought, but it all occurred to me in a flash as I saw the two of them half raise their glasses and as I listened to Pim launch into his toast. This is where the process ends, that’s what came to me with the whole, big, round, comprehensive knowledge of a dream. And spacetime rippled like a big sail losing then catching the wind. The way it does in a dream sometimes.

Dunno. Maybe it was the jiggerful of booze.

I scanned the crowd around me. Celia Anson caught my eye and waved, relieved. She began to make her way toward us. I saw my other big collectors, the Sidells, up against the windows talking to the hanging-stone artist. Invited I knew in the spirit of amicable competition. Speaking of hangings, where was Detective Wheezy Hinchman? I went onto my toes and searched the way I looked sometimes for trout rising along an evening bank. I saw Fazil, the owner of the torture gallery next door to Steve’s, and I saw Steve in animated conversation with the owner of the La Paloma Hotel, another rich collector but of dubious taste.

Sofia squeezed my arm. She was a knockout tonight, dressed elegantly in a new black silk shift and silver chain belt, watching me closely, with the rapt attention of a volcanologist: she was very close, right at the base of the mountain, and her interest in the smoking peak was equal parts science and self-preservation. She stretched and said loudly into my left ear:

“Hand that feeds you, buddy.”

I shook my head against her lips. “What?”

“Relax! It’s a scene. You can’t paint in a vacuum. You need these people.”

These people. I took in the room, and the faces blurred and she was telling me that they loved my work, loved me.

They
do
? That’s what I thought to myself. They do? After what I’ve done? Nobody knew. They knew. A lot of them knew. I felt queasy, I felt like turning around and rushing back out the door.

I sucked in a big breath and found Steve again in the crowd. He does. He really does. Julia was at the front of the room, listening to her handsome husband with huge indulgence. She did. She really loved it. Pim must. I’d seen him go apeshit over a painting. It wasn’t just an investment. I knew how much he adored his daughters, more than anything on earth maybe, and he had asked me to memorialize this time in their lives. So what if the Pantelas had everything and wanted more?

“Not everybody can paint,” she said into my ear like a megaphone. “Some people just get to love it. Buy it, treasure it. The way it should be.”

“The way it should be.”

I felt her squeeze my arm hard again and I felt the adrenaline wash out into my limbs. She squeezed and the fight fluttered out of me. Whatever I was about to say in front of everyone, I had lost it. Was I really
not
going to fuck up and not blow my life apart right here at this autumn art party? Really?

A new phase. Maybe. Damn. Celia grabbed my other arm as if she’d just reached a life ring.

“There you are! How exciting.” Lush kiss low on my cheek.

“Fazil is such an asshole,” she said much too loudly. “Would you kill him for me? You look so different with your clothes on!” She started in on Fazil and all the twisted dealers in town and she was clearly sauced or getting there. She said excitedly that there were reporters here from Albuquerque and
Bullett
, and I lost her words to the clamor in my head, and when they came clear again she was saying that some blogger for
ARTnews
asked—
in reference to you Jim, to you!
—if the tendency among talented artists to believe themselves above the law might extend to a crime like murder—

I lost the sound. The room went mute and began to tilt. What the fuck was I doing here? A burst of loud applause roared through my vertigo and I saw that they were ushering up the little girls, their Costa Rican nanny was, and of course they were in their sailor suits. Pim handed his glass to Julia and reached down to lift one of the girls. The nanny hoisted the other. They swung them up onto a table that had been placed next to the covered easel so the crowd could see. Instantly the hands found each other, came together. They wouldn’t look at their mother, they didn’t know where to look. Someone yelled, “Cheese, girls!” Cameras flashed. Smiles fluttered over their faces like butterflies in the last cold sunlight before a killer frost. I could see that they were terrified. Julia went to them, smoothed their hair, their dresses, whispered in their ears, leaned over to Pim, was clearly telling him to get his stunt over with.

“—life does imitate art. Can’t help itself. Without further ado, I give you Jim Stegner’s latest great painting.”

Well, that wasn’t exactly true, but. He handed the nanny his glass this time, carefully rolled up the drop cloth, then jerked it up and free with a flourish. Cameras flashed. The crowd shifted and shifted back like an ocean swell. Cheers went up, laughter, applause, the girls tucked closer together, eyes closed, and shivered as if weathering a hailstorm. For a long moment the tableau held. Then Julia spoke sharply to the nanny and the two of them lifted the girls down and shuttled them out.

Here’s the strange thing: I felt the energy of the painting move into and through the people around me. A compression and release, maybe the way an explosion moves through water. The sight of the painting. That’s what it was, without a doubt. The spontaneous laughter, the clapping, the sounds, the childlike glee on some of the faces, the sudden serious focus, maybe recognition, on others. What it is about painting, how it can hit people exactly like music, and hit people so differently.

Pim was grinning like he’d just landed a five pound German brown.

“Jim! Where’s Jim Stegner? Can we get our favorite artist up here? Can you say a few words, Jim?”

Filament of panic, lit like a bulb. All eyes turning now to me. A kaleidoscope of hooting owls, huge dark owl eyes lit with love. Goddamn, lucky thing I’m not a mouse. They weren’t scared at all now. How could the man who had painted the twins this way be a murderer? A loose cannon? Well.

Pim was extending a hand, as if to help me from the dock to his yacht. I was on the edge of an open aisle to the painting. Not a red carpet but the blue kilim runner.

Sofia grabbed a handful of my butt and pushed. What the hell. Die Another Day.

Pim put his arm around my shoulders. He raised his glass and two hundred glasses lifted. “To one of America’s greatest painters!”

I thought: None of this would be happening if I hadn’t killed two men. We might be having an unveiling, but there would be less of a crowd, it would be a lot quieter, no writers from
Bullett
. That queasiness, the nausea, washed through the warmth of the booze and rose into my craw. I remembered getting hit by a rogue set wave surfing. Clawing out through the crashing whitewater on a big day to sit well out past the break on the safe calm of the swell and then seeing the thing rise in a wall beyond me, out where I did not think a wave could be, rise and stiffen and begin to collapse. The tumbling wall of my immediate future. Just then a pair of eyes that weren’t owl at all, and weren’t smiling, just a man, looking straight at me, serious, it was Sport, holy shit. Wearing a gray Harris tweed jacket and a predatory expression. Not mean, just patient. Watching the prey. Not still so much as withholding action, for the moment. The way, it occurred to me, I had watched Dellwood from the willows. And next to him was Wheezy. Wheezy at least seemed about to laugh. He couldn’t get over it, any of it.

Another jolt of panic. Had they found the rucksack? Or the gun? Had one of the hunters stepped forward as an eyewitness? Had they come to arrest me in front of all my hometown admirers? I didn’t think so.

“Go ahead, Jim,” Pim prompted. “Give us a word.”

I shook myself off like a dog.

“Thanks,” I said. “Thank you all for years of support. And friendship. I’m not sure what else to say.”

I couldn’t breathe. I needed to get out of here. My mouth felt like parchment. I looked on the table beside me for something to drink. There was nothing. I took a deep breath, let the pounding of the pulse in my ears subside. Did I? Think I was above the law? No. If anything, I always thought the law would probably have its way with me no matter how I chose to live. I said:

“I never thought I was above the law, above anybody, ever.” I looked at Sport. “The law is relentless. I—”

A gasp from the crowd. Pressure drop in the house, just like before a big thunderstorm.

There’s this scene in one of those asteroid movies, where the fleeing, hapless victims—where the fuck are they running? Where could they go, after all?—where they just turn and stand transfixed on a mountainside and watch the hurtling rock the size of like Australia falling out of the sky. That’s what the guests looked like. Like I was about to reach impact and maybe take them all with me. Some, have to hand it to them, were fascinated and incredulous at once. Not every day you get clobbered by a rock. Ask Dell.

Still couldn’t get a full breath. Suddenly I felt sad. Incredibly sad. I looked around the room, scanned face to face. So many faces I knew. I cleared my throat.